Originally published on October 21, 2019.
Continuing from the previous chapter, this article examines the issue of search-avoidance meta tags inserted into Asahi Shimbun articles related to the comfort women issue.
Through the Asahi’s explanation, search avoidance in English and Japanese articles, publication-expiration settings, and suspicions surrounding the article admitting confusion between comfort women and the Women’s Volunteer Corps, it discusses the possibility that the newspaper tried to hide inconvenient correction articles.

October 21, 2019.
We immediately sent a letter of inquiry to the Asahi Shimbun asking, “Why were search-avoidance meta tags inserted only into these two articles?”
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
An unnatural explanation and new shocking facts.
We immediately sent a letter of inquiry to the Asahi Shimbun asking, “Why were search-avoidance meta tags inserted only into these two articles?”
At the same time, the Sankei Shimbun and Yukan Fuji took note of this issue and sent similar questions to the Asahi Shimbun.
The response from the Asahi Shimbun, dated August 31, was as follows.
On August 22, 2014, we distributed several English-language articles concerning the comfort women issue.
At that time, search-avoidance tags were set on the articles, and after internal confirmation work, these tags were removed and the articles were made publicly available.
Of these, in two articles for which work had been done using a different system because their headlines were long, although they were made publicly available, it was found that the work of removing the search-avoidance tag settings had been omitted, and we corrected this.
The details are as follows.
1; In order to make a final confirmation of the articles’ format and other matters, search-avoidance tags were set and the articles were externally distributed.
2; After confirmation, the tags were removed sequentially.
3; In two of these articles, the work of removing the settings was omitted.
According to several IT engineers around me, such an operation is virtually 100 percent impossible.
If this explanation were true, it would mean that the Asahi Shimbun deliberately attached search-avoidance meta tags to articles that had not yet been finalized and checked them in an external environment.
Normally, it is common sense that confirmation work is always carried out in an environment that cannot be accessed from outside.
Even someone like me, with only elementary knowledge and experience, can understand this, and there are almost no engineers who would take the Asahi Shimbun’s explanation at face value.
In any case, it is remarkable that the work omission happened only in these two articles, but in short, the explanation is that the purpose of attaching the search-avoidance meta tags was pre-publication confirmation work, and that the tags remained because of an omission in the work.
By around this time, several internet users with specialized knowledge had provided me with various pieces of advice and hypotheses.
Therefore, with the help of an engineer friend, I decided to verify those hypotheses again by myself.
At a family restaurant at night, we examined related English and Japanese articles from every possible angle.
Then a fact we had overlooked emerged.
Astonishingly, a search-avoidance meta tag had also been entered into the original Japanese article about “confusion with the Women’s Volunteer Corps,” titled “Confusion with the ‘Volunteer Corps’: At the Time, Research Was Scarce and They Were Regarded as the Same.”
Indeed, no matter how much one searched, it was impossible to reach this article directly.
So what I thought of doing was to verify when this meta tag had been inserted.
On the internet, there is a site that saves the histories of websites around the world one after another.
Using this service, I would check the state of this article when it was first published on August 5, 2014.
Fortunately, the file from that time had been preserved.
When I immediately checked the source page, it was not there.
The search-avoidance meta tag could not be found.
Apparently, it became clear that the meta tag in question seems to have been inserted after September 2017.
What does this mean?
This meta tag was deliberately inserted for some purpose long after the article had been published.
This cannot be explained by the previously mentioned “omission in the work at the time of publication.”
The suspicion deepened.
It can only be thought that they wanted to hide it.
According to the morning edition of the Sankei Shimbun dated September 9, in response to Sankei’s questions on this matter, the Asahi Shimbun answered as follows.
“When we were interviewed by the Sankei Shimbun on August 23 about the tags in the English edition, we also conducted confirmation work on the Japanese-version articles. At that time, it became clear that, due to an error in operating the distribution system, the article settings had changed.”
Quoted from the article.
The previous explanation was “we forgot to remove them because of an omission in the work at the time of publication,” and this time it was “in the course of removing the meta tags from the English edition, we mistakenly added meta tags to the Japanese version that we checked.”
Can such a thing really happen?
The Asahi Shimbun’s answer has no sense of reality at all.
However, there was another new discovery besides the meta tags.
The Asahi Shimbun had set publication expiration dates, which did not exist at the time of initial publication, for both the 11 Japanese articles and the English articles.
Once that publication deadline passed, the articles would disappear from the Asahi Shimbun site and could no longer be searched for.
The publication expiration date for the English articles was December 1, 2100, while the publication expiration date for the Japanese articles was, for some reason, April 30, 2019.
In other words, the 11 Japanese articles were programmed to disappear together with the end of the Heisei era.
According to the Sankei Shimbun, the Asahi Shimbun’s response to this was as follows: “Most articles on Asahi Digital cease to be publicly available after a certain period of time. We believed that articles concerning the comfort women issue needed to be made available for a long period, and in April 2016 we set the publication deadline, as a provisional setting, to 2019.”
In fact, when the history of the Japanese article on “confusion with the Volunteer Corps” was examined, traces were found that the Asahi Shimbun had manipulated the publication deadline of this article in the past as well, and it seems that there was a period of about one year and eight months, from around August 2015 to around April 2017, when it could not be searched for.
In the case of this article, a search-avoidance meta tag had been added on top of that.
Does the Asahi Shimbun have some special reason why it absolutely wants to hide this article?
The suspicion only deepens.
This essay continues.