In a decrepit little wooden house between Tokyo and Yokohama lives a very old man with eyes like flashlight sockets, jaws still strong, a ragged white beard which fails to make him look saintly. His name, Mitsuru Toyama, is seldom spoken. At 85 he is the most feared man in the Far East. Last week he was tolerably happy, for things were going his way.
Mitsuru Toyama is the dictator of Japan's network of secret societies. With fronts as dignified as chapters of the D. A. R., these organizations operate behind the scenes with a brutal fanaticism which the Ku Klux Klan never equaled. The master society, which Toyama founded, is called the Black Dragon Society, significantly after Chinese ideographs for the Amur River, between Manchukuo and Russia. Affiliated with it in various ways are groups with such names as the Jimmu Society (after Japan's first Emperor), the National Foundation Society, the Spirited World Society, the Native Land Loving School.
These societies are dedicated to superpatriotism. In the name of the Emperor they rig politics, liquidate moderates, break ground for military adventures, serve the Army with intrigues, keep the national fervor burning. No one knows how big the societies are, though it has been said that Mitsuru Toyama could call upon any one of 10,000 youths to murder anyone but the Emperor, and the deed would be done. The societies meet in buildings which appear to be jujitsu halls, Shinto temples, homes, business offices.
Members are fanatical young men, Army officers, hooligans, chauvinistic politicians, gamblers, ronins (formerly knights who had lost their lords, now cutthroats in general) and here and there a respectable business man and Cabinet minister.
In the last decade, one or another of these blood brotherhoods was behind the assassination of Premiers Hamaguchi and Inukai, onetime Finance Ministers Inouye and Takahashi, Generals Watanabe and Nagata, Admiral Saito, Financier Baron Dan—men who seemed to the superpatriots to have betrayed Japan's divine mission to dominate Asia. Toyama personally had a hand in promoting the acquisition of Korea and in starting the Russo-Japanese war, and through the incredible Major Dohihara and a ruffian named Komei precipitated the Manchurian incident of 1931.
The hand of secret societies was seen behind the bloody February Revolt of 1936, and in the intrigues preceding the outbreak of the China war in July 1937.
Toyama has never been implicated in any of these crimes; it is doubtful whether there is any authority, except perhaps the Emperor, which would dare punish him.
A Japanese superstition holds that toads wield a dangerous hypnotic magnetism over humans, and Japanese say that like a toad Toyama pulls and pushes young men into these plots and assassinations. Born in a frenzy-inclined community on Kyushu Island, he was raised in the "school of heroes" of Miss Takaba, a unique female warrior who wore two swords and swung two hot little fists. In his youth Toyama evaded and broke successive apprentice ships, embarked on a self-righteous outlawry something like Robin Hood's, and about 1894 established the foundations of the Black Dragon Society.