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Hiroyuki Nishimura has a remarkable voice for disenchanted Japanese youth. What he talks about much less is his ownership of the 4chan website.
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by Ben Dooley
Reporting from Tokyo
He has amassed millions of fans on social media, where he talks about the problems of Japanese society. He made the impression on the runway of one of Japan’s biggest fashion shows and in a government video urging others to take care of their finances. In a national poll, top academics said he was their first choice for prime minister.
Winning the affection of young Japanese who feel oppressed by their country’s inflexible rules, Hiroyuki Nishimura has risen incredibly high in Japan, a prominent businessman, author, and commentator so ubiquitous that other people simply call him Hiroyuki, a call as common as Adam in the United States.
In two dozen books and a bunch of magazine columns, he encouraged his enthusiasts to be more selfish, to avoid worrying about what others think, to paint less, and to outsmart the formula by obeying the letter of the law while mocking their spirit. for his role in creating two of Japan’s most popular websites, he has since become a national antihero through elevating a giant primary to mainstream society, expressing his many opposing perspectives as blatantly and publicly as possible.
But one thing Mr. Nishimura is much less willing to talk about: his 4chan property, the unnamed online bulletin board.
Under his leadership, 4chan has one of the most poisonous places on the internet. But few in the U. S. U. S. officials have heard of Mr. Nishimura, even though the site has been linked to mass shootings and conspiracy theories. And few in Japan know much about 4chan, even though his call seems in almaximum each and every recitation of M. Nishimura.
That’s partly because Nishimura rarely talks about his role on 4chan, either in English or Japanese.
However, his candor about almaximum everything else gives insight into his motivations and philosophy for running a site that has free space for some of the internet’s most destructive ideas, with its most frequented forums stifled by misogyny, white supremacy, and nihilistic hatred.
In interviews, Nishimura has been proud of his lack of ethics and willingness to overcome society’s barriers. Their near-total invulnerability to misfortune is something of a superpower in Japan, where an acute concern for society’s guilt is used as a tool of control. – and this has been fundamental in its success.
“I think about my existing and possible long-term options without reference to morality, and then I act,” he said in a 2007 interview with Spa, a Japanese magazine. mine is strange. “
This attitude turned out to have guided Mr. Nishimura in controlling 4chan and its Japanese predecessor, 2chan. As described in court records, interviews and dozens of his books and other writings, Mr. Nishimura, 46, followed a playbook for 2chan that turns out to have become a style for his successor: do as little as possible to control the site and roll back everything that requires converting.
He always operated outside the rules, and even when tension rose in Japanese society and the courts, he refused to budge, arguing that he was not doing anything illegal.
When asked by researchers over the years about his duty at the site, Mr. Nishimura, who, despite his prodigious output, likes to act like a slacker, has continually said that running 2chan is “boring” or “too troublesome. “”If other people had a challenge with its content, he added, they ask Parliament to replace the law.
Pressed on the factor in 2001, he responded that he had “no sense of responsibility” for the site’s content, adding that its maximum active users set their own rules.
“I provide space, but I tell people, ‘all of you do inside. ‘”
In 2015, when Nishimura bought 4chan, he did what he has rarely done since: he answered questions about his vision for the site.
It is already one of the most infamous corners of the Internet. But if he could make just one change, he told users, it would be for more attractive things to happen there, “even bad things. “
His wish came true. Since Nishimura took over, 4chan users spawned the QAnon movement, spread conspiracies about the covid vaccine and the 2020 election, and helped radicalize mass shooters, adding to the white supremacist who conducted a bloodbath last spring in Buffalo. A congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 incident riots at the Capitol revealed that Mr. Nishimura passed on information about Americans related to the attack. And the man accused of attacking President Nancy Pelosi’s husband in October wrote that it was a common sign on the site.
With his websites, Nishimura, who declined to be interviewed for this article, said he was simply responding to a call to outlets where other people can exercise their freedom of expression. He insisted he had a good reputation under the law and responded to government requests for data on alleged work-related crimes.
Nishimura started with 2chan, an extensive, chaotic and, most importantly, anonymous bulletin board he created in 1999 while studying at the University of Central Arkansas. In May 2000, he was already infamous, after a user posted an encrypted message on a city bus in southern Japan, then kidnapped him, stabbed 3 other people, and killed one.
The episode crossed the Japon. De new users flooded the and Mr. Nishimura was temporarily discovered in the news, brazenly explaining his fondness for a country that had just reconciled with the Internet.
“We don’t live in a utopia,” he said in a 2002 interview with Japan’s Flash magazine. “Something had to happen. “
Sooner. The site became a source of free and eccentric culture, fitting into one of the few places in Japan where other people can blatantly express their opinions.
In 2004, 2chan went mainstream with the release of “Train Man,” a collection of posts purporting to show how users helped an unfortunate nerd court the woman of his dreams. The story became a bestseller, a blockbuster movie, and a popular TV screen. This has made 2chan the most active in Japan.
While most users argued or complained about work, others threatened to kill, posted bomb threats, and generated reckless conspiracy theories. A flood of posts from far-right users has denied Japan’s war crimes and contributed to a nationwide rise in hatred against Korea.
While Mr. Nishimura profited handsomely from it—earning up to $100,000 a month—he has also become adept at evading its costs. By his own account, he has been sued more than a hundred times for posts on 2chan. He refused to pay at least $1 million in court judgments, pointing to the lack of penalties for fraud.
“If I was killed for not paying, I would. But nothing will happen to me if I don’t pay, so I won’t,” he told reporters after a hearing in 2007.
For Nishimura, avoiding prosecution, like everything else about 2chan, “is just a game,” said Eichiro Fukami, who has worked extensively with M. Nishimura has been working on 2chan-related projects for years. Fukami effectively sued Mr. Nishimura for defamation after Mr. Nishimura accused him of embezzlement.
Nishimura, he said, has spent countless hours thinking about tactics to bypass legislation and regulations. The servers used through 2chan were founded in the United States, outside the scope of Japanese law. At one point, Nishimura pointed to the site a devoted organization to take advantage of the tax exemption, Nishimura said. Fukami.
“He was moving to the edge of the rules,” he added.
As 2chan’s reputation prices rose, Mr. Nishimura sought to distance himself. In early 2009, he announced that he had sold the site and severed their relationship. He wrote an e-book called “The Reason I Chose 2chan. “
The story didn’t last long. Legal proceedings involving Mr. Nishimura revealed that police believed the sale of 2chan was a ruse to hide his property. In a subsequent unrelated lawsuit, his lawyers proved that Mr. Nishimura had continued to manage the site in secret.
In 2013, Nishimura lost 2chan in a dispute with Jim Watkins, an old friend who later became the owner of 8chan, an even less regulated edition of 4chan. In one fell swoop, Nishimura had lost a very important source of income. and influence.
About two years later, Mr. Nishimura bought 4chan from an American named Christopher Poole. The site had been the birthplace of early memes like Rickroll and LOLcats. But it had a darker side, spawning Gamergate, a crusade of harassment that flooded the women in the video. gaming industry with death and rape threats, and misogynistic culture Incel.
By 2014, Mr. Poole was exhausted and eager to find a replacement. Nishimura interested.
In his successful anti-productivity manifesto “One Percent Effort,” Mr. Nishimura wrote that he would buy 4chan because he was looking to get out of the aging and declining Japanese market. Anonymous message boards, he said, were well known as puts. where “problems are easily raised,” meaning that top corporations were afraid to touch them.
While there is a lot of demand for the sites, there is little competition. “The site would make money even if it did nothing,” he wrote.
Today, the site’s operations are almost absolutely opaque. Unlike Mr. Poole, Mr. Nishimura rarely answers questions on 4chan. Its assets are hidden under a corporate veil and controlled by anonymous moderators who keep quiet with confidentiality agreements. (Nishimura, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times and others familiar with the situation, bought 4chan with the investment of 3 Japanese partners for an undisclosed sum. )
In October, a report on the Buffalo bloodbath through the New York State Attorney General singled out 4chan, noting that the site “operates on the sidelines of efforts across other online platforms to curb hate speech and graphic content that contributes to the cycle of white supremacy. “. ” violence. “
In a manifesto posted on 4chan, the shooter wrote that he had been radicalized through the white supremacist conspiracy theories he first encountered there. His own attack, he said, he encouraged through a 4chan video clip of the 2019 bloodbath in Christchurch, New Zealand.
While other sites have temporarily moved to publish such content, 4chan has done next to nothing, according to the attorney general’s report.
Mr. Nishimura seems to see a challenge with that.
“Since I run 4chan, we have never been sued,” he wrote recently on Twitter, without clarifying that, unlike Japan, US law protects internet platforms from liability for user posts.
“Logically,” he added, “this 4chan has fulfilled its obligations and there are no problems. “
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