By AKINA NISHI/ Staff Writer
September 23, 2023 at 17:31 JST
The headquarters of Osaka prefectural police (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
OSAKA--Local police arrested an American man who uses the tag “Johnny Somali” to livestream inflammatory videos, saying his latest offering shows he was trespassing at a hotel construction site in Osaka.
The YouTuber is 23-year-old Ramsey Khalid Ismael, Osaka prefectural police said Sept. 21.
He was arrested after police said he broke into a construction site in the Nipponbashi district of Chuo Ward around noon on Aug. 20.
Video taken and posted by the suspect shows him repeatedly shouting “Fukushima” in response to requests from construction workers to leave.
Police sources said the YouTube video, as well as security footage, led to his arrest.
Police on Sept. 22 arrested a suspected accomplice, Jeremiah Dwane Branch, 24, also a U.S. citizen. They said he took the video at the construction site, which meant he was also trespassing.
The two have refused to speak to Osaka police until they are in the presence of a lawyer.
Ismael has also posted to social media videos of him shouting the names of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and threatening to drop nuclear weapons again on Japan. Other videos show him disrupting business at restaurants by being a nuisance.
Here is a collection of first-hand accounts by “hibakusha” atomic bomb survivors.
A peek through the music industry’s curtain at the producers who harnessed social media to help their idols go global.
Cooking experts, chefs and others involved in the field of food introduce their special recipes intertwined with their paths in life.
A series based on diplomatic documents declassified by Japan’s Foreign Ministry
A series about Japanese-Americans and their memories of World War II