戦後の御用ジャーナリストの実態
SUNDAY TIMEOUT
Stories spiked despite journalism's mission to inform
Sunday, Jan. 8, 2012
By DAVID MCNEILL
Special to The Japan Times
Olympus isn't the only story that has been or is being ignored or squashed by powerful forces in Japan. Here are three more gems from that rich vein.
■Okinawa-gate
In 1971, Takichi Nishiyama reported for the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper that Tokyo had agreed to secretly absorb substantial costs of the reversion of Okinawa from U.S. to Japanese rule in 1972, including $4 million to restore farmland that was requisitioned for bases.
Inconvenient truths: Mainichi Shimbun staff writer Takichi Nishiyama (center, left), who in 1971 revealed secret deals surrounding the 1972 reversion of Okinawa from U.S. to Japanese rule, is released from prison on April 9, 1972. KYODO
Nishiyama's remarkable journalistic scoop created a sensation but resulted in his public and professional humiliation.
The young journalist was convicted of handling state secrets after revealing his source, a married Foreign Ministry clerk with whom he was having an affair.
The government and sections of the press hounded both from their jobs. The secretary subsequently divorced; Nishiyama left journalism to work in his parents' business — and the story continued to be ignored by the media.
In 2000 and 2002, however, declassified U.S. diplomatic documents from the National Archives and Records Administration proved beyond all doubt that the pact existed. A senior Ministry of Foreign Affairs official later concurred.
The Democratic Party of Japan announced when it came to power in 2009 that it would search for evidence of the pact at the foreign and finance ministries. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the search failed to uncover the legal smoking gun.
On Sept. 29, 2011, the Tokyo High Court concluded that the government probably disposed of such documents related to the reversion of Okinawa — including a secret pact for Japan to shoulder part of the U.S. costs for Okinawa's reversion.
Nishiyama and 22 other plaintiffs in the case have appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, but in view of how long that body often takes to consider cases before it, all Nishiyama, who's now 80, may have to look forward to is a posthumous settling of scores in his 40-year struggle to win a vindication, and a long-deserved journalistic award.
Nonetheless, Nishiyama reserves some of his bitterest criticism not for the state, but for other journalists.
"The Japanese media is sucking the life out of democracy and keeping the public in the dark," he said recently. "They protect the powerful instead of reporting on them."
Punishment of investigative journalists is not limited to print media.
In 1991, Katsurou Kawabe ran a landmark TBS Television probe into the trucking company Sagawa Kyubin that eventually led to corruption charges against political kingmaker Shin Kanemaru. Millions of Japanese still remember the eye-popping discovery of gold bars and $50 million in cash and securities after prosecutors raided Kanemaru's home.
But in 1996, Kawabe was demoted to the accounts department of TBS, and eventually he quit to become a freelance journalist.
"Many journalists have become like salarymen," Kawabe is quoted as saying in Alex Kerr's renowned 2001 book "Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Japan."
"They want to avoid the difficult cases that will cause trouble."
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■Princess Masako:
For years, a bride-hunting committee of the Imperial Household Agency (IHA) had been searching for someone to share the world's oldest inherited job with Crown Prince Naruhito. Close to 100 women were reportedly introduced to the shy, guppy-loving prince, but it was Masako Okawa who caught his eye.
For reasons that have since become obvious, the Oxford-educated diplomat was in no rush to scrap her career and walk three steps behind the prince for the rest of her life.
Indeed, they had met as early as 1986, but she is said to have repeatedly spurned his approaches before relenting in December 1992, reportedly after pressure from both her diplomat father and even Empress Michiko.
The wedding was scheduled for June 1993, but how was it to be kept secret? No problem — the IHA demanded and got a vow of silence from the massed ranks of the big Japanese media.
So, although the story was an open secret among journalists in Tokyo, it was not until early 1993 that it was "scooped" in the media — by T.R. Reid of The Washington Post.
A decade later, rumors began to circulate about Princess Masako's mental well-being.
With the Imperial taboo fading, Japanese magazines carried anonymously sourced articles that even suggested she had suffered a nervous breakdown and wanted out of her marriage. But those journalists officially accredited to cover the IHA, who had heard rumors that she was being treated for depression, steered clear.
In May 2004, when The Times (London) newspaper ran a story headlined "The Depression of a Princess," it was initially condemned, then accepted, by royal watchers in the Japanese media.
As Richard Lloyd Parry, the paper's Tokyo-based Asia Editor who wrote that story, said at the time: "Japanese journalists knew all about (Princess) Masako's illness and it didn't surprise any of them when I spoke to them."
Many also suspected that the princess had received fertility treatment to conceive the now 10-year-old Princess Aiko. However, that story too — despite having been published in many foreign news outlets — was off-limits, and Japan's media was happy to accept the IHA's denials that that was the case.
"Journalists who inquired about the rumor to the IHA were told to expect trouble if they ran it," recalls Yasunori Okadome, editor of the now-defunct magazine Uwasa no Shinso.
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■Kakuei Tanaka:
The most famous political scandal in Japan's postwar history also reveals the Achilles' heel of the Japanese media: its press clubs.
Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka was forced to quit in 1974, less than 2½ years after taking office in July 1972, after it was revealed that he had enriched himself through illegal land schemes.
That story was broken not by the 100 or so highly paid and officially accredited journalists hanging on Tanaka's every word in the Prime Minister's Office press club, but by a freelancer named Takashi Tachibana who was working for the magazine Bungei Shunju.
Caught out: Ex-Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka (center) is arrested in July 1976. Two years earlier he was forced to resign after corruption revelations by a freelance journalist. KYODO PHOTO
Two years later, the Japanese public learned that Tanaka had also taken millions in bribes from the U.S. aircraft-maker Lockheed to help it sell its TriStar planes in Japan. But they learned it first from a probe by the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission — not their own media.
"We all knew that Prime Minister Tanaka was corrupt. We all knew it," Ken Takeuchi, one of the journalists in the press club later admitted to Adam Gamble and Takesato Watanabe, the authors of a book titled "A Public Betrayed: An Inside Look at Japanese Media Atrocities and their Warnings to the West."
"All the information that Takashi Tachibana used in his Bungei Shunju scoop was public information. He just analyzed it and put it together in a way that we did not have to as members of the press club," Takeuchi said.
The Tanaka scandal sparked much soul-searching on the state of the media in Japan — and of the press clubs that have since been subject to sometimes withering criticism in a string of books.
Has anything changed? Nishiyama doesn't think so.
"There are cases where the media has uncovered wrongdoing, but generally journalists see it as their job to project and legitimize authority, not question it."
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ロサンジェルスタイムズの報道に対する態度が分かる記事
Photos of U.S. soldiers posing with Afghan corpses prompt condemnation
After the Los Angeles Times publishes two pictures, American officials denounce the actions of troops photographed with dead insurgents and their body parts.
By David Zucchino and Laura King
April 18, 2012, 5:21 p.m.
From the White House to the American Embassy in Kabul, American officials rushed to distance themselves from the actions of U.S. soldiers who posed for photographs next to corpses and body parts of Afghan insurgents.
Two photos of incidents from a 2010 deployment were published Wednesday by the Los Angeles Times. In one, the hand of a corpse is propped on the shoulder of a paratrooper. In another, the disembodied legs of a suicide bomber are displayed by grinning soldiers and Afghan police.
Secretary of DefenseLeon E. Panettaapologized for the photographs, saying the behavior depicted in the photos "absolutely violates both our regulations and, more importantly, our core values. This is not who we are.... If rules and regulations were found to have been violated, then those individuals will be held accountable."
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney called the soldiers' behavior "reprehensible," and said President Obama wanted a full investigation.
The NATO commander in Afghanistan, U.S. Gen. John Allen, and American Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who were alerted that the photos were coming, condemned the actions even before the photos were published online. Allen said U.S. officials were working with Afghan and international forces "to resolve any issues related to improper treatment of remains." Crocker called the actions of soldiers in the photos "morally repugnant."
At the same time, Pentagon and White House officials expressed disappointment that the photos had been made public. The Pentagon had asked The Times not to publish the photos, citing fears that they would trigger a backlash against U.S. forces.
Speaking to reporters during a meeting of NATO allies in Brussels, Panetta said:
"This is war. And I know that war is ugly and violent. And I know that young people sometimes caught up in the moment make some very foolish decisions. I am not excusing that behavior. But neither do I want these images to bring further injury to our people or to our relationship with the Afghan people."
Davan Maharaj, editor of The Times, said the newspaper considered a Pentagon appeal to delay publication, and decided to hold off for more than 72 hours until military officials said they had taken security precautions against any retaliation.
"At the end of the day, our job is to publish information that our readers need to make informed decisions," Maharaj said in an online discussion Wednesday. "We have a particular duty to report vigorously and impartially on all aspects of the American mission in Afghanistan."
He added: "On balance, in this case, we felt that the public interest here was served by publishing a limited but representative sample of these photos, along with a story examining the circumstances under which they were taken."
After the newspaper provided several photos to military officials last month, theU.S. Armybegan an investigation, saying the soldiers' actions violated Army standards. The photos were among 18 images of soldiers posing with corpses or body parts. They were provided to The Times by a soldier who served in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne Division in 2010.
The soldier who provided the photos said he and others in an 82nd Airborne brigade were concerned about a lack of discipline, leadership and security that he said compromised soldiers' safety — and he cited the photos as one example.
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He expressed the hope that publication would help ensure that alleged security shortcomings at two U.S. bases in Afghanistan in 2010 were not repeated. The brigade, under new command but with some of the same paratroopers who served on a yearlong deployment in 2010, began another tour in Afghanistan in February.
There were no immediate reports of violence in Afghanistan in response to the photos. Many Afghans, especially those in rural areas, do not have Internet access or electricity. The country's main evening news broadcasts did not show the photos.
Suicide bombers and insurgents who plant roadside bombs are widely despised by Afghans. Civilians are routinely killed or maimed by insurgents who detonate suicide vests or set out homemade bombs that kill indiscriminately.
A recent United Nations report said the Taliban and other insurgent groups were responsible for 77% of fatal attacks against civilians last summer, most of them from suicide bombs or roadside explosives.
Still, the taboo against desecration of the dead is strong in this religiously conservative country.
"We condemn Americans posing with dead bodies or body parts," said Najla Dehqan Nezhad, a member of parliament from the western province of Herat.
Farhad Mohammed, a merchant in the southern city of Kandahar, said of the 2-year-old photos: "Nothing has changed since then, and nothing will. Always it is a matter of disrespect."
The Taliban made no initial statement, although the group generally exploits such incidents for propaganda purposes.
Two experts said the photos may have more effect on public opinion in the United States than in Afghanistan.
Andrew Exum, a former Army officer and scholar at the Center for a New American Security, said the photos' effect on Afghans' opinions would probably be "pretty low" compared with some of the actions taken by other U.S. troops in their country, including the inadvertent burning of Korans at a U.S. base.
But the pictures probably would upset many Americans, and would raise uncomfortable questions about the mental health of the troops and the cohesiveness of their fighting units, he said.
"Americans are going to care a lot more about these pictures than the Afghans," said Exum, who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Peter Feaver, a former official in theGeorge W. Bushadministration and a Duke University scholar on the military, said the photos had "the potential to do more damage to public and coalition support for the war than to Afghan attitudes."
He said there had been a series of incidents by U.S. troops and others that had shaken faith in the war. "Each of them is a setback in the war of ideas, and they can accumulate," he said.
He said that although the photos "shock the conscience," other acts, such as those that humiliated Afghans and "fed into the narrative of anti-Islamic bigotry," could do more damage.
Zucchino reported from Durham, N.C., and King from Kabul, Afghanistan. Paul Richter contributed to this report from Washington, D.C., and David S. Cloud from Brussels.
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