DATE: Saturday, November 15, 1997           TAG: 9711150306

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B4   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY NIA NGINA MEEKS, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   84 lines

LOCAL ALLIANCE WANTS APOLOGIES FOR JAPAN'S WORLD WAR II CRIMES

He grew up with the stories. He knows about the survivors. He has seen the pictures.

The hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean and Filipino people enslaved, raped and murdered stay with Xiao Jing Li. And Ping Tcheng. And Jack Moriarty. And hundreds of other activists around Hampton Roads and the world who want to officially close World War II.

For them, the war won't end until Japan admits to its war crimes. Crimes that the government, they say, repeatedly denies.

``The hatred passes from generation to generation,'' said Li, president of the Old Dominion University Chinese Student Association. ``It's not good for peace in this world. I don't want to pass this hatred on to my son or daughter.''

Enter the Alliance for Preserving History of World War II in Asia, or ALPHA. It is a 30-chapter, nonprofit educational organization. The Hampton Roads chapter has more than 100 members, including former prisoners of war, Chinese-, Korean- and Filipino-Americans.

They demand that survivors of war crimes be honored and history completed for generations growing up without full details of Japan's role in WWII.

``It is our responsibility, this generation, to keep this part of history intact,'' chapter President Ping Tcheng said. He lives in Norfolk.

His chapter galvanized after Japanese Emperor Akihito visited the White House in 1994. Two buses headed to Washington to protest. After they came home, they decided to keep things going, joining an international grass-roots campaign.

ALPHA's mission is as varied as its membership. Most want apologies from the government. Some want inclusion of wartime atrocities in Japanese textbooks, which, many maintain, gloss over WWII crimes. Others want reparations for victims.

Post-war Japan stands in stark contrast to post-war Germany. Whereas one has made apologies, reparations and laws to teach history as it stood, just the opposite is true for the other.

Many war crimes committed by the Japanese, unlike those by Germans, happened in occupied territories hidden from world view, ODU Professor Charles Boyd said. He is a WWII expert in the international studies department.

The communist takeover in China after the war and the ensuing Cold War further sealed information from the masses, Boyd said. ``Humanity will never forget about the crimes against Jewish people - and other minority groups, for that matter - in Europe during the Second World War,'' he said. ``The details are just starting to become public in the East Asian war.''

The death toll in Nanking, China, for example, outpaced the casualty count for Great Britain, France and Belgium, according to Iris Chang. She recently wrote ``The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.''

Ping Tcheng met the young author at a national ALPHA meeting and invited her to speak in Hampton Roads this weekend to raise awareness.

``Americans are relatively innocent. There are a lot of Americans who live in very sheltered towns,'' Chang said. ``It's hard to grasp evil of this scope and magnitude. They have a hard time imagining a situation where 300,000 people are getting killed.''

Displaying that evil sometimes draws backlash. The Virginia Beach Central Library received several complaints last year about the graphic nature of ALPHA's Asian holocaust exhibit. The library subsequently denied another booking for 1997.

``We're not restricting the forum to present an exhibit which informs the public about history,'' Central Librarian Carolyn L. Barkley said. ``I am putting some boundaries on how that's expressed in the library.''

ALPHA members understood the problem, moving their crusade to another venue. A Sunday presentation at ODU will join other such commemorations, from schools such as Harvard and Princeton to cities stretching from Oakland to Toronto.

Meanwhile, Congress has picked up the issue. One bill died last year. A new one has taken its place. Sponsored by U.S. Rep. William O. Lipinski, D-Ill., H.R. 126 calls for apologies, reparations for slavery and civilian and military POWs, and a fund to compensate Nanking survivors. The bill is in the International Relations Committee.

``In the United States, we've gone through a lot of self-examination,'' local chapter Vice President Jack Moriarty said. He lives in Virginia Beach.

``I'm not trying to justify our history,'' he said. ``But at least we're looking at it and learning from it.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo

TAMARA VONINSKI/The Virginian-Pilot

Nony E. Abrajano, left, Betty Lu, center, and Peter Chang, members

of the Hampton Roads chapter of ALPHA, an alliance preserving the

history of World War II in Asia, plan for their meeting at ODU on

Sunday.

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