Rebus Employed to Spread Initial Situation of COVIC-19 in Wuhan Hospital (2020)

The COVID-19 pandemic began in Wuhan, China, two years ago. When an early warning of mysterious pneumonia cases shared by doctor Li Wenliang (李文亮) (Wikipedia) with his mates was spread publicly, he was censured by the police. (He soon died of the disease in February 2020.) Ai Fen (艾芬), Li's source (ibid.) working at the same hospital, disclosed the situation in the hospital to a monthly periodical People (人物). The interview article published online on 10 March 2020 was deleted in a few hours, but people spread it in more than twenty variations to avoid the detection by the authorities. They used cryptic character sets, foreign languages, Morse code, bar code, etc. (The Asahi Shimbun, 13 March 2020; more images at asahi.com).
One of them employed emoji to hide characters here and there. Images may be found by googling with "火星字" (Martian script), which refers to writing text by replacing characters with similar sounding symbols etc. ("+U" for "加油" is an example taken from People's China: the character "加" means "add" and "油" sounds similar to "U." The scheme is similar to what was known as "hakspek" in English: "c u 2day" for "See you today", an example taken from Oxford Reference.) The cryptic look is sometimes called "emoji cipher", but may more appropriately be called a "rebus".
The example below seems to be from the interview article. I interleaved the rebus with the original text (in unsimplified Chinese characters), which shows how Chinese characters are replaced with emoji for a similar sounding word. For example, the name "艾" (ai) is replaced by the heart symbol, meaning "love" or 愛 (ai) in Chinese (and Japanese). The character "的" (of) is replaced by a symbol of drops (represented by a similar sounding character "滴" in Chinese). Characters "人" (person) and "毒" (poison) are replaced by ideographs. People versed in Chinese will find out more.

Links:
【發哨子的人】武漢醫師受訪，全網花式接力，胡錫進：要為不滿情緒留出必要出口
中國網民怒用「火星文」揭疫情真相 王丹：看了頭暈但內心鼓舞

Musical Ciphers in Japanese Literature

Ciphers with musical notes make an interesting genre in cryptography. An overview at Cipherbrain is something I wanted to write myself. After providing some additional sources in a comment there, I remembered my old writing. The following are two additional specimens from Japanese literature.

Jun'ichiro Tanizaki (谷崎潤一郎) (Wikipedia), Momoku Monogatari (盲目物語) (1931) (text)
This is a story of Oichi (Wikipedia), a sister of warlord Oda Nobunaga (Wikipedia) as told by Yaichi, a (probably fictional) blind shamisen player. When Oichi's husband's castle is doomed under siege in 1583, the last banquet is held. Yaichi notices the shamisen tune played by a monk includes repeated unnatural interludes, which convey a secret message for rescue.
It makes use of traditional musical notation for shamisen, whereby tsubo (Wikipedia) (places to be held on the neck of the instrument) are represented by kana syllabary.

Hisashi Inoue (井上ひさし) (Wikipedia), Nise Genshijin (偽原始人) (1976)
This is a story of three kids in the fifth grade. They communicate with interesting ciphers. One of them employs musical notes. A sheet music has two parts, one for consonants and the other for vowels. (Most Japanese syllables consists of one consonant and one vowel.) I think I have an image in some of the boxes stacked in my study, but I cannot locate it now.

Dating an English Cipher ca. 1700

I corrected my observations about dating of an English cipher ca. 1700 in "Diplomatic Codes after the Glorious Revolution".
The cipher is dated "1701 July" in the catalog record of the archives, but it appeared to be merely derived from the fact that the cipher is preserved with letters from this month. So, I tried to date the cipher by examining the names included in the nomenclature entries. The entries "late King" and "late Queen" seemed to refer to King William (who died in March 1702) and Queen Mary (who died in 1694). However, there were other entries that suggest it was from the 1690s.
Now, I found the cipher was used in letters of Robert Yard, James Vernon, and the Earl of Jersey in 1699-1700. Probably, the entries "late King" and "late Queen" refer to King James deposed in the Glorious Revolution and his Queen.
Several undeciphered letters can be read by this cipher, but one (Stepney to Manchester) is in a different cipher. I included it in "Unsolved Historical Ciphers."

Acrostics in TV Program Guide on Japanese Newspapers

Acrostics embedded in TV program guides on newspapers have occasionally been making a buzz in Japan. Typically, the embedded text is a message about supporting a local baseball team, some social issue, or just an advertisement of a program. Two examples are:

 

The program guide reads horizontally, but the first characters of each line spell out a meaningful phrase.
According to JapanKnowledge (24 September 2014), the first such instance is said to have been the one for a baseball game of the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters aired by Hokkaido Broadcasting Co., Ltd. (HBC) in 2010.
(By the way, these acrostics are produced by broadcasting stations, not newspaper staff (buzzfeed, 2016/4/20).)

There are even double acrostics, in which messages are embedded in two vertical lines.

 
Googling with "ラテ欄の縦読み" (vertical reading of radio/television guide) returns many examples including:
(HBC, 2013/6/12)
(CBC, 2013/9/19)
(CBC, 2013/9/20)
(NHK, 2018/3/11)
(RCC, 2016/8/6)

The following are examples of double acrostics.
(HBC, 2016/10/13)
(RCC/HBC, 2016/10/23)
(HBC, 2017/9/20)

(NB. Some of the dates quoted in the above may be the date of the tweet or the article rather than the date of the program.)

Ciphers in Cardinal Wolsey's Copybook

Back in 2012, I presented a cipher used by Cardinal Wolsey in "Cardinal Wolsey's Cipher (1524)". It was taken from a fragment printed in a nineteeth-century encyclopedia. Now I found another letter in Harley MS 6345 in which the same cipher is used. Actually, the fragment seems to belong to the same letter in Harley MS 6345, but the corresponding ciphertext is not in Harley MS 6345. So, there must be some other source of the cipher fragment.
I also added two other ciphers from Harley MS 6345. 

 

Cryptic Books That Snatched 136 Million Yen from National Diet Library of Japan

When I wrote about cryptic stone monuments the other day, I remembered a series of cryptic books titled Asho (亞書, "Meta-book") by "Alexander Myaskovsky" (アレクサンドル・ミャスコフスキー) that snatched 136 million yen from the National Diet Library of Japan. No less than 78 hardbound volumes, each priced 60000 yen (before consumption tax of 8%), are full of cryptic text consisting of Greek letters and other symbols.
Starting from March 2015, copies were deposited in the National Diet Library, and about 136 million yen for 42 volumes was paid to the publisher (Risuno Shobo, りすの書房) as a compensation (Wikipedia) prescribed in the law. In October, the books were talked about on the web. The cryptic text might be some ciphertext, but it was pointed out that there were too few repetitions. Some suspected all was a fraud to extort compensation. Right after this, the publisher closed its website on 26 October, and the books were deleted in Amazon.
The manager of the publisher said to The Asahi Shimbun "I typed Greek letters on my PC off hand without any meaning. The volumes themselves are works of art or craftwork." So, it was not a ciphertext after all.
The National Diet Library also contacted the publisher. Finding that few copies were actually sold, they decided to return the books and request a refund.

国立国会図書館収集書誌部「2016年2月2日 『亞書』の返却及び代償金返金請求について」（NDL）
Saki Mizoroki「国会図書館が136万円払った「亞書」騒動を振り返る」（BuzzFeedNews） 6 February 2016
安藤健二「『亞書』解読不能な本を国会図書館が返却、136万円の返金請求へ」（The Huffington Post）
「亞書の謎１１　原点に還る」, 30 October 2015
中澤星児「謎の書物「亞書」を追っていたらとんでもない結末になったでござる / このまま都市伝説化しそうなレベル」, 26 October 2015
「「亞書」制作者がコメントを発表　国立国会図書館の対応に不満」

 

 

Any Material about Codebreaking of Philibert de Babou de la Bourdaisiere?

Philibert de Babou de la Bourdaisiere reportedly was a codebreaker for King Francis I. But the only primary source seems to be a brief reference in Vigenere, Traite des chiffres (1586). My search did not find anything about his codebreaking, but found a ciphertext in a letter to him from his son. Although the letter is accompanied with plaintext, I have not been successful in reconstructing the cipher. (The plaintext seems too long for the length of the ciphertext.) I mentioned this in "French Ciphers during the Reign of Henry II of France".
I also added other ciphers therein as well as in "French Ciphers during the Reign of Francis I" reconstructed from the same source (BnF Dupuy 44).