Justin McCurry

Since time immemorial, foreign correspondents have complained about the antisocial working hours imposed by deadlines set by editors in time zones far, far away. Today, the daily print edition may be in its final death throws, yet deadline tyranny has only increased. The pressure of a 24-hour rolling news culture driven by social media means that a foreign reporter is now permanently on call, and none more so than Justin McCurry, The Guardian’s man in Tokyo.

“You’ve got to keep feeding the beast,” he sighs. “Editors don’t care if they call you at five in the morning or if you’ve done three or four 14-hour days in a row. You’re out at night and your phone rings and you have to say ‘Yep sure!’ while thinking, ‘You’re ruining my life again!’”

McCurry is a victim of his employer’s success. The Guardian, one of the few remaining British newspapers that gives its entire content away for free online while continuing to charge for the print edition, was until recently a minority London-centric publication catering to a dwindling band of left-leaning intellectuals, students, public sector workers and media executives. Yet in the last five years it has performed an extraordinary transformation, metamorphosing into an online global mega-brand with 90 million monthly readers and a string of highprofile international scoops.

The smugness with which it wears its reputation for moral rectitude may still nauseate the rest of Fleet Street, but The Guardian does not care. Its online success has propelled it far beyond the realm of its traditional print competitors to the stellar echelons of Google, Facebook, the BBC, The New York Times and the Mail Online the latter with its 190 million monthly readers kept happy on a diet of health warnings and hatred (of gays, immigrants and working mothers), illustrated by pictures of celebrities “pouring their curves” into bikinis. “I don’t feel like I’m writing for a British audience any more,” said McCurry.

The son of a civil servant from the West Midlands, McCurry, 44, studied economics and politics at the London School of Economics. “I got the drinker’s 2:2,” he said, which, according to the arcane system of British undergraduate exam marking, implies priorities other than academia. After a few months working as “a pipe salesman of sorts” for British Gas, he took a TEFL course and left London in 1991 for a “very small English conversation school in Osaka.”

A FOREIGN REPORTER IS NOW PERMANENTLY ON CALL. ‘YOU’VE GOT TO KEEP FEEDING THE BEAST’

McCurry spent four years there, and, apart from an 18-month period studying Japanese politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London in 1995-96, has been in Japan ever since. “It’s scary when I think about it,” he says. “I can’t imagine myself living here for good.”

On his return from SOAS, McCurry got a job as a copy editor with the Englishlanguage edition of Yomiuri Shimbun, where he stayed for seven years. Working for a hierarchical, conservative Japanese media organization had its frustrations: “We were not allowed to write about anything political or controversial, or any breaking news,” he said.

He began writing occasionally for The Guardian and was offered the staff job in 2003. Ten years on, the repetitiveness of the Japanese news cycle is beginning to pall: “the perennials are Yasukuni, whaling, dolphins, old people, the Senkakus, suicide, North Korean missiles. By the sixth time round it’s pretty difficult to find a new way of saying the same thing.”

He also writes for other international titles including The Christian Science Monitor, and is amused by the difference in editorial approach. “The professional cultures are totally different,” he says. “Americans insist on “playback” [checking edited proofs] at least twice.” We agree that British papers, in contrast, prefer not to let accuracy get in the way of a good story.

Which is not to say that McCurry does not care whether or not Japan is portrayed truthfully in the international media it’s a subject close to his heart. He deplores “wacky Japan” stories, and is an unlikely defender of the reputation of Shinzo Abe.

“I think the whole Abe project is a lot more nuanced than some of the coverage would suggest,” he says. “I don’t think he wants to turn Japan into an expansionist military power again. He has to tread this very fine line between honoring his own beliefs and it’s not often in Japan that you get a conviction politician, so in that sense I quite like him and taking into account the people who helped him get elected, and what Japanese voters and his international allies feel. He is not completely deaf to what the rest of the world thinks.”

McCurry is fortunate among his peers in having a large audience for his work, one that has been boosted by the paper’s famous scoops on Wikileaks and Edward Snowden. Yet, despite the fact that the Guardian’s print edition sells at best 200,000 copies a day, compared to the 5-million-strong daily global readership of Guardian.com, McCurry still hankers after the old-world satisfaction of seeing his name in print.

“I think we’re in a transition period where we still feel that for an article to have any intrinsic value it’s got to be printed on some dead wood,” he said. “But that will change.” Whether he’ll be here writing is the question. McCurry may not know where he will be in ten years’ time, but he is certain that by that time, The Guardian’s print edition will have met its final deadline.

Lucy Alexander is a freelance journalist and correspondent for The Times.