Authors: Robert Whiting
By June 1976, the handwriting was on the wall. The company owed billions of yen in unpaid loans; its credit, theretofore guaranteed by the Japan Real Estate Bank, one of the many institutions Kodama was affiliated with, was now suddenly cut off. Kodama embezzled millions of dollars from TSK coffers and the company was forced to file for bankruptcy – on the very same day, coincidentally, that Kodama, suffering from a sudden attack of deteriorating health, was wheeled into Tokyo District Court to start his long and lengthy trial.
Just exactly why some people in Washington decided to open an investigation into bribery by US corporations overseas and publicly reveal the Lockheed payoffs was something many people in Japan wanted to know. It was certainly the subject of much debate around Nicola’s tables, especially among the foreign journalists who dined there. Some of them cited the new so-called post-Watergate morality as the main motivating factor, rectitude in politics having become the new fashion in Washington, while others claimed an internal CIA rift as a factor. Still others, however, believed the reason was simple revenge.
The Watergate scandal that forced US President Richard Nixon out of office in 1974 had brought about a change in the US power structure. It had meant the end of what some writers called the ‘Southwestern Money Nexus’ (‘Southwestern’ being a reference to Nixon’s California roots), which included the disgraced expresident, Lockheed, the Pentagon and the CIA. Taking its place was the ‘Eastern Establishment Nexus’, which included the Rockefeller Group, the Eastern seaboard multinationals and McDonnell-Douglas. Since Tanaka, Osano, Kodama and the others were known to be tied up with Southwestern Lockheed money, they had to go.
A noted believer in this theory was Kodama himself. Up until the time of his death in 1984, he had been trying to find out why he and his cronies had been singled out for prosecution while others equally guilty – namely, those involved in bribery with Lockheed’s rivals – went scot-free.
Mitsui
author John Roberts, a Tokyo-based journalist and an acknowledged expert on the Lockheed scandal, helped prepare a written appeal by Kodama to a US court for an explanation and reported that Kodama seemed to think it had been a political move by the Rockefeller clique. ‘The best answer he could offer up’, Roberts said, ‘was that he had egregiously offended the omnipotent Rockefellers by successfully persuading the government to cancel the purchase of McDonnell jet fighters … and buy Lockheed instead.’
It may be worth noting that the ranking Republican on the Church Committee was married to a Rockefeller and that the new vice president of the United States, after Nixon’s resignation and Gerald Ford’s assumption to the presidency, was Nelson Rockefeller.
It may also be worth noting that Tanaka himself had suspected that the Rockefellers were out to get him. When subjected to hostile questioning about his political irregularities at a 1974 press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Press Club of Japan, Tanaka angrily stormed out of the room, remarking loud enough to be heard, ‘
Kore wa Rokafera no shiwaza
’ (This is Rockefeller’s doing).
In any event, the complete truth of the Lockheed scandal was never revealed. Then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger obtained a court order that prevented full disclosure of the affair on grounds that revealing certain US government documents would damage the country’s foreign policy interests. For years afterward, Lockheed attorneys would still be arguing that disclosing certain matters would adversely affect the reputations of foreign officials important to good relations with the United States.
An enduring enigma was the fate of bearer checks issued by Lockheed totaling $1.6 million and intended for Yoshio Kodama and Kenji Osano. The checks had mysteriously disappeared and were cashed before Lockheed could cancel them – Kodama’s explanation being that they were stolen while in his possession. Although not obligated to do so, Lockheed then issued another set of checks which Kodama managed to hold on to.
The question naturally, was, why?
There are some people who suspect the original $1.6 million wound up in the re-election campaign coffers of President Richard Nixon. Their line of reasoning was that Lockheed felt obliged to help out at election time with a nicely laundered donation because Nixon had saved the company from bankruptcy. They found it a curious coincidence that the $1.6 million was approximately the same amount of money that mobster-turned-politician Koichi Hamada had lost at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas at approximately the same time the checks had vanished.
Interestingly, in April 1984, the Tokyo High Court determined that Kenji Osano had actually used Lockheed money to pay Hamada’s gambling debts. According to the verdict, Osano received the money in an attaché case from a Lockheed executive at 5 p.m. on November 3, 1973, at the Los Angeles airport and within an hour was on an airplane to Las Vegas, where he turned it over to Sands personnel on Hamada’s behalf, to cover the final installment of what Hamada owed.
The money was believed to have been a final payment to Osano
for his role in persuading ANA to buy Lockheed Tri-Star airliners as well as Orion P3C antisubmarine patrol planes (later). Journalist Takashi Tachibana, in his four-volume work on Lockheed,
Rokkiido Saiban Bochoki
(
A Record of the Lockheed Trials
),
Asahi Shimbun
1994, the most thorough and reliable work on the subject, noted that the amount, $200,000, was significant. It reflected a difference caused by a fluctuating yen-dollar exchange rate to wit: 300 yen to the dollar when the first ‘stolen’ $1.6 million was paid as opposed to 260 yen to the dollar when the second $1.6 million was paid. Lockheed, claimed Tachibana, agreed to add on the extra yen and give it to Osano, because there was still work to be done involving the P3C.
However, speculation that the Lockheed money was used for secret campaign contributions has remained, over the years, only that – despite the incongruity of the lost checks and their speedy replacement. Subsequent investigations by SEC and the Justice Department over the missing checks were inconclusive and no one has ever satisfactorily explained the Lockheed–Osano–Hamada–Sands Casino link and what, if any, the CIA’s and/or CREEP’s involvement was. In fact, US federal courts have blocked full disclosure of the details of the Lockheed case since Kissinger’s court order. Osano went to his grave steadfastly denying the charges against him. Hamada, who resigned from his Diet seat when his high-stakes gambling adventures became public (he was re-elected in 1980), has frequently been quoted as saying ‘
Shinde mo ienai
’, meaning, basically, ‘I’ll die before I tell what really went on.’
No doubt the timely demise of several key people helped keep secrets safe. Tanaka’s chauffeur, eyewitness to some of the late-night payoffs, was found in his car, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning in what was adjudged to be a suicide, much to the surprise of everyone who knew him. However, a close relative was overheard saying that if she dared to pursue an inquiry into his demise that she would be ‘next’. The head of the Kodama-owned company Japan PR, which formally represented
Lockheed, a Japanese-American named Taro Fukuda, who also knew where all the skeletons were kept, died of heart failure while in the hospital being treated for cirrhosis of the liver. During his hospital stay, he had expressed fear of being poisoned and even had mapped out an escape route from the building. Members of his family reportedly did not believe his death was due to natural causes, although they too shied away from speaking out on the matter.
Still another mysterious death was that of a political reporter for the
Nihon Kezai Shimbun
, Japan’s leading financial paper, who had closely followed the Lockheed scandal and who had conducted an in-depth interview with Lockheed chief Kotchian during one of the latter’s final trips to Tokyo before the scandal broke. The reporter was only forty years old and in good health when he collapsed and died one evening – some ten days after the Church hearings had begun. He had left work, stopped at the Copacabana for a drink, then returned home, where he took a bath and ate dinner. Lighting up a post-meal cigarette, he suddenly complained of a severe headache. His wife called an ambulance, which rushed her husband to the nearest hospital, but he was pronounced dead on arrival. The attending physician listed the cause of death as heart failure but could not give a satisfactory response to the wife’s questions as to why heart trouble would cause headaches.
It was still two months before Tanaka’s involvement would be revealed and some 2,000 pages of SEC material delivered to Tokyo. Yet when a close friend of the reporter heard the news of his death, his immediate response was, ‘They got him.’
Who ‘they’ were never became clear.
When all was said and done, not one person charged in connection with the scandal ever did prison time. Kodama escaped full prosecution under the law. He was too ill, his doctors conveniently concluded, to testify at his trial, and court findings on his
involvement were accordingly kept under seal, as required by Japanese statute when the defendant cannot physically present himself before the judge. Kodama would spend the rest of his life at home ‘convalescing’ for another eight years before passing away at age seventy-two. Unlike his American counterpart Richard Nixon, who was disgraced and dispatched into political oblivion for some years by the Watergate scandal, Kakuei Tanaka remained a mightily influential figure. Out on bail and awaiting trial, he was not only overwhelmingly returned to his seat in the Diet but also maintained control over the largest single faction of the ruling LDP. This allowed him to allocate cabinet posts, choose party leaders, dispense patronage, and otherwise run the show from behind the scenes. It was said that during the decade following his arrest, he handled 1,000 ‘cases’ a year. He was once quoted as saying, ‘A prime minister is like a hat. You can change it as you wish.’ His influence over his protégé Yasuhiro Nakasone, the former JPWA board member who was prime minister between 1982 and 1987, was so great that a cynical press corps devised the sobriquet ‘Tanakasone’ to refer to him.
In 1983, Tanaka was convicted of bribery (specifically of taking money in exchange for influencing All Nippon Airways to buy Lockheed planes) and sentenced to four years in prison. He thus became the only postwar prime minister in Japan to be convicted of a crime. However, Tanaka appealed and during the lengthy appeals process was again re-elected to the Diet by his rural constituents, ever grateful for the new highways, high-speed trains, and other material benefits he brought them. He claimed that the overwhelming margin by which he had won constituted vindication.
Of the other thirteen people indicted in the Lockheed scandal, all were found guilty. All appealed, were found guilty again, and appealed a second time, to the Supreme Court. It took nineteen years for the case to drag itself through the legal system before all the appeals had been rejected, during which time the accused
successfully continued their careers. Final sentences were suspended for reasons of advanced age and ill health, thereby illustrating the difficulties of prosecuting political corruption in Japan. Tanaka remained in power until a stroke felled him in 1986; he died in 1993. Kenji Osano, convicted of four counts of perjury that included lying about receiving Lockheed money and denying he had conspired with Yoshio Kodama to help Lockheed vis-à-vis the P3C (there were no counts of bribery because the three-year statue of limitations in effect in Japan had expired), continued to accumulate wealth until his death in 1987, adding more hotels to his Waikiki collection (which already included the Surfrider and the Royal Hawaiian) and running his gambling tours to the States with Inagawa-kai sub-boss Susumu Ishii.
ANA’s chairman Tokuji Wakasa, who was convicted of perjury and of receiving a secret 160 million yen in kickbacks for purchasing Tri-Star planes, as well as for bribing government officials, remained the firm’s chairman. Said an ANA spokesman after the seventy-seven-year-old Wakasa’s verdict was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1996 (the sentence being three years at hard labor, suspended for five years), ‘the firm regrets the ruling. Honorable Chairman Wakasa is highly respected by our employees. He remains our spiritual pillar.’
If nothing else, the Lockheed affair ultimately reinforced the idea that contemporary Japan was a society with no guiding moral purpose – and one that like its feudal and prewar predecessors did not question what was going on. Tanaka showed how a duly elected Diet member can form and maintain his own power structure, inside a duly constructed constitutional parliament, despite breaking the law. All he had to do was drag the legal process out and keep getting re-elected.
A TV journalist reporting the convicted politician’s last electoral victory, barely controlling the tears in his voice as he stood under klieg lights before the National Diet building, asked, ‘How can this happen? After all the painstaking labors of a free press, all the
revelations – what does something like this say about our Japanese democracy?’
Prize-winning author Naoki Inose had the following answer:
Democracy is merely the voice of the people and our postwar value system and that’s what Tanaka used as his biggest weapon … [It] was not an incident in which democratic values were overturned by nondemocratic values. It was an incident created from inside of the system – a system which Tanaka only mastered.
The Lockheed disaster helped to profoundly alter the power structure in the Roppongi underworld – not to mention the makeup of the clientele at Nicola’s. Machii and his gang simply disappeared from public view. One Friday night in 1977, Nick Zappetti, curious as to what had happened to his former customers, took a walk over to the TSK.CCC, still operating as bankruptcy litigation continued, and what he found astonished him. In the entire moribund building – the very same structure that journalists four years earlier had been hailing as the most magnificent in all of Asia – he could count only six customers. The rest of Roppongi, on the cutting edge of Tokyo nightlife and fashion, was teeming with people mirroring a booming new Japan, brimming with confidence from sustained double-digit growth that had continued unabated despite a 1973 oil shortage crisis that temporarily dimmed the city’s ubiquitous neon lights. The pink and white Almond Coffee Shop on the southwest corner of Roppongi Crossing had become one of the most popular meeting spots on earth – the waiting crowds of people on the sidewalk fronting it so thick they blocked pedestrian traffic. But the expensive restaurants and lounges of the TSK.CCC were all embarrassingly empty. Waiters and waitresses stood yawning. Cobwebs gathered in the corners; men from the TSK were nowhere to be seen.