Koichi Mera (目良浩一) is a comfort women denier and the founder and president of Global Alliance for Historical Truth (GAHT).
Mera was born in 1933 in Seoul, Korea, which was under Japanese rule at the time. He received his bachelor’s degree in engineering/architecture from University of Tokyo and Ph.D from Harvard University (urban planning) which he attended as a Fulbright scholar. He has since worked for the World Bank, University of Tsukuba, Tokyo International University, and University of Southern California. He retired from USC in 2008.
In 2006 Mera founded the Study Group for Japan’s Rebirth (日本再生研究会), a monthly Japanese-language study group on modern Japanese history for Japanese residents in Southern California. Members of the study group protested the 2013 establishment of a comfort women memorial in Glendale, California. In 2014 Mera founded GAHT to sue the City of Glendale in federal district court.
After moving to the East Coast, Mera founded “Princeton Institute for Asian Studies” to promote revisionist historical views about comfort women, Nanking massacre, as well as Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The “institute” was immediately rebuked by Princeton University, which it has no affiliation with, and renamed “Pacific Institute for Asian Studies.”
Mera passed away in December 2019.
Selected Publications
- マッカーサーの呪いから目覚めよ日本人! (Wake up from MacArthur’s Curse, Japanese People!). 2012. Co-authored with Yasuo Inoue (井上雍雄) and Sadao Imamori (今森貞夫)
- Comfort Women not “Sex Slaves” (2015). Self-published.