The history of the Soka Gakkai and its involvement in politics through the
Koumei-to (a political party in coalition with the LDP) make this a pertinent
and involved question. I made a somewhat abbreviated remark that it is a
pseudo-Buddhist group, but that requires a fair amount of unpacking. Technically
speaking, it is classified by sociologists as a New Religious Movement
associated with Buddhism. Historically, it was founded as a secular group, then
became a lay Buddhist group associated with a subsect of Nichiren Buddhism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nichiren_Sh%C5%8Dsh%C5%AB)
which it proceeded to co-opt, eventually being excommunicated in 1991 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nichiren_Sh%C5%8Dsh%C5%AB#The_Soka_Gakkai_.28Value_Creation_Association.29).
As
I mentioned in an earlier post, the party lost 5 seats in the lower house of
the Japanese Diet in the recent election due to its perceived collaboration
with the saber rattling of the LDP against North Korea, etc. The LDP, it bears
noting, includes many politicians noted for their association with the right-wing
group called the Nipponkaigi, and for visiting the controversial Shinto Shrine Yasukuni-jinja, which took the unilateral action of enshrining the
spirits of executed Class-A war criminals in the 1970s, after which the then Emperor Showa ceased
visiting the shrine. That shrine is now widely associated with Japanese militarism and visits by elected officials are met with harsh criticism by Korea and China, in particular.
Former
leader of the group Daisaku Ikeda has been criticised for promoting a cult of personality,
etc. You can get a sense of what that is about from this video of a song/dance
that was purportedly created by a layman from Kyoto in 1955. The lyrics are
translated by the group
We
of the Gakkai
Going into this defiled and evil world
Whatever that thwarts the way
Regardless of who we are
With indomitable spirit
Muster our faith to take action
Together we advance
Manifest our conviction
Today and tomorrow as well
We conduct shakubuku
As we march on
Our spirit and life-force gushing forth
With indomitable spirit
Crush the evil doctrines
For they cannot save the people
That’s why we are here
Living in Japan
We do not see the Land of Tranquil Light
Mountains and rivers
through
north and south
Evil religions are everywhere
With indomitable spirit
Permeating the land with the True Law
If we advance valiantly
Even the trees and plants will
move
in tandem As you can see from the original embedded link, which no longer works, below, the Soka Gakkai has taken down the video, but I had had the foresight to archive a couple of related videos, for the sake of posterity, you might say...
As
mentioned above, the original Soka Gakkai was a secular organization founded
during WWII, and the name "Soka Gakkai" means something like "Association for studying the creation of value". Its founder was persecuted by the State Shinto authorities for
lese majeste, etc., dying in prison. This brief declassified 1963 Report on the group from the
archives of the CIA is sufficiently informative: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79-00927A004100080002-9.pdf
As for Komeito’s dropping from 35 Lower House seats to 29 in the snap election last October, he said the setback — despite the LDP’s resounding victory of 284 seats — may reflect frustration among some Soka Gakkai members about what they perceive as Komeito compromising on its pacifist founding principles.
I was shuffling through some miscellaneous stuff in a drawer yesterday when I noticed this business card in the mix from the defendant in the lawsuit (whose name I'd spelled "Yahiya").
It is a curious business card, but I can't remember the occasion when he gave it to me. Considering that the address on it is a Tokyo address, he might have given it to me during his transition from Kyoto to Tokyo (circa 2005-6).
Aside from the fact that there is no telephone number on it, there is no occupation listed, either. Abdelsamad described himself as "The Nazir of Shaigya". Shaigiya refers to a tribal group in Sudan, which is where he said his father, whom he claimed was a diplomat, was from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaigiya_tribe In light of the Japanese rendering of the word Nazir as 准男爵 (じゅんだんしゃく(jun-dan-shaku)),it is clear that Abdelsamad was indeed trying to pass himself off as a member of Sudanese (sub) aristocracy, as the term in English is baronet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baronet The English language Wikipedia page does not show Sudan as a country that uses such a system, however. Here are links to the Japanese Wikipedia page: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%BA%96%E7%94%B7%E7%88%B5 as well as another page that refers to countries other than England:https://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q1153176256
To recap, in the
first post about the subject, I showed that he inherited a company from his
father (apparently), as opposed to being the “entrepreneur” that the Japanese
media with close ties to the government (NHK), etc., lauds him as.
In the case of
Koma, however, the ridiculousity factor is of a magnitude even greater than
that of Tate—the individual being promoted as in idiot savant IoT entrepreneur—in
that the industry Koma is portrayed as ‘disrupting’ (automobiles) is not a new
industry based on novel technology recently developed, but is in fact a highly
impacted and competitive industry involving a complex product with various
practical obstacles. As examples of authentic
Japanese companies involved in the competition, see this: https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2017/09/f9cda51f8ce7-suzuki-mulls-joining-ev-development-venture-led-by-toyota-mazda.html
The above pattern will be familiar to those acquainted with the material in this blog. It is important to note, however, that Koma basically misrepresents (i.e., lies) the background of the company (e.g., series of Japanese Youtube interviews with him embedded at the end of this post), and that the media repeats his misrepresentations without ever looking into the background of the company (established in 1961). The media is the mouthpiece of oligarchic interests operating through national intelligence services to promote these individuals fraudulently infiltrated into civil society under a flimsy cover as"entrepreneurs".
Many of the
Japanese media articles were comparing GLM (which has since been sold!) to Tesla, which is patently ridiculous. In the interview with NHK linked to in
the first post (related video in Japanese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ3IcIGA64o), Koma declared that if he had known about automobiles, he would
not have been able to enter the industry, because he used knowledge that had
nothing to do with automobiles to start the company. Recently, after the front
company was sold (apparently he still has a role in its management) an article
was published describing what appears to be the gist of a new business model in
the automobile industry that garnered investment. That article is linked to and
discussed below, but in short, the idea is to produce electric vehicles based
on modular, interchangeable components, in what is described as a “commodification”
of the automobile sector.
Before examining
recent developments, however, I’m going to start with the first article I
encountered in my newsfeed about Mr. Koma and his funny money company. The was
published by the Asahi Shinbun (a daily newspaper) in April 2017:
First of all, note
that the vehicle is described as having a top speed of 250 kph (confirmed here
on GLM’s website: http://glm-g4.com/performance/),
which is hardly something in the “super car” class:
A prototype electric supercar billed as a “yacht on the road” and a shining example of Japanese manufacturing was unveiled in Tokyo on April 18. The GLM-G4, from start-up firm GLM Co., is a scissor-doored four-seater luxury electric vehicle (EV) with a top speed of 250 kph. “I want to create supercars with sophisticated details that are full of Japanese technology,” said GLM President Hiroyasu Koma at the event. The car is expected to retail for 40 million yen ($367,000), and the company aims to sell 1,000 units in Japan and markets such as Europe, China and the Middle East.
OSAKA -- A high-performance luxury electric
vehicle under development by Japanese automaker GLM will lead the company's
charge into foreign markets.
The G4 will have an electric battery pack and
motors, running 400km on one charge. Yet the model also will sport 540
horsepower and achieve acceleration from zero to 100kph in 3.7 seconds.
GLM eyes sales of 1,000 units, with a price tag
of 40 million yen ($368,000) -- on par with European and other luxury cars. The
G4 will be the automaker's second model, following the Tommy Kaira ZZ electric
sports car, which was sold only in Japan.
The automaker's aggressive pricing is
deliberate, as the company aims to be "the Ferrari of electric
vehicles," said Tomohisa Tanaka, a director at GLM.
"Luxury cars actually have little competition,
so it is easier to target that market," said Koma.
As mentioned in
the first blogpost, not one of the cars was ever manufactured—let alone sold on
the open market—before the presumed Japanese front company was sold to the
presumed Hong Kong front company.
Here, note that
the video describes the car as having 540 HP.
On the GLM
company website (http://glm.jp/about/), the
car is described as using an electric motor sourced from Kyoto company Yuasa originally
for a vehicle manufactured Mitsubishi. The website describes three different
types of chassis design for three corresponding types of vehicles: “MR Sports”,
“Grand Touring”, and “Small Vehicle” (http://glm.jp/technology/).
There is a lot of hype on the Internet about GLM, including a lot of photos and
videos of promotional events, etc., but has very little technical or
engineering-related information. Perhaps that is because there is none—or
almost none—based on the company’s intellectual property rights (i.e., patents)
portfolio. As I mentioned at the end of the first post, GLM owns a grand total
of one single patent of apparently negligible value.
"We envision three types of tie-ups," he
told the Nikkei Asian Review. First, GLM can export the chassis, fully loaded,
and have its tie-up partner assemble the exterior body and windows locally.
Second, GLM can export just the chassis and the
vehicle control unit, and leave the local partner to negotiate with Japanese
parts suppliers for the remaining components.
In the third option, probably for later down the
road, the local partner can mount locally produced batteries and motors to a
chassis provided by GLM. In this scenario, GLM would have more of an advisory
role.
That appears to have
largely been a promotional gimmick that was used to build up some hype before
the falsely promoted front company was sold to another front company in a media
spectacle aiming to make the respective Kyoto and Hong Kong front companies
look like tech savvy innovators capable of competing with Tesla, Toyota, etc. Nevertheless,
as seen above, Japanese newspaper described GLM as an “automaker”. It would not
be infeasible that the Hong Kong jewelry company that bought GLM aims to enter
the auto market in mainland China, but there has been no indication of any such
movement. Moreover, GLM owns negligible intellectual property, which tends to
indicate they have created nothing of value that could be marketable.
From the 1990s, the
electronics industry quickly shifted to a "horizontal division of
labor," outsourcing the development and production of the main components
of televisions and computers such as semiconductors and liquid crystal screens
to outside companies. As a result, these products became
"commodities" for general use, and because it became difficult to
distinguish between the end products in terms of technology or performance,
Japanese manufacturers lost out to Chinese and South Korean makers armed with
cheap labor and mass production who offered the products at lower prices.
"We cannot allow
for the commoditization of automobiles," said Toyota Motor Corp. President
Akio Toyoda, showing an inclination toward in-house development and
manufacturing of products with the use of high-performance fuel cell batteries
for electric vehicles. However, in August, Nissan Motor Corp. announced plans
to sell all shares in its electric vehicle fuel cell subsidiary to a Chinese
investment fund, and otherwise made moves to adapt to the changes in the
market.
GLM Co., a venture
firm founded by Kyoto University in 2010, released 99 limited units of an
electric sports car. The motor, fuel cells and other main parts were jointly
developed with major manufacturers Yaskawa Electric Corp. and Omron Corp., and
the manufacturing itself was all handled externally. The company is planning to
release another 1,000 vehicles of two new models in 2019. Representative
director and president Hiroyasu Koma said, "The trends in the automobile
industry will shift just like in the electronics industry, shifting to a
horizontal division of labor for manufacturing from now on."
HONG KONG -- Watchmaker O Luxe Holdings said on
Sunday it will buy Japanese electric vehicle startup GLM for about 896 million
Hong Kong dollars ($114 million).
Of course, it is
not even true that O Luxe is a “watchmaker,” but that is perhaps a topic for another post...
GLM was set up as a Kyoto University venture in
2010. The company develops, manufactures and sells electric vehicles and is
often referred to as "Japan's Tesla," after its American rival.
Again, they keep
spewing promotional disinformation about GLM, and one can only wonder why a
leading Japanese economics newspaper would do that. GLM doesn’t deserve to me
mentioned in the same sentence with Tesla, or Toyota, for that matter.
I will
eventually polish these posts up a little, but am putting this up now simply to
put these fraudulent people, enterprises, and media promotions behind me—for the
moment—as there are others to address… For those who speak Japanese, there is a series of interviews I've come across on Youtube of Koma that details some of the points made in these two posts:
The next curiosity I’ll present from the intelligence
community side show is another individual being promoted as an entrepreneur in
the pseudo economy that the CIA and Ko-an-sho are trying to superimpose on
Kyoto as a sort of Trojan Horse cover for infiltrating their finance sector
cohorts and other suspects with disposable ill-gotten gain. I have yet to get
around to the second installment about Fujiwara Kenshin yet (Makers Boot Camp,
etc.), as there are just too many operations and operatives to cover, but Hiroyasu
Koma is in the same vein as Kristopher Tate; i.e., a pseudo tech mogul with
virtually no credible background story to support the flimsy cover for the
vaunted ascent into tech-entrepreneur stardom as an “entrepreneur” that has
crossed my newsfeed, catapulted into the public eye the CIA et al.’s media
team. In fact, Koma is listed as an “angel investor” in Fujiwara’s startup
Hacarus (https://angel.co/hacarus, https://angel.co/hacarus/jobs/147021-director-of-digital-marketing,
https://angel.co/hiroyasu-koma),
which was incubated by 500 Startups (see blogpost about James Riney).
Like Fujiwara, Koma is a suspected Ko-an-sho (公安省: Japanese combined CIA/FBI agency called the Public Security
Intelligence Agency). It is a common thread running through the so-called covert
operations that the operatives and their fronts are mutually supportive,
attempting to portray themselves as collectively constituting an organic aggregate
of sorts in civil society.
As described below, it is claimed that Koma started a temp
agency while in college, and then went to Kyoto University to do an MBA,
through which the company, Green Lord Motors (GLM), developing the “EV super
car” to compete with Tesla, etc., was launched. A prototype of the purported EV
super car was put on display last year, the price disclosed as @$400,000. Then,
before one was ever sold (2019 marketing date), the presumed front company GLM was reportedly sold to another presumed front company (selling jewelry!??) out of Hong Kong (http://www.oluxe.com.hk/en/company-introduction) that was founded in 1989.
describes Koma as being from Hyogo Prefecture, and
having played in a piano duo in college, through which he met the founder temp
agency Pasona (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasona).
It states that Koma proceeded to start his own temp agency for dispatching musicians,
and that he got a job at an electronics store to fund his temp agency, whereupon
he found that the electronics store lacked staff, so he started dispatching
temp workers there. It claims that he sold that company to another company,
then started an outsourcing company for home appliance manufacturers. Then it
states that he started a sales promotion company in 2000 called Koma Enterprises,
which achieved sales of 2 billion yen in 2009, whereupon he entered an MBA
program at Kyoto University.
But
wait, it gets even worse. According to the data shown on that archived page,
the company was established on January 11th in the year “Showa 36” (昭和36年) according to the system of numbering years according to the reign
of the emperor. So what year was Showa 36 by the Western calendar?
1961.
That presents
a number of possibilities beyond the scope of speculation of this post
regarding the company, such as that he might have inherited it from his father,
for example (maybe his father was named “Hiroshi”). We don’t know anything about
his family because there is no information online about the would-be Elon Musk
of Japan… Regardless, such possibilities do not (and cannot) account for the fact
that the media representations consistently lie about when the company was
established (i.e., the year 2000). The name of the CEO was changed sometime
between September 2007 and May 2008 (http://www.koma-ent.com:80/company/index.html):
Perhaps the information is being concealed because the
aim is to portray Koma as an entrepreneur as opposed to a politically connected
individual who inherited a company. The above-linked NHK article states that
the $400,000 super car was created by a company with a staff of 22, but the
explication of that is involved, so all I will say in closing this entry is
that the company appears to own a grand total of one single patent related to
motor vehicle chassis. The IP website that researched the company’s patent
holdings questioned the value of that patent. That IP blog is in Japanese only, and I don't have time to translate it, but will post a screenshot: http://www.itopto.com/blog/?p=3532.
