It might be worth recalling that the Foreign Press in Japan (FPIJ) is partly a creation of the Japanese authorities, charged with helping foreign journalists’ work here go smoothly. The EU pointedly reminded Japan of this obligation in a now-famous 2002 report criticizing the cartel-like behavior of its press clubs.

Listing off a string of cases, including restricted press conferences by police investigating the murder of hostess Lucie Blackman, where foreign journalists were prevented from doing their job, the report said: legitimate problems (such as) numbers of attendees “can easily be dealt with through the existing pool structure – the FPIJ – which was itself created by the Japanese government to deal with just such situations.”

It concluded with an equally famous denunciation of the entire press-club system, which, it said, encouraged censorship, over-reliance on single sources and “the widespread and undesirable practice of split briefings for domestic and foreign journalists.” The result was clear: “Increased potential for information to be tailored to one or the other audience by the briefing party, exacerbating the risk of spreading inaccurate and biased information about Japan.”

FCCJ members may lament that recalcitrant officials in the Foreign (MOFA) and other ministries didn’t pay closer attention to that report, or indeed that the EU didn’t write it sooner. In any case, it was a key element in the March 2004 decision by MOFA to instruct all government agencies that holders of the Foreign Press ID card be allowed full access to on-the-record press conferences. We now know that many agencies did no such thing. Former FCCJ President Hans van der Lugt, who helped broker that deal, said presciently at the time that the success or failure of the MOFA letter would “depend entirely on the implementation.” He was right.

In the event, the next six years were marked by more bureaucratic foot-dragging and worse; some FCCJ members say that the treatment of foreign journalists at some ministries actually deteriorated after the MOFA letter. The Kantei, which bitter press-club critic Takashi Uesugi this year accurately called the head of the snake, was a particularly egregious offender.

Over the years, the frustrations of foreign journalists have occasionally spilled over into direct encounters with officialdom. In 1998 David Butts, ex-bureau chief of Bloomberg Business News gate-crashed a presser by then Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto and staged a one-man protest. Former LA Times bureau chief Sam Jameson wrote of his anger at being barred from a police press conference following the stabbing of U.S. Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer in 1964.

I came in as FPIJ chair last year and saw a couple of examples of the restrictions. Commissioned by The Irish Times to cover then-Prime Minister Taro Aso’s decision last July to dissolve parliament, I found myself at his press conference unofficially barred from asking a single question. Four months later, I had to whittle down applicants for President Barack Obama’s first press conference in Japan to 10 foreign journalists, then endure a berating from a MOFA official that my selectees weren’t “foreign” enough. Although I rarely depend on breaking news for my work, I found these encounters baffling and irritating, especially when they came laced with the special brand of arrogance and even xenophobia of some MOFA officials.

Earlier this year I was invited to take part in a debate on the press clubs with local journalists and political figures, including Uesugi and former Nagano Governor Yasuo Tanaka. In my ignorance, I was surprised to hear Japanese commentators if anything even fiercer than foreign reporters in their denunciations of the existing system – a reminder to me that it affected a far larger group of local media workers. Even more surprising was how much influence many thought foreign journalists wielded in Japan. As Pio D’Emilia later told me, the title “FPIJ chair” carries more weight than we think, and could be used more strategically.

In the end, my contribution after those promptings was simply to write to the Kantei lamenting its failure to join other bureaucracies in opening up. We wrote the letter in Japanese and sent it directly to the prime minister’s personal secretary, bypassing the constipated existing channels. I’ve no idea if that letter played any part in Yukio Hatoyama’s declaration that his March 26 presser would be open to all the media. I like to think that we are all chipping away at the press-club wall, a struggle that will probably continue despite Hatoyama’s landmark announcement. ❶