Drawing on a dialogue published in WiLL, this essay examines the Moritomo Gakuen affair by focusing on the decisive contradiction in Yasunori Kagoike’s testimony. It analyzes lecture honorarium norms, altered explanations before the Diet, and the possibility that the narrative fulfills the elements of fraud under criminal law.

At the time, a three-column, sixteen-page dialogue feature in the current issue of WiLL, titled “The Dark Matter and Core of the Moritomo Issue: Why Did It Stop When the Name Tsujimoto Kiyomi Appeared?”, featuring Takayama Masayuki and Yamaguchi Noriyuki, is essential reading for all Japanese citizens.
It is also essential reading for people around the world who wish to understand what truth really is.
It brilliantly demonstrated that Takayama Masayuki is a unique journalist in the postwar world.
At the same time, I am convinced that my own commentaries may also have pushed Takayama Masayuki forward.
What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Takayama:
One thing I find extremely strange is this. For example, when it comes to honoraria for lectures by famous people, there are established market rates—Margaret Thatcher at three million yen, someone else at two million yen, and so on.
They say Ryuchi paid Akie Abe ten thousand yen, but even I, if told to travel that far for ten thousand yen, would say, “Don’t be ridiculous,” and refuse.
Well, no one invites me, so I don’t go anyway (laughs).
If Diet members seriously believe that, then they are completely ignorant of the market.
For the Prime Minister’s wife, it would be only natural to pay one million yen.
Sankei wrote a bit about this too, but most likely the one million yen was actually a lecture honorarium, and when Akie Abe said, “I don’t need it,” they replied, “Then we’ll treat it as a donation.”
Yamaguchi:
At first, Mr. Kagoike Yasunori said, “I received one million yen and took ten thousand yen out of it to hand over,” but at the witness hearing, he changed it to, “I had prepared ten thousand yen in an envelope.”
That is fundamentally different.
When I asked three people who had given lectures at Moritomo Gakuen, all of them said their honoraria were one million yen.
In Akie Abe’s case as well, one million yen was prepared in cash as a lecture fee, and since she did not accept it, it was treated as a donation from Prime Minister Abe Shinzo.
If, with malicious intent to gather further donations, they then re-deposited money that was not a donation—money originally their own—into their own account and presented it as proof that the Prime Minister had donated one million yen via the post office, the story makes sense.
If this narrative is correct, it may satisfy the constituent elements of the crime of fraud.
This manuscript continues.