Do You Know "Shigeki SAKIMURA", the first Japanese who attempted to join the United Nations in 1943-1944 in Sweden and worked against the Nazi-Japan Axis with W.Brandt, G.Myrdal, B.Kreisky etc. in "Stockholm Little International"?
April. 1, 2010
I retired
Hitotsubashi University in March 2010 and now concentrate my work on
research and this web university, "Netizen College." I
become Visiting Professor of Waseda
University (Graduate School of
Political Science) and Professor
Emeritus from Hitotsubashi University, but my office now is my own home (Tokura 2-16-41,
Kokubunji, Tokyo 185-0003, JAPAN; phone +81-42-327-9261). My mail
address is the same as before:
katote@ff.iij4u.or.jp.
Aug. 1, 2009My essay
below,[The Politics of Pandemic in
Mexico and Japan] was translated
into Spanish, and was published in the "Bulletnin
CEAA"Mayo,2009 at El Colegio de
Mexico, as 'Politicas
de la pandemia en Mexico y Japan.'
To study of the life Shigeki
SAKIMURA (1909-82), especially on the
assassination case against Mao Zedong("The
Time", Aug.27,1951), I have to
search for a
huge amount of declassified
FBI/ CIA/MIS documents of the
Interagency Working Group
(IWG) at NARA in USA. In the process, our team found important
historical documents to probe the close connection of the Japanese
government with the US- Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the
early 1950s, just after the independence of postwar Japan. It was
reported as the Top
news of "Mainich Shinbun" newspaper on July 26 and was translated into English on "The
Daily Mainichi" July 27, 2009, as
follows.
Click here for the original Japanese story (Mainichi Japan) July 26, 2009
March 23, 2009 I am now
staying in Mexico City as a visiting Professor at El Colegio de
Mexico. I will live in Mexixo until the end of May. But I still
search for "Shigeki Sakimura" in Germany, Sweden and China. If you
have any information on his activity, please let me know by e-mail to
katote@ff.iij4u.or.jp
April 2, 2008
One surprised news about
Shigeki SAKIMURA came from a Japanese researcher on Willy
Brandt, a famous postwar SPD leader,
Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany1969-1974, and the 1971
Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Brandt was born in Luebeck,
Germany, in December 1913. He worked In 1937 in Spain as a political
observer and representative of humanitarian relief organisations. In
1938 he was expatriated by Hitler's government. In 1940, after the
German occupation of Norway, he was captured, but not identified.
Released as a Norwegian, he fled to Sweden. Until 1945 he lived in
Stockholm. In 1944, he met Shigeki SAKIMURA , and left a
sentance memoir of "A Young Japanese
who worked at the Japanese Embassy in Germany" and attended his anti-
Nazi group in Stockholm.
In his
autobiography "Links
und frei: Mein Weg 1930-1950"(Hoffmann und
Campe, 1982), he refered to the
"Kleine
Internationale (Little
International) " in Stockholm 1943-1945. To this anti-Nazi social democratic group
belonged, not only Willy
Brandt and his close Austrian friend
Bruno
Kreisky (later Chancellor of
Austria), but also many emigre intellectuals and activists in
Stockholm from Norway (Lars
Evensen, Inge
Scheflo), Denmark (Henry Grunbaum),
Finnland, Poland (Anwalt Maurycy Karniol), Hungary (Wilhelm
Bohm), Germany (Fritz
Tarnow, Stefan
Szende), Austria (Bruno
Kreisky, Ernst
Paul), France, Island, Czecho,
Spain, Palestina, Britain and USA (Victor
Sjaholm), and of course Swedish
Sosialists. The representative of Swedish socialists in this group
was Gunner and Alva Myrdal, later Nobel Priza Winner couple in Economics and in
Peace, and Myrdal circle (Richard
Sterner, Ole Jodal, Torsten
Nilsson etc.). They discussed the
hope of postwar peace in Europe, new
design of postwar economic order, and
international solidarity of world-wide social democracy.
Willy
Brandt said in the
page 341 (image) of his
autobiography"Links
und frei: Mein Weg 1930-1950",
"One young Japanese, who escaped from
the Japanese Embassy in Berlin and shelterd in a Stockholm hospital,
visited our group. But he was soon brought back to Berlin . Probably
he might face to a tragic end." This
"young Japanese" was surely Shigeki
SAKIMURA, and he could live through
to the postwar perod in China and Japan. This is only one testimony
that Shigeki SAKIMURA was once in the "Stockholm Little International"
with Willy
Brandt, Bruno
Kreisky and Gunner
Myrdal . If someone know on this "Stockholm Little International", please send me the information to
katote@ff.iij4u.or.jp . It is a
wonderful information for our study on "Shigeki SAKIMURA".
Jan. 1, 2008
After my fieldwork in Sweden and Germany in 2007, I published an
article "Emigre Intellectuals in the
war of Information : From Teido KUNIZAKI to Shigeki
SAKIMURA" in a Japanese
journal
"INTELLIGENCE", No.9 (Nov.2007),
Regretfully, it is in Japanese. About Dr. Teido KUNIZAKI, you
can see it in my article Personal
Contacts in German--Japanese Cultural Relations during the 1920s and
Early 1930s , in, "Japanese-German Relations,
1895-1945 War, Diplomacy and Public Opinion" (Edited by: Christian W. Spang, Rolf-Harald
Wippich ,
Routledge 2006, and in
an
interesting site "Executed Todau.Com." On Shigeki Sakimura, please see New
York Times" May 1, 1944
and "
Time", June 5 1944.
July. 5, 2007 About Shigeki SAKIMURA's exile 1943-1944 from Germany
to Sweden, we now have a German book, " Karena Niehoff. Feuilletgonistin und
Kritikerin. Mit Aufsaetzen und Kritikenm von Karena Niehoff und
einem Essay von Joerg Becker.(FILM & SCHRIFT, Band 4. Muenchen
,Verlag edition text + kritik, January 2007).According to this book, SAKIMURA employed a Jewish
girl
Ka
rena Niehoff as an assistant of his work at
the Berlin Branch of Japanese Iron and Steel Industrial Association,
when he published a German book "Neuordnung der japanischen
Wirtschaft"(1942). When
Ka
rena Niehoff was arrested in February 1943
as a half Jew, Sakimura wrote a petition to the German Court for her
release from the jail and was thereafter watched by Nazi-GESTAPO. The
real reason of his emigre to Sweden is still unclear. He went to
Stockholm at the end of September 1943, entered a hospital from the
end of 1943, lived in Korsbarsvagen 6,
Stockholm, and would not return to
Berlin. Probably he was helped by the Swedish anti-Hitler
intellectual group, organized by Prof.
Torsten
Gardlund of Stockholm Economic
University, and contacted with
Prof.Franz Mockrauer, an exiled SPD scholar
who had Sakimura's German draft paper "Die Berufsausbildung
der Jugend im nazistischen Deutschland". His
words interviewed by the New York Times corrspondent George
Axelsson might be true from his
honest feeling. But the Japanese Embassy in Stockholm, major general
Makoto Onodera,and the Japanese ambassador Hiroshi Ohshima in
Berlin, could not allow such an open statement against the
German-Japan Axis by a Japanese scholar. He was threatened about the
safety of his family in Japan, had to return to Germany, and arrested
by Shozo Sato, the Japanese secret police in Berlin. Japanese Embassy
confined and watched him in a house in a suburb of
Berlin, Bernau-Eichwerder. Frits
Reuterstrasse 7, bei Frau Paul, and
separated from other Japanese and German friends. In May 1945, when
Hitler's Germany was defeated, he was informed to return through the
Siberian railway to Japan, where the war still continued.
By an official report of Japanese
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Shigeki Sakimura escaped from other 182
Japanese group in Berlin in May 1945, and became missing. Actually,
according to his later talk to his son after his return to Japan in
1955, he entered in Changchun in China in September 1945. But the
route and the sponsor of his escape travel from Germany to China is
still unknown. He never talked the detail and kept secret about his
foreign life even after he became a university Professer again in
1956. According to his son's memory, Shigeki Saklimura was employed as an interpreter by
the American Consulate in Changchun in 1946 (he could speak Japanese, Chinese, English, German,
French, Russian, and Swedish !), soon mooved to the Beijing's
American Consulate. The American Consulate moved to Taiwan when the
new communist government of China was established in September 1949.
But Shigeki Sakimura still remained in
Beijing and sent some economic
information to the US Department of State. According to the new
Chinese book "Anti-Spionage
Activities in Beijing at the begining of Communist
Chine"(March 2006), Sakimura was arrested by the Chinese secret police
under the charge of an "economic spy
of USA" with his Japanese assistant
Takeshi Misawa, just the same time of
the arrest of seven "assassination
group against Mao Zedong". He got
five year's imprisonment by this charge, who informed price of foods and
living goods in Beijing's market at the time of the Korean War. We
still do not know if this unbelievable story is true.
Nov. 1, 2006 I am now
searching for a secret peace action by one Japanese in
Nazis-Germany.
His name is Shigeki SAKIMURA (1909-82), who graduated Tokyo University in 1932, became research assistant and lecturer of the Department of Economics at the Imperial University of Tokyo. He was sent to Germany as an attach of the Japanese Embassy in Berlin in 1941. He published one German book "Neuordnung der japanischen Wirtschaft" in 1942. But at the end of 1943, he went from Germany to Sweden, and probably contacted the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services) to inform the real situation of German war industry and to ask the possibility of his own exile. " New York Times" May 1, 1944 reported him as " the first Japanese of any note to attempt to join the United Nations, the first to admit openly that the Axis cannot win the war", and " Time", June 5 1944 published the "Foreign News: Way of a Rebel." It said, "Shigeki Sakimura was one of the submerged, and now forgotten, intellectuals of Japan. As a student he explored the social sciences, brooded over his country's oligarchic economy, dallied with Marxism. At 30, the hardworking, high-strung scholar became a full professor. Two years later, in 1941, his Government sent him to Berlin as Embassy attach, to study German heavy industry. Slight, bespectacled Professor Sakimura poked around the Reich, peered critically into factories pumping out iron, steel, light metals, chemicals and other vitals of war". Although his hope of "Exile" to Sweden was not clear, he could not stay long in Stockholm and returned to Berlin in June 1944. Some secret documents of the OSS support the fact reported by American journalists at the time. He was forced to go back to Berlin, probably by Nazi-Gestapo and Japanese Embassy in March 26, just before the famous Assassination Attempts on Hitler on July 20,1944.
After the collapse of Hitler's Germany, he did not return to Japan. It was mysterous, because almost all Japanese in Europe at the time went back to Japan by Trans- Siberian Railway. He entered in China, where he worked as an information adviser of the American Consular Office in Beijing, probably under the control of OSS (from 1947, CIA). In 1950, one year after the Mao Zedong's socialist revolution, he suddenly arrested by Chinese secret police as a member of assassination group against Mao Zedong("The Time", Aug.27,1951), together with one Japanese (Ryuichi Yamaguchi), three Italians (Antonio Riva, Tarcisio Martina, Quirino Victor Lucy Gerli), one French (Henri Vetch) and one German (Walter Genthner). He was probably in Chinese jail 1950-1955, but could go back to Japan in 1955. Thereafter, he worked as a professor of economics at Takushoku University, Tokyo. As he could not speak about his life in Germany, Sweden and in China, even his family do not know his political actions during these years in detail . I am now looking for the documents of his anti-Hitler actions in Germany 1941-1945, Sweden 1943-44, and pro -American (anti-communist?) works in China 1945-55.
If someone know about him or the documents
concerned, please let me know !
Oct. 15, 2006A New English
File,
Kato
Tetsuro (Hitotsubashi University/ Tokyo):Personal Contacts in
German--Japanese Cultural Relations during the 1920s and Early
1930s , in, "Japanese-German Relations,
1895-1945 War, Diplomacy and Public Opinion" (Edited by: Christian W. Spang, Rolf-Harald
Wippich ,
Routledge 2006(Internet version) is
updated. But this is not the printed version, but the digital version
of the first draft without table,note, or full reference. If you
would like to read or cite exactly, please read
Routledge book.
● Personal
Contacts in German--Japanese Cultural Relations during the 1920s and
Early 1930s , in, "Japanese-German
Relations, 1895-1945 War, Diplomacy and Public
Opinion" (Edited by: Christian W.
Spang, Rolf-Harald Wippich
,
Routledge 2006(Internet
version)
TO
OUR CLASSMATES OF THE OCTOBER 1972 GERMAN LANGUAGE CLASS OF THE
HERDER INSTITUTE LEIPZIG !
E-mail to:
katote@ff.iij4u.or.jp
