Episode 196: QAnon International: Japan feat Sarah Hightower
Translating Q drops, organizing "stop the steal" rallies, forming splinter cults, and worshiping Michael Flynn. It looks like Japan has quite an assortment of Q followers. To help us figure them out, we interviewed Sarah Hightower, an independent cult and extremism researcher with a focus on Japan.
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Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 196 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the QAnon International Japan episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
This week, we're resuming our sporadic but determined series about QAnon spread outside of the United States of America.
So far, we've tackled Germany and the Netherlands.
But this time, we're exploring a truly surprising place for Q's movement to take hold—Japan.
In a way, it's only poetic justice that QAnon, a conspiracy theory birthed on the so-called Chan image boards, would migrate across the Pacific to the country where these online spaces first began.
For more information about that, you can listen to episode 128, From Anonymous to QAnon, where we trace its roots back to the 1980s in Japan.
And to help us with today's endeavor, we'll be interviewing Sarah Hightower, an independent cult and extremism researcher with a focus on Japan.
But before that, Travis has prepared a segment to explain just what we mean when we say Japanese QAnon.
QAnon first got traction in Japan on blogs in 2018.
So, blogging is still very popular in Japan, and there are several blogs that support new religious movements.
These blogs, unsurprisingly, were full of conspiracy theories, prophecies, and questionable medical advice.
The blogs simply incorporated QAnon nonsense into their usual topics in the post.
For example, there is a spiritual influencer named Masatoshi Takashita, whose follower Shanti Phoola translated some of his thoughts about QAnon for her blog.
Takashita incorporates concepts related to QAnon with chakras and his belief that human life is affected by space radiation.
Good start.
But I mean, that's where we come from, right?
Oh, yes.
Well, I mean, you know, we got, you know, Big Bang, blasted the Earth with microwave rays, and that made the little tadpole, you know, grow legs and- We were flushed down the toilet- Walk up on the- Into the sewer, into the green slime.
We developed ninja skills.
You know, arguably, energy from the sun is a kind of space radiation, so.
So true.
That's what I'm saying, man.
That's what I'm saying.
The Deep State is most scared of the awakening of people.
QAnon's mysterious question form helps us to develop our own discernment skills and helps humanity spiritually transform.
QGroup acts based on logical thinking.
It is not until humanity follows through with steps that we succeed in awakening.
I feel that the level of human awakening has reached about 90%.
If explained in terms of chakra, I feel that awakening has come to the Ajna Chakra, the 6th chakra from the bottom.
If the 7th Sahasrara Chakra is opened, humanity will be completely awakened.
I'm definitely following along with this.
Uh-huh.
Tracking so far.
Therefore, I think that some people might feel tension or pressure around the hypothalamus in the center of the head.
I certainly do.
Every fucking day, baby.
Every fucking day.
That's my entire existence.
In such a case, it would be advisable to get relaxed, ease a feeling of tension around the hypothalamus, and imagine the light emitted from there.
For example, think of a lotus flower in the hypothalamus, and portray an image many times that the flower slowly opens, and then it shines when it completely opens.
If you feel tension or pressure removed in this way, it means that Kundalini, primordial life energy, has reached the Ajna Chakra.
Humanity has been currently put under a great deal of stress because of the effect of space radiation.
That's the only thing?
Yeah, that's it.
That's what's bothering us these days.
It means that humanity is approaching an important stage to be awakened.
A lot of traffic accidents have been reported from the first day of consecutive holidays.
It could be the effect of radiation from space.
That must be it.
Wow.
Beautiful stuff.
And honestly, perfectly encapsulates the entire kind of QAnon meets New Age thing that we've been observing here.
Yeah, I can't tell if this is more or less harmful than the QAnon influencers we have over here in the States.
I gotta say, as much as I didn't understand this, it seems a little bit more peaceful.
Yeah.
It's like when you buy the compact disc version of your favorite band's album and it has an extra track on it.
Yeah.
It's still special.
Plus you don't understand any of the writing.
Much cooler.
Yeah.
I think this really encapsulates the sort of the cafeteria nature of QAnon and his versatility because obviously he's not going for the violent execution of his political enemies.
That's not his vibe.
But he is kind of like, he is really vibing with the whole idea of humanity coming together and spiritually awakening and coming to a realization and everyone coming together to reach a higher plane of consciousness.
All that stuff is good.
So he just incorporates that stuff into his pre-existing beliefs.
If your hypothalamus is swelling, it may mean that Hillary Clinton is not yet hung.
You gotta cut that out.
You can't do that.
Absolutely not.
I will leave it in and take all the flack.
It made you laugh this hard.
Hopefully the audience is with you.
Well, yeah, because I wasn't expecting you to do a racist Japanese accent.
Hey, come on now.
Come on.
It was subtle.
A racist Japanese American accent.
It's terrible.
This is what happens when Julian goes to Europe.
Yeah, over here we can speak like that.
All of his manners, all of his manners just slip right out the window.
Here this is, that's polite to do that here.
I am in France, that's correct, which is right next to Japan for you Americans.
All right.
I don't know if that's true, but... Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty true.
Now, QAnon in Japan didn't Goddammit man, Q-Army Japan Flynn.
traction until 2019. One woman who really helped QAnon gain popularity in Japan is Eri Okabayashi, who just goes by Eri
online. In 2019, Eri started posting high quality translations of the Q drops from QMap.Pub into Japanese.
And from this activity, she grew a following which is called the QArmy Japan Flynn.
God damn it, man. QArmy Japan Flynn. That's that's the best nonsensical.
You know, Flynn Army QAnon, you know, Flynn Army, QAnon Japan, you know, as if you're signing a postcard or
something would work.
But perhaps it's just because of the translation, which is why it's flipped around.
Yeah, actually, before General Flynn's account was banned in January of 2021, he was actually following several QArmy Japan Flynn accounts.
So he unsurprisingly was encouraging them and sort of like, you know, maybe nodding and winking towards this movement.
Ari herself had about 80,000 Twitter followers before Twitter purged their site of QAnon accounts.
An analysis by Jeff Goldberg of the firm Social Forensics concluded, however, that the majority of Ari's followers are probably fake.
Ari, however, is still very active on Gab right now where she has about 20,000 followers.
According to an interview that Aerie did with the German news outlet DW, she has some unusual beliefs about the Japanese imperial family.
And to me, it kind of seemed like the Japanese version of the claim that Hitler was secretly Jewish and was actually a British agent.
Eri insists that the members of the real imperial family were, quote, replaced by fakes during the Meiji era, and, quote, Emperor Hirohito had British nationality and is not a pure Japanese, adding that Emperor Hirohito, who was Japan's emperor from 1926 until his death in 1989, was a CIA agent.
Kyunan also claims that Hirohito's son and heir, Emperor Akihito, was behind the March 2011 earthquake tragedy.
It would seem to me a little weird if the CIA bombed the country that they have a puppet at the head of?
A country that joined the Nazis in World War II?
I mean, but I, yeah.
Why am I trying to make sense of this?
Yeah.
Yeah, or that the CIA has some sort of tsunami gun?
Okay. Everyone knows Emperor Hirohito famously was able to wield the power of tsunamis.
Well, wait, wait, wait, hold on.
We're all going to get absolutely cancelled for this episode.
No, no, no.
No, we're all fucked.
I'm putting you right under the fucking wheels of the bus here.
Jake, take one for the team.
No, but they said the QAnon claims his son was behind the March 2011 earthquake tragedy.
Wasn't there a huge tsunami as a result of that earthquake?
Oh.
Oh, magical Japanese people, Jake.
Great.
No, keep going.
Shut up.
This is what the blogger, the QAnon blogger is claiming.
I'm not, this is not, I'm not offering my knowledge of history.
At first, this episode seemed to be a cancellation of Julian.
It has turned into a cancellation of Jake.
So I checked out the Bitshoot channel for QArmyJapan Flynn, and it consists of a lot of videos from American QAnon influencers with Japanese subtitles.
Jordan Sather was actually in there a lot.
He's got some international fans.
They're like, we love this beautiful twink.
He says so many true things.
But there are also videos from enthusiastic QArmyJapan Flynn followers themselves.
I didn't understand most of what they were saying, but I did understand where we go one, we go all.
Universal, that phrase is.
Yes.
Where we go one, we go all has no language.
It is, it is just English.
Well, no, it's where we go all, but like globally, you know, all of us are in this together.
We are so fucked.
We are so fucked.
He's young too.
Yes.
Yes.
He is a young man who has a lot of life to look forward to if he gets off the Q train.
We are so fucked. We are so fucked. He's young too.
Yes, yes. He is a young man who has a lot of life to look forward to if he gets off the Q train.
Or, you know.
Depending how history swings, yeah.
His life might get a whole lot better.
Yeah, maybe he'd bet on the winning horse here.
Because of his, yeah, belief in CUNY, he might be on the winning side.
He will be named general in Flynn's international Q army.
What's going to happen to us if that happens?
I mean, I can only imagine that, you know, Travis will be sentenced to, you know, Narfle the Garfunkel, you know, What?
You guys know what I'm talking about?
You know in Coneheads where they send Dan Aykroyd's character to, you know, narf all the garfuck?
He has to, you know, fight the big... Alright.
I can't say I'm that familiar with the lore of Coneheads.
The backstory, the world building of Coneheads.
It's like the climax of the movie!
Alright.
Anyways, okay, weird references aside, although I don't think Coneheads is that weird a reference, but we will all be banished to some pit to, like, battle some crazy monster, and they'll give us, you know, sticks and stones to tie it to.
Which can break your bones, but words can never hurt you.
In this case, words did, and can, and continue to hurt us.
They affect the hypothalamus.
I mean, I'm already planning to go off the grid as a woodsman, so we'll see how that goes.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're already there, man.
You've secured your family's future and safety, so.
Let's just say he still wants access to a mailbox.
Last year, CNN interviewed two followers of QArmy Japan Flynn named Hiromi and Touhei.
The reasons why they found the QAnon echo a lot of stories of QAnon radicalization that I've heard here in the U.S.
There's financial hardship, a general feeling of aimlessness, and feeling like the political system doesn't offer any hope or progress.
Growing up, the now 58-year-old Japanese acupuncturist felt pressure to conform to Japan's rule-based society.
Acupuncturist felt pressure... Come on, what are we trying to do here?
Come on!
Yeah, that's a bit of a playful one.
Come on!
Somebody's getting clever on the blog.
Okay.
We see what you're doing there, and you're first against the wall.
Felt pressure to conform to Japan's rule-based society, and to become a model worker and wife.
She married young and had three children, but later divorced, and says she still struggles to make ends meet.
Quote, I'm sure some Japanese people question the way of life where we take the same cram train at the same time, we get sucked into corporate life.
It's like we don't think for ourselves.
Instead, we follow someone else's outline for us, Hiromi told CNN Business.
She withheld her full name to keep her privacy.
Convinced there was something wrong with society, Hiromi looked for answers online.
While reading the tweets of a medical influencer who alleged big pharmaceutical companies use the public as human guinea pigs, Hiromi stumbled across Japanese QAnon influencer Eri Okabayashi's Twitter account.
For Hiromi, QAnon provided an escape from the realities of daily life.
Quote, I have no idea what other people would think of me, but I feel like I became so free, she said.
Hiromi and Tūhei, a 33-year-old former real estate agent turned delivery driver, are members of Q Army Japan Flynn.
Tūhei is divorced and has a son.
He told CNN Business that at one point he wanted to be a politician to help change Japan, but later decided politics was a farce.
Quote, it's so tough to stay afloat even with both parents working.
I kept thinking something was so wrong, and that's when I discovered QAnon," he said.
Very interesting that in both of these situations, the grind of our current sort of system is quoted essentially as what drove both of these individuals to start to go down the rabbit hole.
There's a big scoreboard, and Travis has one less point than me right now.
Another QAnon offshoot is called JeAnon.
They are most closely associated with the Stop the Steal movement in Japan.
As it turns out, there's actually a pretty active Stop the Steal group in Japan.
They believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
But what?
Oh my god.
Yeah.
Oh.
Oh no.
In December of 2020, after Trump lost the presidential election, QAnon followers took to the streets in Japan in order to claim that Trump actually won.
God, just imagine being a normal person, opening their windows, looking out and being like, what the fuck is happening out there?
And why am I not being allowed to sleep?
This is insane, because, you know, here in the United States, like, there was barely a 48-hour news cycle about the former Prime Minister of Japan being assassinated.
And yet, here in Japan, it's like, oh, Donald Trump lost the election and, like, people are, like, out in the street saying it's fake.
It's insane.
Well, I mean, what was there to cover?
A brave hero learned construction?
End?
All right.
Oh, boy.
Come on.
Here's one report from Kyodo News about the Stop the Steal protests in Japan.
Less than a month before U.S.
President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration, hundreds of Japanese, including adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, are taking to the streets in support of President Donald Trump's claim that the November 3rd election was fraudulent.
STOP BIASED REPORTING and ADMIT THE U.S.
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED were among the slogans shouted in unison by more than 200 Trump supporters during a rally held at Hibiya Park in central Tokyo in late November.
Some of them were speaking Chinese, saying, quote, The Trump supporters continued organizing events during the holiday season, with a group that calls itself People Who Love President Trump, holding a rally outside the Prime Minister's office in Tokyo on the night of Christmas Eve.
One participant was dressed as Santa Claus, and others were wearing red caps with Trump's Make America Great Again slogan.
Seven QAnon adherents in Japan, including a self-employed person and a delivery service worker, spoke to Kyoto News on condition of anonymity.
Although none of them took part in the Hibiya Park rally, they said they consider themselves journalists protecting freedom of speech.
Society is under the control of a small number of elite people, said a woman in her late 50s who lives in Gunma Prefecture.
Middle-aged women who have been oppressed have woken up to it, she added.
A man in his 40s said he believes Trump will eventually prevail.
"It's possible that key information, which could overthrow the election outcome, will
come out," he said.
The Japanese followers said the purpose of their activities is to "awaken people to
hidden truths" and that they recently started to hold in-person gatherings.
200 people?
Fuck.
It was later reported that these gatherings were not organized by just dedicated QAnon followers in Japan.
They got help from international religious and political groups such as Falun Gong with support from the Rule of Law Foundation, which is an It's an organization that happens to have Steve Bannon as its chair.
Unsurprisingly, the news of these protests received widespread coverage on the social media accounts of the Epoch Times, which is run by the Falun Gong cult.
So, the Stop the Steal protests, you know, they aren't entirely, you know, domestic.
They're getting a lot of assistance from outside the country.
On January 6th, J&N followers also staged Stop the Steal protests prior to the storming of the Capitol.
That's an awkward thing to be mirroring when you see how far it went.
Yeah.
Ah, maybe we should just go home on this one.
Maybe we should not match our American brethren.
Now, the third major QAnon related group in Japan is called Yamato Q, which formed in December of 2021.
They could be recognized by their pretty slick logo, which depicts a silhouette of a dragon inside of a stylized Q.
I gotta say, among the many cues we've seen, this is a pretty cool one.
Yeah, this is a good one.
It's like, you get sick of the cue on fire, which is just, you know, they do variations of that over and over again.
But this, this is... Yeah, this one's dope with the dragon inside of it.
Dragon, the calligraphy cue is nice looking.
Some graphic design skills.
Yeah, plus you can use it as a logo because it's just a single color and basically could adapt to any background and different variants of colors, so graphic designer approved.
Some media reports have called YamatoQ the QAnon Japan arm, but the problem is that this is a label that they have given themselves in order to seek publicity.
They didn't even really start out as QAnon related and were really more of an esoteric cultic group.
They don't for example engage with or decode the Q-drops, which is normally a pretty important
part of being involved with QAnon.
But they hitched onto the QAnon bandwagon in order to boost their profile.
The Japanese investigative journalist website Diamond Online infiltrated the group and said
that the main beliefs of YamatoQ revolve around a cosmic battle of good vs evil that involves
deluding the DNA of who they call the Yamato people.
Yay.
Here's approximately how Diamond Online described their beliefs.
Good aliens and dragon gods?
originally inherited the genes of good aliens and dragon gods, but due to the
Deep State, dark forces, and Illuminati, evil secret societies, the Yamato people
have bad genes. Members of the Shinto Q, warriors of light, awaken the sleeping
DNA to awaken the true power of the Yamato people.
Good aliens and dragon gods? That sounds like a cool video game.
I think they tried to make a movie about this with Daniel Craig like probably a
a decade or so ago and I don't think it went so well.
No, actually, observing this, this seems like Dragon Ball Z. I'm not familiar with Dragon Ball Z. Please, explain.
Well, there are seven Dragon Balls, and over them rules Shenron, who is a dragon god, who appears to grant you a wish, and Piccolo, for example, is a...
A bad alien that then turned good who he was once God but then split into two forms and one was God and one was the devil but then the devil side also became good and so anyways it's all tracks.
Okay cool.
YamatoQ is very fiercely, aggressively anti-vaccination.
They claim on their website that coronavirus doesn't exist, vaccines are part of a plot to decrease the population, and that the vaccine itself causes an infection.
They're also fairly sizable and organized.
In January of this year, 6,000 people participated in YamatoQ demonstrations nationwide, motivating the local authorities to investigate the movement and its members.
They're also a lot more centralized than American QAnon groups.
YamatoQ recruits members for an annual fee of 4,500 Japanese yen, or approximately $33.
The group verifies members' identities by collecting copies of their driver's licenses or identity cards.
Once accepted, applicants receive a card declaring that they are a certified authentic member.
No, I think that's something that is really missing from American QAnon.
Membership cards.
They're numbered and have the logo and everything.
They have your name and a little QR code.
Careful what you wish for, Travis.
Careful what you wish for.
The total membership of YamatoQ is separated into nine divisions across the country.
And each of these subdivisions, which YamatoQ calls Demonstration Corps, has chat groups on the Line messaging app, which are limited to individuals with Japanese phone numbers.
So they're doing organization and OPSEC and stuff.
Interesting.
Here's a story from the outlet Japan News about how a woman in her 50s became involved with YamatoQ and for some reason became a big supporter of Vladimir
Putin.
"My mother was an ordinary housewife, but suddenly she turned into a different person,"
said a 17-year-old high school student in western Japan whose mother has been involved in Yamato Q.
His mother, in her 50s, had always been very interested in the spiritual world.
During the initial period of the pandemic, she wore a mask and urged her family members to do
the same. In September last year, however, she started saying, "There's salt water in the vaccine."
By the end of the year, she was going out without wearing a mask.
People who were strangers to the family came to their home for a gathering, and the mother went out to take part in a camp at Ryokan Inn on weekends.
Questioned by her family members, the mother admitted that she was engaged in YamatoQ activities.
She said that the U.S.
presidential election, in which Trump lost, needed to be redone.
Since Russia launched its attack on Ukraine, she has repeatedly said Putin is doing justice.
The student had hoped his mother would withdraw from the group after the arrest of YamatoQ members last month, but the incident made her more intransigent.
I will not give in to oppression, she said.
I don't know how this happened, the student said.
I just hope she wouldn't do anything that would cause trouble for other people.
Members of YamatoQ do a lot more than just sit around and post about vaccinations.
They also stormed vaccination sites.
In March, they disrupted vaccinations in sites including the Tokyo Dome.
Back in April, several men associated with the YamatoQ were arrested for forcing their way into a venue offering COVID vaccination for children.
On April 7th, roughly 10 YamatoQ members barged into a clinic, shouted vaccination is a crime, and demanded to talk to the clinic's director, according to police.
One of the biggest YamatoQ influencers is a man named Ichibei Akamoto, who actually got started after the events of January 6th, so they're still churning them out.
This was recently reported in a great article for Insider by reporter Cheryl Tay.
For about a year after January 6th, Ichibei Akamoto posted violent samurai-inspired anime.
But earlier last year, he pivoted into streaming what he calls emergency Q broadcasts to thousands of people.
On Facebook, Okamoto issues vague threats to government officials.
In an April 1st post, he took a screenshot of himself and other members at a Q-administrative meeting, he called it, announcing that he'd be going after a list of Japanese members of the parliament, saying this.
If you continue to govern badly, you will soon be on the pick list.
We are not here to negotiate.
Okamoto doesn't talk about what he does for a living, but it has since been revealed that he was a direct-to-video Japanese actor who worked under a pseudonym in the 2000s.
So this may be another case of a tragic failed entertainer-to-Q-non-influencer pipeline.
In 2021, Okamoto capitalized on his Q-length popularity and released a book titled The X-Man File.
Now, The X-Man File was co-written by a man named John D'Souza, who calls himself an ex-FBI special agent and is a conspiracy theory circuit staple.
Oh, yeah, this guy is like all over Gaia.
He's, yeah, he's big time.
The other co-author is a YamatoQ-linked YouTuber who goes by the name Joestar.
In the book, Okamoto is a featured guest and was essentially a published roundtable talk and freeform interview in the book.
The book covers conspiracy theories from, like, how world leaders are clones, manipulated by a deep state cabal, to the proposition that people are teleporting from Earth to Mars.
He also baselessly posits in the book that doppelgangers are ruling the Earth and that President Joe Biden is being played by an actor who closely resembles him.
It also promotes Nasara and Gasara right on the cover.
It even has an X-Files slogan.
The truth is out there.
Mm-hmm.
By all appearances, Japanese QAnon influencers are nowhere near as boisterous or flamboyant as some major QAnon figures in the U.S., but Okamoto still makes efforts to stand out and has been described as having the quote, stylings of a 90s Japanese pop star.
On occasion, Okamoto would style himself like a modern Japanese samurai, showing up at events and on live streams in a yukata, which is a type of Japanese summer kimono.
So that's essentially the landscape for Q-Anon Japan.
The oldest branch is Q-Army Flynn Japan, which grew out of a single influencer who translated the Q-Drops.
The second oldest is J-Anon, which mostly promotes stop-the-steal stuff.
And more recently, there's YamatoQ, which is weirdly organized and is mostly about hating vaccines.
You know, that is the perfect three parts of Q. You've got this sort of like the Q army, which is just about the awakening.
And then you've got the stop the steal, you know, how QAnon was applied to politics.
And then you've got the YamatoQ, which is all about anti-vaccine.
I feel like we saw the same sort of progression here, more or less.
Yeah, flawless adaptation.
Good job, Japan.
Hey, if you're gonna steal, you steal from the best.
We need to stop this steal.
To talk more about QAnon in Japan, we are now joined by Sarah Hightower.
She's an anti-cult activist and extremism researcher.
She serves as the fact-checker for the iHeartRadio podcast Q Clearance, and she almost certainly knows more about the deadly Japanese cult Aum Shirikyo than any person on this continent.
She also has an encyclopedic knowledge of extremist movements generally, and does a lot of work behind the scenes helping journalists and academics get up to speed on cults both here in the U.S.
and in Japan.
Sarah, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Driver's help, I'm trapped in my phone.
Yeah, well, that's too bad.
As I say, this episode is a long time coming.
I actually checked recently when we first started talking to each other on Twitter, and it was in August of 2018, which was before I even met these two jokers.
So good to finally have you on the show.
Hi, Travis.
So a lot of people have made parallels between the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo and QAnon, but you were one of the first.
Now, before we sort of talk about those parallels, what exactly is Aum Shinrikyo?
Aum Shinrikyo was a Japanese doomsday cult and international terrorist organization.
Most of your listeners are going to know it for the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, and also for the fact that some of their propaganda was animated.
It's an anime thing.
It's a Doomsday Cult, and they took a little bit from column A, like Eastern religions, and a little bit from column B, from Western religions, mostly Theosophy and the Book of Revelations, and then they added just a metric fuckton of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish world shadow governments and stuff.
And that's why we're here today!
So back in 2018, there were really a handful of people who were concerned about QAnon and thought it was something more than a weird Chan LARP.
And you were certainly one of them.
When you sort of looked at QAnon all the way back then, what made you, you know, recognize some of the concerning aspects of it and draw parallels between what you already knew and QAnon?
Okay, so first you had the Hoover Dam standoff back in 2018, and then you, uh, I think it was in August 18, uh, there was that Trump rally, and you had the QAnon believers, uh, standing right behind Trump, uh, with QAnon spelled out on their shirts.
Yeah, that was pretty weird too.
And then my aunt, of all people, and my aunt does not live online, she was not a Trump supporter, she's Really more of like a healing crystal woo woo hippie type.
She started asking me if I had heard of this, this QAnon thing.
Cause she had heard about it from the Above Top Secret forums.
And I was like, Oh no, this could get pretty bad.
Pretty bad.
That's crazy.
Cause Above Top Secret was like a staple in sort of like your, your go-to kind of conspiracy.
And it was always, I vaguely remember because it became very political over time, whereas Before, it was kind of more like aliens and sort of, you know, less sort of political stuff.
Yeah, it kind of got ugly, especially when QAnon started taking off.
They were pulling in, like, your guy-am-TV-yoga-ants like mine and essentially just funneling them to 8chan, which is concerning in and of itself.
One of the only reasons my aunt didn't end up like a QAnon boomer is because I took one look at it and I said they're sending you to a website where they want you to basically read the sort of stuff that made Timothy McVeigh blow up a federal building and then within a couple of clicks she saw the Nazi stuff and I was like see told you and that that was enough to keep her awake from like the big QAnon stuff.
Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of other people didn't get that sort of timely intervention, and now we're here.
Yeah.
Now, besides Aum Shinrikyo, I was wondering if you'd help me understand the general state of the conspiracist cultic subculture in Japan prior to 2018.
So, why exactly would a conspiracist movement that is so America-centric take off in Japan?
I think looking at it as something America-centric that took off in Japan, I think that's kind of a mistake.
Especially now, we're three years into this, QAnon taking off in Japan, and we're about a year and a half It's been about a year and a half, I think, since, like, Western outlets started paying attention to QAnon in Japan.
QAnon has a presence in probably, like, every country by now.
Why is it that we're looking at Japan as, like, this weird, kooky, crazy, Orientalist outlier?
I'm not really feeling that interpretation, especially not these days, because, I mean, like I said, it's been years.
But if you want to hear about, like, the history of, like, just conspiracy stuff in Japan, there are basically, like, two strains.
Okay, you have, like, The entertainment fodder?
You have, like, you know, maybe some, like, world shadow government conspiracy theories, or just conspiracy theories in general, but you also have, like, what if ESP is real and we can bend spoons with our minds, like Uri Geller?
What about UFOs?
What about Disclosure?
Area 51?
Cryptids?
Ancient civilization in O parts?
Lost continents, like, you know, Moon Atlantis?
All of that kind of bullshit.
Your standard, like, ancient alien stuff, but also, like, You're mid to late 90s chubby Dan Aykroyd on Fox at like 9 p.m.
kind of stuff.
And there's been an audience for that for decades.
You have an audience for it here.
You have an audience for it there.
Of course, you're going to have an audience for it in Japan.
But if you want to talk conspiracy, conspiracy stuff, you might be thinking about the Jewish conspiracy.
And Japan has an interesting history of anti-Semitism.
I think it dates back to like 1905.
Japan got protocols pretty early.
And they believed in the Jewish World Conspiracy.
Then the war happened, and then the post-war era happened, and in the post-war era, you had your anti-Semitism kind of sort of bacon-wrapped in this weird, like, veneer of philo-Semitism, where, like, we do believe that they control all the banks and just global finance in general, but, like, we kind of want that for ourselves.
We respect the hustle.
And that coexisted with all of, like, the regular, virulent, like, just nasty In the 80s, things started to take an even darker turn, and by the time the late 80s were rolling around, you had like sitting members of parliament, like a fucking LDP member, writing bestsellers about how the Jews have it out for Japan, and like Japan is the final target.
They're messing with our economy on purpose.
The Holocaust was a fabrication.
If you want to get rich, here are the stocks the Jews are looking at.
Maybe we're the real Jews, but that would mean they're the fake Jews.
Something's got to be done about that.
Jesus wasn't actually crucified.
That was his brother, like, James or Jerry or some shit, and then Jesus hooked it over here somehow, and he was literally buried here, and that's proof that, like, we're super racially pure.
Balls to the wall shit.
Like, Moo Magazine.
Because I know you've talked to Matt Ault before, and he's talked about Moo Magazine.
It's like, super mystery Moo Magazine, and they talk about cryptids, they talk about O parts, they talk about all this fun shit.
It's literally called Moo, right?
They weren't printing, like, bloodlines-of-the-Illuminati-level bullshit.
But that doesn't mean that a metric-fucking-ton of magazines weren't, and you had straight-up, the gas chambers were fake articles, front page, major newspapers with subway ads, Japan. And this was like
two months before on the Asa subway.
So that's a really brief overview and I'm oversimplifying a lot of stuff,
but I also just want to state just for the record, Japan isn't just a nation of rabid
anti-Semites. So I'm not trying to paint that with a broad brush. That's not what I'm trying to do
here. Now, you've talked before about how QAnon really first started getting traction in Japan,
through a network of blogs that deal with esoteric and conspiracist matters.
How exactly did that work?
I mean, you had people who were already into just the subculture for the entertainment fodder, and you had some true believers who really bought into a lot of the conspiracy theories and weird shit.
And QAnon, they were starting to pick up on it because it was a hot topic over here, but they were looking at it with a little bit of skepticism.
But then you have, like, these people who have been writing Jewish fucking world domination conspiracy theory books for decades, and they started laundering the QAnon stuff to Japanese audiences.
And I think, like, the biggest example is an expat.
His name is Benjamin Fulford.
He started writing for, like, I think it was Forbes in Japan in the late 80s.
And then he just kind of parlayed that into a career of essentially being like Alex Jones, but like on steroids.
For a Japanese audience.
So you had Benjamin Fulford and his anti-Semitic bullshit taking QAnon, wrapping that up in his own little mythos for his paywalled audience, and you were like seeing that on a new age spirituality cult but not a cult blogs like Shantyfula.
They have an English little arm and they were floating like Cory Good and like David Icke and stuff, but the Japanese one was floating special dispatches from Ben Fulford about, like, the Galactic Command and, like, what's going on with Q. And he was just making shit up.
But it got an audience.
But, like, you didn't see an actual, like, designated, like, little network until Q, Army, Japan, Flynn.
And we only got that because someone decided they were just gonna start translating the entire Qmap.com Yeah, that was started by a woman who just goes by Aerie online, right?
She managed to build quite a following for herself, at least apparently.
playing around Michael Flynn. And that's where Japanese QAnon really starts.
Yeah, that was started by a woman who just goes by Aerie online, right? She managed to
build quite a following for herself, at least apparently.
It sounds like a lot of her followers on Twitter were like fake or bots, according to some
analysis. But yeah, so I mean, the very first sort of major QAnon influencer that sort of
brought the movement there just did high quality translations of the QDrops and QMap, right?
Right, yeah, that was Aerie Okabayashi. And she actually kind of bridged the gap between
like QArmy Japan Flynn.
And what was going on over here at the time.
She was talking about In The Matrix and stuff.
You remember In The Matrix back in 2018?
You remember the major Q influencers we had over here?
She was in contact with them and they were actively promoting her stuff.
So even if a lot of her followers were bots, she also had genuine reach.
Not just in Japan, but over here.
I was hoping if you could help me sort of understand sort of like terms are used in the media to describe QAnon Japan, and one of them is J-Anon.
Now, sometimes I see this used to refer to a particular sect of QAnon, it seems like, and other times it seems like it's a just a general term for QAnon in Japan.
So what exactly is J-Anon?
JNR was a term people on Twitter started using to refer to the Stop the Steal people that were going out and marching in the street in, like, Trump masks.
And, like, that whole entire thing, it wasn't hardcore Q followers.
It was right-wingers, people who were already into conspiracy theories, Trumpists, right-wing, like, trolls, like the Netoyo.
And I just, I think Yoshiro Fujikura explained it as, like, there were basically, like, a group of Johnny-completelys.
And they were also like the more mainstreamed version.
You know how we had Stop the Steal and everyone was just calling it just QAnon like Blanket?
But it wasn't.
It was like a more mainstreamed QAnon-adjacent sort of thing that was still very much tied to QAnon and like Rod and Watkins and stuff?
Yeah, over in Japan it was basically like the same thing.
Because all of a sudden you have this influx of what appears to be a bunch of brainwashed conspiracy theorists on like Twitter.
There's another segment of what is supposedly the QAnon community in Japan called YamatoQ.
down the Deep State, they're not citing Q-stuff, and they're all tied in with groups like Falun Gong,
Unification Church, and like Happy Science and stuff. So that's, that's J-anon.
There's another segment of what is supposedly the Q-anon community in Japan called Yamato-Q.
Now, I'm told that they didn't really start as a sect of Q-anon, but media reports keep
referring to them as like Q-anon's Japan arm.
And they seem to be more like, I don't know, they apparently just sort of like took up the Q branding in order to increase their reach.
So what exactly is their deal?
They're basically like the Japanese equivalent of negative 48.
The JFK Jr.
QAnon cult.
It's one dude.
He's jumping into the pit.
He's already got an audience.
It's prime for it.
And he's funneling it.
And doing his own thing with it, but he's still using QAnon stuff and the QAnon name and, like, fringe Q stuff.
And he amasses a following!
Like, an actual physical following, just like we saw in Dallas!
It's basically that sort of deal.
Yeah, what's really weird about YamatoQ, we sort of talked about in the episode, is that they seem more, like, structured and organized than your typical kind of, like, QAnon following.
They have, like, membership cards, and they organize their membership into sort of different segments all over Japan, and they do, like, OPSEC stuff.
Like, they make sure, like, that people have Japanese phone numbers before they join the Line messaging app.
So why, I mean, that's, that's a little weird concerning when something is like that, uh, you know, aggressively cultic and also, you know, kind of like, um, developing a hierarchy.
Yeah.
And also like the numbers were pretty concerning too.
So I think in like January public security put the estimates at like what, like 6,000, I think.
And these are just people that were like joining those line groups by region.
And then they could just like be mobilized.
You'd call them to action, like almost overnight.
It's kind of worrying.
The membership cards and the membership dues and stuff like that, YamanoQ and Ichibei and all of them, they're in it for the money.
Ichibei wants power and it's cultic as hell, but it's also a business.
And I think, as of now, it's an actual, literally registered business entity in Japan.
And that was pretty recent.
That was after the first or second wave of arrests.
They've been doing money stuff this entire time.
They've been doing, like, the MedBeds, the Tesla Biolabs, like, healing cans.
Like, they took that and ran with it so far that your Tesla MedBed stuff, like your weird little cans that you're supposed to put under your bed or whatever, those are called Yamato cans!
And members make and sell their own!
And it's just, like, ten cans, wrapped with, like, I feel like that's the beginning of, like, a horror movie where, like, a family member wakes up and finds, like, a strange can with, like, weird crystals glued to it under their bed.
in and they're also sneaking these things like under like their family
members beds because they genuinely believe in this stuff.
I feel like that's the beginning of like a horror movie where like a family
member wakes up and finds like a strange can with like weird crystals glued to
it under their bed they don't know where it came from. I can also tell you
this like if you go to like the bio healing labs like website and you scroll down
they they have an affiliates program
So if you're an influencer or whatever, and you're hawking this crap, you can get a cutback.
You just gotta send the company your PayPal and set up an arrangement with them.
And if you look at YamatoQ, you got a lot of YouTubers and a lot of Twitter influencers and a lot of people who already have social media followings, and then they started pivoting to There was a recent report published in Insider about the YamatoQ influencer Ichibe Akamoto.
Now, I think he's an interesting case because he's someone who got into the conspiracist-influencer game after January 6 and managed to find some success.
So what exactly is his deal?
He just, like, rage posted about how the world will feel his justice, and then he started bringing QAnon into it, and he had some influencer friends.
He started to amass a little bit of a following for himself, and now he's run there with, like, oh god, there's this YouTuber who's sort of affiliated, he runs with, like, Ichibei, and he's YamatoQ affiliated, and he goes by Joestar, and he's out there with, like, John D'Souza, saying he's, like, a former Fuckin' FBI dude and he's got the real disclosure and he can tell you all about the real alien autopsies and real X-Files shit.
They're, like, doing, like, Kindle self-pubs, making lots of money.
So, like, Ichibei's whole entire deal is, like, he's, like, the other prick who's running, uh, negative 48 out of Dallas.
It's that exact same- he's just a malignant narcissist.
He wants power.
He wants money.
He wants control, and he wants to lash out.
Now, here in the U.S., there is a bunch of QAnon-affiliated political candidates running for positions in, like, Congress, Secretary of State, and even Governor.
Are there any, like, QAnon candidates in Japan?
No, they didn't try to pull an Ohm this time around.
And you also have, like, other, like, far-right political parties, like the anti-NHK party, and they're running their own candidates that are actively courting the conspiracy theorists.
And like the YamatoQ and the QAnon adjacent crowd, they're sort of filling that gap, but as far as like YamatoQ itself, I don't think they ran any candidates this time around.
It could be wrong, there could be one or two, but like there was no like Shinrito or Happiness Realization Party equivalent this time around.
They were also like getting their shit wrecked by public security.
Like raids, lots of arrests.
So it probably wasn't the best time for them to run, like, a coordinated campaign.
Might have something to do with it.
Yeah, obviously I have no conception of Japanese law whatsoever, but it seems like the authorities were especially aggressive about Yamato-Q arresting people.
How exactly does that work?
Are they a little edgy about the way in which Yamato-Q crashed these vaccination sites and stuff?
Yeah, and like, QAnon stuff and cult stuff and conspiracy theory stuff, like, they're already looking out for that crap.
The backlash after the sarin attacks, holy fucking shit.
Like, public security, they got an earful, right?
And they basically kind of had to restructure.
Back in the day, your monitoring people, like, your Japanese feds and whatnot, they were more focused on, like, the far right and the far left and, like, anti-nuclear protesters or whatever.
These days, they focus more on, like, cults and conspiracy theory stuff.
They don't want another Aum.
So when you have people saying a lot of the same shit Aum did, it's already cultic as hell, they're bringing lots of people in, and you have known Asahara worshippers also buying into this and, like, re-broadcasting, like, a bunch of QAnon shit and anti-vax shit, that's gonna catch their eye.
I think before they raided the Tokyo Dome vaccination clinic, you already had, like, police officers and plainclothes public security detail walking with these people during their public demonstrations.
Like, they'd already been marked.
I want to ask you about a New York Times op-ed by Matt Ault headlined, Why QAnon Flopped in Japan.
Matt Ault is a fantastic Japanese-based writer, and we've had him on the show to help us understand the origins of Chan culture.
In that article, Matt Ault acknowledges the growth of J-Anon and Q-Army Japan Flynn, but he argues that generally Q-Anon has had a tepid reception in the country.
He says that this is due to the fact that Japanese culture avoids open conflict, there's a fairness doctrine in national broadcast law, and there's an enduring popularity of I like Matt.
I think Matt Ault is great.
I think he made some good points, but I also think that he may have focused a bit more on just like the numbers comparatively.
And yes, comparatively, if you're looking at America and like January 6th and shit, it's going to look like QAnon totally flopped in Japan at the same time.
Let's get back on our conversation today.
We started out with QAnon, like the Japan Flynn stuff, right?
And that was basically like the original QAnon stuff we had over here.
Then, just like our shit progressed and mainstreamed and started to coalesce around Stop the Steal and started drawing in more people, they had the same thing with J-Anon.
And then after Q stopped posting, and after Tigers broke free, and after just everything blew the fucking lid off of it, We had the rise of these little splinter groups headed up by malignant narcissists like Michael White-Protzman and Negative48, and we had the same thing over there with shit like YamatoQ and Ichibig.
Okay, you can say something totally flopped, but did it really totally flop?
If I can sit here and fucking, like, do these one-one comparisons of how these things have progressed and brought in more people, it's still kind of going.
And on top of that, I don't really know the right way to say this without sounding like I'm righteously indignant or whatever.
If you have a bunch of people talking about how this movement has brainwashed their mom, and they can't even talk to their mom anymore, and their family's basically ruined and it hurts, if you have people talking about that shit, It's still like a destructive group.
It's still an anti-social group.
It's still causing harm.
And if you lose, if you drop the focus on that, if you lose sight of that, you're going to ignore it.
And if you ignore it and you turn a blind eye to it because it doesn't seem like that big of a deal at a time, man, It's just gonna keep getting worse.
It's not just, we're not gonna wake up tomorrow and all of these people who believe these conspiracy theories, all of these people who have invested their entire lives into these bullshit fucking conspiracy theories and prisons of belief, we're not gonna wake up tomorrow and like, they're just gonna be back like it never happened.
So, like, I don't want to disrespect Matt Alt, but I disagree on some points for my own reasons.
I mean, shit.
Japan just decided to forget about what Unification Church had been doing.
And we see how that worked out.
That worked out really well for everyone.
Someone just murked Shinzo Abe because the Unification Church basically ruined his life.
And then the network of lawyers and the support system set up just to help tackle the Unification Church issue.
They sort of lost popular support.
It wasn't cool to talk about the Unification Church anymore.
It became this open secret.
But it was still ruining lives and destroying families.
Someone whose life was absolutely destroyed, whose family was absolutely destroyed.
We're talking multiple suicides in one household because of what the Unification Church basically allowed to get away with.
But one of them finally popped and made a gun and shot, like, one of the most prominent politicians in the country.
So who's to say if something flops or not?
I don't know where we set that standard.
No one can seem to agree on it, but it should still be treated as like a social issue.
Yeah, the whole awful business with the assassination of Shinzo Abe was really horrifying because, you know, when I first, the reports coming out about what happened was kind of confusing at first.
At first, I thought he was a Unification Church member, and then it turns out that actually he was radicalized because his family was involved, and the Unification Church, of course, ruined them entirely, and that made him The Unification Church over the past few decades has been allowed to metastasize into not just like a global cult, but also like a series of front organizations, NGOs, God knows how many companies, and then of course your religious arms.
They've been allowed to get away with like actual human labor trafficking for decades and they've been making inroads with right-wing politicians and cozying up to like really important right-wing politicians in god knows how many countries, and this is all documented man, for decades.
Now, the Unification Church is a Korean cult, it's a Korean organization.
They've been treating Japan in particular as like their ATM machine,
as their favorite pay pig for decades.
We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
They had quotas, outrageous fricking quotas from like, we need to get like $160,000
from each fricking region of Japan before the end of this fiscal year.
And then they take it and then they pour it into shit over here
Like, what is it?
The Washington Times and stuff?
They'd also take that money, and they would- they would start, like, organizations.
Literally every sort of business you could probably think of!
OK, that cult that Luann joined that was masquerading as a sorority house, that was inspired by what the Unification Church has been doing on college campuses here since the 60s or 70s.
Ask somebody about Colt Row.
It's a thing.
And in that King of the Hill episode, they brainwash their pledges and stuff, and then they chip them off to do unpaid labor to sell jams and jellies.
That's how the Unification Church operates.
And they either, like, make you so afraid of sending your entire fucking ancestral bloodline to hell that you, in some cases, literally, like, fucking prostitute yourself to give them hundreds of thousands, if not upwards of, like, millions of dollars for bullshit trinkets and holy books, or they basically just send you to labor trafficking.
They targeted the shooter's mom when she was already vulnerable because that was already, like, a very unstable household.
And anytime somebody would help them throughout this dude's life, she would keep going back because of the control.
They had that level of control and it's not uncommon.
We're talking about a group that would browse the obituaries so they could go door knocking and say, hey, we got a message from your loved one that just died and they're in hell, but you can help them.
Like, we're dealing with that level of bullshit.
So no, he was never a member.
She just sold his life away and didn't care about him.
They have making trips to Korea because she was basically coerced into doing it.
And he and his siblings grew up alone in a house that sometimes didn't even have food.
And then he snapped because, like, it got to the point where, like, Shinzo Abe was cuddling up with, like, I think it was, like, the Universal Peace Federation, one of their fake ass NGOs, literally, like, complimenting The leader of this cult that they call True Mother.
And since he couldn't, like, take it out on True Mother or any of the Unification Church executives, he finally just settled on Shinzo Abe.
And when he realized that a pressure cooker bomb would hurt other people and a Molotov cocktail wouldn't get it done, he made his own gun using, like, YouTube tutorials.
Maybe we shouldn't, like, ignore what cults do to people individually or to families.
I don't know.
Yeah, well, sage advice.
Let's see if it works this time.
I've done my best for the past four years.
Hasn't been going great, but we'll see.
Again, we're speaking with Amshurikyo expert and extremism researcher Sarah Hightower.
She is charmingly averse to self-promotion normally.
Let's see if we can fix that.
I do recommend that you follow her through her Twitter account, Nezumi Ningen.
That's N-E-Z-U-M-I underscore N-I-N-G-E-N.
You can also support Sarah through Patreon, as I have for several months, though she has not tweeted out her Patreon link in a long, long time.
Maybe you could try pinning that so more people could, you know, support you because people like what you do and want to support you if they knew how to.
Okay.
Thanks again, Sarah.
Thanks for putting up with me.
Have a good one, okay?
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
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Listener, until next week.
May the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
The longest-serving Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, has been assassinated.
He was 67.
My sympathies to his family and to the people of Japan.
I'm not a security expert, but this video is just to ask some questions.
Here is a picture of the aftermath of the shooting.
If you're in politics and have to give a speech in public, you can't control who's in front of you so much, but you can control what's behind you.
I know a little bit about this because in March of 2021, as a political candidate, I was giving a speech in Union Square and someone tried to get up on the stage behind me.
I was completely oblivious.
In this next clip, notice the people walking about in the background freely.
There's the suspect second from the left in the background.
I would argue that whoever chose this location for Abe to give a speech
should be questioned in terms of culpability.
I've had many students from Japan.
One thing I'll say about the Japanese is that they are incredibly devoted to their children.
With that said, here's some information about Japan for Americans.
A few billionaires who control the central banking system, the World Economic Forum is their marketing arm, are set on creating a new world order.
One government, one currency, one religion.
All wars are bankers wars.
World War I and II were executed in part to facilitate the NWO.
Sovereign homogenous nations like Germany, Italy, and Japan, our World War II foes, were a headache to these banksters.
