Published on July 15, 2019.
This article begins with the Sankei Shimbun scoop on the arrest of the perpetrators of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries bombing and examines the ideological background of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front and Masashi Daidoji.
It critically considers anti-Japanese propaganda originating from China and the Korean Peninsula, the plot to assassinate Emperor Showa, the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries bombing, and their continuity with contemporary anti-Japanese reporting and attacks on governments.

July 15, 2019.
Daidoji swallowed it whole and founded the “East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front.”
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The emphases in the text, apart from the headings, and the passages marked with ＊～＊ are mine.
The Sankei scoop beat the other newspapers.
That is why it seemed so sudden.
I was greatly surprised that, besides Kazuo Shii, there was still a fool in this world who believed that a communist revolution was possible in Japan.
But there was still more to be surprised about.
Eight months after hearing the explosion on the seventh floor of the Ministry of Transport, early in the morning on May 19, 1975, I was awakened by a phone call from the city news desk.
When I picked up the receiver, the voice of a desk editor I recognized was shouting.
“You’re the only one still sleeping.
Get up here right now,” he barked.
But there was none of the sharpness that comes when one has been beaten on a scoop; his voice was laughing.
“Why?
The morning papers must have arrived already.
Read through all of them before you come.”
The Sankei Shimbun had arrived.
On the top of the front page, a white-lettered headline announced, “Metropolitan Police Department to Arrest Today the Perpetrator Group in the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Bombing Incident.”
I hurriedly looked at the other papers, but there was not even the first syllable of Mitsubishi.
It was a tremendous scoop by the police reporters covering the Metropolitan Police Department, a public-security story that any newspaper reporter would understand.
I understood very well why the desk editor was excited.
When I arrived at the company, the excitement over the scoop, while the newsroom was on edge, was rising and being transmitted through the editorial office.
They said the city editor had stayed overnight from the previous night.
The barbarity of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front.
When he saw my face, he told me to write the evening edition’s lead article.
“There are about half a dozen suspects.
We have reporters attached to the detectives going to arrest them, but the other side intends to shake them off.
We do not know whether they will be able to reach the arrest sites successfully.
Taking that into account too, write the immediacy of the arrests.”
A little earlier, the detectives heading for the arrests had left the Metropolitan Police Department.
In the end, all of the reporters were shaken off.
Even so, one photographer managed to stay with them and photographed the moment of arrest.
That was Masashi Daidoji, the principal offender.
It was just before the deadline for filing the evening edition.
While listening to the photographer, I wrote 180 lines in one burst, and they went straight into print.
Later, in the reason for the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association Award, that piece was described as having “vivid, realistic description,” but it was also a piece with personal meaning for me.
What surprised me was the true aim revealed by the arrested Daidoji and others of “Fangs of the Earth.”
Daidoji began moving toward extremist terrorism after the 1970 Security Treaty struggle ended.
In his state of emptiness after the festival, the “Overseas Chinese Youth Struggle Committee” approached him.
They said Japan had committed atrocities in Asia, exploited it, and massacred people.
They said Japan was the oppressor of the Asian peoples.
It overlaps with Xi Jinping’s words that “China, which resisted the aggressor state Japan, is justice.”
In the 1970s, Chinese people were implanting that into left-wing extremists.
Daidoji swallowed it whole and founded the “East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front.”
Its aim was revenge for the claim that “Koreans and Taiwanese were turned into imperial subjects, men were used as bullet shields for the imperial army, women were used for the imperial army’s sexual processing, and many were massacred”（from Daidoji’s statement of appeal）.
＊The time has long since come for the Japanese people and people throughout the world to realize that it is no exaggeration at all to say that opposition-party political operators such as Kiyomi Tsujimoto, former NHK producer Eriko Ikeda, who co-sponsored the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal held by former Asahi Shimbun reporter Yayori Matsui and North Korean spies, Alexis Dudden and others in the United States（that such people are called scholars is astonishing）, anti-Japanese activists in Japan, and similar people inhabiting the world are all, in the same way, people under the influence of China and the Korean Peninsula（and it would not be an exaggeration to say that they have no reason to exist other than propaganda）.
I would like to name them, beginning with Kiyomi Tsujimoto, together with the Asahi Shimbun” and NHK and the like, the “East Asia Anti-Japan False Fabricated Reporting Front for Attacking the Government.”＊
There were two targets.
One was zaibatsu such as Mitsubishi, which they said had exploited Asia, and the other was Operation Rainbow, that is, the plan to assassinate Emperor Showa.
Daidoji and the others made explosives using sodium chlorate as the base, and in mid-August 1974, they went to plant them on the Akabane railway bridge over which the imperial train carrying His Majesty the Emperor back from the Imperial Villa would pass.
In the middle of the night, they carried the explosives to the base of the bridge pier, but Daidoji lost his nerve and turned back.
Japanese consciousness prevented the execution.
The next day, they again reached the bridge pier, and when all that remained was to set the detonator, Daidoji again said he felt as if someone was watching them, and they withdrew.
Having abandoned the plan to assassinate the Emperor twice, the “Fangs of the Earth” group changed its plan there, and the two cans were to be planted at the next target, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
Daidoji’s death sentence was finalized in 1987, but he suffered from multiple myeloma and died this May in the Tokyo Detention House amid pain worse than death.
To the very end, he never tried to speak of the real reason why he twice abandoned the assassination of the Emperor, which he could have carried out without resistance if he had done it.
There was also a strong view that the faint Japanese consciousness remaining within him prevented him from carrying it out.
Does it mean that no matter how Chinese people suggest things to them, Japanese people do not cross the final line?
Daidoji, too, was Japanese after all.
（August 2017 issue）