The Myth Of Japan's Free Press And Democracy

 Kenichi Asano

In examining the media situation and political governance in Japan, let me first introduce my experience as a correspondent in Southeast Asia. For 22 years, I worked as a news reporter for Kyodo News, Japan's representative wire service.

I also covered the Cambodian conflict and democratization process in Thailand. I have been an independent journalist for eight years, having also taken a position as professor of mass communications at Doshisha University since April 1994.

I have a special interest in media ethics, mainly how the news media should cover crimes and criminal victims, as well as suspects, defendants, and convicts. I often compare media-accountability systems in various countries. I also try to monitor the "independence" of journalists from the political centers of local and national power that they cover.

WHY JAPAN IS SO UNDEMOCRATIC

Let me now turn to why Japan is one of the most underdeveloped states when it comes to healthy journalism and democracy in the Asia-Pacific region.

Firstly, according to opinion polls last year, more than 55 percent of the Japanese public reportedly support Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's cabinet, even after he twice worshipped at Yasukuni Shrine near Tokyo, a Shinto shrine where Class-A war criminals from World War II (including Japan's then-prime minister Hideki Tojo) are enshrined as gods. 

Yasukuni Shrine was the center of state-sponsored Shintoism during the years of Japan's invasion of the Asia-Pacific region since 1895, when Japan annexed Taiwan by military force. To make a comparison, that would be like the current German president paying an official visit to Adolf Hitler's graveyard on the day that Nazi Germany surrendered to Allied forces.

Moreover, Shintaro Ishihara, the former governor of Tokyo-infamous for repeatedly denying Japanese atrocities in the Nanjing Massacre, Korean sex slaves, and Allied POW torture still ranks as the most popular politician in Japanese public opinion polls. It is safe to say that on the political spectrum, Ishihara is far right.

Most Japanese citizens, to this day, refuse to admit that Japan ever invaded any Asia-Pacific countries. Japanese people even go so far as to emphasize that Japanese military occupation in the region has helped these countries.  The reason is government controlled education and government control of media.  All schools and media outlets are given government subsidies and these are cut when media goes against government mandated narrative.

Japanese Emperor Hirohito was acquitted of wartime atrocities at the close of World War II, and since then, most Japanese people have closed the book on taking any responsibility for their government's own past crimes against humanity. From that time up to the present day, Japan's ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been dominated by ultra-right politicians and bureaucrats.

Herbert P. Bix's recent Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan shows in painstaking detail the many ways that the former Emperor led Japan's military wartime regime, and how he was later protected by Occupation forces after the war. The book, which has been out in English since 2000, was finally translated into Japanese mid-2002, the language that would expose it to its most important audience. Japanese publishers had been reluctant to publish Bix's book in fear that they will become targets of right-wing violence. Kodansha, leading publishing firm in Tokyo, published its translation. Most Japanese newspapers criticized the book in their book reviews. What makes Bix's book so threatening is the high quality of his scholarship, revealing the truth of the matter with indisputable facts. Mr. Minoru Kitamura, one of several Japanese historians seeking to prove that the Nanjing Massacre in China never happened, has written a new book called "The Massacre Myth." Kitamura accused Mr. Harold Timperley, correspondent to China for the then-Manchester Guardian newspaper of Britain, of "creating" the story of the massacre.

Kitamura stresses that Timperley, author of the widely read book "The Japanese Terror in China," was an agent of the Chinese Kuomintang, the nationalist party then in government. Mr. John Gittings, a Guardian correspondent to Shanghai, wrote an article about it titled "Japanese Rewrite Guardian History: Nanjing Massacre Reports Were False, Revisionists Claim" on October 4, 2002.

Gittings, by analyzing Guardian archives in London, found out that the reason for the misquoting of the numbers of massacred people was due to Timperley's references to the Yangtze River delta being omitted at the time by Japanese diplomats in China. I too firmly believe that the number of victims of the massacre committed by Japan is still not clear, simply because the Japanese government has burnt or otherwise nullified evidence of its crimes all over the world.

More recently North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un has admitted that his country kidnapped Japanese citizens-and that at least four were still alive. "It is regretful and I want to frankly apologize," Kim said to Japanese Prime Abe, as the two leaders held talks in Pyongyang during their first face-to-face meeting last year.

Eight Japanese nationals, who were abducted in the 1970s and 1980s, are confirmed as being dead. Mr. Kim reportedly said that those responsible for the kidnappings had been "sternly punished." Six out of 11 people, whom Tokyo has long claimed were abducted, were confirmed to have died in North Korea.

In a joint statement that followed the meeting between the two nations' leaders, North Korea said it would abandon compensation from Japan's 35-year imperial invasion of the Korean Peninsula. In turn, it demanded Japanese official development aid and expected private investment from Japan. Pyongyang has long held complete compensation from Japan's colonialism as a pre-condition for talks over normalizing relations between the two countries. But suddenly, North Korea let Japan's responsibility for wartime atrocities just fade away.

In this sense, the Japan-North Korea joint statement is worse than the 1965 so-called "peace treaty" between Japan and the military government of South Korea. Mr. Kim of North Korea now badly seems to need Japanese economic help as well as diplomatic support, at a time when he is under intense pressure from the United States. North Korea can no longer afford to make so many demands.

Revisionists and ultra-rightists in Japan have acquired renewed political power following North Korea's admission that it abducted Japanese citizens several decades ago. The Japanese media, and most Japanese citizens, are behaving as if they are innocent victims of some brand of devilish "outlaw state." It seems to me that they have all conveniently forgotten what their own Japanese Imperial Army had done to the people of several Asia-Pacific countries since 1895. 

In August the Asahi Newspaper was forced by Abe's regime to retract stories on the Korean sex slaves and the Nanking massacre or have their reporters expelled from the Japanese Press Club.  Reporters must be members in order to gain access to all Tokyo officials.

In these instances, as with many other past issues, the major Japanese newspapers, magazines, and TV networks again showed their bad side: carrying out their reporting via the phenomenon known as "pack journalism."

In "pack journalism," the employees of news organizations throng to a single news source like a pack of animals, pursue the story almost as one herd, and report mass amounts of information that end up in stories nearly identical to one another. This is exactly the term the New York Times once used to describe Japanese news reporters, when the corrupt president of the Toyoda Shoji company was stabbed to death by a mobster in 1985, right in front of the reporters.

Mr. Kim Sok-pom, a Korean writer born in Japan, severely criticized the Japanese nation and its media recently during an October 26 citizen's group meeting on monitoring the media coverage of the North Korea abduction cases.

Kim stated publicly: "The mass media in Japan have been reporting the abduction cases without mentioning what Japan has done to Koreans. This kind of reporting by the Japanese mass media, which incites anti-Korean sentiment among the Japanese public, is a kind of violence against Koreans born in Japan. Japan has neglected to commemorate the massacre of Koreans born in Japan during the massive earthquake in the Kanto area [of Japan] on September 1, 1923, as well as all kinds of atrocities during Japanese colonial rule. Is there any country like Japan in the world?"

Kim Sok-pom added that "Japan is suffering from amnesia." He further accused the Kim Jong-il government of an "act of treachery and shameful diplomatic policy" when it recently gave up its right of any future claims to Japan's cruel occupation of the past.

Japanese revisionists have made great strides in erasing any written references to ianfu-former "sex slaves" of the Japanese Imperial Army-and the Nanjing Massacre in China from Japanese school textbooks. Very few Japanese citizens today know about Japanese modern history in any real depth.

Secondly, Japan is still under the military occupation of the United States of America. Following Japan's unconditional surrender to the U.S.-led Allied forces on August 15, 1945, and the subsequent end of World War II, Japan was placed under U.S. military control. The American military forces have never left Japan since then. More than 40,000 U.S. troops remain based in Japan today, as we speak. This is ostensibly to protect Japan from "enemies" like North Korea-and yet no U.S. military bases in the area, outside of those in South Korea, are facing imminent war with North Korea.

The Japanese news media and citizens are now criticizing North Korea's nuclear weapons plan. However, the Japanese have also totally forgotten that there are functioning nuclear reactors all over Japan, not to mention large numbers of nuclear weapons located on U.S. military bases in Japan.

Yet the Japanese government has confidently claimed that Japan's nuclear program will never be used for weapons and that U.S. armed forces are restricted under the antinuclear policies of the Japanese constitution from bringing nuclear weapons into Japan.

And this propaganda seems to be working well. One would be hard-pressed to find any large demonstrations against U.S. bases in Japan by Japanese students or Japanese workers. One can find an active anti-U.S. base movement only in the southern island of Okinawa, where most of the beautiful beaches are essentially occupied by the U.S. military. Extremely weak trade unions and university student bodies in our country make it very easy for the ruling class to control people. The Japanese, I would say, have politically changed very little since 1868, when the shogun-ruled Edo period ended and the Western-leaning Meiji period began.

Thirdly, the Japanese people have never experienced any real social revolutions in their history, unlike nations in many other parts of the world that have fought hard to acquire democracy at the cost of enormous numbers of their own citizens.

JAPAN'S LAP DOG PRESS

I would like to assert one good reason why Japanese democracy is not yet matured, despite Japans enjoyment of a high technological standard of living: the problem known as "lap dog journalism."

The press in Japan is not as free and open as that of any nation in the world, including the U.S. and European countries. Freedom of the press in Japan is only passively protected by the constitution that Japan adopted after World War II. Any kind of censorship is forbidden, but the LDP does threaten media outlets with lawsuits of libel and the new state secrets law could add charges of treason. For this reason self-censorship runs rampant. Those who work in Japanese media circles do not use their constitutional right to carry out investigative reporting. The Japanese press, as a whole, lacks any skepticism toward authority.

Lack of diversity and variety is the cause of such weak journalism. There is only one local newspaper in most of the local prefectures of Japan. Major TV networks are owned by prominent newspaper companies, which enjoy high business profits. Japan has the highest number of newspaper readers per capita of any country in the world.

And still, ironically, journalists and the general public alike in our country do not realize that Japan's freedom of expression was a "gift" bestowed upon us by the Allied forces at the cost of 23 million victims throughout the Asia-Pacific region during World War II. Major newspapers throughout Japan since the 1950s have acted as if their highest duty were to help enforce the continuing rule of the LDP.

A healthy, tense atmosphere between news sources and journalists is indispensable for solid journalism to flourish.

In Japan, news sources try to curry favor with journalists only so they can obtain favorable coverage of the organizations they belong to. But this is not right. Journalists should be independent of any news source if they are to effectively carry out their duty of working for the citizens' right to know.

According to a survey taken in Japan in the late 1980s, 90 percent of news stories in the Japanese press originate from government officials and Big Business. This is because the majority of mainstream news reporters get their "facts" through a system known as the "kisha clubs," or press club system imposed on media outlets from above. Under this system, the n - H media serve merely as mouthpieces for those in power. The number of commentators and academics who appear daily on major television networks in Japan are overwhelmingly scholars whose work is patronized by the government.

A lack of objective, balanced reporting principles is another problem. The Japanese media as a whole pay little or no attention to clarifying news sources and attribution of those sources.

You may be surprised to know that very few professional journalists in Japan have ever studied journalism before entering their profession. Only a few universities-out of about 400 universities in all of Japan even have a journalism department. A professional journalist is only regarded to be such when he or she becomes gainfully employed by any of the news organizations.

Generally speaking, Japan's concept of democracy is just like one that Professor Noam Chomsky of the United States defines as "an alternative conception of democracy." That is, under this conception, citizens must be barred from managing their own affairs and the means of information must be kept narrowly and rigidly controlled.

CONCLUSION

In closing, I could see with my own eyes how the people of Thailand fought against the regime of General Sutchinda in May 1992 in seeking democratic reforms, and how the people and journalists of Indonesia waged a courageous struggle to oust General Suharto in the 1990s. Likewise, the people of the Philippines fought against the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos and contributed to the eventual withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from their country.

Journalists in those Asian nations were always to be found in public demonstrations, alongside laborers, students and activists of nongovernmental organizations.

If Japan is ever to attain the status of a truly democratic state in the modern world, then it is precisely this type of free and open journalism that Japanese journalists will need to vigorously practice and defend.

Kenichi Asano is a Professor of Communication Studies at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan