As a historian of premodern Japan active on Twitter, I seldom find myself embroiled in controversies in real time. I occasionally get pushback when I discuss the legacy of female emperors or nationalistic myths of ethnic homogeneity, but by and large, there’s little trouble. So I hardly expected any powerful backlash in February of 2021 when I retweeted an article in The New Yorker by Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen on a contentious publication regarding comfort women. In the tweet I had simply remarked “This is a fabulous summary of how this event unfolded across media and academic circles, also placing the major issues in historical perspective.” The result, however, was a ferocious Twitter storm from historical denialists that came to absorb my life and the lives of a number of my colleagues for months thereafter.

Far from existing solely in online spaces, the vicious attacks on scholars (and their supporters) continue to endure and are indicative of broader patterns of internet-based harassment that many academics have faced in the last decade. These attacks can affect the personal lives and professional careers of any academic or institution, regardless of their level of public interaction. In what follows, I outline how this particular controversy over Japan’s wartime atrocities unfolded, traveling from the digital pages of a journal into extremist online communities and, eventually, permeating the lives of digitally-engaged academics.