In a bombshell accusation, Todai Shimbun, the student-run paper of Tokyo University, alleges that a graduate admissions site embedded a keyword related to Tiananmen Square for over a year. The goal was apparently to prevent the page from loading in mainland Chinese and thus block Chinese students from attending, the paper alleges.
Todai Shimbun reports that the keyword appeared on the website for graduate admissions to its Computational Biology and Medical Sciences Program (メディカル情報生命専攻). The keyword used was 六四天安門 (roku-shi tenanmon), or “June 4th Tiananmen.” June 4th was the date of the student Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989.
The paper says the keyword can still be seen in the Internet Archive’s version of the page dating from between August 12, 2023 and September 29th, 2024. UJ confirmed the keyword’s existing using the Wayback Machine’s February 21st, 2024 version of the page:
The keyword is banned by China’s Great Firewall, which filters out any news critical of the ruling regime. That means there’s a strong possibility that the admissions page wouldn’t load for Chinese students looking to apply to the program for at least a portion of the 13 months between August 2023 and September 2024.
Tokyo U officially acknowledged the incident in the wake of the paper’s report. The University says it has since removed the keyword from its page. It also says it’s updated its source code check-in verification procedures to prevent anyone from entering the keyword into the University’s HTML code a second time.
This isn’t the first controversy involving Japan-China relations at the University. In 2019, associate professor Osawa Shohei, who ran a company called Daisy, wrote extensively on Twitter about how he refuses to hire Chinese people, saying they exhibit “poor performance.” His department issued a rare rebuke, and the university dismissed him the next year.
Discrimination against Korean and Chinese nationals in Japan is, sadly, not an isolated phenomenon. A restaurant in Shin-Okubo drew criticism this year for putting up a sign saying it would refuse service to Korean and Chinese people. Korean and Chinese residents in Japan also face the brunt of housing discrimination.
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Sources
入試情報サイトに「六四天安門」のキーワード指定 中国からの留学阻害を目的か 東大大学院・メディカル情報生命専攻で. Todai Shimbun
