Hotsumi Ozaki

Photo: Kyodo News Stills / Getty Images.

Hotsumi Ozaki was a Japanese journalist working for the Asahi Shimbun and Mainichi Shimbun, an advisor to Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, and an informant for a Soviet intelligence officer named Richard Sorge. During World War II, Sorge established an espionage ring in Tokyo as a means of determining Japanese diplomatic and military intent towards the Soviet Union. Ozaki’s first editor allegedly called him “a near-total flop,” arguing that “his news sense and his writing style were completely hopeless.” Ozaki’s writing aside, he did successfully recruit a few fellow journalists to Sorge’s spy ring. In “An Impeccable Spy,” Owen Matthews writes that “Ozaki was the descendant of a samurai family. He became inspired by communism while studying law at Tokyo’s Imperial University, but never formally joined the party.” Sorge, Ozaki and their fellow spies were arrested by the Japanese in 1941. Sorge told his captors that Ozaki was his “first and most important associate.” Ozaki said he “had been working for the cause of international peace and had his nation’s best interests at heart.” In the end, the two men were executed on the same day in November 1944.