Since July 2010, The Turntable of Civilization has continued publishing through goo and Ameba. After the decision to publish the book in 2011, it appears to have faced search obstruction, impersonation, and manipulation of access figures. This essay exposes the darker side of the internet and Japan’s inadequate legal response to online wrongdoing.

March 1, 2020
Online Obstruction and Manipulated Numbers: The True Scale of The Turntable of Civilization
I will write about another evil.
Since I first appeared in this way in July 2010, I have continued to publish almost every day through goo and Ameba, sending my words to Japan and to the world.
My readers know this very well.
On June 1, 2011, from a hospital room where I was being treated for a serious illness, I announced that the publication of my book had been decided for December 1 of that year.
From that point onward, a certain man began attacking me on the internet.
Around the end of August 2010, after having been arrested on suspicion of fraud and while out on bail, this man came to our company building with two others, one man and one woman, saying that he wanted to rent an office of about twenty tsubo.
Our company was defrauded of more than one hundred million yen by this man.
He was then in his mid-forties, and one of the things he said about himself was that he had played rugby at Ritsumeikan University.
Judging from his physique, that part seemed likely to be true.
He also said that during the height of the internet bubble he had managed a company called Digicom.
That, too, was probably true.
For six months, neither rent nor deposit was paid, not even a single yen.
Perhaps precisely because of that, he came almost every day to our office in the building and talked about various things.
At one point, he said the following.
“We had a department that created websites, but we were not merely making websites. This world is a competitive society, so every client has rival companies and rival products. We used methods to push those competitors down in search results and bring the client’s company or product name to the first page, to the very top of the search results. I cannot say any more than this because it is a trade secret.”
The attack that this man now appears to be carrying out against this essay is, judging from the websites of law offices found online, the type of attack in which negative sites are created in order to push down the search visibility of the target.
It began after June 1, 2011.
At present, from around September 2018, on nifty, he appears to have created more than sixty IDs of exactly the same type, at least as far as has now been confirmed.
He then pasted one of my articles without permission and placed advertisements above and below it.
Nothing else was written there.
Needless to say, nifty is a proper company.
Whenever it discovers such wrongdoing, it deletes it immediately.
Yet the persistence of this conduct is abnormal.
Around September 2018, for example, on goo, my daily number of searches was about thirty thousand, and the number of visitors was around three thousand.
On Ameba, the respective figures were about one third of those numbers.
Then, one day, both goo and Ameba suddenly fell to one third of their previous figures.
I was utterly dumbfounded.
On Twitter, there were several instances of account hijacking and impersonation.
On Facebook, friend requests arrived almost every day from IDs with names that made it impossible to know what country the people were from.
The contents led to vulgar pornographic video blogs.
Both Twitter and Facebook had been linked to goo and Ameba simply because I wanted as many people as possible to read my writing.
Therefore, I decided to withdraw from them cleanly.
Three times this year, the persistent attack that appears to have been carried out by this man stopped for some reason, and the true form of this essay appeared.
As I have already written, among all of goo’s approximately 2.8 million blogs, my blog remained around first place for a day and a half.
When I wondered what on earth was happening and checked, I learned that neither goo nor Ameba used its own software for search numbers and related figures.
For someone familiar with the internet industry and the dark side of the internet, intruding into such software and altering numbers should be an easy matter.
Although the world has become completely internet-based, Japan has almost no laws concerning wrongdoing committed online.
At the very least, laws comparable to anti-stalking laws must immediately be created for the online world as well.
A friend asked me:
How many people in the world are reading this essay?
I immediately answered by citing a certain reliable example.
“At least one hundred million people, or one hundred million searches. That is the true scale of this essay.”
My friend, too, immediately understood and agreed that this was entirely plausible.
I do not say this number as an exaggeration.
When one considers the reality I have seen, the true figures that suddenly appeared, and the response to this essay in Japan and throughout the world, no other conclusion is possible.
No matter how much evil hides numbers, obstructs searches, impersonates others, creates false sites, and distorts what is displayed, the truth will inevitably reveal itself.
The Turntable of Civilization exists, as its name declares, to change the direction of civilization.
That is precisely why they fear it.