Okay, it's time for some breaking news. Luckily at this time.
Is it breaking or is it just an update?
Both breaking and an update from the last episode that we just did.
Well, not episode actually, it's not, it has nothing to do with Japan,
but it has something to do with the opener we did on the last episode.
Actually, not only just to do with it, it's actually pretty heavily tied to it.
Update on the avian flu.
So I'm taking from something going on in the local neighborhood,
and I'm going to make it worldwide.
This article is from March 13th, 2023 from cbc.ca.
The title of the article is eight dead skunks found in Vancouver and Richmond
test positive for avian flu.
So here in the article, here in the article,
eight skunks found dead last month in Vancouver and nearby Richmond, BC,
have tested positive for avian flu.
The BC government says it is the same strain of avian flu associated with the
outbreak that began in April, 2022.
The skunks were found in residential areas in both cities and were taken to BC's
animal health center over concerns.
They may have been deliberately poisoned.
That would be awful.
Well, both scenarios are awful.
British Columbia's ministry of agriculture says the skunks were infected with the
same H5N1 strain that had caused the deaths of millions of domestic poultry
since the outbreak began in April last year.
The ministry says in the statements, the skunks have contracted H5N1 by scavenging
on infected wild birds.
I didn't know skunks did that.
I guess I guess they would.
Yeah, I don't actually know what they eat.
I know I never actually thought about it.
They definitely aren't like stealth predators.
That's for sure.
I guess that would make sense if you're thinking about what they would eat.
The statement says while avian flu in skunks is considered to be low risk to
humans, there are always risks when people or pets come into contact with sick or
dead wild animals.
I mean, we don't generally go around eating skunks, which is why I think that
they say it's not high risk.
Try to avoid them, I believe.
In fact, I very heavily try to avoid it actually.
Since last April, the ministry says wildlife infected by flu included more than
20 species of wild birds, two skunks and a fox found in rural areas of the province.
That's the latest update.
Well, it's not the latest update.
I'm going to run through the fashion of our year end update and I'm going to run
through some other headlines of what we have put together in regards to this,
because it's not just skunks shockingly or birds.
It's spreading to other wildlife and other things as we'll get to.
So the next article I have is bird flu kills thousands of South American sea
lions as outbreak continues, which is crazy.
There are concerns that bird flu could be getting better at crossing over to
mammals after the disease killed 3500 South American sea lions in Peru.
Holy shit.
The Natural History Museum posted that article.
Next article is from the CDC and it has the bird flu current situation summary.
It's keeping account.
I believe this would be for the United States of what's going on there.
There is currently been 6356 wild birds infected.
58 and a half million poultry affected.
I'm assuming that's farm poultry.
Yeah, or I'll say it'd be wild birds.
Yeah.
There are restrictions with bird flu and wild birds.
There's 50 states with poultry outbreaks, 47 and states with reported cases of a
human death. Are these fatalities?
That one person did die, yes.
Yeah.
So one person in the United States.
Then we move on again with another article from the CDC.
H5N1 update.
Two humans, H5N1 cases in Cambodia were infected with the avian influenza.
Just trying to see if they died.
Yep, they died.
It was a child of the father.
The avian flu.
Then we have another one.
This is the New York Times that has blocked me.
That's okay.
All you need is the title.
Bird flu dolphin cetaceans.
I can't even read the title.
I can just read you the one sec.
I'll just pull it quick link.
And then while Taylor pulls that bird flu found in dolphin in Florida and porpoise
in Sweden, what's in Sweden?
That's pretty crazy.
And what's the other one?
Not just for birds.
Avian influenza is also felling wild mammals.
They're finding the virus in red foxes, bobcats and other mammals in North America.
And then the final article that I have here for dead seals test positive for bird flu
in Scotland. This is worldwide.
It's not just happening in Canada and the United States, obviously.
It's going between species now and eventually into humans.
So I think that has some pretty scary implications.
There's one more article too, I think should be included as well,
because it's just something different.
Three Montana grizzly bears euthanized last fall, tested positive for avian flu.
Why were they euthanized?
That's a good question that the article's title does not answer.
And I guess we will leave it at a mystery.
I was reading a bit of one of the articles in there as well,
because just hearing all these animals is kind of devastating.
But like, what does that actually mean?
It was explained in the New York Times article, not just for the birds.
Avian influenza is also felling wild animals by Emily Anthes.
She talked to a virologist at St.
Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis.
And basically they say evolution is a numbers game.
And the more mammals the virus infects,
the more opportunities it has to pick up new mutations that could help it spread
among all the animals that it is spreading to, as well as humans.
Because remember, it's a bigger evolutionary step to get from bird to mammal
than it is from mammal to human.
Wow, that's crazy.
I don't know why I would say remember.
It's just a bigger gap.
Yeah.
Wow.
I think that it's not good, that's for sure.
When it was just with birds alone,
I think it was having some pretty serious implications.
And a direct quote here.
What it's going to take for this virus to transition from being a duck or a chicken
virus to being a mammalian virus is more chances to replicate in those mammalian
hosts, Dr. Webby said.
So that's why when we see these mammals being infected by this virus, we do take
notice, end of quote, I would assume so.
And COVID just went right from bat to humans.
Well, that's a mammal.
I didn't think it was.
OK, it was a dinosaur, wasn't it?
I guess you could say that.
I thought it was a reptile.
But yeah, this may in fact be our last update on it before it isn't a fringe topic
anymore, but hey, maybe it makes the year end.
We can always hope.
Yeah, we can see about it.
That's the update.
One article and some headlines.
And with that, let's get into the episode.
From the unexplained to the mundane, come join us on a Journey to the Fringe.
Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe, where we join this episode already in progress.
Next up, Chelsea, do you remember that unit that you wanted to completely avoid talking
about because the things that they do are really horrendous and hard to talk about?
No, I didn't want to not talk about it.
I just thought we would do a full episode on it.
OK, there's a lot.
Well, we might do an episode on it in the future.
But unit 731 is grotesque.
Also unit 100.
But that's a different thing.
It also comes up right here.
During the International Military Tribunal for the Far East,
U.S. occupation authorities deliberately omitted witnesses to obfuscate evidence
in relation to the conviction of several Japanese right wing officials.
This process of covering up war crimes
against humanity committed by Japanese officials extended to Japanese biological
warfare programs in Manchukuo in 1946 and 1947.
The State Department and U.S. military intelligence officials began a pressure
campaign to convince Shiro Ishii, director of unit 731, to take a deal with the U.S.
in regard to the transfer of information research during unit 731's activities in the region.
This caused Ishii to take a deal to avoid prosecution.
He would give the U.S. intelligence
officials information on human experimentation procured during his time as director.
To the great consternation of the SCAP and U.S. officials,
the Soviet Union began its own campaign to gain information in relation to the
biological weapons, and the Soviet officials blackmailed former unit 731
members to reveal their research lest they be prosecuted at the Pavarov's war crime trials.
The U.S. intervened, forcing interrogations to be performed only in the presence of U.S.
military officials, obscuring the true extent of Japanese human experimentation
and to preserve their own research edge over the Soviet Union in the field.
The American government sent General MacArthur to oversee the rebuild of postwar
Japan, which we already knew MacArthur was also responsible for gathering data
on biological warfare, which was obtained through human experimentation.
The U.S. government offered full political immunity to high ranking officials who were
instrumental in perpetrating crimes against humanity in exchange for the data about their experiments.
That's not all. Among those was Shiro Ishii, the commander of unit 731.
During the cover up operation,
the U.S. government paid money to obtain the data on human experiments deducted in China,
according to two declassified U.S. government documents.
The total amount paid to unnamed former members of the infamous unit was somewhere
between 150,000 and 200,000 yen.
An amount of 200,000 at this time is equivalent of 20 million to 40 million yen today.
So they not only got off Scott clean, they also got wealthy.
Yes, because that's like hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And they also helped the government cover up what unit 731 was actually up to.
They destroyed many of the documents.
Hirohito, as emperor, gave his consent regarding the policies and activities of
unit 731 and unit 100 and other human experimentation facilities.
Despite this, there is no evidence that he was thoroughly informed on most of
the atrocities that occurred within the facilities.
He was one of many that would be granted immunity.
Though it is unclear on whether Emperor Hirohito was made aware of the full extent
of unit 731, the emperor's younger brother, Prince Makasa, had toured the headquarters
of unit 731 and wrote in his memoirs that he watched films of how Chinese prisoners
were made to march on the plains of Manchuria for poison gas experiments on humans.
MacArthur, abiding by the Potsdam Declaration, gathered a jury for the Tokyo trials,
where a number of Japanese officials were successfully tried and convicted.
In 1981, one of the last surviving members of the Tokyo Tribunal, Judge
Rowling, expressed his unhappiness that the war crimes committed in unit 731
had been protected by the US government and wrote,
It is a bitter experience for me to be informed now that centrally ordered
Japanese war criminality of the most disgusting kind was kept secret from the
court by the US government.
Unquote.
So, yeah, that's awful.
Next up, let's talk Yakuza.
We know that the Yakuza was used well by the government prior to World War II.
They came up in Manchuria.
They were used as strikebreakers in 1920, 1925 and 1928, respectively.
I don't know why I said respectively.
They just were.
During the reverse course,
MacArthur and the SCAP decided to turn a blind eye to the growing criminal
organizations, many of whom had links with the legal
ultra-nationalist organizational bodies for the reason of their anti-communism.
Again, the most important thing is that you're anti-communist.
Everything else doesn't matter.
Many of the rehabilitated politicians had links with the ultra-nationalist
organizations. Instead, the SCAP and MacArthur adopted the Red Purge, purging
and dispossessing members of the labor unions, the Japanese Communist Party and
leftist academia. During the Red Purge, Willoughby and his associates began paying
right wing criminals in the Yakuza to repress the left.
The Yakuza were used in strike breaking operations, as well as attacks on leaders
of the Japanese left. Willoughby, who came up earlier and his subordinates, became
described as obsessed and paranoid with finding plots concerning communist infiltration.
Willoughby and his Yakuza operatives allegedly staged a derailment of a Japanese
national railway locomotive, which we talked about earlier, in a rumored
false flag operation meant to discredit the Communist Party.
The G2 and US military intelligence used the Yakuza in extrajudicial abductions
of left wing figures, including novelist Kaji Wataru, which led to his torture.
Externally, the Yakuza were deployed in Korea as Yoshio Kadama in negotiations
with Douglas MacArthur supplied thousands of Yakuza and IGA veterans as volunteers
in Korea, where they posed as Korean soldiers.
Because remember, Japan does not have a military, so they cannot fight an
offensive war, so the Yakuza supplied Japanese military to the Korean at the
behest of the US military.
Oh my God.
OK, the US is just as bad as Japan.
Next up, the Lockheed scandal.
And this ends with a fantastic story.
The scandal involved Meru Beni Corporation and several high ranking members of Japanese
political business and underworld circles, including finance minister,
Isaku Saito and the JASDF chief of staff, Minoru Genda.
In 1957, the Japanese Air Self Defense Force wished to buy Grumman F-11F-1F
Super Tigers to replace the F-86 Sabre, then in service.
But heavy lobbying by Lockheed, now Lockheed Martin, of key liberal Democratic
Party figures led to the adoption of the F-104 instead.
Later, Lockheed Martin hired
underworld figure Yoshio Kadama as a consultant in order to influence
Japanese peristatal airlines, including All-Nepal Airways, which is ANA.
It's the airlines, All-Nepal Airways, to buy the Lockheed L-1011,
TriStar instead of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10.
On February 6, 1976, the vice chairman of Lockheed told the Senate subcommittee
that Lockheed had paid approximately three million dollars in bribes to the office
of Japanese Prime Minister Kakuhei Tanaka for aid in the matter.
Lockheed also paid 2.4 billion yen to earn the contract from ANA.
500 million of the total yen was received by the prime minister.
160 million was received by ANA officials.
1.7 billion was received by Yoshio Kadama, who, remember, is that Yak is a guy
from earlier on who was the fixer for the LDP.
On October 30, 1972, All-Nepal Airways, ANA,
announced its decision to purchase 21 Lockheed 1011 TriStars, which cost
approximately five million dollars each, even though it had previously
announced options to purchase the DC-10.
The 1986 U.S.
President's Commission on Organized Crime
revealed that from 1969 to 1975, Lockheed used Deek and Company, a large
foreign exchange operator owned by Nicholas Deek, as a conduit to transfer
money intended by Lockheed to bribe Japanese officials.
It was disclosed that the U.S.
8.3 million was moved to Deek's office in Hong Kong, where a Spanish-born
priest representing Lockheed took the cash and carried it to Japan.
And this is my favorite story about Yoshio Kadama.
This pisses off a extreme right-wing Japanese porn star by the name of Mutsuyasu Meino.
He gets so pissed off because he says that this is an affront to the samurai code.
Even though he's an extreme right-winger, he says, no, you must follow the Japanese code.
He rents a plane and kamikazes Yoshio Kadama's house.
Oh my God. What?
Yeah.
In process of scandal, actor, porn actor Mutsuyasu Meino made a suicide attack
on Kadama's Tokyo home by crashing a light aircraft onto it.
I read the story and basically he went in full kamikaze gear, like what they wore
to attack Pearl Harbor, and he went with another plane and they were posing.
There's a picture of him outside of his light aircraft.
And somebody asked, like, hey, what are you doing at the tarmac?
And they're like, oh, we're just filming a scene for a movie.
Anyhow, they both go up in the air.
He says, like, oh, I'm just going to take a quick detour over this way.
And then he turns on his calm.
He says, this is for the emperor, which in Japanese ends with Banzai,
which is what they kamikaze yell before they kill people or themselves.
And crashes it into Yoshio Kadama's house.
Yoshio Kadama had suffered a stroke two years earlier,
so he was more or less like house-ridden.
Didn't move a whole lot.
But luckily for Yoshio, he ends up actually completely unharmed in this plane crash.
Oh my God.
Tanaka for this probe was arrested in July 27, 1976,
and was released on August on a 200 million yen bond.
He was found guilty by Tokyo courts of violation of foreign exchange control.
He was sentenced to four years in prison,
but re-evaluated on appeal until his death in 1993.
The same thing happens with Yoshio Kadama.
He has a trial, but he dies before it can come to pass.
He has a stroke in 1984.
So, yeah.
And then the last thing I wanted to talk about was that assassination
that had just happened in Japan last year of Shinzo Abe.
So, Shinzo Abe shot, giving a speech, by a homemade gun.
And Yamagami, the guy who did it, basically, he ends up coming out with the story
that he wanted to kill the leader of the unification church, the Moons.
But it was too difficult to get to her.
Instead, it would be easier to get to a previous prime minister and shoot him.
Which is crazy.
He just needed to shoot.
Like, he made this homemade gun and he just needed to shoot someone.
Yeah, but Shinzo Abe and the LDP have a big history with the unification church,
which is a cult, which I'm going to tell you about.
And I'm now going to reveal the thing that I've been hiding until now.
Shinzo Abe is Kishi Nabusuke's grandson, the prime minister during Anpo
and the guy who ran Manchuria.
I feel like a horse at this point.
I found a great article.
It's called The Dark Shadow Cast by Moonsung Myungs,
Unification Church and Abe Shinzo by Peter McGill.
I'm just going to give it background on what the Moonees are.
It's going to be a minute, but I think it's well worth our listen.
So in 1941, a man by the name of Sung-myung Moon,
which is why he called Moonees, began studying electrical engineering in Tokyo,
but did not finish the course and returned to live in Seoul,
where he married his first wife.
After Allied forces liberated Korea in 1945,
1945, Moon moved to Pyongyang and started his own church.
Other ministers complained of his teachers
in 1946, Moon was arrested and charged for polygamy.
Two years later, he was excommunicated from the Presbyterian Church
and Moon was sentenced to five years at the Hungman Labor Camp,
where he wrote his memoirs that he was beaten until he vomited blood.
When the Korean War broke out in the 1950s,
he was freed from the camp when guards fled from advancing United Nations troops
and traveled to Busan in the south, where he began a new church.
By then, a convinced anti-communist,
he identified movements in countries with biblical figures.
Korea became the Adam nation,
while Japan was Eve and America the Archangel.
Communist countries were the lair of Satan,
and Korea was the front line in a war between good and evil.
In 1955, one year after official founding of his Holy Spirit Association
for the Unification of World Christianity,
Moon was arrested over allegations of sex with female followers.
Ewha Women's University, a prestigious Methodist mission college,
dismissed five professors and expelled 14 students.
80 young women involved in the case refused to testify in court
and charges were finally dropped.
The FBI later cited reports that the cult was engaged
in a sexual right called pickerion or cleaning of the womb,
in which a woman had sex with Moon three times
to cleanse her blood from Satan's lineage.
The woman then could cleanse her husband by having sex with him.
Oh, God.
Yeah, that's what this church is all about.
Also, the Unification Church is very commonly known
as the church that plans weddings.
They have mass weddings where thousands of people get married,
and the Unification Church tells you who you're married,
so you don't get to pick your...
Oh, I was just gonna say, are these people not in the...
They're all in the cult, and they're just running the side wedding business.
But this thing is fucking huge.
Like, it is a huge cult.
The Unification Church was organized by retiring brigadier general Kim Jong-Pil,
the founder and first director of the South Korean CIA,
which was set up by the CIA,
and Kim Jong-Pil, a relative of Park Chung-hee,
an architect of the coup who later became prime minister,
has been using the church, which has a membership of 27,000,
as a political tool, says a CIA report.
Oh, God.
This cult's first overseas bridgehead was in Japan,
where Kishi Nobusuke, the maternal grandfather of Shinzo Abe,
rolled out the red carpet for move.
The Unification Church was granted a Japanese status
as a Christian religious corporation in July 1964,
and a few months later moved its headquarters
to an art deco-style building
beside Kishi's home in Tokyo's Shibuya Ward.
Kishi had used the building as his official residence while prime minister.
20 years after the Unification Church became his next-door neighbor,
Kishi would beseech US President Ronald Reagan
to free Moon Sung-Yun from imprisonment.
From the 1960s to the late 1980s,
the Unification Church was stridently anti-communist.
More than 300,000 South Korean troops were sent
to support American forces defending South Vietnam,
and Moon was a vocal supporter of the Vietnam War.
His position was fully shared throughout the war
by all mainstream Protestant churches in South Korea.
At home, critics of the South Korean military deployment
risked detention and torture by the KCIA,
and massacres by Korean troops in Vietnam were covered up.
Party Yamagami's lethal animus,
that is the guy who killed Shinzo Abe,
derived from his grandfather's partnering with Moon
in the International Federation of the Victory Over Communists.
They have so many friggin' anti-communist groups
that they just... I don't know how they come up with so many names
and say, I'm not with the communists.
The International Federation for Victory Over Communism,
the Anti-Communist League, and there's more that will come up.
And Moon founded it in Seoul in 1968.
The honorary chairman of the Japan affiliate
launched in the same year in Japanese,
Kokusai Shokyo Rengo, was none other than Sasakawa Ryōchi,
that guy who was the Class A war criminal I haven't mentioned yet
who got out.
One of the most notorious and flamboyant Japanese of the 20th century.
He is considered like the daddy warbucks of Japan.
His biggest regret is that he never won the Nobel Peace Prize,
and during World War II, he was so proud of the planes that he bought
that he flew them to Italy to show his hero, Mussolini.
Big fascist.
Also, he owned the entire gambling that's allowed in Japan for years,
likely because he had a really good in with the Yakuza with Yoshio.
So that's where Ryōchi comes in.
Sorry, I finally got to him.
Oh, God, where was I?
What a roller coaster.
Moon also sponsored the 1970 Tokyo meeting of the World Anti-Communist League.
See, they have a million ways of saying they're against communism,
with which the IFVOC and Shokyo Rengo were affiliated.
The WACL grew out of the Asian People's Anti-Communist League,
formed in 1954 at the request of South Korea's Ri Sing-Man
and Taiwan's Chiang Kai-shek to fight communism in Asia
after the end of the Korean War.
The WACL established in Taiwan in 1966
expanded the scope of anti-communist activities onto a global stage.
In the 1970s, the European division of the WACL became notorious
for a large influx of fascist groups,
especially after British white supremacist Roger Pearson
took over as WACL chairman in 1978.
Geoffrey Stuart Smith, who headed the league's British chapter,
resigned in protest, describing the WACL as,
largely a collection of Nazis, fascists, anti-Semites,
sellers of forgeries, vicious racialists and corrupt self-seekers.
Sounds like a great group of people.
Yeah. The Unification Church expansion into the US began after Moon moved there
with his rapidly growing family in the early 1970s.
With money also pouring in from Japan,
the Unification Church bought the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan,
a seafood operation said to supply half of the sushi sold in the United States,
a cable TV network, a recording studio and a shipbuilding firm,
all owned by the Unification Church in New York.
And to this day, I can't remember if it comes up or not,
70% of the income from the Unification Church comes from donations in Japan.
Is it still a cult?
It's still a cult, still very much so around.
It's mostly Japan and Korea, mostly Japan, but it's everywhere.
That's crazy.
And they still, I'm pretty sure, own the Washington Post.
If you ever see an article from the Washington Post,
it's owned by the Unification Church.
Yeah. Or sorry, Washington Times, not the Washington Post.
OK, I was going to say, huh?
Geoff Bezos owns the Washington Post.
The Washington Times are owned by the Unification Church.
Yeah, so they go to the US, but they buy all these companies.
And a US congressional probe into the Korea Gate scandal of influence buying
in Washington lifted the lid on the close cooperation between the Unification
Church and the government of Park Chung-hee.
The spark for a wide ranging investigation
into the US-Korea relationship was revelations of corruption by South Korea's
chief lobbyist, Tong Soon Park, who funneled money from the KCIA to members of Congress.
Cash filled envelopes were handed over
that lavish parties at the Georgetown Club that Park had founded for entertaining.
Park Chung-hee had authorized an aggressive influence buying operation
around the Washington embassy to counter moves to reduce the US troop presence
in South Korea and other US military assistance, as well as to roll back
mounting criticism of human rights violations by his regime.
The chief agent of repression was the KCIA, widely suspected of involvement
in the 1973 abduction from Tokyo of Korean opposition later in later Nobel
Laureate Kim Dae-jung. Moon also manufactured guns for the Korean
military through the Unification Church, which drew much unfavorable attention.
Tongil Heavy Industries, headed by his second cousin, made the Vulcan gun,
an anti-aircraft weapon, an air gun used by Korean school children for military
training, the M79 grenade launcher, and most controversially at the time
for Korea Gate, the M16 rifle, the basic infantry weapon of the Korean Army.
The M16 was made under the license from the Colt Industries in the US and was
made under an agreement with the US government that was only to be reproduced
or to be produced by the South Korean government.
So the South Korean government is so intertwined with this cult at the time
that they basically see no difference between them making it and this cult
making the weapons. Washington Times, founded by this ubiquitous
henchman Pak Bo-hee in 1982, strengthened bonds.
The paper was meant to be a conservative
counterweight to liberal Washington Post that had been instrumental in driving
Nixon from office and enjoyed a monopoly in the capital area.
Reagan read the Washington Times every day for his presidency.
That took me a moment.
The American people know the truth.
You, my friends at the Washington Times, have told it to them.
He said in 1997.
Isn't it great that like one of everybody's
favorite presidents fully loved Colts readings?
Colts readings.
Colt newspapers, literally owned by a cult.
That might make them better. I don't know.
I don't know.
And then this is where the CIA part actually comes in.
The Moody's, the Unification Church, are definitely involved with the CIA.
The guaranteed part is right here.
In 1979, the hereditary dictatorship of the Somoza family, Somoza family
in power in Nicaragua since 1937, was deposed by left wing Sandinistas.
Reagan believed that the Sandinista victory threatened
Southern frontier of the United States.
In addition to a trade embargo against Nicaragua, he authorized the CIA to
covertly help Contra rebels operating out of camps in the neighboring Honduras
and Costa Rica with funding, training and weaponry, obviously known as the
Iran-Contra affair. After Congress prohibited federal funding of the Contras
in 1983, Colonel Oliver North on the National Security Council formulated a plan
for the Reagan administration to continue backing them by selling arms to Iran
and channeling the proceeds to the Contras.
The CIA was supported in these covert
campaigns by a broad range of right wing individuals and networks connected
to Singh Lob's World Anti-Communist League.
It's Latin American chapter, the C.A.L., which stands for Confederación
Anticommunista Latinaamericana, would gradually involve representatives of all
the Latin American domestic security forces, intelligence services, military
establishments, paramilitary movements and desuades across the continent.
Moon's contribution to the anti-communism in Central and South America was through
a new political arm of the Unification Church called the CASA, Spanish
for cause founded in New York in 1980.
CASA was inevitably headed by Noon's ultra loyal ex-Colonel Pak Bohe.
In 1984, the celebrated American investigative journalist Jack Anderson
described in a syndicated column how Moon's cult worked with the CIA.
And this is from his article.
In the Central American hinterlands, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish
CIA operative from the Reverend Somyon Moon's disciples.
They appear to be working in harness
against the communist tainted Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.
This troubles at least one Pentagon analyst now stationed in Korea, who has
warned the White House that the CIA Mooney connection could cause possible
political damage to the president's reelection campaign, that president being
Ronald Reagan. Current Mooney involvement in the government officials,
contractors and grantees could create a major scandal, the memo warns.
CASA International, Moon's political front, has representatives working
in the programs that help the CIA in its contra work against the Sandinista government.
CASA maintains a publicity office in Tezegalpa, the Honduran capital,
but its principal activities are in the field.
CASA provides cash and other aid to Honduran based Nicaraguan contras
and Honduran right wing political groups.
Many anti-Sandinista guerrillas wear red CASA t-shirts with a map of the world on them.
But CASA and its affiliates, the Refugee Relief Freedom Foundation,
provide more than t-shirts to the rebel group.
They also funnel supplies to refugee families in and near contra camps and pay
for trips by rebel leaders to the United States.
The airlift of supplies to the rebels by Moon's Unification Church has escalated
since Congress cut off CIA funding for contras.
The administration has been attempting to privatize its war against the
Sandinistas and it's apparently willing to work with Moon's people.
While CASA was active throughout South America, it was Uruguay's military
dictatorship that offered the warmest welcome.
In March of 1981, Park Bohee met the president, vice president and interior
minister in the capital of Montevideo.
By the end of the year, CASA was granted rights to set up two newspapers,
Noticia del Uruguay and Ultima Noticia, and a radio station in Uruguay,
as well as a casino in violation of local gambling laws.
It brought the largest publishing house, a restaurant and a meatpacking plant,
and owned Montevideo's only luxury hotel, the Victoria Plaza, which housed the casino
and was later extended to include a convention center.
Uruguay's offshore banking system operated behind walls of secrecy
and was notorious for being a laundromat for drug money, as well as a haven
for flight capital and tax evasion.
CASA's acquisition of a controlling interest in Uruguay's third largest bank,
the Banco de Credito, prompted many questions.
The cult's sudden interest in acquiring a Uruguayan bank may have been related
to its intense scrutiny it was receiving from U.S.
tax authorities, which led to Moon's conviction, incarceration and a Connecticut penitentiary.
This provoked an extraordinary intervention by Kishi, the former prime minister who had done
so much to facilitate unification church entry into Japan.
On November 26, 1984, Nobusuke Kishi wrote to Reagan at the White House,
imploring him to release Moon by all means from his unfair imprisonment as soon as possible.
Kishi begins his letter by congratulating Reagan on a sweeping election victory
and on departing from the New Deal policies of the Democratic Party,
ultimately derived from Marxism, which have been the parents
since the time of President F.D. Roosevelt.
Kishi alludes to a recent World Media Conference in Tokyo, of which he and Douglas MacArthur
II, American ambassador to Japan from 1957 to 1961, had both been honorary
chairman, attended by, quote, 800 journalists from 87 countries.
According to Kishi, the conference closed with congratulatory
speech by Mike Mansfield, who was U.S. ambassador to Tokyo from 1977 to 88.
The World Media Conference was founded by Moon, whom Kishi extols in his letter
as a genuine man staking his life on promoting the ideals of freedom and correcting communism.
His existence is and will be in the future a rare, precious,
indispensable one for the maintenance and freedom of democracy.
A reply was drafted by Reagan's signature and was sent to Kishi on March 5th, 1985.
It is noted that Moon's request for a parole
have been denied and his scheduled release date remained August 20th,
although a formal request for executive clemency was under consideration.
Japanese defense minister Nobuo Kishi, who is Abe's brother, said this week
that unification church members had volunteered in his own past election
campaigns and the head of Japan's agency investigating security lapses in Abe's
killing told reporters that he headed the executive committee for a church linked event in 2018.
And this is the Moonies.
It hosts mass weddings, owns a famous ski resort, a soccer team, travel agency,
construction company and numerous factories, sits on a giant land bank of 4628 hectares
and pursues government sanction, economic and political diplomacy with North Korea.
So close have been relations with the government that the unification church
gave anti communist indoctrination courses to South Korean civil servants at its
Su-taek-ri compound outside Seoul.
Inside the compound was the unification church,
factory making rifles for the South Korean military.
And in 2021, both Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump addressed a unification church rally of hope.
Both Trump and his former CIA director and secretary of state, Mike Pompeo,
addressed another Moonie event in Seoul in August of 2022 after Abe's assassination.
So that super fucked up.
On September 8th, the LDP released the results of an internal survey that it had done,
showing that almost half of its 379 diet members had admitted to dealing with the Moonies cult.
In addition, 290 members of the prefectural assemblies and seven prefectural governors
have acknowledged associating with it, according to the survey by a side.
So close have their relationships been with the government that the unification church
gave anti communist indoctrination courses to South Korea and Japan.
And yeah, basically how they get all their money.
It's super sketchy.
I cut this part out, but they look in the obituaries.
The unification church find people that have recently died, go to their loved ones
and say, your family member that's passed on is in hell right now and you need to give us money
and commit yourself to our church that your loved ones can live a better life in the afterlife.
I'm just amazed at how many people they take in with all of this.
They take in so many people.
I'm always amazed at cult and how they operate like this.
Fuck, I hope I still have this article open, do I?
Because this is absolutely vital.
Basically, it's the story of...
Why would you close it if it's vital?
I thought I had it in my thing.
That's 25 pages long.
But basically Yamagami, the guy who assassinated Shinzo Abe,
his life was ruined because his father died in a construction accident when he was young
and his mother got taken in by the unification church.
They forced her to sell her family's construction company and sell all the land that they owned
and give all that money to the unification church, which ended up being about $700,000.
Yamagami's brother committed suicide basically because they were destitute.
Yamagami attempted to commit suicide at one point.
His mom basically says that she has no family left and only cares about the church.
And Moonie, Sung-yeon Moon, died and his wife is now in charge of the church.
He wanted to assassinate her because he hates the church so much,
but was unable to find a place that would actually work.
So instead, he found the next closest thing that he could,
which is a family that is deeply tied to bringing it into Japan,
which is the Abe and the Kishi family.
So that's why he assassinated Shinzo Abe.
And that is why a Korean cult church came up in my episode about Japan and the CIA.
And that is where this episode ends.
What a web that's been weaved.
We touched on a little bit of everything.
That was, I don't even know what to compare that to.
I was going to say roller coaster, but it wasn't quite a roller coaster.
It was something different than a roller coaster.
It was a plane ride with a Japanese porn star of a ride.
OK, yeah, I'll take that one.
I'll take it. In fact, encourage it.
Embrace it. Yes.
And let's just say right now I had to cut this short.
This is the short version of this episode.
And does this bring us to the end of Japan?
Probably not.
This brings us to the end of Japan for now.
Because there's obviously still other stuff we need to touch on that have come up.
Yeah, God. Chelsea, any questions?
I don't think there's any comments.
I was crazy.
Lots of things in these last three episodes that have taught me a lot about the history
of Japan, much of which I had no idea of.
It was a journey for me, much of which I did not know, nor would have any reason to know, I guess.
Yeah, they're fringe topics.
I've been oblivious to what Japan's been up to.
And like we knew we were going to circle back to, I'll be keeping my eye on Japan
a little closer here on out.
But other than that, I don't know that I have any.
I can't add much to that.
But what a journey.
OK, what a journey it has been.
God, I'll be happy to not have to think about Japan for a little while.
Oh, it's just like math.
We always got to be thinking about Japan.
We always got to be, or else you're insane.
Yeah.
Or else some bad shit's going to happen.
And you might become part of the cult.
But with that, I'll leave you with the same advice.
If you ever hear anybody talking about the Unification Church or the Moonies,
don't give them your money.
Just don't.
As much as you want to.
Even if they're trying to sell you stuff.
Don't. Because we're your Japanese experts.
Sure, we don't speak the language, but we tell you, don't.
And with that sage advice, I have been Taylor here with Chelsea.
We are Journey to the Fringe.
Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week.
Bye.
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