Tong Zeng is a wanted man. Seven years after he vowed to pursue reparations for thousands of mainland victims of Japanese atrocities during the 1930s war in China and World War II, elderly Chinese men and women still seek him out through his Alma Mater, prestigious Beijing University, or his workplace, a research institute specialising in issues related to old age.
Some out-of-town visitors even bed down at Beijing's train station overnight, too poor to afford better. Their goal: to press the Japanese Government for compensation and an official apology.
The sheer number of people awaiting Mr Tong's help spurs him on. 'They have suppressed their anger and desire for compensation for so long that it is a great relief for them to be able to talk openly about their sufferings in the past,' he said.
They encompass people who suffered in different, unimaginable ways: the hundreds of thousands of 'comfort women' forced into sexual slavery by Japanese soldiers; victims of the Nanjing massacre; and, most recently, the 102 people who testified last week in Tokyo about germ-warfare experiments the Japanese Imperial Army's notorious Unit 731 conducted on them between 1939 and 1942. The plaintiffs each want 10 million yen (HK$664,000) and a public apology.
At the outset Mr Tong was a lone campaigner. In 1990, after learning about the piles of lawsuits brought against unified Germany by East European Jews, he decided to take similar action on behalf of his countrymen.
In his job as a researcher, he met many aged citizens, some of whom told him they were victims of wartime atrocities.