MEETING TO SPOTLIGHT JAPANESE WAR CRIMES.

Byline: James O. Clifford Associated Press 

The timing couldn't have been better for a symposium on Japan's World War II atrocities, outrages participants claim have long been overshadowed by Germany's war crimes.

Not only will the event be held on the 55th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, chance has put the gathering in the spotlight with the announcement that 16 Japanese men are now on a Justice Department ``watch list'' that previously contained only Nazis.

The Japanese army veterans on the list are suspected of medically experimenting on prisoners and operating forced sex camps, two subjects in the news recently.

The experiments and the so-called ``comfort women'' are just a few crimes the Asian nation must answer for, according to the scholars, lawyers and victims who will attend the gathering at Stanford University.

The atrocities include the pillaging of Nanking and the starvation and killing of Allied prisoners of war, they said.

``It was really the rape of Nanking,'' said Ignatius Ding of the Alliance for Preserving the Truth of Sino-Japanese War.

Six weeks of rape, looting and murder followed the fall of Nanking to the Japanese on Dec. 13, 1937, he said.

``Japan has a moral obligation to acknowledge the evil that was perpetrated in China and other Asian nations,'' he said.

His organization belongs to the sponsoring Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, a coalition of about 30 organizations.

The Miami Beach-based Center for Civilian Internee Rights will be represented by Gil Hair, who was a child when he was imprisoned by the Japanese in the Philippines.

The watch list will be increased substantially, predicted Hair, whose father survived the Bataan Death March only to die on a prison ``hell ship.''

There were 33,021 U.S. military POWS captured by the Japanese, and almost 37 percent died in captivity, a rate seven times higher than those held by the Germans, he said.

``Why do we continually have this dual standard when it comes to Japan,'' he asked.

The symposium will search for answers, but Hair already has his theories.

He blames the peace treaty that was signed in San Francisco in 1951.

The United States wanted to use Japan as a staging area against communist advances in Asia, so the defeated nation was let off the hook compared to Germany, according to Hair, whose group is seeking reparations from Japan.