Using Holocaust Denial Methods, a Denier of Japan’s War Crimes Exploited UN Rights Body to Defend Duterte’s Atrocities

IN CONTEXT: Shunichi Fujiki’s record spans comfort women denial, nationalist activism, using methods similar to Holocaust denialism, and a decade of using international human rights forums such as the UN Human Rights Council to shield governments from accountability — not to seek it. And many in the Philippine media were quick to amplify his disinformation.

MANILA — When Shunichi Fujiki took the microphone at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on March 11, he was introduced — and widely reported in pro-Duterte media — as a Japanese human rights researcher making an impassioned plea for the release of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. The framing was misleading at best.

Fujiki is not an independent human rights researcher. He is a Japanese nationalist activist and businessman with a documented record of using international forums to deny wartime sexual slavery, discredit accountability mechanisms, and deploy methods that scholars have compared — in striking and specific detail — to Holocaust denialism. His appearance at the UNHRC on the one-year anniversary of Duterte’s transfer to the International Criminal Court was not a spontaneous act of conscience. It was a coordinated political intervention by a man who has spent over a decade working the corridors of UN institutions on behalf of the Japanese nationalist right.

A Revisionist Network That Found Its Way to the UN

Fujiki holds two institutional titles: representative of the International Career Support Association and senior researcher at the International Research Institution of Controversial Histories (iRICH), a Japanese incorporated association established in 2018. iRICH is upfront about what it is: the organization’s own founding documents describe its purpose as working “to protect the honor and dignity of Japan and the Japanese people through international controversies over historical issues.” That is not the mission of an independent research body. It is an advocacy mandate wrapped in academic language.

The Georgetown Journal of International Affairs has placed iRICH within what it calls an “interlocking web of small but vocal lobby groups” that approach historical writing the way Holocaust deniers do — mining selectively for fragments that fit a predetermined narrative, discarding evidence that contradicts it, and presenting the result as scholarship. 

That characterization is not unique to one journal. The peer-reviewed Genocide Studies and Prevention, published by the University of South Florida, has documented the same methodological parallels between Japanese historical revisionism and Holocaust denial in dedicated academic research. The United States Institute of Peace has similarly described what it calls “Holocaust-like denialism” at work in campaigns targeting the comfort women historical record. 

Fujiki has been attending UN human rights sessions since at least 2014,  by his own account working behind the scenes drafting speeches, coordinating delegations, and lobbying committee members. In a chapter published by the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact, a fellow revisionist organization, he described his UN work as a counter-campaign against what he called “anti-Japanese propaganda” by “leftists” and human rights lawyers — framing international human rights accountability as a form of political attack rather than a legitimate legal process.

Denying What Survivors Survived

Long before Duterte, Fujiki built his activist reputation on the comfort women issue — specifically, on contesting the established historical consensus that the Imperial Japanese military coerced and enslaved women across Asia to provide sexual services to soldiers during World War II. The historical record on this is not ambiguous. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, multiple UN treaty bodies, and decades of peer-reviewed scholarship have documented the comfort women system. Japan’s own government acknowledged it in the landmark 1993 Kono Statement. Survivors testified to it before courts and international bodies at great personal cost.

Fujiki’s position is that the women were not forced into sexual slavery, a claim that University of Connecticut historian Alexis Dudden, an expert on modern Japanese and Korean history, has characterized in Inside Higher Ed as “academic fraud analogous to Holocaust denialism.” In his own public statements, Fujiki has argued that his position is not “comfort women denial” but rather denial that comfort women were sex slaves — a distinction that, in practice, dismisses the testimony of survivors while offering the appearance of nuance. The Japan-U.S. Feminist Network for Decolonization (FeND), which has tracked Fujiki and his network for years, has documented his participation in organized campaigns to have comfort women memorials removed in the United States, South Korea, and Taiwan.

The tactics went well beyond argumentation. In 2014, Fujiki — together with Tony Marano, an American video blogger known online as “Texas Daddy” — staged a photo at a comfort women memorial in Glendale, California, placing a paper bag over the head of the statue. Fujiki later acknowledged he had engineered the stunt deliberately to provoke Koreans and other Asians into amplifying it internationally, as a recruitment signal to sympathetic Japanese nationalists. It was, by his own description, a calculated act of provocation against the memory of sexual slavery victims.

Marano was not a random recruit. Fujiki had identified him — a retired salesperson from Brooklyn who had gained a following online for criticizing anti-whaling campaigns — and developed him into the English-language face of the Japanese revisionist right, coordinating his books and lectures in Japan. The Korean Quarterly, reviewing a documentary on the comfort women controversy, described the strategy plainly: Japanese neo-nationalists recruited white male Western spokespeople to project an image of cross-cultural, independent credibility onto positions that, coming from Japanese nationalists alone, would face immediate scrutiny.

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At the UNHRC on March 11, Fujiki described Duterte’s detention at the ICC as a “grave injustice,” called it “political persecution,” and claimed that the Marcos administration had extradited him “without due process, bypassing Philippine courts and violating national sovereignty.” He demanded a humanitarian review and the former president’s immediate release — framing what is, at its core, a criminal accountability proceeding as a human rights violation against the accused.

The structural parallels to his comfort women advocacy are not coincidental. In both cases, the argument runs the same way: international bodies are being weaponized by political actors against a sovereign government; the alleged victims are overstating or misrepresenting what happened to them; and the real injustice is being suffered by the powerful figure being held to account. Whether that figure is Imperial Japan or Rodrigo Duterte, the template does not change.

It is worth noting that Duterte himself cultivated unusually close ties with Japan during his presidency, particularly with the government of then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which notably refrained from criticizing his human rights record at a time when Western governments were raising alarms. The CSIS Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative has noted that Japan provided Duterte with an alternative source of investment and security assistance “without threatening the Philippines’ territorial interests or criticizing its human rights record.” The Japanese far right and the Duterte political circle were, in that sense, ideological fellow travelers long before Fujiki arrived at the podium.

Fujiki’s UNHRC appearance was also not a solo act. Reports confirm it was backed by the Republic Defenders for Peace and Unity (RDPU–DDS Japan), a pro-Duterte Filipino diaspora group in Japan organizing international rallies against the ICC proceedings. The timing — precisely the one-year anniversary of Duterte’s arrest — was not incidental. It was coordinated messaging delivered through a UN podium.

The ICC has denied Duterte’s requests for interim release three times. Pre-trial judges ruled in January that no new or changed circumstances warranted his release, and confirmation of charges hearings proceeded in February covering crimes alleged between November 2011 and March 2019 — thousands of killings documented by Human Rights Watch,Amnesty International, and Philippine human rights groups.

Not a UN Voice — a Lobby Visit

One more fact bears stating clearly. Fujiki’s remarks carry no UN authority whatsoever. Statements made during UNHRC general debates are delivered in a personal or organizational capacity and do not represent any position of the United Nations. The International Career Support Association, through which Fujiki spoke, holds what the UN classifies as “special consultative status,”  a category granted to narrowly focused advocacy groups, not independent research bodies.  That access, designed to bring civil society voices into international dialogue, is what Fujiki has exploited for years, using the visual imprimatur of the United Nations to amplify positions that would receive far less attention outside it.

The Masa Sara Duterte Alliance hailed his appearance as international validation. What it actually demonstrated is something more troubling: the same networks that spent a decade working to erase the testimony of wartime sexual slavery survivors have now turned their attention to the thousands of Filipinos killed in Duterte’s drug war — and are using the same forums, the same dismissals, and the same methodological sleight of hand to do it. The victims are different. The denial is identical.

The Media Reports Without Caveat, Context

The Philippine press coverage of Fujiki’s UNHRC appearance was, with few exceptions, a case study in what happens when journalists treat access to a UN podium as a substitute for editorial judgment. Several outlets — including Mindanao Times and Diskurso PH — ran his statements largely verbatim, identifying him only as a “Japanese researcher” or “human rights advocate” without any examination of who he actually is, what organizations he represents, or what positions those organizations hold. 

None of the coverage that amplified his remarks reported on his decade-long record of comfort women denial, his documented role in harassment campaigns against memorial statues, his alias “Shun Ferguson,” or the fact that iRICH — the institution lending him his research credentials — exists explicitly to defend Japan’s wartime reputation rather than advance independent scholarship. 

The Daily Tribune’s report at least noted, in a single line buried near the bottom, that UNHRC speakers do not represent the official position of the United Nations — a crucial caveat that most coverage omitted entirely. Reporting a speech is not the same as reporting the truth of what is said, and when outlets skip that distinction, they don’t just fail their readers: they become transmission belts for exactly the kind of disinformation they should be interrogating. (Rights Report Philippines)