Who was Yoshio Kodama?
The man with the plan
One person that absolutely fascinates me is a guy called Yoshio Kodama and as a filmmaker, I intend to one day make a film with him as one of central characters!
I first read about Yoshio Kodama in Robert Whiting’s amazing book Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan, which is by far and away my favorite book ever written. If you are a lover of gangster stories, corrupt political scandals, Japanese professional wrestling, Japan itself, or books that read like a Hollywood movie, please pick up a copy of Bob’s book, it’s a fascinating story!
https://www.amazon.com/Tokyo-Underworld-Times-American-Gangster/dp/0375724893
So who was Yoshio Kodama?
Born on February 18th, 1911 (died on January 17th, 1984), Kodama was a prominent figure in the rise of the yakuza in Japan. He was one of the most famous behind-the-scenes power brokers (known as kuromaku) of the 20th century and was active in Japan's political arena and criminal underworld from the 1950s to the early 1970s. He was notorious since the 1920s for his connections with right-wing and underworld groups and had very high-level connections in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
The mob and politicians ruling together? See, I told you it was a fascinating story!
The Liberal Democratic Party (jiminto), frequently abbreviated to LDP, is the ruling conservative political party in Japan and has been in power almost continuously since its foundation in 1955 (except between 1993 and 1994, and again from 2009 to 2012).
In response to Cold War tensions in Asia post World War II, the LDP was funded by the CIA, who were paying as much as 1 million US dollars a month in the 1950s and 1960s for intelligence gathering and to make Japan a bulwark against communism in Asia. Basically, America had its hand up the puppet ass of Japan’s government despite an incredible amount of anti US sentiment in Japan at the time.
So how do Kodama and communism fit in with the LDP and the US war machine? The Americans needed Kodama for his intelligence on China, who was then under Communist threat, and also his Korean connections.
At the end of World War II, Japan was made to “"eat humble pie” as the American military once put it. The country was defeated in devastating fashion, it’s industries destroyed, and morale of the entire nation shattered. The new Constitution, drafted up by the allied forces, was imposed in place of its feudal system of government, and the allied occupation of Japan began.
The allies, or basically the United States, wanted to make Japan the Switzerland of Asia - a peace loving Swiss like utopia. But by late 1947 and early 1948, the emergence of an economic crisis in Japan, alongside concerns about the spread of communism (thanks to Mao in China and the Russians in North Korea) sparked a reconsideration of occupation policies. No more Swiss utopia, time for a change!
Known as the “Red Scare in Japan”, the US became concerned that a weak Japanese economy would increase the influence of the domestic communist movement in Japan. This would have been possible because there were a lot of Koreans in Japan, as Japan had occupied the Korean peninsular from 1910-1945. With a communist victory in China's civil war also increasingly likely, the future of East Asia appeared to be at stake and the US decided to act fast. Communism was indeed spreading, and the West’s fear of a Communist planet (as well as the Communist fear of destruction at the hands of the Capitalists) fueled a decades-long conflict we have come to know as “The Cold War.”
And so here comes Yoshio Kodama to help out. He was the political fixer and CIA contact man who helped the US secretly finance things.
Back in 1933, Kodama formed his own ultranationalist group called the Independent Youth Society (Dokuritsu Seinensha), which planned to assassinate various Japanese politicians. The Independent Youth Society’s main activity was opium export from Japan to Korea and Manchuria, in order to break the resistance of the local population against the Japanese colonial rule. Interestingly, this was also a tactic the North Koreans attempted to do to Japan after the end of World War II - they wanted to flood Japan with cocaine so that both the US armed forces and the newly formed Japan Self-Defence Force would be so high on drugs that they could not fight a war. As history tells us, it was a mission that failed.
Kodama’s Dokuritsu Seinensha group collaborated with the group Tenkokai ("Society for Heavenly Action") and were responsible for the murder of three Japanese politicians who advocated for the peaceful coexistence of Japan, Korea and China. In 1934, Kodama was also involved in the planning of an assassination attempt on Prime Minister Makoto Saito’s life. After Kodama's plot was uncovered, the attack was prevented by Japanese police and Kodama was arrested. For his role in this, Kodama served three and half years in Fuchu prison.
After his release in 1937, a full eight years before the end of World War II, the Japanese government contracted Kodama to help move supplies for the Japanese war effort out of continental Asia and into Japan. He accomplished this through a network of allies he made during his time working in Korea as a youth. Kodama was also moving opiates to Japan along with the supplies he was paid by the government to smuggle. He formed a vast network of allies and gained a fortune - reportedly more than $175 million dollars, making him one of the richest men in Asia during this time.
At the end of World War II, Kodama was arrested by the United States as a Class A war criminal. Before being arrested, he had acted as an advisor to the Japanese interim government of Crown Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni and because Kodama feared the confiscation of his property by the US allied occupation authorities, he gave parts of it to yakuza boss Karoku Tsuji, known as Japan's Al Capone. His other possessions were said to have been kept on the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.
The U.S. intelligence community secured Kodama’s release from Sugamo Prison in exchange for his help in fighting communism in Asia. Kodama, being a right-wing ultranationalist, eagerly obliged, using his fortune and network of contacts to squash labor disputes, root out Communist sympathizers, and otherwise fight the socialist presence in Japan. In 1949, the CIA paid him to smuggle a shipment of tungsten out of China. The shipment never arrived but Kodama kept his money.
Together with the Tsuji, who was also released from Sugamo Prison, the pair formed the Liberal Party, a conservative party who then merged with the Democratic Party (despite being conservatives), to form the Liberal-Democratic Party, which as I mentioned in the beginning, has basically run Japan ever since.
It was while being held in Sugamo Prison that Kodama formed a close relationship with fellow suspected Class-A war criminal (and future Japanese prime minister) Nobusuke Kishi, who is the grandfather of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, who resigned in 2020 due to “ill health and stress”, engulfed in many scandals of his own. He was shot to death in July 2022 by a home made gun and the assassination spotlighted the Unification Church links to Japan's politics and how dirty the game is.
The assassination has focused public attention on the religious movement that was apparently the target of the alleged assassin's hatred — and its decades-old ties to Japan's leaders and ruling party.
Nobusuke Kishi also married his first cousin Yoshiko Kishi, and it was Kishi and other politicians who later founded the Liberal Democratic Party, thanks to the merger.
See the pattern? Despite being designated as Class A war criminals by the International Military Tribunal, Kishi, Kodama, Tsuji, and others were no longer considered war criminals because they were able to help out the US and their fight against communism. All is forgiven, now let’s smash the commies! The formation of the main political party in Japan, the LDP, was greatly influenced by these Class A war criminals.
Kodama used his power in the yakuza to suppress anything he deemed the least bit communist or anti-nationalist. In 1947, he ordered the Meiraki-gumi, an affiliated gang, to break up a labour movement at the Hokutan coal mine. During this period, Kodama used his underworld connections to help unite the various gangs, which had rapidly increased in the years immediately following World War II (lots of Korean influence). The short-lived Kanto-kai was the most prominent example of these efforts and Kodama also brokered a truce between the Yamaguchi-gumi and the Tosei-kai, headed by his colleague Hisayuki Machii.
With the LDP now being fully backed by the United States government, Kodama was perhaps the most powerful individual within the faction. It is no stretch to say that the yakuza dictated the party and country's policies even as we know them today.
Kodama always controlled who got the job of prime minister and what policies he was to follow during the post-war period, and was also appointed as advisor to Japan's first post-war cabinet. It was reported that anyone who probed too deeply into his background, or his current activities, would be murdered by one of his underworld associates, or by his private army, which was said to number 20,000 men. Kodama's network of contacts reached into every ministry and into every branch of the police, which kept his whereabouts a secret.
Among Kodama's "accomplishments" was handing the position of Minister of Justice to Tokutaro Kimura. Kimura was designated as a Class D war criminal for his past activities. From that position, Kimura engineered the release of other yakuza from prison. He was later transferred to head the new Self-Defence Force. Kimura lived past his nineties and his other activities included forming many other societies -- all with aims of maintaining a sovereign emperor, eliminating the MacArthur constitution and strengthening the army. However, his most infamous success was revising the history textbooks to soften descriptions of wartime atrocities in both China and Korea.
It was around this time that Kishi made his real power move within the LDP, as he powered his way up, backed by Kodama, to become the secretary-general. He then moved on to become the Deputy Prime Minister under the Yoshida government, and later Prime Minister in March 1957.
Author, Roy Thomas;
"Nobusuke Kishi, a former economic czar of Manchuria, and architect of Japan's wartime economy, joined Tojo's cabinet in October 1941, and was a co-signer of the declaration of war against the United States. He served as Industry Minister and, following Tojo's resignation in 1944, as Vice Minister of Munitions.
"After the surrender, Kishi was held for three and a half years at Sugamo Prison as a Class "A" war criminal. But in 1952 he was released under a general amnesty and began a new political career during which he showed that he had lost none of his old style. It took him five years to become prime minister, so that in thirteen short years he had moved from Tojo's war cabinet to become head of the U.S.'s most trusted ally in the Pacific" (Japan: The Blighted Blossom, 1989, pp. 31).
The influence of these criminals was based on mutual help and continued into the next generation. David Kaplan writes;
"When Kishi assumed office in March 1957, he took the nation's highest post only five years after depurge, and nine years after release from war criminal status. This mutual assistance among the Sugamo graduates would mark Japanese electoral politics for years to come.
"Kishi managed to help return to centre stage a whole galaxy of prewar rightists and yakuza allies. Among them were two symphonious, and notorious, names -- Ichiro Kono and Bamboku Ohno. Kono was a part of many major LDP decisions, including those to name Prime Minister Kishi and his successor, Eisaku Sato" (Yakuza, pp. 82).
Bamboku Ohno was closely connected to the Kobe-based yakuza, Yamaguchi-gumi. Backed by Kishi and Kodama, Ohno assumed the secretary-general post in the LDP party, where he remained until his death in 1965.
During the period under his leadership from 1957 to 1960, Kishi continued to strengthen the far right-wing in the LDP. He kept an eye on future succession as well. Among the Kishi cabinet was Yasuhiro Nakasone, the youngest member of the Kono faction and a protege of Yoshio Kodama. Nakasone would go on to become Japan’s prime minister in 1981.
It was the yakuza who helped fight against the Anpo protests, a series of massive protests throughout Japan from 1959 to 1960, and again in 1970. They were protests against the United States–Japan Security Treaty, which is the treaty that allows the US to maintain military bases on Japanese soil. As the treaty was being signed, and as hundreds of thousands of protestors surrounded Japan's National Diet building in Tokyo, the yakuza were employed as human shields to stop protestors storming their way into the Diet building. Where were the American mob on January 6, 2021, when they were needed?
In the aftermath of this incident, a planned visit to Japan by US president Dwight D. Eisenhower was cancelled, and PM Kishi was forced to resign.
After the death of Ohno and Kono in the 1960s, Kodama continued to mastermind the selection of the post of the Prime Minister, including Eisaku Sato and Kakuei Tanaka.
By 1981, Nakasone finally ascended to the nation's highest post and became Japan's longest serving and most influential prime minister. An advocate of increasing military budgets and making Japan a nuclear power, he had headed the Defense Agency and, as a protege of Kodama, had impeccable extreme right-wing credentials. The ties between Tanaka and Nakasone were close ones -- both were affiliated with the yakuza and ultranationalist groups.
Again, from Roy Thomas;
"More than half of Japan's mobsters are supporters of the nationalist wing of the LDP, and are indistinguishable from the neofascist cliques which increasingly thrive within the party. During the 1980s, under the premiership of Yasuhiro Nakasone, the number of such groups increased. It is estimated there are now about 120,000 right-wing conservatives with yakuza ties" (Japan: The Blighted Blossom, pp. 233-234).
Unlike the Nazis in Europe who were driven underground following their defeat, the yakuza war criminals were never eliminated by the American Occupation. In fact, they grew and prospered with the Occupation. The majority of the worst criminals, with Class A war criminal records, spent a few years in prison, after which they walked free with a change of clothing and went on with life as usual.
Yoshio Kodama was also involved in a number of scandals in the post-war era, many of which involved United States businesses and the CIA. Most notable of these was the Lockheed L-1011 sales scandal in the 1970s, which I also first read about in Bob’s book. This scandal helped Japanese journalists launch a merciless campaign against Kodama. Police investigators carried out house searches and confiscated incriminating papers that he had not yet destroyed.
Not only did the Lockheed scandal end Kodama’s career, but after it all came to light, a disillusioned ultranationalist porn actor called Mitsuyasu Maeno attempted to assassinate Kodama by flying a plane into his Tokyo house, kamikaze style. The attempt failed as Maeno hit the second floor of Kodama's mansion and died in the plane crash. Kodama was unharmed as he was recovering from a stroke in a different room.
Kodama became unpopular on the Japanese right and in June 1977, charges were brought against him for tax evasion related to the scandal, but the trial was never completed as he died in his sleep of a stroke on January 17th, 1984.
A ruthless underground gangster who helped the Americans get their way in Asia, guided the Liberal Democratic Party policy for decades, and decided who gets to be PM, Yoshio Kodama will go down in history as the man who helped shape modern day Japan.
wow!
Excellent article! I've always been fascinated by Kodama.