TOKYO (AP) -- Hakudo Nagatomi is a Japanese war criminal. And not only does he admit it, he has made telling the world of the crimes he and his comrades committed his mission in life.
"I wasn't human then," the 82-year-old says, recalling how he buried alive women and killed children in China during World War II. "We just killed everyone in sight."
Such confessions by Nagatomi and a handful of other veterans have generally elicited a chilly silence from their own government. Now, however, the pressure is mounting for Japan to face up to its past by identifying and tracking down those members of its military who went too far.
Despite repeated requests, Tokyo has refused to cooperate with U.S. efforts to find Japanese nationals on a Justice Department list of suspected war criminals that also includes thousands of Nazis. Japanese names were added to the list just two years ago.
The addition of the names reflects a heightened recognition in the United States of Japanese military atrocities.
But Japan has been reluctant to comply. Japanese officials have provided no information -- not even birth dates -- on the dozens of Japanese names now on the list, said Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations.
``We hope that Japan will assist us soon, so that this disagreement, this unpleasantness, can be put behind us," he said in a recent telephone interview from Washington, D.C.
Tokyo does not challenge America's right to track suspected war criminals, who are barred from entering the United States. But the Japanese official in charge of the issue, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Japan doesn't have enough documents to judge whether anyone is a war criminal and officials are worried about violating the rights of those on the list.
Japan's failure to help with such efforts is highly unusual, Rosenbaum said, adding that Germany and other nations have cooperated with tracking down suspected Nazis.
Japan has long been criticized for being too slow to apologize for, or even acknowledge, the excesses of the war machine it unleashed on Asia in the earlier half of this century.
History textbooks have been screened, politicians have repeatedly defended their country's actions and courts have regularly shot down the demands from victims in other countries seeking compensation.
Some progress has been made in recent years.
In 1992, the government finally admitted it had taken part in the systematic sexual slavery of Asian women, who were repeatedly raped by Japanese troops and euphemistically called ``comfort women."
But a strong layer of opposition remains.
Just five years ago, Shigeto Nagano was forced to resign as justice minister after he dismissed the 1937 "Rape of Nanking" as a hoax. Historians say the Japanese killed as many as 300,000 people in a matter of weeks.
The massacre has been so controversial here that the release of the Japanese translation of the 1997 book on the atrocity by American writer Iris Chang, initially set for later this month, has been indefinitely postponed.
Chang said in a statement that she rejected a proposal from Kashiwa Shobo Publishing Co. to add material that was not in her original book. Kashiwa Shobo has received threats from right-wing extremists contesting material in her book and demanding the cancellation of the book's release.
Still, pressure for Japan to atone is increasing.
``Don't deny history," said Ignatius Ding, who heads a group based in Cupertino, Calif., that has been trying to identify Japanese war criminals. ``We are asking for historical responsibility."
Ding's Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, which collects information from around the world, believes there are several hundred Japanese war criminals who are still alive.
Accounts of Japanese atrocities are chilling -- soldiers chopped up babies, conducted germ-warfare experiments on prisoners of war and civilians, burned families alive in their huts and used people tied to stakes for bayonet practice.
Nagatomi acknowledged he did not realize the implications of what he had done until he was in a Chinese prison for war criminals. He had long lost count of the people he had killed -- only that it was more than 100.
"I may try to forget, but what I did is all so horrible," he said. "Inside, we can't forget. What I did won't go away. Ever," he said.