HAVING been tortured for decades by memories of wartime atrocities in China, Azuma Shiro was finally at peace with himself when he died in Japan on Tuesday at the age of 93.

On the other side of the waters, many Chinese mourned Shiro's death Wednesday, saying it was a loss to those who work for friendly ties between the two countries.

"He (Shiro) was a warrior fighting for justice; he was a sincere friend to the Chinese people; and he stood for the Japanese mainstream with respect to their attitude toward history," said professor Jing Shenghong at the history department of Nanjing Normal University, who has been in contact with Shiro.

Shiro had been haunted by the painful memory of crimes committed against innocent Chinese, but sharing it brought him even more pain.

In 1937, Shiro was forcefully conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army. He was dispatched to China later that year. He documented in his diary his participation in the notorious massacre of residents of Nanjing, then China's capital.

Within a few weeks after the invading Japanese troops captured Nanjing, by December 1937 more than 300,000 defenseless civilians and unarmed soldiers had been killed. Japanese soldiers had raped more than 80,000 women between the ages of 7 and 70.

After half a century of silent and violent inner remorse, Shiro published his wartime journal in 1987, the first exposure of Japanese atrocities published by a Japanese veteran.

The actions recorded were horrifying.

"When I tried to cut off the first one, either the farmer moved or I misaimed. I ended up slicing off just part of his skull. Blood spurted upwards. I swung again ... and this time I killed him," Shiro wrote in the diary.

At the time, he said, his fellow soldiers convinced him to overcome his qualms. The Imperial Army was consumed with a prejudice so intense that killing became easy, he said.

"We were taught that we were a superior race since we lived only for the sake of a human god - our emperor. But the Chinese did not. So we held nothing but contempt for them," Shiro recorded in his diary.

He blamed a system that produced a military that believed human life had no value.

"There were many rapes, and the women were always killed. When they were being raped, the women were human. But once the rape was finished, they became pig's flesh," he said.

Stories like Shiro's are rarely heard in Japan. When he first began publishing his diaries painstakingly written during the period on the front lines, Shiro was ostracized.

After that, he was constantly attacked by rightists in Japan. The persecution escalated and Shiro was later sued by a former soldier he described as a war criminal in the diary.

The diary recorded a Chinese civilian being forced into a sack soaked with gasoline with grenades tied to it. The soldier then set the sack on fire and threw it into a pond.

Three times Japanese courts ruled in the former soldier's favor and judged that Shiro was guilty of fabricating material and libeling the litigant.

"I lost the case just because the whole process was puppetry by the Japanese Government, which was manipulated by the die-hard, shameless and remorseless rightists. Their true goal has always been to deny the Nanjing Massacre," Shiro said.

The penitent war veteran had been to China several times. Together with the Memorial Hall to Victims of the Nanjing Massacre and a Japan-based committee, Shiro collected evidence to prove the truth of his diary, denouncing Japanese right-wing activists who attempt to deny the atrocities. He also made speeches in various places in Japan to tell the truth of the Nanjing Massacre.

Some 60,000 Chinese people have mailed letters to the Nanjing memorial hall to express their support for Shiro, the curator of the hall said.

"The Nanjing Massacre is the iron fact that I experienced, and Japan must face and recognize the history and apologize to the Chinese people sincerely," Shiro said in an interview with the Beijing Youth Daily in Beijing in November 2004.

"Only in this way, can the friendly relations between China and Japan truly develop," he added.

Shiro's funeral will be held in Japan on Saturday morning.

Editor: Wing