On the cusp of national elections in Japan and South Korea, it would seem Pyongyang’s decision to fire a “satellite launch” is ill-timed and certain to guarantee electoral victories for pro-military conservative candidates against their more pacifistic rivals. The North’s provocative action must seem completely illogical, in fact, self-defeating to observers who are unfamiliar with the secret history of modern Asia.
 
Tossing another spanner into this Byzantine puzzle is Israel’s covert role on both sides of the firing line - as if opposing sides actually exist.
 
Novelist Tom Clancy once said: “The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense.” Making any sense of the present reality requires a long story, too long for this essay. So here I am presenting a thumbnail sketch of the dangerous illusions that comprise reality versus the fabrications manufactured for consumption by a naïve world public via the mass media.
 
Sub Rosa
 
Nothing is as it appears to be, especially when it comes to back-room deals inside Japan’s former empire. The legacies from the Japanese militarist occupation of Korea and Northeast China remain as convoluted as ever and are kept sub rosa, below the surface. The principal characters in the present drama are all connected to the dark past in a Korea and Manchuria under Japanese military occupation:
 
- Shinzo Abe of the Liberal Democrats, who leads in the race for prime minister, is the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, the powerful economy minister of the puppet state  of Manchukuo.
- Park Geun-hye, top contender for South Korea’s presidency, is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the Korean dictator who was an infantryman in the war against China and became an officer in the imperial Japanese military. After Japan’s defeat, Park swtiched from being a militant apocalyptic Buddhist to secretly joining the Korean Workers’ Party led by the Soviet-installed Kim Il-Sung, making him a double agent from the start of his political career. (Rev. Moon did much the same, spending time in the North.)
- The Kim dynasty of Pyongyang, whose closets are packed with skeletons, has never been what they’ve made themselves out to be to a controlled society or to foreigners.
 
The North Korean rocket launch gives Abe the pretext to restart Japan’s nuclear reactors including Fukushima, to press the need for nuclear weapons and to push for elimination of the anti-war Article 9 of the postwar Constitution.

South Korea under another Park administration can now justify the expansion of its nuclear reactor industry (its small-scale reactors are easily adaptable fast-flux mode for naval vessels), build the next-generation KDX-3 super-destroyer and, in quiet cooperation with  Israel, assemble extra-large, nuclear-capable Dolphin submarines.
 
While the massive armaments build-up is supposedly aimed against a rogue Pyongyang ­ the straw man in this exercise - the goal is the same as it has been since the constraints imposed by London Naval Accords of the 1920s ­ to surpass the West in naval tonnage and firepower. The quest for a stronger, more secure Asia might be a noble cause, if it were not so prone toward warfare within the region rather than defense against Western intervention ­ which is why Beijing is alarmed, to say the least.
 
These authoritarian political figures are supported by a shadowy netherworld, which includes the Unification Church of the late Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a secret society called the “Horse Riders” association, European fascist movements, and major yakuza groups and drug-trafficking networks formerly associated with the Kempeitai, or imperial Military Police.
 
Abe is further implicated by his mentorship of the weapons smugglers who were transferred from the Unification Church into the Aum Shinrikyo, the state-sponsored sect involved in the 1995 Tokyo subway gassing. The one assailant who was captured in the rush hour attack was released from hospital, and according to sources in the police, was allowed to return to South Korea. At my weekly newspaper at that time, one of our reporters was an Aum member married to the top gamer at Tokyo University. The couple relocated to the United States, assigned to Abe who was at the JETRO trade office in New York, and they broke into computers at DARPA, the Pentagon’s advanced weapons development program.
 
Abe was once a research manager at Kobe Steel, from where electromagnetics weapons designer Hideo Murai was recruited as Aum’s minister of science. After Murai promised to disclose the details of his links to the government, he was stabbed to death in public by an ethnic Korean gangster. His secret never emerged to harm Abe, who then launched a public relations campaign to distance himself from Aum. Despite all his wiggling, Abe is the very personification of a Manchurian Candidate, beholden to Pyongyang.
 
Revisionist-Zionist Fascism
 
The ongoing secret cooperation between Pyongyang and conservative forces in Japan, South Korea and Israel is rooted in the Revisionist Fascist movement, which had many fundamental differences from the racial purity policies of Nazism.
 
In contrast to the Aryan race theory espoused by Hitler’s chief of ideology Alfred Rosenberg, the Japanese militarists from the late-1920s pushed a “pan-Asianist” strategy for the landmass from Tokyo to Istanbul. To bridge the many religious and racial differences between Buddhists, Muslims and Jews, Japanese military propagandists turned to a theory proposed in “Japan and the Lost Tribes of Israel”, a book by Nicholas McLeod, a Scotsman who had picked up on the parallels between ancient Judaism and Shintoism as proffered by a resident rabbi in Meiji Japan.
 
From this acorn of pseudo-history grew Japan’s war against the Anglo-American powers, the gestation of a modern state of Israel, and the budding of the present-day neo-Axis alliance. The evidence for a “Jewpanese” race, when critically examined, is thin and dodgy indeed  ­ six-pointed stars inscribed on stone lanterns of imperial shrines and tiny hats worn by mountain hermits. These symbols could just as easily have originated in Zoroastrian Iran rather than Abraham’s homeland of Mesopotamia.
 
As this exotic seed sprouted, new “discoveries” and “claims” were added:
 
- Judaism and Shintoism have a common root in the “Sumerian” race that created one of the world’s first civilizations;
- Sumeria was founded by powerful aliens ­ divinities who descended to Earth and intermarried with lowly humans, creating the higher races of man as opposed to the servile herd;
- The god-descended aristocracy, the Chosen People, formed a horse-riding elite that rode out to conquer the ignorant masses who were hardly better than untamed apes or rice-growing peasants;
- The cunning Western barbarians broke the gentlemanly rules of combat to seize territory from the natural aristocracy by trickery, betrayal, drug addiction and the blatantly deceptive promise of “democracy” to the uneducated mob; and
- That the Horse Riders of Asia have sacred a duty to follow their prophets into battle for the return of their kings, and after a titanic world war revive New Sumeria.
The warped narrative is like watching the Lord of the Rings on shabu (methamphetamines).
 
This mad schema underpinned the rabid fanaticism of Ishihara Kanji, the colonel who precipitated the invasion of Manchuria with a false-flag bombing, the General Staff that ordered the attacks on Pearl Harbor and Singapore, and Nobusuke Kishi, who as postwar prime minister initiated Japan’s nuclear power industry and advocated an atomic bomb program. All of those Class-A war criminals left footprints in occupied Korea and the puppet state of Manchukuo.
 
Likud-Irgun in the Empire of the Sun
 
And so did the Jewish zealots of the Irgun terrorist group, who were transported out of Poland and the Baltics by Chiune Sugihara. The diplomat was  no “Japanese Schindler” as claimed by Zionist propagandists but was an agent for Japan’s military intelligence, according to documents from his employees in the Free Polish government in exile.
 
With Stalin’s cooperation under a non-aggression pact, the Japanese military brought the Jewish exiles, including the highest-ranking Torah scholars, to Harbin, where plans were laid to establish a state of Israel along the Heilongiang River in China's border with Siberia. As the General Staff began to lay plans for the Pacific War, however, the younger Jews were sent to Shanghai, where they were enlisted in the Betar militia, which was trained in the use of automatic  weapons and explosives. In June 1941, the revisionist Zionists with the Stern gang and Irgun carried out guerrilla attacks on British military outposts in Palestine, launching the war to liberate Greater East Asia from the British Empire ­ six months before Pearl Harbor. The Polish Zionists were the vanguard of the Empire of the Sun.
 
Thus the Likud Party of Daniel Netanyahu, descended from the terrorist Irgun, is the heir to a long covert relationship with the only nation that would sponsor Jewish nationalism in the 1930s and ‘40s. From the 1960s, the State of Israel reciprocated by providing weapons and military technology to Japan and later China through its chief arms smuggler Saul Eisenberg, who had spent the war years in Tokyo as a collaborator with the Japanese military. (His presence in devastated Tokyo was uncovered days after the war’s end with a door knock by a American GI named Franz Schurmann, who later became editor of the Pacific News Service.) Eisenberg later became the main financier and weapons supplier to Pol Pot in Democratic Kampuchea.
 
From its alleged transfers of rocket technology and uranium to Pyongyang, Israel is forging the foundations for a Fortress East Asia hostile to the United States and Russia, fulfilling the old fascistic dream of Asian Co-Prosperity. The leak of information from the North Korean military about a planned uranium facility in Syria, which was then bombed by the Israeli Air Force, was probably also a reciprocal gesture in thanks to Tel Aviv.
 
The neoconservative drive toward a fascistic and militarized Northeast Asia is in diametric opposition to an Asian Economic Community (AEC) envisioned by the ASEAN bloc and China. Washington has totally misread the situation, failing to realize that ultimately the United States will be the target for destruction by the vengeful neo-fascists. Then again, Washington D.C. is rife with politicians and bureaucrats on the payroll of the Unification Church and the Zionist cabal. The Republic will probably end in a happy surrender rather a heroic defeat.
 
In just days, the Manchurian Candidates will be clinking their champagne glasses, and the game of make-believe will go on in Tokyo and Washington, just like it did until the early hours of December 7, 1941.
 
Yoichi Shimatsu, a science writer based in Hong Kong, is former editor of The Japan Times Weekly.