‘45 Massacre of Chinese in Japan Remembered : Protest: Coalition in Los Angeles seeks reparations for wartime incident in which 113 slave laborers died.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the massacre of Chinese slave laborers in Japan, a coalition of Asian American and Latino groups held a demonstration Friday in Little Tokyo to remember the victims and to seek reparations for survivors.

“As one who experienced the horror and terror of the [Japanese] Imperial Army, I am profoundly saddened that after 50 years, the victims still have an uphill struggle to restore their dignity and respect,” R. Ting Huang, head of the Pacific Holocaust Commemoration Committee, told about three dozen placard-carrying supporters.

Huang, a 62-year-old Chinese American engineer from West Los Angeles, lived through the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 as a child. His cousin was murdered by a Japanese soldier, he said.

After a news conference during which half a dozen leaders recounted the history of Japan’s crimes against its neighbors in the World War II era, a delegation went inside the Kajima Building on 1st Street and submitted a petition and a letter at the offices of East West Development Corp., a subsidiary of the Japanese construction giant Kajima Corp.

Calls Friday by The Times to East West Development officials were not returned.

Nearly 1,000 Chinese laborers had been conscripted to work on a Kajima project to change the flow of the Hanaoka River in Akita Prefecture in northern Japan.

Unable to stand malnutrition and wretched conditions under which they lived and worked, a group of slave laborers attacked the Kajima office in Japan on June 30, 1945, to seize weapons and try to escape north to Hokkaido. But they were swiftly overpowered and 113 were killed in what has become known as the Hanaoka Incident.

The Los Angeles group’s action Friday coincided with the filing of a lawsuit in Tokyo this week by the 11 survivors of the uprising.

The Hanaoka laborers were among about 40,000 Chinese men brought to Japan during World War II to work in mines, construction sites and factories operated by 135 Japanese companies.

The Japanese military also recruited hundreds of thousands of men from Korea, which was then a Japanese colony.

“Few countries in the Pacific Rim escaped the rape of the Imperial Army,” but so little of that history is known outside Asia, Huang said.

He accused Taiwan and mainland China of letting Japan get away with war crimes by putting economic interest ahead of human concerns.

But he is heartened as a Chinese American, he said. With so many Asians living in the United States now, especially in Los Angeles, human rights advocates can work from here to exert pressure on the Japanese government and corporations, he said.

Alex Fan, whose father was shot to death by Japanese soldiers in Shanghai when Fan was a child, said that unless Kajima admits its crime and compensates the victims, it cannot become a good corporate citizen.

“A brave and great person is the one who can admit his mistakes and move on,” he said. “The same principle applies to a good company.”

Unlike Germany, which has repeatedly apologized for its conduct under the Nazis, Japan has been reluctant to face its wartime past. Kajima has shied away from facing the issue despite years of demands by the victims.