Simon Fraser University at Harbour Centre

David See-Chai Lam Centre for International Communication

Pacific Region Forum on Business and Management Communication

"Media and PR in Japan"

by Andrew Horvat
Presented on June 28, 1990

Summary by Andrew Horvat

Japan's powerful media offers both challenges and opportunities for informed
outsiders. Japanese newspapers are the largest free-market publications in the world
and a well-placed article about one's project in a mass-circulation daily can go a long
way to assure its success in Japan. But while the rewards for those who cultivate good
contacts with the Japanese media are only too obvious, an absence of functioning libel
laws and the presence of about 400 exclusive news cartels (euphemistically known as
"press clubs") result in few dull days for the foreign correspondent or PR officer
working in Japan.

I. The Strength of Japanese Media: High Concentration

The strength of the Japanese media stems from its high degree of concentration. There
are only five national dailies serving more than 100 million Japanese readers. The
Yomiuri Shimbun (newspaper) alone has a circulation of 10 million per day. The
Asahi Shimbun is not far behind and the Mainichi and Sankei newspapers cater to 6
million and 3 million readers respectively. Even the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan's
leading financial daily, outsells the Wall Street Journal by more than two to one.

As Japan's five private national TV networks are closely tied to the mass-circulation
national dailies, a high degree of concentration obtains in the electronic media as well.
For example, Asahi TV's hour-long evening news program attracts about 15 million
viewers. Even a relatively unpopular Japanese TV program--one that has a rating of
no more than one or two percentage points--is likely to reach anywhere between one
to two million viewers. Moreover, in spite of the licensing of a number of small, local
TV stations in recent years, cable is virtually unknown in Japan and the huge national
networks are likely to retain their influence in the foreseeable future.

Although there is some truth to accusations that the Japanese market remains closed
to many foreign products, access to the Japanese media can be remarkably easy for
foreigners. In spite of more than a century of close contacts with the West, Japanese
are still keenly interested in what they perceive as curious and unusual about the West
and its culture. Japanese-speaking foreigners are a constant source of amusement to
the average viewer and two recently retired young Mormon missionaries have made
fortunes as talk-show guests on Japanese TV. The two young men can be accurately
described as vying for the honor of possessing the blandest personality on Japanese
television, but given the recent acrimony in US-Japan relations, the Japanese public's
demand to be exposed to two inoffensive Americans for several hours each week may
not be all that strange. On a more serious plane, Nippon Television paid about $3
million to the Vatican to subsidize the restoration of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel
murals in return for broadcast rights.

All national dailies and both major national news services run daily interviews with
unusual personalities. Some papers carry two such columns, one each in the morning
and afternoon editions. A simple calculation will show that Japanese print reporters
must hunt down approximately 6,000 interviews each year to satisfy the demand for
such articles. A disproportionately large number of the interviews are with non-
Japanese, or with Japanese involved in international or inter-cultural projects. In one
recent month the Asahi carried pieces about a free-lance photographer in New York
who covers crime stories, a Korean resident who heads a museum devoted to
recording the history of Koreans in Japan, and a young Japanese woman who returned
from the UK where she did research on Mother Goose nursery rhymes. For
Canadians, however, the most significant interview the Asahi carried that month was
virtually unknown in Japan and the huge national networks are likelwith the governor
of the Spanish province of Catalonia, who had come to Japan to generate interest
among potential investors. The six or seven square inches the Asahi gave the Spanish
governor probably justified the man's trip to Japan.

Access to the personality columns of the Japanese press or to the afternoon shows of
Japan's TV networks is relatively easy to obtain for even mildly colorful foreigners
fortunate enough to have a bit of expert help. But no amount of expertise is enough
when it comes to dealing with the increasingly acrimonious rivalry between the
Japanese and foreign media. For the time being, it is Japanese companies who have
been running afoul of the foreign media but there is precedent for the reverse
scenario. In most cases the problem stems from historical and cultural differences
many of which are reflected in the practices of the so-called press clubs (in Japanese
"kisha kurabu").

II. Invisible Obstacles: Perceptions of the Foreign Press in Japan

In spite of official policy encouraging equal access for foreign reporters to news
events in Japan, the virtual monopoly many Japanese press clubs maintain over news
conferences and briefings at key ministries and industrial organizations has triggered
a regular flow of protest against the Japanese media from the foreign press in Japan.
Among the most ludicrous incidents stemming from the total shut-out of the foreign
media from Japanese press clubs was the barring by Japanese reporters of American
correspondents from briefing Japanese officials gave in March 1964 on the medical
condition of former US Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer after he had been stabbed
by a deranged Japanese youth. In effect, if American reporters wanted to know if their
ambassador was to live or die, they would have to wait to buy the following day's
Japanese newspaper.

Although there has been a marked improvement in access at some government

agencies, notably the foreign ministry, the press clubs attached to law courts, the
prosecutors office and the police are still off limits to all but a small number of
accredited reporters, all Japanese nationals. Recent moves to delay the granting of
space to Japanese reporters in Washington by US government agencies has been
interpreted as retaliatory action against the exclusion of foreigners by the Japanese
clubs. The reading of a statement by American diplomats at the beginning of each
news conference at the US Embassy in Tokyo stating the commitment of the US
government to fair and free access to news is clearly intended to remind Japanese
reporters of foreign displeasure with local practices. In recent years, as US-Japan
( EC-Japan) relations have come under strain due to trade rivalries, the closed-shop
practices of many of the Japanese press clubs have become a focus of open criticism.

Since 1986 there have been about a dozen incidents in which foreign reporters were
either barred or strongly discouraged from covering events of world importance in
Japan. But unlike in certain countries where government uncomfortable with press
freedoms place obstacles in the path of reporters, in Japan it is the reporters
themselves who create rules which result in the banning of their own colleagues.

For examples, in February 1985, about 45 foreign correspondents were prevented by

Japanese reporters from entering a room at Tokyo's Narita Airport, where Korean
opposition leader Kim Dae Jung was giving a press conference. Kim, who had been
convicted of treason by the government of general-turned-president Chun Doo Hwan,
was on his way back to Seoul to resume his political career after a year in exile in the
United States. Clearly, the event was of interest outside Japan, but the two Japanese
press clubs--the one attached to Narita Airport and the other, run by Japan's
association of magazine reporters--expected foreign correspondents to choose from
among themselves on literally a few hours' notice a small number of reporters to
cover an event which in a Western country would have been open to all comers.
(According to Japanese press club rules, news conferences are invariably held by the
clubs themselves and not individuals or organizations wishing to reach the public.)

The most recent cases of media friction involved Sony and Mitsubishi, two firms
whose purchase of American assets has become the object of much heated debate. For
example, the generally bad press Sony received after its $ 3.4 billion purchase of
Columbia Pictures can be traced to a news conference in Tokyo where company
officials told foreign reporters that the room where the announcement of the corporate
takeover was to be made was "too small" to accommodate reporters not accredited to
the all-Japanese press club officially hosting the event. A few months later, just before
the Mitsubishi Corporation was to announce its acquisition of Aristech Chemicals
from USX (formerly US Steel) officials gave in at the last moment and permitted
foreign reporters to attend. In both instances, employers of the Japanese companies
confided to foreign reporters that they had been under strong pressure from the kisha
kurabu covering their respective industries not to open the conference to outsiders.

Gebhard Hielscher, long-time Tokyo correspondent of the Munich-based

Sueddeutsche Zeitung and for many years chief negotiator on behalf of foreign
reporters in Japan in talks with Japanese press clubs, has called the clash between
Japanese and Western reporters "a conflict of two incompatible systems." The BBC's
William Horsley, Hielscher's successor was less patient. He accused the Japanese
press of being in principle "anti-news." For most foreign reporters stationed in Japan
the relationship Japanese press club reporters cultivate with their sources (as well as
with each other) is too close for comfort. Japanese reporters, however, argue (not
without justification) that Japanese sources do not speak freely to anyone they do not
know on a personal basis. In essence, Japanese-style reporting accurately reflects the
Japanese preference for dealing only with those who have shown that they can be
trusted. From the Western point of view, however, a reporter who allows his source to
trust him completely, betrays the interests of his readers.

III. Roles of the Media in Japan: Cultural and Historical Differences

Clearly, some serious historical and cultural differences separate the Japanese and
Western press in terms of attitude toward news and propriety of coverage. It is good
to remember that the history of the Japanese mass media is a relatively short one.
Until 100 years ago, most newspapers were carved from blocks of wood; in fact most
carried little more than a few paragraphs to illustrate the blood-dripping pictures of
robbery, murder or double-suicide which invariably graced their pages. Given Japan's
Confucian-influenced political atmosphere, the purveyors of such low-class journals
commanded little respect. Today one still comes across in old bookshops such
newspapers carrying the masthead of the Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun, the direct
predecessor of the Mainichi newspaper, one of Japan's big three establishment media
empires.

The first Japanese press club was formed in 1890, when reporters joined forces to
bargain for the right to be briefed by officials of the Japanese parliament, established
that year under the terms of Japan's first modern constitution. But collective
bargaining alone was not enough to justify the right of a reporter to demand answers
from public officials. Confucianism demands that those who seek power adhere to
higher moral standards than those whom they seek to lead. This Confucian view has
come to cast an enormous shadow on Japanese journalism to this day. For example,
Japan's major national dailies give no space at all to humor. There is no equivalent of
an Art Buchwald or an Alan Fotheringham in Japan. One reporter who tried to imitate
Buchwald's style was eventually forced to apologize in print because one of his jokes
involved a fictitious exchange between two politicians, very common in a humor
column on the pages of a foreign paper, but totally unacceptable for a daily which
justifies its right to criticize the government by claiming to publish only the truth.

Thus, the Japanese reporters clubs are not merely news cartels which exclude
newcomers (although they do that too), the clubs reflect a kind of national
schizophrenia in news, not akin to the deep division between respectable morning
papers and racy evening tabloids in Britain. But unlike in the British case, where
reading matter is determined along class lines and political affiliations, in Japan the
national dailies are expected to print the "tatemae" (polite and inoffensive
information) while the salacious, free-wheeling weeklies try to home in on the
"honne" (the unpleasant other side of the same story).

Rivalries in the Japanese media do not stop here. For example, at the Tokyo
Metropolitan Police Agency, no fewer than four press clubs exist separately. The
oldest and most prestigious is the Nanashakai, whose name literally translates as "the
seven companies' society." It is so exclusive that it only has six member
organizations. A newspaper which once belonged to the club ceased publication
shortly after the Second World War but the remaining six organizations seem not to
have judged as worthy of membership reporters of any media outlets established in
the past 45 years. At the police agency, Japanese TV reporters belong to a separate
press club and there are two other organizations, one each for magazine writers and
reporters from trade publications.

While foreign reporters see the press clubs primarily as xenophobic cliques, in fact
most of the discrimination by the clubs is directed against reporters from second-tier
provincial papers, small trade publications and free-lance writers working for
weeklies and monthlies. By Japanese standards, the Kim Dae Jung conference was, if
anything, held in a relatively liberal atmosphere because reporters from national
dailies co-operated with those from weeklies and monthlies.

For the foreign reporter, dealings with the Japanese press are full of dilemmas.
Although reporters belonging to the establishment dailies are the best informed and
the best connected, many seem to lack a commitment to full disclosure which the US,
Canadian, or UK reporter sees as his very reason for existence. In spite of the lip
service reporters from the major news organizations pay to intrepid news-gathering,
Japan's press clubs are famous for sitting on scandals and protecting their news
sources. In 1974, while the monthly Bungei Shunju magazine accused former prime
minister Kakuei Tanaka of graft and corruption on a massive scale, none of Japan's
national dailies reported a line until Tanaka stalked out of a lunch at the Foreign
Correspondents' Club of Japan. Only when foreign newspapers carried reports of
Tanaka's embarrassment--reports which essentially parroted the Bungei Shunju--did
Japanese reporters attached to the prime minister's press club dare to write the news
which eventually led to Tanaka's resignation a few weeks later.

But while the non-establishment press is keen on full disclosure--or more precisely,
maximum exposure--it adheres to few other principles. The Bungei Shunju article on
Tanaka was poorly documented and even more poorly sourced. For every article in a
weekly or monthly that forces a corrupt official out of office, dozens appear which
burn sources and malign innocent people. While an officer of the Foreign
Correspondents' Club, I made the mistake of answering a few questions from a
weekly magazine about a speech given at the club by a foreign sumo wrestler. To
further its rivalry against the establishment dailies, the weekly published an article
claiming that I was disgusted by the stupid questions posed to the wrestler by
reporters from the national dailies, who attended the press luncheon. In fact, the
questions I related to the weekly had been asked by foreign reporters. Given the non-
functioning of Japan's libel laws, there was no way to force the weekly to print a
retraction.

An awareness of the compartmentalized nature of news-gathering in Japan is

absolutely necessary for foreign organizations seeking to take advantage of the
Japanese media's enormous reach. For the individual foreign reporter, PR officer, or
diplomat, cultivating personal contacts with reporters inside major press clubs is
absolutely essential; these contacts should be based on mutual help in news-gathering;
most Japanese are fastidious in their return of favors.

When inviting Japanese reporters to gatherings with foreign visitors, it may be

necessary to hold separate events for the establishment press and the trade press. One
way to avoid press club rivalries is to try to act as host for one's own press conference
either at the Japan National Press Club or at the Foreign Correspondents' Club. (Those
clubs are not the same as "kisha kurabu" type clubs and accept questions from all
reporters.) As for the weeklies, the best policy is to be away from the telephone any
time they call.