When Japan cool meets American violence

The bizarre confluence of a Japanese toymaker and an online agent of chaos.

It should come as no surprise that the families of victims of the racially motivated mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, are demanding justice. Earlier this year, the now 19 year old perpetrator of this heinous crime was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Last month, four families filed a lawsuit against individuals, gun makers, and social companies that they believe “profit from the racist, antisemitic, and violent material displayed on their platforms to maximize user engagement.” 

But you might be surprised to hear about one of the defendants named in the proceedings: Good Smile Company, a Tokyo-based maker of toys and hobby products. How on earth did a purveyor of Japanese playthings get mixed up in the ongoing tragedy of American gun violence? The answer is simple: it was a major investor in the notorious anonymous online imageboard 4chan, where the convicted killer was a regular participant. “I only really turned racist when 4chan started giving me facts,” the shooter is alleged to have posted on Discord.

This is dark stuff indeed, seemingly difficult to square with the concept of Japan as a genial purveyor of global fantasies. Things from Japan transformed us as we consumed them, and that has broadened our tastes, our worldviews, and even our imaginations. But there’s a flip side to this equation, too. Japan may be cool, but the ubiquity of Japanese cultural products at nearly all levels and demographics of American society means it’s cool among some who aren’t very cool people, to put it mildly.

I dedicated the final chapter of Pure Invention to this little-explored dark side of Japan’s rise as a fantasy superpower. “The Antisocial Network” showcased the rise of anonymous internet websites and their impact on global society: first that of 2channel, in Japan, and then its spiritual successor 4chan, in the United States. Both began as safe havens for the socially disenfranchised. Both devolved into incubators of disturbing, disruptive, and dangerous behavior, along almost identical lines that suggest this is a feature and not a bug of such systems.

4chan probably doesn’t need much introduction, but here’s a cheat sheet if you’ve been out of the loop for the last decade for some reason (and, oh, how I envy you). It is an anonymous online forum that was created by an American teen in 2003 as a gathering place for fans of anime, manga, and other things from Japan. At first it must have felt like a round-the-clock anime convention, with rooms for people of virtually every stripe. But within a decade, and particularly after the Lehman crash of 2008, a few of its wilder forums became the final destination for those too angry for mainstream social media. This was a group who reveled in one-upping each other with trolling and what we’d now call anti-woke ideology: misogyny, racism, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories.

This echo-chamber remained largely self-contained for years, aside from a few high-profile exploits like hosting hacked celebrity nudes, but shrewd political operators tapped into it during the run-up to the 2016 election contest. With the assistance of partisan media eager for scoops in a 24-7 news cycle, they injected far-fringe fevers like the Gamergate online harassment campaign, the Pizzagate fake-news scandal, and the paranoid conspiracy of Qanon straight into the mainstream. All three of these originated in 4chan forums before surfacing in major outlets. There’s a compelling argument to be made that Qanon provided the basic blueprint for the current platform of an entire political party.

Linking 4chan or Qanon to the same cultural flows that produced glorious creations like Hello Kitty, the Game Boy or anime infuriated a subset of the book’s readers. They felt blindsided by seeing the things they loved connected in any way to such odious developments in American, and global, society. Believe me, I sympathize. At first it seems a stretch: Qanon and its ilk aren’t Japanese, of course; they’re pure manifestations of the American id. (This is, incidentally, why Qanon never really gained traction here in Japan.) And the vast majority of 4chan posters are American. 

Yet 4chan has in fact been owned and operated entirely by Japanese entities since 2015, when the founder sold his stake in it to 2channel’s creator, Hiroyuki Nishimura. Details of the transaction remained private until 2021, when a scoop in the The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Nishimura had been funded in large part by Good Smile Company, to the tune of 2.4 million dollars, according to subsequent reporting by Wired.

Why would a toy company think it prudent to invest in a website that has been called “one of the most toxic places on the internet”? Even now, 4chan’s landing page is topped by the category of “Japanese Culture,” and forums for Japanese games, cartoons, and kawaii culture remain staples of the site. A fascination with things from Japan is woven deep into its DNA — literally, as even its underlying software is Japanese. Many of 4chan’s posters undoubtedly consume the same sorts of content for which Good Smile Company produces merchandise. Perhaps that helps explain the toymaker’s otherwise inexplicable decision to link fates with 4chan. Or perhaps Hiroyuki was just a very smooth talker. (He has in recent years emerged as a bestselling self-help guru in Japan, peddling get-rich-quick books to the same sorts of disenfranchised young men who first signed up to 2channel.)

Whatever the case, this means that one of the most infamous vectors of chaos into American society is, for all intents and purposes, Japanese. Interestingly, this connection is little reported on in the American mass media. Very few of the big reports on the Buffalo shooting even mention Good Smile Company, and even fewer mention that 4chan is owned and operated by Japanese entities. This could be because 4chan’s 2015 sale happened largely out of public sight. But the bigger reason, I think, is because of soft power. It’s hard to fathom how the Japan we know and love (or think we know and love) might be involved in something so repugnant. As a result the “Japan brand” has escaped any blowback from the 4chan connection – until this lawsuit, anyway.

The Japanese roots of America’s most notorious website are something that people really don’t like talking about – not fans of Japanese pop culture, not the bureaucrats behind “cool Japan” initiatives, and least of all the most politicized users of 4chan, obsessed as they are with Making America Great Again.

But it also helps that the problem isn’t really about Japanese content. It isn’t that stuff from Japan radicalizes – it’s that it has become so part of the fabric of online daily life that the radical-prone consume it too. This makes for some very strange bedfellows. It’s hard to imagine Black Lives Matter supporters and the Proud Boys agreeing on anything, but if there were a Venn diagram of shared interests it would undoubtedly overlap on anime. I don’t mean this flippantly. You don’t have to look hard to find examples of, say, an iconic Black moviestar and white supremacists both being fans of Attack on Titan.

The optimist in me wants to conclude this on some kind of upbeat note, to write about how made-in-Japan content has such a preternatural ability for broad appeal that it has the potential to build bridges. I believe it does. But there aren't two sides to this particular story. There is no bridging to be done between the victims and their murderer. The Buffalo shooting was a horrific tragedy, and there is no escaping the fact that a Japanese website played a role in its happening.

For its part, the Good Smile Company now claims to have “never had any influence over the management and/or control over 4chan,” and to have terminated the relationship in 2022 – tellingly, only after reports of its secret involvement began to surface. And Hiroyuki presumably continues to manage 4chan as before, from his home in France. He does not seem to have been named in the Buffalo lawsuit. Make of that what you will.

Societies around the world continue to wrestle with the question of how much responsibility those who host online platforms bear for the behavior of their participants. While that debate rages there’s no question that what happens in online forums can have real-world consequences. I knew including 4chan as the final chapter of Pure Invention would ruffle feathers, and it did. Yet the more time has passed, the more I realize that if anything I understated the case. The repercussions of digitally connecting the Japanese and Western imaginations are still unfolding in unpredictable ways even today.