This essay exposes how the Association of Korean Scientists and Engineers in Japan, under the umbrella of Chongryon, built networks across Japanese universities, research institutes, and corporations and enabled advanced technologies to flow to North Korea.
Using Sankei Shimbun reporting as a guide, it sharply denounces the realities behind Taepodong development, the illicit export of jet mills, the cultivation of Japanese researchers, and the danger of a Japanese society indifferent to the threat.

2019-06-16
The Japanese themselves, indifferent to the threat, are in the end drawing the bow against their own homeland.

This is a chapter I posted on 2017-04-26 under the title, “Until August three years ago, I was not reading the Sankei Shimbun, and so in 2007 I knew absolutely nothing of this fact.”
Trying to confirm the essay I posted yesterday, I searched for the chapter, “What the academic world ought to make an issue of is that a professor belonging to a nuclear-related department at Kyoto University, a professor who is, if I recall correctly, a Zainichi Korean, has played an important role in North Korea’s nuclear development…”
Then the following article appeared.
Until August three years ago, I was not reading the Sankei Shimbun, and so in 2007 I knew absolutely nothing of this fact.
All readers of the Asahi Shimbun will surely be as stunned as I was.
At the same time, it proves that my own argument about the condition of the Asahi Shimbun Company, where a Chongryon elite of precisely this sort, educated in Korean elementary, middle, and high schools and then graduated from Peking University, serves as desk editor of TV Asahi’s foreign news section, was completely correct.
Truly, it is the disgraceful reality of a paradise for spies, to a degree beyond words.
It would not be an exaggeration at all to say that every employee of the Asahi Shimbun Company is an Ozaki Hotsumi now existing there.

“Japan in Danger” Part 1.
The Invisible Enemy (6).
Kakyō steals minds and technology.
(Sankei Shimbun, 2007/07/21)
A solid thirteen-story building stands along Hakusan-dori in Hakusan, Bunkyo Ward, Tokyo.
On its roof towers a giant shortwave antenna.
On the sixth floor of this building, which houses many organizations under the umbrella of Chongryon, is the headquarters of the Association of Korean Scientists and Engineers in Japan, Kakyō.
When a photographer from this newspaper tried to take a picture, a man immediately came out of the building and pressed him, saying, “For what purpose are you taking photographs?”
It was in March 1999, at the “National Scientists and Technicians Conference” held in the People’s Palace of Culture, that several executives of this Kakyō were greeted in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, with thunderous applause.
At the end of August the previous year, North Korea had launched the medium-range ballistic missile Taepodong-1, which flew over Japanese airspace and landed off Sanriku.
Standing on the platform, Choe Tae-bok, secretary of the Korean Workers’ Party, declared, “By our own technology, we successfully launched for the first time the artificial satellite Kwangmyongsong-1,” and then praised the Kakyō delegation led by chairman Shin Jae-gyun, as follows.
“Korean scientists and technicians in Japan have actively carried out patriotic activities for the prosperous development of the socialist homeland and the reunification of the homeland, have deeply engraved in their hearts the honor of becoming citizens of Juche Korea, and have made a great contribution to economic construction together with the scientists and technicians of the homeland.”
A senior Workers’ Party official thus recognized that the successful launch of the ballistic missile called “Kwangmyongsong-1,” which shook the Japanese people with fear, was the fruit of Kakyō’s “patriotic activities.”
In fact, the activities of this organization, which Chongryon insiders call “Kāgī,” had long been shrouded in secrecy.
It was the Public Security Bureau of the Metropolitan Police that tore away that veil, when in October of the year before last it searched Kakyō headquarters for the first time in connection with a Pharmaceutical Affairs Law violation case involving Kakyō officers and others.
The seized materials brought astonishing realities to light.
First, it became clear that Kakyō was directly under the control of the External Liaison Department, an operational organ of the Korean Workers’ Party, and that it had been instructed to carry out joint research with institutions such as the State Academy of Sciences, which is an organ of the North Korean cabinet.
The activity directives sent from the External Liaison Department to Kakyō said, “Science and technology are the pillar that will make the homeland into a strong and prosperous great power.”
“A strong and prosperous great power” was the national objective of General Secretary Kim Jong-il, a slogan aimed at making the country a great power in military and technological terms.
Specifically, Kakyō was being called upon to contribute to the improvement of nuclear and missile technology.

The State Academy of Sciences, with which Kakyō was conducting joint research, was once reported by a South Korean newspaper as a likely uranium enrichment facility, after the United States reportedly informed South Korea of that fact.
Kakyō may be called a procurement organ for materials used in the development of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons.
Company A, headquartered in Aichi Prefecture, is a maker of special steel indispensable to missile and nuclear development.
It is known for developments such as weight reduction in engine parts and transmission components.
About ten years earlier, North Korea asked to send an inspection team to Company A, but Company A refused.
Yet North Korea remained obsessed with weight-reduction technology, and public security officials say that Kakyō-related figures appear to have been targeting retired employees of firms such as Company A and approaching them.
The External Liaison Department, Kakyō’s superior organization, is also the organization to which operatives involved in the abduction of Keiko Arimoto belonged.
Can it not be said that infiltration operations are continuing where the eye cannot see?
(Keiichi Takagi, Hiroshi Kawase)

Researchers indifferent to “the North.”
Another astonishing aspect of Kakyō is the breadth of its network.
What the Metropolitan Police seized was a list of just under 1,200 members of Kakyō across its twelve branches nationwide.
Among these, the list of about 300 executive-level members was comparatively detailed, and in addition to Korea University it included the names of Japan’s former imperial universities as educational backgrounds.
As workplaces, there were the names of multiple national universities, research institutions under independent administrative agencies, and representative Japanese corporations such as major electronics manufacturers and heavy machinery firms.
There were experts in fields such as engineering, chemistry, and agriculture, and also members in fields that could be diverted to military technology.
The problem is that through this Kakyō network, Japan’s advanced technology and knowledge have been continuously leaking to North Korea.
The emphasis in the text and the passages between asterisks are mine.
In June 2003, the Metropolitan Police searched the machinery maker Seishin Enterprise on suspicion of illegally exporting to Iran and elsewhere a super-pulverizer called a “jet mill,” which can be diverted to the development of solid fuel for missiles.
Those who watched NHK News last night should, through the mention of this super-pulverizer “jet mill,” which can be diverted to the development of solid fuel for missiles, understand for the first time, as I did, that this was what it was all about.
But the problem is that NHK conveyed none of this fact at all.
Of course, compared with TV Asahi’s Hodo Station, which has no intention whatsoever of telling people anything about this, though that is only natural for an organization that places a Chongryon elite at the desk of its foreign news division, NHK is still better.
Even so, it is surely an indisputable fact that they have also penetrated NHK itself.

It was also made clear that a former senior Kakyō official was involved in illegally exporting jet mills to the North.
The month before, in May, a hearing concerning North Korean weapons exports had been held before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs.
A former engineer involved in North Korea’s ballistic missile development, who defected in 1997, the year before the launch of Taepodong-1, testified that “Ninety percent of the missile parts were imported from Japan.
They were transported every three months aboard the Mangyongbong through Chongryon.”
The seized documents also contained records that when Kakyō executives visited the homeland aboard the Mangyongbong, North Korean researchers with whom they made contact requested specific technical information necessary for their research.
In addition, documents were found suggesting procurement orders from the “Second Committee,” a body directly under the Korean Workers’ Party’s military industry, as well as documents directly ordering, “When you return this time, bring back materials on XX to the homeland.”
The problem is that Kakyō, seen by public security officials as “an industrial espionage organization supporting North Korea’s military,” is drawing Japanese scientists in directly and indirectly.
Kakyō’s first chairman, Ri Si-gyu, advanced from Kyoto University to graduate school at Osaka University and studied atomic physics under Dr. Koji Fushimi, Japan’s leading authority on nuclear research.
According to public security officials, in 1986 Ri invited the late Professor Hideo Itokawa, an authority on space engineering and professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, and in 1987 Dr. Fushimi, to North Korea.
In the January 2001 issue of the monthly magazine Japan no Shinro, Dr. Fushimi wrote, “People from the North are presently active here in Japan.
They travel frequently back and forth to their homeland.
And yet, even now after half a century, why have diplomatic relations still not been restored?”
Public security officials point out that Kakyō-related figures skillfully approached Japanese researchers at national universities and elsewhere and absorbed Japan’s advanced technologies.

This June, North Korea launched three short-range ballistic missiles.
All are said to have used solid fuel.
It is not impossible that the jet mills illegally exported by Japanese companies played some role.
Missiles using solid fuel are vastly more mobile than those using liquid fuel.
They can be loaded onto the bed of a truck and launched freely at any time.
That makes detection far more difficult.
If diverted for missiles aimed at Japan, they become a grave threat to Japan’s peace and security.
The Japanese themselves, indifferent to the threat, are in the end drawing the bow against their own homeland.

This installment continues.