Former U.S. servicemen and their families hold a meeting in Virginia in late May. Some of the veterans were taken prisoner by the Japanese Imperial Army in the Philippines during the World War II.

Moves to question Japan's wartime behavior are becoming active in the United States. The U.S. government has started to look for historical records concerning the behavior of the Japanese army during the Japanese-Chinese War and World War II. Meanwhile, former prisoners of war and women who were forced into sexual slavery to serve Japanese soldiers are suing the Japanese government and companies to demand an apology and compensation.

At the beginning of this year, a thick document was delivered to seven U.S. government organizations, including the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department. The report, titled "Search Term List Regarding World War II Japanese War Crimes, War Criminals, Persecution and Looting," noted the following:

"It should be noted that anything relating to American and Allied prisoners of war should be considered relevant as most POWs suffered at the hands of their Japanese captors.

"Likewise, anything relating to biological warfare should be considered relevant because of the use of POWs and civilians as test subjects as well as the Japanese use of biological warfare against their enemies.

"Records relating to the use of force and slave labor and to the involvement of women in the Japanese 'comfort women' program should be considered relevant."

The report then went on to list the following items, covering 65 pages.

* The names of Class A war criminals, including former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, and 28 members of the Unit 731, including commanding officer Shiro Ishii and others who developed and carried out experiments of biological and bacteriological weapons on humans.

* The dates and names of 128 places where the Japanese army massacred prisoners of war and civilians.

* Five "death marches" in Bataan and elsewhere in which many prisoners of war died. Twenty-three cases of the death penalty given to prisoners of war who tried to escape.

* Seventy-one troopships that carried Allied prisoners of war to Japan from elsewhere in Asia. Two hundred and one facilities in and outside Japan where prisoners of war were detained and forced to work.

Manchurian Incident

The report carries a foreword by Samuel Burger, former presidential assistant for national security affairs under the Bill Clinton administration, urging the U.S. government to dig up and disclose secret documents that prove war crimes and persecution by Japan retroactive to 1931, when the Manchurian Incident occurred.

In response to the enactment of the Japanese Imperial Government Records Act last year-end, U.S. government agencies have started to go through the archives again based on the list.

During its occupation of postwar Japan, the United States took back large quantities of Japanese military and government documents for the purpose of investigating Japan's war crimes and gathering military intelligence.

In the 1950s, the Japanese government demanded the documents be returned. In 1954, crew members of Daigo Fukuryu-maru, a Japanese fishing boat operating in the Pacific, were exposed to radioactive fallout from a U.S. nuclear test in the Bikini Atoll.

Out of concern that Japan-U.S. relations could deteriorate over the incident, the State Department called on the CIA, the military and Congress to meet Japan's request.

According to U.S. sources, the U.S. military agreed to the return on condition that it would be able to peruse the documents again in the future.

The U.S. government recorded about 3 percent of a total of 18 million pages of documents on microfilm and sent them back to Japan starting in 1958.

The members of the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) are showing strong interest in the documents that were returned to Japan.

IWG Chairman Steven Garfinkel said that if necessary, the group may request the Japanese side to give it access to the documents.

The U.S. side is unhappy with Japan that it has not fully disclosed war-related information. According to Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Office of Special Investigations with the U.S. Justice Department's Criminal Division, the number of Japanese whom the United States bans entry because of war crimes now stands at around 30. While the office tried to add dozens more to the list as a result of an independent U.S. study, it has not been able to because the Japanese side has refused to confirm their dates of birth.

Forced labor

"If the Japanese government and corporations acknowledge that they forced us into slave labor, it (our resentment) will go away," said Edward Jackfert, Past National Commander of American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, a veterans' group.

Jackfert, 79, who lives in West Virginia, was captured by the Japanese army in the Philippines in 1942, when he was working as a mechanic in the U.S. army. He was transported by ship to Kawasaki and was a forced laborer at an operation center of a Mitsui group company for nearly three years.

Jackfert maintains that he was not fed properly and was not allowed to stop work even during bombing by U.S. forces. He is preparing to sue a U.S. Mitsui subsidiary and other parties to demand compensation for forced labor.

More than 30 similar lawsuits against Japanese companies have been filed since 1999, of which about half have been dismissed by federal courts.

Japanese companies maintain that the Allied Powers and the people have renounced their claim for compensation toward Japan and the Japanese people under the San Francisco Peace Treaty and the problem has been settled. So far, the suits have been decided in their favor.

However, in May, the Superior Court of California's Orange County urged both the plaintiffs, former prisoners of war, and the defendants, Japanese corporations, to start negotiations for a settlement. This is the first time in the series of trials for the court to recommend the conflicting parties to reach a settlement.

Michael Hausfeld, a well-known Washington lawyer, represents 15 former "comfort women" who come from the Republic of Korea (South Korea), China, Taiwan and the Philippines. In September, they filed lawsuit against the Japanese government with the Washington federal district court demanding compensation.

Hausfeld said that what is at issue is not the acts of soldiers but violations of human rights. He has squarely challenged the governments of Japan and the United States, which are demanding that the case be dismissed on grounds of "sovereign immunity" based on treaties.

A Japanese government official who has been stationed in the United States for a long time said: "No matter how many times we are sued, we cannot break the order built by the peace treaty. Japan paid a huge amount of reparations at the time and the matter was settled between governments. If we are to compensate individuals from now on, it would mean a huge burden on the national finance. I doubt the Japanese public would accept that."

In November, Japanese lawmakers submitted a bill to establish an Investigative Bureau For Eternal Peace within the National Diet Library to bring to light the real situation of war damage. The purpose is "to uncover the ravages of war, promote public understanding and pass it down to the next generation to build a relationship of trust with people in Asia and the world."

The Japanese Imperial Government Records Act took effect in March. The bill was submitted to the Senate by Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California and was made into law last year. It provides that the U.S. government find and disclose confidential records in its safekeeping concerning all people officially recognized by the government as having ordered, instigated, supported or participated in human testing or persecution under order by Imperial Japan between September 1931 (when the Japanese began their conquest of Manchuria) and the end of 1948.

The content of the law is similar to that of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act that was passed in 1998. Feinstein has been tackling the problem of discrimination by race, sex and disabilities. Partly supported by moves of Asian-American groups, group of experts in international human rights law took the initiative for legislation.