September 2024
Dear members,
As summer winds down (although, unfortunately, not the temperatures), the new board has selected the club’s committees, launched Professional Activities Committee and Film Committee events and, on 23 August, met members and listened to their hopes about the FCCJ.
August 2024- New President
Dear Members,
It took a while, but a new BoD now represents the FCCJ and held its first meeting on August 9. I will serve as president, Khaldon Azhari as First Vice President, Randy Schmidt as Second Vice President, Anthony Rowley as Treasurer, and David Umeda as Secretary. Completing our directors are Shuri Fukunaga, Taeko Nagayama, Suvendrini Kakuchi, and outgoing President Dave McCombs, and Simon Farrell as Kanji. Milton Isa will serve as Reserve Director.
There is one open Kanji position and I hope to be able to update on next steps for this role shortly, as well as who will lead our many FCCJ Committees.
August 2024
Ever wonder what’s going on at the club?
What do the club’s bylaws say about how many directors are needed to form a board? How does the FCCJ’s first-quarter revenue compare with the same period a year ago, and the five years before that? What board resolutions related to club restaurants were considered over the past 12 months?
Those are all fair questions to ask of the president. As it happens, I can answer any of those and many more in seconds. And that’s not because minute details of the club’s operations, board moves and bylaws are at the top of my mind and tip of my tongue.
July 2024
The only safe thing is to take a chance.
Elaine May
A visitor to the club could be forgiven for asking: “What happened?” The glorious hallway leading to the main bar is decked with the faces of world leaders, entertainers, athletes, artists, business titans and authors who’ve crossed our threshold. But it’s been a while since we have hosted big global names on a regular basis.
I’m often told by members that this must be reversed. The idea is that if we just worked harder and smarter and talked to the right people, we’d begin to relive our glorious past as a club. It’s a seductive narrative, for some. Youth can be hard to let go of, as are memories.
June 2024
Ohayō, FCCJ
It’s morning at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan. The long, dark night of declining membership, cuts in services and senior staff turnover has ended.
May 2024
Dear members,
Charles Darwin’s centuries-old insights into biology can help explain more than the origin of species. They also provide a helpful frame for analyzing what’s going on in society, including the news media industry.
We often hear that mainstream news media are losing trust, readership and viewership because they’re biased or too focused on this and not that. But what does mainstream mean if not broadly popular? They are the fittest, marketwise, and, above all, they survive.
“Survival of the fittest’’ encapsulates an important idea, even though it didn’t originate with Darwin and doesn’t reflect the core idea of his world-changing theory of evolution.
April 2024
Dear members,
In conversations with past presidents and longtime members, I’m often greeted with the notion that the club has “always been this way”. It could be easy to believe that the only thing that ever changes at the club is the pace at which things stay the same.
But we know better.
February 2024
Dear members,
Mindfulness is a necessity in the face of grinding layoffs and publication closures across the journalism industry. The words “stunned” and “historic” appeared in coverage of a slew of bad media news stories earlier this month, including the closure of Sports Illustrated magazine and the Los Angeles Times’ decision to lay off 20% of its workforce. Business Insider, Forbes and National Geographic have piled on the misery, shedding journalists and retrenching in recent weeks.
January 2024
Dear members,
It’s natural for journalists to support freedom of the press. Many of their jobs depend on it. And citizens in a free state rely on the news media to safeguard democracy. But what about corporations and business leaders? What’s at stake for them?
December 2023
Dear members,
Apparently, no one is reading my columns to the end, where I’ve been pleading for members to step up and take on some committee assignments. So, this time, I am starting with the beg, then on to the column.