The Enigma of Japanese Power (14 page)

As the nineteenth century entered its closing decades, the power-holders did not need to resort to much force to gain the co-operation of the newspapers. Journalists were to play an important role in spreading the new myth of a divine emperor and the nationalist ideology of a ‘family state’.
²²
In the first three decades of the twentieth century, control of the press was accomplished largely through a self-censorship encouraged by the very inconsistency and capriciousness of official censorship. It was often not clear what would be censored, since official instructions were vague, abstract and ambiguous.

Many important events – the rice riots, the attacks on Korean residents following the great Kanto earthquake of 1923 – were given little or no attention. Mention of the establishment and development of the Communist Party was strictly taboo. Even apart from such obviously politically important subjects, unpleasant facts in general were ignored either out of ‘patriotism’ or as a result of pressure from above. Laws and special codes were only a minor means in this suppression; a favourite method of government officials was personal warnings that went unrecorded.
²³
This is still a preferred device of the Japanese bureaucracy in general: elusive control for which no one can be held responsible.

Freedom of the press was increasingly curtailed from 1920 onward. But contrary to the common view among today’s Japanese intellectuals, that resulted less from growing ‘militarism’ than from a combination of bureaucratic control and media ‘self-control’.

Self-censorship continues to be a conspicuous characteristic of the Japanese press. Newspapers, agencies and broadcasting companies gather their news from government and business via
kisha
(reporter) clubs, which came into their own in the war years, when censorship was official. The
kisha
club represents the institutionalised symbiosis between journalists and the System’s organisations they report on.
²⁴
They help the journalist, since he or she need never worry about missing a vital development, and they provide the power-holders with their main means of co-ordinating media self-censorship. There are about four hundred
kisha
clubs, attached to all the ministries and government agencies, the Bank of Japan, the LDP, the police, industrial associations – everything and everybody, in short, that help make Japan go round. They cater to roughly twelve thousand journalists representing more than 160 media organisations. To gather genuine news from important organisations without going through the
kisha
clubs is difficult and sometimes virtually impossible. Formal press conferences in Japan are stage-managed to a ludicrous degree.

The prime minister is followed every day by three people from each of the major newspapers, who stick with him wherever he goes and pick up whatever he says. When Nakasone was prime minister,
kisha
club members were forbidden to follow him only during his weekly meditation at a Zen temple. A favourite journalistic method is to arrive at a politician’s doorstep very late at night. Long hours of waiting may then be rewarded with an invitation to come in and talk with an LDP heavyweight
en famille
and clad in pyjamas. The inner circle of most loyal reporters, who are allowed to confer informally with a politician, will not risk their status by publicising major discoveries or revelations; both sides understand that much information gathered this way will never see print.
Kisha
club members may also receive presents from the person they are expected to cover.

Most Japanese journalists spend the entire day with fellow
kisha
club members, and generally have little contact with informants outside this environment. Their club makes collective decisions on what its members may or may not report, occasionally even on the tone of their reports. Such rules can be strict. According to a Japanese colleague of mine, a reporter from one of the major newspapers was banned from his
kisha
club for six months because his paper had carried a story which they had all agreed not to print. The fact that a colleague from another desk had been responsible, having picked up the information from an alternative source, was not considered a mitigating circumstance. The
kisha
clubs are fairly exclusive, and many of them are closed to foreign journalists, notwithstanding a decade or more of negotiations by successive chairmen of the Foreign Press In Japan.

It hardly needs to be pointed out that the
kisha
club system makes for very cosy relations between the newspapers and the people whose activities and aims they are expected to scrutinise. There is hardly any incentive for individual journalists to investigate anything by themselves, and no reward at all for presenting a case in a manner that contradicts the conclusions of their colleagues. But, typically, when a political or industrial scandal breaks and is reported by all media, Japan is treated to a veritable avalanche of information on it, since many of the journalists were aware of the details all along. As one veteran foreign journalist observes:

When a big scandal breaks the public is suddenly immersed in a torrent of revelations that gush forth from the newspapers, magazines, and broadcasting stations day after day, week after week, until the scandal itself seems to be the whole political process, unique and unrelated to anything else in the past. For that reason scandal after scandal erupts and subsides, yet no political lessons are learned and no real reform is achieved.
²⁵

While editors and journalists routinely emphasise ‘the public’s right to know’, and sometimes ceremoniously take the government to task for depriving the public of that right, they themselves often help to keep secret the details of how the administrators actually run Japan. Most journalists who have specialised in a particular field are fully aware how far practice diverges from the official ‘reality’. It is amazing, however, to what extent they confuse the two in fields they do not personally cover. Few have faced up to the reality of a System which operates fundamentally at variance with the conventions and rules of parliamentary democracy. Those who have fall back on the worn-out cliché of ‘monopoly capitalism’ to describe it.

The effect of self-induced editorial ignorance can be rather eerie. Newspapers, for instance, may lament a parliamentary boycott by the minority parties on the grounds that it prevents Japan’s elected representatives from discussing momentous events happening in the world – blithely ignoring the fact that foreign policy issues, even those affecting the national interest in a direct manner, are never debated in the Diet. Concerning a major embezzlement case, a
Yomiuri Shimbun
editorial stated that stockholders and the union should have monitored the goings-on in the company in question; yet such bodies have never had anything remotely resembling that kind of role in a Japanese company. Similar examples can be found practically every day.

The major source of the power of the Japanese press is its monolithic nature. In the first morning edition of the five major national dailies (whose combined morning and evening editions have a circulation of 39 million copies) the choice of news and the tenor of editorial comment may vary somewhat. But by the last morning edition – read in the large cities – there is a homogeneous approach to all but certain routine controversies (such as that on defence spending) in which newspaper attitudes are sometimes recognisably different. Editors furiously read each other’s early editions, and keep adjusting their own. The rare scoop is normally saved for the last morning edition, sold in the cities, because if it appeared earlier no one would know that it was a scoop. Lead articles in the days following important events tend to be non-committal, vague and ambivalent, and are generally indistinguishable from each other. Most of what these papers print is a predictable product of desk editors, compiled from ‘feeds’ supplied by a number of reporters and influenced by extraneous political factors. The result is almost never challenged, again with the exception of the routine controversies. All Japanese read approximately the same things every day and have their opinions formed by what is in effect a single source.

This unified voice of the press is often critical and sounds like the lamentations of the smaller parties in the Diet. Rapping the authorities over the knuckles is considered proper every once in a while, but is little more than a ritual. Some components of the System use this predictable behaviour of the press to get back at, or gain leverage over, rival components. In fact, the press plays an important part in the continuing balancing act with which some groups of power-holders prevent others from becoming too strong.

Political controversies on a limited number of recurrent themes induce a practically unanimous press reaction as immediate and predictable as the salivating of Pavlov’s dogs at the sound of the hell. Even when there is a break in unanimity, the pattern is very predictable. For instance, the
Asahi Shimbun
, which has the most prestige, is inclined to frown on anything Japan’s ‘rightist’ forces are supposed to stand for, including pleas for a greater Japanese share in the burden of its own military security. It was similarly suspicious of Nakasone’s efforts to increase political leverage over the bureaucracy. The
Asahi
’s editorial line is influenced by columnists and editorial advisers who tend to be anti-USA and were in some cases weaned on an old-fashioned Japanese version of Marxism.

The most important press development in recent years has been the
Yomiuri Shimbun
’s break with the conventional anti-US, anti-defence stance. The
Yomiuri
, the largest newspaper, distributes nine million copies a day. The
Mainichi Shimbun
still tends to follow the
Asahi
line on these matters, as all the others used to do. The
Sankei Shimbun
, the smallest of the four non-economic national dailies, has a right-leaning reputation. This reputation appeared to be confirmed by its refusal to go along with an agreement the Japanese media made with the Chinese government, in return for permission to station correspondents in Peking, to write only positive reports about China under Mao Tse-tung. The defection of the
Yomiuri Shinbun
, the anti-left stance of the
Sankei
and the staider interpretations of the
Nihon Keizai Shimbun
, the largest financial and economic paper, have helped much in breaking post-war taboos on the discussion of military matters. At the same time, less attention than before is given to the voices of leftist groups.

Japanese journalists are sometimes conscious of their own daunting dilemma in a society that does not reward those who point out its contradictions. The press is ideally situated to note and comment when the power-holders fail to adhere to the official rules, yet is severely hampered in doing so by its own journalists and editors, who fear rending the fabric of reality as presented by the System. What is a Japanese journalist to do with the wealth of information he has concerning actual practices in the System? Should he consistently point out the institutionalised breaches of major rules, his own small part of the real (as distinct from the ideal) world might well come crashing,down and crush him. The perennial problem is how to know where to draw the line on honest reporting. The ability to sense the appropriateness of self-censorship is commonly referred to as the ‘adult mentality’ of journalists.
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An uncomfortable sense of not living up to professed standards of journalism, which are certainly part of the training of journalists, is nevertheless fairly common. The problem is complicated by the press’s self-imposed but socially accepted (and expected) function in preserving the social order and guarding public morality. There are outlets for the resulting frustration. As in many other instances of apparently insoluble conflict in Japanese society, the tendency is to find a temporary solution in ritualised behaviour. Thus the newspapers, mindful of the traditional precept ‘Punish one to warn one hundred’, wage periodic campaigns in which a great deal of indignant energy is released.

About every other year the newspapers ‘discover’ a teacher who has had the temerity to sell examination questions to ambitious parents. Officials of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation were once caught smuggling small consumer items into the country, and the press lambasted them until the company contritely promised to lower the (exorbitant) international telephone rates. The top executive of a famous department store was dragged through the mire after it was found that Persian antiquities sold in the store were manufactured in Yokohama. Another example was the press treatment of the owner of Hotel New Japan, after the hotel went up in flames and was found to have lacked some of the mandatory safety facilities. ‘Developments’ in such selected cases are kept on the front pages for weeks and sometimes months on end, while the people held responsible are thrown in the gutter and kicked in unison by indignant editors, often before any arrests have been made.

Other department-store or hotel bosses, or executives of whatever organisation may be chosen next, are definitely frightened and forewarned. Society is served this way by having the ubiquitous racketeering reined in a bit. In a country where laws exist for the administrative purposes of the bureaucracy rather than the protection of citizens, the press plays a critical sanctioning role. It can do this because Japanese strongly fear the consequences of having their reputations blemished. This concern with preserving their good name substitutes to a large extent for legal sanctions in keeping organisations and people in line.