Media watch: Was the Utoro arson incident in August a hate crime?

Posted on December 20, 2021 by philipbrasor
Utoro district

The Utoro district of Uji city in Kyoto Prefecture holds a great deal of historical significance for Zainichi Koreans, meaning permanent residents of Japan with Korean background. During World War II, the area was home to workers who had been brought over from Korea, then a colony of Japan, to build an airfield. They lived in a ramshackle workers’ dormitory, and after Japan surrendered in 1945 and construction of the airfield was suspended, many stayed on in the area and made their homes there, despite the fact that they eventually lost their Japanese citizenship and became foreign nationals. In 1989, the owners of the land in Utoro where these Zainichi Koreans lived filed a suit to have them evicted, and in 2000, after several appeals, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the land owners. However, by 2011 some of the residents had raised enough money, both within Japan and in South Korea, to buy part of the land in Utoro. In 2017, the local government opened a public housing complex on the land, with a second complex slated to open in 2023. Many of the tenants are descendants of the original mobilized Korean workers.

According to a June 28 article in the Asahi Shimbun (which was published in English July 12), Utoro is home to about 90 Zainichi Koreans comprising 50 households. The article was mainly about a memorial hall that the residents were building to honor those who had moved to the area from Korea and made it a community. The hall, which cost ¥200 million to build, would be a three-story steel frame building comprising 450 square meters of floor area. The workers’ dormitory was torn down, but one section measuring 25 square meters has been preserved as part of the exhibit for the memorial hall, which is set to open next year. 

Unfortunately, the Utoro Heiwa Kinenkan will have fewer exhibits than originally planned. On August 30, a fire originating in a vacant house in Utoro spread to five other buildings, including a storehouse where many of the exhibits for the memorial hall were being kept. On December 6, a man was arrested for purposely starting the fire. He was identified by Uji police as 22-year-old Shogo Arimoto, unemployed. As it happens, Arimoto had been arrested in October for setting fire to the Nagoya office of the Korean Residents Union in Japan (Mindan). 

According to Kyoto Shimbun, a local anti-discrimination citizens group held a press conference on December 15 at a Kyoto prefectural building where they released a statement saying that the Utoro arson case should be investigated as a hate crime, since there is evidence that the suspect started the fire out of malice toward Zainichi Koreans. Though many mainstream media outlets have covered the Utoro arson case, none have suggested it might be a hate crime, probably because the term has no legal purchase in Japan. Kyoto Shimbun defined hate crime as crime motivated by prejudice based on race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, religion, language, or disability.

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Media Mix, Dec. 18, 2021

Posted on December 19, 2021 by philipbrasor
Next year is the 50th anniversary of the Sapporo Olympics

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about Sapporo’s bid for the 2030 Winter Olympics. As pointed out in the column, the Japanese press doesn’t sense a lot of enthusiasm for the bid among Sapporo residents and thinks it may have something to do with latent feelings about the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Moreover, the Olympics has become less of a big deal as far as the average global citizen is concerned over the past decade or so. It’s difficult to gauge how much enthusiasm will return once the pandemic has faded, and in that regard the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics will be not only a huge challenge but a kind of indicator as to the future of the Games. A week or so ago, the main issue was the diplomatic boycott that many countries had announced in response to China’s poor human rights record. Japan’s joining this boycott has been relatively tentative: no cabinet members, including the prime minister, will attend, but there’s been no formal announcement yet to clarify why they aren’t going. In the past week, however, the point has become almost moot, since the swift spread of the omicron variant has caused so many countries to tighten their borders. It seems fairly certain the Games will happen in February but attendance will likely be quite limited.

Sapporo, if it’s approved, wouldn’t be until 2030, which sounds like plenty of time for people to make the adjustment, but as Tokyo 2020 proved, too much heartbreak can happen in the meantime. That’s why the IOC has been pushing up its decisions on future host cities. Hosting isn’t quite as attractive as it used to be, mainly owing to the runaway costs that always seem to attend preparations for the Games. Sapporo has already said it will not build any new facilities for 2030, but instead renovate venues used for the 1972 Winter Olympics. They’ve even put forward a plan to use land owned by the central government for the athletes village. The 30,000 square meter plot is currently being used by the Hokkaido Development Bureau, which plans to move its operations to a different location in the city in 2026. Afterwards, the city’s housing authority would build city-owned rental apartments on the land provided that the bid is successful, since they would build the units as an athletes village that would later be turned into apartments. If the bid is not approved, the housing plan is cancelled.

And there is another infrastructure scheme that’s uncertain. The Hokkaido Shinkansen is eventually supposed to extend to Sapporo, though as it stands it won’t be finished by the time the Olympics takes place. The business magazine President predicted last summer that if the bid goes through, the shinkansen authorities might try to push up the completion date so that it will be ready by the Winter Olympics, which would be difficult since it’s has already been delayed due to difficulties related to tunnel construction. But given that the line, which currently terminates at Hakodate, hasn’t seen much use so far and likely won’t see any more even after it’s extended to Sapporo (flights to Sapporo from Tokyo are much more convenient than the train, especially in the winter), nobody seems to cares. 

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Review: Belushi

Posted on December 18, 2021 by philipbrasor

Having not read Bob Woodward’s infamous biography of John Belushi nor seen the even more infamous narrative movie adaptation, I approached R.J. Cutler’s fairly conventional documentary about the legendary actor with few prejudices and left it with more questions than I had when I went in. The ostensible reason for Cutler’s new take on Belushi’s life is a collection of recordings of people close to Belushi that were used for a kind of corrective oral biography by his widow, Judy Belushi Pisano, in 2005. The interviews were done not long after Belushi’s death from a drug overdose in 1982, and many of the famous people who do the talking are dead themselves, thus lending the overall production a macabre tone that weighs it down. Generally speaking, Cutler tries to build his narrative around these recordings but since there is so much personal history to fill in he has to stretch what he has with reenactments (some animated) and extensive archival footage. 

Though not a hagiography, the movie clearly tries to make the case that, as as actor (which is how he thought of himself rather than as a comedian), Belushi was both unique for his time and a trailblazer, tracing a professional arc from his early days with Chicago’s Second City comic theater troupe in the early 70s to his seminal role as one of the founders and, according to Cutler, the guiding spirit of Saturday Night Live, and on to his short but very successful movie career. What distinguished Belushi from his boomer peers in the comedy business was his physicality. One of the things that Cutler does right is show how Belushi’s involvement in the counter-culture humor magazine National Lampoon’s extension into non-print media also expanded its base way beyond the college egghead crowd. With his whip-smart comic instincts and willingness to make a complete ass of himself, Belushi broke through the intellectual barriers that had limited the appeal of left-wing humor in the 1960s. Much of the movie is given over to his unofficial lifelong partnership with Dan Aykroyd, a fellow Second City alumnus and half of Belushi’s most remunerative creation, the Blues Brothers. Though equally outrageous, Aykroyd was still more of a cerebral performer, and the combination of the two working with and off of each other basically led to what visual comedy would become in the 1980s.

Cutler does a decent job of laying this out in a comprehensible way, and what’s inevitably frustrating about the movie as a whole is that nothing really sounds new. All the archival material is already available on YouTube, and the interviews, since they were mostly recorded so soon after Belushi’s death at 33, tend to linger on his accomplishments in a morose way.

In other words, there’s little long-distance perspective, which seems like a lost opportunity. The major complaint about the Woodward book is that it focused too closely on Belushi’s drug use, and Cutler’s movie does pretty much the same thing but with a less salacious tone. For once I would have liked to hear from some scholarly talking heads who could have explained Belushi’s work in a wider cultural context. As it is, the doc stresses his contributions to the 70s, when American TV and movies changed significantly, but does little to enrich our appreciation of the man himself or what exactly we lost when he died prematurely. In the end, John Belushi comes across as another creative genius who couldn’t handle stardom, but for those of us who were there when he shone brightest, there was obviously so much more. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645). 

Belushi home page in Japanese

photo (c) Passion Pictures (Films) Limited 2020

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Review: The Most Beautiful Boy in the World

Posted on December 17, 2021 by philipbrasor

Directors Kristina Lindstrom and Kristian Petri position their assertions right up front—the late Luchino Visconti was a famous Communist homosexual—even before they say much about his reputation as one of the most revered filmmakers of all time. Most likely, they assume that anyone coming to see this biographical documentary about Bjorn Andresen, whom Visconti cast as the pre-adolescent object of desire in his 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, already knows a lot about Visconti and therefore they don’t see any point in doing much more than skimming over his greatest hits. But the first impression is that of a tabloid hit piece, and the movie isn’t that at all, despite its unabashed reliance on tabloid content.

It starts out exploitative enough. Andresen is seen walking through dilapidated hallways in the present day, a man of 66 with long, stringy hair and a full beard. On the soundtrack is sounds of him during his childhood, and then a quick cut to Stockholm in 1970, when he was discovered by Visconti, who, according to the film, ruined his life. The director had already spent months looking for a boy to play Tadzio, the Polish youth who in 1911 has come to the Grand Hotel des Bains in Venice on holiday with relatives. He’s spied by the ailing, aging composer Aschenbach (supposedly based on Mahler), played by Dirk Bogarde, who immediately falls in love with him. In order to make this story not only believable but tragic, Visconti had to find “the most beautiful boy in the world,” though he focused on northern and eastern Europe and eventually came across the blonde Andresen. Fortunately for Lindstrom and Petri there is plenty of footage available about the meeting, since it involved a tortuous audition process in which Visconti got uncomfortably close to Andresen without actually becoming physical: Eventually, Andresen ends up in his underwear. In a sense this methodology was more practical than erotic, since Visconti wanted the boy to understand directly how the gaze of the doomed composer should be conveyed to the audience, as well as Tadzio’s role in what transpires. “He was a dictator,” Andresen says of Visconti in the present day.

Andresen was traumatized by Visconti’s leering demands, and you can see it in his eyes in the audition footage, a kind of excitement curdling into panic. For all intents and purposes, the documentary attempts to come to grips with that dynamic, and occasionally it strains for meaning where there really isn’t any. Suffice to say that while Visconti really did make Andresen a teen star, it was a qualified success, dependent first on how long he could hang on to his angelic looks, and second on his emotional fortitude and sense of agency. A good measure of self-pity enters into any conversation the directors have with Andresen as an adult: how he gave up his dreams of being a musician in order to pursue the life of a pinup; how he is still extending his proverbial 15 minutes of fame into his dotage; how his experience has convinced him that the world will soon end in cataclysm. His life is certainly in a shambles: a subplot shows him trying to fend off eviction. 

The movie might have been more educational had it explored fully Andresen’s impact on popular culture. There’s a brief but compelling sequence in which the boy’s popularity in Japan is explored. Though he made several TV commercials that have since become classics of the Showa Era, his larger contribution was to the peculiar visual style of shojo manga, in particular The Rose of Versailles, which appropriated his facial contours and hair style for the princely hero, a template that persists to this day. Andresen’s main resentment is that he’s never made money from it. He also resents that Visconti effectively turned him into some sort of gay icon (which he equates with pedophilia) and is constantly stating his hetero bona fides, though he hasn’t necessarily had a happy love life. He seems to love alcohol more than sex or women. 

But despite the salacious import of the documentary, it’s touching in its own strange way. It takes some effort to connect this bitter old man to the flawlessly pretty adolescent, and near the end, when we see him simply relaxing with his younger girlfriend you get it: He’s as much beholden to a manufactured image as we are to the idea that movies are their own version of truth, and we’re both wrong.

In Swedish, English, French, Japanese and Italian. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645).

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World home page in Japanese

photo (c) Mantaray Film AB, Sveriges Television AB, ZDF/ARTE, Jonas Gardell Produktion, 2021

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Seshu special: Nobuteru Ishihara unemployed again

Posted on December 14, 2021 by philipbrasor

Last Friday, Nobuteru Ishihara, one of Japan’s most famous dynastic (seshu) politicians, announced he was resigning his post as special advisor to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, after the media dug up a story about his political support group receiving special COVID relief funds in 2020 while he was still a Diet lawmaker. However, even before the relief fund matter came to light, Ishihara had drawn the scrutiny of the press due to his appointment to a cabinet position so soon after he lost his Diet seat in October’s lower house election.

His loss came as a shock to many people outside of the party, including reporters, if for no other reason than that he is an Ishihara; specifically, the eldest son of Shintaro Ishihara, former governor of Tokyo, best-selling novelist of the Showa Era, and the self-appointed conscience of Japanese nationalists. More important for his political purposes, Nobuteru is also the nephew of the late Yujiro Ishihara, perhaps the most beloved movie star in postwar Japan. All the Ishiharas who entered politics could rely on the Ishihara Gundan—the action-movie stars who comprised Yujiro’s own production company—coming out during election campaigns to stump for their mentor’s kin. Though Japan is no more celebrity-obsessed than other countries, given the restrictions, both legal and self-imposed, of elections in Japan, the most important consideration is attracting voters to campaign events, and Ishihara Gundan was a guaranteed draw that Nobuteru could always count on. Alas, the Gundan was dissolved in 2020 when the production company closed, so Nobuteru couldn’t count on them for this year’s election. However, he also may have invested too much trust in his name-recognition value. One sports tabloid reported that he hardly campaigned at all.

More significantly, he wasn’t able to retain his Diet seat through proportional voting, either. Proportional candidates are placed on a ranked list by their parties. After the final proportional votes for parties are tallied and each is allotted a number of winners that correspond to its share of the vote, the choice of which party members will fill those seats is determined from the top down, and apparently Ishihara was not placed high enough on the list to get a seat. As a former secretary-general of the LDP, it seems odd he would be relegated to such a low position on the totem pole, but maybe the LDP bean counters were also over-confident in his ability to win in his Tokyo constituency. In any case, they made up for it by giving him a job advising Kishida on matters related to tourism (specifically “inbound” tourism, of which there is none at the moment thanks to COVID), a move that many in the media saw simply as a means of assuaging any hurt feelings on Ishihara’s part. It’s not as if he needs the job, and the advisory gig doesn’t come with a salary. The only remuneration is a per diem of ¥26,400, albeit one that is paid regardless of how many hours (or, for that matter, minutes) he works a day. 

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Media Mix, Dec. 11, 2021

Posted on December 12, 2021 by philipbrasor

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about a proposed revision to existing immigration laws that would allow more foreign workers to stay in Japan indefinitely. If the revision passes, it would go into effect probably as early as the spring. At the moment, of course, non-resident foreigners in general are not being allowed into Japan, so there isn’t a whole lot of formal debate over the matter. As pointed out in the column, however, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence being presented in the media that such a revision could prove to be controversial if only because a similar revision was controversial in 2019. It’s going forward because the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has already formulated a policy to relax residency rules for foreign workers in order to alleviate some of the labor pressures on employers. What they haven’t done is relax entry procedures, per se, so foreign workers, specifically laborers and service workers, would still have to get into Japan mainly through the equally controversial technical trainee program or as students who are allowed to work a certain number of hours a week or month. Companies who recruit white collar specialists already have greater freedom to hire foreigners, but that isn’t where the need is right now, so it will be interesting to see if the government relaxes entry requirements for laborers and service workers as well. 

It may prove to be even more difficult since those who oppose any increase in the number of resident foreigners will make noise. When the last revision was implemented in 2019, Sakura TV, a web channel run by powerful right wing players in the media and government, including Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), protested loudly, but despite the fact that many LDP members also belong to Nippon Kaigi the revision went into effect. One conservative politician complained about the revision by falsely claiming that 85 percent of foreign workers who “ran away” from their employers did so in order to look for higher paying jobs. In actuality, they ran away because they couldn’t live on the money they were making, which is a very different thing. For this current revision, the pushback has mainly been on social media, which tried to pin the blame on Kishida, since some elements think Kishida is too “liberal” on certain issues, but the immigration policy that the revision advances was already designed by the LDP. It is, essentially, a cabinet decision. Some pundits have said that the reason the LDP boldly went ahead with the revision so soon after the last one is its victory in the recent lower house election. They are taking advantage of whatever momentum they have at the moment, and make no mistake: the impact of this kind of revision could be huge. One pundit compared it to the Status of Forces Agreement with the U.S. But as mentioned in the column, there will still be social barriers to foreign workers even if the structural ones are removed. Without coherent welfare policies that can help these workers adjust and assimilate, they might not want to stay in Japan indefinitely, and that may be what the conservatives are counting on. How it all plays out economically in the long run is anyone’s guess. 

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Review: Gunda

Posted on December 10, 2021 by philipbrasor

One of the surprising things about Russian director Victor Kossakovsky’s wordless black-and-white documentary about the lives of some farm animals, at least in retrospect, is that it was shot on three farms in three different countries. While watching the film in a state of varying degrees of unease I was constantly under the impression that Kossakovsky never left the same half-acre of field and barnyard. And in a sense this realization, after having read the production notes following my viewing, that in fact the world depicted was not an integrated place brought home to me how easily a filmmaker can make an emotional case by manipulating things a viewer might take for granted.

Perhaps it’s not a big deal, but Gunda has little in common with conventional nature documentaries. It treats its subjects as animals at the mercy of their own milieu without trying to help us understand how they feel, and yet we do feel for them. Most of the storyline, as it were, is about a sow raising her piglets. The movie starts just after she gives birth, and while the newborns are cute their juxtaposition to their larger parent makes for queasy viewing (it ain’t Babe, babe). It’s all slobbery wetness and sucking and sometimes interpig violence, which may be play, but under Kossakovsky’s lens you wonder. At one point, the sow tramples on the runt of the litter and the viewer isn’t completely sure if the piglet survives. But Kossakovsky doesn’t linger on the notion, and thus the story takes on a life of its own, continuing through the weaning weeks to adolescence before the inevitable takes place—this is a farm, after all—a process the director handles indirectly but with no loss of tragic implication. 

Occasionally, he leaves the pigs to look at some other livestock, namely a herd of cows and some wayward chickens. Since everything is shot from an animal-POV, meaning close to the ground, as well as up-close-and-personal, the film has a claustrophobic feeling that makes you want a wider view to allow for a more complete picture of the environment these animals occupy, but that might confound Kossakovsky’s purposes, which seem to be for us to identify with these animals without anthropomorphizing them. The distributor stresses that the executive producer is Joaquin Phoenix, a famous vegan and animal rights advocate, so, at least from a commercial aspect, the movie has a target audience, but I wonder if other vegans and animal rights advocates will come away from the film with the kind of meaning they expect going in. This is how barnyard animals really live, but we can’t help but put it all into a narrative box. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645).

Gunda home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 Sant & Usant Productions

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Review: Last Night in Soho

Posted on December 8, 2021 by philipbrasor

Because Edgar Wright made his reputation poking fun at big budget genre movies, there’s always a feeling in whatever he does that he’s taking the piss, and from the first frame of his latest, in which it’s difficult to distinguish the modern-day setting from the barrage of references to England’s Swinging Sixties, there’s an overriding sense of cross-purpose at play. As it turns out, these competing temporal modes are what the movie is all about, and not just in the way they’re incorporated into the story, but in the way they are drilled into the viewer’s consciousness. Our protagonist, Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), is a budding fashion designer whose obsession with the 60s is all-encompassing, from her 45s collection to her fondness for vintage fabrics. The thing is, Wright doesn’t stop there. He has to cast Rita Tushingham, an actress whose identity is completely tied into the British youth films of the 60s (A Taste of Honey, The Knack), as Eloise’s grandmother, and whenever Eloise asks her what it was like in those days you can just hear Wright giggling in the background.

That he uses this dynamic in the service of a fantasy horror movie only shows how beholden Wright is to the same kind of high concept that guided his parodies, but the results are less satisfying since he doesn’t have as tight a grip as he needs to have on either the 60s milieu or the scary stuff. Eloise, a suburban girl, moves to London to attend a prestigious fashion school and immediately her throwback style prerogatives run up against the post-millennial sensibilities of her fellow classmates, who ridicule her “granny shit.” Feeling ostracized and threatened, she moves out of the dorm and into a private flat under the care of elderly Ms. Collins, played in her last role by Diana Rigg, who, as Mrs. Emma Peel in The Avengers, was even more identified with the 60s than Tushingham was. Though the old-fashioned decor and atmosphere of her new abode initially makes Eloise feel more at home, her nights quickly fill with visions of another young woman trying to make her name in London—but during the height of the 60s themselves. Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) is an aspiring singer who is trying to get noticed by the shady management of the legendary Cafe de Paris. 

The pastiche comes fast and furious from then on, but the comical payoff one usually expects from Wright never comes. In fact, his determination to make this a real creepfest seems disingenuous in contrast, and the various subplots involving a fellow fashion student (Michael Ajao) with a crush on Eloise and a mysterious old guy (Terence Stamp—the original “angry young man”!) who may or may not be involved in a murder that Eloise sees during her dreamtime as Sandie, only confound the general mood. Even as Eloise turns detective to find out who Sandie really is (and whether she really existed) and what powers are sending her back in time to relive the singer’s tragic, exploited existence, the movie never properly follows a path that makes sense as either a thriller or a farce (or, for that matter, as a comment on the kind of sexism that has survived into the 2020s). Most of the effort goes into recreating the Swinging Sixties without making it at all believable, which is OK since it’s being reimagined through the mind of a girl born after 2000, but it still feels half-assed. 

Opens Dec. 10 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Last Night in Soho home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2021 Focus Features LLC

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Media Mix, Dec. 4, 2021

Posted on December 5, 2021 by philipbrasor
Ishin no Kai leader Ichiro Matsui

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about Ishin no Kai’s (the Japan Innovation Party) attempt to regulate the distribution to Diet members of funds that cover expenses for mail, correspondence, and transportation, familiarly called buntsuhi. At the time the column was written and edited it wasn’t clear what the proposed bill would look like, but the main idea would be to replace a lump monthly allowance of ¥1 million, which is paid regardless of how many days a lawmaker works in a month, with a daily allowance that only covers days worked. Also, receipts would have to accompany a report of how the money was spent, which is not required now. The media found the whole matter suspicious because in the past some members of Ishin, which is based in Osaka but wants to become one of the main national opposition parties, used the buntsuhi to line their own pockets by “donating” leftover funds to their political support groups, a practice that at least one expert says is illegal. This is the so-called “boomerang” effect the media talked about, namely that the party’s complaint about the wastefulness of how buntsuhi is administered came back to hit them after their own use of the money was scrutinized. To me, the practice didn’t indicate rank hypocrisy as much as it showed how the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. At the local level, Ishin’s reputation has been built on fiscal reform, and they pounced on the buntsuhi issue as an easy means of spreading their cost-cutting gospel nationwide. They just neglected to look in their own house first.

Last week, the party announced it was submitting its bill to revise the rules for buntsuhi, but on Friday, apparently, the revision hit a wall. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party also had its own revision in mind and apparently the two parties didn’t see eye-to-eye on how to proceed, so it’s stalled for the time being. It’s important to note that while Ishin is technically an opposition party, its conservative philosophy is closer to that of the LDP than it is to other opposition parties, and that the transfer of leftover buntsuhi funds to political support groups is not limited to some Ishin members. It’s obvious from media reports that some LDP members do it as well. It’s just that they didn’t talk previously about doing away with the system, so there was less of a boomerang effect. Having the two parties oversee a revision of the allowance allocation may strike some people as an example of the foxes appointing themselves the guardians of the henhouse, but, again, that’s too simplistic. They obviously think the system needs to be overhauled, and it does. But other opposition parties don’t seem to have a problem accounting for how they spend their buntsuhi. As mentioned in the column, the Japan Communist Party makes a point of posting on their home page how their members spend it and how much they return to the treasury. They are, in essence, already following the protocols that Ishin was going to propose in its revision. Why they and the LDP can’t come to an agreement about a revision deserves more attention. 

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Media Mix, Nov. 27, 2021

Posted on November 28, 2021 by philipbrasor

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about the suicide of an Asahi Shimbun reporter and what it says about the state of journalism right now, especially with regards to daily newspapers. I, of course, write this column for a daily newspaper and have had to contend with the issues discussed in the piece on an ongoing basis, but since I’m a freelancer my particular difficulties are different from those of staff writers, whose problems with management has a direct effect on what news is reported and how it’s reported. Coincidentally, Shukan Bunshun, the only media I know of that covered the Asahi reporter’s death, last week ran another story about local news. Apparently, a fair portion of the English language writers who work for Kyodo, the biggest news service in Japan, have been quitting lately, thus putting the company in a severe situation since its reach beyond Japan depends greatly on translations of its Japanese content as well as original English language reporting. The people who are leaving, it seems, are young and foreign educated, and though the article doesn’t go into enough detail it sounds like a typical example of power harassment, meaning the reporters in question are being regularly scolded, but not necessarily for incompetence. It seems to have more to do with the stories they submit and how they cover them. I’m not sure if these reporters think they can easily find work owing to their bilingual skills, but, in any case, they obviously don’t believe it’s worth their while to work for people who don’t appreciate their value. How much of this friction is due to the usual age-oriented, hierarchical hazing you tend to find in Japanese organizations I can’t tell, but even if that is the case, young workers shouldn’t have to put up with it. 

Taking the wider view, if this is how news organizations treat new recruits it doesn’t bode well for an industry that’s already in trouble. In the past, Japanese media people were hired straight out of college and not necessarily because of their field of study or expertise. It usually had more to do with the school they attended and the whim of the recruiter. As with all corporate hiring in Japan, the idea was that the rookie would be trained on the job according to the company’s peculiar needs and internal culture, and that included reporters, who often didn’t have any journalistic training before they were brought on board, so for most there was no grounding in what we tend to call journalistic ethics. But now an increasing number of young university students are looking toward a career in journalism, and the unfortunate reporter for the Asahi Shimbun was described as just such an idealist. His particular problems arose when that idealism clashed with the practical economic needs of his editor, but it may have also had something to do with the notion that young college grads are no longer as malleable as the corporate patriarchy expects them to be.

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