Matt Cutts was the one who twittered:

Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while.

According to Google Blogoscoped

Akky Akimoto at the Asiajin blog recently reported that Google Japan was paying bloggers to review a new Google widget. Using pay-per-post service CyberBuzz, blog posts like the following popped up, strangely resembling each other, as Asiajin reports

Now Google Japan issued an apology:

Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.

It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Googles search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.

Here is the reply from Matt Cutts on this penalty : I expect that to remain for a while.

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