Sayonara Secret Sinophiles: Revenge of the Anti-Chinese Deep State
Did Shinzo Abe need killing? The Abe assassination's unexplored history...
You will remember where you were when you learned that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated but you will likely not be told that there are a lot of dry eyes around the world. Let’s examine why.
Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group is quite right when he compares it to the JFK assassination. A killing in a country where there aren't really gun deaths will beget conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory so let me offer a few of my own lest anyone beat me to the punch.
Of course, calling something a conspiracy is a great way of dismissing it, isn’t it? And isn’t that the training of nearly all intelligence officers to deny, deny, deny?
But when you are in the assassination business you are in the conspiracy business. Japan’s history there is not so tame. In Japan, gun crime is yakuza crime. At least so we’re told.
This isn’t some random crazy person but a very directed (and probably not very crazy) person. The Abe assassination will change Japan for forever by revealing that Japan hasn’t really changed at all.
There’s so much to say about it that it’s hard to know where to begin.
First the details:
If someone works so hard as to fashion a hand-made firearm you can expect a level of attention to detail that is hard to ignore. I was over at a Japanophile friend’s house and we marveled at the craftsmanship. You put in the hours when you want to get the job done, apparently.
In quintessential Japanese fashion the assassin was wearing his mask. No, not a balaclava but a surgical mask.
He’s here to kill Abe, sir, not to get you sick with covid! I have to say I love how polite the Japanese are. You almost expect him to clean up after himself (though it does appear he was wearing a mask below his nose)!
There was a hint of something wild (according to the BBC).
Police named the suspect as Tetsuya Yamagami, a 41-year-old who lives in Nara, where the attack took place. Investigators say Mr. Yamagami told them he had a grudge against a group that he believed Mr. Abe was connected to.
They provided no further details but said Mr. Yamagami told them he fired the shots and took a bus to the site of the attack. It wasn’t clear if Mr. Yamagami had a lawyer.
And which group was that?
By some accounts it is the Moonies, who allegedly preyed on the shooter’s mother causing her to go bankrupt, and who are themselves connected to the Yakuza.
(At some point we will probe the rise of cults in the 1970s and 1980s, their ties to organized crime and the nation state, and the mistaken apprehension that we don’t have cults around us today. We just call them tech companies.)
Here’s how The Guardian describes the Reverend Moon’s ties the very same organized crime forces which backed the Liberal Democratic Party (which is neither Liberal, Nor Democratic):
Moon prospered under Reaganism. At this time he was backed by two Japanese tycoons that the US occupation had formerly imprisoned as war criminals. One was Yoshio Kodama, a yakuza (Japanese gangster) boss and organizer of fascist secret societies. Kodama made millions looting Manchuria in the war, and died in 1984 while awaiting trial in the Japanese Lockheed bribery scandal. The other was Ryoichi Sasakawa, who also made millions in the war and died in 1995. In the 1970s, when he controlled the $14bn Japanese motorboat racing business, Sasakawa described himself as "the world's richest fascist".
Those forces — the Yakuza — are very much still alive today. Part of what makes Japan so peaceful is that they are fully in operational control.
Are we allowed to say the Yakuza yet?
And how shall we think of our own country’s ties to the Yakuza? What was Governor Huckabee doing meeting with a member of the Japanese underground anyway? What does it mean that one of Arkansas’s political families is tied to the Yakuza? What might it mean for Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s campaign for governor? Is this just the deal if you are a governor from Arkansas? You get roped into some international money laundering?
Whenever there seems to be an investigation into these ties, Abe’s congenital illness seems to flare up precisely when he needs an exit. It happened in 2007 and again in 2020.
Then there’s these curious details about the assassin Yamagami. He is a former member of the Maritime Self-Defense Force. Might he have been doing the patriotic thing by killing Abe, who, though out of politics, remained a kingmaker?
I know, I know, this is taboo to say but could it be that Prime Minister Abe needed killing?
Was there a chance that Abe, like Bibi Netanyahu, was attempting a return to politics and that the Japanese deep state, itself tied into America since the Second World War, vetoed it?
How should we consider that Japan, still closed to the outside world thanks to the wonders of the covid excuse, seems to be turning inward? (You still can’t visit as a tourist.)
Well, that isn’t strictly true is it? Japan has joined the Quad and with it, supposedly is checking Chinese involvement in the South Pacific.
Are we returning to the government by assassination period of Japanese society?
Let me suggest that Abe’s killing was the bill for something long due across the generations: Pearl Harbor and the enslavement of the comfort women. This latter point is why so many in Korea and China aren’t mourning Abe, who refused to apologize for the systematic enslavement of the Chinese let alone pay reparations.
Indeed Abe’s maternal grandfather served in the war-time Japanese government and even played a key role in the surprise attack against the United States, an attack which nearly killed my grandfather, Dwight Lyman Johnson and did kill many of his friends aboard the USS Oklahoma. (He got shore leave right before the attacks.)
Abe’s maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, was the mastermind behind the economic enslavement of millions of Chinese for the industrial militarisation of Manchuria. Later, Kishi signed the declaration of war against the United States in 1941. After the war Kishi, an A-list war criminal, escaped prosecution and became a founder of the LDP, serving as prime minister from 1957 to 1960.
You can read all about that history of violence in a great piece in the Spectator.
In Tim Reiners controversial 2006 book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, Kishi was close to Japanese war criminal and crime boss Yoshio Kodama, who along with the CIA, funded the LDP.
Did Abe maintain his grandfather’s ties to the underworld? It looks like his father sure did.
Abe’s father Shintaro Abe was foreign minister during the 1980s. You know, when Japan, like China today, was supposed to take us over and replace America or something. Instead the elder Abe was forced from government after his involvement in an insider trading ring was made clear.
Does Abe the son have the same ties to the underworld?
He does if Tokyo Reporter in 2012 is to be believed.
On Monday, Abe, the current president of the Liberal Democratic Party, denied any links to gangsters despite his appearance in a photo from June 2008 that shows the politician being flanked on both sides by former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and Icchu Nagamoto, a financial broker for the Yamaguchi-gumi, who was arrested earlier this year for violating money-lending laws.
“As to close connections, there are none,” Abe said, referring to organized crime.
Huckabee, who had dropped his candidacy in the U.S. Republican presidential primary elections three months earlier, was in Japan on a one-week tour. On his Web site, he indicated that he visited Tohoku University and met with the Governor of Hokkaido.
The Shukan Post article says that the photo was taken inside Abe’s office within the Members’ Office Buildings of the National Diet around the time when Huckabee arrived in the country. The photo is now hanging inside a frame on the wall of a room in an unidentified residence in Setagaya Ward, Tokyo.
…
Nagamoto, who is of Korean descent and also goes by the name Son Il-ju, was arrested in March of this year after returning to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport from Korea. He was accused of assisting in a fabricated capital increase scheme for mid-level construction firm Inoue Kogyo, located in Gunma Prefecture.
“He’s in the loan-sharking business,” a business associate tells the tabloid. “If you want to make profit from business dealings with shady figures, you demand a high rate of interest with real estate as collateral.”
The source goes on to say that Nagamoto (known as “the Blackmarket King”) has been making a killing through new stock listings and fabricated capital increases. “He can come up with a one billion-yen loan in no time flat,” the associate says.
Sounds like SoftBank to me! Say, didn’t SoftBank fund shady real estate firm WeWork?
If you’re like me, you wonder a lot about the relationship between Japan and China and what it’s really all about. It’s just so foreign. You feel as if you aren’t really getting the real story. You do what we all do — you turn to Cold War clichés.
How much Chinese cash winds up in Japanese bank accounts? How much Japanese investment takes place in China? You might think that perhaps Japan and China are somewhat a part of the same transnational polity. Its opacity is part of its strategy.
Let’s consider that Xi himself is a product of the pro-Japan Chinese factions within China. He waited hours after Abe’s death to send his condolences. Abe had “contributed positively” to the China-Japan relations, Xi said. By which Xi really meant that Abe served as his puppet.
Abe was the first foreign leader to visit Trump as president. Is it a coincidence that Masa Son — who has his own ties to the Japanese and Korean underworlds — visited shortly thereafter? And what was Abe doing visiting Trump at Mar-A-Lago twice?
And so, I wonder, is the assassination a warning to other politicians?
Well, funny you should ask. Winston Churchill once said that in politics you can be killed many times and so it seems with Prime Minister Boris Johnson whose luck seemingly ran out.
It was the Punjabis who ultimately felled Boris with Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid departing—almost like that was an order given. What shall we make of Home Secretary Priti Patel remaining in the job?
Boris was thoroughly in the pocket of the Ukrainian mob lobby and of the criminal Chinese. The scholarship boy got got by Beijing when he was mayor of London with the Netanyahu Israelis having gotten him before that. There’ll be no “Singapore on the Thames” now.
Alas, so much of what we know about Asia is wrong.
Do you dare discuss how Taiwan itself is a prison for the troublesome, very anti-American Chinese, how Chiang “Cash My Check” Kai-Shek’s spymaster, Dai Li, was killed in a very suspicious plane crash right after the war, and how Mao himself might have been the good guy (at least when it comes to kicking out the Japanese and the Japanese-friendly Chinese factions now residing in Taiwan)?
Abe was very Chinese. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is very Chinese. Netanyahu is very Chinese (thanks to Macao casino magnates and therefore Chinese assets Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn). Two down one to go? Both Biden and Lapid will be judged harshly if they fail to keep Netanyahu out of office.
Is Donald Trump very Chinese? That is the question before us. Sure, he owes a bunch of money to the Bank of China. But he wasn’t selling EB5 visas from the White House, like his son-in-law and his criminal family.
No, Trump, to his credit, routinely endorses against the Chisraeli candidates. He opposes the criminally corrupt Axiom Partners which backed Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, David McCormick, and Josh Mandel. He stops short of endorsing the very Chisraeli former Governor Eric Greitens whom he called “smart,” and “tough” but “controversial.” He calls out Chinese asset Elon Musk for being a “bullshit artist.”
Other nations haven’t been so lucky and often aligned themselves with the Chinese mob. Abe is no different. Like Merkel or Kurz’s ties to Chinese money laundry Wirecard, Abe protected Chinese-mob backed SoftBank throughout his time in office.
Abe also protected Joi Ito, whose ties to Jeffrey Epstein, were whitewashed in a MIT report which protected Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn.
With Abe dead, it’s worth asking who stands to win and who stands to lose. Qui bono? Xi no bono because Xi is backed by the pro-Japanese Chinese factions.
Even after Abe left office for the last time Abe continued to push the absurd notion that America needed to defend Taiwan at all costs. This is a familiar neocon feint, decided to get the world to waste time, talent, and energy on Taiwan instead of focusing on the key technologies that will dominate the 21st century — genetics and biometrics.
Besides why would you invade what you already control?
There are lots of ways to assassinate people and I suspect Abe won’t be the last. These things come in waves.
Say, are we going to talk about how Elon Musk owned a meaningful stake in the Japanese (and Chinese mob backed) SoftBank?
Your work is always thought provoking. This piece made me think about a book I read possibly 15 years ago called City of Sadness. The story is about Japan losing control of Taiwan which is taken over by the Chinese Nationalist government. The plot is about the sudden cultural impact and the toll it takes on the community and within individual families. The lines between good guys and bad guys get blurred, depending on who tells the story.
The word "conspiracy" no longer has that aura of silliness to me.
I used to dismiss conspiracies out of hand. Now I dismiss people who call everything a conspiracy. It's just trolling and gaslighting at this point.