Masanori Kaneko (金子正則) is the founder and president of International Career Support Association, a non-governmental organization with the special consultative status with the United Nations. ICSA partners with the Alliance for Truth about Comfort Women, providing a platform to far-right Japanese nationalists and comfort women deniers at various United Nations meetings.
In addition to being a conservative ideologue, Kaneko is an alternative medicine advocate. His latest research (as of May 2017) on the miraculous benefits of green sap (“aojiru” in Japanese) was published in a journal considered among “potential, possible, or probable predatory” publications by the so-called Beall’s List. On social media, Kaneko posits that aojiru could “eliminate breast cancer at once.”
In 2015 Kaneko ran for the Nara Prefectural Council from the Party for New Generations, which is now known as the Party for Japanese Kokoro. He lost the election after receiving less than three hundred votes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In September 2018 Fujii made international news when he was caught kicking a statue dedicated to victims of Japanese military “comfort women” system in Tainan, Taiwan. The surveillance camera footage shows Fujii raising his foot several times to kick the bronze statue while an accomplice with snaps shots of his feat.
