Sterling and Peggy Seagrave speak to JI

Gold Warriors authors: An interview.

Have you found anyone willing to translate and publish this book here in Japan?

Seven of our nine books have been published in Japanese, each selling over 12,500 copies. They rank as bestsellers for foreign authors. The Yamato Dynasty has been translated and will be published shortly. But we don't have a publisher yet for Gold Warriors -- even though the English language edition is selling well through Kinokuniya and Amazon.co.jp.

Very few in Japan will be brave enough to publish Gold Warriors. But Japan is changing. Fear is no longer universal there, as it has been for centuries. One sign we are having an impact is that Japanese media now refer to the Imperial family as "the Yamato dynasty" -- a term we were the first to use.

Was Japan's "economic miracle" of the past 50 years -- during which a bankrupt postwar nation rose from the ashes to become the second largest economy in the world -- partly the result of M-Fund financing?

Nobody can deny Japan's energy and creative genius. But Japan was by no means bankrupt at the war's end. The Imperial family, the oligarchs and the underworld were far richer than they were before the war, thanks to the looting of the Asian mainland from 1895 to 1945. Most industry, great estates and infrastructure survived undamaged. The greatest damage from firebombing was to the homes and lives of ordinary people. General MacArthur then set up a number of secret trusts like the M-Fund to bribe Japanese political leaders, using recovered war loot -- gold, platinum and vast quantities of gems and diamonds. The real tragedy is that MacArthur handed power back to the same notorious men who started the war, and their so-called Liberal Democratic Party continues to make a joke of democracy today.

What are some of the benefits to the US of illicitly financing Japan's economic ascent?

America benefited during the Cold War because nobody was more anti-communist than Japan's fascists, who controlled and bankrolled the LDP -- men like Prime Minister [Nobusuke] Kishi and his Sugamo Prison cellmate, yakuza godfather Kodama Yoshio, who used war loot to launch the LDP and was a bagman for the CIA until he died. Now America and Japan are like Siamese twins, joined together at the purse: If one gets sick, the other hemorrhages.

Was former Assistant Attorney General Norbert A. Schlei "destroyed by the US government," as Chalmers Johnson recently told us.

Yes. Norbert Schlei was a grave threat to the LDP leadership because he had convincing evidence they were running a huge financial scam.

Here's how it worked: Prime Minister Tanaka had the Ministry of Finance (MOF) print high-denomination promissory notes called '57s' that Tanaka sold to wealthy men with a promise of huge returns on maturity. But Tanaka made them look different from normal Japanese bonds so they could later be denounced as forgeries. Anyone who wasn't a crony of Tanaka would lose his shirt.

Schlei was a world-famous attorney hired to press Japan to honor those 57s. The LDP leadership fought back by urging Washington to destroy Schlei.

A deal was cut in which the LDP would honor certain 57s presented by friends of President George H.W. Bush, and in return, US Treasury agents filed false fraud charges against Schlei that destroyed his career and bankrupted him -- ultimately resulting in his death. Put simply, the White House crucified Schlei in return for private kickbacks from the LDP black bag.

If you were in Japan now, how would you pursue M-Fund leads?

If you seriously pursued such information inside Japan, you'd soon be the victim of "assisted suicide." We have collected a mountain of evidence on the M-Fund and other secret trusts like the Yotsuya Fund, which financed death squads in Japan. Our book cites many Japanese and Western sources who confirm the existence of the M-Fund. Respected Japanese journalists have published articles about it. When Norbert Schlei died, Chalmers Johnson called Schlei "one of the most distinguished authors the Japan Policy Research Institute has ever published. His article on the M-Fund and the financial certificates [57s] issued by the Japanese Ministry of Finance was essentially correct."

A high-ranking official at the MOF tells us: "[The M-Fund] is nonsense."

The MOF has to deny the existence of the M-Fund and the 57s. We have eyewitnesses who attest that Prime Minister [Noboru] Takeshita told an emissary of President Bush that Japan could not afford to redeem more than a small number of 57s because the LDP had looted Japan's treasury so thoroughly that it even had to privatize NTT to stay afloat. Former Minister of Finance Watanabe confided to Schlei that the 57s were actually printed at the MOF plant in Takinogawa. So the MOF's denials are comic.

The whole idea of looting the Asian mainland was to enrich Japan's oligarchs, not to enrich the Japanese people. That's why Emperor Hirohito, in the spring of 1936, put his brother Prince Chichibu in charge of a secret palace agency that would supervise all looting and make sure the treasure got back to the imperial coffers. This secret agency was called Kin no Yuri, or "Golden Lily," after one of Hirohito's poems.

This same kind of high-level greed continued after the war, as LDP leaders accepted huge bribes from Washington. In 1960, Vice President Nixon turned the M-Fund over to Prime Minister Kishi in return for giant kickbacks to Nixon's presidential campaign fund. Kishi took billions from the M-Fund for his own offshore accounts. Then Kishi turned it over to Tanaka, who moved so many billions offshore that he had to run the 57 scam to cover his tracks.

The big losers were the Japanese people, who had their postal savings looted to feed the greed at the top. Banks are allowed to collapse as a way to shift the blame and divert attention. As an American robber baron once remarked, "In a recession, money simply returns to its rightful owners." The oligarchs.