Photo/Illutration An online story that falsely identifies Akira Okaniwa, an assemblyman of the city of Misato, Saitama Prefecture, as a relative of a murder suspect (Hidemasa Yoshizawa)

MISATO, Saitama Prefecture--A city assemblyman here seeking re-election may have to use the campaign slogan, “I am not related to the murder suspect.”

Despite his public denials, his demands to website operators to delete false information and his pleas for help from the police, Akira Okaniwa, 82, is still fighting bogus rumors that he is related to a double murder suspect who lives in the same neighborhood and bears the same surname.

“I am a low-profile city assemblyman, not like a Diet member,” Okaniwa said. “Yet I’ve gotten tangled up in things like this. It is a scary time when people spread false information based on assumptions.”

Ibaraki prefectural police on May 7 arrested the 26-year-old suspect over allegations he attacked a family in their sleep in the town of Sakai, Ibaraki Prefecture, in September 2019.

The parents were fatally stabbed and their two children were seriously injured.

After the arrest was all over the news, a false rumor surfaced that the assemblyman is related to the suspect.

“It spread before you knew it,” Okaniwa recalled.

After returning to his office from city hall one evening, he learned that a company run by his eldest son had received media inquiries about his relationship with the suspect.

Soon, websites said the suspect is Okaniwa’s nephew or grandson, and the assemblyman’s picture was posted with the false information.

“The city assemblyman is busy trying to turn off the rumor,” one online poster wrote.

Another said bluntly: He has no choice but to resign.”

Okaniwa initially thought the brouhaha would eventually die down. But offline and in the real world, he realized that people were looking at him differently.

When he played golf in Ibaraki Prefecture, he felt that workers at the club were all staring at him.

He ended up initiating conversations by saying, “I am not the (suspect’s) relative or anything.”

But the silent phone calls did not stop. By noon on May 10, his son’s company had received about 300 harassing calls, scaring the employees and interfering in their daily work routine.

Okaniwa’s public email address received about 20 harassing messages as well.

The assemblyman, who is running for re-election in July, reached a point where he felt that something must be done to prevent the false rumors from damaging his political activities.

On May 9, he sent a message to the operators of around 20 websites, demanding a correction and an apology.

On May 10, he issued a statement denying the rumors and asking people to remove untrue and harassing posts from social media.

Okaniwa also contacted police about his predicament.

Most of the websites agreed to correct the information, but some false statements remained.

One operator of a website that wrote that Okaniwa “is an uncle of the suspect” told The Asahi Shimbun that the “source” was an anonymous post on an online message board called “5channel.”

“I created a story with information picked up in a lawless zone,” the operator said.

After Okaniwa demanded the removal of the story and an apology, the operator said: “I begrudgingly corrected the story and posted an apology. I can’t tell if (Okaniwa’s) statement is true or false, but he is a public figure, whom people like me can’t fight against.”

The operator, who makes a living by blogging, also said, “To do a write-up on an affair that attracts a lot of interest is nothing but a good opportunity for us.”

Yoshiaki Hashimoto, a professor at Tokyo Women’s Christian University who specializes in information behavior and social psychology, said people tend to spread false rumors about criminal cases that draw wide media attention but offer little information about the suspect.

People use unverified rumors to fill in the blanks of ambiguous information, mostly through social networking sites, because they want to share them and check them with strangers, Hashimoto said.

Hashimoto said people who share and retweet baseless rumors should be aware that they are complicit in spreading false information, and they can be held legally responsible for such action.

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