There are many reasons I do not enable comments on articles here at The New Leaf Journal. Among those reasons is spam. I have comments enabled on our Guestbook page and that page alone receives hundreds of spam comments every week. Fortunately, the very effective free and open source Antispam Bee plugin sends the spam comments directly to my spam folder with a 99.9% success rate, but I shudder at the thought of how much spam there would be on more than 1,700 articles and short posts (and counting).
Of course, comment spam is not the only kind of spam that can hit a WordPress site. Spam may also come in the form of pingback/trackback spam, wherein a spam website links to a non-spam website. While I have disabled NLJ’s XML-RPC endpoint for security and spam-prevention purposes, I do enable pingbacks on all posts in order to support Webmentions. Once every few months, I receive pingback or trackback spam.
Rare Trackback Spam Targeting My Iroha Isshiki Hair Color Study
I offered that brief introduction to set up what I found to be interesting trackback spam in context. I present the spam below as seen in my WordPress dashboard.
As you can see, a spam website linked to my February 12, 2021 article Iroha Isshiki’s Hair is Brown, as Expected?, and my site received the trackback on September 28, 2026. How do I know this is a spam website and not a legitimate website sharing my anime/light novel 2D girl hair color research? Well, the fact that the link text was “free russian porn” (according to my WordPress dashboard) tipped me off. If this were a legitimate website, it would have capitalized “Russian” and the text would have been “free Russian porn.” Failing to capitalize a country name was the obvious tell. There may be other tells, but I think capitalization is the big one.
Later that same day, I received a trackback to the same article – this one in Russian – and I understand that this one also put the link to my article on text that translates roughly to free russian porn.
My focus on proper capitalization aside, it would be easy to dismiss this as the worst kind of trackback spam, especially since I am not clicking either of those links for obvious reasons. But I like to challenge myself, and challenge readers, here at The New Leaf Journal. What if the spam is trying to tell us something, something non-pornographic or not a flashing “clicking this link will lead to your computer being infected” sign. Recall back in 2023 when I critically examined an email solicitation I received at my webmaster email address, purportedly from Li Shangfu, the former Defense Minister of the People’s Republic of China. There is no reason we cannot give this new trackback spam due consideration.
Taking the Spam Trackback Seriously as Applied to Iroha Isshiki
The article which received the trackback spam – Iroha Isshiki’s Hair is Brown, as Expected?, is a historically significant article in The New Leaf Journal archives. I published this article on February 12, 2021, five days after publishing Hair Color Dress Code Rules in Japan, an article which examined an odd Japanese school dress code policy which, on its surface, prohibited unnatural hair colors, but in at least one case was applied to require a Japanese student with uncommon naturally brown hair to dye her hair black. That real-world story highlighted (pun unintended) the fact that, while most Japanese people have black hair, a relatively small number of Japanese have natural brown hair.
Some months before I read the story of the real-world struggle of a Japanese schoolgirl with brown hair, I read one of the entries in the My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong, As I Expected series, heretofore Oregairu. In one passage, Oregairu’s primary view-point character, Hachiman Hikagaya, made a mental note about the brown hair of one of the series’ most significant characters, Iroha Isshiki. While numerous characters in Oregairu, which is set in a modern, real-world Japanese school, are noted to dye their hair, Hachiman observed that Iroha’s “light-brown hair” appeared to be “natural.” This struck me as interesting when I read it, both because the author, in writing Hachiman’s internal monologue, thought it was worth noting, and also because there had been no indication in what I had read (or watched in the anime) that Iroha is not fully Japanese. The implication was that Iroha had naturally occurring brown hair despite being Japanese.
I used my Iroha article to launch a long-running and always-ongoing series on understanding hair color in specific Japanese anime, novels, and games. Having noted that the series launched with the naturally brown-haired Iroha, I will also note that a later entry covered another apparently fully Japanese schoolgirl with naturally brown hair in the Ippon! Again anime.
Now let us return to our spam. No less than two spam sites linked to my research article on 2D girl Iroha Isshiki’s hair color with the text free russian porn. As a threshold matter, I will vigorously reject any implication that Iroha is engaged in pornographic endeavors along with the spam links suggestion that my article has anything to do with such filthy matters (this is, as Victor V. Gurbo once put it, a family website). Let two things be said here. For one, your humble author is a big fan of Oregairu, having evaluated the three seasons of the anime cumulatively as one of his most-recommended TV anime of the 2011-20 decade, and having give his own much sought-after (source?) anime of the year awards in 2015 and 2020 to the second and third seasons of the Oregairu anime respectively. Also let it be said that Iroha, who features in the second half of the novels and anime, is the author’s personal favorite character in Oregairu. While Iroha admittedly has some manipulative tendencies, feigning being an airhead while playing up that she is adorable, and she may on at least one occasion encouraged another character to play proverbial homewrecker (context omitted for spoiler reasons), Iroha is not the kind of 2D girl who would turn to pornography. I am confident that the series leaves Iroha on a path where she will, as a 2D woman, graduate high school and go on to better society.
For the foregoing reasons, I was initially offended that anyone would dare suggest that Iroha Isshiki is engaging in pornography or that I would suggest such a thing. But what if the spam sites were trying to teach us something about her by using “porn” in a non-literal way. That is, perhaps they were trying to offend me in order to grab my attention while making a real point.
In my article on Iroha’s hair color, I wrote the following:
Furthermore, there is no indication in the show or in the novels that I have read thus far that Iroha has a foreign parent.
At the time I wrote that passage, I had watched the entirety of the Oregairu anime, which closely tracks the novels, and had read most, both not all, of the novels. That remains the case today, although I will be completing the novels for a forthcoming project (spoiler?). In any event, it remains the case that I am unaware of any indication in Oregairu that Iroha has a foreign parent or is otherwise not fully Japanese, a matter we studied in my article on hair color in the Red Shift visual novel. If this is the case, it would seem that Iroha’s brown hair is uncommon rather than the result of having at least one non-Japanese parent with brown hair.
If we take the spam trackback link seriously but not literally, we may have to change our understanding of Iroha Isshiki and her brown hair. We know for certain that Iroha is not engaging in non-family friendly activities, but what if she is part Russian? To be sure, Iroha being part Russian could explain her brown hair. A Japanese novel series localized as Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelins in Russian was adapted into an anime in 2024 and features a Japanese schoolgirl who is part Russian, so the idea would not be unprecedented. However, Alya appears to have silver hair, and I have not watched the series and have no plans to do so, so I am not sure what to do with that one. But Alya’s silver hair aside, our spam trackback-sending sites may be suggesting something about Iroha that would be less offensive than its suggestion that my article is about Iroha engaging in morally questionable activities.
What if we went a step further. I noted previously that Iroha does have a manipulative streak. Could she be a Russian spy? Is the plot of Oregairu thickening? I am inclined to think no based on the paradigm I suggested for diagnosing fictional characters with various flavors of autism or other disabilities or disorders. Let us keep things from spiraling and assume arguendo that the spam sites are merely suggesting in an unpleasant way that Iroha is part Russian.
But I digress.
With all that being said, Ockham’s Razor suggests that the two spam trackback links are simply spam trackback links, and should not affect Oregairu author Wataru Watari’s understanding of his excellent character. On that note, perhaps we should disregard this entire section.
Questionable Searches Once Benefited a New Leaf Journal Article
My hair color study of Iroha Isshiki has been a moderately successful article in terms of attracting visitors, ranking as our 51st and 52nd most-visited article in 2025 and 2024 respectively, with several monthly top-24 placements in late 2024. To the best of my knowledge, it has not been the beneficiary of internet users searching for generalized impiety, only to be disappointed to find that we engage in wholesome 2D person hair color research. However, back in mid-2025, I did discover after the fact that one of my very pious visual novel reviews may have benefited from Google Searchers hoping that the visual novel was impious. You can read that story in My Kaori After Story Review and Questionable Searches.
