Issue:
February 2026 | Japan Media Review
A controversial ‘nuclear deterrent’ remark has sparked a debate over the Japanese media’s coverage of off-the-record comments
On December 18, an advisor to the Japanese cabinet on national security held an off-the-record meeting with members of the press club assigned to the Kantei, or prime minister's office. During the meeting, the advisor said that he felt Japan should possess nuclear weapons, given the increased threats from China and North Korea. Although the advisor stressed that he was only expressing a personal opinion, the comment was clearly at odds with Japan's non-nuclear principles, which state that it will not make or possess nuclear weapons, nor allow them on its soil.
Media outlets subsequently reported the remark without naming its source, causing problems for the administration of the prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, with government leaders renouncing it and reaffirming Japan's non-nuclear principles. However, a second debate quickly materialized about the reporting of the comment, since the meeting where it was made was supposed to be off-the-record, meaning that the reporters present had pledged to not report what the advisor said. It's not clear if one media outlet or several broke this pledge, but even if only one did, once the remark had been made public, other media could report it as news. A few days later, the weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun named the alleged commenter as Sadamasa Oue, a retired Air Self-Defense Force officer who three years ago was appointed by then Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to the defense ministry policy division.
While the comment caused problems for the government, the subsequent coverage sparked outrage directed at the media, which had not adhered to informal press rules regarding what can and can't be reported. An article posted on Aera Digital on December 26 referred to two types of off-the-record events. The first, kanzen ofu-reko, or "completely off-the-record," means journalists cannot report the conversation at all in any form. The second, known as "background," allows reporters to use the information conveyed during the conversation without naming the interlocutor in order to explain a situation that the reporter is covering. Several lawmakers claimed that the first rule was in force, including former foreign minister Taro Kono, who said on X that revealing a comment from a conversation pre-designated as being off-the-record is a serious breach of protocol for the media, which means inevitably some outlets will no longer be invited to participate in off-the-record discussions with government figures. However, Aera also pointed out that the content of the comment in question was "in the public interest," since possession of nuclear weapons by Japan is a serious matter.
As an illustration, Aera interviewed a reporter who leaked an off-the-record comment in November 2011 by the Okinawa bureau chief of the Ministry of Defense. During the meeting, which took place in a bar, the bureau chief talked about the planned construction of a replacement for the Futenma air base in the coastal area of Henoko, a project that to this day is still under fire from locals. When he was asked if the government would carry out a legitimate environmental impact assessment, as required by law, the representative answered with an offensive metaphor, saying that you don't warn a woman that you are about to rape her.
The reporter, who worked for the local newspaper the Ryukyu Shimbun, informed his editor of the quote. It appeared on the paper’s front page the following day, triggering the defense official’s dismissal. The editor said that they felt the remark needed to be exposed because so many residents of Okinawa did not trust the government’s handling of the Henoko construction project.
On December 22, the TBS Radio show Session interviewed two reporters, Daiki Sawada of TBS Radio and Masakatsu Ota of Kyodo News. Both said that the substance of the advisor's remark at the December 16 meeting clearly violated the government's anti-nuclear weapons policy, and so it was important for the public to hear it, since not reporting it would violate citizens' right to know. What followed was a discussion on how reporters in Japan handle off-the-record conversations.
Sawada stressed that none of the Kantei press club reporters revealed the advisor's name in their reporting of the remark. His own company referred to the interlocutor as a "key cabinet advisor", adding that the remark did not reflect the opinion of the prime minister, even though no one at that point had asked Takaichi for a comment. He also made a point of saying that no one in the government ever speaks on the record "about this particular issue". Other media referred to the individual differently, with Nippon TV and NHK describing the person as a "cabinet-related individual", a term that made the source sound like a bureaucrat. Jiji Press made perhaps the vaguest reference, calling the person a "government representative". The point Sawada was trying to make is that the press club members attempted to make the identity of the person as blurred as possible.
The upshot is that there is no standard term for such a source among Japan's media outlets, and that masking the person's identity as much as possible provides an excuse to report what that person said. Sawada also revealed that the ground rules for off-the-record conversations assert that reporters cannot record them in any way, meaning they can't use recording devices or take written notes. Under such circumstances, however, many reporters have developed a talent for memorizing conversations and then writing them down verbatim immediately afterwards.
As several Japanese commentators have stated, in other countries there is no coverage of off-the-record conversations at all, while in Japan reporters interpret the rule differently and often do report such conversations while hiding the identity of the speaker. However, Japan's press club system means reporters assigned to ministries and other bodies make informal pacts with the people they cover on a daily basis: representatives of the organization or ministry being covered feed reporters the information they want but within a range of limitations. The representative may insist on remaining anonymous – referred to as kankeisha or "related source" – demand no coverage at all, or something in between. The sticking point is reporters who do not belong to the press club, such as freelancers and writers for weekly magazines and tabloids, who are not beholden to any off-the-record rules pledged by press club reporters. A lot of non-mainstream press reporting relies heavily on anonymous sources, including other reporters, and, for that reason, these reporters come up with a greater portion of scoops in Japan.
But even press club members will play fast and loose with the off-the-record rule, especially in situations where protocols are not clearly delineated. On the Session program, Ota and Sawada mention a conversation with an aide to then Prime Minister Fumio Kishida who said during an off-the-record "chat" that he didn't like being around gay people. A Mainichi Shimbun reporter who heard the remark reported it after informing the person who made it that he intended to do so. He did not, though, reveal the person's name. Following the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, the trade minister, Yoshiro Hachiro, joked that he wouldn't contaminate a reporter with radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which had been crippled in the disaster. Several journalists reported the remark, and Hachiro was forced to step down. He obviously thought he was speaking off the record, but the reporters disagreed.
In Japan, the protocols for off-the-record conversations are not set in stone. Former TV reporter Ichiro Shimoya, on a recent episode of his YouTube program Shojiki Media, explained that Kyodo News described the December 16 meeting as "unofficial," a term he found odd. How can any kind of newsgathering involving a government official be called “unofficial”, he said. Similarly, the special words that reporters use when relating conversations that are not on-the-record have little meaning to readers and viewers. Reporters tend to use kondan to describe such a discussion, an arcane term that only media people use when talking to government representatives they are assigned to cover. In essence, press club reporters are company employees before they are journalists, which means even if they are told that a conversation is off-the-record – and press club reporters usually attend several off-the-record discussions a week – they feel it is part of their job to pass whatever they hear on to their editors.
Shimoya said the timing – December 16 – of the off-the-record meeting with the national security advisor probably meant it had been particularly informal, maybe an end-of-year get-together involving alcohol. In any event, the speaker obviously wanted these reporters to know his opinion, which is not a popular one, and the reporters in turn were only too happy to listen to it. Shimoya added that many government officials had expressed a similar opinion about nuclear weapons to him. In that sense, the quote is only genuinely newsworthy if the speaker had revealed that the government was actually thinking of changing the non-nuclear policy. Without proper context, the remark wasn't really newsworthy.
Shimoya said the government was more likely to ban a reporter from a press club for writing negatively about an official than for, say, leaking an off-the-record comment. After all, officials leak such statements all the time under the cloak of anonymity to advance their personal or administrative agenda. In another discussion on the web news program Democracy Times, former news editor Ko Suzuki implied that the press club system was more beneficial to the authorities than to the media. When it comes to national security, which is what the December 16 meeting was ostensibly about, the government is extremely cagey about the information it releases, so the public has little idea of what Japan's national security policy is. The debate about the media's lack of scruples when it comes to off-the-record meetings misses the point. Suzuki mentioned official press conferences where all you see is press club reporters typing away on their laptops rather than engaging with government representatives. If they just stopped typing and listened to what was being said, he pointed out, they might be able to ask important questions. After all, everybody has a voice recorder.
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.
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