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Blogxclusive: The Prince and the Gangster

Tokyo University Hospital is one of the most advanced, reputable and best equipped medical institutions in Japan,so it is no surprise that it is the first choice for poorly Top People. Only yesterday, none less than Crown Prince Naruhito checked in for a routine but uncomfortable sounding operation - the removal of a polyp from his botto- ... er, his duodenum.

The polyp is benign, the operation went well and the direct descendant of the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu-no-Omikami, should be back home in a week genki as a fiddle. Meanwhile, though, his hospitalisation is causing more than usual anxiety because of a delicate security problem.

The difficulty arises because of the presence in the hospital of another eminent patient, a 64-year old man named Tadamasa Goto. Mr Goto is suffering from liver cancer, and like the Prince wants the best medical treatment that his considerable wealth can buy. He has acquired his fortune, however, in an unconventional way - as the head of the Goto-gumi, a syndicate of the Yamugichi-gumi, Japan's largest gangster organisation.

Yup, Japan's next Emperor is sharing a hospital with one of its biggest and scariest yakuza. [The photograph depicts a generic yak, by the way, not Goto-san himself.]

Leo guests on Horie

[For the first time, Asia Exile is entrusted to the hands of a guest blogger - my worthy colleague, Leo Lewis, Asia Business Correspondent, who returns to The Times this week, amid scenes of near hysterical rejoicing, after a few weeks getting something out of his system (working for the Financial Times). He writes on Takafumi Horie, the former CEO of Livedoor, who faces a verdict this Friday is his trial on charges of market manipulation and false accounting.

Take it away, Leo.]

Abraham Zapruder, Deep Throat, that Area 51 alien dissection footage and now…me.

Nestled in a top secret location somewhere in Tokyo (and under 24-hour guard by vicious attack pot-plants) is my Olympus Voice Trek 50 digital recorder – an excellent model that will record around 40 hours of interviews at pin-drop high quality.

And the Japanese want it from me.

Oh how they want it from me.

They want it so badly they will pay anything to get it. They are talking offer prices that are corpulent with zeroes. One chap called eight times yesterday and on the eighth refusal got his friend to call me a further five. The final husky-voiced “give me the tape” call came in at 2:30am (because they thought I was in the UK).

And what lies behind this joke-and-dagger farce?

Surgery

[By the way, here's my story from yesterday's paper about an old former member of the Imperial Navy who has owned up to carrying out the vivisection of live prisoners of war in the Philippines.

Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, who took the photpgraphs, tells the backstory of the interview on his blog today.]

Dissect them alive: chilling Imperial Order that could not be disobeyed

Richard Lloyd Parry in Hirakata

For 62 years Akira Makino spoke not a word of what he had done. But to those who knew him well it must have been obvious that he was a man with a tortured conscience. Why else would he have returned so often to the obscure, mosquito-blown town in the southern Philippines where he experienced such misery during the Second World War? He set up war memorials, gave clothes to poor children, and bought an entire set of uniforms for a local baseball team.

Last year, at the age of 83, he embarked on a gruelling pilgrimage to 88 Buddhist temples in Japan. After number 40 he collapsed from heat exhaustion, having permanently injured his knees. “My wife didn’t like me going back to the Philippines — she called me ‘war crazy’,” said Mr Makino, a frail old man who lives alone in Hirakata, near Osaka. “But she let me go anyway. Right up until she died three years ago, I never told her. But over time I think she realised.”

Only in the twilight of his life has Mr Makino begun to talk about the secret he carried for more than 60 years. In 1944, as a medical auxiliary in the Imperial Navy, he was stationed on the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. There he was party to one of the most notorious and poorly chronicled cruelties of the Japanese war effort — the medical dissection of living prisoners of war.

Days of the Boar: Predictions for 2007

[Madame Sosostris, the renowned clairvoyant, is very bunged up when I call on her, but even dosed up on Sudafed and Flu Strength Lemsip she remains one of the most brilliantly gifted ladies in the expanded Europe Union, and her Tarot pack is (for want of a better word) wicked.

Her parlour is in a narrow gritty street in Shoreditch, a quarter of minicab offices and kebab shops, unencroached upon by rising rents and yuppification. A mute man in his sixties (said to be Madame S's son by a famous matinee idol) answers my ring and leads me into the dim room where she sits, an ancient figure wreathed in scarves, her black eyes sparkling in a mask of powder and mascara. She croaks a greeting, and directs me to the leather armchair at her side. A cup of bitter tea is offered in a brittle China cup. I hand over the agreed amount which she counts with supple fingers.

"So, my dear," she wheezes. "What's it to be? To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits? To report the behaviour of the sea monster? Describe the horoscope? Haruspicate or scry?"

"I seek, Madame, to know what will transpire in the Orient in the twelvemonth ahead."

"In the Orient, eh?" she says, shuffling the Tarot deck. Cards flash and are covered, some of them familiar to me. The drowned Phoenician Sailor; Belladonna, Lady of the Rocks; the man with three staves; the one-eyed merchant. "I do not find The Hanged Man," she says in a tone of puzzlement. "Curious, in the circumstances."

Here, then, are Madame Sosostris's predictions for 2007, the Year of the Boar.]

Journey to the Carterets (Words and Photographs)

This month the photographer Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert and I travelled to the Carteret Atoll, a collection of tiny coral islands far off the coast of Papua New Guinea. For at least 20 years now it has been obvious that the Carterets, and their population of 2,600 people, are sinking into the sea. As usual, it's difficult to state with absolute confidence why this is happening. Is it because of a submarine volcano which is causing changes in the level of the sea bed? Or is because - as this research demonstrates - global warming is causing sea levels in the South Pacific to rise steadily?

You can read my piece from Thursday's paper here; Jeremy's put a few of his photographs on his blog here, here and here; and a few of my own follow.

Click on any of these images to enlarge. (All photographs are the copyright of Richard Lloyd Parry.)

The Lion King and I

The World Economic Forum, that gathering of politicans, plutocrats and intellectuals which meets every year in the Swiss town of Davos, is holding a meeting in Tokyo. Last night I went to a welcome reception at the Prime Minister's Residence, the Sori Kantei. It's an outstanding piece of modern architecture, a soft, gentle structure of wood, glass and concrete with stands of bamboo and miniature rice paddies planted around it. In the twilight, washed by gushing, rainy season rain, it looked very beautiful.

The Davos fat cats were in their suits and ties, but Koizumi, of course, wore only an open-necked shirt. June sees the beginning of the "Cool Biz"campaign which he set in motion last year, whereby office workers are encouraged to discard their jackets and ties in order to save on the air conditioning. Koizumi is stepping down in September, and he had just emerged from his last parliamentary session as prime minister. "I feel very relaxed  because at last I am done with fielding questions in the Diet," he said as he greeted the Forumists. "I think that no prime minister in the world has to respond to so many questions as the Japanese Prime Minister."

After his remarks he began to mingle with the crowd. I was standing in the front row beside two very tall Americans. I'm 6' 3", and they each had a couple of inches on me. Koizumi approached; this was our exclusive conversation:

Read The Village Where Nothing Happened

[Read the next post first - Sing The Village Where Nothing Happened. What follows is the version which I dictated to the copy taker by phone, rather than the edited version eventually printed in the newspaper. There may be small differences.]

Printed in The Independent on 4th December 2001, under the headline, 'A village is destroyed ... and America says nothing happened'

By Richard Lloyd Parry in Kama Ado, Eastern Afghanistan

The village where nothing happened is reached by a steep climb at the end of a rattling three-hour drive along a stony road. Until nothing happened here, early on the morning of Saturday and again the following day, it was a large village with a small graveyard, but now that has been reversed. The cemetery on the hill contains 40 freshly dug graves, unmarked and identical. And the village, so obscure that no one can agree on whether it is called Kama Ado or Mado, has ceased to exist.

Sing The Village Where Nothing Happened

The single newspaper story of which I am most proud was published in The Independent on 4th December 2001. It was a month after the fall of the Taleban, and I was in the Afghan city of Jalalabad close to the border with Pakistan. Anti-Taleban mujahideen, friends of the Americans, were fighting a ragged battle against a remnant of al-Qaeda fighters holed up in the Tora Bora caves in the Spin Ghar mountains to the south. There were a few commandos of the American and British special forces on the ground, but allied support was largely limited to massive air raids on the mountains by B-52 bombers.

I was staying with a group of foreign reporters in a hotel in Jalalabad. Every few hours, the ground shook with the explosion of the massive bombs, 40 miles away. At night the horizon was illuminated with orange fire. We all wanted to go to the mountains to see the battle for ourselves. But the mujahideen, who more or less tolerated us as a necessary and amusing nuisance, said that it was too dangerous.

Then one morning, we were summoned to the Jalalabad residence of one of the mujahideen commanders. I remember arriving there by taxi to see a pick up truck pulled up in the drive. It was full of dead, dusty bodies - young mujahideen fighters in their thin pyjama-like robes and sandals. It was explained that they had been staying in a house, close to Tora Bora which, out of the blue, had been struck by a bomb from one of the B-52s. I remember the face of Haji Zaman, the mujahideen commander as he told us this. He was a hard, sarcastic, unlikeable and wholly untrustworthy man, but as he spoke he seemed to be close to tears.

The same thing happened the next day. Then at the beginning of December, we were told that an entire village had been destroyed by the Americans. From the safety, and relative comfort of our hotel, we reported these claims. They were flatly denied by the Pentagon, in the least ambiguous terms: "it just didn't happen".

We asked once again if we could go down and see for ourselves. Haji Zaman agreed.

Three others went, apart from me: Chris Tomlinson of AP, the photographer Yola Monakhov, and a CNN correspondent whom, for reasons which will become clear, I will not name.