Masaya Kudo was chairman of the Nihon-no-Kai ultranationalist political movement in Japan during the 2010s.
Biography[]
Masaya Kudo was born in Tokyo, Japan, and he founded the ultranationalist Nihon-no-Kai organization before serving as its chairman. Kudo supported the return of the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin, and the Senkaku Islands to Japan from Russia and China, and he also supported traditional Japanese values. In a May 2015 interview with Vice, he denied that his group was connected to the Yakuza, while acknowledging that many other right-wing organizations were run by the Yakuza as front organizations. He also denied that his group was racist, and instead shared how his group (among other right-wing groups) often engaged in volunteer work, such as providing enough soup and rice for 400 people following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, and forming the Disaster Area Safety Patrol to stop Chinese criminals in Ishinomaki from looting and mutilating dead bodies. The group armed itself with iron pipes, pepper sprays, and tasers, and he said that, if a person responded to his group's greetings in Chinese, the group would have killed them. Later in the interview, he admitted that his group would follow the protest instructions of Yakuza subgroups, but insisted that this was the limit of his group's interactions with the Yakuza. On 10 November 2015, Kudo ceded the chairmanship to his colleague Michiya Nakahodo.
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