Kirk here. As I’ve written before, the president of Sojo University was recently in the news because he had been chair of the “Kumamoto Citizens Promoting the Building of a Tunnel Between Japan and Korea” (日韓トンネル推進熊本県民会議). Since posting that, I’ve learned a bit more about the history of the tunnel scheme.
Since President Nakayama was head of the Kumamoto organization, I started by searching for the website of the national organization, the “International Highway Foundation” (国際ハイウェー財団):
This lists SATO Hirofumi (佐藤博文) as its head, so I tried to find more information about him. It turns out that he has written a book about the project with the following title: 平和の大道 国際ハイウェイ・日韓トンネル(The Great Way of Peace: The International Highway and the Japan-Korea Tunnel). What’s more interesting is the first line of the blurb summarizing the book: 国際ハイウェイは、真の父母様の願いであり (The International Highway is the desire of the True Parents . . .). Once you see “True Parents” you know you are dealing with Moonies. Here’s the website where the book is still being sold, though I don’t recommend buying it: https://www.kogensha.jp/shop/detail.php?id=3843
I wanted to learn a bit more about this SATO Hirofumi guy so I googled him a bit more and found this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4vK6saHbbI
It begins with a conversation between SATO and some Korean gentleman and the second half is a nicely produced PR video about the project. The screenshots in this post are from the video. The project to build the tunnel itself is huge but it is only a part of a larger messianic mission to save the world (make it peaceful) by uniting it via an international highway. Mr. Moon is clearly cited as the originator of the plan.
So, if he had tried to figure out who was at the top of the organization he was supporting in Kumamoto, I think President Nakayama should have been able to figure out that it was a Moonie project.
That made me wonder how the local newspaper, the Kumamoto Nichinichi Shimbun (Kumanichi) covered this tunnel scheme before the sh*# hit the fan in regard to Nakayama. I searched a database and found out that in April of 1996, they published an article about a guy who filed a lawsuit claiming that he had been bilked of 3.7 oku (about $3 million USD today) in support of this tunnel project. That article is behind a paywall but you can read about the lawsuit here: https://topics.smt.docomo.ne.jp/article/dailyshincho/nation/dailyshincho-881898
Interestingly, however, that was the last time that the Kumanichi connected the tunnel to the Moonies explicitly. As late as June 21 of this year (just over two weeks before Abe’s July 8 murder) the Kumanichi published an article with the headline the following headline: 「日韓トンネル推進県民会議」設立１０周年 熊本市で記念総会 韓国 海底トンネル It was about a party held to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the establishment of Kumamoto’s organization to promote the tunnel. In the nearly three decades since their article about the lawsuit of 1996, the Kumanichi published quite a few articles about the tunnel project but none of them mentioned the Moonie connection – until Nakayama’s recent press conference. Curiouser and curiouser.
Finally, here are links to my previous posts about this tunnel: