nse plan in 1996, my effort was directed at ensuring
that mobile base stations have back-up power with fast recharge.
- A subsequent phone call when my colleague returned to
Tokyo went dead when I mentioned "GE." That incident occurred
on the day that GE's CEO Jeff Immelt landed in Tokyo with a pledge to rebuild
the Fukushima 1 nuclear plant. Such apparent eavesdropping is only possible
if national phone carrier NTT is cooperating with the signals-intercepts
program of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
- The Manchurian Deal
- The chain of events behind this vast fabrication goes
back many decades.
- During the Japanese militarist occupation of northeast
China in the 1930s, the puppet state of Manchukuo was carved out as a fully
modern economic powerhouse to support overpopulated Japan and its military
machine. A high-ranking economic planner named Nobusuke Kishi worked closely
with then commander of the occupying Kanto division, known to the Chinese
as the Kwantung Army, General Hideki Tojo.
- Close ties between the military and colonial economists
led to stunning technological achievements, including the prototype of
a bullet train (or Shinkansen) and inception of Japan's atomic bomb project
in northern Korea. When Tojo became Japan's wartime prime minister, Kishi
served as his minister of commerce and economy, planning for total war
on a global scale.
- After Japan's defeat in 1945, both Tojo and Kishi were
found guilty as Class-A war criminals, but Kishi evaded the gallows for
reasons unknown-probably his usefulness to a war-ravaged nation. The scrawny
economist's conception of a centrally managed economy provided the blueprint
for MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry), the predecessor
of METI, which created the economic miracle that transformed postwar Japan
into an economic superpower.
- After clawing his way into the good graces of Cold Warrior
John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's secretary of state, Kishi was elected
prime minister in 1957. His protégé Yasuhiro Nakasone, the
former naval officer and future prime minister, spearheaded Japan's campaign
to become a nuclear power under the cover of the Atomic Energy Basic Law.
- American Complicity
- Kishi secretly negotiated a deal with the White House
to permit the U.S. military to store atomic bombs in Okinawa and Atsugi
naval air station outside Tokyo. (Marine corporal Lee Harvey Oswald served
as a guard inside Atsugi's underground warhead armory.) In exchange, the
U.S. gave the nod for Japan to pursue a "civilian" nuclear program.
- Secret diplomacy was required due to the overwhelming
sentiment of the Japanese public against nuclear power in the wake of the
Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. Two years ago, a text of the secret
agreement was unearthed by Katsuya Okada, foreign minister in the cabinet
of the first Democratic Party prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama (who served
for nine months from 2009-10).
- Many key details were missing from this document, which
had been locked inside the Foreign Ministry archives. Retired veteran diplomat
Kazuhiko Togo disclosed that the more sensitive matters were contained
in brief side letters, some of which were kept in a mansion frequented
by Kishi's half-brother, the late Prime Minister Eisaku Sato (who served
from 1964-72). Those most important diplomatic notes, Togo added, were
removed and subsequently disappeared.
- These revelations were considered a major issue in Japan,
yet were largely ignored by the Western media. With the Fukushima nuclear
plant going up in smoke, the world is now paying the price of that journalistic
- On his 1959 visit to Britain, Kishi was flown by military
helicopter to the Bradwell nuclear plant in Essex. The following year,
the first draft of the U.S.-Japan security was signed, despite massive
peace protests in Tokyo. Within a couple of years, the British firm GEC
built Japan's first nuclear reactor at Tokaimura, Ibaragi Prefecture. At
the same time, just after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the newly unveiled Shinkansen
train gliding past Mount Fuji provided the perfect rationa