Saturday, September 30, 2017

Who is Andrew Capistrano?

It has come to my attention that this individual suspected of being a covert CIA operative has been erased from the current (renamed, etc.) version of the website of the CIA/Ko-an-sho “think tank” front formerly called Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, so the record needs to be preserved. I have located the archived webpages for the old site, after some confusion...

After posting the first iteration of this post, I realized that the name of the "think tank" previously known as Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation has been changed to "Asia Pacific Initiative". Here is a link to a quasi promotional Japan Times article I just discovered related to the founding of the original organization: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/01/10/national/japan-urged-to-embrace-u-s-style-think-tanks/#.WdADk8ig-Uk

The name was changed in July 2017: https://apinitiative.org/en/

Yoichi Funabashi is suspected to be yet another media mogul (like the deceased former owner of the Japan Times, Mr. Ogasawara, examined on this blog) who works for/with the CIA/Ko-an-sho (公安省). The Asahi Shinbun is regarded as left-leaning historically, but that has not panned out in recent years at all. This guy is undoubtedly part of the reason. He is a stealth neoconservative/neoliberal ideologue aiming to promulgate that ideology in the guise of a "liberal international order". 

This is the link to the archived page: 
http://web.archive.org/web/20160310054928/http://rebuildjpn.org:80/en/about-us/staff/




This is the present version of the former webpage on which Capistrano appeared, which instead lists Harry Dempsey (MI6) and Joseph Doyle (CIA) as “Research Assistants”:

Apparently the individuals stationed with this front are being groomed for “official cover” posts in the diplomatic corps, which can be gleaned from the lecture featuring Capistrano at the U.S. Embassy’s “American Center” shown below.




Capistrano has removed this photo (now the only one a Google search returns as a cached: https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=Andrew+Capistrano,+Japan&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjlmavUxczWAhXJKpQKHdhfAFUQ_AUICigB&biw=1280&bih=601&dpr=1.5#imgrc=Mwd-kRO5lprJtM:) from his LinkedIn profile.

There is only one other specific reference to his ever having been affiliated with said organization, and that is a “Bio-Data” blurb which pops up when you hold the cursor over the link (but doesn’t display as an independent window) on this page on the Korean Association of International Studies page that published a paper he wrote:
http://www.kjis.org/journal/view.html?uid=174&&vmd=Full#B









Archived on list, here:

Meanwhile, as shown in the following image, there is an indirect reference to the "think tank" in this publication from UC Berkeley's History Department:


That reads
Andrew Capistrano (BA ‘11): “Greetings from Japan to everyone in the history department! After graduation I moved to Tokyo, received a MA in political science from Waseda University, and worked at the US embassy’s public affairs center. Currently I am doing research on the US-Japan alliance for a think tank. I will finally leave in September to start a PhD in international history at the London School of Economics, where I’ll study US-Japan-UK relations and the international order of the early 1920s. I am still glad I took History 118C with Professor Barshay.”

In 2015 he presented a lecture at the American Center operated by the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo:




In 2014 he had presented a lecture at something called Knox English Network in a western suburb of Tokyo.
That lecture was described as:
外国人から見た日本って…?
Mr.Andrew R. Capistrano氏をお迎えして日本に来ての失敗や驚いたことなど、私たちからのたくさんの質問に答えてもらうセミナーです。その他、スピーカーの専門である国際関係論という難しいお話も少ししていただきます。
スピーカーの紹介:
Andrew R. Capistrano カリフォルニア大学バークリー校卒業。現在早稲田大学院政治学研究科にて国際関係を研究中。



He presented another talk of some sort about a year later, in 2015 at the same place.

















































And this is the link to the archived page of the "project" with which Capistrano was associated:
http://rebuildjpn.org:80/en/project/japanusmilitary/








Monday, September 25, 2017

Website featuring Thomas Bertrand blocked from web.archive.org, apparently Ko-an-cho (公安庁) connected website...

This article appeared in my newsfeed today:

http://www.nippon.com/en/views/b00206/
Thinking Out of the Box: French Retailer 
Selling “Bentō” Goods to Global Fans

That article features Thomas Bertrand, a suspected French DGSE officer with a hapless persona (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies_of_France) whom I first met in @2001--as a hapless French student... His first company is the main subject of the article, but he has another one, a quasi-IT company in the logistics sector called Ship&co. (https://www.shipandco.com/en/).

Like Vogely, he is a covert state actor falsely promoted as an entrepreneur... under the harmless guise of lunch box salesman. He has also opened another business aiming to disrupt logistics in Japan; i.e., to compete with the Japan Post. I won't dwell on this presently. He has been described to the Court in the lawsuit...

Normally this wouldn't merit a blogpost, and the only reason I am posting this is because I discovered, upon attempting to archive the article, that it was excluded from the web.archive.org site (the WayBack Machine). This screenshot shows his store(front) (pun intended).


Then I discovered that the entire website is excluded, indicating that it is likely a website operated by the Japanese joint-duty FBI/CIA called the Ko-an-cho (公安庁):
http://www.nippon.com/en/about-nippon-com/

Bertrand is quite the travelling salesman!


Nippon.com is sponsored by the Sasakawa Nippon Foundation, Ryoichi Sasakawa being an acknowledged CIA asset with organized crime ties, etc., also discussed in the lawsuit:

http://www.nippon-foundation.or.jp/en/who/about/history/01.html

And sociopath Robert D. Eldridge

http://www.nippon.com/en/authordata/robert-d-eldridge/

has been scrutinzed on this blog elsewhere in conjunction with another right-ring publication also featuring Christopher Tate... 

In short, another Sasakawa Foundation funded (Diego Pellecchia, etc.) entity (i.e., media front) used to provide cover for covert state actors and falsely promote them in civil society.

In the meantime, here are three pages from a filing with the D.C. District Court setting forth a paragraph including a list of intelligence agency proprietary front companies including those operated by Bertrand.



  

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

This is the deleted Facebook page of Sasaoka Teizan, my first shakuhachi teacher (Tozan-ryu)

He is not Japanese Ko-an-sho (joint-duty FBI/CIA: "Public Security Intelligence Agency"), but another of his former students, Shibata Michio (柴田道雄, aka 柴田玉堂 (竹号):http://www.baq.jp/sakka/mitio_sibata/) is, and I believe it was him who caused Mr. Sasaoka to deleted his Facebook page after learning he and I had become friends. Sasaoka Sensei retired some years ago and returned to Kyushu.

The story is complicated, but it involved people that Sasaoka Teizan Sensei introduced me to while I was studying with him, including, for example, another Ko-an-sho individual active in the shakuhachi world who wrote a book I translated a couple of chapters of named Shimura Satoshi.
More about those people later.