Two unrelated news stories that have been gathering momentum in the United States in the past few weeks have focused attention all over again on the touchy issue of old crimes and delayed punishments. The conflicts involved are not novel -- they surfaced as recently as last year, when Spain attempted to extradite former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet and in the ongoing debate over whether to prosecute ex-Khmer Rouge guerrillas for crimes against humanity -- but every new story puts its own twist on them. Is justice sometimes better served by forgiveness than retribution? When is it fitting to remember, and when is it better to forget? One of the stories, moreover, brings these issues sharply home to Japan.

The first concerns the controversy provoked by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' stated intention of presenting a special Oscar this month to the ailing 89-year-old film director Elia Kazan "for his body of work." Nobody denies that Mr. Kazan's work, which includes the classics "On the Waterfront" and "A Streetcar Named Desire," warrants such an honor. Many, however, object to the planned accolade on the grounds of Mr. Kazan's cooperation with the McCarthy-era House Un-American Activities Committee, to which, in 1952, he denounced eight of his colleagues as one-time Communists. Mr. Kazan has long refused to apologize to those who were blacklisted and saw their careers derailed at least partly on the basis of his testimony. For this reason, as much as anything, he has consistently been denied the industry honors that would otherwise have gone long ago to a filmmaker of his stature.

The other story concerns some old men in Japan whom the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations has been trying to confirm as war criminals for two years now -- stymied, it says, by the Japanese government's failure to provide or even corroborate information. In line with its longtime policy of identifying Nazi war criminals so as to bar their entry to the U.S., in 1996 the OSI added to its list the names of scores of Japanese suspected of participating in atrocities during World War II (but why did it wait so long?). Last December, OSI Director Eli Rosenbaum publicly vented his frustration over Japan's refusal to cooperate, even to the limited and routine extent of confirming birth dates, and compared this country's attitude unfavorably to that of Germany.