The Newspaper That Dare Not Speak Its Name

In my previous blog post about the logo sported by Japan’s World Cup soccer team, I refrained from mentioning the newspaper, article, and writer that brought the three legged crow on their jerseys to my attention. This uncharacteristic lapse had nothing to do with a sudden interest in not attributing my sources. In fact, I was merely respecting the linking policy of the newspaper in question. Wait, allow me to rephrase that. I was merely respecting the bizarre linking policy of the newspaper in question.

The newspaper in question is The Daily Yomiuri, the conservative rival to the liberal Asahi Shimbun, which leaves the middle to the Mainichi Daily News and The Japan Times. I read all four papers daily, but only link to The Japan Times with any regularity since the Asahi and the Mainichi tend not to archive their articles for very long, and the Yomiuri, well, since they forbid linking. 

While they generously grant permission to link to the paper itself, they forbid links to specific stories. Don’t believe me? Check this out:

No linking to individual articles is, in principle, permitted. If you have a special reason for linking to any specific articles, you are requested to explain the reason to The Yomiuri Shimbun and obtain its prior permission.

Since they don’t also forbid linking to their linking policy, I’ll share it here for the incredulous to read the seven “Terms and conditions for linking” for themselves.

All done? Welcome back.

In this age of “link love” where the number of sites linking back to one’s own impacts search engine rankings, which then drives traffic to the site, ultimately leading to greater influence, a bigger audience, and higher ad revenue, it is really hard to imagine why they insist on such a strict linking policy. Even after reading their seven conditions with its fears of copyright violation and loss of prestige, something still doesn’t quite add up for me. What is the correlation between “hey, check out this article” and the theft of intellectual property? In my mind, the far greater threat is having another website reprinting articles unattributed, which has nothing to do with someone linking to an article on your site. Personally, I would like nothing better than to have someone link to a post of mine, regardless of what they have to say about it. I trust the new readers to make up their own minds about the post without any assistance from the original linker. Then again, I’m not a major media organization, so what do I know?

The only explanation for the Yomiuri’s linking policy that makes any sense to me is the vague feeling I have that their English website is provided more as bonus content for Japanese subscribers learning the language than as an outlet for English speakers looking for a window on Japan. If that is the case, then their desire to remain undiscovered is a bit more understandable. The one flaw in this argument is that there are a number of DY twitter feeds available in English, two of which I follow (hopefully they don’t kick me off after this mildly critical piece that is sure to tarnish their prestige, if ever so slightly).

In the end though, they can’t entirely suppress my need to acknowledge sources, even if it is less likely any of my readers will be able to see them, so here it goes. The article that inspired the World Cup Omens post was written by Kevin Short, a nature writer for the Yomiuri who I have been following for years. If you cut and paste the title of the article “Samurai Blue's emblem offers insight into Japan's classic mythology” into Google, it will display the link, along with a few other naughty websites who appear to have linked to it in flagrant violation of the Yomiuri’s policy. Having gone to all this trouble to acknowledge Short for writing about the logo when a simple link would have sufficed, all I have left to say about those rogue linkers is, GET THEM!