James Arthur Watkins (born November 1963) is an American businessman, QAnon conspiracy theorist, and the operator of the imageboard website 8chan/8kun and textboard website 5channel. Watkins founded the company N.T. Technology in the 1990s to support a Japanese pornography website he created while he was enlisted in the United States Army. After leaving the Army to focus on the company, Watkins moved to the Philippines. In February 2014, Watkins became the operator of 2channel after he seized it from its creator and original owner, Hiroyuki Nishimura. He began providing domain and hosting services to 8chan later that year and became the site's official owner and operator by year's end. It has been widely speculated by journalists and conspiracy theory researchers that Watkins or his son, Ron Watkins, either know the identity of, or are themselves, "Q", the person or group of people behind the QAnon conspiracy theory. Early life James Arthur Watkins was born in Dayton, Washington, and grew up on a family farm in Mukilteo, Washington. His mother worked for Boeing and his father worked for a phone company. Watkins joined the United States Army in 1982 when he was 18 years old and served until 1998 or 1999. Over his time in the Army, he worked as a helicopter mechanic and recruiter; he reached the rank of sergeant first class in 1994. The Army sent him to a technology school in Virginia in 1987, where he learned about computers and the early Internet. Career In 1998, while still enlisted, Watkins created a website for Japanese pornography called "Asian Bikini Bar". By hosting it in the United States, he was able to circumvent the strict pornography censorship in Japan. He later renamed the venture "N.T. Technology", which according to Watkins was a meaningless acronym meant to make pornography purchases less conspicuous on credit card statements. N.T. Technology, which is based in Reno, Nevada, initially sold advertising, and later also sold web hosting services to other Japanese adult entertainment websites that couldn't be hosted in Japan. In 1998 or 1999, during the dot-com boom, Watkins left the army to focus on N.T. Technology. In October 2020, Mother Jones reported that N.T. Technology has hosted domains with names suggesting connections to child pornography, and that regardless of whether child pornography is hosted on the domains, Watkins is "profiting from words that appeal to the real thing". Watkins dismissed the claim as