Sharon Isac

Sharon (Mikiko) Isac is a Japanese woman who lives in Canada. Isac is a member of far-right Canadian Patriotic Society and a frequent contributor to anti-Islamic hate sites. She is also a comfort women denier who spoke at a denier panel organized by Nadeshiko Action at the UN Commission on the Status of Women NGO Parallel Events (2016) and helped to translate (badly) Nadeshiko Action’s publication, “Comfort Women Issue: From Misunderstandings to Solution,” authored by Yumiko Yamamoto and Kiyoshi Hosoya.

Yoko Nagato

Yoko Nagato (永門洋子) is a certified nurse-midwife practicing at Japanese Women’s Center, a general OB-GYN clinic for Japanese and other women in Teaneck, New Jersey. Since 2015, Nagato collaborated with Nadeshiko Action to use Japanese Women’s Center as a vehicle to promote comfort women denial, publishing revisionist ads in Japanese language publications in New York/New Jersey area.

In 2016, Nagato founded Himawari Japan, a nationalist group for Japanese women in the area. Members of the group met with Mio Sugita and Yoshi Taguchi in June 2016, which led to the first Himawari Japan lecture on August 23, 2016 featuring Sugita, Shiro Takahashi, Yasuhiro Takasaki, and Shinichi Tokunaga.

Nagato is a staunch supporter of Makoto Sakurai, the founder of Zaitokukai as well as Japan First Party. During the 2016 Tokyo gubernatorial election in which Sakurai ran, Nagato wrote that those who criticize Sakurai are “not real Japanese.”

Ads by Japan Women’s Resource Center:

JWC Ad 2016

JWC Ad 2015

Terumi Imamura

Terumi Imamura (今村照美) is a migrant from Sasebo, Japan to Los Angeles and a comfort woman denier. She has been in the leadership position at True Japan Network, a denier organization of Japanese people in the greater Los Angeles area. She spoke out against the proposal to enact a comfort women memorial in San Francisco at the Board of Supervisors meeting in summer 2015 (along with Koichi Mera, Yoshi Taguchi, and Mariko Okada-Collins) and facilitated a denier panel at the UN Commission on the Status of Women Parallel Events (2016) featuring Mio Sugita, Koichi Mera, and Kiyoshi Hosoya.

Jason Morgan

Jason Morgan is a graduate of University of Wisconsin with Ph.D in modern Japanese legal history and a comfort women denier. While he was a research assistant at University of Wisconsin, Morgan made news by refusing to participate in diversity trainings required for all teaching assistants, arguing that they were discriminatory toward white people. He nonetheless received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Japan.

In Japanese right-wing publications, Morgan not just denies the history of comfort women, but goes so far as to claim that Japan was the righteous side in the WWII, which he characterizes as a war against the “communist” regime of President Franklin Roosevelt. He criticizes U.S. academia as far-left and unobjective, arguing that the Japanese academy is superior in its objectivity and respect for academic freedom.

Morgan is a 2016 fellow at Mises Institute, which “encourage[s] critical historical research, and stand[s] against political correctness.” He is also a fellow at the nationalist think tank Japan Forum for Strategic Studies (日本戦略研究フォーラム), which funded his effort to translate conservative historian Ikuhiko Hata’s book on comfort women for publication in the U.S.

In 2016 Morgan published a book in Japan titled “America ha naze nihon wo mikudasu noka? (Why does America look down on Japan?)” (アメリカはなぜ日本を見下すのか?間違いだらけの「対日歴史観」を正す) which challenges American historians’ view of Japan’s past. Soon after, he was appointed as an assistant professor of foreign languages at Reitaku University, which also boasts other conservative big names including Shiro Takahashi, Hidetsugu Yagi (Japan Education Rebirth Institute), Yoshihisa Komori (Sankei Shimbun), and others among its faculty.

In his ongoing campaign against American historians and other scholars, Morgan is known to file Freedom of Information Act requests to public universities that employ academics he dislikes in wild fishing expedition in search of incriminating emails.

In addition to supporting historical revisionism and bashing U.S. academics, Morgan writes prolifically on “pro-life” (anti-abortion) politics.

Jason Morgan 2016 Talk

Michael Yon

Michael Yon is a former member of the U.S. Special Forces, military writer, and comfort women denier who has written extensively about U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2014, Yon received or was promised large payments from Japanese conservative leader Yoshiko Sakurai to speak at her Japan Conference-affiliated think tank and to publish articles in English media that challenge the history of comfort women, according to the right-wing magazine editor Kazuyoshi Hanada. Yon disputed some details of Hanada’s claim (e.g. whether or not Yon and his wife were flown first-class by the Japanese right-wing) but not the financial arrangement itself.

While his relationship with Sakurai has since deteriorated over his criticism of Yujiro Taniyama and some other members of the Japanese nationalist movements since then, Yon continues to publish many posts on his blog and social media characterizing the comfort women story as “lies” designed to divide important U.S. allies in East Asia (Japan and South Korea) and is working on a full-length book on the topic.

Yon is credited with calling attention to the IWG Report (2007) which he claims proves Japan’s innocence in relation to the comfort women system. Historians and the authors of the report disagree with his amateur interpretation.

In January 2021, Michael Yon was among the crowd that gathered in front of the U.S. Capitol as Trump supporters broke into the legislative building to halt the certification of President-Elect Joe Biden’s electoral victory. Yon claims that he stayed outside of the building and witnessed that Antifa, not white nationalist militias such as Proud Boys or Oath Keepers as other media have reported, “clearly led” the insurrection, in an interview with the conspiracy theory-laden Epoch Times. Media Matters has reported that the Epoch Times actually promoted the “Stop the Steal” Capitol rally that led to the riot.

Kent Gilbert

Kent Gilbert is a former Mormon missionary and California lawyer turned television personality in Japan. Gilbert was a popular figure in Japanese TV variety shows during the 1980s, but in recent years became a mouthpiece for the Japanese far-right nationalism. Gilbert authored many books in the past few years in defense of Japanese nationalism, militarization, and historical record (i.e. war crime denial), including those co-written with fellow American Tony Marano.

Mariko Okada-Collins

Mariko Okada-Collins (岡田コリンズまり子) is a Japanese language lecturer at Central Washington University and comfort women denier. In published statements, Okada-Collins disclosed that she lectures about modern Japanese history “exposing the lies” of comfort women and Nanking atrocities, which have led to her being negatively reviewed by students and reprimanded by the supervisor.

In Spring 2015, Okada-Collins invited Yujiro Taniyama from Japan to screen his comfort women denier film, “The Scottsboro Girls.” The campus community put on multiple public events on the actual history of comfort women in protest, which were attended by hundreds of students and community members. See a series of articles about these events in the June 1, 2015 issue of the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus Newsletter.

In that Summer, Okada-Collins traveled to San Francisco to testify against the establishment of comfort women memorial there along with Koichi Mera, Yoshi Taguchi, and others.

As of the academic year 2018-2019 Okada-Collins is no longer employed at Central Washington University.

Yujiro Taniyama

Yujiro Taniyama (谷山雄二朗) is a video producer, perennial fringe political candidate, and comfort women denier. He has produced the first feature-length English-language denialist documentary titled “Scottsboro Girls.” The title for the film comes from the “Scottsboro Boys,” nine black teenagers falsely accused of raping white women, suggesting that Japan is also falsely accused of forcing women into sexual slavery.

Taniyama was invited by Japanese language instructor Mariko Okada-Collins to screen his film at Central Washington University in Spring 2015. The campus community put on multiple public events on the actual history of comfort women in protest, which were attended by hundreds of students and community members. See a series of articles about these events in the June 1, 2015 issue of the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus Newsletter.

While Taniyama’s film was widely applauded by Japanese conservatives including Yoshiko Sakurai, American writer and comfort women denier Michael Yon dismissed the film as a “a disaster that needs to be edited with a chainsaw, or tossed out entirely” for anyone “who is serious about presenting the truth on the Comfort Woman issue to an educated western audience.”

Yoshi Taguchi

Yoshi (Yoshiaki) Taguchi (田口義明) is a former San Francisco director and current New York director of Happy Science. Taguchi has organized followers of Happy Science in California and New Jersey/New York to mobilize against comfort women memorials. His past involvement includes: securing venues for comfort women denier events such as the Nadeshiko Action/Happy Science Events in California (2014), facilitating online petitions against comfort women orthodoxy, organizing members to attend hearings about comfort women, and speaking at such hearings himself.

During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign, Taguchi brought Happy Science followers (who are also Himawari Japan members) to volunteer at the Donald Trump campaign headquarters in the Trump Tower. Happy Science openly supported Trump, calling him a reincarnation of George Washington.

Mio Sugita

Mio Sugita (杉田水脈) is a member of Japanese House of Representative and a comfort women denier.

Before joining LDP in late 2017, Sugita visited California in December 2013 as part of the three-member delegation of Japan Restoration Party (日本維新の会), which later became the Party for Japanese Kokoro (日本のこころを大切にする党). While there, Sugita and her colleagues met with local Japanese American leaders who had endorsed the comfort women memorial in Glendale. Failing to convince them that the history of comfort women was fabricated, she later dismissed the Japanese Americans as “typical left-wing extremists” in an interview with a Japanese publication.

Since losing her re-election in December 2014, Sugita traveled around the world extensively to promote comfort women denial at the United Nations level, speaking at the United Nations Human Rights Council (2015) and at the UN Commission on the Status of Women NGO Parallel Events (2016) along with people like Shunichi Fujiki, Koichi Mera, and Kiyoshi Hosoya. She also participated in Alliance for Truth about Comfort Women Geneva Delegation (June 2017).

In the book “Women Fight the History War” (Rekishisen ha onna no tatakai), co-authored with non-fiction writer Keiko Kawasoe, Sugita proposes bombing comfort women memorials in the U.S. When asked if she was encouraging terrorism, she responded that she would leave the interpretation to the readers.

Sugita joined the board of Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, a historical revisionist organization in 2017.

In the October 2017 election, Sugita ran for Shugiin (House of Representatives) from the Liberal Democratic Party at the urging of Yoshiko Sakurai and won.

Sugita threatening to bomb U.S.