The disclosure that the CIA secretly funded Japan's ruling party during the 1950s and 1960s helps explain why the Liberal Democratic Party remained 38 years in power, a tenure that bred deep corruption.
But without the agency's funneling of millions of dollars to friendly Japanese politicians, the world today might have more to regret than some graft in Tokyo.Consider the times. A welter of political parties competed for power in postwar Japan, but these eventually boiled down to two main contenders - the conservative LDP and the Socialists. In short order, the latter became a puppet of the Soviet Union, intent upon leading the nation into the Marxist
fold. The Socialists' success would have been calamitous to American interests. Mao's forces had swallowed China. The USSR, a glowering presence in the west Pacific, had exploded an atomic bomb. Had Japan gone com-munist after its American occupiers left, how could other Asian nations have remained independent in the shadow of three Red giants?
Hence, America chose "the reverse course" in Japan. Rather than punishing all the wartime rightists, U.S. authorities began bolstering some of them to counter the Marxist threat.
According to former CIA agents and diplomats, the initial phase of this policy was a cloak-and-dagger masterwork. A Japanese on the CIA payroll smuggled tungsten to the Pen-tagon, which needed it for missiles. Some $2 million of the Pentagon's payment was shifted to conservative Japanese candidates. Later, LDP members received regular installments of CIA money.
Admittedly, these clandestine gifts - like those that flowed to conservative parties in postwar Europe - hardly exemplified textbook civics. But nations sometimes must fight fire with fire: Japan's Socialists were presumably bankrolled by Moscow. With all its warts, the LDP guided previously authoritarian Japan to new levels of freedom, wealth and education.
Japanese voters last year ended LDP dominance. Soviet proxies would have been harder to dislodge, and immeasurably less benign.