South Korea handed hundreds of millions of yen to the late Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka in 1973 to help arrange a breakthrough in the diplomatic standoff between the two countries over the kidnapping of Kim Dae Jung, Tanaka's former aide said in a recent issue of a Japanese monthly.
Hiroyasu Kimura, 72, told the latest edition of Bungei Shunju, which went on sale Wednesday, that Lee Pyong Hui, then a South Korean minister without a portfolio, visited Tanaka's residence in Tokyo in late October 1973 and handed Tanaka "at least 400 million yen in cash in two paper bags."
Kim, then a South Korean dissident leader and now the country's president, was abducted from a Tokyo hotel on Aug. 8, 1973, and forcibly returned to his home in Seoul five days later.