it came to light that the kanji character string “six four Tiananmen” – possibly referring to the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square incident
Damn. It’s crazy they had an incident in Tiananmen Square on the same day the Chinese gov’t massacred a few hundred citizens for protesting peacefully.
It’s hard to tell from the article whether the professor was protesting the Chinese government or intentionally getting the page blocked specifically so no Chinese students would apply.
I saw a sign that said no vacancy in english and chinese, but then in japanese below it it said, if you can read this, come on in.
I hope it’s the former and he’s reinstated with back pay.
Why block China when you can get China to block you?
What is a Tiananmen code ?
I didn’t know either, so i read the article, and now posting it here so others cam read it without clicking.
University of Tokyo suspends professor over ‘Tiananmen code’ embedded in website
August 5, 2026 (Mainichi Japan)
The University of Tokyo is seen in the capital’s Bunkyo Ward in this June 15, 2021, file photo. (Mainichi/Kimitaka Takeichi)
TOKYO – The University of Tokyo announced on Aug. 4 that it had taken disciplinary action against a professor in their 60s for embedding “Tiananmen code” in websites operated by the professor’s department and laboratory.
In 2024, it came to light that the kanji character string “six four Tiananmen” – possibly referring to the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square incident – had been embedded in a university graduate school admissions website. According to government sources, the recent disciplinary action was taken over that incident. The string may have prevented Chinese international students from accessing admissions information.
The string was embedded in the source code of admissions-related pages on a website operated by the Department of Computational Biology and Medical Sciences at the university’s Graduate School of Frontier Sciences. Source code serves as the blueprint for a webpage. If it contains keywords related to the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, the page may be blocked by China’s internet censorship system and become inaccessible from within the country.
The issue came to light through reporting by the Mainichi Shimbun in 2024, prompting the university to conduct an internal investigation.
According to the university, the professor inserted the string into the source code between 2020 and November 2023. The university suspended the professor for three days in a disciplinary measure dated July 29 this year.
In a statement issued under the name of Executive Vice President Ryuji Yamamoto, the university said, “This was conduct unbecoming of a faculty member of this university and is absolutely unacceptable.”
(Japanese original by Asako Takeuchi, Tokyo City News Department)
I feel kind of bad that this takes away clicks from the website, but not that bad since i don’t like going to a lot of these websites, if I could read them in comment form instead.
