Interview with Yukiko Ogasawara,
president of the Japan Times.

Things could hardly have been worse when Yukiko Ogasawara became president of the Japan Times last March. She faced the aftermath of wide-ranging job cuts, a precipitous drop in the newspaper’s circulation, and fierce, growing competition from Internet news sites, expat bloggers and the rest of the so-called new media.
Her father, Toshiaki Ogasawara, the chairman of plastic parts and components manufacturer Nifco Inc., bought the Japan Times in 1983. This year The Japan Times celebrated its 110th anniversary. Daughter Ogasawara says she is determined to increase circulation and put the paper back on a firm financial footing. But with the Japan Times losing money, and far more commercially successful print media also feeling the pinch, is it even worth trying?
Blogger Debito Arudou recently triggered a lively debate with an impassioned plea for the Japan Times’ survival. He argued that the broadsheet had a special role to play as the “only independent newspaper in Japan.” Putting the opposite case, Mark Devlin, publisher of the Japan Today news website recommend people “just let the damn thing die … there is a slim possibility that some new blood would come along and resuscitate it.”
So which is it? Is the Japan Times a dinosaur doomed to extinction or a phoenix about to rise from the ashes of the print media? The No. 1 Shimbun recently spoke to Yukiko Ogasawara in her office.

You have just put your price up. Isn’t that a strange thing to do when circulation is already dropping?
Good things don’t come cheap. In 2001 our subscription price was about ¥100 more than it is now. We dropped the price when the International Herald Tribune came in 2001. [Now] we have to recover our costs, so we have just brought it back up to what it was.
I do feel confident that people who really know us know that we have the best writing and a more independent viewpoint compared to the Asahi and Yomiuri. They don’t have reporters that actually run around gathering stuff. It’s all taken straight from the mother paper. People can see that difference.

But is it true that your circulation has halved in five years?
That’s not quite true. It’s been [on] a downward trend for the last 5 years for sure. The severe downturn for this company happened in about 2001.

Is it still going down?
We are pretty much plateau-ing on the bottom. Hopefully we won’t go down any more than this. We are trying to put our brakes on. Our highest ever circulation was 74,000 in 1991. Now our ABC circulation is 40,000. We’d like to keep it at 40,000 and take it up.

What makes the Japan Times different from other newspapers in Japan?
I think the most important thing for us is that we are the most independent English newspaper in Japan. Our parent company has nothing to do with newspapers and nothing to do with the media world. Essentially we run ourselves.
Japanese media, I think, are traditionally known to be very complacent, and toe the government or business line. We like to think that we have a different perspective from the Japanese media.

Who are your readers?
Our readership is about half Japanese and half non-Japanese, [although] the balance tips this way and that. The Japanese readers are highly skilled in English and many are retirees with a lot of time. They are kind of a special group for their age. They have a high interest in English and they are less conservative than their peers.

How many reporters do you have?
We have 15 Japanese reporters on our domestic desk; they are our breaking news team. In the heyday of the Japan Times there were far more; we are a skeleton crew right now. It’s a very tough time for daily papers.
The quality of the people we have here is amazing, especially the Japanese people. They are all from Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia Journalism School. They are highly bilingual.
All of our editors are native English speakers. We have just one non-Japanese general reporter. It is harder to find non-Japanese with high levels of Japanese than Japanese with high levels of English.

It’s not just the JT though, is it? Why do you think newspaper circulations are dropping?
It’s too easy to just say the Internet, although that is a big reason. I think the biggest reason is that technology has allowed new things to happen. It’s not just the internet, it’s cell-phones, Palm Pilots, blogs, the way we absorb and get information.

If that’s the case, what does the Japan Times have to offer that new media doesn’t?
[We can] be an interface for the public, meaning the wider world, to know about Japan in a very quick, easy and trustworthy way. With our brand we can still be a site or a paper or a blog or a keitai site or whatever it is going to be.
We pride ourselves on solid fact-finding, solid groundwork and reporting. [We want to be] a one-stop shop. We want our readers to say they can trust what these guys are saying, [and know] they will give us both sides.

Do you think the Japanese-language media is facing up to the new media threat?
As you know, Japan has the highest newspaper readership in the world. We are a very traditional society, content to stay with things that we are used to. I think that the newspaper business still has a few years left here. It’s habit, comfort.
Japanese media companies are being a little bit Luddite in the sense that they understand that there is this rumbling going on all around them; I know that they are feeling it. [But] it’s as if there is this great tsunami warning – I don’t know if they will move fast enough.

Do you have podcasts, a cell-phone site?
We have a few experimental podcasts for the Shukan Weekly, but we don’t have the technology and people to set it up at the moment. We had a mobile-phone site before, but we decided to stop it because we need to re-conceptualize what we are doing exactly. It was just our articles on a keitai. We need to redo the whole thing.

Your internet archive is a fantastic resource, and a free one at that. Is it going to stay free?
My philosophy right now on that is yes. I see other sites around us that are trying to charge, and it doesn’t seem to really quite work. What we need to do is raise our page views, visibility and search-ability. Web 2.0 now is all about networking, being available. We might charge companies, but I think “free for consumers” is going to be the model.

The bottom seems to have dropped out of the newspaper classified-ads market. Can you replace that income?
Basically, I’m not looking so much at how to keep raising revenue from our newspaper, per se. I am looking to make it a bit better and bring in some new readers. I would like to bring that circulation back to a state where it can sustain itself, because to be honest, it’s not sustaining itself. The cost of production is higher than what we are selling right now.
We really shot ourselves in the foot because we didn’t move fast enough earlier. We are playing catch up. We didn’t quite understand the trend of classifieds that were combined not only with the Internet but these full employment services like Daijob and all the other sites.
[But] we are somewhat diversified. We have a publications department. We have a good reputation and a possibility to go forward into education areas. I want to balance our business through other means than just the newspaper.

You also hold a seat on Nifco’s board. How committed is Nifco to the long-term future of the Japan Times?
It depends who you ask. If you ask me, very very committed. [At Nifco], we are very passionate about this project. Nifco is a $1.1 billion company, but nobody knows who we are. Unless you are in the industry you really don’t know what Nifco is. What the Japan Times allows for Nifco is a certain exposure and connection to the society of Japan. And you have to understand that the Japan Times is just a tiny part of Nifco’s business.

Where do you want the Japan Times to be five years from now?
On paper we want to service the local community, and through the online site service the wider world. To become the absolute number-one source on Japan would be great.
I want domestic news to be our strength, so that as an outsider looking into this country you can get the nuances of why things happen, or, as a Japanese, more about what is really going on: what is the Asahi not telling me? What is the Yomiuri not telling me? We want to do things that the Japanese media are afraid to do, or don’t want to do, or don’t want to look back on, or see. ❶