⛩️ #30 The Last Kamikaze

P*rn Actor Flies Plane into Right-Wing Kingpin's House

Aftermath of the kamikaze attack on the estate of Yoshio Kodama. Image: Mainichi Shimbun

In 1976, a failed porn actor tried to kill the shadowy right-wing fixer/gangster who controlled the Japanese government by kamikaze’ing an airplane into his house…

…and it was all because a giant American corporation had systematically corrupted the Japanese state, leading to the arrest of everyone from the Prime Minister on down.

The true story of The Last Kamikaze is so insane we’re devoting this edition to it.

Let’s dive into it:

THE HISTORY

The Last Kamikaze

F-104 Starfighter in flight. Image: Wikipedia

The Widowmaker

In the 1960s, U.S. aerospace company Lockheed had a problem. Their F-104 Starfighter combat aircraft faced multiple issues, including an ejector seat designed to fire downwards (that killed legendary pilot Iven Carl Kincheloe Jr. during testing), plus a new preference for fighters with longer ranges and heavier payloads.

The US Air Force moved swiftly on to competitor McDonnell Douglas’s F-4 Phantom project, leaving Lockheed scrambling to find buyers for the rickety Starfighter. They found them in foreign governments — with the help of an enormous bribery program.

The West German government was first to gulp from the money hose, with Minister of Defence Franz Josef Strauss and his party raking in at least $10 million for a 1961 deal for 900 F-104G Starfighters.¹

The Germans eventually lost 292 of 916 aircraft (plus 116 pilots) to crashes, its high accident rate earning it the nickname Witwenmacher (“widowmaker”) from the German public.

Meanwhile, Lockheed turned their attention to Japan.

* * *

The War Criminal

Yoshio Kodama. Left: 1946, Class A war criminal; Right: 1953, welcoming Ichirō Hatoyama to his Tokyo estate. Hatoyama became Prime Minister soon afterwards.

Yoshio Kodama was the kind of personality Darwin called an “evolutionary sport”.

These “sports” exist entirely outside of natural selection — being random variations thrown up by nature somehow perfectly suited for the environment they find themselves in.

Kodama was one of these “sports”, a human cockroach who survived and thrived in every filthy world he found himself in: prison, wartime China, the ashes of post-WW2 Tokyo, gang life, CIA skullduggery, the right-wing militant nut-bag milieu — and managed to scuttle upwards to become the ultimate insider, pulling the strings of both the underworld and the Japanese government.

Born the fifth son of a bankrupt businessman, Kodama’s first brush with notoriety came in 1929, when, at age 18, he made an audacious attempt to hand Emperor Hirohito a self-written appeal for increased patriotism (something which was not exactly lacking in the quasi-police state of the time).

He won himself six months in prison, plus some heavy new right-wing backers. One of them was a Colonel Kenji Doihara, chief of military intelligence in the Chinese puppet state of Manchuria.² Kodama was shipped off to Xinjing on a mission to help “suppress anti-Japanese resistance”, something which involved a lot of wet work on the unfortunate native population.

With shades of later CIA ops in Latin America, a drug smuggling pipeline was also established, Kodama bringing in Japanese opium, to get the locals hooked on the pipe instead of the pipe bomb. This particular patriotic mission had the pleasing side effect of making Kodama (and the military hierarchy above him, including Doihara) absurdly rich.

He used this cash to return to Japan, where he set up his own right-wing secret society, helped assassinate politicians advocating friendly relations with China and Korea (as opposed to the default setting of making them slave societies of the Japanese Empire), and, oh, also plotted to off the Prime Minister of the time.

When the authorities finally caught up with him he did three and a half years in prison before his patron Doihara, now a Major General, ordered him released. War with China was heating up (due largely to Doihara’s own enterprising provocations) and ruthless people who knew how to make money were in more demand than ever.

Cockroach Kodama made the war his plaything, ending up a Rear Admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy with massive, exclusive supply contracts via his “Kodama Agency” enterprise (児玉機関), plus the ongoing opium scheme, plus another “patriotic mission”: large-scale plunder of anything Chinese-owned in order to ship the goods back for sale in Tokyo.

He ended the war a multi-millionaire — and under arrest as a Class A War Criminal.

His sponsor Doihara died at the end of an American noose at Tokyo’s first war crimes trial, side-by-side with wartime premier Hideki Tojo.

But for our guy Yoshio Kodama the whole Class A War Criminal thing was, obviously, merely a temporary inconvenience.

He spent his two years behind bars usefully hobnobbing with his fellow, extremely influential defendants, before the American authorities embarked on the gigantic reverse ferret which decided the state of post-war Japan up to and including this very day:

Increasingly fidgety about the incipient threat of communism taking hold in the demolished remains of Japan, the U.S. encouraged a deliciously cynical nexus of compliant politicians willing to toe their line, right-wing nutbags motivated to do the day-to-day organizing groundwork for a political movement, plus yakuza gangs, who would provide the muscle to stomp the noodles out of any uppity workers seeking to organize under a Red flag.

Kodama, with his wartime connections, working capital, and total ruthlessness was the perfect fixer to help CIA join the dots between these worlds. He was released, and went to work behind the scenes of the political front for this garish marriage of interests, which became known as the Liberal Democratic Party — the political party that has been in power in Japan almost continuously since that time.

* * *

Back to Lockheed

The Starfighter had been a dog that could only be sold with the assistance of massive kickbacks.

Then, in the early 1970s, just as with the Starfighter vs the far more successful F-4, Lockheed again found itself sandbagged by a superior product from McDonnell Douglas, as their first passenger jet, the L-1011 Tristar, was being trounced by their rival’s more popular DC-10.

It was time revert to the old playbook — and the Lockheed bigwigs hoping to get Japan’s quasi-state airlines to abandon their DC-10 orders picked up the phone and called the one man who could get it done: Yoshio Kodama.

Our guy didn’t disappoint. All Nippon Airways quickly signed a blockbuster $105m deal to outfit their fleet with Lockheed’s Tristar.

And Kodama personally cleared $7m on the deal — $40m at 2024 prices.

His little piggies up and down the political food chain hastened to the trough too, including Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, who got $3m, a nifty $16m today.³

Unfortunately for Kodama, the Liberal Democratic Party, and Japan’s international prestige, within a couple years a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate led by Senator Frank Church embarked on a diligent investigation that blew the wings off the whole operation.

The Church Committee exposed the Lockheed graft machine to the world in minute detail, including the exact prices Kodama and Tanaka had extracted, plus the second strangest part of the entire story: how the aerospace giants had used a dodgy quasi-bank also known for its bespoke drug cartel money-laundering operations to move the bribes through Hong Kong, where a Spanish-born priest (!) ferried the cash to Japan in cardboard boxes labeled “oranges.”⁴

The actual strangest part of the entire story is Mistuyasu Maeno, The Last Kamikaze.

* * *

The Loser

Kumi Taguchi and Mitsuyasu Maeno (left), mid-flight lovers in softcore movie Tokyo Emmanuel (1975). Less than a year later Maeno staged his kamikaze attack in a similar aircraft.

If Yoshio Kodama was a Darwinian sport of utter self-confidence, Mitsuyasu Maeno was a man with a void at his center.

Born in 1946 the ruins of Tokyo, he was a jittery young man, jumping fads, careers and identities while repeatedly torpedoing his personal life.

Obviously, he became an actor.

He got through a few acting classes at the University of California in 1967, then returned to Tokyo with fantasies of making himself some grand cultural bridge between Japan and America.

Film was the perfect medium for a man so two-dimensional, and he managed to get himself work on a number of softcore cheapies — but never more than one a year — with the only moment that could be described as cinematic his brief appearance in Tokyo Emmanuel (1975) where he and star Kumi Taguchi have sex at 10,000ft in a private aircraft.

Never properly catching on or catching the eye in the business they call show, Maeno was lost, lonely, and convinced he was destined for greatness — the type who are often fodder for cults.

His gateway figure was Yukio Mishima, the brilliant writer who had committed seppuku in 1970 after a made-for-film performance, calling on the Japanese Self-Defense Forces to revolt and reinstate a bushido-tinged ultra-nationalist military dictatorship.

Revved up on Mishima, disillusioned with the idea of bridging American and Japanese culture, Maeno veered into throwback fantasies of olde Japan. In 1971 he attended a meeting of ultra-nationalists at Tokyo's Hotel Okura, the hype-music to which was “Song of the Race”, written by our guy himself Yoshio Kodama. The lyrics to the song called for the overthrow of the government and a restoration of Japan's Imperial policies which had proved so lousy in WW2.

Was it at this meeting that Maeno became a Kodama obsessive?

Is it true that Maeno met Kodama, boasted of his movie connections, and introduced Kodama around the studios— and Kodama quickly realized he was strictly small fry?

However it went down, in a precursor for the age in which we now live where parasocial relationships between celebrities and fans have become rampant, Maeno became fixated on Kodama.

Known as “West’s Disease”, after author Nathanael West, the writer who pinpointed the exact pathology, Maeno was one of those people who, for whatever reason, are unable to turn wishes into passions.

He wished to be a famous actor, but didn’t have the chops. He also wished to be a pilot, but wasn’t capable of devoting his life to aviation.

Living out their lives as fantasy instead of reality, these people hate people whose lives are pursued with passion.

And they want to appropriate the vitality of those people, so first they idolize them, then, when the celebrity doesn’t acknowledge them sufficiently — and no level of acknowledgement would ever suffice — in a blink of an eye the fan turns, and vows to destroy the object of their obsession.

Thus as the Lockheed scandal broke, Maeno, disillusioned by a man he had previously respected, started prattling on about how Kodama’s taking bribes had betrayed the right-wing and the samurai code he espoused, and had caused a national disgrace.

And he was going to do something about it; and the actor in Maeno required a theatrical climax.

* * *

May 1976, a Special Parliamentary Committee was set up to look into the Lockheed affair amongst a blizzard of other investigations.

Various factions of the LDP engaged in a circular firing squad, trying to weaken their rivals and ensure their own survival.

The public was spellbound, fascinated and disgusted.

Yoshio Kodama shut himself up in his estate and claimed unspecified but serious illness, avoiding any attempts to question him.

Mitsuyasu Maeno put his masterplan into action.

* * *

BANZAI!

Maeno on the day of the attack, complete with kamikaze cosplay. Image: unknown

For the attack we go to Wikipedia:

• Early March 1976. Amateur pilot Maeno flies around Kodama's picturesque neighborhood of Todoroki, southern Tokyo, gaining knowledge of the area in preparation for the kill-mission.

• On the morning of March 23, 1976, he arrives in the western suburbs of Tokyo at Chofu Airport with two friends. All three are dressed in kamikaze uniform; Maeno informs airport officials they are renting two planes to prepare publicity for a planned film on suicide pilots.

• Maeno poses in his uniform, with white scarf and rising-sun sleeve-badge in front of the Piper Cherokee plane he had rented.

• With Maeno in one plane and his two companions in the other, they buzz around Tokyo for about an hour before Maeno informs his friends he has business in Todoroki. The other plane, with a cameraman on board, follows on the flight to Kodama's estate. Maeno circles twice before keying up his radio to scream Long live the Emperor! Banzai! (天皇陛下万歳！), then dived-bombs his plane into the house.

• The plane hits the second floor of the home; Maeno is obliterated instantly, but target Kodama, resting in another part of the building, survives unharmed.

• The crash causes a fire, injuring two servants. Kodama's yakuza bodyguards go quickly to work to extinguish it.⁵

Now back to The Kyote:

The yakuza bodyguards also beat the bananas out of reporters who flocked to the house, just on principle — and the police told the gentlemen of the press it was their own fault for being provocative.

* * *

The Aftermath

Kazuomi Fukunaga, Chairman of the House of Representatives Special Committee on Aviation, treating the entire scandal with the gravity it deserved. Fukunaga was the only politician who freely admitted receiving bribes; the LDP (his own party) blocked him from testifying. Image: Mainichi Shimbun

• Maeno’s kamikaze performance shocked the nation — but some people viewed it with sympathy, an attempt at a cleansing act to banish the national shame of the Lockheed revelations.

• Leave it to the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper to put things in context though, with the rhetorical “Is it imaginable that a young German would commit suicide 30 years after World War II in a Nazi uniform, shouting ‘Heil Hitler!’?” Good point.

• Kodama went on trial the next year, 1977, but managed to get the proceedings, obviously, postponed on medical grounds.

• Before his trial could be reconvened, on January 17, 1984, Kodama died peacefully in his sleep.

• According to a 2012 article in sleazy tabloid mag Jitsuwa Knuckles (sample article: “Learning life skills from the Yakuza”), Kodama had actually been impressed by the bravado of Maeno’s kamikaze attack on his house. Figures.

• Kakuei Tanaka, by then a former Prime Minister (having resigned due to a different financial scandal), was arrested on 27 July 1976.

• He was eventually sentenced to 4 years in jail and a 500 million yen fine but filed an appeal and refused to leave the Diet.

• His case remained open before the Supreme Court at the time of his death in 1993, 17 years after his arrest.

* * *

• Along with bribes to Japanese, West German, Italian and Dutch lawmakers, over a five year period (1970-1975), Lockheed managed to pay Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi $106 million in commissions for “marketing services”.

• In 1976, Lockheed CEO Daniel Haughton and vice chairman and president Carl Kotchian resigned from their posts due to the bribery revelations.

• A year later President Jimmy Carter signed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act into law, making it illegal for American companies to bribe foreign government officials.

The End

• Mitsuyasu Maeno, The Last Kamikaze, wanted to write his own blazing page of history and be remembered like Yukio Mishima, who performed ritual suicide when his own effort to restore Japan to a wartime samurai ethic failed. But Mishima’s death was the weird cherry on top of a genius literary career. Maeno was in a couple of cheap softcore flix. Telepathically to Maeno: you should’ve just started a nice little sightseeing flight business and given up on dreams of fame, glory, martyr-death and trying to steal the thunder of a freakishly successful psychopath.

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Enjoy The Kyote this time? Check this out next: The Three Great Train Mysteries

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The Kyote is published in Kyoto, Japan every Sunday at 19:00 JST

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_bribery_scandals#West_Germany

2. https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/kenji-doihara-japanese-general-and-convicted-war-criminal/

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_bribery_scandals#Japan

4. https://web.archive.org/web/20210121002435/https://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/10/business/collapse-of-deak-company.html

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsuyasu_Maeno#Attack