and the Company's clandes¬tine understanding . . .
He had arranged the initial financing for the project, as well as the political accommodations, with letters of credit, promissory notes, and his word. And, eventually, if need be, the full financing could be raised by partial liquidation of his massive real estate holdings in Hawaii.
But the near-term expenses—and the necessary payoffs in the LDP—that was different. In Japanese kosaihi, the "money politics" of gifts and outright bribes, secrecy was everything. He remembered how he'd had to arrange for the mighty Yoshio Kodama, a powerbroker who had once shared his virtual ownership of the Japanese Diet and the Japanese press, to accept responsibility for the CIA-Lock¬heed bribe affair. It was a close call. That had involved a mere twelve million of American cash to Japanese politi¬cians, but it had changed the rules