Originally published on October 21, 2019.
Based on an essay by Yamaoka Tetsuhide in the special issue of Sound Argument, this article examines how the Asahi Shimbun failed to widely announce in English its corrections and retractions of comfort women reporting, and allegedly used methods that made those articles difficult to find through search engines.
Through the issues of impression manipulation, English article metadata, search avoidance, and reverse SEO, it questions the responsibility of a newspaper that should serve as a public instrument of society.

October 21, 2019.
Those who carry out “reverse SEO” are mainly individuals with undesirable pasts, or criminal organizations that operate underground websites for criminal purposes.
It is probably no exaggeration to say that it is unprecedented for a newspaper company, which ought to be a public instrument of society, to apply “reverse SEO” to its own articles.
The following is from an essay by Yamaoka Tetsuhide published in the special issue of Sound Argument under the title The Asahi Shimbun That Continued to Hide Its Comfort Women Corrections in English Articles.
The other day, I declared that the Asahi Shimbun, in substance, is no different from the Buraku Liberation League or the yakuza, that is, a pressure group that harms the national interest.
Far from that alone, this is a truly painstaking work that reveals the Asahi to be an organization exactly like the Chinese Communist Party, a country of bottomless evil and plausible lies, and exactly like the Korean Peninsula.
As my readers know, because I appeared in the world of the internet in this way, since August 2010 I have been defrauded of a large amount of money by criminals carrying the DNA of a country of bottomless evil and plausible lies, and, on top of that, I have continued to suffer persistent reverse-SEO attacks in the world of the internet.
Reading this truly painstaking work by Mr. Yamaoka, I was utterly astonished by the viciousness of the Asahi Shimbun Company.
That is because the Asahi Shimbun Company had been doing exactly the same thing as the falsification of search results and reverse-SEO attacks against my The Turntable of Civilization.
August 15, 2018, the anniversary of the end of the war.
At Yasukuni Shrine under the blazing sun with heat haze rising, I attended the “Central National Rally to Memorialize the War Dead” and listened intently to the speech by Kent Gilbert.
Despite the intense heat, many people were visiting the shrine, and I felt a sign of changing times in the fact that many young people were also there.
However, on that day, the Asahi Shimbun published two English articles related to comfort women.
One was an article saying that, at the ceremony for South Korea’s first “Comfort Women Day,” President Moon stated that “the comfort women issue cannot be resolved through bilateral diplomacy.”
The other was an article reporting that the first comfort woman statue had been erected in Taiwan.
Both contained English expressions that evoked “the forced taking of comfort women by the Japanese military and their sexual enslavement,” expressions that Mr. Kent and I had been demanding since July that the Asahi stop using.
In other words, on the anniversary of the end of the war, the Asahi Shimbun showed an attitude of ignoring our request 100 percent.
The first time I exposed the Asahi Shimbun’s continuing impression manipulation in its English edition concerning the forced taking of comfort women was in the May 2016 issue of Sound Argument.
At the time of its 1997 verification of comfort women reporting, the Asahi Shimbun asserted such things as “there was coercion in a broad sense,” and while saying that the truth of the articles related to Yoshida Seiji was uncertain, it did not retract them.
It was only in August 2014 that it finally fully acknowledged the false reports and retracted 18 related articles.
Even then, at first, in accordance with the intention of President Kimura Tadakazu, it did not apologize; afterward, scandals involving the testimony of Director Yoshida of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and the column by Ikegami Akira piled up, and finally it was forced into an apology and President Kimura’s resignation to take responsibility.
Then, after being criticized by the third-party committee that the Asahi Shimbun itself had organized, it announced various reform proposals.
However, the Asahi Shimbun did not repent as a result, and in its English edition it has continued thorough impression manipulation.
When the word “comfort women” is used in an English article, it is always automatically followed by the phrase “who were forced to provide sex to Japanese soldiers.”
There are several variations, but the pattern often used, including in the August 15 articles, is to continue by saying that “many of the comfort women came from the Korean Peninsula, which was then a Japanese colony.”
If an English speaker reads this, it can be read as meaning, “The Japanese military rounded up many women from its colonies, made them comfort women, and forced them to have sex, and the overwhelming majority were Koreans.”
This is precisely coercion in the narrow sense.
It is an outrageous act of betrayal and an attack on Japan and the Japanese people, but for Japanese people unfamiliar with English, it is difficult to grasp immediately.
The person who raised his voice in anger on behalf of Japanese people was Kent, an American and a lawyer.
We gathered more than 10,000 signatures, visited the headquarters of the Asahi Shimbun on July 6, and formally requested that it stop its impression-manipulating reporting.
The Asahi side received us politely and answered that it would “take the matter seriously and respond sincerely,” but the day on which it finally showed an attitude as though it would “not give it even a single thought” was the anniversary of the end of the war.
By coincidence, both of us were at Yasukuni Shrine.
I felt renewed anger at the arrogance of the Asahi Shimbun, and at the same time felt apologetic toward the heroic spirits of the war dead.
They are making it impossible to search.
However, from this point, the situation developed rapidly.
When we made our request to the Asahi Shimbun, what Kent was especially particular about was that the retraction of the articles should once again be widely announced overseas in English.
He said that even the New York Times, when it acknowledges a false report, disciplines those involved, apologizes, retracts it, and widely announces the retraction.
Kent strongly argued that this is the pride of a major media outlet, and that the Asahi should learn from it.
In response, the Asahi Shimbun answered that an English translation existed of the article it published on August 5, 2014, in which it judged the Yoshida testimony to be false and retracted it, and that it could still be viewed online; it then provided the URL, the online address, of that English article.
In other words, its counterargument was that it had already made an English-language transmission.
Certainly, if one types that URL directly into a browser, one can see the English translation.
However, both Kent and I felt unconvinced.
That was because, though we had searched the internet many times for articles related to comfort women, we had never seen it.
So, in a video in which the two of us appeared, Kent, while showing the URL in question, muttered suspiciously, “Even if you search for half a day, it does not come up.”
This one sentence changed the flow.
Among the viewers were professional IT engineers, and the suspicion crossed their minds: “Could it possibly have been programmed to avoid being searched?”
When they immediately checked it, that was exactly what had happened.
Several people contacted me through Twitter and other means.
In the source page of the article in question, that is, the program page on the web which anyone can view, code called a meta tag had been inserted to avoid being searched by search engines such as Google.
When this is inserted, even if one searches on Google, one cannot directly reach the article.
An even more astonishing point was indicated by viewers.
There were 11 comfort women-related articles published on August 5, 2014, and their English translations were published on the 22nd of the same month, but there was one more article in which a search-avoidance meta tag had been embedded.
It was the article acknowledging that the Asahi had confused comfort women with the Women’s Volunteer Corps.
The tag was not inserted into the other articles.
In other words, the Asahi published its own claims such as “the essence of the comfort women issue has not changed” and “there was coercion,” while it made the two inconvenient articles, which admitted its own mistakes, as difficult to read as possible.
That was not all.
All 11 of these English articles had been created as Japanese pages on the Japanese-language site.
At first glance they look like English articles, but they were created within the Japanese Asahi Shimbun Digital site, and when one looks at the source page, they are defined as “language = Japanese” and “content = Japanese.”
Although the Asahi Shimbun has another English-language site called “Asia & Japan Watch,” only these English translations were placed inside the Japanese-language site as Japanese pages.
This makes them even more difficult to search for from overseas.
I will omit the technical details, but various other “devices to prevent searching” were also employed.
Miyawaki Atsushi, an IT journalist who follows my Twitter account, pointed out that this was “reverse SEO.”
Ordinarily, both companies and individuals make every effort so that websites they have created are listed as high as possible in search rankings.
Usually, meta tags are also used for that purpose.
This is called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.
On the other hand, there are cases that are the exact opposite, that is, efforts are made so that one’s own site or one’s own name will come into public view as little as possible.
This is called “reverse SEO.”
Those who carry out “reverse SEO” are mainly individuals with undesirable pasts, or criminal organizations that operate underground websites for criminal purposes.
It is probably no exaggeration to say that it is unprecedented for a newspaper company, which ought to be a public instrument of society, to apply “reverse SEO” to its own articles.
This essay continues.