By all means, do go and tell your side of the story to them, motherfucker.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I heard that your daughter gives really good head… and so does your son.
Hey, I wanted to hear if your children are getting a good sleep because… when you get fired, and I get fired, you’re going to have to put your kids out of international school and into Japanese school and I’ll be teaching there. (The tape recording is below ↘）
(2007)
Christopher Johnson
Where I come from, you don’t mess with a man’s car, a man’s woman, a man’s dog, or a man’s job. You go behind someone’s back, and they come knockin on your front, with a shotgun. And I suppose you’ll send this to your mommy to defend you, right? (2011)
I have a talent for pissing people off. I’m sure it comes from a personality defect, of which I have many, and I will strive to work on improving my generally surly nature.
However, while I’m surly I don’t delight in the suffering of other people. Unfortunately, I have a cyberstalker who does. And when he can’t get to me, he attacks my friends. Or uses his virtual sock-puppets (Chris Beck, Kita (I don’t have the balls to use my real name) Yaesu to do it.
The worst troll in the world is one that claims to be a journalist—they abuse our profession by writing with malice, distorting the truth and mixing it with enough lies to make it seem plausible, and claim to be “reporting” to do it. I call them “trollnalists”.
There is a certain disgruntled self-professed journalist Christopher Johnson aka The Troll who has a personal vendetta against me and anyone who is my friend or employer. The reasons are very simple: I made the mistake of asking about his visa status when he was denied entry into Japan and/or deported in 2011. I then refused to write an article on his behalf in 2012. He took it very personally.
He’s accused me of 1) being addicted to meth-amphetamines 2) not having been a police reporter, which is probably because he can’t read enough Japanese to figure out what 警視庁記者クラブ means 3) being a womanizing asshole 4) plagiarism 5) being completely wrong about yakuza involvement in the nuclear industry 6) being mentally ill and in addition, he’s stalked and defamed my friends and colleagues, especially female reporters. It goes on and on.
He’ll probably alter his crazy blog posts soon to eliminate claim #5. He’s devoted 40 sprawling pages to my life which he continually rewrites when glaring errors are found. No one is sure what he does to support himself these days but perhaps his famous brother, Gordy Johnson aka Grady Johnson is supporting him. Who knows?
He is right about number 3. Gotta work on that. I can be an asshole and a womanizer. Guilty.
I didn’t mind so much his man-crush and attacks on me, but now he continues to harass other journalists I know, accusing them of plagiarism. He accuses them of taking money from corporations to slant their coverage, etc. He writes their editors, calls their offices, tweets at them endlessly. It’s hard to really explain how venal this individual is so I’ll let him speak for himself.
This is the kind of guy I’m dealing with. The kind of guy who left messages like this for his co-worker at NHK in 2007.
I will have to tell you that Tanaka-san and Iida-san are now well aware of your fucking bullshit. By all means, do go and tell your side of the story to them, motherfucker.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I heard that your daughter gives really good head… and so does your son.
Hey, I wanted to hear if your children are getting a good sleep because… when you get fired, and I get fired, you’re going to have to put your kids out of international school and into Japanese school and I’ll be teaching there.
It is a revolting thing to do, for which CJ has never apologized. It makes him sound like a pedophile–and although he spent many years in Thailand, there is no evidence that he is one. But it’s still a fucking awful thing to say. An apology would be nice.
Dave Schaufele, the NHK co-worker, sent JSRC a note on the incident:
“It’s time to stand up to this bully. I would have no hesitation beating the living crap out of this sicko after his comments about my children, as would any father in a similar position I suspect. So if he ever sees me again he better turn the other way and run.
Friends at NHK who know CJ recommended that I just ignore him because he’s mentally unstable. But if his slanderous meltdown rant is starting to spread I guess I need to reply and set the record straight.
I must admit I’m so short of time between work and family that I haven’t even started a Facebook page, let alone made 14,000 blog posts as “Greji” whose slang and poor spelling might indicate that English is not his first language. CJis simply delusional.
I suspect he knows I’m not Greji but was simply looking for a way to use NHK’s name in the headline and fabricate a high profile story that would make him seem like a victim instead of a predator. CJ knows that his own actions resulted in his loss of work but his alter ego is trying to find someone else to take responsibility.
CJ pulled all the hateful slander completely out of his ass. I have many Jewish friends and have never made any anti-Semitic remarks nor written anything about Johnson’s girlfriend or family and therefore he can provide no examples at all in his rant.
I made no phone calls to him period; another fabrication to try and justify his pedophile phone messages left on my keitai answering system. Playback is continuous once activated and no alterations were made whatsoever.
I do sometimes get a sunburned neck when working outdoors but have no neo-nazi contacts or own any guns. I guess those were the most hurtful fabrications Johnson could come up with in his appeal for sexual-predator sainthood.
He’s a mental case whose 2 sexual harassment complaints on file at NHK got him fired in 1995 but he managed to sneak back in years later. I was unaware of his past and when he first started work I actually tried to help the guy out as a fellow Canadian by giving him over $1,000 in extra work, which he thanked me for by inviting me over to his XXXs place for a beer. Seems like he’s been freeloading off her for years. But as the old saying goes – no good deed goes unpunished. CJ left town on short notice and our NHK boss asked me to cover a couple of his shifts. When he returned he went psycho and tried to get me fired, which backfired because the bosses remembered that he was the pervert they got rid of in ’95. When he made disgusting sexual comments about my young children I played his phone messages for my boss and it was 3 strikes you’re out – again – for that sicko.
I guess CJ figured that if I hadn’t posted his phone messages in 5 years I have probably lost or erased the file so it’s safe to slander me and headline NHK’s name to regain his Economist notoriety. I did erase the file because I didn’t want to hear his voice again. For the record I haven’t spent a minute thinking about the asshole during the past five years and this is my first and only blog post related to him in all that time.
Now you know – the rest of the story.”
He does what trolls do. He writes my employers, he makes threatening calls to the FCCJ. He has a penchant for harassing my female friends especially. Maybe in his mind they are the weaker sex. I gather he’s a misanthrope and a misogynist. I wish he would just attack me. It’s such a dishonorable thing to do to attack the friends of the person you hate. Even the worst yakuza aren’t usually that low.
He is angry that I would not take up his cause or defend him. I don’t know him well and I didn’t think he had a position that I could defend and I politely declined to offer my support. By asking one pointed question, about his visa status, he perhaps feels that I sprung a hole in his credibility dyke, which caused him a flood of attack and ridicule.
I don’t know; I’m not a mind reader.
Recently his threats have escalated. He is very fond of threatening to sue people for slander. He also poses threats to them as questions under the guise of being a journalist. He makes sexual slurs about female reporters. He has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make me angry and scare individuals working with me. For many months, I ignored him. He went away. I ignored him again. But he came back and started harassing anyone he can identify as my friend or employer.
I realized that stepping back was the wrong approach. It was a cowardly act to do nothing. This man under the guise of ”journalism” has terrorized individual after individual because everyone hopes that he will grow bored and find a new person to attack and stalk–and thus they do nothing. This is understandable. But because no one stands up to this bully, the number of those who have suffered because of him keep growing.
Albert Einstein once said, “The world is a dangerous place. Not because of the people who are evil; but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” Einstein was right. I’m doing something about.
The more I know about the individual and his past, the more I began to feel increasingly uneasy. He has a history of making insidious threats. On October 16th, 2007, he left disgusting messages on the answering machine of an NHK colleague that implied he would sexually molest the individual’s children. The tape contains what seems to be the sounds of said journalist masturbating over the phone.
Allegedly, the dispute The Troll had with a co-worker ended in him making several obscene calls to the man’s home phone which resulted in his firing from NHK. NHK has not confirmed this although others who were working at NHK have and so has The Troll in his own blog.
Transcripts of threats made to NHK co-worker October 16th, 2007
The story of the Troll who threatened to molest the children of a fellow NHK worker
録音テープ（出所不明）被害者はNHK職員だとそうです。
10月16日2007年
Troll：
I will have to tell you that Tanaka-san and Iida-san are now well aware of your fucking bullshit. By all
means, do go and tell your side of the story to them, motherfucker.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I heard that your daughter gives really good head… and so does your son.
和訳：飯田さんと田中さんはあなたの嘘八百をよく知っているよと教えてやろうと思った。どう
ぞ、あなたの言い分を二人に言ってみな、この糞野郎。ところが、言い忘れたが、あなたの娘は
フェラチオがうまいそうだね。。。あなたの息子も。
新しいメッセージ、１０月１６日、火曜日、(平成１９年)
午後９時２２分
Sounds of what may be masturbation
約２０秒ジョンソンが自慰している音が聞こえる
メッセージを保存しました。次の新しいメセージです。
１０月１７日、水曜日、午前、１０時５８分。
Hey, I wanted to hear if your children are getting a good sleep because… when you get fired, and I get
fired, you’re going to have to put your kids out of international school and into Japanese school….
子供はよく寝ているか。聞きたかったな。あなたと僕は首になったら、あなたは自分の子供をイン
ターナショナルスクールから退学させなくちゃならない。そして子供を公立学校に入れると。。。
（俺はそこで教えて待っていますよ）
For the record, this is his explanation:
“The letter enraged ●●●。 His new round of phone calls and letters now insulted ●●● and my family,including my brother, leader of one of Canada’s most popular bands at that time. I couldn’t take it anymore. Regrettably, I lost my temper. During a heated exchange of insults by email and phone, I left a nasty message on his phone. I responded to his insult that, “I hear there’s a job opening for a teacher who likes children, right up your alley”. In effect, I said to him: “if you get me fired from NHK, I will have to get a job teaching English again, and I might end teaching your children.” ●● claims he recorded it. He probably took the comments out of context, and possibly tampered with them, given his skills at voice acting and doctoring evidence and twisting facts…”
You can listen for yourself.
In addition, in May of 2011 he also made several threats to the journalist who replaced him at France 24.
Although I received the journalist’s permission to post this and verified it with three sources, I have deleted the name of the journalist threatened and changed the name of the one making the threats. Why? Because it’s customary practice in Japan to not publicize the names of people who are possibly mentally ill and may be under investigation for criminal offenses.
Other than blocking out some names, to protect the individuals from the loathsome attacks and smears of the troll, I have altered not a word, but put some sections in bold that are particularly disturbing. I’m reasonably sure the Troll aka Hostile Journalist will coming looking for me since by opposing him, I’m obviously a mofo.
We shall see.
PS. To Hostile Journalist: Do not even think about threatening (脅迫罪) anyone who cooperated with this article other than myself. Have some decency.
The story of the Troll threatening the journalist aka “The Mofo” that “stole” his job
Troll’s Letters To His Replacement at France 24 May-June 2011
The Troll, quoted here as “Hostile Journalist” sent a series of hostile emails after being fired by France 24. The reasons he was fired or let go may or may not have to do with the emails he sent. The emails were provided by a past victims of the Troll and on my own initiative I have kept his name non-public for fear that The Troll will retaliate against him as well.Hopefully, he is intelligent enough to realize that the emails he has sent constitute a threat. If he has a problem with this posting, I hope he will be a man and come after me and not the journalist who was kind enough to give me the materials. The letters began with an unsolicited posting from Troll.
The Troll Writing To France 24 Journalist Who Replaced Him
20 May 2011
Dear Journalist
I’m Troll, a veteran Tokyo-based journalist who has covered almost every major story in Asia and around the world since 1987, including the wars in Yugoslavia, East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq, for major media worldwide.
I’m going to cut straight to the point about this. I do not allow people to take freelance strings that I have cultivated over the years. For your information, Loick Berrou hired me in July 2007 as the France 24 Anglo reporter in Tokyo, and since that time I have done hundreds of live phoners and on-camera
reports from Tokyo (often using the satellite feedpoints at Reuters and NHK), Tibet, China, Burma and Thailand (using feedpoints at Asiaworks).
I have taken great risks to build up the network. I was the only foreign journalist in Lhasa the week of the riots in March 2008, and I broke the story worldwide on France 24, beating BBC, CNN and everybody else. I also snuck inside Burma and reported on the crackdown on protesters, and Cyclone
Nargis, for the network. Last year, I did a flurry of reports amid gunfire and explosions during the battle of Bangkok (working in the same battle-zone where France 24 cameraman Nelson Rand was shot several times.)
Immediately after the March 11 quake, I spent a great deal of time and effort trying to arrange logistics for●●●, one of the network’s top Francophone correspondents (you can see the work we did together on the documentary The Battle of Bangkok). I also did 60 live reports for France 24 the first four weeks
after the quake, while you were working for somebody else, apparently.
I do not know what university training or professional qualifications you have in journalism, and I’m not familiar with the impact of your work. I’ve worked around most of the top journalists in Asia, and I don’t recall meeting you.
As for me, I have been through a weeding out process, of four years at Canada’s top journalism school at Carleton University in Ottawa, and then some of the leading networks and newspapers in Canada, before coming to work as a professional journalist in Asia. I learned to speak and read Japanese beginning in 1989, and covered the Kobe earthquake and sarin gas attack for CBC TV in Canada and others in 1995.
Like many other pros, I naturally have issues with amateurs who come to Japan, declare themselves journalists, hang around the FCCJ to pick up work, and then consider themselves experts in our field. Doctors and lawyers would not tolerate this in their fields either, and I think I have every right to call someone’s bluff on this.
While I was covering the TEPCO presser today, I found out from●●, ●●● and a senior person in Paris that you, somehow, have become the France 24 correspondent in Tokyo. I do not accept this, for any reason, and I will do whatever is necessary to protect a position that I have earned with the network, at great personal risk and sacrifice.
It’s not personal, it’s professional, and I can assure you that I will stake my 25-year career on this. If I tried to steal someone’s string, which has earned them thousands of dollars over the years, I would expect them to fight me for it.
I will tell you very frankly that I am a 6-foot, 200-pound guy from a rough part of the Detroit area, and I’ve been through too much – 9 wars, where I lost 7 friends – to let anyone disrespect me.
★★★
The Troll later discovered his email was forwarded to France 24 prompting another email.
★★★
21 May
That is very sleazy to send a letter, which I sent to you and you alone, to my employers at France 24. If you have any manhood, you will meet me in person to settle this. And you can bring your pals XXX and the other jerks who diss me on Facebook and at the FCCJ as well
The Journalist Responds To Troll’s Implied Threats
21 May
Troll-guy ,your unsolicited message appears to be a clear threat of violence towards me. Please clarify if I’m mistaken in this.
For the record: I was approached in Feb to work with F24 and have done a few bits of work with them since. I have no interest in who has worked with them in the past, continues to work with them now, or will work with them in the future.
I have no idea what issues you have with F24, but please take them up with the organization.
Equally, I have no idea what issues you have with ‘jerks’ on FB or the FCCJ, but please take them up with the people involved.
The Troll Responds To The Journalist
Who the hell are you talkin to me like this? You think your ass is powerful? You are a 5-foot 6, 150 lb dweek in shorts and sunglasses looking over your shoulder in a crowd. And I suppose you’llsend this to your mommy to protect you, right?
You aren’t the asshole ●● who smashed my brother’s head against the grocery store wall, and beat up my father in front of my mother and sister across the street from our house, and then laughed at my little brother in the court house. aYou aren’t the crackhead who shot my uncle ●● in the head in Detroit. You aren’t the home invader who murdered my brother’s drummer in his house in ●● this Christmas. You aren’t the gang that strangled me and beat me unconscious and broke my nose and ribs and left me naked in a park to die in Nairobi, or the jerks who mugged me at knifepoint in Rio de Janeiro. Youaren’t the Chetniks who severed the head of my roommate ●●●in Vukovar. You aren’t Khaled Sheikh Mohammed who cut up Daniel Pearl like a goat a few weeks after we had Thanksgiving dinner in Islamabad. You aren’t the Taliban motherfuckers who murdered●● and raped and killed the women in the van in Afghanistan. And you aren’t the gunmen who shot ●●●●● three times last year when we were working for France 24 in Bangkok. You are a spineless sewer rat who sends a private confidential letter to my boss to shaft me out of a job worth perhaps 10,000 year or more, a job I earned while you were a driver with another network and writing an FCCJ article slagging off serious pro journalists who hired you. Where I come from, you don’t mess with a man’s car, a man’s woman, a man’s dog, or a man’s job. You go behind someone’s back, and they come knockin on your front, with a shotgun. And I suppose you’ll send this to your mommy to defend you, right?
Where I come from, you don’t mess with a man’s car, a man’s woman, a man’s dog, or a man’s job. You go behind someone’s back, and they come knockin on your front, with a shotgun. And I suppose you’ll send this to your mommy to defend you, right?
★★★
The Journalist Responds To The Troll
Mr. Troll,
It seems you got a rough deal off F24, which is a shame, but I really think your anger is directed in the wrong direction. To state the obvious, I don’t make the hiring decisions. I was asked to work with them in Feb and was surprised not to hear from them during the post-quake period. It seems they used someone else – that would be you. Now they’ve asked me to do the odd phoner.
I don’t know why they they’ve made that decision- it’s between you and them.
I was more than a little surprised to come in on Friday night to a long abusive threatening email from someone I’ve never met. I forwarded it to the people at F24 – ●● saying I had no idea what your history with them is and the situation needed clarifying .If you wanted a respectful response, you should have a sent a respectful email. This will be my last response to any insulting/ threatening mails.
★★★
“If you wanted a respectful response, you should have a sent a respectful email. This will be my last response to any insulting/ threatening mails.
That seems to be the best approach to dealing with this fellow. He does make a lot of threats. He, or his proxy, even threatened the editors at Wikipedia, when they refused to post an entry for him. He accused an employee of Google Japan of deliberately altering search results to make him look bad. He does manage to get under my skin. However, I’m certainly not the only one.
If you’d like to know more, please check out Japan Probe which has article after article about his not so amusing attacking on others journalists, his implied threats, his rantings, and his career history as a malcontent and troublemaker in Japan.
I took this post down once. I’m reposting it so that everyone knows that this is a man that threatens to molest children and viciously attacks other members of the journalism community. He may be a journalist; he is also very close to being a cyber stalker. I won’t write his name because he thrives on attention. I tweeted a parody of his blog today that has his actual name on it. I should have read it closer. I was taught that the mentally unstable should have their names undisclosed because they aren’t entirely responsible for their acts. I don’t know if that is the case with this individual but I suspect as much. Possibly a sociopath with delusional disorder. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.
I won’t engage with this individual in any way. Because there’s a difference between him and me. I give a damn about my sources and my friends. I’d rather people think I’m a jerk than violate the three things I believe in: protect your sources, write the truth, and if you can’t do both, then don’t write the story. Some people may not agree with that philosophy. It’s what I believe in. I don’t have a perfect score on protecting my sources. I get to live with that for the rest of my life. I atone and I carry on.
Because where I come from, when you attack a man’s friends and defame them, stalk women, and threaten to harm children–you’re someone who needs to go to jail until you learn to behave like a human being, not a troll. Or am I simply too old-fashioned?
I recognize that people have a right to start their lives over–that they deserve a second chance. And I’d be willing to give this man a second chance, if he showed any remorse, if he apologized to all those he’s wronged. He won’t do that. He won’t even answer three simple questions 1) Did you threaten to molest a man’s children when you were working at NHK? 2) Did you threaten another reporter in 2011? 3) Have you misused the position of being a journalist to harass women that reject you and people who disagree with you?
There is no solution to dealing with a man like this. As long as he has access to the internet, he will continue to try and destroy those whom he perceives as his enemies—and there a lot of them. He’s bordering on criminal behavior and when he finally crosses the line, I hope to see that at last he gets the attention he deserves. Because where I come from, when you attack a man’s friends and defame them, stalk women, and threaten to harm children–you’re someone who needs to go to jail until you learn to behave like a human being, not a troll. Or am I simply too old-fashioned?
At the very least, if he was a man and not a troll, he’d stop attacking my friends and young reporters-–and do some actual journalism.
*This article was published several years ago but has been updated at the request of several individual who claim to be experiencing harassment from Christopher Johnson.