War crime victims unite to shame Japan

In an emotional and electric meeting in Tokyo, Allied servicemen and civilians interned in the Far East during the Second World War joined hands with former "comfort women" - sex slaves of the old Japanese Imperial Army - in demanding compensatio n for their ordeal.

Martyn Day, the London solicitor representing the veterans from Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, who are to launch legal proceedings against the Japanese government on Monday, also announced last night that a delegation of all aggrieved victims of Japan's war will attend the Group of Seven summit in Canada this July to press their demands for recompense.

In a loud but trembling voice, Son Shindo, 73, told the meeting of her torment as a Korean teenager compelled from the age of 16, to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers - "sometimes 15 of them a day, you couldn't finish until dawn" - in army brothels in occupied China.

"Maybe you can't understand, but I know how I suffered, and now I speak to you because I feel so sad. They drew swords, they beat us, all kinds of cruelty. Unless you had seen it, you wouldn't understand," she told grim-faced Allied veterans and their supporters assembled in a meeting hall. Since the war she had several times contemplated suicide.

Mrs Son has begun her own legal action in Tokyo to seek compensation, but emphasised: "I am not interested in money, because no emotion can be bought with money." She demanded that the Japanese Prime Minister make a clear apology, the only way, she said,to correct the injustice done to tens of thousands of "comfort women" like herself.

At the end of the war Japan had been reduced to a state of which "even animals would feel ashamed," but now "Japan has grown strong, clever and deceitful," she added.

A former British PoW, Arthur Titherington, also 73, said of Mrs Son's speech: "I heard a tone and words which did not need translation - for they brought back many harsh memories which still frighten me." Though he was "quite sure nothing I had to endurecould possibly be like your suffering, madam".

After stepping down from the podium, Mr Titherington went over to where Mrs Son was sitting and embraced her. Under a barrage of camera flashes, they both wept.

Mr Titherington was taken a prisoner in 1942, in Singapore. As a 20-year-old Royal Signals dispatch rider, he had been blown off his motorcycle and injured. Later, he was taken to Taiwan to labour in a copper mine of the Nippon Mining Co where the death rate among Allied PoWs exceeded 80 per cent. For three and half years he was fed on a diet "99 per cent composed just of rice" with the occasional pickle, or more rarely a piece of whitebait. Many of his comrades died of beri-beri, dysentery, malnutrition or mine accidents before liberation by the Americans in 1945.

Yesterday Mr Day met the deputy director of the division in charge of British affairs at the Japanese Foreign Ministry. A senior Foreign Ministry official said there had been a "very frank exchange of views". The Japanese government stuck to its positionthat the issue of compensation for PoWs was settled after the 1951 San Francisco peace treaty.