Relative of Japanese linked to 'Sorge' spy case gets Soviet-era award

TOKYO, Jan. 13 Kyodo - A Soviet-era decoration was awarded Wednesday to a relative of Japanese painter Yotoku Miyagi, who was accused of complicity in leaking Japanese intelligence to an operative of the former Soviet Union in an international spy case.

At the Russian Embassy in Tokyo, Russian Ambassador to Japan Mikhail Bely
awarded the Order of the Patriotic War medal, second class, to Toshiko
Tokuyama, Miyagi's 81-year-old niece who lives in Los Angeles and had been
trying to locate the decoration that was originally granted in 1965.
In awarding the medal, Bely said Miyagi was one of those who had contributed to
freeing the world from fascism.
In the so-called ''Sorge'' spy incident that came to light in October 1941,
Soviet spy Richard Sorge had acquired secret military and economic information
and passed it on to the Soviet Union. Sorge and his accomplice Hotsumi Ozaki
were executed by Japanese authorities in 1944.
Miyagi, a native of Okinawa Prefecture, was suspected of having served as a
bridge between Sorge and Ozaki, who was close to Japan's Prime Minister
Fumimaro Konoe at the time.
Moscow decided to give the award in 1965, but Bely said Miyagi's family could
not be contacted after he died of a disease at a detention facility in 1943.
The Russian envoy added that a decoration for Ozaki has also been found.
==Kyodo