Yasuhiro Takasaki (高崎康裕) is a New York-based business consultant and the president of the far-right New York Historical Issues Study Group. He has an MBA from the American University and an extensive background in real estate and construction industries, having worked at Shimizu Corporation for 25 years.
Takasaki has been a speaker on panels organized by Himawari Japan, a comfort women denier group.
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.”
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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 (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.
Yumiko Yamamoto (山本優美子) is the former vice president and secretary general of far-right racist group Zaitokukai (在特会) and the founder of comfort women denier group Nadeshiko Action (なでしこアクション) which calls itself “Japanese Women for Justice and Peace.”
Yamamoto left Zaitokukai in late 2011 (according to her) or early 2012 (according to Zaitokukai press release) after members of her group have been prosecuted for violent assaults on Korean elementary school and other targets. In her book “Josei ga mamoru nihon no hokori (女性が守る日本の誇り)” published in 2014, Yamomoto explains that the reason for leaving the organization was not because of any disagreement with its activities, but because she felt confident that the organization had grown strong enough that she could focus her effort on comfort women denial.
Yamamoto is a board member of Global Alliance for Historical Truth (GAHT) and a key member of Alliance for Truth About Comfort Women.
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