A newly revealed scandal shows that a UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur received $200,000 from China and funds from other authoritarian regimes. The IMDAR network—supported by activists, academics, and media figures—has used international institutions to pressure Japan with politically motivated “human-rights recommendations.” Key actors such as lawyer Sayo Saruta played a role in advancing false narratives abroad, including claims about Japan’s nuclear program and “Okinawan independence.” The case highlights how Japan’s lack of counter-information strategy and legal safeguards enabled foreign influence operations for decades, contributing to major political consequences, including the broader environment surrounding the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Professor Yoichi Shimada of Fukui Prefectural University published an important analysis in The Sankei Shimbun, revealing that Alena Douhan, a female Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council, received $200,000 from China and additional funds from other authoritarian regimes.
This revelation confirms, once again, what must now be obvious: the UN Human Rights Council has long been exploited as a political weapon by illiberal forces.

One of the key facilitators is a Korean-born professor at Aoyama Gakuin University who appears frequently on NHK.
She traveled to Geneva and played a central role in the IMDAR network, an organization that repeatedly pressures the UN to issue “human rights recommendations” against Japan.
IMDAR, in reality, is not a neutral human-rights entity but a political front used to attack Japan from within the framework of international institutions.

Until August 2014, I was a subscriber of The Asahi Shimbun, AERA, and Shukan Asahi.
Through the reporting of the only true journalist of the postwar era—Masayuki Takayama—we later learned that lawyer Sayo Saruta, adviser to the late Governor Takeshi Onaga, traveled to the U.S. Senate and spread false claims that Japan’s nuclear program possessed enough plutonium to build thousands of nuclear bombs.
Her activism was designed to destroy Japan’s nuclear infrastructure and weaken national security.

Saruta was also the architect of the so-called “Okinawan independence movement,” openly advancing narratives aligned with Chinese interests.
She even insisted at the United Nations that Okinawans were an “indigenous minority,” a claim utterly detached from historical and genetic fact.

AERA and the Asahi media empire eagerly amplified her claims and treated them as legitimate criticisms of the Japanese government.
When Governor Onaga delivered his disgraceful speech at the United Nations—one that aligned perfectly with Beijing’s geopolitical objectives—the figure standing behind him was Saruta, along with IMDAR and similar operatives.

Japan, still under the long shadow of Asahi-driven postwar indoctrination, was fatally naïve.
That naivety, left uncorrected for decades, eventually contributed to the unthinkable: the assassination of the greatest statesman Japan had produced since the war.