#kokusai

[disease]

"MIZUNOE TAKIKO AT HER FINAL SHOW" HIROSHI HAMAYA 濱谷 浩 | KOKUSAI, 1938 [gelatin silver print | 25 x 37 cm.]

[garadinervi]

Bruno Taut, Fundamentals of Japanese architecture, Kokusai bunka shinkokai (The Society for International Cultural Relations), Tokyo, 1937 [Clark Art Library, Williamstown, MA]

[nobrashfestivity]

Nippon, Japan the Nation in Panorama, a photo album by Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai

[jugeullae]

ANGEL FLIGHT: Kokusai Reikyu Sokanshi (2023)

[laboitediabolique]

Front cover of Galvion press sheet, 1984. Scanned from my personal collection.

[oars]

when im not stressed over my student visa the thought of moving and having my own apartment and space and traveling overall makes me so so excited

[internationalpress]

75º Festival Minato de Tokio los próximos 18 y 19 de mayo

El 75º Festival Minato de Tokio se llevará a cabo el 18 de mayo (sábado) y el 19 de mayo (domingo) de 2024, en la Terminal Internacional de Cruceros de Tokio en Koto Ward, Tokio, (Tokyo Kokusai Terminal – 東京国際クルーズターミナル), ubicado a 8 minutos de la estación Daiba de la línea Yurikamome. Este evento conmemora la apertura del Puerto de Tokio, que se inauguró como puerto comercial internacional el 20…

[fire-in-the-dingo]

Kyoto Kokusai Hotel by Kengo Kuma and Associates , Interior Design, Interior Decorating Ideas, Architecture

[diviani]

Kyoto Kokusai Hotel by Kengo Kuma and Associates , Interior Design, Interior Decorating Ideas, Architecture

[plan-s23]

Kyoto Kokusai Hotel by Kengo Kuma and Associates , Interior Design, Interior Decorating Ideas, Architecture

[yubelchan]

Kyoto Kokusai Hotel by Kengo Kuma and Associates , Interior Design, Interior Decorating Ideas, Architecture

[whatisonthemoon]

“Japanese Bridgehead” - on how the UC gained power in and through Japan

Excerpted from The Dark Shadow Cast by Moon Sun Myung’s Unification Church and Abe Shinzo by Peter McGill

The cult’s first overseas bridgehead was in Japan, where Kishi Nobusuke, the maternal grandfather of Abe Shinzo, rolled out the red carpet for Moon.

As minister of commerce and industry in the cabinet of Gen. Tojo Hideki, Kishi was a co-signatory of Japan’s 1941 declaration of war against the United States and the British Empire. He played a key role in designing a centrally planned, military-dominated economy in Japan’s puppet state of Manchukuo to feed the home island’s war machine. His policies helped inspire the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) in plotting Japan’s post-war export miracle, as well as guiding South Korea’s rapid industrialisation.

After the war, Kishi was locked up at Sugamo Prison as a Class A war crimes suspect but was never put on trial. Instead, he was released on Christmas Eve 1948, a beneficiary of the Occupation “reverse course” from purging militarism to suppressing communism. In 1955, Kishi brokered the founding of the Liberal Democratic Party that has since ruled Japan almost without interruption. Capping an astonishing metamorphosis, Kishi became prime minister in 1957. Kishi tried and failed to abolish the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution, bequeathing that unfinished task to his heirs, but succeeded in ratifying a new Japan-U.S. Security Treaty before stepping down in 1960.

▲Sun Myung Moon and Nobusuke Kishi

Park Chung Hee, the most consequential of South Korea’s leaders, was an officer in the Japanese Imperial Army who in his cups would later lustily sing Japanese gunka army songs. Like Kishi, he also reinvented himself as a conservative nationalist. In 1961, Park and fellow generals seized power and began implementing elements of the Manchukuo model of state-led capitalism to jump-start South Korea’s economy. One of his priorities was to normalise relations with Japan. Kishi played a key backstage role with Kim Jong Pil in forging terms highly favourable to Japan. “Fortunately, South Korea is under a military regime when even a small number of leaders under Park Chung Hee can decide everything,” Kishi noted. Park was desperate for Japanese capital, and the 1965 ROK-Japan treaty largely brushed aside Japanese compensation for the colonial past. The issue still festers in bilateral relations. Park’s rule became increasingly repressive and in 1979 he was assassinated by his intelligence chief. His daughter became president of South Korea in 2013 and frequently sparred with Abe until being impeached over a financial scandal.

The Unification Church was granted 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.

Twenty years after the Unification Church became his next door neighbour, Kishi would beseech U.S. President Ronald Reagan to free Moon Sun Myung from imprisonment.

The first president of the fledgling church in Japan was Kuboki Osamu, a former youth leader of Rissho Koseikai, a powerful Nichiren Buddhist denomination. Kuboki led the Moon cult in Japan for 27 years.

From the 1960s to 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.10

Part of Yamagami’s lethal animus against Abe Shinzo derived from his grandfather’s partnering with Moon in the International Federation for Victory Over Communism (IFVOC) that Moon founded in Seoul in 1968.

▲ Sun Myung Moon with Ryoichi Sasakawa

The honorary chairman of the Japan affiliate launched in the same year – in Japanese, Kokusai Shokyo Rengo - was none other than Sasakawa Ryoichi, one of the most notorious and flamboyant Japanese of the 20th Century. In the 1930s, Sasakawa started an ultra-rightist party and volunteer air corps, and flew a Japanese-made aeroplane from Tokyo to Rome to meet Benito Mussolini. During the war, Sasakawa engaged in large-scale profiteering in cahoots with Kodama Yoshio, and in 1945 was imprisoned at Sugamo for suspected war crimes, along with Kodama and Kishi. After he was de-purged, Sasakawa was granted a highly lucrative concession tied to gambling on powerboat racing that funded his reinvention as a philanthropist. He also made a fortune in Japan from stock speculation.

Moon also sponsored the 1970 Tokyo meeting of the World Anti-Communist League, 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 Rhee Syngman 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 activity onto a global stage. In the 1970s, the European division of 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 Stewart-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.”

Related links below

CIA’s Front Organizations: Unification Church And WACL

The CIA in Japan After WWII

On the Unification Church in Japan - excerpted from Moonwebs

Sasakawa, a Respected War Criminal

FBI Confirms Tae Kwon Do as KCIA Cover in the 70s, and Bo Hi Pak Connection

Nazi Roots of the Anti-Communist League WACL

Moon on the “World’s Richest Fascist” Ryoichi Sasakawa

Japan’s Daddy War Bucks

Who was “Papasan Choi” (Or Sang Ik Choi, or Bong-choon Choi)?

The Imperial Ghost in the Neoliberal Machine (Figuring the CIA) by Koichiro Osaka

On the Unification Church Inheriting the Moral Re-Armament Movement’s Role (and Resources on the MRA)

On the 1962 Reorganization of the Unification Church as a Political Tool of Japan, South Korea, and USA

Ryoichi Sasakawa and Reagan

Sasakawa Foundation Linked to Peruvian Sterilizations

[chaddavisphotography]

Restauraunt, Kokusai Dori, Tokyo

[jugeullae]

To handle death is to handle life. Those who are left behind must keep on living. We help the families say goodbye to their loved ones, so that they can grieve as needed. That’s what our job is.

ANGEL FLIGHT: Kokusai Reikyu Sokanshi (2023)

[twiregret]

Kyoto Kokusai Hotel by Kengo Kuma and Associates , Interior Design, Interior Decorating Ideas, Architecture

[vittoria-agli-assassini]

Kyoto Kokusai Hotel by Kengo Kuma and Associates , Interior Design, Interior Decorating Ideas, Architecture