Paul Ham, author of the new book, "Sandakan", published by Random House wrote a letter to the Emperor of Japan and published it in The Australian on Tuesday this week (2nd October 2012).
The murders (for that is what they were) were worse than just about any other atrocity imposed by the Imperial Japanese Army on Australian POWs.
You can read Paul Ham's article.
David Barrett, co-author of Digger's Story fought the Japanese Government through news paper articles and media appearances trying as hard as he could to embarrass them into apologising and paying reparations for many years.
This is all documented in the latter chapters of "Digger's Story" as I explained in a letter published in The Australian yesterday (see image at right).