HONG KONG — Less than a week before he was killed, Charlie Kirk was in Asia spreading his conservative and anti-immigration message, making stops in South Korea and Japan, where he urged people to have more children and embrace religion.
“Their country is totally under attack,” he said of South Korea on his podcast this week after returning from his trip. “The same things that we have been fighting for here, whether it be lawfare in South Korea or mass migration in Japan — this is a worldwide phenomenon.”
There is a receptive audience for messages such as Kirk’s in South Korea and Japan, both East Asian democracies and U.S. allies with highly monoethnic populations, falling birth rates and growing far-right movements.
Anti-feminist backlash in South Korea, which ranks 101st out of 148 countries in the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Gender Gap Report, was said to play a role in the 2022 presidential election victory of Yoon Suk Yeol. As Yoon faced impeachment over his December 2024 declaration of martial law, supporters who embraced his claims of election fraud and legal persecution adopted symbols and slogans associated with President Donald Trump.
In Japan, government efforts to bring in more foreign labor in the face of an aging population have met with resistance, and last month there was public panic when misinformation about a new cultural exchange program suggested it would lead to a flood of immigrants from four countries in Africa.
Kirk’s first stop was in Seoul, where last Friday and Saturday he spoke at Build Up Korea, a conservative forum previously attended by Donald Trump Jr. and whose advisory board includes President Trump’s adviser Alex Bruesewitz and Steve Bannon’s daughter Maureen Bannon.
“The phenomenon of young people, especially men, turning conservative is occurring simultaneously across multiple continents,” said Kirk, 31, according to the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo.
“It is not unique to the U.S., which is why it deserves more attention. That is why I chose South Korea as my first Asian destination,” said Kirk, a co-founder of Turning Point USA, a nonprofit group that promotes conservative political ideals to young people.
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Kirk was welcomed with pyrotechnics and chants of “USA” as he walked onto the stage and spoke against immigration, communism, and cheered the prevalence of Christianity in South Korea.
He also pointed out how safe he had felt walking around the South Korean capital, which he later recalled in his podcast as “striking” and “amazing.”
“I didn’t even have to think about where I was going because anywhere I went I knew it would be perfectly clean and safe,” he told the forum attendees. “A lot of American cities are not like that.”
Kirk called on South Korea, a country of more than 50 million people, to fight against the “left-leaning elite” and keep itself safe from the “menace” of the Chinese Communist Party. Over the course of his 40-minute speech, he also mentioned the country’s birth rate — the world’s lowest — and said it was up to South Koreans to keep their country from “disappearing.”
“It’s not just morally wrong to not have children,” said Kirk, a father of two, dismissing widespread concerns about the country’s rising cost of living, education and housing. “If you look at it in historical terms, it’s pathetic.”
After South Korea, Kirk left for Tokyo, where he has also steadily gained popularity. He made similar appeals in Japan, including the need to increase the birth rate, which fell to a record low last year in the nation of more than 120 million.
He was invited to speak at a lecture organized by Japan’s far-right party, Sanseito, whose “Japanese first” credo is inspired by Trump’s MAGA movement. The party made big gains in the July upper house election after warning about a “silent invasion” of immigrants.
Previous rallies by the party, which has grown from a fringe anti-vaccination group to a mainstream political force, have called for greater restrictions on foreign workers and investment. Its leader, Sohei Kamiya, who is sometimes described as a “mini Trump,” has dismissed allegations of xenophobia.
Sitting next to a Sanseito lawmaker, Kirk said he hoped to “invigorate the people of your great nation to keep fighting this globalist menace.”
“We’re in a big fight against globalism,” Kirk said in the video, which was posted by the party ahead of the event.
Kirk said he was “thrilled” to see a “growing political movement” in Japan that was “fighting the same things we believe in,” telling CNN in an interview there that if the country were to receive a large influx of foreigners, “Japan’s not Japan anymore.”
“That’s not xenophobia, it’s common sense,” he said.
Foreign-born residents make up just 3% of the population in Japan, far lower than in the U.S. and many other countries. But their number rose more than 10% last year to a record of almost 3.8 million, according to the Immigration Services Agency.
Kamiya said on X that he was “stunned” and “heartbroken” by Kirk’s shooting death Wednesday during an event at Utah Valley University.
“We had promised to meet again at his year-end event and had begun to imagine the work we would take on together,” he said.
“We will honor him in the only way worthy of his example: by treasuring what we received from him, by telling it faithfully, and by carrying it forward — here in Japan and beyond.”
