Issue:
July 2025
Newspaper correspondent Momotaro Enomoto led a double life, but his death is also shrouded in mystery
During World War II, a certain Japanese correspondent moved around Europe. He was a brilliant journalist, but he also acted as a spy for the intelligence services of Japan, Germany and other countries. After the war, he was recruited to work for the United States and returned to his homeland. Some years later, he committed suicide under mysterious circumstances.
This could be the plot of a novel by John Le Carre or Frederick Forsyth, but it was the real-life fate of Momotaro Enomoto, a wartime European correspondent for the Mainichi Shimbun.
On July 16, 1951, the Mainichi Shimbun carried a brief story that reported its former correspondent, Enomoto, as having committed suicide in India. He had reportedly left a note that stated, "I've failed at every job and my life has lost all meaning." However, many of his friends and colleagues voiced skepticism as to whether he had actually taken his own life.
Their doubts were probably well founded. Now, 80 years since the war's end, it's become clear that Enomoto was party to too many secrets and had made too many enemies.
Enomoto was born in 1908 in Oishi, Saitama Prefecture, a village since incorporated into Ageo City. He was interested in left-wing ideologies from high school and participated in the anarchist movement. After graduating from Rikkyo University, he became a reporter for the Mainichi. Around the time Germany invaded Poland and set off World War II, he was dispatched to Paris as a correspondent.
Enomoto was fluent in several languages, including English, French and German. He was also sociable and good at building personal connections, gathering information from politicians and military personnel in various countries. He filed one scoop after another from Turkey, Hungary, and Bulgaria. During this time, he married a Hungarian woman who gave birth to a daughter. He was in Stockholm when the war ended.
Journalism, however, was only one aspect of Enomoto’s multifaceted life.
When it served his own interests, he also worked as a spy for foreign countries, as has been revealed in declassified British government documents.
Three months after the end of the war, in November 1945, Enomoto visited the British Legation in Stockholm, where he provided information about large amounts of funds being concealed by the Japanese Legation in Stockholm. The British government was excited by this disclosure.
Before the war ended, the Allies had been conducting Operation Safehaven, which aimed to track down the assets of Nazi Germany. This was to prevent Germany, which anticipated its defeat, from transferring the assets to neutral countries such as Sweden and Switzerland, denying it the funds it would need to initiate a new conflict. The assets of Japan, one of Germany's Axis partners, were also targeted.
According to Enomoto, the Japanese mission maintained an account in the name of the Yokohama Specie Bank (predecessor of MUFG banking group) at a Swedish bank in Stockholm. At the end of the war, the account's balance was 6 million Swedish krona, of which 4 million krona had already been seized by the Swedish authorities.
The remaining 2 million krona was withdrawn in July or August and kept at the Japanese legation until being transported to a Swedish bank in a leather bag for deposit. Claiming that the Japanese legation in Switzerland was also concealing funds, he revealed the names of officials handling the transactions.
The information Enomoto supplied resulted in a real windfall for the Allies.
The British introduced Enomoto to the American Legation in Stockholm, where he was assigned to the attaché, Adolf J. Lium. Lium was no ordinary diplomat; during the war, he had worked as an operative for the Office of Strategic Services, America's wartime intelligence agency.
At that time, the American Legation in Stockholm seized a large number of Japanese documents from the Japanese mission, including telegrams to Tokyo and account books, which Enomoto translated into English at Lium's request. This also contributed greatly to Operation Safehaven.
Why did Enomoto cooperate with his country's former enemies? The answer can be found in Lium's declassified reports.
At the time, Enomoto had a personal account at a Swedish bank but it had also been frozen. He wanted to buy warm clothing for his family and had medical bills to pay, so in return for the information he provided, he wanted Lium to approach the Inter Allied Committee to help release his funds. Lium was successful, earning Enomoto's gratitude.
The U.S. side was also interested in Enomoto's intelligence activities during the war, which, according to one report, included his work not only as an agent for Japan but also for the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service.
As the war approached its end, Enomoto had been sent to Stockholm by the Abwehr to establish a communication system, comprising a group of three men who were preparing to dispatch German agents to the U.S. from the Iberian peninsula. He also had contacts with Hungary's intelligence service and was active in the local black market.
In other words, in wartime and postwar Europe, Enomoto wore three different hats: journalist, spy and black marketeer.
A colleague remembers Enomoto remarking: "A top journalist makes things happen through his own efforts, and then reports them. A second-rater just waits for things to occur before reporting them." If that is the case, the scoops Enomoto wrote about could have come from his own intelligence activities. By today's standards, he was an adventurous correspondent, but with questionable morals and a casual acquaintance with common sense.
Recognizing Enomoto’s potential value, Lium came up with a plan.
The Cold War had already begun, and in Japan, now under military occupation by the Allies, a bitter rivalry between the intelligence services of the U.S./Britain and the Soviet Union was underway. In the midst of all of this, Lium decided to send Enomoto to Tokyo as an intelligence agent.
A U.S. report contained the following passage from the interrogation of a high-ranking member of the Japanese military: Enomoto is “without doubt the only Japanese journalist … with any talent for intelligence work … He speaks several languages and, unlike nearly all Japanese, gets on easily with foreigners”.
In January 1946, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Tokyo ordered Japanese nationals in Europe to return to their country immediately. Enomoto and other diplomats and military personnel were transported by bus to Naples, Italy, where they departed on a repatriation ship.
Just before he left Italy, Enomoto received a letter from Lium that read: “It is my personal hope that when you arrive at Japan that you will continue your collaboration, and that your work will be the kind of assistance that will mean a better future for you personally and for your country.”
Enomoto, then, returned to Japan as an American agent, but a few years later left his employment with the Mainichi Shimbun and headed overseas again.
In a letter to Lium, Enomoto wrote: "To my mind, the Near East, and not the Far East, is the part of the world in which I may be able to serve for the most useful purposes. The situation is the Near East seems to call for me more urgently ….”
A U.S. document reads: "Enomoto could be of immediate value in the Near East as he knows all the important people there, and is a most clever person in digging up information."
That being so, India may have been one of Enomoto's new fields of intelligence activities … and it was there that he died.
From that available information, it remains unclear whether he committed suicide. What is certain, however, is that as a journalist and a spy, Enomoto knew too many secrets. To some people, his very existence constituted a danger.
Lium, who may have known the truth about his death, joined the newly-formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and after the war worked in several countries, including Denmark and Greece, retiring in the 1960s. He died in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended.
Eiichiro Tokumoto is a writer living in Tokyo.
