Written on May 17, 2019, this article portrays the merciless nature of communist states through the lives of Kim Philby and Yoshiko Okada, while sharply questioning the folly of Japanese companies that still cling to illusions about China and of a Japanese society that refuses to face the danger.

2019-05-17
Kim and Yoshiko Okada staked their lives on proving how utterly rotten communist states are.
Even so, there are still companies that, having learned nothing from this, continue to place their dreams in China.

Why did she ever long for such a country?
She too must have repeated the same question to herself as Kim Philby did.
Only, Kim did not beg his homeland to send him Worcestershire sauce.
The chapter I published on 2019-02-23 under that title has now entered the real-time best ten.
What follows is from the Shukan Shincho released the day before yesterday.
All those who purchased and read the following must surely have exclaimed in admiration, “Masayuki Takayama truly is extraordinary!”
And they must also have silently nodded at my assessment that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
To Die in China.
Kim Philby, a well-born young man who went from public school to Cambridge, for whatever dissatisfaction he may have felt, became infatuated with communism and volunteered to serve as a Soviet spy.
After graduating from university, he plunged into the Spanish Civil War under the title of a Times correspondent, and submitted to Moscow a plan to assassinate General Franco.
Although that plan came to nothing, at that time he also had killed a reporter from another company who had seen through him as a spy, disguising it as if the man had been caught up in battle.
After returning home, he entered British intelligence, MI6, and astonishingly took charge of the anti-Soviet intelligence network.
For the Soviet Union he was an immensely valuable spy, and thanks to Kim’s reports, both the Polish spy network and the Albanian anti-communist organization could be wiped out.
A Soviet spy enthroned at the very center of British intelligence.
His disguise was finally stripped away only thirty years later, in 1963.
After being interrogated, he defected to the Soviet Union that very night and was given work by Khrushchev as a KGB adviser.
But the Soviet Union he had so deeply admired was poor and desolate.
At the GUM department store there was not a single item comparable to what Harrods would carry.
It seems this was quite a blow to a man raised in the British upper class, and his dying words were, “More Worcestershire sauce.”
Around the time when he committed his first killing in Spain, the stage director Sugimoto Ryokichi and the actress Okada Yoshiko, who had similarly longed for the Soviet Union, crossed the border into northern Sakhalin.
But what lay there was a communist state without the slightest shred of common sense.
The two were arrested on suspicion of espionage.
Okada’s appeal had been her exotic beauty, one-eighth Dutch by blood, but like her eccentric socialist father, her character and conduct were both bad.
She disliked pain as well, and when tortured confessed, “Yes, I am a spy,” and admitted that her companion Sugimoto was also a spy.
She was also made to say that the Russian director Meyerhold, whom she had never even met, was a spy.
Because of her confession, Sugimoto and Meyerhold were shot to death after torture.
She too was sentenced to ten years and sent around to various prisons starved of women.
Why did she ever long for such a country?
She too must have repeated the same question to herself as Kim Philby did.
Only, Kim did not beg his homeland to send him Worcestershire sauce.
Nor did Okada ask her homeland to rescue her.
Both quietly felt ashamed of their own blindness.
Okada later returned to Japan, but perhaps because she felt she had no right to live in comfort here, she went back to the Soviet Union, where she had nothing but bitter memories.
There was something admirable in that.
The Chinese are cunning.
They lied that the chemical weapons left unused by Mao Zedong had been “abandoned by the Japanese military,” and made the Japanese government pay one trillion yen in disposal costs.
Even for such filthy money, Fujita leapt at the opportunity.
When four employees went to China, they were detained on suspicion of espionage.
Just before that, a Chinese fishing boat had rammed a patrol vessel near the Senkakus, and its captain had been arrested.
Fujita’s employees were arrested in retaliation for that.
The proof is that the captain was detained for nineteen days, and Fujita’s employees too were released precisely after nineteen days.
When Huawei vice chair Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada, China immediately arrested thirteen Canadians in China.
And on top of that, it retried another Canadian, who had been serving a fifteen-year sentence for drug smuggling, and sentenced him to death.
China is the kind of country that carries out retaliation like a knee-jerk reflex.
At the time, the Japanese ambassador was China-admiring Niwa Uichiro, chairman of Itochu.
Indeed, he went so far as to denounce Japan, which refused to yield the Senkakus, in the strongest terms as “a brat running around with his penis hanging out.”
In that same spirit, Itochu invested 600 billion yen in the declining Chinese state conglomerate CITIC, only to incur an unprecedented loss.
The moment that happened, China detained a male employee of the company.
If Itochu were to pull out its investment, China seems ready to sentence him to death.
Kim and Yoshiko Okada staked their lives on proving how utterly rotten communist states are.
Even so, there are still companies that, having learned nothing from this, continue to place their dreams in China.
The employees may appear to have become victims, but that is not so.
Employees who gladly join such companies and happily study Chinese are also sufficiently at fault.