In comparing the Japanese weekly newsmagazines and the mainstream press club newspapers, two primary tatemae explanations are likely. The first is simply that the press club newspapers are authoritative and respectable, whereas the weeklies are unreliable, sensationalistic, and trashy. For example, Nobuaki Hanaoka, a former senior editorial writer for Sankei newspaper, recently defended the Japanese press club system in a panel discussion at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan: "The clubs are our hard-won achievement in the battle against the government over a century. Of course we need them." And Hajime Kitamura stated in an interview for this book that "press clubs were established so that papers could maintain a presence and monitor activity from within those actual agencies. They work within those agencies to ensure that the officials are not up to any chicanery." Japanese media scholar Ellis Krauss has noted that "the Japanese media defends the clubs, citing the collective nature of the club and its institutionalized rules as a way to protect the individual reporter from intimidation or manipulation by the source." According to those who agree with these assertions, Japanese press clubs are a "means for the media to jointly press reluctant public officials to disclose information." Given the collusive relationships between the Japanese establishment news media and government and corporate sources, as enforced by the press club system, it is obvious that these are all tatemae explanations. The Japanese establishment press and press clubs may at times function according to some of these rosy descriptions, but their primary functions are thornier, to say the least. In this case, not only are they superficial and formal, they contradict reality. A second tatemae explanation of the relationship between the Japanese news media and the weeklies is that, contrary to the explanations above, press club journalists are mere mouthpieces for the establishment, spouting little else but the official views (tatemae) of the news, whereas the writers for weekly newsmagazines are bold outsiders courageously investigating and printing the truth (honne) of the news. Kengo Tanaka, the former president and CEO of Bungeishunju Ltd. and a former editor in chief of Shukan Bunshun, gave an example of this view in a personal interview for this book. "I fail to think that Shukan Shincho and Shukan Bunshun are delving into seriously scandalous issues today," he commented. "There was a period of scandalous writing, but this only lasted as long as it would sell. To my mind, this is no longer the case. Such sensationalism appears mainly on the so-called wide-shows [a popular type of Japanese TV talk show]. I have the impression that Shukan Shincho and Shukan Bunshun have toned down their coverage of scandals quite a bit and that they perform good journalism and are taken very seriously today." Of course, this second view of the newsmagazines, as related by Tanaka, is just as tatemae, or formal and superficial (and, in fact, false), as the previous stories mouthed by those who support the establishment newspapers. Japanese weekly newsmagazines beget an extraordinarily sensationalistic version of the news that seldom takes hold of the honne, or substance, of the way things really are in Japan. They may cover stories in more entertaining and titillating ways than the press club media, and they sometimes present subjects in greater depth. They have even been known to break important political scandals. However, they rarely offer much in the way of genuinely important journalism. The New York Times's Howard W. French, writing in the year 2000, sums this situation up nicely: "Indeed, a growing body of press criticism says Japan's mainstream dailies suffer from their cosseted relationships with the government and other powerful institutions, while the fat, glossy-covered weeklies pull some of their punches out of fear of Japan's huge and omnipresent advertising agency, Dentsu, an integral part of a deeply conservative establishment." Another veteran American writer (who requested not to be named) with longtime, close ties with Japanese weeklies described the coverage by shukanshi in an interview for this book. "When it comes to the establishment, they never go beyond certain boundaries. They don't challenge the way things are done beyond a certain point. It's like the difference between boxing and sumo wrestling. Real journalists are like boxers. They are out for blood. But the weeklies are like sumo wrestlers. There's a lot of huffing and puffing, and a lot of weight thrown around; people sometimes even get hurt a bit, but they are certainly not out to do any real damage." Jun Kamei, a former Shukan Shincho reporter and assistant editor with some twenty years at the magazine, resigned because of what he describes as the unethical news coverage of his former employer. Since then, he has written extensive expos?s on Japanese newsmagazines, including his book "Shukanshi no Yomikata" ("How to Read Shukanshi"). As an assistant editor, Kamei's livelihood depended for many years on his ability to understand exactly what kind of readers his magazine targeted -- and how. In an interview for this book, he explained the appeal of Shukan Shincho and similar weeklies: "Unlike the newspapers that have their press clubs, through which they are completely piped into the big companies and the government agencies, and who are essentially public-relations apparatuses for these businesses and agencies, the weeklies take a position that says, 'We're not those bureaucrats, and we're not their proxies either. We're not those big fat capitalists, and we're not their proxies either.' The regular man on the street in a busy city sees so many of their ads everywhere. It's like the magazines are whispering to people, 'Do you want the real scoop? This is the real scoop. Do you want to know the truth? We've got the truth.' They work so hard to convince their readers that they've got the genuine information, but it's just a sleight-of-hand trick. They don't publish the truth." This outsider posturing of the magazines actually makes them the perfect vehicles for supporting the Japanese establishment's tatemae. Although marketed as alternatives to the establishment press, they are nothing like real alternatives. As the examples in this book show, their politics are decidedly conservative in almost every way. They are strongly supported by Dentsu and other Japanese advertisers. They regularly run pieces that support nationalist thinking and that attack feminists, foreigners, opposition parties, advocates for human rights, and others. Again, this does not imply in any way that there is a conspiracy within the weekly newsmagazine industry to manipulate public opinion. On the contrary, many weekly magazine reporters take great pride in the fact that their papers regularly run humiliating information about specific politicians, business leaders, and other elites of various affiliations. However, almost all take a decidedly conservative position on social and foreign-policy issues. Moreover, they almost never challenge major Japanese institutions in a serious way, let alone question the fundamental ways in which those institutions interact. The Japanese weekly newsmagazines' relatively bold approach to the news means that they could, theoretically, be strong forces for journalistic and democratic reform in Japan. For instance, if they were truly dedicated to real journalism, they would rail against the corrupt press club system that denies them direct access to official sources. But they do not. "A Public Betrayed" will be released August 17 by Regnery Publishing Takesato Watanabe is a professor of media ethics at Doshisha University in Kyoto and was a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 2001. He is the author of a dozen Japanese-language books, including "Information Democracy and the People's Right to Communicate" (2000). He is co-author of the Encyclopedia of Media & Communication Studies (1999). His next book, "The Media and Power Structure in Modern Japan, 1945?2000," will be published in English in 2005 through Harvard University's East Asia Monograph Series. Adam Gamble is a writer and investigative reporter, and the author of "In the Footsteps of Thoreau." He has served as publisher at On Cape Publications in Massachusetts since 1995, where he has produced some two-dozen books. During the three years of research that went into "A Public Betrayed," he personally interviewed more than 150 individuals. NEXT ISSUE (August 12)
Part Two: Established press leaks tips to weeklies
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