Japan’s Shintaro Ishihara claims CIA plot to kill him in traffic accident and make it look like Chinese did it

Claims by erstwhile Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara that former US President Barack Obama ordered his assassination have been described as the “rantings of a doddery old reactionary” and an effort to divert attention away a growing scandal revolving around the relocation of Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market.

Ishihara made the claim in an interview with the Shukan Post tabloid news magazine during a discussion about how best to deal with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator.

“Why doesn’t America just assassinate Kim Jong-un already?” Ishihara said, according to a translation provided by the Tokyo Reporter web site.

“I mean, they killed Gaddafi and Bin Laden after careful planning, didn’t they?” he added. “Assassinations are their speciality.

“When Tokyo was trying to purchase the Senkaku Islands, Obama told the CIA: ‘Use Chinese people in Japan and kill Ishihara by making it look like a traffic accident.’”

Ishihara - a notorious nationalist who called for Japan to develop and deploy nuclear weapons in order to defend itself against China and repeatedly stated that the Rape of Nanking was fiction created by the communists in China - was not pressed by the interviewer on his allegations and offered no evidence to support them.

First elected governor of Tokyo in 1999, Ishihara already had a record of needling China but incurred its full wrath in 2012 by announcing a plan to purchase the archipelago that Beijing refers to as the Diaoyu Islands from the family that owned the uninhabited group.

“Tokyo will protect the Senkaku Islands,” Ishihara declared in a speech in April 2012 at the Heritage Foundation in the United States.

“No matter which country dislikes it, no-one should have a problem” with the purchase.

Both Taiwan and China protested and diplomatic ties between Japan and its two neighbours began to degrade dramatically. In the end, the Japanese government stepped in to buy the islands for the nation, but ties between Beijing and Tokyo plummeted to new lows that have yet to fully recover.

“These are the rantings of a doddery old reactionary who is using conspiracy theories to deflect attention away from his numerous failings in office,” said Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies at the Japan campus of Temple University.

“He was re-elected four times as governor of Tokyo and most people thought he did an okay job, but now he is under fire for his role in the plan to move Tsukiji fish market, including what he did and did not know.”

A new state-of-the-art facility was due to open on a man-made island in Tokyo Bay in November to take over the functions of the crumbling Tsukiji market. An environmental survey as far back as 2008 found high levels of a number of dangerous chemicals in the soil, with benzene levels 43,000 times the permitted legal levels.

A massive clean-up operation was ordered - at a cost of Y85 billion (HK$6.44 billion) - but when new tests in 2015 found the site was still contaminated it was revealed that much of the work had not been carried out before construction work began. The site remains empty.

“Ishihara has given evasive replies regarding his role in the project and attempted to shift the blame and responsibility to anyone else that he can,” Kingston said.

Ishihara also used the magazine interview to propose that the US use nuclear weapons against Pyongyang, adding: “I don’t think the world would complain even if the leadership of North Korea were to be annihilated by nuclear weapons.”

An alternative, he suggested, would be to infiltrate a covert unit into the North to kill Kim.

Asked to comment on Ishihara’s claim about former President Obama’s order to kill him, a spokesman for the US embassy in Tokyo told South China Morning Post, “We have nothing to say.”