BETWEEN FOUR WORLDS: CHINA, RUSSIA, JAPAN AND AUSTRALIA.
BETWEEN FOUR CAREERS and FOUR LANGUAGES

1. Premonitions
2. The Warning
3. The Abductee Issue

With time I began to feel my lecture audiences were not reacting quite as sympathetically as before.

Maybe it was partly my fault;  Japan’s foolish economic, foreign and education policies were beginning to annoy me. 

Suffice it to say that one day I got a fairly blunt request from my Jiji sponsors to keep away from criticising Japan’s position on the Northern Territories question. 

There was also a sharp reduction in their lecture requests. 

1. Premonitions

The Jiji warning I could live with. They were a fairly rightwing news-agency outfit, and their lecture circuit was less than greatly rewarding or exciting. 

(Kyodo, their more interesting, progressive but less prolific rival, had dropped me years earlier when they knew I was with Jiji.) 

But it was not till I ventured into the North Korean abductee issue that the shutters really began to come down.

2. The  Warning

The first warning that I needed to be careful came with a vicious attack on something I had written for a conservative business magazine, Zaikai-jin (Business People). 

In the context of the North Korean abductee question I had pointed out that Japan had also abducted Chinese and Koreans to work in Japan in the war years, and their work had been a lot more strenuous than acting as language teachers (the jobs allegedly given to two Japanese couples abducted to North Korea). 

The death rate had been tremendous.

…

A powerful right-winger in Japan’s construction industry wrote to the magazine demanding a retraction and apology. 

He repeated the usual argument – that Korea was under Japanese control and Japan had every right to conscript Koreans for wartime labor in Japan (yes, but not for the brutal labor imposed on them, and without right of return).

The Chinese, he said, had come willingly seeking higher wages. 
(In fact the press-ganged Chinese had been put into camps in China and then onto boats to Japan where the death rate allegedly was almost as high as in the places where later they were forced to work.) 

My column with the magazine was cancelled. They clearly did not want to give offence to their rightwing sponsors. 

But I could live with that too. I should not have been with them to begin with.
(My initial contact came from them wanting me to get Rupert Murdoch to accept their award for top international businessman of the year.)

What I had not expected was the flood of hate mail sent to my university and Akita prefecture, asking why this anti-Japan type was being allowed to pollute the minds of young Japanese. 

Someone either was organising the mail, or the rightwing was much stronger than I had realised and many were reading this magazine.

… 

Even more ominously, the lecture and interview requests had begun to run down very quickly. 

That really did hurt. It meant I was losing income and my standing in Japanese society – a standing that for more than 20 years I had been working to create.
My university was good enough not to bow to the pressure. But it was clear that for them too as a fairly right-leaning organisation I was damaged goods. 

3. The Abductee Issue

In particular I had badly under-estimated how national sentiment had been aroused by this abductee issue – by the thought that Japan’s citizens could be captured and held by a rubbishy nation such as North Korea. 

I had thought that since Tokyo had done well with the 2002 request to North Korea to release the five known surviving abductees, one could safely criticise the rightists, Abe Shinzo especially, who were trying to demand more abductee releases and so prevent any continuation of the policy of reconciliation with North Korea.

I was wrong.  
I tried to point out how keeping faith with the 2002 promises and opening relations with Pyongyang would have made it that much easier to find and get more abductees released – if indeed they existed. 

It would also have helped remove the nuclear threat that Japan said it feared.  
But even as I spoke I could feel the audiences freeze. They did not want to hear such details. 

They could not accept the insult of Japan’s sovereignty being breached by those wretched North Koreans.

Before long the rightwing, whose existence and power I had always felt, but from which I had felt immune because of the way Japan Inc. had liked my theories about Japanese culture, began to move. 

I was on their blacklist. And they were ready to strike.