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Japan Media Review Blog
The Real Japan, as Told by Tabloid
Not an insignificant part of Japan's media world, they command circulations as large as all but the largest U.S. newspapers. Indeed many of them are owned by the same conglomerates that own Japan's establishment media, or by a handful of reputable book publishers.
Their significance, though, is driven more by the omnipresence of their advertisements – plastered on train cars and in other publications nationwide – which entice readers to their scandalous and sometimes lurid fare. For a critical view of the weeklies, see JMR's two-part seriesexcerpted from "A Public Betrayed, an Inside Look at Japanese Media Atrocities and their Warnings to the West." (Note, that it has come to light since then that the book's co-author Doshisha University Professor Takesato Watanabe appears to have his own personal problems with the weeklies, as he recently sued the magazine "Shukan Shincho" for libel. The magazine alleged, among other things, that Watanabe is a sympathizer of one of the weeklies' biggest targets, the Soka Gakkai religious sect.)
This month, a team of four veteran gaijin (non-Japanese) translators and writers – Geoff Botting, Ryann Connell, Michael Hoffman and Mark Schreiber – are publishing an anthology called "Tabloid Tokyo: 101 Tales of Sex, Crime and the Bizarre from Japan's Wild Weeklies," offering a pungent taste of this other Japan.
The book contains a collection of pieces that the four authors originally translated from the weeklies and published in two English-language newspapers. Stories include accounts of businesses whose expertise it is to make people quit their jobs, confessions from straight men who like to don women’s drawers under their clothes, even an investigation of how cheap sushi restaurants mislabel their fish.
The authors say they are drawn to the weeklies because of the exuberance with which they tackle subjects ignored by the mainstream media.
"The weeklies, non-members of the press clubs, scorn politeness, defer to no one, and thumb their noses at social convention -- sometimes even at the law, seeming at times almost to court legal challenges -- in the primary interest of a good story, regardless of whose chicanery or peccadilloes it may expose, whatever unpleasantness it may lay bare."
Needless to say, sex is a large part of what drives the weeklies, and Tabloid Tokyo revels in the frankness with which it is discussed. Take, for instance, this excerpt from a story about stores specializing in satisfying men's obsessions with women's undergarments ... now reaching out to women with the opposite inclination.
”Ewwwww. Several years back, men's briefs made a splash, so to speak, when certain squeamish housewives confided to the media that so begrimed were their husbands shorts, they eschewed handling them, using chopsticks to drop them into the wash. Sensing a business opportunity, an appliance manufacturer even marketed a two-vat washing machine so dad's grimy shorts could be isolated from the rest of the family wash. Now, its seems, women are buying these garments to heighten their passion while practicing hitori etchi, as solitary sex is referred to here."
Though he says "perverted voyeurism" is not their theme, co-author Mark Schreiber acknowledges that he and his cohorts love writing about sex, despite receiving the occasional complaint.
"Japan is a country where information about sex is widely generated by the media, so even if we were to stop writing about it, people would still be exposed to it in other forms. I would be sad if we had to drop sexy contents from our weekly columns, because the tabloid magazines write about it with such unashamed flair."
But the essence of the tabloids is their portrayal of ordinary Japanese, the authors say.
"Like newsmagazines everywhere, they cover politics, business, sports, science and entertainment. But they are at their best writing about daily life and the secrets teeming beneath its surface ordinariness. That, above all, is what we look for in them."
That appears to be why they included this story about the troubles encountered by a woman in the sex trade trying to get married.
"When the time came for Rika, 28, to tie the knot and settle down, she encountered an unexpected problem. She'd spent the past several years working as a masseuse in the "pink" industry. And -- all the more cause for this bride to blush pink -- she'd met her fiance on the job.
The problem was, Mr. Right came from an old-fashioned family that insisted on nothing less than a big wedding. Which meant attendance by both the groom's and bride's extended families would be obligatory.
But Rika had severed ties with her family years ago. What to do? Well, for a not-inconsiderable sum, Rika arranged for a professional alibi service to subcontract a small agency that specializes in booking professional actors. The agency supplied her "parents" and a dozen or so family members to attend the affair, and no one was the wiser."
Or these ruminations, following a piece describing how children are becoming sexually active at increasingly young ages.
"Dreading isolation, kids are increasingly unable to say no," a school counselor tells Spa!. And isolation is never farther than a snub away. Parents are preoccupied, families withdrawn, communities rootless, friendship conditional. Is it any wonder children are drawn to sex? It may well seem to them the only relationship left."
In the introduction, the authors ask themselves whether the Japan the weeklies are portraying in Tabloid Tokyo is "the real Japan."
"That would be a bold claim indeed for an anthology of stories with titles like 'Pornographers Target Public Baths,' 'Moms Mistake Kids for Pets,' and 'End of World Found in Tokyo.' Not the real Japan, but certainly a real Japan, or a part of the real Japan ... The weird characters, uncanny situations, bizarre relationships and stressed-out states of mind you will encounter in these pages are as real as anything imaginable, and no understanding of Japan -- or of humanity, for that matter -- is complete without taking their measure."
Sony's Aibo Turns "Newshound"
Loaded with a version of an RSS newsreader, Aibo's owner can select his or her own Web sites or blogs – so long as they are written in RSS – for the Aibo to read aloud.
"With one simple voice command Aibo can read the morning's headline news while its owner folds the laundry," noted Toshi Kawai, senior manager of Entertainment Robot America (ERA), a division of Sony Electronics, in a press release.
As for blogging, Sony has equipped the new Aibo with a "diary" feature that enables the robot dog to take photos and record short comments about the day's activities. These can then be uploaded to a blog site on the Internet.
The new model Aibo can also say more than 1,000 English words, and in a nod to multi-culturalism, about 30 Spanish words and phrases such as sientate (sit down), ven aqui (come here), and buen perro (good dog).
The new Aibo will list for $1999. For the most complete third-party review, see PC Magazine's “The New Aibo Converses.”
NHK Seeks Fee Delinquents Among Screening Attendees
The fees, which are required of all households owning at least one television, make up 96.4 percent of NHK's total revenues. However, in the last year a growing number of Japanese has refused to pay in protest over a string of embezzlement scandals and allegations that NHK bowed to political pressure to censor a controversial documentary.
Viewers who seek to attend the screenings of the shows are chosen by lottery. NHK says it will use the contact information they provide to locate those who are not paying their licensing fees. However, it will not prevent those in violation from attending the screenings.
As of the end of July, the number of households refusing to pay licensing fees had risen to 1.17 million.
Last week, NHK revealed that as much as 30 percent of those who owe viewer licensing fees (including those who refuse to pay, those who have deferred payment, and those who haven't even signed up to pay) are delinquent in their payments. NHK estimates that it could see a loss of around 50 billion yen ($441 million) in the fiscal year ending March 2006.
Also last week, NHK approved a special plan to restore its finances and improve its credibility, which included taking legal action against those who didn't pay the user fees as well as conducting layoffs amounting to 10 percent of its workforce. (See JMR's report, “NHK's Revival Plan Lays Off 10 Percent of Workforce.”)
In Constitutional Revision, LDP Seeks to Restrict Press?
The five rights include 1) the right to protect personal information; 2) the right to know; 3) the right to a clean environment; 4) rights for the handicapped and crime victims; and 5) the right to protect intellectual property.
What has the media most concerned is the so-called "right to know." The LDP defines it like this: "The right to know provides that the national and local governments shall bear the responsibility of explaining the content of what they do, and that the people's right of access to information shall be guaranteed."
Though it sounds much like the concept of open government, what the LDP is after is restricting the freedom of the press, claims the anonymous (but oft-quoted) lawyer and former newspaper reporter who pens a blog titled (loosely) “What We Can Do to Promote the Free Circulation of Information.”
"Behind the deliberating over this right to know, is the political motivation to establish a new right of access. What this is, in effect, is a right of reply that gives anyone who is criticized in the newspapers or on television (politicians have themselves in mind) the right to rebut the criticism in the same space.”
The new rights had been considered at a meeting in July, but at the time were shelved for further discussion. However, the LDP's overwhelming victory at the polls in September has added new momentum to their consideration.
Not only did the LDP and its coalition partner Komeito achieve complete dominance of the lower house of Parliament with a combined 327 seats, but they even obtained more than two-thirds of the total seats, enabling the ruling coalition to override a dissenting vote by the upper house of Parliament.
Earlier this year, in a post titled “Media Change Tone on Constitutional Revision,” JMR noted that several newspapers had argued strongly against this right to access:
“The Yomiuri said such a provision would encourage fringe groups to protest media coverage, and politicians to exert further pressure on newsgathering. The Nikkei argued that including such a provision 'would diminish freedom of the press, and conversely become an obstacle to the people's right to know.'"
The LDP hopes to present its final revision proposal in November in conjunction with the celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of its founding.
Nippon TV to Broadcast Tape Recovered from 1991 Eruption
According to news reports in the Yomiuri and Mainichi newspapers, the six minutes of footage, including both video and audio, were discovered this past June. It was found in a hut located in an area closed to the public, and authorities were alerted to its existence with an anonymous phone call. Camera equipment from three other media companies was also found there.
The NTV footage will be broadcast just after midnight on Oct. 17 as part of a documentary called "378-Second Testament."
The Mainichi Shimbun describes the video like this:
"The footage begins with the sound of rain. At the time, the press corps was photographing approximately four kilometers from the summit. At 3:57 p.m., just before the pyroclastic flow was thought to have begun at 4:08, the camera captures a rapidly expanding cloud of black smoke. 'This is incredible,' comes a voice from the press corps. 'Volcanic ash is surrounding us. There is a sharp burning smell,' a TV reporter begins to say. 'Are you getting it on camera?' 'Yeah, I’m getting it.' And then you hear a policeman say three times, 'This is extremely dangerous. Please get out of here.' The camera captures a raincoat clad Mainichi Shimbun cameraman (the late Tsutomu Ishizu) heading towards the mountain. Then just after 4:08, the camera suddenly points to the ground and stops."
Lava first started emerging from Mt. Unzen in May 1991 and the Japanese government took steps to evacuate local villagers. But tragedy ensued when a sudden pyroclastic flow on June 3 shot out 4.5 kilometers from the crater, burning 180 houses and claiming the lives of 43 reporters, film crew members and scientists observing the eruption.
Notes University of California, Davis geology Professor Richard Cowen:
"Three volcanologists were killed: Maurice and Katia Krafft, who had produced spectacular films and books on volcanoes, often by risking their lives very close to eruptions; and Harry Glicken, an American expert on Mt. St. Helens, who would have been sensitively aware of the dangers of pyroclastic flows. Glicken had in fact the week before compared Mt. Unzen with Mt. Pele, the dangerous volcano on Martinique. It is clear that most of the people killed understood the danger, and chose to accept it. They were in the evacuated 'forbidden zone' when they were killed."
The camera belonged to the late Koji Kobayashi, then 26. The camera was destroyed in the explosion, even the inside filling with volcanic ash. Despite being deformed by the heat, some 70 percent of the exposed video and all of the audio were restored.
NTV has shown the footage to the survivors and obtained their permission to release it. It says it is releasing the footage in the hopes that it might help prevent a similar tragedy in the future.
Digital Cellphone TV Broadcasts to Begin April 1
The Tuesday event, which included presentations delivered by female anchors from each of the major broadcasters, marked the start of a publicity campaign introducing “One Seg(u).”
“One Seg(u)” gets its name from the fact that one of the 13 segments of the 6 Megahertz of spectrum allocated to terrestrial broadcasting of digital television in Japan will be directed to cellular telephones.
The service will be offered without charge to anyone with a special tuner-equipped cell phone, personal computer or car navigation system. Programming will match what is offered on the other 12 digital TV stations.
Along with the announcement, NTT Docomo and KDDI also demonstrated prototypes of handsets that can be used to receive One Seg(u) Tuesday. Docomo’s P901iTV, for instance, will come with a rectangular screen that can be turned horizontally so that one can view the screen as a normal TV screen, while allowing simultaneous access to the keyboard to change channels or use the Internet. A special feature of One Seg(u) is that it allows users to view receive video and audio in the upper part of the screen, while receiving data in the lower half.
As digital TV does not consume much power, viewers can use the Docomo handset for two and a half hours continuously. However, those who wish to view analog stations instead will only be able to watch for an hour and a half.
According to a report in Forbes, the Docomo model is expected to cost some 10,000 yen ($89) more than a standard cell phone.
Terrestrial broadcasting of digital TV began in December 2003. By the end of this year, 90 percent of the Tokyo metropolitan region – which is home to nearly a third of Japan’s total population – will be able to receive the broadcasts, according to TV Asahi's Tamayo Marukawa, as quoted in the trade publication Keitai Watch.
Softbank to Create Online TV Portal: Report
The Nikkei said the site would host more than 1,000 programs from each of the networks and would be mostly supported by commercials rather than viewer fees. Softbank expects it to begin operating by next spring.
However, Softbank would not confirm details when queried by multiple other media outlets. A few of the broadcast networks told Reuters, however, that they had been approached by Softbank but had not made a final determination.
The Nikkei said the talks concern which programs Softbank will be given access to as well as how much it will pay for them. The new site is expected to initially contain mostly news and sports shows, because their copyrights are relatively easy to deal with.
Though Softbank owns a controlling stake in Japan's most popular portal, Yahoo! Japan, it told the Nikkei it will create a new company to launch the Web site. The firm will likely cooperate with Yahoo Japan, however, possibly relying on it for access to its customer database, the Nikkei said.
Softbank's move comes as each of the broadcast networks has separately sought ways of offering their programming online (see this report by JMR: “TV Networks Considering Pay-per-view Online”).
In contrast to Softbank, the individual broadcasters plan to offer their programming for a user fee. In July, Fuji Television Network Inc. began offering sports programs and concerts online, for about 300 yen (about $2.70) per program. Similarly, Nippon Television Network, for instance, said it would release up to 10,000 programs online beginning in October, including both dramas and variety shows, and would charge 100 yen ($0.90) for a 15-minute program segment.
Softbank itself has already been broadcasting video over the Internet since 2001 through its BBTV video-on-demand service. BBTV now offers more than 5,200 video-on-demand movies for rent and 28 live broadcast channels, which, among other things, broadcast games played by the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks, a professional baseball team owned by Softbank.
The Nikkei said Softbank's future plans extend to developing a 1,000-channel service that will receive programming from Japan's public broadcaster NHK, regional TV stations and foreign broadcasters – in addition to the five private networks it is reportedly in negotiations with now.
Sankei Introduces New Electronic Edition
Called NetView, the new electronic edition will be available Oct. 1. It is being priced at a mere 315 yen ($2.83) per month, substantially less than the 2,950 yen ($26.47) it costs to have the morning edition delivered monthly, or the 2,100 yen ($18.84) it costs to subscribe to the Sankei's current electronic version, Sankei Web–S.
The Sankei can offer NetView at such a low price because users can only view that day's morning edition. No archives are available for searching; nor can articles be saved. They can be printed, however.
Still, there was apparently considerable dissension within Sankei as to whether NetView could be profitable at such a low price. According to Shizuo Kobayashi, head of the Sankei's digital media division, as quoted by CNET Japan, “Much content on the Internet is offered for free, and users tend to resist paying for content. So we decided that we could just get away with pricing it at 315 yen.”
The Sankei is targeting the new electronic edition particularly at young readers.
Though TV listings, stock prices, and full-page ads have been eliminated, NetView looks exactly like the Sankei's paper copy. Even ads appear just as they are printed in the paper edition. Content unique to the electronic edition includes video and sound files. Created in Flash, NetView can be viewed using any Web browser.
The first Japanese newspaper to create an electronic edition, the Sankei in 2001 launched Newsvue, which like NetView, attempted to copy the exact look of the paper edition. For a monthly fee of 1,995 yen ($17.90), users could print, search archives and jump to related articles. According to CNET, Newsvue never took off, partly because it required a special Acrobat-like viewer to read it, and because it had been launched before broadband was widely available. Sankei discontinued Newsvue in March of this year. (For a description of Newsvue, see Japan Inc.'s “A New Way to Read the Morning Paper”.)
Behind LDP VIctory, a Sophisticated PR Effort
R30, who blogs anonymously and asked that his name not be revealed, responded via e-mail to a series of questions posed by JMR. A former staff editor for what he calls Japan's "most authoratative weekly business magazine," he now acts as an assistant professor in marketing management at a part-time business school. Recently, he obtained one-hour interviews each with the PR directors of the LDP and their main opposition rival, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ).
"Until this election," said R30, "the LDP's election strategy was essentially to act on the hunches of the secretary general, who acted as the chief in command of the election campaign." However, under the direction of upper house member Hiroshige Seko, deputy head of the LDP's PR headquarters and a former public relations manager for NTT, that has changed.
All PR strategies are now based on data, R30 said. The LDP has hired a PR company, which analyzes the party's image in the media every day. Questionnaires are conducted daily and weekly in which voters are asked to evaluate party leaders, their image, and their campaign promises. Based on these findings, the LDP charts out how it wishes to express its policy choices, what specific language to use, and in what media to make its appeal.
For instance, R30 noted that most media have reported that the LDP sought to limit discussion during the campaign to the postal privatization issue. On the contrary, he said, the LDP had prepared announcements about other policy issues and newspaper ads explaining its views. But the DPJ failed to elicit voter interest on other issues, so the LDP was able to stick to the one issue.
(Media sources might dispute R30's claim that the LDP wasn't responsible for keeping the public focused on the debate over privatizing Japan Post. For instance, Professor Thomas Berger of Boston University's International Relations Department told JMR, “I did have the chance to talk at length with the Asahi newspaper reporter who covered the [prime minister], and he was very frustrated. The Asahi and other media outlets tried to widen the range of the issues that were dealt with in the campaign, but with only limited success.")
Moreover, R30 said, the LDP endeavored to extend its media reach beyond television to include tabloids, trade papers, and even the Internet (see JMR's piece “Blogs Begin to Impact Japanese Political World,” which discusses the LDP's first outreach to bloggers.) For instance, it made its first efforts ever to reach out to Japan's popular sports newspapers (tabloids), as well as to purchase advertisements in them. It did so to take advantage of the fact that sports newspapers feel freer to publish stories that don't quote both sides of an issue. What's more, it hoped to capitalize on the fact that the headlines of the sports newspapers are often re-reported on widely seen morning news programs.
The LDP's outreach to new forms of media has important consequences, R30 wrote:
"The channel to politicians, which had once been monopolized by the large national newspapers, is now being opened to the tabloids and even to bloggers. Thus the status of the opinion leaders at the large national newspapers has rapidly become threatened ... We can say that this election has revealed the breaking down of the hierarchy of the mass media (television > newspaper > weekly magazine > minor media), and at the same time, revealed the gradually declining status of opinion leaders, who, though they don't supply particularly insightful commentary themselves, try to foment a crisis over the supposed triumph of populism."
R30 had particularly sharp words for the opposition DPJ, which he claimed failed to even try to shape its media coverage. Though the DPJ had been first to seek a PR firm's help in previous elections, its media strategy was particularly inept this time around, he said. For instance, R30 noted that the LDP was able to find out who the DPJ was fielding to appear in a televised debates and to refuse to participate if the DPJ candidate was strong, or substitute in a better candidate at the last minute. By contrast, the DPJ made no such effort in response.
Perhaps out of modesty, the LDP's Seko denies R30's claims that the party's PR strategy was "particularly clever or unique." On his own personal blog (which, ironically, he continued to write during the election campaign period despite all the noise about Web-posting being a potential violation of Japan's Public Office Election Law), he notes that he has received a lot of media inquiries since the election asking about the LDP's PR efforts. He says that he has told each reporter:
"The work of the communication strategy team is to objectively analyze the media situation, and to make sure that where the LDP's message is not being communicated, to reconsider our strategy and change it on a daily basis. It's not particularly glamorous ... This time, my job was to make sure that Prime Minister Koizumi and the LDP's strategy, tone and preparedness were perceived by the public, especially with regards to postal privatization. Public relations just assisted me in that effort."
Interestingly, R30 says that the LDP owes the success of its PR strategy primarily to Seko's business experience, rather than to any input or assistance from the political campaign industry in the United States. Though he notes that Seko did investigate the White House's media response team, his model was the PR division at NTT where he had worked prior to entering politics.
As proof of this, R30 notes that the LDP turned to an external PR agency for help, rather than specialist election consultants, as is generally done in the United States. Moreover, the LDP used the firm to obtain research and media training, but not to conduct planning. By contrast, he says, the DPJ used a PR agency (Fleishman-Hillard) in a more "American-like" fashion.
NHK's Revival Plan Lays Off 10 Percent of Workforce
Most drastically, the plan calls for laying off 1,200 employees, 10 percent of NHK's workforce. If realized, it would mark the public broadcaster's biggest staff reduction since its founding in 1926.
According to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the plan emphasizes natural attrition through retirement as well as curtailing the number of new recruits over the course of three years beginning next April. The layoffs will affect reporters, program directors and technical staff.
They are intended to address NHK's worsening financial situation as more and more viewers refuse to pay its mandatory licensing fees. These fees, which are required of every household in Japan that owns a television, have accounted for 96.4 percent of NHK's total revenues. They amount to about 1,400 yen ($13) per month for a color TV.
As of the end of July, the number of households refusing to pay licensing fees had risen to 1.17 million.
In the last year, a growing number of Japanese has refused to pay the fees in protest over a series of embezzlement scandals and allegations that NHK censored its own programming due to political pressure. The scandals claimed the job of former Chairman Katsuji Ebisawa, who resigned in January.
The revival plan also contains proposals for cracking down on non-paying viewers. NHK says it will initiate legal action against them by sending letters through summary courts (essentially small claims courts) demanding payment. However, it will not "forcefully exact payment," NHK President Genichi Hashimoto told The Asahi Shimbun earlier this month.
In the revival plan, NHK reaffirms its commitment to relying on viewer fees for its revenue.
"Precisely because we place the burden [of our finances] broadly on our viewers through licensing fees and do not accept advertising revenues or taxes," it says, "we can deliver news and programming without being a prisoner to viewer ratings or specific points of view."
And in a nod to criticism that NHK bowed to political pressure to censor a controversial 2001 documentary about Japan's responsibility for World War II (for background on this issue, see JMR's “Asahi Revisits NHK Censorship Allegations”), the plan notes that the mission of public broadcasting is "to attain autonomy and self-reliance, without being pressured or influenced by anyone, and to supply to all, without prejudice, information and richness of culture that is the foundation of all decision-making."
Internet Newscaster Sues Yahoo Subsidiary for Blocking Controversial Ads
Calling itself Japan's first news-only Internet broadcaster, VNN was launched in November 1999 by Tetsuo ("Teddy") Jimbo, because he felt Japan needed "an independent, private sector broadcaster that didn't rely on advertisement." (As a matter of disclosure, this writer was a colleague of Jimbo's at the Associated Press’ Tokyo Bureau in the late 1980s).
VNN's videonews.com site has since become known for its willingness to take on controversial topics. For instance, it has broadcast a series of 233 weekly talk shows called "Radical Talk on Demand" in which Jimbo discusses the news of the day with outspoken sociologist Shinji Miyadai, a professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University known for his research on high school girl prostitution and juvenile crime.
In March of this year, videonews.com contracted with Overture to place its ads when it refreshes its own news site with current news stories. A fully owned subsidiary of Yahoo!, Overture manages a system that places Web advertisements according to how much an advertiser is willing to bet on specific search terms. Described from the user's perspective, Overture's system acts as a search engine that lists search findings according to how much advertisers bid on various search terms. Advertisers only pay Overture when visitors click on their ads.
In Japan, Overture's search engine/advertising distribution system is used by Yahoo! Japan, the country's most popular Web portal, MSN and Nikkei.net among others.
However, soon after reaching agreement, Overture began refusing to place certain ads, especially those containing references to VNN news stories concerning controversial subjects such as the Yasukuni Shrine to Japan's World War II dead, the anti-war Article 9 of Japan's Constitution, and anti-Japanese demonstrations. Such topics are commonly found in all of Japan's mass media.
When asked about the rejected ads, Overture on July 13 responded to VNN saying, “In accordance with our [published] guidelines, we have decided that we cannot accept the ads for placement, because we have come across content that slanders specific political organizations and individuals." In its basic rules of use, Overture requires its clients to guarantee that ad content will not include "slander, libel or intimidation."
A dialogue between VNN and Overture ensued and finally in late July, Overture told VNN that it would no longer accept any VNN advertisements. VNN says a total of 174 ads were rejected.
For its part, VNN argues however that the articles or video referenced in its ads do not criticize specific people or organizations and therefore do not violate Overture's guidelines. A spokesperson told the Mainichi Shimbun: “Because of [Overture's] refusal [to place ads on our site], the number of visits to our site has continued to drop, and we have lost credibility as a media institution."
Though it's obviously very eager to advertise itself, VNN makes a point of not taking advertisement so it will retain journalistic objectivity. In a JMR story two years ago (“Video News Network Pioneers Internet TV in Japan”), JMR writer Jane Ellen Stevens noted that VNN gave founder Teddy Jimbo "the freedom to cover controversial topics the mainstream press ignores, but is anybody listening? Jimbo spends thousands a month to keep his Internet TV station running, but VNN's alternative programming has attracted just 4,000 subscribers."
Japan's First Virtual Prediction Market Doesn't Predict LDP Landslide
Between Aug. 11 and Sept. 10, Hatena, a blog-hosting company, sponsored “Hatena General Election,” an online game that allowed participants to bet and trade virtual money on political parties as if they were stocks on a stock exchange. (See JMR's “Japan Begins Web 'Trading' of Political Party Stocks” for background.) During that time, 1,163 users participated in the exchange, performing a total of 15,459 trades.
There was initial concern that Hatena's virtual election market might run up against Japan’s Public Office Election Law, which has restricted use of the Internet during election campaigns. However, trading continued as originally intended until Sept. 10.
Ultimately, Hatena users predicted that the LDP would get 50.86 percent of the vote, their coalition partner Komeito 8.37 percent, and the principal opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, 31.35 percent.
In the actual election, the LDP did considerably better: it won 61.67 percent, or 296 of the 480 available seats. The Komeito came closest to the game's prediction, winning 6.46 percent (31 seats), but the DPJ did much worse, obtaining only 23.54 percent (113 seats).
One source of the discrepancy is the fact that Japan's lower house of Parliament is composed of two kinds of districts: 300 single-seat districts in which the candidate with the most votes wins, and 180 proportional representation districts, in which seats are awarded according to the percentage of votes received by each party. Hatena's predictions are closer when one only considers the proportional districts. The prediction for the DPJ's total (31.35 percent) comes very close to the actual result of 33.89 percent, but the LDP forecast (50.86 percent) is considerably higher than the actual 42.78 percent of votes received.
Hiroshi Yamaguchi, chief economist for The Japan Center for International Finance and a specialist on predictive markets, said it's too early to say how well Hatena General Elections works, based on only one election. Still, he told JMR:
“My assessment is that Hatena General Election seems to be as good a predictor as opinion polls. But it is not a replacement; it works rather as a complement ... The problem lies in whether the market mechanism is truly functional or not. A major concern of us before Hatena's attempt was that Japanese people might not be well accustomed to 'markets,' especially virtual-money markets. In this sense, now I am very pleased to see that Hatena General Election showed the market mechanism worked fairly well. In my opinion, the prediction market approach has good potential as a new method to predict political events (and other issues).”
Like Hatena General Election, opinion polls also underestimated the extent of the LDP's win. On his blog, Yamaguchi names two representative opinion polls: a Sept. 4 poll taken by The Asahi Shimbun that predicted the LDP would take 53.1 percent of the seats, and a Sept. 3 prediction by Prof. Masayuki Fukuoka that the LDP would win 51.7 percent.
That may have been intentional. According to Nozomu Nakoaka, a former senior editor of the business magazine Weekly Toyo Keizai, the major newspapers may have deliberately toned down the findings of their opinion polls prior to the election. He wrote:
Just two days before the election, a small private meeting was held at the center of Tokyo, where journalists, diplomats, scholars, government officials and others attended and freely exchanged their own views about various topics. This time, naturally, the main subject was about the election. One participant, who is well acquainted with newspaper editors, said that the newspapers intentionally reported the conservative forecasts because if they report the most likely results, it would surprise the readers greatly and might influence their voting behaviors. Needless to say, the most likely outcome would be a land-slide victory for the LDP. In a sense, the opinion polls made a correct prediction. Other participants agreed with his comment and analysis.
Blogs Begin to Impact Japanese Political World
Since Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi called in early August for a general election, there has been a spirited discussion of politics in the blogosphere, attesting to the significant amount of public interest in the election. As of the writing of this entry early Saturday morning Japan time, blog search engine Technorati Japan reports that six of the top 10 terms most frequently used to search its blog directory during the last 12 hours concerned election topics. For instance, it counted some 68,700 posts that include the search words "postal privatization" (yusei mineika in Japanese), a central issue in the election. That's 23,200 more posts than it counted Aug. 23, 16 days ago.
Yasuharu Dando , however, doesn't believe the activity in the blogosphere amounts to much. The longtime blogger and e-mail newsletter writer calculated the reach of one of his own posts -- a widely read entry summarizing a cross-section of views about the election -- and observed that most of the people who read his entry came from various news readers and personal information sites, but not from other blogs. So, he concluded that the power of blogs to propagate information is today pretty minimal.
Politicians Take Notice
More important perhaps than the actual numbers of bloggers or blog posts is the fact that politicians are starting to take notice of the whole phenomenon. As many as 93 politicians who are running in the election have created their own Web logs, including 29 LDP candidates (not including Livedoor's Takafumi Horie, who is technically running as an independent) and 46 Democratic Party candidates. All their addresses are collected on a comprehensive election information Web site called “ele-log,” sponsored by Nichiei Intec, a manufacturer, and i-Hive Co., a Web design and application developer.
To their credit, the Liberal Democrats made initial overtures to the blogging community during the campaign. The party issued invitations (a copy can be viewed here) to a select group of 33 "credible" bloggers and e-mail newsletter ("mail magazine") writers to attend an Aug. 25 discussion with Chief Cabinet Secretary Tsutomu Takabe and Hiroshige Seko, acting chief of the LDP's public relations department. Ironically, the LDP even invited blogger Yasuharu Dando, not realizing perhaps that his day job is with The Asahi Shimbun. That was curious because the LDP has said it will respond to reporting inquiries from Asahi reporters until it accounts for a recent leak of interview notes from a controversial report alleging media censorship by the LDP. (For background, see JMR's “LDP Leaders Shut Out Asahi”).
Some bloggers such as "Brother Jin" criticized the party's arbitrary choice of attendees and suggested that it was seeking support within the blogging community rather than to engage bloggers as citizen reporters. However, former journalist and marketing specialist R-30 argues that the LDP's action is "epoch-making." Noting that at the discussion the LDP's Seko was quoted as saying “blogs are a form of media that we can no longer afford to ignore,” R-30 writes:
“If the LDP wins this election ... there is no doubt that they'll see their 'blogger strategy' as a contributing factor. And that will mean the end of an era of 'one-way' communication in which it was good enough just to have a Net strategy, that is, to upload their own pronouncements as well as the party's on their homepage. So in the future, those responsible for devising election strategy will have to figure out a way to respond to Net media in which countless numbers of people are involved in deep, two-way discussions. So it's not an exaggeration to say that a new form of media different from the mass media 'emerged' in this election whose influence can't be ignored.”
Election Law Limits
Still, few are predicting that in the near term, Japanese blogs will have anything near the impact blogs did in the 2004 American presidential election, or Internet users did in Korea's presidential 2002 election, where efforts to mobilize online voters is said to have affected the outcome.
In part, their lack of influence is due to the restrictions placed on Internet use during the campaign by Japanese election law. Written in 1950, the Public Office Election Law limits the distribution of text and images for use in campaigns to postcards and pamphlets so as to reduce the need for campaign financing. The law has been interpreted to mean that Web pages cannot be created or updated during the official campaign season, which runs for only 12 days before the actual election.
Consequently, much of the online information that might have proved most useful to voters is off limits. For all of Japan's high-tech prowess, none of the parties have been allowed to update their Web sites, send out e-mail newsletters, or post new material on their blogs once the campaign began Sept. 30. They're not even permitted to announce when candidates will be giving a speech or upload their party platforms.
Even Takafumi Horie, the brash Internet entrepreneur who is pitting himself against the prominent rebel LDP lawmaker Shizuka Kamei, stopped blogging Aug. 16 around the time he declared his own candidacy. Ironically, "the Net guru-turned-candidate has to depend very much on physical stumping and lots of handshaking," noted the Nihon Keizai Shimbun.
By contrast, there are no limits on campaign use of voice and sound, so anachronistic sound trucks can bombard neighborhoods with political messages.
Fear of violating the restrictions has also frozen some of the interchange that might have occurred online. Horie's company Livedoor, which hosts many blogs, announced that it would remove comments on individual candidates and parties from its Web servers. Moreover, the popular "goo" portal hosted by NTT Resonant stopped enabling comments or "trackbacks" on political Web postings.
Writes the Nikkei’s Waichi Sekiguchi in an analysis,
"In an age when election battles in many countries are waged fiercely online, campaign tactics in Japan may appear quaint. But because of the 1950 election law, the potential of the Internet as medium for connecting with voters - especially the young - is voided."
Mobilizing the Young
Nevertheless, some are actively trying to change that situation. On Aug. 2, even before the election had been called, a group of 157 entrepreneurs founded a group called the “Yes! Project” aimed at encouraging young people to vote. They immediately set up a blog and a social networking site so participants can converse among themselves so as to encourage political participation.
According to journalist and blogger Tsuruaki Yukawa, reaching out to young people is the most likely way the Net will change politics, and efforts like the Yes! Project could even impact the current election.
"According to the 80-20 rule [for a definition, see this entry on Wikipedia], the mass media can send information to only 80 percent of the population, because of space and time constraints. Accordingly, that leaves 20 percent of the population's information needs unmet. However, the Net can reach that 20 percent – that's the Net's particular strength...
The important thing, then, is how critical is this 20 percent of the population. In other words, are the rival parties competing fiercely enough that the 20 percent hold the critical deciding votes? ... If they are, then discussion on the Net will have critical importance. If activities like the Yes! Project are able get usually indifferent young people to go out and vote and influence the course of the election, then I think it's fair to call this election 'a blog election.'"
A New Star Emerges: Housewife-Turned-Journalist Ai Izumi
Ironically, it may turn out that the Sept. 11 election may impact bloggers themselves more than they will specifically impact the election. One result has been the emergence of a new "star" blogger, thanks to her intrepid election reporting. A former housewife and divorcee, the 38-year-old Ai Izumi decided she wanted to create a new life as reporter after suffering a bout of breast cancer. In contrast to most of Japan's bloggers who provide mostly opinion, Izumi pounds the pavement and posts long transcripts of original interviews. She was one of the few to attend the LDP meeting for bloggers, not because she was originally invited, but because of her tireless entreaties to interview LDP officials.
She has also attracted a slew of compliments from other bloggers, including those with many years more experience. Commented The Dancing Newspaperman", an experienced reporter of 10 years:
"Without a reputation or an organization to back her up, I think it's awesome that this former housewife has scored interviews with the top leaders of the main political parties. To this reporter, who has grown used to so-called
'objective newsgathering,' her reports are stimulating and original."
Says another journalist, Hokkaido Shimbun's Masayuki Takada, she has become the pioneer for a new kind of journalist in Japan. “I think she proves that anyone can become a reporter, so long as you have a platform for transmitting information (in this case, a blog), as well as enthusiasm, fighting ability and some measure of skill.”
Izumi authored a two-part series describing her own transformation into a Net journalist that can be found at goo's election portal, "Blog Election Portal: Lower House Election 2005".
LDP, DPJ Both Warned Against Putting Campaign Literature Online
Last Tuesday, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications notified the DPJ that its posting online of the comments of party leader Katsuya Okada's first speech following the official start of campaigning for the Sept. 11 general election was "problematic." It asked the party to take "appropriate measures," according to press reports.
That night the DPJ removed the offending material.
However, on Thursday, Hiroshige Seko, the acting chief of the LDP's public relations department and a one-time PR section head at NTT, stepped up the criticism of the DPJ. He said that not only had the rival DPJ had posted Okada's speech on its homepage, but it had also distributed a "mail magazine" (an e-mail newsletter) Thursday comparing its party platform with the LDP's and listing a schedule of campaign speeches.
Seko claimed that those actions were not permitted by Japan's Public Office Election Law. "As an officially sanctioned party, it needs to obey the rules," he told the Nihon Keizai Shimbun.
The Public Office Election Law rigidly defines the period during which election campaigning is permitted and the types of campaign materials that candidates can distribute. As Internet campaigning was not listed in the 55–year-old law, the government has held that creating Web sites and posting new material on them during election campaigns is illegal.
In response, the DPJ submitted an inquiry to the Ministry (a copy of the inquiry appears here), asking whether there had been any policy change, since both the DPJ and the LDP had posted similar campaign material online during the April lower house special election and the July election for the Tokyo Prefectural Assembly but had received no guidance from the Ministry either time. Moreover, it noted that the LDP's Seko, among others, had posted entries concerning Koizumi speeches on his personal blog, and asked whether those were in violation or not.
"So long as clear guidelines and standards are not established and legal interpretations change each time there is an election, the principal of fair elections will not be upheld," the DPJ said in an accompanying statement to the media, according to an Asahi Shimbun report.
On Friday, the Ministry responded. In a letter to the Democratic Party signed by the director general of the Election Department, the Ministry said it was not changing its position that political parties could not post new material online after the official start of campaigning. And it said the entries on Seko's blog quoting speeches by Koizumi also likely violate election law as well, and said that it had informed the LDP.
A copy of the Ministry's response appears on a blog authored by Shinji Miyadai, a sociology professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University who has lobbied the government on revising election law.
Miyadai, who described the whole incident as "laughable," notes that the government came close to revising the archaic election law ahead of last year's upper house elections. However, in the wake of Roh Moo-hyun's victory in Korea's 2003 presidential election, which many attribute to his success mobilizing voters online, a few fearful politicians put the issue on hold, he says.
According to an analysis in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun,
"Japan is about the only industrialized nation that prohibits by law online campaign activity. The country's high-speed communications infrastructure -- among the most advanced in the world -- remains untapped because of technophobic politicians' reluctance to revise the election law."
TBS Plans Large Private Placement
TBS said last week that it will issue 28 billion yen ($256 million) in new shares to third parties, but it denied media reports that this unusually large private placement was intended to defend against a potential hostile takeover.
The Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported Wednesday that Yoshiaki Murakami's M&A Consulting, a takeover fund, had acquired an unspecified stake in TBS and was urging TBS to conduct a management buyout. A former Ministry of International Trade & Industry bureaucrat, Murakami is the shareholder activist who started the chain of events leading to another media M&A battle earlier this year: Livedoor's 3-month long attempt to acquire control of Fuji Television, Japan's largest private broadcaster (See JMR's "The Legacy of Livedoor/Fuji”).
TBS later confirmed that it would issue 9.92 million new shares, about 5.5 percent of its total outstanding, to Dentsu Inc., Bic Camera Co., Mitsui & Co. and Mainichi Broadcasting System . The investment will make Dentsu, which already owned a 2.5 percent stake in TBS, its largest shareholder. Dentsu is Japan's largest advertising agency.
However, TBS denied that the private placement was intended as a takeover defense. It said it would use the proceeds to expand its presence in new media, especially wireless networks and the Internet. Compared to other broadcasters, TBS is said to be particularly dependent on its traditional television business.
As part of the total investment, TBS said it would invest 10 billion yen ($91 million) in eMobile, a unit of the broadband provider eAccess . eAccess has announced it will apply for one of two new licenses to be awarded later this year for building a national mobile phone network. No such licenses have been awarded in more than a decade, allowing the market to be dominated by NTT DoCoMo Inc., KDDI Corp. and Vodafone's Japan unit. TBS's investment is said to amount to the first significant investment in a telecoms firm by a Japanese broadcaster, according to the U.K.'s Financial Times .
In a press conference following the Nikkei report, Murakami denied the claims that his firm had purchased a stake in TBS and that he had suggested that TBS pursue a management buyout, media reported.
As recently as June, TBS issued 80 billion yen ($730 million) in equity warrants to Nikko Principal Investments , a UK-based asset investment wing of the Nikko Cordial Group, which would allow Nikko to obtain a stake in TBS at 90 percent of the share price if the broadcaster were subject to a hostile takeover attempt.
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