Monday in Washington, April 1, 2019

THE KALB REPORT: A CONVERSATION WITH COKIE ROBERTS ON DEMOCRACY, POLITICS, AND THE PRESS. 4/1, 8:00-9:30pm. Sponsor: National Press Club. Speaker: Cokie Roberts, Journalist and Author, National Public Radio.

ROUNDTABLE WITH H.E. DARELL LEIKING, MINISTER OF INTERNATIONAL TRADE AND INDUSTRY OF MALAYSIA. 4/1, Noon-1:30pm, Washington, DC. Sponsor: U.S. Chamber of Commerce; US-ASEAN Business Council. Speaker: Minister Datuk Darell Leiking, Minister of International Trade and Industry of Malaysia. BY INVITATION ONLY.

A CONVERSATION WITH CONGRESSMAN MICHAEL MCCAUL. 4/1, 2:00-3:00pm, Washington, DC. Sponsor: Wilson Center. Speaker: Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), Ranking Member, House Foreign Affairs Committee; Jane Harman, Director, President, and CEO, Wilson Center.

Media ethics betrayed in Japan

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by Jeff Kingston, Director of Asian Studies at Temple University Japan, a former columnist of The Japan Times and author of Japan (Polity 2019).

East Asia Forum, 12 February 2019

Imagine that the editorial page of The New York Times suddenly shifted dramatically rightward and columnists critical of US President Donald Trump were ousted and replaced by sycophantic pundits. Then a tape emerges of the editor justifying these changes as intended to counter accusations that the newspaper is anti-American and the sacking of Trump debunkers as designed to boost government ad revenue and snag an interview with Trump. This is essentially what recently happened at The Japan Times.

In June 2017, public relations firm News2u purchased The Japan Times, Japan’s oldest and most circulated English-language newspaper. The new management jettisoned the newspaper’s previous critical editorial stance in favour of lauding Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s policies. The Japan Times now embraces Abe’s revisionist history, which promotes a vindicating and exonerating narrative of Japan’s wartime past.

Based on information from an insider’s tape, on 25 January 2019 Reuters reported that Executive Editor Hiroyasu Mizuno insinuated during a staff meeting that criticising Abe’s policies and revisionist views on history conveyed an anti-Japanese bias. He said, ‘I want to get rid of criticism that Japan Times is anti-Japanese’ — akin to arguing that criticising Trump makes The New York Times anti-American. According to that logic, much of the Japanese population must be anti-Japanese since polls suggest support for Abe’s signature policies hovers between 25–30 per cent.

At the same meeting, a senior manager clearly stated on tape that termination of my own column (which was often critical of the Abe administration) had already produced an upside, boosting revenues from government-sponsored content and scoring an interview with Abe.

Reuters drew attention to Mizuno’s unsuccessful efforts in mid-2018 to convince his editorial team to soften its criticism of Japan’s wartime misconduct, annotating several articles to make his point. According to copies of his notes, he ‘objected to calling comfort women “victims” or mentioning that they included girls; questioned referring to Japan’s occupation of Korea as “brutal”; and criticized the paper’s reporting and stories by wire services, including Reuters, as generally “pro-Korea” and not adequately reflecting Japan’s view’.

The latter is a misleading claim, as there is no monolithic Japanese view of history as it varies across the political spectrum. The Japan Times has shifted from the Asahi newspaper’s left-of-centre stance to the deep right at the Sankei end of the spectrum.

Having failed to sway his team, Mizuno proceeded to ignore their objections, inserting a note at the end of an article on 30 November 2018 about the Seoul–Tokyo fracas over forced labour. The note announced that The Japan Times would no longer use the terms ‘comfort women’ and ‘forced labour’. In doing so, Mizuno overturned the terminology long used at the newspaper and most English-language media, including The New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian.

Mizuno’s brief note explains that the newspaper will now refer to comfort women as ‘women who worked in wartime brothels, including those who did so against their will’. And Korean workers will be referred to simply as ‘wartime labourers’, omitting any reference to coercion.

The note angered many Japan Times reporters and staff, forcing Mizuno to hold a meeting to clear the air (at which the tape featuring his controversial remarks was made). After the meeting on, 6 December 2018, Mizuno acknowledged and expressed his regret that the note ‘damaged the relationship of trust that we have developed with our readers, our writers and our staff’.

Mizuno told Reuters that he is not opposed to ‘appropriate’ criticism. But the editorial shift seems to exclude hard-hitting commentary. New columnists act as cheerleaders for Abe, while an acerbic political reporter who asked awkward questions at press conferences was shifted from the Prime Minister’s beat. Blogosphere reactionaries are triumphant, claiming victory now that The Japan Times has capitulated and is endorsing euphemisms about the comfort women system of sexual slavery and forced labour.

The bombshell Mizuno tape has tarnished The Japan Times’ brand. The tape suggests that the newspaper’s editor lacks integrity and journalistic ethics, having traded both for government ad money and access to Abe. The Japanese media has also picked up the story, amplifying the reputational damage. Transactional journalism of this sort overshadows the excellent reporting and features that make The Japan Times so valuable. Whether or not one agrees with the new terminology on comfort women and forced labour, the revelations are devastating public relations for a venerable newspaper now owned by a PR firm.

Although the newspaper’s physical circulation is just 45,000 copies,The Japan Times plays an outsized role in global perceptions of Japan because of the internet. This is precisely why a cabinet minister reportedly asserted at a late-2016 meeting that something had to be done about The Japan Times’ critical coverage, which was undermining the government’s pro-Abe public diplomacy.

After the ownership change, The Japan Times began fawning over Abenomics and the Prime Minister’s right-wing agenda. The evident willingness to kowtow to power, rather than speak to it, highlights the larger problem of self-censorship in Japan and a beholden media reliant on access journalism.

Japan Times staff have been in damage control mode since the Reuters story broke. It appears unlikely that there will be any reversal of the new editorial direction despite internal discord and the embarrassing revelations. Management is likely hoping to brazen out the scandal and continue milking the government for sponsored content and crumbs of access as it rides the lucrative 2020 Olympic wave

Japan's path to the terrors of the past

The pretext of counterterrorism covers many sins
By Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies, Temple University Japan and APP member

The Japan Times, Mar 19, 2016

The Japanese government’s track record on respecting civil liberties and the rule of law is suspect, as I detailed in last week’s Counterpoint.

In 2002, the former Defense Agency, which is now a full-fledged ministry, spied on people who filed information disclosure requests, while the police and courts railroaded antiwar protesters on dubious charges of trespassing after they passed out flyers encouraging members of the Self-Defense Forces to oppose deployment in Iraq as war raged there in 2004.

These weren’t the only cases. A Buddhist priest was also apprehended while passing out antiwar flyers (imagine that, a peace-loving monk!), and the police kept a tail on one civil servant so they could catch him distributing copies of the Communist Party newspaper — arresting him even though it was on his day off. Don’t the cops have anything better to do than harass ordinary citizens exercising their constitutional rights? Is this how they pretend to keep the nation safe from terrorists?

In any society governed by the rule of law, it is essential to protect civil liberties by applying reasonable limits to police surveillance powers. In battling terrorism, such limits are portrayed by critics as handcuffing the police and other security agencies and thus endangering public safety. Unlike despotic societies defined by tyranny and the denial of human rights, however, democracies depend on ensuring that civil liberties are not trampled and human rights are respected. Debating the balance between an individual’s privacy and the state’s desire to pry strengthens a democracy and the rule of law — but this is a project that is never fully realized and depends on constant vigilance and an ongoing commitment.

As Japan wades ever further into the “war on terror,” it is important to ask what protections should be accorded to ethnic and religious minorities. It is evident that the police have zeroed in on Japan’s tiny Muslim community, seeing it as a potential hotbed of terrorism. But can this profiling of an entire community based on religious belief be justified? Is it not a violation of fundamental rights such as freedom of religion and privacy? Are such discriminatory practices consistent with democratic norms?

The it-can’t-be-helped school of thought asserts that terrorists don’t abide by any rules, so democratic societies are vulnerable and therefore sometimes need to curtail civil liberties and discriminate for the greater good.

Germany, however, has found that such blunt instruments are ineffective. According to a report by the U.N. Human Rights Commission, a German profiling program known as Rasterfahndung gathered information on 32,000 Muslim residents in Germany, but failed to identify any suspected terrorists.

There are an estimated 100,000 Muslims in Japan and it has been reported that the government has compiled dossiers on 70,000 of them. It has so far failed to identify a single terrorist, but has succeeded in indiscriminately invading privacy. The courts have sided with the police, affirming their right to conduct surveillance based on profiling alone without an iota of evidence suggesting criminal activities or terrorist inclinations.

Back in 2010 there was a leak of documents from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department that revealed just how intrusive this surveillance is, prompting a lawsuit that accused the police of violating constitutional rights to privacy and religion, and protections against discrimination. In 2014 the court awarded token damages for the leak of personal information, but dismissed the constitutional claims and held that the police surveillance was necessary and inevitable. This means it is open season for the police to collect personal information and conduct surveillance of designated groups of people based on ethnicity or religion, absent any concrete evidence justifying intrusions of their privacy and human rights.

So, with judicial backing, the police can take the picture of everyone who enters a mosque in Japan and intercept the communications of any resident solely based on the individual’s faith. As Japan boosts tourism in the run-up to the 2020 Olympics it is attracting many Muslim tourists, but are they all being tracked as potential terrorists? Can customers of halal restaurants expect special scrutiny? That’s a sinister twist on the welcoming spirit of omotenashi.

You only need to look at South Korea for an example of a nation struggling to prevent the wholesale expansion of police powers under the pretext of cracking down on terrorism. President Park Geun-hye’s ruling Saenuri Party is pushing through an antiterrorism bill that would give her country’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) sweeping new powers that are “justified” by the “security emergency” associated with North Korea’s recent nuclear test — despite a lack of concrete evidence that shows Pyongyang is preparing terrorist attacks on South Korea.

There are concerns that the law would primarily serve to repress internal dissent in line with Park’s efforts to tame the press and intimidate critics, including educators. Opposition parties tried to block the new law by mounting a record-breaking filibuster because there is no pressing need to expand the extensive snooping powers the NIS — an organization indelibly associated with terrible excesses under a succession of authoritarian governments — already enjoys.

Moreover, the NIS has been implicated in a dirty tricks campaign that helped Park win elections in 2012 by a slim margin, and oversight mechanisms remain feeble. One can understand why security agencies seek indiscriminate authority to collect intelligence, tap wires, conduct investigations, track financial transactions, delete online posts and impose travel bans — that is the nature of the beast. But giving them a blank check is perilous to civil liberties and constitutional rights. Rather than unleashing the NIS, it needs to be reformed and subject to more extensive monitoring to prevent abuses. As Japan ratchets up its counterterrorism capabilities, the NIS provides a worrying example.

Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Sanae Takaichi has gained notoriety for her comments warning that the government could suspend broadcasting rights if programs are deemed “politically biased. “Problematically, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s idea of bias seems to be defined as criticism of its policies — an essential element of democratic societies. So it’s not enough that media firms have ousted several newscasters critical of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s policies, or that they have hired relatives of Abe (a nephew at Fuji TV) and Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso (a nephew at TBS), now they are being warned that in the coming battle over revising the Constitution, the government is taking off the gloves.

These developments are having a chilling effect on freedom of the press and expression in Japan, and raise real concerns about expanding police powers under the guise of counterterrorism. Attempts to muzzle the media while subverting the public’s right to know through the new state secrets law imperils democratic freedoms and highlights the need to strike a virtuous balance between ramped-up counterterrorism, civil liberties and accountability.

Showing Abe Americans care

On Tuesday, April 28th and Wednesday, April 29th from 9:00am to Noon there will be demonstrations on the West side of the Capitol Building on the grassy middle area, know as Area 1 hoping to catch the attention of visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. A Comfort Woman from South Korea will be there. It is an opportunity to show that Abe’s denial of Japan’s responsibility for WWII and Imperial Japan's war crimes concerns Americans. It is not merely a problem for Korea and China.

Events Happening Elsewhere in the country related to the Comfort Women

Uemura Takashi, a former reporter of the Asahi Shimbun, is currently an adjunct lecturer at Hokusei Gakuen University in Sapporo. In 1991, while a reporter for the Asahi, he wrote two articles on Kim Hak-sun, the first “comfort woman” to come forward to tell her story (1991). Because of these two articles, Uemura has been the target of denunciations by nationalists. He has been labeled "the reporter who fabricated the 'comfort woman' issue" and denounced by nationalists as a “traitor.” Such bashing took a critical turn for the worse in 2014, to the extent that he and his family risk losing their right to a livelihood.

REPORTING ON THE "COMFORT WOMEN": THE EXPERIENCES OF A JOURNALIST NOW FIGHTING A BACKLASH. 5/1, 9:00am-3:30pm, Milwaukee, WI. Sponsor: Center for Transnational Justice, Marquette University. Speakers: Takashi Uemura, former Asahi Shimbun reporter; and Norma Field, University of Chicago. Location: Marquette U, Alumni Memorial Union, 1442 W Wisconsin Avenue, Room 163.

REPORTING ON THE "COMFORT WOMEN": THE EXPERIENCES OF A JOURNALIST NOW FIGHTING A BACKLASH. 5/4, 4:00-6:00pm, New York, NY. Sponsors: New York University (NYU); Columbia U. Speaker: Takashi Uemura, former Asahi Shimbun reporter; Introduction: Carol Gluck, Columbia University; Commentator, Yukiko Hanawa, NYU. Location: NTU, 19 University Place, 1st floor conference room.

SCENES FROM A JAPANESE BACKLASH: THE EXPERIENCES OF A FORMER JOURNALIST REPORTING ON THE 'COMFORT WOMEN. 5/8, 5:30-7:00pm, Los Angeles, CA. Sponsor: UCLA, Asia Institute. Speaker: Takashi Uemura, former Asahi Shimbun reporter. Location: UCLA, 10383 Bunche Hall. 

LDP vs. FCCJ: Behind the Barricades

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Reprinted from the FCCJ's Shimbun #1

In the lead up to the election, the LDP and Komeito shunned the Club.
Has Japan’s government suddenly turned shy of the foreign media?

by David McNeill
McNeill writes for the Independent, the Irish Times, the Economist and other publications and is a coordinator of the electronic journal JapanFocus.

In the well-trudged battlefield between politician and journalist it was a relatively minor skirmish but an important one nonetheless: Japan’s government effectively boycotted Asia’s oldest foreign correspondents’ club before the Dec. 14 general election. The Liberal Democrats (LDP) and coalition partners Komeito were the only two major parties not to send senior delegates to the FCCJ to explain their policies.

The boycott risked breaking a long tradition of pre-election pressers by the government. It also meant that foreign correspondents had only one limited venue – the Japan National Press Club – to directly question the cabinet. The office of the LDP’s No.2, Sadakazu Tanigaki, told the FCCJ that it was powerless to change the decision, which was made at the party level.

Off-the-record, officials said the decision was prompted by concerns that some of its members had “not been treated fairly” at recent events.

Why? The LDP’s public relations division cited “scheduling difficulties” when questioned by the FCCJ. “We are now in the middle of an election battle,” explained a spokesperson, apparently unaware that this is precisely why such pressers are considered newsworthy at all.

There was of course another reason, though the LDP was loath to discuss it publicly. Off-the-record, several officials said the decision was prompted by concerns among the party’s hierarchy that some of its members had “not been treated fairly” at recent events.

They noted a twitchy press conference by Eriko Yamatani, chairperson of the National Public Safety Commission. Yamatani visited the FCCJ in September to discuss North Korea’s kidnapping of Japanese citizens in her capacity as Minister in Charge of the Abduction Issue. Instead, she was grilled on her alleged connections to Japan’s hard right.

Knocked off message, Yamatani stumbled through the press conference seemingly intent on not putting distance between her office and perhaps Japan’s most toxic racist group, Zaitokukai. The event ended with Japan’s top cop being shouted down by a particularly enthusiastic freelance member of the press.

The presser (and its denouement) was relished by some as the sort of scrappy, rambunctious encounter that helped make the FCCJ’s reputation, such as it is. But where many saw spirited, open debate, others saw chaos. Allowing freelancers such leeway at the more scripted events run by the NPC is unheard of.

Yamatani’s encounter capped an uneasy two years for ties between the FCCJ and the government of Shinzo Abe, which has made itself far less available to the media than its predecessors. Abe himself has not been to the Club since he came with a group of LDP presidential candidates in September 2012.

That in itself is not especially noteworthy – in fact, the FCCJ has not hosted a sitting prime minister since Junichiro Koizumi in 2001. But neither Abe’s foreign nor defense ministers have made an appearance at all, and it took 19 months to get Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, who tried (but failed) to have the questions scripted beforehand.

The Abe government's full-frontal assault on the Asahi newspaper has -- perhaps permanently -- weakened Japan's liberal flagship.

Yamatani is one of 12 cabinet ministers to speak before the Club’s journalists in the two years since Abe took power in December 2012. That compares to 24 ministers under the three years of the previous Democratic (DPJ) government, which sent its foreign minister no fewer than three times.

The Abe government’s tepid relationship with the FCCJ hardly amounts to an organized snub, but it does point to a carefully parsed strategy of control and spin. The government has adopted a similar attitude to the domestic media, avoiding hostile outlets while favoring their conservative rivals, particularly theSankei newspaper.

Its full-frontal assault on the Asahi newspaper has – perhaps permanently – weakened Japan’s liberal flagship. Many commentators say NHK, the nation’s top broadcaster, has also been brought to heel by the Abe government, which has stuffed its board with fellow political travellers.

The more successful this strategy has become, the more the government’s confidence has grown: The LDP seemed heedless to charges that it was trying to suppress critical coverage when it sent “guidelines” to Japan’s big broadcasters in late November demanding “correct” coverage of the election. It was striking too that Abe avoided the one other place where he was sure to face serious interrogation – Okinawa.

In that context, avoiding the possibility of political landmines at the FCCJ seemed just common sense, and the Yamatani clash provided the pretext. As FCCJ President Lucy Birmingham says, “I feel it was an excuse. They thought ‘Why bother sending anyone to the Club?’ They might make a mistake.”

The spat has focused minds on both sides of the media divide. Birmingham says one result will be tightened rules at FCCJ press conferences to ensure legitimate journalists are given priority in asking questions. Why give the government an excuse not to come?

One reason why the FCCJ makes politicians nervous is that questions are entirely unscripted, and evasions can be challenged, as the Yamatani dustup showed.

Meanwhile, the bad publicity generated by the FCCJ boycott – and charges that the Abe cabinet is running shy of tough questions – has both angered the government and created signs of détente. Birmingham met a Cabinet Office official in December who pledged to “make efforts” to bring more ministers to the Club.

That doesn’t mean they’ll get an easy ride. One reason why the FCCJ makes politicians nervous is that questions are entirely unscripted, and evasions can be challenged, as the Yamatani dustup showed. That’s only natural, points out Shiro Yoneyama, a lecturer at Toyo University and a member of the FCCJ’s events committee. “The idea that journalists ask what they want to ask is a normal, global standard. The ability to answer questions in an unscripted press conference is effectively an international prerequisite for politicians.”