TOKYO (TR) – A former general of the Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) has revealed that he was targeted by a suspected Chinese “honey trap” while conducting research in the United States, warning that Japan is critically vulnerable to modern espionage.
Takashi Fukuyama, who served as a senior guest researcher at the Harvard University Asia Center after retiring from the military in 2005, detailed the chilling encounter in “The DNA of the Nakano Army School: What You Should Know Before the Establishment of the National Intelligence Agency.”
Excerpted by site President Online, the tale outlines the realities of international information warfare.
Reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn
According to Fukuyama, a beautiful Chinese international student in her late 20s began showing an unnatural interest in him in an English class, which he took as his two-year stint in Boston was coming to an end.
“There were 692 students in the open course,” he writes. “The class was multinational, and there was one Chinese woman in my class. In her late twenties, she possessed a beauty reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn. She introduced herself not with a Chinese name, but as ‘Kay Tee.’ During class, she was reserved, and she didn’t talk to anyone during breaks. Even when I spoke to her, I only received curt replies.”
However, in the final class six months later, her mood changed.
“I want to create memories with all of you, so please let me take some pictures,” she said, holding a Japanese-made camera and smiling as she went around the classroom taking photos.
“She was clearly focusing her shots on me,” he goes on. “Up until then, we hadn’t really had a proper conversation, but suddenly she started calling me ‘Takashi, Takashi’ in a familiar tone. Having worked in the intelligence world, I found this behavior strange.”
“Job interview”
In January 2007, about 10 months after he completed the course. Kay Tee suddenly visited his private office at the Asia Center. Her pretext was a “job interview.”
She knew exactly where his room was located, one of several aggressive attempts to make contact right before his return to Japan.
“She talked non-stop for over an hour,” the former general writes. “She was a completely different person from the quiet one she was at the public lecture; she was friendly, even fawning.”
The woman disclosed that her father was a general in China’s strategic missile forces, formerly known as the Second Artillery Corps.
Sensing a trap, Fukuyama took immediate defensive measures.
“I left the door open, kept my distance, and ultimately ignored her. Both my reason and instinct were sounding alarms,” Fukuyama recalls. “If you string together the circumstances, it was clearly the initial contact of a Chinese-style recruitment operation.”
Fukuyama believes that had he given in to the woman’s advances, he would have been blackmailed and manipulated into becoming a collaborator for Beijing.
The former general utilized his harrowing experience to highlight a “structural deficit” in Japan’s intelligence-gathering apparatus, stating that the government’s capabilities remain dangerously far behind global standards.
