2018-09-26
The following is a continuation of the preceding chapter.
All emphasis in the text, other than the headings, and all passages enclosed by asterisks are mine.

The Sankei Scoop That Left Every Other Newspaper Behind

That was why it seemed so sudden.
I was greatly astonished to learn that, besides Kazuo Shii, there were still fools in Japan who believed that a communist revolution remained possible.
But there was still more to be astonished by.
Early on the morning of May 19, 1975, eight months after I had heard the explosion on the seventh floor of the Ministry of Transport, I was awakened by a telephone call from the city news desk.
When I picked up the receiver, the familiar voice of an editor was shouting at me.
“You are the only one still asleep.
Get yourself in here at once,” he barked.
But his voice lacked the bitterness it normally carried when we had been beaten to a scoop.
He was laughing.
“Why?
The morning papers must have arrived by now.
Read every one of them before you come.”
The Sankei Shimbun had arrived.
Across the top of the front page, a bold reversed headline announced: “Metropolitan Police to Arrest Group Responsible for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Bombing Today.”
I hurriedly examined the other newspapers, but not one of them contained so much as the first syllable of Mitsubishi.
It was an extraordinary scoop by the reporter assigned to the Metropolitan Police Department, based on public-security information—the kind of scoop whose magnitude any newspaper reporter would immediately understand.
I now fully understood why the editor was so excited.
When I reached the office, the newsroom was tense, yet the excitement generated by the scoop could be felt surging through the entire editorial department.
The city editor, I was told, had stayed in the office throughout the previous night.

The Atrocities of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front

The moment he saw me, he ordered me to write the lead story for the evening edition.
“There are about half a dozen suspects.
We have assigned reporters to the detectives going out to make the arrests, but the police intend to shake them off.
We do not know whether our people will manage to reach the arrest scenes.
Take that into account and write something that conveys the immediacy of the arrests.”
A short while earlier, the detectives heading out to make the arrests had left the Metropolitan Police Department.
In the end, all our reporters were shaken off.
Even so, one photographer managed to stay with them and captured the very moment of an arrest.
The man arrested was Masashi Daidoji, the principal leader.
It was just before the deadline for the evening edition.
As I listened to the photographer’s account, I wrote 180 lines in a single burst, and the piece went directly into print.
It was later praised for its “vivid and compelling description” when the newspaper received the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association Award, but it was also a piece to which I remained personally attached.
What astonished me was the true objective revealed by the arrested members of the “Fangs of the Earth,” including Daidoji.
Daidoji began moving toward extremist terrorism after the struggle over the 1970 renewal of the Japan–United States Security Treaty had ended.
While he remained in the state of emptiness that follows a festival, he was approached by the Overseas Chinese Youth Struggle Committee.
They told him that Japan had committed atrocities in Asia, exploited its peoples, and massacred them.
Japan, they said, was the oppressor of the peoples of Asia.
The claim overlaps with Xi Jinping’s assertion that “China, which resisted the aggressor state of Japan, represented justice.”
Chinese activists were already planting that idea in the minds of left-wing extremists during the 1970s.
Daidoji swallowed it whole and established the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front.
Their objective was retaliation for the claim that Japan had “turned Koreans and Taiwanese into imperial subjects, used the men as shields for the Imperial Army, used the women for the sexual gratification of the Imperial Army, and massacred many of them” (from Daidoji’s statement of reasons for appeal).
＊The time has long since come for the Japanese people and people throughout the world to recognize that opposition politicians such as Kiyomi Tsujimoto; former NHK producer Eriko Ikeda and the others who supported the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal organized by former Asahi Shimbun reporter Yayori Matsui and North Korean spies; American figures such as Alexis Dudden—although it is astonishing that such a person should be called a scholar; Japanese anti-Japan activists; and similar people living throughout the world are all, without the slightest exaggeration, operating under the same kind of influence exerted by China and the Korean Peninsula—operations whose very existence can scarcely be explained by anything other than propaganda. I would like to call Tsujimoto and the others, together with the Asahi Shimbun, NHK, and their kind, the “East Asian Anti-Japan Front for Attacking Governments through False and Fabricated Reporting.” This fact also makes clear that there is no substantial difference between Daidoji and people such as Katsuichi Honda—the Asahi Shimbun and others—NHK, Jiro Yamaguchi, Kenzaburo Oe, Haruki Murakami, and the rest.＊
There were two targets.
One consisted of the Mitsubishi zaibatsu and other conglomerates that they claimed had exploited Asia.
The other was “Operation Rainbow”—in other words, a plot to assassinate Emperor Showa.
Daidoji and his associates made explosives using sodium chlorate as their base material.
In the middle of August 1974, they went to the railway bridge at Akabane, across which the Emperor’s special train was to pass as he returned from an Imperial villa, intending to plant the explosives there.
In the middle of the night, they carried the explosives beneath one of the bridge piers, but Daidoji lost his nerve, and they withdrew to try again later.

His Remaining Sense of Being Japanese Prevented Him from Carrying It Out

The following day, they again reached the bridge pier.
Just as they were about to install the detonating device, Daidoji once more said that he felt someone was watching them, and they withdrew.
Having abandoned their plan to assassinate the Emperor on two separate occasions, the “Fangs of the Earth” group changed its plan.
The two explosive-filled cans were instead planted at their next target, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
Daidoji’s death sentence was finalized in 1987.
He later developed multiple myeloma and died in the Tokyo Detention House in May of this year, amid suffering said to have been worse than death.
Until the very end, he refused to explain the true reason why he had twice abandoned an assassination that, had he proceeded, could apparently have been carried out without resistance.
One influential view was that the slight remnant of Japanese identity still remaining within him had prevented him from carrying it out.
Perhaps it means that, no matter what suggestions Chinese activists implant in their minds, Japanese people will not cross the final line.
Daidoji, after all, was also Japanese.
(August 2017 issue)