Issue:
December 2024 | Japan Media Review
Why didn't Shimbun Akahata get the recognition it deserved for its scoop on the LDP funding scandal?
On September 4, the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association (Nippon Shimbun Kyokai, or NSK) announced the winner of its annual newspaper award, which is given to a publication for "outstanding news coverage". The 2024 recipient was the Asahi Shimbun for its feature about political donations that factions of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) collected by selling tickets to entertainment functions they refer to as "parties" and then neglected to report these donations as required by law. The NSK said it was giving the award to the Asahi because the article "exposed the structure of links between politics and money from different aspects". The newspaper, the association said, "led coverage" of the issue through newsgathering and analysis that addressed the actions of these LDP factions "so as to bring about a change in the Political Funds Law".
According to an article in the September 5 online issue of the weekly magazine Flash, city desk editors at other major Japanese news outlets found the NSK's award rationale "laughable," saying that the methodology used for choosing the winner is based on individual media outlets' self-promotion. In essence, a newspaper nominates itself for the NSK award; or, more precisely, the manager of the city desk (shakai-bu) submits articles to the NSK selection committee for consideration. Flash added that the Asahi's main rival, the more conservative Yomiuri Shimbun, won the award last year, so the Asahi was "desperate" that it be cited in 2024. In addition to the LDP party ticket feature, the Asahi submitted six other articles for consideration.
What was missing from both the award announcement and the Asahi's own coverage of its win was the fact that the LDP party ticket story was broken by a different newspaper a full year before the Asahi article was published. The Asahi's feature mainly reported that the Tokyo District Prosecutor's special investigations division had launched a probe into the LDP party ticket matter. However, prosecutors had decided to launch the investigation based on claims of LDP wrongdoing that had been brought to it by a university professor who had been made aware of the wrongdoing through the reporting of Shimbun Akahata (literal translation: Newspaper Red Flag), the news organ of the Japan Communist Party, which broke the story in October 2022.
The professor is Hiroshi Kamiwaki, who teaches constitutional law at Kobe Gakuin University. During its investigation, Akahata interviewed Kamiwaki, an expert on political funds, about the ramifications of the unreported money that the LDP had collected through the sale of party tickets. Kamiwaki started checking all the reported purchases of party tickets by individuals and organizations against the political funds reports submitted by the LDP, and found that over a four-year period five main factions in the LDP neglected to report a total of ¥40 million in funds derived from the sale of tickets. He then took his findings to the Tokyo prosecutor’s office, saying that it appeared the LDP factions had violated the Political Funds Law. It was only later that the Asahi reported on the matter.
After the NSK award was announced, people posted on social media platforms that the Asahi didn't deserve it. Even if Akahata was not a member of the NSK and thus ineligible for the award, ethically speaking the NSK, not to mention the Asahi, should have at least acknowledged that almost all the legwork for the story had been carried out by Akahata. The latter contributed its own take on the matter with posts by its city desk manager on X, stating that the Asahi article only used information "given to it by the prosecutor", meaning that the Asahi didn't do any digging of its own. This failure to acknowledge Akahata becomes even more ironic when you consider that the Asahi, as a major Japanese daily, has a close connection to the Tokyo prosecutors that Akahata, an organ of the politicial left, does not.
One unnamed reporter for a major daily told Flash that the Asahi knew about the party ticket scandal much earlier but didn't report it because it was afraid it would upset the LDP, which might have restricted the newspaper's access to the party in response. Consequently, they waited until prosecutors announced their investigation so that they could report it as news.
In what could be deemed a rebuke to the NSK award, on September 10 the Japan Congress of Journalists (JCJ) gave its 2024 award to Shimbun Akahata for a series on the party ticket scandal it had published in its Sunday edition.
The JCJ mentioned the effect Akahata's coverage had had by pointing out that when Fumio Ishiba announced on August 14 that he would not seek another term as president of the LDP – effectively announcing his resignation as prime minister – he mentioned "politics and money" six times - the term Akahata had pushed in its coverage. The JCJ also acknowledged that Akahata had been the outlet that broke the story, despite the fact that in its own coverage of winning the NSK award the Asahi described its related reporting as a "scoop".
In its response to receiving the JCJ award, Akahata tried to clarify its role in the LDP factions' downfall by laying out the process of its coverage of the scandal. Apparently, it had received a tip from a former LDP official that some factions were "hiding" the revenue from sales of party tickets to various industy-related political action committees (PAC), which commonly buy them as a means of donating money to the LDP and other political parties. Often, members of the PAC don't even attend these functions, they just purchase tickets for the purpose of buying influence. For donations of less than ¥200,000, no reports need to be filed, but one PAC associated with electronics manufacturers in 2018 bought ¥300,000 worth of tickets from the faction of Fumio Kishida and ¥900,000 worth of tickets from the faction attached to the late prime minister Shinzo Abe. If a politician neglects to report taking funds from an individual or organization of more than ¥200,000 they are liable for penalties of up to ¥1 million or prison sentences of up to five years.
After the tip, Akahata's editors wondered if the practice was more widespread and started investigating the records of other industry PACs registered with the interior ministry, which numbered 61,188 in 2022, as well as the records of political organizations (seiji dantai) headed by lawmakers that would have received these funds according to the PAC reports. Money received properly by political organizations is not taxable, which is one reason why the improper cash received has been characterized as "slush funds". In the cases of five LDP factions, Akahata found wide discrepancies between what the PACs had reported and what the political organizations had reported. Between 2018 and 2020, some ¥24 million in party ticket sales was not reported by these organizations.
But there was more. A year after Akahata initially published its findings in its November 6 2022 issue, it updated its reporting with data about non-disclosure of funds for 2021 in its November 5, 2023 issue – 94 cases comprising five factions, bringing the total amount of unreported funds to about ¥40 million since 2018. Lending credibility to Akahata's research was the fact that whenever the Sunday edition covered the matter, the factions in question quickly revised their reports. By this time, Kamiwaki had already submitted his complaint to the Tokyo prosecutor’s office, specifically naming lower house speaker Hiroyuki Hosoda, who was the chairman of the Abe faction at the time, for violating the Political Funds Law. The prosecutor’s office launched its investigation based on Kamiwaki's complaint in the fall of 2023, which is when the Asahi picked it up.
Akahata claims that one of the reasons prosecutors sat on Kamiwaki's findings for a full year before starting its investigation was the source of those findings, namely Akahata, which the prosecutor deemed was part of a "political scheme" initiated by the JCP. But after a year, the scale of the alleged unreported funds had become too large to ignore. During this period, all the major news media ignored Akahata and Kamiwaki's allegations. It wasn't until their hand was forced by the Tokyo prosecutors’ announcement that they picked up the story, although the Asahi got there first. As a result, the LDP "punished" the lawmakers involved in the scandal last April and said it would not endorse them in the next general election, which took place in October.
Adding insult to irony, while the LDP lost big in that election owing to the information uncovered by Akahata, the JCP itself lost two seats, thus indicating a gap of public recognition of the work the JCP's newspaper carried out to expose the LDP's wrongdoing, which continued even during the election campaign. According to the financial magazine Toyo Keizai, Akahata uncovered ¥20 million in LDP funds that was provided under the table to the "non-endorsed" former LDP candidates in the election. One political analyst said this revelation did immeasurable damage to the LDP, which went on to lose its majority in the lower house. Toyo Keizai surmises that this intelligence was leaked by an LDP insider aligned with current Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba who wanted to further punish former members of the Abe faction running for office. Toyo Keizai figures that Akahata's report did make a difference, because right after it was published there was a notable spike in voters submitting absentee ballots, and exit polls indicated there were more non-aligned voters this time than usual. Reports that the LDP had lied about not endorsing members who had engaged in improper sales of party tickets obviously offended some citizens to the point that they voted to punish the LDP. In a further twist, when the Asahi published its own report about the LDP's clandestine funding of the non-endorsed candidates, this time it acknowledged the source reporting of Akahata … but not until the last paragraph.
The fact that voters who wanted to punish the LDP didn't necessarily vote for the JCP points up the communists' eternal dilemma. Decades of JCP demonization by the establishment has convinced the bulk of the electorate that the party stands for a radical leftist ideology, which most people find scary. The ostensible purpose of the reporting carried out by Akahata is to help JCP lawmakers make their cases in the Diet and other legislative bodies by providing them with hard facts and evidence, but in doing so they often uncover stories that the mainstream press, for reasons of maintaining access to those in power, neglect. Regardless of its political stance and authoritarian structural problems, the JCP takes its position as an opposition party seriously, so much so that it refuses to take subsidies from the government that all political parties in Japan are entitled to. In fact, the sole source of its funding, apart from donations by citizens, is subscriptions to Akahata, one of the most journalistically rigorous newspapers in Japan. The irony just keeps overflowing.
Philip Brasor is a Tokyo-based writer who covers entertainment, the Japanese media, and money issues. He writes the Japan Media Watch column for the Number 1 Shimbun.
Sources
https://smart-flash.jp/sociopolitics/304569/1/1/
https://smart-flash.jp/sociopolitics/313867/1/1/#google_vignette
https://jcj.gr.jp/recentactivity/12198/
