"We experienced beatings and violence that became part of our everyday life,'' said Arthur Titherington, 73, a British veteran who was one of the five plaintiffs providing the group's first testimony.
Titherington was taken prisoner in the 1942 fall of Singapore and sent to a copper mine in Taiwan, where he and his fellow slave laborers suffered starvation and sickness.
The former POWs' lawsuit was filed earlier this year on behalf of some 73,000 members of veterans' organizations in their respective countries. The ex-prisoners are demanding $22,000 each in compensation, matching the amount paid by the U.S. government to Japanese-Americans sent to U.S. internment camps during the war.
Japan forced prisoners to work in shipyards, mines and jungles in violation of international rules. They were also starved and beaten, and some were executed.
The allied POWs' death rate at the Japanese camps was 27 percent, compared to their counterparts' 4 percent.
For several years, the Japanese Labor Camp Survivors Association has demanded ?15,000 pounds ($23,500) compensation for each of its 12,000 mainly British members. They said they had hoped to win Japanese concessions through informal channels, without resorting to time-consuming legal action.
"It is the last resort,'' Martyn Day, a British attorney, said after the court hearings, referring to the plaintiffs' ages. "The case cannot be concluded until the human rights of these people are reinstalled.''
The group's request to meet with Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama during its visit was turned down, Day added.
The Japanese government has insisted that all war-compensation issues were settled by postwar treaties.
But following recent criticism from activist groups, the government established a private fund for women conscripted as sex slaves.
One lawyer for the group, Takashi Niimi, insisted that nevertheless, Japan had still not met its moral obligations.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended the war, have made the Japanese see themselves as war victims instead of aggressors, Niimi told the court. And the former prisoners of war echo his sentiments.
"The Japanese know only one side of the history,'' said U.S. citizen Gilbert Hair, a plaintiff who was a 9-month-old baby when his family was interned by the Japanese after the fall of the Philippines.
Hair, a resident of Miami who represents 47,000 U.S. civilian war prisoners, has developed various illnesses, including joint problems resulting from malnutrition.
"They should know there are some people who still have resentment toward Japan,'' he said. "The Japanese treated us like animals.''
Hendrik Zeeman of New Zealand said the quality of his life has suffered greatly because of his experience at a juvenile prison in central Java as a Dutch civilian prisoner.
Joan Jameson, 67, a former internee at a camp on Sumatra Island in the former Dutch West Indies, said she was forced to bury internees who died from hard labor, scorching heat and malnutrition. Jameson said she was often abused sexually by Japanese soldiers.
"Even 50 years later I'm so ashamed of what had happened to me," she said, weeping. "It's a legacy that hangs over me until the day I die.''
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