Yet none of that seemed to matter much to American intelligence.
The US Air Force attempted unsuccessfully to recruit him after he was taken off the war crimes list in 1949 and came out of hiding, and CIA and US Army files show him working for G-2. In the 1950s he was elected to Japan's parliament. He vanished in Laos in 1961 and was never seen again.
The Army considered him a potentially valuable source, but the CIA was not impressed with Tsuji's skills as an agent. The files show he was far more concerned with furthering various right-wing causes and basking in publicity generated by controversial political statements.
“In either politics or intelligence work, he is hopelessly lost both by reason of personality and lack of experience,” said a CIA assessment from 1954. Another 1954 file says: “Tsuji is the type of man who, given the chance, would start World War III without any misgivings.”
Kodama was another unsavory player. A virulent anti-communist and superbly connected smuggler and political fixer, Kodama commanded a vast network of black marketeers and former Japanese secret police agents in East Asia.
The CIA, however, concluded he was much more concerned about making money than furthering US interests. A gangland boss, he later played a major role in the Lockheed Scandal, one of the country's biggest post-World War II bribery cases. He died in 1984.
“Kodama Yoshio's value as an intelligence operative is virtually nil,” says a particularly harsh 1953 CIA report. “He is a professional liar, gangster, charlatan and outright thief ... . Kodama is completely incapable of intelligence operations, and has no interest in anything but the profits.”
Nowadays, the most powerful legacy of the US occupation is the democratic freedoms and pacifism built into Japan's 1947 constitution. But the US association with Japanese war criminals illustrates how Washington embraced nationalist and conservative forces after World War II, helping them reassert their grip on the government once the occupation ended in 1952.
“It's hard to imagine back in those days how intent the US was on rapid remilitarization of Japan,” said John Dower, historian and author of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II.
“When we talk about the emergence of neo-nationalism or a strong right wing in Japan today, this has very deep roots and it involves a very strong element of American support,” he said.
Yet the ex-war criminals failed to rebuild a militarist Japan.
“Prewar right-wing activists who escaped war crime charges in fact did not have much influence in the postwar period,” said Eiji Takemae, historian and author of The Allied Occupation of Japan.
To the Americans, he said, “they were in fact not very useful.”
On the Net:
US National Archives and Records Administration: www.archives.gov/iwg/japanese-war-crimes/introductory-essays.pdf and www.archives.gov/iwg/reports/japanese-interim-report-march-200 2-1.htm
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