by LINDA HAVENSTEIN & FABIAN SCHAFER
Abstract: This article investigates the popular social media channels of former Happiness Realization Party official Yukihisa Oikawa, who has built himself a profile as a media personality within the Japanese language conspiracy narrative realm. In our analysis, we put a particular focus on his statements concerning the Russo-Ukrainian war and examine them within the context of his larger ideological and political views. Using mixed quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis methods, we are able to trace radicalization and semantic shifts within his terminology, as well as investigate the connection between metapolitical communication strategies and the monetization of anti-media and conspiracist disinformation – a connection that is common for the political strategy of the global far-right.
Introduction
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, public discourse in Japan has mostly promoted an anti-war stance and portrayed the invasion as an act of aggression and a clear break of international law.1 Debates on social media largely mirrored this attitude, but statements opposing this view began to emerge and spread, especially on the far-right spectrum of the online sphere. One place in which this occurred was the social media accounts associated with Happy Science (?????, k?fuku no kagaku, abbreviated HS), a new religious movement with ambitions to restructure the political, economic, and social order by means of a wide and diverse field of activities and institutions, including the establishment of its own schools, a university, publishing and entertainment media houses, and a political party (Baffelli 2017, 139–141). While estimates of its membership range between a self-proclaimed 11 million to a more critical assessment of 13,000 (Winn 2022), its transdisciplinary and missionary style of participating in politics, publishing, and education has given it considerable visibility in the public sphere, making it the “leading new religion in late twentieth-century Japan” (Baffelli 2017, 139).
Among the associated YouTube channels, the one with the most followers was ‘the Wisdom Channel,’ a political commentary channel featuring Yukihisa Oikawa (?? ??, Oikawa Yukihisa), a former high-ranking official of Happy Science and its political arm, the Happiness Realization Party (?????, K?fuku Jitsugen-t?, abbreviated HRP). To our surprise, Oikawa retired from his 20-year career with Happy Science in the middle of our research. Therefore, what had started as an analysis of the anti-media and pro-Russia claims of an official of a political fringe party and new religious movement needed to be reconsidered, and instead became an analysis of what is usually called a ‘conspiracy entrepreneur’ in existing research (cf. Birchall 2021). With our dataset covering the very time of his transition from one to the other, we were able to observe this process in situ. With Oikawa, we thus analyze the articulations of a spiritual writer and fringe party politician turning into a social media personality, increasingly establishing himself in a social media counter-public sphere. We argue that he is a representative example of the strategic connection between the monetization of anti-media and conspiracist disinformation, and metapolitical communication strategies,contributing to the internationalization of the far-right in Japan by disseminating pro-Putin and Trumpian worldviews.
Happy Science and Yukihisa Oikawa
Happy Science is a religious and spiritual movement founded in 1986 by Ryuh? ?kawa (?? ??, ?kawa Ry?h?), promoting a blend of religious teachings, self-help principles, and political ideologies. The organization’s doctrine is based on the belief that its recently deceased founder and central figure ?kawa was connected to, or a reincarnation of, various religious figures, including Buddha and Jesus Christ, and that he possessed special divine knowledge (Grillmayer 2013, HAPPY SCIENCE Official Website n.d.). The organization’s political party, the Happiness Realization Party, runs on a conservative and nationalistic platform, including the revision of the constitutional “peace” article 9 and boosting military spending to attack North Korea, as well as to radically increase the birth rate in order to make Japan a globally leading country (for more information on HS and HRP cf. Baffelli 2010, Baffelli 2017, Demetriou 2009, Gilbert 2021, Hall 2023, Klein 2011).
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