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Kodama, who turns 65 next week and whose origins in northern Japan are obscure, first burst upon the public consciousness as a prewar activist in right-wing causes. He has been jailed three times for a total of seven years. He was imprisoned by the Japanese for involvement in the 1936 assassination of former Premier Makoto Saito and again by the Americans as a Class-A war-crimes suspect (he was later released without trial). He became wealthy during World War II by supplying the Japanese navy and, by his account, "bringing home truckloads of diamonds and platinum" from territories occupied by Japan. After the war, he emerged from Sugamo prison as a kuro maku, or "black curtain," a term taken from the Kabuki theater that has come to mean many things rolled into one: kingmaker, underworld godfather and secretive political manipulator.
Kodama has financed adamantly conservative causes and postwar politicians. He is also reputed to have a grip on the yakuza, the Japanese equivalent of the Mafia; politicians have been known to wince at the mention of his name. Idaho Democrat Frank Church, chairman of the Senate subcommittee, charged last week that Kodama is "a prominent leader of the ultra-right-wing militarist political faction in Japan. We have had a foreign policy of the United States Government which has vigorously opposed this political line in Japan and a Lockheed foreign policy which has helped keep it alive."
In Japan, the disclosures aroused howls of "Kuroi kiri!" (black mist or political corruption). In the U.S., a kind of black mist has been swirling around corporate-Government connections too, and it got denser last week. Deputy Defense Secretary William P. Clements Jr. told a joint House-Senate committee that Northrop has paid back to the Air Force $564,013 for "improper costs" on contracts—apparently representing political contributions for which Northrop had quietly charged the Pentagon. But Clements was embarrassed by the subcommittee's disclosure of the names of 55 more Pentagon personnel who had been guests of military contractors on duck and geese hunts in Maryland.
Meanwhile, Southern Railway conceded that it had paid for a Christmas visit by Agriculture Secretary Butz to the railroad's private resort near Charleston, S.C.—even though the Agriculture Department has filed petitions with the Interstate Commerce Commission protesting rate increases by Southern on farm products. Butz told the Associated Press that he had done nothing wrong, said he would repay part of the cost himself and defiantly added that, if asked, he would visit the resort again next Christmas.