In response to China's solemn representations, the Japanese government will dispatch a team of experts to investigate the latest incident involving chemical weapons abandoned by invading Japanese troops during World War II.

The team will travel to Dunhua, Jilin Province, where two schoolboys were injured when they found a canister containing a chemical agent, a Japanese embassy official said Wednesday in Beijing. She did not state when the team would arrive, but said that further action would depend on the result of the investigation.

China lodged official representations concerning the issue with Japanese diplomats on Tuesday.

The two victims, now being treated in a local hospital, uncovered the 50-centimeter-long canister six days ago when they were playing near a river close to Lianhuapao Village. One of the boys pried open the rusted container and was splashed with the liquid chemical it contained, causing blisters and burns. The second boy was less severely injured in the incident.

Farmer Yu Shuncheng told the local media that residents often find such weapons in the nearby mountains. Few of them realize the potential danger and many farmers simply dump such weapons in their courtyards at random.

In 1954, Yu and his family found 360 such weapons in the nearby mountains.

Some 670,000 chemical weapons were left in Dunhua, the area with the most abandoned Japanese chemical weapons in China, according to a report in Shanghai's Oriental Outlook.

(China Daily July 29, 2004)