A leading Japanese politician espouses a 9/11 fantasy
March 8, 2010
WashingtonPost.com
YUKIHISA FUJITA is an influential member of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan. As chief of the DPJ’s international department and head of the Research Committee on Foreign Affairs in the upper house of Japan’s parliament, to which he was elected in 2007, he is a Brahmin in the foreign policy establishment of Washington’s most important East Asian ally. He also seems to think that America’s rendering of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, is a gigantic hoax.
Mr. Fujita’s ideas about the attack on the World Trade Center, which he shared with us in a recent interview, are too bizarre, half-baked and intellectually bogus to merit serious discussion. He questions whether it was really the work of terrorists; suggests that shadowy forces with advance knowledge of the plot played the stock market to profit from it; peddles the fantastic idea that eight of the 19 hijackers are alive and well; and hints that controlled demolition rather than fire or debris may be a more likely explanation for at least the collapse of the building at 7 World Trade Center, which was adjacent to the twin towers.
As with almost any calamity whose scale and scope assume historic proportions, the events of Sept. 11 have spawned a thriving subculture of conspiracy theorists at home and abroad. The only thing novel about Mr. Fujita is that a man so susceptible to the imaginings of the lunatic fringe happens to occupy a notable position in the governing apparatus of a nation that boasts the world’s second-largest economy.
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