Issue:
July 2024 | Cover Story
Are media in Japan and China explaining the causes of bilateral friction, or inflaming them?
At a summit last year, Hiroki Sugita, a veteran Kyodo journalist and winner of the Japan National Press Club Award, warned about the “slow motion” deterioration of the Japanese media, driven by negative reporting and online campaigns. “Most of the reporting is very one-sided … very nationalistic and sometimes chauvinistic and militaristic”, he said. “Japanese government policy and public opinion about China are getting worse and worse.”
The percentage of Japanese respondents saying their impression of China is “poor” hit 92% in 2023, according to nonprofit organization Genron, up from 23% in 2005 (just below the record 93% set in 2014). Negative Chinese impressions of Japan have seen some recent improvement but still languish at 63%, roughly where they were 20 years ago. Japan (and Australia) has the highest negative sentiment toward China, according to other polls.
A key reason for this sullen and potentially calamitous distrust among Asia’s two most powerful nations is media framing. Many studies have noted a steep rise in anti-Japanese propaganda in China since the 1990s. At one point well over half of Chinese TV dramas focused on the war with Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. During the second administration of Shinzo Abe (2012-2020), China made over 200 anti-Japanese war movies a year.
Since the 1990s, Japanese conservatives have aggressively challenged much of the accepted narrative of the Second World War, complete with its grim catalogue of war atrocities in China. The Abe administration attempted to cajole or pressure public service broadcaster NHK and the commercial media into taking a less independent or critical line on these controversies and to adhere more closely to government views on the growing threat posed by China.
One of the results has been more circumspect and cautious coverage of historical issues. During the Abe era, for example, NHK effectively banned the terms “Nanking Massacre” or “Rape of Nanking”. NHK’s inhouse stylebook now mandates that the 1937 destruction of the Chinese capital by the Imperial Japanese Army must be referred to only as “the Nanjing Incident”. NHK says it is “difficult” to determine the number of actual victims and states that many civilians were “allegedly” killed. This elliptical description contrasts sharply with China, which not only mandates teaching the massacre as part of the national educational curriculum, it commemorates it nationally every year (since 2014) on December 13.
Throughout the last two decades, media workers at NHK have found it more difficult to challenge the conservative line. Eriko Ikeda, an ex-NHK producer, says that program-makers in NHK tacitly understood that the Nanjing Massacre and comfort women – women and girls forced to serve in Japanese military brothels before and during World War II – were taboo. She says that in the mid-2000s, her proposals on comfort women were repeatedly blocked by NHK management.
The number of TV documentaries in Japan dealing with the war, heavily clustered around the anniversary month of August, has also sharply declined since the late 1990s. Programs that show Japanese Imperial Army perpetrating war crimes have fallen to almost zero today. A corollary of this decline in attributing agency to Japanese wartime actions is a rise in victimhood. According to a 2017 analysis, 88% of Japanese represented in dozens of television programs on Japanese TV over four decades were victims.
The agenda-setting of the Japanese media has changed, too. In addition to eliding or dismissing Chinese claims about the past, negative reports about China have mushroomed. TV often highlights the irrational and capricious nature of the China’s leadership, its growing military budget, human rights abuses, and its attempts to “reshape the global rules-based order” and claim regional military supremacy. Increases in China’s military budget, which has risen steadily for 28 consecutive years, are reported in detail.
Less reporting is given to context. Although Japan’s military is generally framed as “defensive” in the domestic media (NHK even frowns on the word “troops” to refer to Self-Defense Force personnel), it is nevertheless one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated. Japan shelters under the US nuclear umbrella. While China has long affirmed a nuclear weapons policy of no first use, the US and its allies have not. Until the 2020s, China had little desire to modernize its nuclear forces because it perceived no immediate external threat, notes Tong Zhao of Carnegie China. “But that era is gone now.”
Japan’s military spending, meanwhile, grew by 5.9% between 2021 and 2022, reaching $46.0 billion, the highest since 1960, notes the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In 2022, Japan announced a doubling of this spending to 2% of GDP and an expansion of military options, including the ability to strike enemy bases. All this represents a profound shift in Japan’s military policy, concludes Xiao Liang, Researcher with SIPRI’s Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme. “The post-war restraints Japan imposed on its military spending and military capabilities seem to be loosening.”
In a representative democracy, such a profound shift might be accompanied by robust public debate. Critics of the Japanese government, however, say it has discouraged discussion and tried to avoid journalistic inquiry. Such criticism spiked after Hiroko Kuniya, who had anchored NHK’s flagship investigative program Close-up Gendai for two decades, quit in 2015. The weekly press blamed her departure on a 14-minute interview on July 3, 2014, with Yoshihide Suga, then the government’s top spokesman. Kuniya asked an unscripted question on the possibility that the government’s new security legislation might mean Japan becoming embroiled in America’s wars.
This skirmish was not the last. During a live interview in October 2020, Yoshio Arima, anchor of NHK’s flagship evening news program News Watch 9, asked then Suga, then prime minister, to explain why he had blocked the appointment of six scholars as advisors on government policy, reportedly as payback for their criticism of his predecessor, Shinzo Abe. “I think there are people who want an explanation about what is going on,” prodded Arima. “There are things that can be explained and things that cannot,” Suga responded, cutting him off. Arima quit in March 2021. Arima’s predecessor, Kensuke Okoshi was also allegedly ousted after a clash with a member of the Abe government.
All of this had a chilling effect on the media, according to shareholder activists led by Yuko Tanaka, a former president of Hosei University, and Kihei Maekawa, an ex-administrative vice-minister for education. The activists this year announced at the FCCJ a set of formal shareholder proposals to the big TV networks, including a demand that they “observe the autonomy and independence as stipulated in the Broadcasting Act”. They were triggered partly by what they called the networks’ “eerie silence” on Japan’s military buildup. “Have those in power become servants of some rather than the whole,” asked Maekawa. “Are they preparing for war without the knowledge of the sovereign people?”
Studies have pointed to a tendency by the Japanese mainstream media to interpret China’s rise negatively and confrontationally. A content analysis of 196 newspaper stories published from 2018 to 2020 by researchers at the School of Journalism and Communication, Shanghai International Studies University, concludes that selective framing by Japan’s five main daily newspapers “strongly exaggerate the China threat” and “create the illusion that China is challenging the existing order and disturbing regional peace”.
Another study of China coverage in the Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun from 1987-2018, noted that while neither had an overarching narrative, the cumulative impact of terms such as “concern”, “anxiety”, “distrust”, “crisis” and “risk”, and 2increased influence and presence” reinforced stereotypical interpretations of China as a threat.
One of the problems alluded to by Sugita is that press clubs tend to faithfully and uncritically regurgitate Japanese government reports on Chinese military development. In the popular media, meanwhile, xenophobic or racist commentary is rife. That means the framework for a lot of Japanese media coverage of China is “othering” China, and vice-versa in the Chinese media. “Portraying ‘otherness,’ whether as a role model or a threat, has become a means of constructing a Japanese identity through a foreign mirror,” concludes Shogo Suzuki of Manchester University.
Within this landscape, some might celebrate the waning ability of the mainstream media in Japan to frame issues in a way that reinforces nationalist sentiment. But ultranationalist, xenophobic and conspiratorial commentary is also a feature of online discourse. Distrust in the establishment Japanese media, which clusters around press clubs disgorging official information, is growing says Masaru Seo, the president of Slow News, an online media outlet set up in 2019 that supports investigative journalism. “The media views themselves as watchdogs monitoring those in power but the public sees the media as a vested interest group.
The stakes are high. In 2024, the joint command of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces and the U.S. military for the first time named China as a hypothetical enemy. Japan will have the third largest defense budget in the world by 2027, after the U.S. and China. Asia’s arms race, CNN warned last year, risks spinning out of control. Are the media, to cite the title of a landmark study of propaganda in Japan from the Meiji era through the Second World War, illuminating the facts, or “fanning the flames”.
David McNeill is professor of communications and English at University of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo, and co-chair of the FCCJ’s Professional Activities Committee. He was previously a correspondent for the Independent, the Economist and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Nao Kato is a PhD student at University of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo.
