200 Ë Conclusion
Did Bammat and others who worked with the Japanese understand the essence
of Great Power politics that hid American colonialism in Asia? One does not know for
sure. The present work has shown that the United States was intricately embroiled
in the trans-Paci c shadow triangle of Russia, Japan, and itself. Yet its hidden role in
this embroilment, which began with Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War, has
been almost completely omitted by Eurocentric or Americocentric works. Hence the
importance of a Eurasian perspective.
In any event, deeply disappointed by the Germans but still hopeful of Japan, by
1943 Bammat had settled in Switzerland and abandoned politics to concentrate on
his study of Islam. He died in Paris in 1965. Kantemir, like Mikheil Kedia and many
others who had worked with the Japanese before 1941, collaborated from June 1941 to
1945 with the Germans and, foreseeing Hitler’s defeat, quickly began working with the
United States, in which they saw a new ally. Kantemir continued to be active in émi-
gré politics, editing several journals devoted to the Caucasus,¹⁵and died in Munich
in 1963. Takanobu Manaki, who, like Usui, worked closely with the Caucasus group
in the 1930s, met the end of the war in Indochina and died in 1979. Even in private
conversations after the war, he did not disclose his clandestine work in the 1930s with
the Caucasians and others.¹⁶HiroshiOshima, who, along with Manaki and Usui, col- ̄
laborated closely with the Caucasus group, was arrested after the war. Tried as a war
criminal for his role in Japan’s wartime alliance with Germany, he was sentenced to
life imprisonment. Released in 1955, he lived another twenty years. Like Manaki, how-
ever,Oshima remained largely silent about Japan’s secret work with the Caucasians, ̄
even though it was he who signed the May 1937 secret agreement with Germany on
clandestine work in the Caucasus.
In 1937–38, in the Caucasus as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, countless people
were destroyed by Moscow for their alleged Japanese connections. But Soviet agents
who worked against the Caucasian-Japanese network did not fare any better. Nu-
merous secret police agents were executed. Lavrenti Beria himself, who oversaw the
Great Terror in the Caucasus by Stalin’s order, was executed in 1953, charged with
espionage for foreign countries. Some of his own relatives had had close connections
with Japanese authorities in Manchuria, although they were almost certainly work-
ing for the Soviet government. Shalva Berishvili, a professional spy who had contact
with H ̄ory ̄o Tateishi, Japan’s military attaché in Turkey, turned against his comrades
and worked for Moscow as “Omeri.” Yet he was also arrested in 1942 by the Soviet
secret police on suspicion of working for Polish, British, French, German, Turkish,
and Japanese intelligence and sentenced to twenty ve years in the Gulag.¹⁷(Tateishi
15 See Patrik von zur Mühlen,Zwischen Hakenkreuz und Sowjetstern: Der Nationalismus der sowjetis-
chen Orientvölker im Zweiten Weltkrieg(Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1971), 229 and 231.
16 Private communication and interview records in Tokyo.
17 O.B. Mozokhin, ed.,Politbiuro i delo Beriia. Sbornik dokumentov(Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2012),
p. 314. His memoirs were published in 1993 in Georgian:Tbilisi, 30 June, 1, 5–7, 13–15, 19–20 July 1993.