Ryoichi Sasakawa

From SourceWatch

Ryoichi Sasakawa

"In 1984, at the age of seventy-one, Borlaug was drawn out of retirement by Ryoichi Sasakawa, who with Jimmy Carter was working to get African agriculture moving. Carter was campaigning in favor of fertilizer aid to Africa, as he still does today. The former President had fallen in with Sasakawa, who during the Second World War had founded the National Essence Mass Party, a Japanese fascist group, but who in later life developed a conscience. Today the Sasakawa Peace Foundation is a leading supporter of disarmament initiatives; Carter and Sasakawa often made joint appearances for worthy causes." [1]

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Notes

"This was also the axiom by which certain Americans in the early 1980s, after considerable soul-searching, decided to establish the United States-Japan Foundation with a capital grant of about $45 million from the right-wing mogul Ryoichi Sasakawa--money derived from legalized speedboat racing, cleared by the Diet, and closely watched in program expenditure by the Foreign Ministry.

"This foundation, juridically an American organization with a joint U.S.-Japanese advisory board, has concentrated on the public (as opposed to academic) education of Americans on Japan, and has funded some innovative projects, including journalist fellowships and a highly successful exchange of Tokyo and New York City officials and urban troubleshooters. By 1987-88 its capital base had grown to over $80 million, two to three times that of the U.S. government's Friendship Commission. At the outset quite a few Japanese friends of the U.S. were in doubt as to the wisdom of the American side in taking this money--Sasakawa, with his open support of right-wing causes and groups, and his well-researched and substantiated ties to Japanese gangsters, still remains beyond the pale for most Japanese intellectuals and political liberals. But the Americans convinced themselves, with their usual insouciance, that--like the Ford Foundation's or the Rockefeller Foundation's largesse--this was sufficiently 'laundered' money to make it acceptable. By 1986, however, the redoubtable Ryoichi Sasakawa (still active today at the age of 95), had himself decided that his previous donation was too well-disguised; hence he created back in Japan and more effectively under his personal control the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, capitalized at one half billion dollars (at 1994 yen-to-dollar exchange rates) for charitable activities world-wide." 1994

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