NEWS - Japan W.W.II Vet To Exhume G

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Subject: NEWS - Japan W.W.II Vet To Exhume Graves

Tuesday November 2 2:13 AM ET 

 Japan W.W.II Vet To Exhume Graves

 By MICOOL BROOKE 

 KUAN YUAM, Thailand (AP) - A Japanese World War II veteran who says his
government abandoned thousands of comrades' bodies in Thai jungles has
 won Thai approval to exhume 600 graves and set up a temple to the dead.

 Nagase Takashi, 81, believes more than 7,000 soldiers of Imperial
Japan's 15th Army are lying in jungle-covered graves along the border in
northern
 Thailand. They perished fleeing Burma, now known as Myanmar, when
Allied forces drove them out in late 1944. Among those who died was
Nagase's
 brother-in-law.

 Nagase wants to pique his government's conscience about Japan's lost
generation of war dead. The frail veteran plans to fund the project with
his military
 pension.

 ``These soldiers have been forgotten and abandoned by Japan's
government that sent them to their deaths on foreign battlefields,''
Nagase, who was an
 interpreter for Japan's feared military police on the so-called Death
Railway during the war, told The Associated Press.

 Last week, local monks and authorities gave Nagase permission to start
excavating the grounds of a Buddhist temple at Kuan Yuam in the northern
 province of Mae Hong Son in mid-November. Monks and the Kuan Yuam
police chief are organizing the dig and exhumation using local labor. It
is
 scheduled to be done in February.

 Remains will be stored temporarily at the temple, which was a field
hospital during the war and eventually will be the site of Nagase's
planned shrine to the
 Japanese war dead.

 Nagase is no stranger to such projects.

 He has helped locate the graves of 13,000 Allied prisoners of war who
were beaten, tortured and starved to death under forced labor on the
Death
 Railway - the subject of the Hollywood film, ``The Bridge on the River
Kwai.'' He also has made 102 missions of atonement to Thailand to offer
a personal
 apology for the war. He wrote about his experiences in a book,
``Crosses and Tigers.''

 Now, though, he wants to turn his attention to the Japanese casualties.
He said his memorial could infuriate the Japanese government, which has
struggled
 to come to terms with its role as an aggressor in World War II.

 He wants to send some of the excavated remains to Tokyo to spur the
government to repatriate war dead.

 ``It will be impossible to find all the Japanese soldiers in such
remote and inhospitable jungle,'' Nagase said. ``That is why we will
concentrate of the 600
 reported to have been buried near the field hospital at Kuan Yuam,
within the grounds of the temple.''

 Some 2 million Japanese men died on foreign battlefields in the war,
from Burma to China to the Pacific islands.

 The 15th Army was defeated by the Allies in an ambitious drive into
India in mid-1944. The survivors died from disease and starvation during
the retreat by
 foot across Burma back to Thailand.