You’ve probably all heard the story about Michael Q Todd, the dolphin-botherer-botherer who got nicked in Taiji for not having a passport and chucked in the Gaijin Gulag (© CJ). When the story first broke I had a soupçon of sympathy for him as he apparently had a fiance and a child in Tokyo, but now it has all vaporized. An update on his fundraising page says (scroll to the bottom):
Michael is in Japan on a tourist visa.
His LinkedIn profile suggests that he has been running a company for seven months – two tourist visas plus an overstay, perhaps – in Tokyo. Strike One!
Michael knew his Japanese visitor’s visa was going to expire and [his fiancé] reports that he had applied for an extension.
You cannot extend a visitor’s visa except in exceptional circumstances, or by doing a visa run… Strike Two!
Before he connected with the Canadian filmmakers, he was then asked to produce his passport by the authorities. He could not produce it as he had left his passport in Yokohama where he has lived with [his fiancé].
Not carrying your passport as required by law. Strike Three!
There’s a bit of extra information/rumour/scandal in a Japan Probe comment here, and Eido clears up tourist visa issues here.
Perhaps after deportation he can ask Christopher Johnson to write up his case? 
@havill:
Thanks for that.
Comparing that photo with the one here … hmmmm.
Skin tone and face shape is very similar, Hogan’s hair is more grey than MQT’s but the style is similar, distance between the bottom of the nose and the mouth looks similar (taking into account that MQT is smiling).
Too much apparent damage to Hogan’s ears to compare.
MQT has a light mole to the right of his nose. This is either absent in the Hogan photo, or is hidden by the gore.
Fifty/fifty, can’t tell for certain.
Version 1.0
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s268/sh/7dca38fe-2860-429f-8c96-cd77671e302e/97dce16bdd20b1e040d836779cb8baa9
Version 2.0
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s268/sh/306a5ea0-c97e-4c67-b22b-bede27554c9d/2060fb92c3bae11af823c60893340c22
Version 3.0
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s268/sh/d5d0ee00-9405-4fc4-a64b-47da8bf89214/19ab16bbee4f996085737c75c25a456b
@VK:
Written records make it harder to lie. You’d think a lawyer would know that.
Lesson to those putting their lives into cyberspace: Don’t lie, especially if you’re asking for money. Leave that to the professionals.. politicians.
It’s all the Streisand effect. Some blog made by a guy who told his story about getting sent to Immi detention for overstaying (can’t find the link) did not generate a firestorm of criticism.
Why?
Because his story seems honest (overstaying was basically own his fault) and he didn’t make a public appeal for cash.
And I’ll just point out the other elephant in the room. Perhaps we Anglos in Japan are reacting so harshly because he makes us look bad. He meets (and exceeds by leaps and bounds) the stereotype of the drifter gaijin loser with no prospects who came to Japan to hang out and bang chicks, leaving a trail of abandoned kids behind like a GI in 1946. The cops may use Todd as “proof” that the racist part of their brain can be right. The Taiji police have more “proof” that activists and associated persons there are likely to be overstayers and liars; increasing their ID checking and less likely to believe excuses from people who might actually be innocent. Pity the legal gaijin visiting Taiji who honestly forgets his Zairyu Card post-MQT.
(Look, debito loons, I admit, as I and all of us “apologists” have always done, that racism is sometimes real! Ignore that as you always do..oh wait, I feel “apologism” coming on… Isn’t Todd’s new wife’s mother right to oppose the marriage? It’s just the reaction to marrying a bum, not racism.)
Bad gaijin make life just a little bit tougher for all of us. Maybe that’s why we are tough with them.
@Steve:
I don’t think they’re the same person and here’s why:
Debito foolishly published (then retracted, but after it was too late) the Japanese bank account details for the pseudonym Mick Hogan, which allowed people to see the account name (thank you, オレオレ詐欺 prevention laws!)
I’m not going to name him, but I will say the account is Osaka City based, and the account holder name was a Japanese-appearing family name and a foreign-
appearing given name (Japanese bank furikomi account names for both Japanese and non-Japanese are displayed as half-width katakana, hence the ambiguity).
@havill:
Fair enough.
@Level3:
Here you go:
Description of what the [Shinagawa] Detention Center is probably really like:
http://gaijinass.com/2011/09/01/letters-from-the-immigration-lockup/
Vending machines, convenience stores, laundry, unlimited showers, pay phones, LCD TVs in your room, private toilets. No forced labor. Free meals. Only two, sometimes one, to a room. Unlike a hotel (or prison), you can sleep in.
Alas, no internet (that’s gotta be tough if you have a net addiction to go cold turkey like that). And no pr0n in the combini. No beer either! And NHK only! Oh, the humanity! What a GULAG, eh?
Sounds a lot nicer than sleeping on the streets of Hong Kong penniless, honestly. I wouldn’t say that about real Japanese prison.
@Level3:
For me, the really scary thing about that facebook discussion is that out of the whole crowd involved, only one or two people question whether it’s right or wise for him to be discussing such a serious family issue in a public non-anonymised forum, and thus casually dispense with the privacy of the other people involved.
I mean, is it wise to have a nice public discussion where people get to freely suggest your potential mother-in-law is bigoted?
VK, I’m shocked, shocked! that you would be second-guessing a Social Media Guru! He’s a Twitter Coach and Social Media Strategist (TM), that aims to connect and promote great people who will make a bigger difference by collaborating! He continually studies social media tools and strategies especially Twitter!
Discussing your private life on Facebook with random strangers and allowing the entire world full access, nary a password required? Why, if a Social Media Expert does it, it must be legit!
Can I just say that Michael Q ‘Shitty’ Todd is not making me look bad. I just finished packing a whole wad of glands around a big shaft and I’m standing here dripping in white goo, surrounded by burly roughnecks who have never ever heard of this dolphin-shagging half-man who preys on plain looking older women for an empty shell of a living.
I’d ask around if anyone knew what a twitter coach was but I think I already know the answer. Hell, we all do don’t we?
*Twitter Coach: A charabanc full of housewives on a shopping trip.
Next.
@iago:
Twitter coach:
A baseball team manager with Tourette’s?
Sorry.
Twitter coach:
A person whose life is too fucked up to be a “life coach”.
Twitter coach:
Someone confusing the process of following a social trend with “getting in on the ground floor” and being an “innovator”.
@havill: That puts an end to that line of thought, then. Cheers.
One more thing:
from the indietogogo updates column (emphasis added): http://igg.me/p/235933
Remember, MQT claims he knew NOTHING of the fundraising going on in his name. That’s a critical part of his defense on how he has nothing to do with the money solicitations. This post does not specifically mention that “the work that had been done to support him” is the same as raising money to raising money, but the message is posted on the updates for the fundraising, by the ringleader for the fundraising.
Havill – there was a post on his Facebook and the helping MQT blogspot (now deactivated) that said the money had been transferred to the girlfriend’s bank account in Japan and used for the lawyer and any deportation expenses, with any spare going to the dolphins – apparently the lawyer, Michael and Yoriko “were all on the same page about this”
This was at the start of November, before his release, although this now seems to have been deleted from his Facebook
Despite claims that he wasn’t doing any translating or other work for the film folks
Steven Thompson posted to Michael Q Todd 14 October on Facebook
I helped Michael connect to the Canadian film crew. He volunteered to interpret for them and set up the interviews with them in Osaka and the right wing group Team Kansai that demonstrates in Taiji, Wakayama. This work was done by Michael in Japanese. His prep work for the documentary was more than any non-Japanese has yet done to interview Japanese about their pro-dolphin killing stance.
Someone guessed somewhere that the ARC validity date of 15th December related to being 1 month after birthday that follows the visa expiry – MQT’s birthday on Facebook does appear to be 15th November.
For the doubters there’s a few vids of the man behind bars – well glass anyway. http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10151151009098710
@Impressed:
Funny, it seems he was “hired” in any news prior to him meeting his fundraisers..and then suddenly a “volunteer” afterward? Is that about right?
I guess the change happened about the same time his passport got “stolen”.
I can imagine the conversation from behind the glass. ”
IF I were earning money in Japan for work on a tourist visa, that would be breaking (another) immigration law, 
but of course, I was “volunteering” and you should be clear about that on the fundraising blog which I know nothing about 
but am making videos for 
, right? ”
Or did they just take hints about the basics of Immigration law from Japan Probe?
“His prep work for the documentary was more than any non-Japanese has yet done “,
Too.. many…punchlines…
1. Exaggeration is Key To Social Media Succe$$
2. Too bad he didn’t prep his visa.
3. Did that include wedding preparations, or was that more of a surprise?
4. I think the Academy Award winning makers of “The Cove” who spent all that time trespassing and planting video cameras in fake rocks at midnight would beg to differ as to who the champion of gaijin prep work is on this subject…
They just can’t stop dissing their peers. Social media geniuses!
Michael ‘Queersmiles’ Todd doesn’t have emotional issues.
He causes emotional issues.
Hell even Level3, usually the champion of steadfast ironic detachment, has got his knickers all up in a twisty knot over this paltry, flimsy little fuckshard of a man.
@Level3:
Careful with the wording, there, Level3. The latest excuse is he wasn’t even there to “volunteer” (because I originally pointed out that volunteering aka work for no pay is still “work” in the eyes of immigration around the world).
The reason immigration does this is because if they didn’t, it’d be too easy for everyone that was caught but scheduled to receive payment at some later date (which is almost all work) to claim they were actually thought they were doing the work for no money.
Anyway, I think his current excuse is something like he was tagging along with his fiance and “observing” or something, with the fiance doing all the working/volunteering/helping.
And Michael Q Todd’s account of how much contact he had with the outside world and how many visitors he had has changed quite a bit. Steve Thompson appears to have met him several times. Yoriko appears to have met him several times. Updates suggest he is ‘eating well’ and ‘appreciates all the letters and reading materials’.
It’s only when he gets out that he insists he ‘didn’t want, need, or know about’ the funds until he actually was freed from the detention center. Which of course is utter hogwash. And note that he has not made -any- public post on his twitter or Facebook page asking for people that donated to contact him about refunds.
He’s hoping everyone just kinda forgets about it.
Everyone seems so prim and proper and shocked at the fact that they’ve just found out that Michael Q Todd is a liar, like he took a dump in the Paddington Bear biscuit tin aisle in Harrods when no-one was expecting it.
@havill:
True.
Awfully nice of them to pay for his transportation if he didn’t take part in any way. But I guess a lone indie filmmaker has tons of money to throw around.
@VK:
Thanks for your reply.
I think I’m being a typical leftie. I’m seeing someone act in a way that only harms himself, and then saying to those (justifiably) critical, “do we have to be so thorough?”
Furthermore, that he’s a “social media guru” suggests none of privacy issues are by accident or naivety, but by well thought out conscious choice. I know it’s easy to give yourself a fancy title these days, but regardless, he’s making himself open for attack.
I think the fact that when I was younger I also wasn’t careful with my online image (and it took me a long time to erase some things) leads me to be empathetic. However, neither he or Debito are young making fooling mistakes.
@answers please:
If it’s about the money, then a lot of the facts aren’t that important. There was misinformation, he admitted to it, and proclaimed to give the money back ASAP. The only thing for the public to do now is ensure the money does get returned. How many wives or kids he has doesn’t really matter.
@beneaththewheel:
I’d tend to agree with what you’re saying. Even the money is not really important except to the people who paid it, as a warning to future donors, and perhaps an indicator of how online payment services handle claims from donors who later deem whatever Cause to be fraudulent (weren’t there a couple claims – reported to have been refunded by the intermediary directly, before the balance got transfered to Todd’s side – a couple weeks back that were mentioned?)
The most important issue is the visa and WTF actually happened, is happening and will happen, as a lesson to the rest of us.
The social media and lifestyle choices just point out the (un)reliability of information on the above 2 points – and allow us to take educated guesses as to what happened. Which is (unfortunately) necessary.. as there’s no straight story here.
Now, if the phrasing of any refund efforts, the phrasing of any announcements to the donors is all engineered to guilt the donors into not asking for their money back (it’ll take me a long time, my kids, my new wife, new life, the dolphins!)..I wouldn’t be surprised, and it would boost the Shadiness Quotient of the whole saga.
I hope to be surprised, though.
@beneaththewheel:
I’m left wing, but I don’t think it’s left wing to question invasion of privacy – plenty of conservatives would do the same. I also don’t think it’s left wing to go easy on personal responsibility – although I can only speak for the British tradition, which holds that the impact of personal irresponsibility should not be excessively greater for the poorer than the richer, or the less powerful for the more powerful.
If he were, say, a Malaysian immigrant with ties here and dedication to his new home, for whom finding work is tougher, who got caught up in a political protest like those at Taiji, whose papers were not in order because he was struggling to maintain visa status because of the aformentioned difficulties, and if he was honest about his situation and status – I’d go into bat for him. Yes, he’s illegal, but fuck it, there are times when we need to see the bigger picture.
But here is a guy born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who plainly chose to be illegal, who has almost certainly been dishonest about the fundraising, who seems incapable of taking responsibility for anything, whose whole lifestyle seems to be based on the virtues of parasitism… What offends my left-wing sensibilities is his inability to account for how he impacts on the lives of others. Like too many people into “alternative” lifestyles, he appears to have, under the fluff and smiles and I-love-everybody rhetoric, an overweening ego.
In other news:
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20121119a1.html
@havill:
Some of their stories sound genuinely Kafka-esque. Good luck to them. It’s not as if Japan does has any kind of excessive immigration problem.
does@havill: Wha–? And the authorities didn’t do on the spot document checks and round them all up? Racists!
No, wait, uh…
@havill:
A coach-surfing bum getting a visa for marrying while in detention for visa violations would be a big fat insult to these people who have family, kids (from just one mother even!) and actually try to keep jobs.
I don’t know how the crusaders would spin such a double standard (aging white guy gets visa, brown people don’t). I guess just ignore it. Kind of like ignoring racist element of the “US soldiers are all criminals so kick them out!” movement. Kind of like ignoring the Asahi attack “journalism” (which they later apologized for) about Hashimoto’s burakumin roots.
Must be hard to be crusaders against racism in Japan when they ignore so much of it.
From CJ’s article:
I hope the MoJ uses neither twitter nor foursquare:
https://twitter.com/search/?q=mqtodd%20foursquare
@havill: Well, thanks for that. I had questioned the value of social media before, but question it no longer.
@havill: But, but, I thought he had never overstayed!
(BTW, I see Japan journalist Christopher Johnson has never heard of duplicate content
)
LOL, and someone pointed out on Japan Probe:
“However, one brave soul asks on his Facebook page, “When are you going to pay back the $6000 you stole from the well-meaning people that donated? You know, the money you said you ‘didn’t need and didn’t know about’?”
I don’t see the post, so might have been deleted, but someone still fighting the good fight…
@havill:
My god. Under suspicion of conning people out of $6000, unemployed with no source of cash except his fiancee, under investigation for overstaying, working without a visa and almost certainly of attempting 偽造結婚… meanwhile he’s spending more on dining out in 3 days than I do in a month (and I have a job!), hanging out in bars until last train on a weeknight, crosses prefectural borders and he signs up to advertise this all on 4sq?
I think he wants to get deported, just with lots of drama, so he can pretend it’s the evil system that’s to blame?
Ugh, no sense this makes.
“Jerry, just remember. It’s not a lie if you believe it.” – George Costanza
What’s up with CJ’s weird appropriation of the word ‘Japologist’?
He used it both in the article and in his comments here.
He seems to think its a real ‘thing’. Or it’s part of some lonely Jedi mind game that he plays with the other voices in his head.
@Ken Y-N:
He’s currently out on bail … usually set to around ¥300,000 to ¥400,000 for immigration detention centers. You know, if you had $5,774 [¥469,889] laying around, you could use part of that to pay for bail. I guess the fiance didn’t have that kind of cash in her bank account, otherwise he could’ve been released earlier.
Anyway, I sure hope one of his bail conditions isn’t that he stay in a designated prefecture, otherwise he may have a harder time repaying that money he claims he didn’t need.
@havill:
If true, it reminds me of how Sea Shepherd head dude Paul Watson skipped bail and fled Germany.
The link is pure coincidence, but shows it is easy to not care about bail if you’re using other peoples’ money. We’ll see.
Doesn’t this also shoot a big hole in the claims of armchair activists that gaijin can never get bail in Japan? I suppose it would still be a rare case, but if having a Japanese guarantor on the bail can get you out of jail until a judgment is made..that would be something useful to know. (but would shoot another hole in the narrative that Japan Is Like Sooooo Totally Racist..and will thus be ignored)
@Level3:
Apparently not that rare, as the Japan Times article about the foreigners demonstrating against their deportation orders which were currently pending which I wrote about above, obviously implies these foreigners too, must be out on bail.
@havill:
Apart from appealing to people’s vanity (Look, I’m special and I’m HERE), I’ve never seen the point of foursquare, except as an invitation to commit burglary.
If going to Tokyo breaks his bail conditions, (and presuming (a big if, though) CJ didn’t make that bit up or distort this, he clearly understands his bail conditions), and he’s seen what people are doing with all the other information he’s put up about himself, it’s very hard to fathom why he’s advertising the fact. He can’t be that stupid. Can he?
I wonder if there is an exception for Tokyo to see one of his offspring. “Limited to Kanagawa and Tokyo” doesn’t sound as bad, and it wouldn’t be beyond CJ to make stuff up.
@havill:
Of course!
<—to me.
Bail is possibly quite common, except it's among those brown-skinned people who might not speak English..and worse, actually engage in the active type of activism, rather than the blogging in English type of “activism”. They’re stealing the spotlight from #Microagression&OtherAngloGaijinProblems!
Perhaps the armchair activists should just say “Bail is almost never given to gaijin who have no Japanese friends or family [willing to act as guarantors and post the cash]. ”
But that condition colors just about every argument they have.
@Level3: This is becoming tangential because it is talking more about marine mammal supporters than this particular case, but I have a feeling it goes beyond the idea of not caring if you throw away other people’s money. This particular episode has led me to read more comments by the “march on Taiji” crew than I have ever chosen to do before, and I get a very very strong whiff of ends justifying the means. Any action taken, any corners cut are OK because it is for the dolphins, “and they don’t have a voice to speak up for themselves.” They seem to believe that they are on the only side which is right, so anything they do, no matter how outrageous, is right too.
@VK:
You’re absolutely right that my comment presumes that CJ’s reporting is accurate, which is a very Big IF, as the primary source and subject of the article has publicly disavowed it due to accuracy issues (MQT on Disqus via JapanProbe).
As for the “can’t be that stupid?” question… Well, in order to believe MQT at his word, you have to accept that, as a person who’s been in Japan a long time, he’s as dumb as bricks: doesn’t understand the difference between a SoR expiration and a ARC expiration, doesn’t know what activities are permitted by a TVLP, doesn’t know how or if or why he should keep his address up to date, doesn’t know how to keep his passport secure and safe, … I can go on, but it just feels cruel to point out how dumb he’s asking people to believe he is just to show he’s not an illegal alien.
Being as dumb as bricks, you also have to believe he is one of the worst lawyers in the world, suffering from a chronic case of FTFSI (military slang: failure to follow simple instructions). Which explains the 4square stupidity if what CJ wrote is true — again, a big If as you point out.
And even if you believe the dumb as bricks explanation, you still have to believe too many other things that defy plausibility.
Do I believe he’s that stupid? No. I believe he has something else wrong with him. I’m not a doctor, so I’m not speculating. That’s why I want him to get help from a professional. In New Zealand, where as a citizen the welfare will be most effective.
I HOPE something is wrong with him, because I am convinced he is not telling the truth. Not even close. The sequential, numerous series of implausibilities adds up to something that challenges even a conspiracy theorist’s sense of reasonable doubt.
Why do I want to believe this? Because the only other explanation is to believe he is a conman. Conmen are usually nice and friendly with pleasant, outgoing personalities. And conmen often play stupid or play the hapless victim to get what they want. As he’s now on his fourth marriage and left multiple children in his wake — not to mention the dodgy businesses, I want to believe something besides the conman theory. Believing he’s innocent of immigration violations is not possible for me.
Other theories welcome.
@havill:
He wants to get deported, blame it on the evil system, play the victim, use that to gain street cred with the fish-huggers, and somehow flip that into social media succe$$
Extract money from the post-Cove wave of indie dolphin documentarians, make a Powerpoint about this saga and try to get paid (will work for food) to present it, from there move on to other environmental issues where there are plenty of uncritical suckers waiting to give alms to Mother Earth, plenty of people have already gotten very rich in what is basically a religion to lots of people.
You can get away with almost anything if you say you’re doing it “for Mother Earth”. But it’s a crowded playing field now.
Well now, google has just turned up an interesting episode on Wikipedia. Attention from Tepido and Japologism (along with “groups.google.com”, ffs) are being cited as grounds for why a certain journalist merits his own wikipedia article. By someone pretending not to be Christopher Johnson.
ugh: are -> is. Editing foo gone to siht.
@havill:
You’ve met MQT – would you agree with what seems to be a common assessment that he’s infectiously charming? His supporters seem full of praise for him, without ever really detailing what he’s done. That said, this particular social media crowd don’t seem weighed down with factual information about the world.
Here’s the thing I don’t get, that I struggle to rationalise without thinking he’s dumb: For myself, I imagine that being incarcerated and hauled before a judge before (temporary) release, would make me incredibly careful about following the rules of my release in the period after getting out.
Oh, and have there been any substantive changes in the story since you cached it? MQT said he was going to ask Johnson to withdraw it, but that hasn’t happened. It would be something to add to the lengthening resume of unethical behaviour: CJ endangers the welfare of respondents in the teeth of their protests.
@VK: Ahh, this article not at all written by Christopher Johnson, Japan’s greatest journalist.
@Ken Y-N:
Not at all. The author shows none of the paranoia or the tendency to lash out at people one would normally associate with Japan’s Greatest Journalist.
Arse. That should be paranoia and tendency to lash out.
Speling, fromating, it’s all gonig to siht.
@VK: Bloody hell, I read the whole sordid story. Christopher “Rollingwagon” Johnson is a
.
@havill: In Twitter news, MQT shows his solidarity with the marchers: