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”:
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.
As can
be seen from his LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-r-capistrano-414630120/?ppe=1
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
And in
full, here: http://web.archive.org/web/20170930091239/http://www.kjis.org/journal/view.html?uid=174&&vmd=Full#B
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/
