A patriot passes

Murray Sayle

Tokyo

akuei Tanaka, the former Japanese .1./Prime Minister and current ruling strongman, may yet do time for his involve- ment in the long-running Lockheed scan- dal, but his co-defendant and rival political fixer Yoshio Kodama has, alas, beaten the jailers. Kodama died here last week after a long and convenient illness, still out on bail over Lockheed, reasonably full of years (73) if not exactly honours — his track record includes stretches for tax evasion, high treason, lese majeste, war crimes and con- spiracy to murder.

Well, nobody's perfect, and the boss's passing has been marked by long and, on the whole, respectful obituaries in the Japanese press and guarded tributes from Kodama associates and rumoured associates, including a gruff `no comment' from the office of the present shaky Prime Minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone (also a good buddy, Spectator readers will recall, of Ron Reagan's), when asked whether the PM would be gracing the boss's funeral.

The guarded tone, evasiveness and pro- lixity have the same cause: for most of his life, no one was quite sure how important Kodama was in the Japanese scheme of things. He was, in fact, the greatest, if not the last of contemporary kuromaku, or powers-behind-the-scenes (the word means 'black curtain'). Personally I rate Kodama a pivotal figure, as well as a rogue of genius (this should earn a gold-toothed grin when this Spectator arrives, slightly scorched, at the boss's new address), a conclusion sup- ported even by what is publicly known of a long, richly stained and chequered career.

Kodama was born in the village of Motomiya in Fukushima, near Tokyo in 1911, to (according to himself) a family of poor but honest Samurai origins. He was, however,N, the same account orphaned, adopted, discarded and readopted three times as a small boy, before being sent at the earliest opportunity to a menial labour- ing job in a Dickensian iron factory staffed by the lowest dregs of Japanese society. Although Japan is not strong either on or- phanages or porridge, this sounds remarkably like the boyhood of Oliver Twist, or, for that matter, Adolf Hitler, and it may be psychologically significant that all three sprigs of the seedy provincial gentry became writers of sorts, as well as pursuing careers in the arts and politics.

Adolf and Yoshio had, perhaps, the more in common. An early experience which did much to shape Kodama's think- ing was a trip to Korea, then part of the Japanese Empire, in search of work. He didn't find any, to his taste at any rate, but the impressionable youth observed that the Japanese were the master race there, and so even the poorest and least privileged of them was entitled to put the boot into the Koreans. This kindled a pride of race, while Kodama's failure to hold or even land a job gave him a lifelong distaste for capitalists, vile moneygrubbers, in his view without any sense of Samurai honour.

Like Adolf, Kodama thus became a revolutionary of the Right. He followed the future Fiihrer, too, in looking round for a political party expressing his viewpoint, or capable of being taken over, and in 1928

joined something called the Tenkokukai, or `Divine Country League', a grouplet of some 200 unemployed romantic roughnecks like his goodself.

To each nation, it seems, its own form of nutty nationalism. Just as the English love dogs, Americans guns, and Germans uniforms, Japanese seem to have an inex- tinguishable fondness for swords, armour, tattoos on martial themes, white headbands and fierce, scowling expressions. These things are all, of course, elements of the Samurai tradition which, comical as it may appear to some foreigners, and repulsive to many Japanese, is the only tradition they've got. Whenever in Japan we en- counter these items of antique military fur- niture we may be sure we are in the presence of the political Right.

Rightists, however, seem to get along no better than leftists, and the Japanese far Right is a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of confusion, splitting and merging as they discover new items of dress or doctrine to disagree about. Some of them are scarcely more than patriotic sake-drinking clubs, no odder, really, than your average Man- chester Oddfellow. Others are, or claim they are, full-blown revolutionary con- spiracies, hardened by standing under freezing waterfalls and armed with con- verted kitchen knives and sharpened motor- car springs (no Samurai warrior, they hold, would dirty his hands with a noisy, smelly gun, the preferred weapon of cowardly foreigners). Some of them, like the All- Japan Love Country Alliance, have been active for half a century, and are still at it, riding round Tokyo in armoured loud- speaker vans on their way to harass some meeting of leftist schoolteachers; others, like the Green Rice Ears League or the Black Dragon Society, disappeared with Japan's colonial Empire (`Black Dragon' is the poetic name for the Yalu River in Korea).

There are probably as many of them about today as there were on the eve of Pearl Harbour, with an important dif- ference — then they had a military arm, the Japanese army, while at present they have no more than nuisance value. Things might be different, however, in a re-armed Japan.

Events were moving in that direction, in fact, when young Yoshio first thumped a tub in the turbulent years which, in Japan as elsewhere, followed the Great Crash of 1929. The world silk market collapsed and Japanese farmers were hit especially hard, betrayed, as they believed, by treasonable financiers under the thumb of greedy Americans. Kodama got his first stretch, of six months, for.pushing through police lines in an attempt to present a petition to Emperor Hirohito (the same) on behalf of starving farmers in north-eastern Japan. Then he joined, or possibly originated, a plot to assassinate ministers of the govern- ment, and followed this up by sending a dagger to the Finance Minister, Junnosuke Inoue, suggesting that he should use it either to defend Japan (by increasing the military budget) or to slit his stomach. Inoue did neither, but resigned instead.

After a three-year stretch Kodama went fresh out of prison to China in 1938. His job was chief bodyguard to Wang Ching-wei, a leading light in the ruling Chinese Kuomintang Party who had thrown in his lot with the Japanese as presi- dent of the Japanese-sponsored Nanking Republic. Many Chinese were anxious to kill Wang but, as a supposedly independent head of state he could hardly be seen with a Japanese army guard, and so Kodama got the job. Years later the CIA for similar motives of delicacy was employing have- gun-will-travel civilian freelance killers as `independent sub-contractors' in Vietnam.

Wang moved to Japan, where he felt safer, and Kodama took a step up the career ladder to Shanghai, working as a civilian for the Japanese navy as head of the 'Kodama Organisation'. His job was to procure scarce raw materials and other resources or, more bluntly, to loot the part of China occupied by the Japanese of anything of value (among other things, he probably collected the uranium which was used in Japan's attempts to build an atom bomb). Kodama later stated that his secretary in Shanghai was an agent of the Kempei-Tai, the Japanese equivalent of the Gestapo. Others have said that it was Kodama himself who was running the operation in Shanghai, a sort of Klaus Barbie of the Orient, no less. In any event, he prospered mightily.

Wheeling and dealing in opium, platinum and jewellery, Kodama amassed a private pile he later estimated at around £30 million, two-thirds of which, he said, he had been forced by the exigencies of war to leave behind in China. Back home he acted as adviser to the first post-war Japanese government, led by Prince Higashikuni (the subject and content of his advice is unknown) and contributed, from his China loot, a sum adjacent to £5 million as a Patriotic gesture to help found the Liberal Party, the forerunner of the Liberal Democratic Party which governs Japan today.

The boss seemed set for a new career as an elder statesmen when, in January 1946, he was arrested by agents of the Counter In- telligence Corps, forerunner of the CIA, and charged with being a Class A war criminal (this curious title indicates not that his alleged war crimes were outstandingly gruesome, but that they were political in nature). Arrested along with Kodama were Nobusuke Kishi, Japan's wartime muni- tions minister, postwar prime minister and currently president of the Japan-America Association (and, according to President Lyndon B. Johnson, 'one of the finest leaders the Free World has produced') and Ryoichi Sassakawa, the Mr Big of Japan's enormous gambling industry — a trio later known as the 'Class of Sugamo', the prison to which they and other war crimes suspects' were conveyed.

Kishi and Sassakawa thought they would surely all swing, while Kodama, ever the op- timist, felt that they might get away with 30 Years. On Christmas Eve 1949 General Hideki Tojo, Japan's wartime prime minister, and 12 others were hanged in Sugamo, the general shouting, 'Long live His Majesty the Emperor!' as he mounted the scaffold. A few days later Kodama and the others were released, all charges drop- Ped. A tremendous change was under way, with the Korean war in the offing. From be- ing an enemy to be punished, Japan was overnight, as she is now, a prospective ally to be wooed, and Japanese of influence Were suddenly in demand.

The Japanese Right, too, was undergoing a deep change of heart. After Hiroshima and the 1945 surrender they could hardly be expected to be pro-American, but by 1951 Kodama for one had rethought his posi- tion, a new departure signalled by the Publication in that year of his book I Was Defeated — 'an Asian publication' accor- ding to the title-page 'of Robert Booth and Taro Fukuda'. Who are this pair of hither- to and subsequently unknown publishers? Fukuda was an interpreter at Sugamo prison and later became a public relations Man in Tokyo and key figure in the

Lockheed scandal. Booth is probably a phoney name, concealing, it seems likely, a representative, if not an employee of Craft- iness In Action. Shortly afterwards, accor- ding to persistent reports, Kodama took a job with the same agency, looking into the alleged communist sympathies of Japanese coalminers. Certainly by the early 1950s he was well-known in Tokyo as a man with tremendous influence with the Americans, with access (in deserving cases) to American funds.

Why? In I Was Defeated Kodama claims that he was converted to democratic ideals by reading the American Constitution in prison (Sassakawa spent his time reading Life magazine, where he found the even more profitable idea of gambling on motor boat racing). In his book Kodama is also careful to distance himself from the detested Japanese army. 'I was disgusted,' he writes fastidiously, `by the sight of generals' staff cars parked all night outside geisha houses in Shanghai while their men were dying far away at the front.' (He does not explain what he was doing after hours in the Shanghai red light district, with much of China, presumably, still to loot). However, genuine or not, Kodama's conversion was certainly a critical turning-point for post- war Japan. He can claim the credit, pro- bably most of the credit, for swinging the Japanese far Right behind American causes, beginning with the Korean war, and thus earning golden American opinions and laying the foundations for Japan's ag- gressive and profitable parasitism on the US ever since.

Why did Kodama do it? Partly for money, very likely. The post-war American aid in food and raw materials to Japan was sold for yen, generating enormous and un- controlled sums of money, the mysterious M Fund, G Fund and X Fund.

Some of this money undoubtedly found its way into Japanese politics in the early Cold War years, and Kodama, with his China loot and picturesque past, would have been the ideal conduit, below suspi- cion as we might say. Then again, he was ideally placed as a middleman, the Japanese believing, with much justification, that he had influence with the Americans, the Americans recalling that he had great in- fluence among Japanese. And, as things stood in the early 1950s, a shrewd Japanese patriot like Kodama was on sound ground in perceiving that, by playing the American card correctly, Japan stood to gain the ac- cess to markets and raw materials, the con- trol (by proxy) of Korea and the Pacific that Japan had fought for, and lost, during the war.

Certainly, Kodama was well enough thought of on both sides of the Pacific by 1959 to be engaged as the confidential agent in Japan of the Lockheed Corporation, suc- ceeding the following year in selling 100 Lockheed Starfighters to the Japanese Air Self Defence Force. The fact that his old cellmate Kishi was now prime minister may also have helped mightily in his successful sales campaign for the needle-nosed, widow-making aircraft. By 1963 Kodama was back in action as a right-wing political boss, founding the Seinen Shiso Kenkyukai, or 'Youth Thought Study Association', a band of 1,500 thugs who are still in business extorting money from com- panies either by contracting to handle their labour relations (with knuckledusters) or undertaking to refrain from disrupting their meetings by beating up the shareholders, in return for 'research fees'.

So Kodamawas jogging along, making a dishonest living and starring as easily the most publicised undercover figure in Japan, when he was arrested in 1976 and charged with having distributed some $10 million in bribes on behalf of the Lockheed Corporation, and evading taxes on the same. The case against Kodama was largely based on the deposition of A. Carl Kot- chian, sales chief of Lockheed, taken in the US on a promise of immunity from Japanese prosecution.

Despite millions of dollars spent on `public relations', according to `Ko-than', as the Japanese affectionately call him, things were going badly in the campaign to sell Lockheed Tristars to Japanese airlines when, on 5 October 1972 Kotchian called on Kodama at his office in the smart part of Tokyo, the Ginza, accompanied by the same ubiquitous Taro Fukuda (also deceased) as interpreter. Apprised that no orders for Tristars had been concluded, Kodama, according to Kotchian, said that people in high places needed to hear the 'Wrath of God? I heard it was some Mexican volcano.' merits of the aircraft and in his presence got on the telephone to the present Japanese Prime Minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone, then Minister for International Trade and In- dustry. Coached by Fukuda, Kodama praised Lockheed's plane in glowing terms and, as a matter of public record, a few days later it was announced that the Japanese airlines were buying ten Tristars for around $250 million. (Excellent planes they are, too; I often fly in them.) Nakasone has frequently said that he has no recollection of the conversation and has had no dealings with Kodama, although it is well known that Kodama's long-time secretary, one Tsuneo Tachikawa, once us- ed to work for Nakasone. Still, in Japan's close-knit society nearly everyone has con- nections with everyone else and American businessmen are, as we know, gullible when it comes to handing out their firm's money. Tristars have Rolls Royce engines, too.

The arrest of Kodama in connection with Lockheed had an even more bizarre conse- quence. On 24 March 1976 an unemployed porno film actor, Mitsuyasu Maeno, wear- ing a World War Two kamikaze pilot's uniform, a sword and a white band around his head inscribed 'Determined to Die', did just that when he crashed a rented Piper Cherokee aircraft on Kodama's house, nar- rowly missing the boss who was out taking the air on his balcony. This event was politically important, marking the emergence of a 'new Right' which strongly objects to all this truckling to the Americans, who did after all defeat Japan. The new rightists' proclaimed policy is to 'destroy the crimes of Yalta and Potsdam', that is, to recover Japan's lost empire. The Japanese police estimate that, of 120,000 professional hard-core rightists in Japan only 2,000 are 'new right', (conservative people, Japanese) but they are growing, and giving many people a nasty feeling of `here we go again'.

Japan-watchers were hoping to hear more from the thick lips of Kodama himself as the leisurely Lockheed trial dragged on (the sentence of four years' hard for former prime minister Tanaka came only last Oc- tober), but the boss attended only a few ses- sions and, when the questioning got sticky, retired to hospital whence, after as they say a prolonged illness, he has just gone to his reward. Considering his extensive connec- tions his funeral was thinly attended, only his old prison colleague Ryoichi Sassakawa putting in a loyal appearance to hear relays of Buddhist monks chanting the Lotus Sutra, the one which teaches the futility of all earthly desires.

Kodama, with his low forehead, close-set piggy eyes and bow legs was not exactly a beauty, but in this as in many other respects he was very much in the Japanese tradition of homely resolute men of humble origins who have, in Japan's various times of trou- ble, managed to push and scheme their way to the top. He looked, in fact, rather like the portraits of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a common soldier who rose from the ranks in the 16th century, defeated all other warlords and unified Japan — quite a feat, in a hierarchical society, for a 'base-born, monkey-faced adventurer' as the historian James Murdoch (no relation to Rupert) calls Kodama's ugly, sword-wielding predecessor. Yoshio Kodama, too, was a man of parts and, no doubt, according to his lights a sincere patriot. We shall not, with a bit of luck, look upon his like again.