An essay examining the tragedies of Kim Philby and Yoshikichi Sugimoto and Yoshiko Okada to warn against illusions about communist regimes, criticizing China’s retaliatory diplomacy and the naivety of Japanese corporations.

February 23, 2019
China is a country that carries out such retaliation almost like a knee-jerk reflex.
At the time, Japan’s ambassador was China-infatuated Niwa Uichiro, chairman of Itochu.

The following is from Shukan Shincho, released the day before yesterday.
All who read it must have exclaimed how extraordinary Masayuki Takayama truly is, and must have silently nodded at my assessment that he is the one and only journalist of the postwar world.

To die in China.

Kim Philby, a well-born son who advanced from public school to Cambridge, became enamored of communism and volunteered as a Soviet spy.
After graduating, he plunged into the Spanish Civil War under the title of a Times correspondent and reported plans to assassinate General Franco to Moscow.
Although the plot failed, he had another journalist who saw through him as a spy killed under the guise of being caught in battle.
After returning home, he entered British intelligence MI6 and was put in charge of counter-Soviet intelligence.
He was an invaluable spy for the Soviet Union, and through his reports the Polish spy network and Albanian anti-communist groups were wiped out.
A Soviet spy seated at the very heart of British intelligence.
His true nature was finally exposed in 1963, thirty years later.
Interrogated, he defected to the Soviet Union that very night and was given employment as a KGB advisor by Khrushchev.
Yet the Soviet Union he had so admired was poor and desolate.
The GUM department store had nothing to compare with Harrods.
For a man raised in the British upper class, it must have been devastating, and his dying words were, “More Worcestershire sauce.”

Around the time he committed his first killing in Spain, director Yoshikichi Sugimoto and actress Yoshiko Okada, who also admired the Soviet Union, crossed the border into northern Sakhalin.
But it was a communist state devoid of common sense.
They were arrested on suspicion of espionage.
Okada, famed for her exotic beauty with one-eighth Dutch blood, resembled her obstinate socialist father in character and conduct.
Disliking pain, she confessed under torture, saying, “Yes, I am a spy,” and declared Sugimoto to be one as well.
She was also made to accuse Russian director Meyerhold, whom she had never met, of espionage.
Based on her confession, Sugimoto and Meyerhold were tortured and shot.
She herself was sentenced to ten years and transferred among prisons suffering from a shortage of women.
Why had she admired such a country.
She must have repeated the same self-questioning as Kim Philby.
But Kim did not beg his homeland to send him sauce.
Nor did Okada beg to be rescued.
Both quietly bore shame for their own blindness.
Though Okada later returned to Japan, perhaps feeling she had no right to live comfortably there, she went back to the Soviet Union of bitter memories.
There was something resolute about it.

China is cunning.
It claimed that chemical weapons left by Mao were abandoned by the Japanese army and forced the Japanese government to pay one trillion yen for disposal.
Even such dirty money attracted Fujita.
When four employees went to China, they were detained on suspicion of espionage.
Just before that, a Chinese fishing boat had rammed a Japanese patrol vessel near the Senkaku Islands and its captain had been arrested.
The Fujita employees were detained in retaliation.
The captain was held for nineteen days, and precisely nineteen days later the Fujita employees were released.
When Huawei vice-chair Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada, China immediately detained thirteen Canadians in China.
It also retried another Canadian already serving fifteen years for drug smuggling and sentenced him to death.
China is a country that carries out such retaliation like a knee-jerk reflex.
At the time, Japan’s ambassador was Niwa Uichiro, chairman of Itochu, infatuated with China.
He even harshly criticized Japan for not yielding the Senkakus.
In that spirit, Itochu invested 600 billion yen in the declining CITIC Group and incurred unprecedented losses.
China promptly detained a male employee of the company.
If Itochu withdraws its investment, perhaps he will be sentenced to death.
Kim and Yoshiko Okada proved with their lives how dreadful a communist state can be.
Yet some companies still place their dreams in China without learning.
It may seem that employees are victims.
But those who eagerly join such companies and enthusiastically study Chinese share responsibility as well.