Shooting the messenger: journalism under siege in Japan

Journalists who refuse to toe the official line are under pressure, experts say

BY DAVID MCNEILL AND JUSTIN MCCURRY

SPECIAL TO THE JAPAN TIMES

Hair graying and dressed in slacks and an open-necked shirt, 58-year-old Takashi Uemura would be hard to pick out in a crowd — even for the neo-nationalists who despise him.

The former journalist shrugs off the possibility that such hatred might one day translate into violence. Yet, as he talks, Uemura pushes his glasses up to his brow, creases his forehead and gives a look that says, “Why me?”

A quarter of a century ago, Uemura penned two articles as a young Osaka-based reporter for his then employer, the Asahi Shimbun, about Asian “comfort women” who were corralled into Japanese military brothels before and during World War II.

The articles made him a hated figure on the right. The initial low-key criticism, published in the conservative monthly Bungei Shunju over the years built into a furious campaign of denunciation that branded him a “fabricator” and a “traitor.”

In 2014, the campaign peaked when Uemura took early retirement and applied for a teaching position at Kobe Shoin University. His job offer was retracted after the university received death threats and hate mail triggered by an article in Shukan Bunshun....

Media watchdog

The role of journalism as guardian of the public interest against abuses of power has long been understood as its most important function in liberal democracies. An independent media should prompt debate and the free flow of information about the political and economic interests that dominate our lives.

A conflicting view — one prevalent in Japan in the 1930s and ’40s, and in modern-day China — is that the media should primarily be an instrument of state power, distributing “official” information.

This debate often breaks down along left-right lines, although that should not be the case, argues Kengo Suganuma, chief editor of Tokyo Shimbun.

“Our critics say we are left-wing or ‘anti-Abe,’ but we think of what we do as monitoring power, looking at the powerful from the position of the bottom, or from the perspective of people with no power,” he said. Newspapers, he adds, should be watchdogs on behalf of their readers.

Japan’s media was reformed after World War II to guide it in the direction of the watchdog model. Although those efforts were often circumscribed by political and economic pressure, and by the formalized control over the free distribution of information promoted by the press club system, it performed pretty well.

Not anymore. Journalism in Japan is under siege. The latest Freedom House rankings put Japan 44th in the world; Reporters Without Borders recently ranked Japan at 72 out of 180 countries, down from 11th place in 2010.

Japan is one of four countries that fell out of the “full democracy” category (along with South Korea, Costa Rica and France) in the latest Democracy Index published by The Economist (a publication that McNeill writes for, although he has no involvement in compiling those indexes).

Uemura’s story helped inform a critical report on the country’s declining press freedom by U.N. Special Rapporteur David Kaye in April. After interviews with many Japanese journalists, most of whom spoke anonymously, Kaye warned of “serious threats” to the independence of the media....

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/05/28/national/media-national/shooting-messenger-journalism-siege-japan/