Dong's lawyer is able to meet the journalist once a month and bring him his wife's handwritten letters, the younger Dong added, and his father prepared a 45-page handwritten document for the appeal.
Dong is in good health and has tried to stay fit in prison by doing 200 pushups and 200 leg raises a day, his son said, but he gets just a few hours of sunlight per year and has not been allowed to see his wife.
Dong Yuyu, then a senior editor at a Communist Party-run newspaper that was increasingly out of step with the party's hardening line, was arrested in February 2022 as he was having lunch with a Japanese diplomat in Beijing.
The younger Dong says his mother later heard in court that eight meetings with Japanese diplomats were listed as evidence against his father.
He urged Japanese authorities to help show that the senior Dong's meetings with Japanese diplomats had nothing to do with espionage.
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