Japan has released some secret documents from 1942 relating to a Tokyo spy center led by Richard Sorge, a German who spied for the former Soviet Union and is often referred to as invaluable help for Moscow to win World War II. The documents describe wartime efforts by the Japanese government to hide the Sorge spy center, which is now at the center of Japan's largest spy scandal. Thirty-five people, many of them high-ranking Japanese officers, were arrested in Tokyo in October 1941 for espionage for the Soviet Union. Sorge, the German leader of the spy ring, had fought for the Central Powers in World War I, but later became a Communist and then trained in espionage by Soviet military intelligence. He was then sent to Tokyo where, thanks to his friendship with the German ambassador, he served at the German embassy. Eventually he informed Moscow that Japan's German ally had no intention of invading Russia from the east. This suggestion allowed Stalin to move hundreds of thousands of troops from the Far East to the German front. Blown that helped the USSR to repel the Nazi advance and win the war.
The Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, which saw the declassified documents, said they were in the personal archives of Taizo Ota, a Japanese counterintelligence officer who headed Division VI of the Japanese Ministry of Justice. The unit was in charge of the political police and counterintelligence during the Second World War. The documents date back to May 1942, when the Japanese government finally published the arrest of Sorge and his comrades. Six months after they were caught spying for Moscow. The documents were issued by the Japanese Ministry of Justice but, according to experts, were likely written by officials of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who were tasked with investigating Sorge's spying case. According to Mainichi Shimbun, the documents were part of a larger effort by the Japanese government to cover up the espionage case by instructing the country's media to give it marginal attention.
A document instructs newspaper editors to cover the incident on an inside page and use a smaller headline that is four columns long. Another document instructs newspaper editors not to use images in reports and adds that information other than that included in government press releases should not be printed. A third document instructs newspaper editors to avoid any reference to Kinkazu Saionji, the main link in Sorge's espionage chain. Saionji was a member of the Japanese government aristocracy and grandson of former Prime Minister Kinmochi Saionji, the country's most respected politician. Indeed, much of the information contained in the recently declassified documents describes the efforts made by the Japanese state to conceal the importance of Communist penetration into the country's main families and government circles.
Coverage of the Sorge incident in two major Japanese newspapers of the time, Nichi Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun indicate that government pressure was successful, according to Mainichi Shimbun. Both articles covered the incident, but neither newspaper had front-page information about it, nor was there any mention of Saionji or other senior Japanese officials who were members of the Sorge spying system. According to the Japanese researchers, the documents provide rare detailed examples of attempts by the country's war government to guide reports on national security affairs. The files are currently stored in the modern Japanese Political History Materials Room of the National Diet Library in central Tokyo.
source intnews.org