Japan's navy said yesterday that an officer had illegally copied classified documents and repeatedly visited China to see a woman, in the latest twist to an espionage scandal between the Asian powers.
A newspaper said the woman worked at the same karaoke bar frequented by a Japanese diplomat whose suicide set off a bitter exchange of allegations between the countries.
In the latest case, the navy said the 45-year-old petty officer went to Shanghai eight times over a 15-month period without reporting his trips to his superiors.
The officer also illegally copied classified documents on CDs and kept them at his home on Tsushima base in southwestern Nagasaki Prefecture, a navy spokesman said.
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, the government spokesman, called for the Defense Agency to be vigilant in protecting information.
"The Defense Agency has information that could lead to serious damage to our country's security if leaked. I hope that the agency will make its utmost efforts to protect information," Abe told reporters.
Abe, a conservative who is the front-runner to be the next prime minister, said the Defense Agency did not inform the Cabinet about the incident.
The navy, known as the Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF), said it launched a probe but doubted the officer leaked information to China, whose ties with Japan have soured in recent years.
"Between the time he made the copies and MSDF investigators confiscated them, he did not go to China," a navy spokesman said. "We concluded that the officer did not take out the documents outside of the base and leak information."
The documents found included reference materials on how to identify foreign ships.
The secret trips and document copying were reported by separate whistle-blowers. The officer, who made his last visit to China in March, was transferred to another base.
The spokesman declined to confirm whether the bar was the same establishment linked to the death of the Japanese diplomat, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.
"The MSDF does not have the means to investigate this case in China," the spokesman said.
The diplomat committed suicide in May 2004 after allegedly being wooed by a bar hostess and then pressured by a Chinese agent to divulge secret codes for communications.
Japan lodged a protest, with top officials labeling Chinese tactics as "ruthless." China has repeatedly denied the allegations and accused Japan of trying to stir up tension.
Friction has grown between the two countries, in part over China's charges that Japan has not atoned for its bloody 1931-1945 occupation. Asia's two largest economies also dispute lucrative gas and oil resources.
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS