''Once they accepted that, there was no more reason to look for people,'' Mr. Saito said.

Sadaaki Numata, the chief Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said however that the Government had established procedures to repatriate the former prisoners in Siberia and does pay for them to return to Japan. He noted that the number of these former prisoners returning to Japan is increasing.

''We are trying as much as we can to get these people back,'' he said. ''Those people who remained are dispersed in many parts of Russia, and the information which we have on them is 50 years old. And that presents serious practical difficulties in locating them.''

Russia's treatment of former Japanese soldiers touches a deep nerve here. At the end of the war, Soviet troops seized and imprisoned more than half a million Japanese troops and civilians in China and other places. More than 50,000 perished in brutal conditions in Stalin's labor camps in the late 1940's and early 1950's. The Soviet Union made its last major repatriation of Japanese prisoners in 1956, but since then there has been a trickle of others like Mr. Meguro, particularly since the collapse of Communism.

Mr. Meguro was a code-breaker stationed throughout the war on Sakhalin, an island that Japan then controlled but is now part of Russia. He was sent to Siberia after Japan's surrender and spent eight years in a labor camp.

Asked what it was like, Mr. Meguro looked blank and said nothing. His interpreter from Russian to Japanese, Eiko Tanikawa, a Japanese woman who also was stuck in Russia after the war and was allowed out only after writing in 1968 to Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, said gently: ''I asked him about it this morning, and he said: 'Some of my close friends died in the camps, and I don't want to remember that time. It's too awful to speak of.' ''

Upon his release in 1953, Mr. Meguro said, he was assigned to work in a remote collective farm in Siberia.

''I applied to go back to Japan, but that was denied,'' Mr. Meguro said.

It is not clear why Mr. Meguro was kept in the area, but he had been working in a small logging camp and it may be that the camp directors did not want to deal with the expense and nuisance of sending him home. So he was simply put under the supervision of the nearby collective farm, and he was so relieved at the improvement that he did not much question it.