Issue:

Though some suffer from dwindling resources and access barriers, East Asian journalists reporting from Tokyo have a big impact across the region.

In an unremarkable residential neighborhood in the Ebisu area of Tokyo stands a small, anonymous office building with security cameras and a distinctly unwelcoming locked door. There is not even a sign on its glass façade. But this is the local headquarters of the most powerful news media organization of continental East Asia; this is the Tokyo Bureau of the Xinhua News Agency, as well as an annex to the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China.

Media is not noted for its shyness in seeking attention. The whole concept is to be out there in the public eye. So when a media organization hides behind a locked door, we can imagine factors at play that lay outside the industry norm.

These are tough times for media everywhere, and that includes the foreign media in Japan. Foreign correspondents have been hit by a double blow since the 1990s: the declining financial fortunes of the news media globally and, specifically, the fading foreign interest in Japan.

While pockets of keen interest in Japan remain, it is believed by most media watchers that, within the Tokyo based foreign journalist community, East Asian journalists are the only group that is growing in numbers and capacity.

A TALE OF THE NUMBERS

The number of journalists granted Foreign Ministry press cards is one way to gauge this assertion. The South Korean media, for example, had 41 journalists with press cards in 2004, and the current level is 38.

The number of Hong Kong journalists with press cards grew from 10 in 2004 to 15 journalists today, while over the same 10 year time period, the number of Taiwanese journalists with press cards dropped, but only slightly, from 11 to 10.

The one truly striking figure, however, is that of China. From 27 holders of Foreign Ministry press cards in 2004, the community of Chinese journalists in that category has now grown to 47.

These figures, of course, don’t include freelancers and stringers, but from discussions with the East Asian press community here, it seems that freelancing for the South Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese media organizations is a profession that effectively doesn’t exist.

“Living in Tokyo is expensive,” notes Yang Ming Chu, the Tokyo bureau chief for Taiwan’s Central News Agency. “There’s no way for freelancers to make money. The media companies will not even cover a freelancer’s travel expenses.” Moreover, editors at East Asian newspapers do not generally welcome submissions from anyone other than their own reporters.

This is not to say, however, that there isn’t a lot of work for the reporters here. For Taiwan, especially, the public appetite for news from Japan is voracious. “Taiwan is remark ably influenced by Japan,” says Amy Huang, Tokyo bureau chief for China Times, “Our public is interested in all kinds of things; not just politics and economics, but also culture, the arts, manga, food, transportation and various aspects of tourism.”

THE TIGHTENING FINANCIAL SITUATION

Unfortunately, that massive public interest back home does not translate into sound economic prospects for the Taiwanese journalists here. As it has globally, the internet has undermined the traditional media outlets, and most Taiwanese can now access, at no charge, English language news or Japanese media services translated into Chinese in order to learn about the major happenings in Tokyo.

Even the Central News Agency, the Taiwanese equivalent of NHK, now stations only a single correspondent in Japan Yang who does all of her work alone, including writing articles out of her apartment and taking video with her little handycam.

“Before I came here,” she laments, “there used to be a lot of Taiwanese journalists in Tokyo. If you were a bureau chief like me, for example, you’d be making good money and you’d be treated like an ambassador. There were cars and mansions... but now we don’t even have a dedicated office.”

That’s certainly not the case for the state media of China, which has become increasingly dominant in the field of Chinese language reporting about Japan. Xinhua’s staff is now young and professional and equipped with state of the art television cameras. They have the manpower to put stories out immediately, and the budget to send reporters and crews all around the Japanese archipelago. They are now operating on an entirely different level from the one man or one wom an shows that characterize the Taiwanese or, for that matter, the South Korean journalists.

Taiwanese journalists point out that more and more of their potential readers take their news directly from Xinhua, which usually can deliver its reports more quickly. But since Xinhua is also the state media of a non democratic country, there are questionable effects attending its expanding dominance of the Chinese language sphere. It can change the political nuances of stories, and can have other unfortunate effects.

For example, the China Times’ Huang relates an incident in which her editors in Taiwan called her frantically after they had read a breaking story in the Chinese press. According to the reports, Japan was sending a warship to the Senkaku Islands, and the situation had the potential to start a war. They demanded that she file her copy on the warship’s departure as soon as possible.

“I told them, ‘It didn’t happen!’” she says. “I’m talking directly with Japan’s Ministry of Defense and I’m telling you that such an event did not occur!” It took some effort to convince her editors that the headlines splashed across China’s newspapers were, in fact, baseless.

Attempts to get a direct response on this issue from the Chinese side were unsuccessful in light of that locked door in Ebisu and unanswered requests for interviews.

Transparency or the lack of it is not only a feature of the Chinese media. South Korean journalists did answer interview requests, but requested anonymity in order to speak freely. The picture they paint of their community stands somewhere in the middle, both in regard to the financial resources available to them as well as to the political pressures that they must conform to.

The recent poor diplomatic relations between Tokyo and Seoul encourages them to be critical of Japanese policy in some of their reports, which could be a reason why they frequently have trouble scheduling interviews with Japanese news sources. They are set apart from the other East Asian journalists by their national language and a more competitive media environment among the Koreans themselves.

It is believed by most media watchers that East Asian journalists are the only group that is growing in numbers and capacity

DEALING WITH THE BARRIERS

On top of their financial struggles, most East Asian journalists have little institutional support for their efforts. They are routinely blocked out of some events by the Japanese press club system, and few of them feel that there are enough compelling reasons to join the FCCJ.

They make some use of the government affiliated Foreign Press Center Japan (FPCJ). For the journalists with no travel budgets, FPCJ press tours to the various local regions are a welcome chance to see other parts of the country and socialize with their peers. On rare occasions such as after the Fukushima nuclear disaster the journalist community has banded together on their own.

South Korean journalists, for example, became unhappy at their treatment regarding access to the danger zone. Japanese journalists were being given tours of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, and Western journalists were also being provided with tours through the Foreign Press In Japan (FPIJ) but the South Korean press was completely locked out. Some of them then grouped together and approached the FPCJ to help them. Their effort bore fruit when several journalists were allowed to participate in a plant tour along with a very large delegation of Japanese journalists.

The Taiwanese journalists have a similar story. After becoming aware of a rumor that spread across Taiwan after 3/11, suggesting that Hakodate in Hokkaido had been terribly damaged by the tsunami, they banded together and decided to take a look for themselves. There was some urgency involved because Taiwanese tourists had begun avoiding Hokkaido, and the local economy was feeling the pinch.

What they found, of course, was that tsunami damage in Hokkaido was relatively light. The local Japanese authorities were very cooperative once they understood the purpose of the Taiwanese journalists’ visit, and that the reporters were spending their own personal money to report the story. The very positive result of their reports from Hakodate was that Taiwanese tourists were effectively reassured and they quickly began to return to Hokkaido in large numbers.

This latter example highlights the largely unrecognized importance of the East Asian journalists in Tokyo. In fact, their reports, even when compiled with very modest resources or with particular political slants, may exercise a larger influence on the real world of politics and economics than the English language media reports that receive more attention from Japanese government and big business.

The Central News Agency’s Yang points out that she is often locked out from video news coverage by press club restrictions, and she doesn’t receive support from the FPIJ because of her use of a handycam, but that the impact of her reports on the Japanese economy may be greater than that of the “major” Western agencies.

” she says, “meaning that they are viewed not only in Taiwan, but also in Hong Kong and in some coastal parts of mainland China, as well as via the internet to Chinese speaking communities in Australia, the United States, and elsewhere.

“The system run by the ‘major’ Western agencies is extremely unfair,” she adds. “Although I work alone, I am also a major agency.”


Michael Penn is President of the Shingetsu News Agency and First Vice-President of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan