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1. Just as the post-war Ger­man econ­omy is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the remark­able and deadly Bor­mann orga­ni­za­tion, the Japan­ese econ­omy is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the flight cap­i­tal pro­gram set up by Koichi Kido, the prin­ci­pal assis­tant to Emperor Hiro­hito. The eco­nomic and polit­i­cal com­po­nent of a Third Reich gone under­ground, the Bor­mann orga­ni­za­tion con­trols cor­po­rate Ger­many and much of the rest of the world. (It was cre­ated and run by Mar­tin Bor­mann, the orga­ni­za­tional genius who was the “the power behind the throne” in Nazi Germany.)

2. The Bor­mann group is a pri­mary ele­ment of the analy­sis pre­sented in the For the Record programs.

3. This pro­gram sets forth the facts con­cern­ing the Kido flight cap­i­tal pro­gram, the con­ti­nu­ity between the zaibatsu (fam­ily trusts) of Impe­r­ial Japan and the Keirestsu (the con­tem­po­rary Japan­ese cor­po­rate pow­ers) and the truth of Hirohito’s cen­tral role in the Japan­ese war of aggres­sion and the eco­nomic loot­ing of Asia.

4. Much of the first side of the pro­gram con­sists of dis­cus­sion and analy­sis of a very impor­tant arti­cle about “the M-fund,” a clan­des­tine fund allegedly set up by the post­war Japan­ese eco­nomic inter­ests and the CIA. (“Mis­chief or Con­spir­acy?” by Gillian Tett; Finan­cial Times; 4/7–4/8/2001; p. 10.)

5. This alleged fund came to light as the result of the appear­ance of allegedly coun­ter­feit Japan­ese gov­ern­ment bonds. “It looks innocu­ous enough: a sim­ply worded warm­ing about “fic­ti­tious bonds” sits on Japan’s Min­istry of Finance web site. In fact, it is a gate­way into a world swirling with explo­sive accu­sa­tions of fraud, con­spir­acy and polit­i­cal inter­fer­ence. . . . But that hasn’t stopped these mys­te­ri­ous ‘quasi-bonds’ from turn­ing up in finan­cial cen­ters around the world. In total, their pur­ported face value comes to tril­lions of yen. And their ori­gin is the sub­ject of mys­tery and con­tro­versy. Are these quasi-bond cer­tifi­cates part of a com­plex polit­i­cal con­spir­acy, or are they sim­ply a ploy to trap for­eign investors?” (Idem.)

6. A for­mer Kennedy admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial is con­vinced the funds are real and has faced severe legal prob­lems as a result. “One man con­vinced the cer­tifi­cates are real is Nor­bert Schlei, a senior U.S. lawyer and for­mer adviser to Pres­i­dent John F. Kennedy. In 1995, he was appre­hended in Florida for han­dling these cer­tifi­cates and charged with secu­ri­ties fraud.” (Idem.)

7. “Schlei main­tained that these cer­tifi­cates were valid, and that they were part of a com­plex scheme by the Japan­ese right and the CIA to recy­cle hid­den cap­i­tal from Japan­ese World War II loot. In his defense, he told the courts the cer­tifi­cates were legit­i­mate and owned by a dozen of his Japan­ese clients. Then he dropped his bomb­shell by claim­ing Japan’s Min­istry of finance had secretly issued the cer­tifi­cates in the 1980’s to con­ceal a hid­den polit­i­cal slush fund. And this slush fund was linked to money that the CIA allegedly had used to fund rightwing polit­i­cal groups in Japan, as part of an anti-communist drive.” (Idem.)

8. Although Schlei’s account has been attacked, there is evi­dence that his account is cor­rect. “But Schlei’s ver­sion of events is the one sup­ported in a book, yet to be pub­lished, by Ster­ling and Peggy Sea­grave, two U.S. authors who have writ­ten exten­sively on Asia. ‘When the Amer­i­can and Japan­ese pub­lic find out what has been going on all these years, par­tic­u­larly with regard to covert finan­cial mis­chief, there will be a huge pub­lic out­cry,’ they say. In fact, finance and pol­i­tics in Japan are deeply murky and the com­plete truth may never emerge. But there are two main the­o­ries as to where the bonds came from.” (Idem.)

9. The Japan­ese MoF (Min­istry of Finance) main­tains that the bonds are fraud­u­lent and are the work of the Japan­ese under­world. (In fact, the yakuza—Japan­ese orga­nized crime—is closely linked to the Japan­ese cor­po­rate estab­lish­ment, as well as the fas­cist right wing.) The phys­i­cal evi­dence is incon­sis­tent with that hypoth­e­sis, how­ever. “The offi­cial expla­na­tion, by the MoF, is that a gang of Japan­ese crooks printed them in the 1980’s. Some of the gang were con­victed in Japan for fraud in the mid-1980s, given a sus­pended sen­tence, and have now dis­ap­peared. But the cer­tifi­cates were dis­trib­uted to crim­i­nals over­seas, who con­tin­ued the fraud, say Japan­ese police. . . . It sounds credible—but con­tains odd details. No finan­cial insti­tu­tion has ever admit­ted los­ing money as a result of these bonds. And the MoF did not declare the cer­tifi­cates coun­ter­feit until 1993—a decade after they first appeared. It has also seemed reluc­tant to per­mit its bureau­crats to tes­tify that the cer­tifi­cates were fake. At one trial in the U.S., a MoF wit­ness dis­ap­peared early, and the tape recorder col­lect­ing his evi­dence broke. The min­istry blames this on a ‘mis­un­der­stand­ing.’ Another odd­ity is the cer­tifi­cates’ design. Crim­i­nals usu­ally make fake bonds iden­ti­cal to real bonds and in small denom­i­na­tions, to avoid attract­ing atten­tion. The ‘quasi-bonds,’ how­ever, do not even pre­tend to be a Japan­ese gov­ern­ment bond, but an IOU—of a type not seen in Japan. Each cer­tifi­cate is ded­i­cated to a spe­cific Japan­ese per­son, and says it can be exchanged for 15-year bonds in the future, via the Bank of Japan ‘and Dai-Ichi Kangyo bank as an agent of the Bank.’ They claim to have been issued in 1982—or Showa 57 in the Japan­ese cal­en­dar (they are some­times called ‘series-57 bonds’ by Amer­i­cans. . . .But if that looks sus­pi­cious, the other expla­na­tion is far stranger and begins in the early 20th cen­tury, when Japan invaded its Asian neigh­bors and looted vast wealth.” (Idem.)

10. The “unof­fi­cial expla­na­tion” is rooted in the clan­des­tine his­tory of the Japan­ese econ­omy dur­ing World War II and its after­math. “After the Sec­ond World War, U.S. intel­li­gence forces secretly seized this wealth and later used it to finance covert anti-Communist operations—paying bribes, for exam­ple, to rightwing mem­bers of Japan’s Lib­eral Demo­c­ra­tic Party. Schlei told the Florida court that in the post­war U.S. ‘we came to feel that [such pay­ments] were OK because the Rus­sians were sub­si­diz­ing the com­mu­nists and social­ists.’ In the 1960’s, the U.S. returned con­trol of this fund—called the ‘M-fund’—to Japan. Japan­ese politi­cians, such as Kakuei Tanaka, a for­mer finance min­is­ter and later prime min­is­ter, grabbed it, stole large sums and used it for their per­sonal use and to buy polit­i­cal sup­port with bribes. ‘For 25 years Tanaka was known as the money man of Japan­ese pol­i­tics. My clients say the rea­son he had so much money was he got con­trol of this M-fund,’ Schlei said. In the 1960’s, Tanaka tried to hide some of the fund by buy­ing JGB’s and reg­is­ter­ing them in the name of his crones and sup­port­ers. But in 1976, he was sucked into a cor­rup­tion scan­dal and con­victed of receiv­ing bribes from the U.S. Lock­heed com­pany. In the fol­low­ing years, his cronies wanted extra money and, in the late 1970s, the Tanaka clique decided secretly to print what have become the dis­puted cer­tifi­cates as part of a com­plex finan­cial scheme.” (Idem.)

11. In addi­tion to Tanaka, Yoshio Kodama was deeply involved with the Lock­heed bribery scan­dal. Kodama had been interned by the Amer­i­cans as a war crim­i­nal at the end of World War II. Like another Japan­ese fas­cist, Ryoichi Sasakawa, Kodama had been deeply involved with the Japan­ese patri­otic and ultra-nationalist soci­eties that brought fas­cism to Japan. Both Kodama and Sasakawa were deeply involved with Rev­erend Sun Myung Moon’s Uni­fi­ca­tion Church.

12. In an attempt to redeem some of the cap­i­tal invested in these bonds, the gov­ern­ment of Paraguay approached some Wall Street bankers who, in turn, attempted to enlist the aid of for­mer White House chief-of-staff (under Nixon) and Sec­re­tary of State (under Rea­gan) Alexan­der Haig. “Some for­mer Wall Street bankers, who insist on remain­ing anony­mous, say that in the early 1990’s they were hired by gov­ern­ment offi­cials in Paraguay, who had acquired some ‘bonds’ and wanted to off­set them against Paraguay’s debt to Japan. They hired Alexan­der Haig, a for­mer U.S. sec­re­tary of state, to find out whether Japan’s finance min­istry would accept a deal. The Sea­graves claim a deal was struck.” (Idem.)

13. Inter­est­ingly, and per­haps sig­nif­i­cantly, Haig is close to the Moon orga­ni­za­tion. The Nixon White House and the gov­ern­ment of Paraguay were also close to the Bor­mann orga­ni­za­tion. “The German-South Amer­i­can group also had direct access to the Nixon White House through their rep­re­sen­ta­tives in Wash­ing­ton, and were proud of the fact that Bebe Rebozo was Pres­i­dent Nixon’s clos­est friend. For, know­ingly or unknow­ingly, Rebozo processed mil­lions of their dol­lars through his Florida bank as part of nor­mal com­mer­cial oper­a­tions.” (Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile; Paul Man­ning; Copy­right 1981 [HC]; Lyle Stu­art Inc.; ISBN 0–8184-0309–8; P. 275.)

14. The sec­ond half of the pro­gram deals directly with the Kido flight cap­i­tal pro­gram. With Japan’s mil­i­tary defeat clearly on the hori­zon, Hiro­hito aid Koichi Kido under­took to secret the emperor’s for­tune out of the grasp of the Allies. Speak­ing to the afore­men­tioned Mar­tin Bor­mann, I.G. Far­ben head Her­mann Schmitz out­lined the Japan­ese flight cap­i­tal pro­gram. “Her­mann Schmitz, had eleven I.G. Far­ben com­pa­nies in Japan, as well as the intel­li­gence orga­ni­za­tion of Max Ilgner’s N.W. 7. The I.G. Verbindungs­man­ner, who were the liai­son offi­cers between Far­ben in Japan and the home office in Ger­many, let him in on some of the fis­cal secrets of Emperor Hiro­hito, who had used Swiss banks to place his enor­mous liq­uid for­tunes beyond the reach of the Allies. So did the indus­trial and finan­cial lead­ers of Japan, who also knew how to move their wealth around the world.” (Ibid.; pp. 120–121.)

15. It should be noted that the actions of Koichi Kido were influ­enced by those of Bor­mann. “With his immense land hold­ings and the prof­its from his many invest­ments, Emperor Hiro­hito was by far the wealth­i­est indi­vid­ual in Japan. Within the struc­ture was the lord keeper of the privy seal, the emperor’s most impor­tant advi­sor, the only one who could offer unso­licited com­ments. From 1940 to the end of the war the lord keeper of the privy seal was Mar­quis Koichi Kido, who per­formed just as ably for Hiro­hito as Mar­tin Bor­mann did for Hitler. . . . And when Emperor Hiro­hito received his two requested reports on the future of the war in the Pacific from his army and navy chiefs of staff, he, too, con­curred that their war cold not be won. He asked Kido to pre­pare a peace plan for the Japan­ese nation; and Kido began work on it in Jan­u­ary 1944. The lord privy seal envi­sioned the first step in any peace plan as one that would pre­serve the impe­r­ial throne and its impe­r­ial wealth. Kido held meet­ings with key bankers and the trans­fers of impe­r­ial money to Swiss accounts was effected smoothly via bank tele­graph credit, inas­much as major Japan­ese banks had their own cor­re­spon­dent bank­ing rela­tion­ships with the impor­tant fis­cal insti­tu­tions of Switzer­land. Emperor Hiro­hito and his impe­r­ial house­hold zaibatsu had stock own­er­ship and deposits in four­teen of the major Japan­ese banks, all of which cher­ished the honor of act­ing as an impe­r­ial depos­i­tory. The four­teen banks gave all assis­tance nec­es­sary, of course, to the Kido trans­fer.” (Ibid.; pp. 121–122.)

16. The flight cap­i­tal plan was more than suc­cess­ful, and the cap­i­tal on hand for both the emperor and the Japan­ese cor­po­ra­tions (zaibat­sus) served as the foun­da­tion for post­war Japan­ese recov­ery and suc­cess. “By the end of the war, the deposits on hand were astro­nom­i­cal, and dur­ing the post­war reha­bil­i­ta­tion of Japan, the impe­r­ial for­tune kept increas­ing from the inter­est charges for loans to var­i­ous zaibatsu com­pa­nies who were struggling—as were Ger­man firms—for a come­back in world mar­kets. As a result of these trans­fers Amer­i­can SCAP [Supreme Com­man­der, Allied Pow­ers] fis­cal inves­ti­ga­tors found the impe­r­ial vaults pretty nearly bare when they went pok­ing through the recorded assets in the impe­r­ial palace fol­low­ing Japan­ese sur­ren­der aboard the U.S.S. Mis­souri on Sep­tem­ber 2, 1945.” (Ibid.; p. 123.)

17. As was the case with Ger­many, the wealth that Kido fun­neled out of the coun­try included the for­tunes of the nations con­quered and occu­pied by Japan. Those coun­tries’ assets were looted and absorbed into the Japan­ese econ­omy. “Like the Third Reich, the Japan­ese pat­tern of con­quest and pil­lage pre­vailed. As armies marched, fought, and con­quered, they were fol­lowed by the ubiq­ui­tous bankers and busi­ness spe­cial­ists who assumed eco­nomic con­trol of the lands and peo­ple and assets they cov­eted. They seized gold and formed com­pa­nies to mine for min­er­als, oil, coal, and all other sub­stances nec­es­sary to a resource-poor coun­try like Japan. . . . But behind the slo­gans was a hard-headed com­mer­cial­ism ded­i­cated to prof­its for the zaibat­sus, which included the impe­r­ial house­hold zaibatsu, fun­neled through stock own­er­ship in the scores of cor­po­ra­tions estab­lished in bank­ing and indus­try of each con­quered coun­try.” (Ibid.; pp. 123–124.)

18. Both Kido and Hiro­hito exhib­ited con­sid­er­able cyn­i­cism dur­ing the clos­ing phase of the war. Rec­og­niz­ing that it was essen­tial to deceive the Japan­ese peo­ple into pro­long­ing the con­flict, as well as deflect­ing blame for the defeat away from the emperor and the zaibat­sus, both men engaged in a pro­gram of pro­pa­ganda aimed at buy­ing time for the flight cap­i­tal pro­gram to be con­sum­mated. “In 1944, while the lord privy seal was mak­ing his peace plans, Emperor Hiro­hito waited for the ulti­mate excuse for with­drawal from the war. Kido had rec­om­mended the removal of Prime Min­is­ter Tojo from office in 1944. Tojo had orig­i­nally been placed in office on the rec­om­men­da­tion of Kido, but now he was to take the blame for the defeat and for the atroc­i­ties that Japan­ese forces had com­mit­ted when it was fore­seen that the war was lost. Actu­ally, the war had been planned in the War Room of the Impe­r­ial Palace, from the attack and rape of Nanking to the bomb­ing of Pearl Har­bor, with the emperor an inter­ested par­tic­i­pant in all major strate­gic deci­sions. . . . Kido knew the peo­ple would have to be pre­pared for sur­ren­der. The fight­ing men had staked their honor on vic­tory or sui­cide, and vast num­bers had died in the emperor’s name. If peace were pre­ma­ture, many would say that Hiro­hito lacked the courage to fight the war through to the end. Wid­ows and orphans would blame the emperor for caus­ing their fathers and hus­bands to die in vain. The emperor and Kido knew that the peo­ple had reached the point where they were eager to see an end to war. When the time arrived that they thought it was they who had fought poorly and let the emperor down, then and only then, if Hiro­hito declared for peace, would the peo­ple feel oblig­ated to him.” (Ibid.; pp. 124–125.)

19. Ulti­mately the plans of the emperor and Kido were suc­cess­ful. “While the emperor waited for an excuse for with­drawal from the war, he approved the many defen­sive mea­sures being under­taken to repel the invaders. . . . His pro­pa­ganda min­is­ter, like Dr. Goebbels in Berlin, fos­tered the notion of bat­tle to the last, but it was smoke of sorts, con­trived to make more stead­fast the flag­ging will of the peo­ple. . . . On August 7, 1945, the emperor was pre­sented with his rea­son to ini­ti­ate peace. He received the Japan­ese army report of the atomic destruc­tion of Hiroshima. Two days later, on August 9, a sec­ond A-bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Although the emperor and Lord Privy Seal Kido had been think­ing about sur­ren­der for nine­teen months before the two atomic bombs fell, it took only days for Emperor Hiro­hito to agree to sur­ren­der terms on the Pots­dam Dec­la­ra­tion. At this point in time, as in Berlin, the prepa­ra­tions for post-war com­mer­cial sur­vival for two defeated nations had been com­pleted, and now only the final sce­nario had to be played out.” (Ibid.; pp. 126–127.)

20. As had been envi­sioned by the emperor, Kido and the cor­po­rate lead­er­ship of the zaibat­sus, the flight cap­i­tal pro­gram achieved its aim. “. . . once the occu­pa­tion ended and Japan again became mas­ter of her own des­tiny, the family-controlled hold­ing com­pa­nies were to make their come­back big­ger and stronger than ever before, under the name ‘Ker­estsu,’ which also means ‘group.’ Today, the six big Ker­est­sus con­tol the econ­omy; in fact they are the econ­omy. The six largest groups con­trol 40 per­cent of the nation’s cor­po­rate cap­i­tal, and 30 per­cent of its cor­po­rate assets. The trad­ing com­pa­nies of these six Ker­estsu hold stock in more than 5,400 com­pa­nies in Japan, and the Keirestsu banks own even more. The Mit­subishi and Mit­sui fam­i­lies were zaibatsu before their hold­ing com­pa­nies were bro­ken up by MacArthur, but today they are com­fort­able Keirestsu. . . . As was proven in time, the wealth and the cor­po­ra­tions con­trolled by the Bor­mann orga­ni­za­tion, on the one hand (in the Fed­eral Repub­lic of Ger­many, 1 per­cent of the cor­po­rate lead­er­ship con­trols 40 per­cent of the indus­try and finance), and by the zaibatsu/Keirestsu, along with the hold­ings of the impe­r­ial fam­ily, were the basic instru­ments that guided both defeated nations back to eco­nomic power.” (Ibid.; pp. 127–128.)