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The clubs admit only members of the major media groups, and membership depends on following the collective rules, which forbid investigative journalism against the host entity.
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“Access journalism” is common worldwide, but the Japanese press club system is one of the world’s most extreme expressions of it. Each government ministry, the major industrial associations and companies, police departments – all have their clubs. In practice, this means that the best investigative reporting in Japan is often done by freelancers.”Ī primary expression of this arrangement is the press club ( kisha kurabu) system. Why would media behave in such a way? In 2012’s “Strong in the Rain: Surviving Japan’s Earthquake, Tsunami, and Fukushima Nuclear Disaster,” authors Lucy Birmingham and David McNeill, who were on the ground in Tohoku in March 2011, describe Japanese reporters as “generally staffers, usually embedded in organizations with a strict line of command and lifetime employment.” They add, “Investigative reporting is limited… Most of the stories carried in the Japanese newspapers are not bylined. This gathering was the largest protest movement in Japan since the Vietnam era, 40 years before, but the country’s largest newspaper by circulation, the Yomiuri Shimbun, declined to cover it. At that time, Japan’s Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe asserted that Japanese media had colluded with the government to give nuclear power a stranglehold. In the year following the triple disaster, anti-nuclear protests continued and grew, with more than 150,000 gathering in downtown Tokyo on a mid-July day in 2012.
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The mainstream media continued to transmit (mis)information to the public from TEPCO, government offices, and compliant academics.Įnjoying this article? Click here to subscribe for full access. One of the reporters was fired and the company was forced to apologize. Get the NewsletterĪ few days later, one of the weeklies, AERA, featured a sensational cover suggesting that radioactivity was on its way to Tokyo, which was in fact true but contrary to the official story coming from TEPCO and the government. Get briefed on the story of the week, and developing stories to watch across the Asia-Pacific. Sakurai’s YouTube video became such a viral sensation that he was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world for the year. In it, Sakurai entreated the world for the supplies and other support that had not been forthcoming from the national government, and urged the Japanese media to return to his and other towns in the area. Two weeks later, Sakurai Katsunobu, the mayor of Minamisoma, one of the many devastated towns in Tohoku, went over the heads of Japanese media and government by posting a video with English subtitles on YouTube. Three years earlier, in China, which has a notoriously restricted media, journalists had flocked to cover the Sichuan earthquake with a degree of openness that was (and remains) unprecedented for the People’s Republic.Īnd yet the major Japanese media fled the tsunami/reactor explosion area en masse the day after the quake, March 12. One would think that such a perfect storm of events as happened in Tohoku, the northeast region of Japan closest to the epicenter, on March 11, 2011, would have proven extremely compelling to any country’s media.
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Therefore, we conclude that the accident was clearly ‘manmade.’” They effectively betrayed the nation’s right to be safe from nuclear accidents. The National Diet of Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC) concluded in 2012 (in bold type), “The TEPCO Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident was the result of collusion between the government, the regulators and TEPCO, and the lack of governance by said parties. But the meltdowns, explosions, and radiation release at Fukushima Daiichi were another matter. The ensuring triple disaster – earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi – killed nearly 20,000 people, destroying dozens of towns, rendering thousands of hectares uninhabitable, and spreading contamination that will take decades to remediate.Įarthquakes are largely unpredictable, and modern technology gives us some minutes of warning at best about tsunamis. This week marks the 10-year anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011.