Projecting Images: The Role of the Media in the UK and Japan

The seventh seminar in the 2010 series, ‘States in Change: National Identity in the UK and Japan’, addressed the role of the media in influencing and projecting national images. It considered national news coverage in relation to the global news network, and the role of the foreign correspondent in the UK and Japan. This was a particular focus as the two speakers discussed approaches to transmitting news stories from abroad to home. Distinct characteristics of the British and Japanese media were explored along with the nature of images and stereotypes in the reporting of different cultures.

Summary

The first speaker, Leo Lewis, began by introducing five newsworthy stories from Japan before going on to comment on the life of a Japan correspondent.

 

Referring to past commentators on Japan, Lewis quoted Oscar Wilde’s perception of Japan as having ‘a culture than neither has nor needs contextualising’ as it is the sum of its visible parts and dismissing it as a fantasy, a collage of geisha and prints. Rudyard Kipling, having travelled through Japan, criticised Wilde’s comments saying that ‘Japan is a mystery wrapped in a kimono’ and in so doing, proving as fallacious as Wilde. Both, said Lewis, understood Japan just as well and badly.

 

A problem for Japan correspondents is that their editors, often in Kipling and Wilde’s footsteps, continue commissioning stories of ‘their’ Japan as Japan, perhaps more than any other country provokes a sense of ‘ownership’. Every foreigner has his or her own vision of the country which they are certain is the real or correct one. An editor might ask for a piece on robots or on the impact of global warming on the cherry blossoms, leading Lewis to say that a country which produced synthetic stem cells shouldn’t be patronized in this way.

 

Turning to the focus of a correspondent abroad, Lewis returned to one of the pieces of news initially introduced, namely that a Japanese electronics company had named its new electronic reader ‘Galapagos’ as a reference to ‘evolution’. Lewis ruefully noted that the ‘Galapagos syndrome’ refers, in fact, to tailoring a product to the domestic market in isolation from globalisation and being surprised if is takes off elsewhere. In such an instance, asked Lewis, does the correspondent focus on the crazy nomenclature or on the new product?

 

Journalists in Japan still manage to report through the editors’ prisms of the erratic, erotic and electronic and anything that may seem funny. This funny or quirky behaviour may, in fact, go on to be replicated elsewhere as has happened with zero interest rates, or places that rent dogs by the hour; both of which initially resulted in ridicule.

 

Lewis said that 65% of his pieces from Japan are simply news stories about earthquakes, elections, stimulus packages and other news items; 15% are a reflection of his own interests smuggled in a mainstream news article, while the remainder are a result of calls from his editor in London, asking for a comment on the fact that the president of Europe writes haiku in his free time, for example.

 

Over the past couple of years Lewis has asked himself whether Japan should be taken seriously and if so, how had it merited this? Conversely, does Japan deserve to be described via whacky stories?

 

Having spent six years in Japan, Lewis cited some questionable aspects: the system of the ‘kisha club’ or closed ‘reporters’ association’ doesn’t allow Japan to observe itself with any objectivity; Japan’s level of public debt has not been taken seriously by the Japanese; Japanese journalists don’t treat suicide rates with any importance; the environmentally unsound overuse of disposable wooden chopsticks and plastic packaging is rife and the outsourcing of carbon emissions to China.

 

If the Japanese themselves take Japan seriously, continued Lewis, where are the protests? The current economic and debt situation would have brought fury elsewhere and people onto the streets. It causes some level of fury in Japan, but not that you can notice. It could be reported that a ‘manga’ version of ‘Das Kapital’ had become extremely popular, but not that the workers had shrugged off their chains.

 

Having portrayed such a bleak and whacky picture of Japan, Lewis went on to say that all of the above is a distraction and that Japan should, of course, be taken seriously. The last ten years have shown, if anything, that other economic systems outside Japan are just as flawed and that Japan’s problems may, already, be just those beginning to afflict our own society.

 

The second speaker, Hidemitsu Kibe, went on to give an overview of the Japanese media and its future role beginning by saying that Japanese readers are currently more interested in domestic news having lost interest in foreign news. On a personal level, Kibe said that he finds the reporting of UK politics very interesting.

 

The historic Japanese elections of 2009 resulted in a new governing party, that of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). Prior to the elections, Kan and Ozawa – DPJ party heavyweights – visited the UK in the hope of learning from British politics and Blair’s tenure as Prime Minister. Meeting with Alastair Campbell, Blair’s press secretary, they were told that speed of reform is of the essence. Echoing Blair’s style, Kan remarked that the DPJ’s priorities were ‘employment, employment, employment’.

 

Kibe went on to say that Japanese readers are interested in the idea of Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ and also in Ed Miliband, the new Labour Party leader. In these economically straitened times as Japan enters its third lost decade and has been overtaken as second biggest economy in the world by China, readers continue being interested in how the UK overcame its entrenched stagnation of the 1970s and in learning from Thatcher’s premiership.

 

Kibe went on to recount ways in which the Japanese media is in trouble. He said it has been hit by various factors; the economic crisis of 2008 led to a decline in advertising as online advertising took over for the first time. As more people have taken to reading newspapers online rather than in print and the population is decreasing, many media players are competing for a domestic audience in a shrinking market. In this environment of dwindling returns, overseas bureaux are being hit by declining budgets and are being closed in some cases.

 

Despite having set a stark scene, Kibe finished on an upbeat note, saying that newspapers exist not to be the government’s mouthpiece, as the Japanese newspapers are sometimes prone, but to challenge in a truthful and fair way. Kibe finished by quoting Raymond Chandler’s character Philip Marlow in ‘Playback’, ‘If I wasn’t hard, I wouldn’t be alive. If I couldn’t ever be gentle I wouldn’t deserve to be alive.’

 

The lively questions and comments following the talks covered a range of issues including the idea of deeply ingrained stereotypes the British may have of Japan and vice-versa, the censoring of journalists in Japan through its closed reporters’ clubs, whether there is a sense in Japan that the media will return to an international agenda- focused reporting, the accessibility of UK public bodies to foreign journalists, education and the role of the media and the demand for ‘dumbed down’ news.

About the contributors