Building an Inter-Communal Anti-Colonial Movement against Collusive Denialism and Colonial Impunity by the Japanese Far Right, Zionists, and White Supremacists
The landslide victory of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's party in the election in February 2026 has generated widespread critique over her far-right imperialist militarism. Global implications of Takaichi’s supermajority victory cannot be fully understood, however, without examining the longstanding dangerous collusion among Zionists, white supremacists, and the Japanese far right, including members of the ultra conservative Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference) , over decades. Since former prime minister Shinzo Abe’s pro-Israel turn (2012-2020), the Japanese far right, including Abe and his acolytes like Takaichi, has propelled the Israelization of Japan in collusion with Zionist individuals and institutions (including Benjamin Netanyahu, Hudson Institute, American Jewish Committee, Simon Wiesenthal Center, AIPAC and many other Zionist organizations) and US white supremacists (including the US ruling class represented by Donald Trump and many neoconservatives).
While Japan’s economy was contracting, those far-right politicians positioned Japan as an active participant in the US/Israeli imperialist war machine, which enabled Israeli settler colonial genocide against Palestinians as well as aggressions against Lebanon, Iran, Venezuela, and others. The collusive parties have urged Japan to build a “deterrence” system using Israel as a model, by purchasing the types of missiles, drones, and surveillance systems that Israel has manufactured and tested on the Palestinian people. In May 2024, for example, pro-Israel former US ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel urged Japan to learn from Israel’s “defense” against Iran, including the so-called Iron Dome, and apply it to the alleged crisis in the Indo-Pacific region, especially against the purported military threat posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Touting the benefits of the military enterprise for US profit making, Emanuel also made it clear that building deterrence means enhancing capacity for allegedly “preemptive” attacks against what the collusive parties conjure up as threats:
On November 7, 2025, at the Lower House Budget Committee , Prime Minister Takaichi proclaimed her desire to escalate the militarization of Japan, stating that “Taiwan contingency could create a situation that threatens Japan's survival,” thus allowing “the country to exercise its right to collective self-defense.” Yet even the Japanese far right, Zionists, and white supremacists have acknowledged that it is unlikely that the PRC will initiate a military confrontation. Takaichi’s assertion, however, was to pressure the PRC into responding militarily in defense of its national sovereignty, including over the territory of Taiwan. Takaichi laid bare Japan’s colonial and ongoing threats to violate its neighbors’ sovereignty, perilously threatening the lives of people in Taiwan and Okinawa. Zionists praised Takaichi’s belligerent claim as a departure from the ambiguous position held by previous administrations over the issue of Taiwan’s sovereignty. The US ambassador to Japan, George Glass, who is known for his pro-Israel and anti-China stances, also confirmed the US’s “rock-solid” support for Japan, especially commending Takaichi’s reduction of Taiwan from an issue of national sovereignty to a matter of national security for Japan and the US. Contrary to the widely held impression of her careless improvisation, Takaichi was merely reiterating positions long promoted by Zionist and white supremacist policy and lobbying networks.
Ideological and Institutional Collusions
Central to the Israelization of Japan is the collusive parties’ imperative to preserve their impunity for their ongoing and past (neo-)colonial and (neo-)imperialist crimes. The collusive parties secured their respective impunity through their opportunistic mutual support for their racist supremacist ideologies and official denialisms . In the words of the “Comfort Women” Justice Coalition , this was, “a systematic attempt at a permanent erasure of states’ crimes spearheaded by the highest levels of the government.” Back in the 1990s, Zionist organizations such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center had appeared to support victims of Japanese colonial crimes, since they considered imperial Japan to have been an ally of the Nazis. However, they later pivoted and opportunistically “forgave” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the Japanese far-right government for Japan’s past crimes, in exchange for Japan’s support for Israel and Zionism. Central to the exchange was not only Japan’s support for Zionists’ denial of their colonial crimes against Palestinians, but also Japan’s increasing role in reinforcing Zionists’ Islamophobic and Orientalist criminalization and demonization of Palestinian resistance and liberation movements against Israeli settler colonialism.
Hudson Institute, a Zionist and white-supremacist think tank with close ties to the Rand Corporation, became one of the institutional homes for this political and ideological collusion. The institute, which awarded its Herman Kahn Award to both Benjamin Netanyahu and Shinzo Abe , boasts of its hateful repertoire of so-called “research,” including Zionist demonization of Hamas . In 2019 Abe established a “Japan Chair” Policy Center for “research” focusing on issues relating to Japan at the institute utilizing Japan’s expanded “strategic overseas dissemination” budget (¥560 million from the fiscal 2018 supplementary budget ). Under the influence of the Abe administration, “Japan Chair” fellows propagated Japanese-supremacist and imperialist ideology for legitimizing and denying its colonial war crimes, including the Japanese military’s system of sexual slavery (so-called “comfort women” system), colonial slave labor, the Nanjing and Kanto massacres, Unit 731 human experimentation, massacres in Okinawa, and numerous other atrocities.
The Hudson Institute’s role in advancing this alignment was further demonstrated on July 23, 2020, at an event titled “Pushing Back Against Chinese and North Korean Missile Threats: Strengthening the U.S.-Japan Deterrence Strategy and Joint Missile Defense Posture.” The event promoted Israel’s deterrence system as a blueprint for Japan’s (re)militarization. “Japan Chair” fellows tethered Japanese imperialist ideology and racism targeting the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK—North Korea) and PRC to Zionist Islamophobic and anti-Arab racist narratives on Palestine and Iran. The institute further connected Japan’s anti-DPRK/PRC racism to US anti-communist and imperialist frameworks directed at the DPRK, the PRC, and Russia. In doing so, these actors helped legitimize escalating militarization by reinforcing overlapping racialized ideologies drawn from distinct regional and historical contexts.
In 2020, Donald Trump selected Zionist Kenneth Weinstein, then director of the Hudson Institute, as the US ambassador to Japan, although Trump’s appointment never materialized during his first term. During the ongoing Israeli/US genocide, Weinstein, who has since taken up the Japan Chair at Hudson, has intensified efforts to advance the Israelization of Japan. For example, on November 18, 2023, shortly after the Al Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7 and two years before the inauguration of the Takaichi administration, Weinstein was already promoting Japan’s role in building “deterrence” against China over the issue of Taiwan.
In an interview published in Japan Forward , the English-language outlet of the far-right Sankei newspaper, Weinstein linked the Japanese far right's imperialist anti-Chinese racism directly to Zionist narratives that criminalize and demonize Palestinian anti-colonial resistance, including the Al Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7, 2023. Weinstein credited his friend Shinzo Abe with making the connection and encouraged Prime Minister Kishida to continue Abe’s far-right militarism while further escalating the criminalization and demonization of Palestinian anti-colonial resistance. In other interviews , Weinstein has asserted that the alleged security threat posed by China necessitates expanding both Japanese and US militarism, including strengthening settler colonial control in Okinawa and other Ryukyu islands, while emphasizing Japan’s responsibility to expand its defense infrastructure and deepen its integration into the imperialist security architecture by joining AUKUS, a security partnership between the United States, Britain and Australia.”
Douglas J. Feith , a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, has joined George Glass , the current US Ambassador to Japan, in aggressively hyping the “Hamas’s double crimes” narrative, originally perpetuated by Netanyahu and Israel’s propaganda machine . They allege that Hamas intentionally placed its “military assets” in “civilian infrastructures” such as schools, hospitals, and mosques, in order to invite Israeli “mass murder” of Palestinians in retaliation, thus leading international society to blame Israel for its viciousness. The mantra glosses over the overwhelming evidence of Israel's genocidal intent that South Africa has presented at the International Criminal Court in January 2024. This propaganda also attempts to falsely present the armed wing of the Palestinian resistance, including Hamas, as isolated from the multifaceted, 100-year-old Palestinian national liberation movement and anti-colonial resistance against the ongoing Nakba. Needless to say, Israel’s lies collapse in the face of the basic historical fact: Israel’s settler colonialism and genocide began in 1948 (and even earlier if we count the decades of the British colonial mandate, which facilitated Zionist land theft, economic control, and genocide), decades before the foundation of Hamas. Glass, however, repeated this false narrative at the inaugural meeting of the Parliamentary Israel Allies Caucus in Japan , a Christian Zionist organization under the Israel Allies Foundation (IAF), which aims “to advance cooperation with Israel, defend the Jewish state against antisemitism and delegitimization, and highlight shared Judeo-Christian values.” Most disturbingly, Glass’s speech at the meeting reinforced a video message by Johnnie Moore , executive chairman of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), who falsely demonized Hamas in order to obscure the GHF's well-documented abuse of distribution centers as sites for the cold-blooded executions of Palestinians seeking food amid an Israeli induced famine and starvation.
The Japanese government, including the Kishida, Shigeru Ishiba, and Takaichi administrations, has played an increasingly active role in demonizing Palestinian anti-colonial and anti-imperialist resistance, including their armed wings, as well as the forces fighting in solidarity with Palestinian liberation, including the Yemeni resistance. In October 2025, then Prime Minister Ishiba jettisoned even Japan’s minimal support for the so-called two-state solution originating in the Oslo Accords and withheld recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly. On October 16, while condemning the UN resolution supporting two states, Glass praised Japan for supporting the state of Israel and Trump’s blueprint for the US-led occupation of Gaza.
In October 2025, large delegations of Zionist donors led by AIPAC and American Jewish Committee arrived in Japan, ROK, and Taiwan to promote closer ties between Israel and “US-allies” in the region. In turn, in January 2026, in the midst of the US imperialist assault on Venezuela, the Takaichi administration sent a large delegation to Israel led by former defense minister Itsunori Onodera . The delegation included Michihito Kaneko , Christian Zionist member of the House of Councilors, member of the right-wing Japan Innovation Party, and Chair of the Parliamentary Israel Allies Caucus in Japan, as well as Yusuke Arai, Japanese ambassador to Israel, and his wife Rui Matsukawa, who is Abe’s acolyte .
A group photo of the Japanese delegation to Israel posing with Benjamin Netanyahu in his office in Jerusalem on January 6, 2026.[1]
Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog thanked the delegation for Japan’s support of Israel during the genocide. Takeshi Okubo, Special Assistant to the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Ambassador in charge of Gaza Rebuilding Assistance, recently boasted that “Japan will help young people in Gaza gain economic independence and prevent them from radicalizing ,” while aping Israel’s and the US’s racist criminalization of the Palestinian resistance. During a telephone talk with H.E. Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the State of Qatar, on March 4, 2026, Toshimitsu Motegi, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Japan, not only refused to condemn Israel and the US for their unlawful attacks against Iran, but also falsely condemned and accused Iran of allegedly “destabilizing the region.”
Against Normalization of Genocidal Sexual Violence
A central mechanism through which the Japanese far right, Zionists, and white supremacists sustain impunity is the denial and normalization of state-sanctioned sexual violence—an extreme form of collective punishment used by imperialist states against Indigenous, colonized, racialized, and gendered populations for the purpose of annihilating Indigenous and colonized peoples. Abe’s primary goal in establishing the “Japan Chair” Research Center at the Hudson Institute was to enable the Japanese denialist government to silence aging survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery, so-called “comfort women” system . Through the system, the Japanese imperial government enslaved hundreds of thousands of women in Asia and the Pacific regions to subject them to the Japanese imperial military’s genocidal sexual violence between 1932 and 1945.
Since the 1990s, the survivors of the “comfort women” system have courageously led fierce transnational justice movements demanding a legally binding official apology and redress from the Japanese government. Like Zionist propaganda, however, Japanese far-right denialist politicians led by Abe have propagated colonial lies while falsely criminalizing survivors, portraying them as “greedy and seductive prostitutes ” who allegedly “profited” from sexual slavery. Elected officials from the Japan Innovation Party have even claimed that sexual slavery was a “necessary evil” for the Japanese imperial army. Central to the colonial lies was Abe’s Japanese-supremacist gendered racialization of the victims, violently identifying Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipina, Indonesian, and other racialized Asian and Indigenous Pacific Islander women as inherently rapable under the Japanese supremacist imperialist rule. Through denying the crime, the far-right Japanese government continues to normalize their colonial and imperialist dominance.
As eminent feminist scholar and public intellectual Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi has taught us (for example, in her “Israeli Settler Colonialism in Context: Celebrating (Palestinian) Death and Normalizing Gender and Sexual Violence ”), Israeli denialism also centers around Israeli genocidal gendered violence. From Gaza to Israeli prisons, Israeli soldiers and settlers have engaged in this genocidal gendered violence as part of a normalized and systematized process of torture and collective punishment against the Palestinian people . Similar to Japanese denialists who attempt to criminalize victims, Israeli denialists, led by Netanyahu and the Zionist propaganda machine, have constructed a baseless colonial rape myth to demonize Hamas, Muslim, and Arab men, as alleged rapists of Israeli women. They did so to “manufacture consent for genocide” and to justify the detention and torture of Palestinian men, including journalists and medical professionals, as well as children, as part of Israel’s genocidal collective punishment against the Palestinian people. US colonial/imperialist feminists , such as Hilary Clinton and Kamala Harris, have continued to invoke this now completely debunked rape myth , while refusing to express feminist solidarity with Palestinians of all walks of life, including Palestinian women and queer people, who have testified to systematic brutal state-sanctioned genocidal sexual violence by Israelis.
Takaichi is also a colonial-imperialist feminist, specifically the kind I call “denialist feminists.” Denialist feminists, including Takaichi and other Japanese far-right feminists, have built their “feminist” careers by denying past and ongoing Japanese-supremacist colonial crimes. Since the 1990s, Takaichi , along with Abe, has played a pivotal role in erasing Japan's colonial history from school textbooks, especially the history of the sexual slavery system. After Takaichi’s assertion about a “Taiwan contingency,” Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff vividly depicted the prime minister as a bellicose monster spewing forth a genocidal rapist soldier from her mouth.[2]
This image is a caricature of Japan’s new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, standing on the Japanese archipelago with black high-heeled shoes on. The image is signed by Carlos Latuff.[2]
As Prime Minister Takaichi shamelessly, submissively and with strategic “cuteness” embraced fascist war criminal Donald Trump during her most recent official trip to Washington D.C., her “feminism” came to embody a cis-hetero-patriarchal form of feminine submission to white supremacy that is inherent in Japanese imperialist ideology. This dynamic must also be understood within a broader global context of imperialist core ruling class violence and impunity. While the world is riveted by the Epstein files, Palestinian Youth Movement contended:
The billionaires, political officials, and intelligence agencies at the heart of the [Jefferey] Epstein story are the same or similar to the networks involved in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, counterrevolution in Latin America, the ICE raids in American neighborhoods, and so much more. We should not be so shocked that a class which immolates children daily in Gaza also trafficks and sexually abuses them. Their lavish and amoral lifestyles are fueled by mass death.
In this context, the Israelization of Japan—symbolically led by cis-hetero-patriarchal denialist feminist Takaichi—can be understood as part of a broader process of the country’s ruling class integration into these transnational imperialist-zionist-white supremacist networks of violence and impunity.
Inter-Communal Solidarity for Anti-Colonial Resistance
It is critical for people to counter the Israelization of Japan and the collusive parties’s desire to turn Japan’s “deterrence” system into “preemptive” military aggression against manufactured threats. Do the Japanese people who voted for Takaichi in the most recent election know that they are consenting to becoming “Israelis” who are waging fascist colonial wars of invasion propelled by Jewish-supremacist Zionist ideology and the fanatic and cold-blooded genocide of Palestinians? This genocidal violence has killed and injured hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the past two and a half years and has caused widespread destruction of Gaza’s ecology and life-sustaining infrastructure, including homes, schools, hospitals, and places of worship. Are the Takaichi supporters prepared to become foot soldiers of imperialist militarism, carrying out the same atrocious colonial crimes committed during Japan’s brutal rule in Okinawa and Ryukyu islands, ancestral lands of the Indigenous Ainu people, Taiwan, Korea, China, and across the Asia-Pacific region, this time also against Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, and others in collusion with the US, Israel, and the broader imperialist core?
Japan has used its immigration and criminal justice systems to perpetuate colonial and racist attacks against Zainichi, Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese, South East Asian, Okinawan, Ainu, Buraku, Arab, Muslim, Kurdish, and other communities of color residing in Japan. Would Japan allow the Israeli military to further escalate this violence, in the same way that the Guantánamo, US border agents, and ICE have adopted the Israeli model of violent abduction and indefinite administrative detention of people who have not been charged with any crime? In fact, on March 5, 2026, the prime minister’s official X (formerly Twitter) account announced that Takaichi “received a courtesy call from Mr. Peter Thiel, Co-Founder and Chairman of Palantir Technologies Inc., at the Prime Minister’s Office .” Takaichi’s move is all the more striking amidst the intensifying global BDS movement against Palantir due to the company’s “unwavering, ongoing technological and ideological support for the Israeli military.”
To counter the expanding imperialist and fascist networks of violence, it is most urgent for grassroots anti-colonial/anti-imperialist movements to expose how the fascists’ ideological and material collusion reinforces and sustains impunity. It is critical for the radical left to forge closer and stronger inter-communal coalitions across borders, connecting the Palestinian anti-colonial national liberation movement, the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction) movement, Okinawan anti-base and anti-colonial struggles, Indigenous land back movements, the Zainichi Korean liberation movement, Black revolutionary movements, and anti-colonial feminist struggles such as “comfort women” justice movements, to name a few.
Key to such intercommunal coalitions is our collective (and personal) memory of past and ongoing anti-colonial resistance, which serves as the foundation for standing in firm solidarity with anti-colonial resistance in all forms, especially armed struggle led by the masses. Dr Tiffany Willoughby-Herard , a prominent Third-World studies scholar, has shown how Black feminists such as Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Collective refused the white supremacist, settler colonial-imperialist state that normalizes murders and rapes of Black women through various forms, including armed resistance.
We also remember more recent anti-colonial resistance by CeCe McDonald against anti-Black, anti-trans violence by neofascists in 2011, as well as the imperialist state’s criminalization of her resistance and unjust incarceration following the death of one of her attackers. During the Kanto massacre , which took place after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, the Japanese imperial government, police, military, and vigilantes slaughtered and raped Koreans, Chinese, socialists, and those targeted as such. The Japanese government, police, and media orchestrated and justified the massacre as a way to punish and demonize fierce armed uprisings against Japanese colonial rule in Korea and elsewhere. In fact, one of the reasons the Japanese imperial government expanded the Japanese military sexual slavery system- particularly targeting the most impoverished colonized women- was to suppress anti-colonial resistance to the military’s widespread genocidal sexual violence across its empire.
Movements in and for Palestine, including survivors of settler colonial sexual violence, have refused to be silenced in the face of imperialist attempts to break their will to resist. Influential Palestinian feminist scholar Dr. Lena Meari has shown how survivors viewed practicing sumud (steadfastness) throughout their suffering as central to collective Palestinian anti-colonial resistance. When the Japanese government attempted to placate “comfort women” survivors by throwing money at them, survivors- many of whom were severely impoverished- rejected these efforts and instead demanded a sincere official apology as the sine qua non of meaningful redress. In doing so, the survivors played a leading role in demanding genuine decolonization for all the colonized and racialized peoples. In Mumia abu Jamal’s words, Palestinians and “comfort women” survivors have stood as “Indigenous living refutation of settler colonialism.”
These histories of resistance do not remain confined to their specific contexts but instead point toward the necessity of building shared, transnational frameworks of struggle and knowledge. In response to the revolutionary statement by Palestinian and Arab thought leaders published in al Akhbar, cross-border epistemic insurgencies against the collusive denialism allows us to build an anti-imperialist radical vision for justice, while honoring the enduring labor of struggle for justice, including armed resistance, martyrdom, hunger strikes led by Palestinian prisoners, and many other forms of revolutionary sacrifice.
Tomomi Bae Kinukawa (they/them/theirs) has taught in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State University for over ten years. As a queer scholar-activist with Zainichi Korean and Japanese ancestors, Kinukawa has published widely in academic and social left media, including Feminist Formations, Journals of Women's History, Archives of Natural History, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Mondoweiss, and Counter Punch. Kinukawa is completing their book project tentatively titled Anti-Colonial Health as Insurgencies: Zainichi Korean Community Health Movements Against Imperialist Japan’s Medical Genocide. The book offers a unique interdisciplinary critique of medical apartheid and genocide by analyzing the relation between regional racial and gender politics and health disparities in a transnational comparative frame. Kinukawa is a founding member of the “Comfort Women” Justice Coalition.
Notes
[1] X post by @IsraeliPM_heb on January 6, 2026. The text reads: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met this evening in his office in Jerusalem with a delegation of members of parliament from Japan. The Prime Minister congratulated the members of the delegation on their visit to Israel, and thanked them for standing by Israel throughout the war. During the meeting, the Prime Minister discussed with the members of the delegation regional challenges and the promotion of cooperation between the countries.” https://x.com/IsraeliPM_heb/status/2008597973585011117?s=20
[2] Takaichi, who wears a blue jacket and a short black skirt, is holding a Japanese imperial flag in her left hand and thrusting it upward. Takaichi’s mouth is wide open like a monster. Out of the mouth, a ghost of WWII, which looks like a human skeleton dressed in the brown uniform of the Japanese imperial military, strides out with a bayonet that points forward, in his hands. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=3306372506168010&set=pb.100003858796537.-2207520000&type=3