Hiromi spent most of her life feeling trapped.
Growing up, the now 58-year-old Japanese acupuncturist felt pressure to conform to Japan's rules-based society, and to become a model worker and wife. She married young and had three children, but later divorced and says she still struggles to make ends meet.
"I'm sure some Japanese people question this way of life where we take the same crammed train at the same time; we get sucked into corporate life. It's like we don't think for ourselves; instead, we follow someone else's outline for us," Hiromi told CNN Business. She withheld her full name to keep her privacy.
Convinced there was something wrong with society, Hiromi looked for answers online. While reading the tweets of a medical influencer, who alleged big pharmaceutical companies used the public as human guinea pigs, Hiromi stumbled across Japanese QAnon influencer Eri Okabayashi's Twitter account.
It translated QAnon information into Japanese, and had more than 80,000 followers before it was shut down in January as part of a mass purge of QAnon-related accounts by Twitter. Hiromi started speaking to Okabayashi, who claimed to offer her the opportunity to make the world a better place.
For Hiromi, QAnon provided an escape from the realities of daily life.
"I have no idea what other people would think of me, but I feel like I became so free," she said.
The baseless QAnon conspiracy theory began in October 2017 when a person or persons using the name "Q" (which is a level of US security clearance) posted a thread on 4chan, an anonymous American messaging board regarded as the birthplace of the alt-right movement. The poster spread several conspiracy theories, including ones claiming that then-President Donald Trump is facing down a shadowy cabal of child-trafficking elites, and others about the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election. The theory quickly moved from the darkest corners of the internet to draw in people around the world.
Japan has become one of QAnon's most sophisticated and active networks outside of the United States with its own ideologies and influencers, according to social network analysis research firm Graphika. Though there aren't solid estimates for the number of QAnon followers worldwide or in Japan, Hiromi is just one of a niche number of people who have fallen into fringe QAnon groups that have emerged in Japan.
QAnon is rooted in the belief that governments and established institutions are lying to the public, an idea with broad appeal around the world. Experts say QAnon adherents are searching for meaning in a society they feel is broken, manipulated to believe QAnon answers all the world's problems.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/23/tech/qanon-consipiracy-theory-japan-trump-hnk-intl-dst/index.html