When his body isn't groaning under the weight of its 81 years, and the sun is shining in the skies over his native Kyushu, Sakae Menda sometimes forgets the ordeal he suffered and knows he is lucky to be alive.

But most days, there is no blotting out that the Japanese state stole 34 years of his life, or that he thought every one of those 12,410 days would be his last. "Waiting to die is a kind of torture," he says, "worse than death itself."

Early on Dec. 30, 1948, a killer broke into the house of a priest and his wife in Kumamoto Prefecture in Kyushu and used a knife and an ax to murder them and wound their two young daughters. In the dirt-poor early postwar years, life was cheap and black markets flourished in most parts of Japan. The killer could have been anyone -- but penniless, uneducated farmhand Menda was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was arrested over a separate crime of stealing brown rice.