While his three tabby cats are curled up and his wife slumbers beside him under their floral bedspread, George Edgar Cobb shivers and jerks, lost in his nightmares.

``I never remember what they are about,'' he said as he smooths his silver hair with a stroke of his palm. ``I guess I've buried them too deep.''

Cobb, a World War II Navy veteran, has been haunted by these nightmares ever since he hobbled out of a Japanese prison camp 55 years ago. With his ribs jutting out from his burlap prison garb, he had dropped nearly half his weight toiling as a slave laborer in a frigid copper mine in northern Japan.

Over the more than half century since then, the San Jose native has waited and hoped for an apology. The Japanese government has issued a general one, but the companies that exploited him and thousands of others -- Mitsubishi operated his copper mine, for example -- have not acknowledged violating international laws on the treatment of war prisoners.

Now, as he nears his 81st birthday, Cobb has a chance of getting some satisfaction.

The aging survivors of Japan's war machine are launching dozens of class-action lawsuits against more than a dozen large corporations. The California Legislature unleashed the flood of litigation last year with a law extending the statute of limitations on World War II war crimes. The ex-POWs have also been emboldened by the recent multibillion-dollar settlements by German companies and Swiss banks for their involvement in the Holocaust.

Legal experts aren't sure if these suits will prevail. The U.S. government negotiated a peace treaty in 1951 absolving the Japanese government of culpability in the war. No one knows if that treaty extends to Japanese businesses as well.

But even if the suits stumble in state court, the ex-POWs believe they will win in the court of public opinion: They will have brought long overdue recognition to a humiliating chapter of the war.

``The pain never dies unless it is resolved,'' said Mike Honda, a Democratic assemblyman from San Jose and a prominent apology advocate.

Honda endured the other side of the World War II horror: His Japanese-American family was interned for three years during the war. He was one of many Japanese-Americans who fought for, and won, a formal apology from the U.S. government and $20,000 in compensation.

50,000 Americans

If the Japanese abused in America deserved an apology, so too, do the Americans brutalized in Japan, Honda said. About 50,000 Americans -- 36,000 from the military and 14,000 civilians living in Asia at the time -- were captured by the Japanese.

While the suits may help to soothe old wounds, they may also open some complicated new ones: Should the survivors of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki sue the American government for war atrocities? Can the Japanese labor camps really be compared with the Nazi concentration camps? And whatever the answers to these questions are, is there anything that can or should be done at this late date?

Some historians say it is impractical to brood on the wrongs of the past. Once you begin trying to rectify it, there's no telling where it will end. ``We're still paying for Christ being hung on the cross 2000 years ago,'' said Mark Orr, an emeritus professor of Japanese history at the University of South Florida.

Meanwhile, Japanese business groups fear that repeating stories about their nation's decades-old brutality will only fuel new anti-Japanese racism. Those tales could also rattle the United States' already fragile relationship with a key Asian economic power. Japanese companies maintain they should not be penalized for decisions made by a bygone generation in wartime.

``We're operating in a totally different era today,'' said Steven Teraoka, of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce of California, based in San Francisco.

All that may be true. But the ex-POWs say lawsuits are the only means of getting the big Japanese companies to listen. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group in Los Angeles, puts it this way: ``Lawsuits are a forum that will encourage the Japanese corporations to do the right thing.''

Many apologies

Apologies are popular these days. Pope John Paul II recently apologized for centuries of what he called the improper treatment of Jews and other minorities. That came on the heels of Australia's apology to the Aborigines. African-Americans are waging an ongoing campaign for a slavery apology.

A few words of regret may not seem like much. But, surprisingly, proponents say, those simple words can do a lot.

``An apology is a validation of your hurt,'' said Aaron Lazare, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, who is writing a book about the power of apology. ``It gives you the strength to let go of the hate.''

What would an apology mean to Cobb?

He falls silent for several moments. He leans back on his overstuffed sofa inside his small, lemon yellow and blue trimmed house on a quiet street a block from the Valley Fair Shopping Center. His mind drifts back to his shipmates who didn't survive. His eyes fill with tears. Finally, he speaks:

``They starved us, butchered us, killed us, made us suffer on hell ships and turned us into slaves.''

``I want a public apology, and I want it in writing,'' Cobb said. He wants to hold that piece of paper between his fingers, first scarred from the years he was forced to work in a copper mine, and now, creased from old age. ``It might,'' he said, ``release some of the tension.''

The tension was so bad when Cobb returned home after the war and met and married his wife Liz, he frightened her with his war stories.

``He'd sit there and just talk and talk and talk. I couldn't take it any more,'' said his wife, who will celebrate 54 years of marriage in June. ``But my father said, `Elizabeth, let the boy talk. He's got to get it out of him.' ''

Cobb left Santa Clara High School just short of graduation and enlisted in the Navy, where he served as a cook and a machine gunner on destroyers and submarines. He was captured in 1942 when the Japanese seized Corregidor, a military base in the Philippines. Before the Japanese got to him, he pulled out his pistol and tried to kill himself. Another shipmate yanked his arm so the bullet only grazed his head.

Cobb was sent to a Mitsubishi copper mine in the town of Hanawa on the Japanese island of Honshu. Now known as an automobile and electronics company, Mitsubishi produced fighter jets and warships during the war. Other present day companies such as Nippon Steel and Mitsui Mining Co. were also part of the war effort.

Five days a week, Cobb and 550 other men marched 10 miles up a steep hill to the mine and back, often through 15 feet of snow. At the mine, Cobb worked eight grueling hours a day lifting, hammering and manipulating giant screens and filters to grind rocks from the mine into dust to collect the copper. On the remaining two days of the week, they cleaned up the camp. Like all of the men, Cobb labored though bouts of malaria, beriberi and other diseases.

When he got word that the war was over, Cobb went over to a corner of the camp and just sat there. ``I was relieved,'' he said. ``But there was too much suffering. There was nothing to cheer about.''

Cobb has thickened from the trim young man pictured on his wedding day. He wears two hearing aids because his eardrums burst from the incessant bombings. And he's got a full set of false teeth because his real teeth decayed from malnutrition during captivity. But considering what he's gone through, Cobb is fit for a man of his age. It is remarkable how the human body, like its spirit, can renew.

Most days, Cobb doesn't think about the war. He tries to keep it stored somewhere in the back of his mind, the way his yellowing war photos and letters are stashed in his bookcase. Cobb prefers to spend his time salmon fishing, planning vacations with his wife, and visiting their son in Union City.

There isn't much more Cobb wants out of life. Just an apology. And perhaps with that, the luxury of making it through the night without any more nightmares.



Note:
Warren (Jorgy) Jorgenson, a member of the ADBC WebTeam; also a resident of Central California, was a Fourth Marine, captured on Corregidor in 1942.   He too, was at the Mitsubishi copper mine in Hanawa during the same time as Cobb.   His experiences were similar; but as all POWs after 55 years, the memories of what happened are somewhat different.