Another Student's Essay

And this one is titled "Why Is the Media Coverage on Japan So Biased?"

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Why Is the Media Coverage on Japan So Biased?
Seven Problems that Prevent the Improvement of Media Coverage on Japan

I have come to realize that many of the articles in the media in the western countries especially in the United States publishes on Japanese society and culture, received from its office in Tokyo, are heavily biased. There should be, I would imagine, a certain set of reasons behind why these kinds of heavily biased articles are written over and over again. The subject of these articles may differ, but the quite a lot lately about the issue of biased media coverage on Japan, and have come up with several problem that seem to permeate articles in the foreign media.

First of all, all national media, in both Japan and the United States, are geared towards a domestic audience and are self-absorbed. The Japanese media has assumed all these years that no foreigner would read what they write in Japanese, and has indeed written what could only pass uncontested within the nation. For example, we should be reminded of the famous Marco Polo magazine scandal; in one of their issues, they published an article which claimed that ”Nazi gas chambers never existed,” without any historically-founded evidence. The publishers decided to include this article in their magazine, never questioning nor even trying to verify the claim. Consequently, the magazine was heavily criticized by Jewish organizations abroad. One of the magazine’s sponsors, a foreign firm in Japan, withdrew its sponsorship, and soon after the magazine was forced to discontinue its publication. I believe this could happen because the editors were ignorant about what was going on in the international scene, or, even if they weren’t entirely ignorant, they probably thought they could get away with it, imagining that Japan functions in a vacuum, completely isolated from the rest of the world. There sure was a perverse sense of complacency in the belief that only Japanese would read articles written in Japanese.

But times have changed. In this day and age, non-Japanese read the Japanese press even when articles aren’t translated into other languages. However, although English language media is already widely read all over the world, the “national media” image of the American press is quite strong, much stronger than that of its European counterparts, and the American media seems rather reluctant to imagine the reactions of the foreigners portrayed in their articles. In that respect, the American media is as self-absorbed as the Japanese press is.

The second problem has to do with a tendency of the media in the U.S. to ridicule issues concerning Japanese women. Ten years ago, one could already predict that Japanese women would become the next target for Japan bashers. Since Japan has become triumphant in the U.S.-Japan Trade War and other economic conflicts, the United States began to run out of trump cards in its battle against Japan. There was a time when Japan could even brag about its lasting marriages while the United States was dealing with an increasing number of families falling apart. Because women in Japan pay the price for the stability of the Japanese family, I was expecting that Japan would soon be attacked for being an underdeveloped country when dealing women’s issues. Sure enough, I was quite right to assume that sooner or later, the phenomena surrounding the family, such as the fact that Japanese marriages don’t fall apart so easily or that the divorce rate don’t go up because people in Japan don’t marry out of love, would be used as symbols of Japan as a mysterious or a backward country.

Thirdly, there is a problem of orientalism. The word “orientalism” originally came from Edward Said’s book of the same title. “Orientalism” refers to a specific gaze which views “the East” as an exotic, mysterious, unintelligent, and underdeveloped “other”. What is often misunderstood is that orientalism isn’t an attribute to the East, but rather part of the self-consciousness of the West trying to hold up its own supremacy. It naturally follows that, even if you understand what orientalism means, that does not mean you understand the East. It does mean, however, that you understand what Westerners think the East is (or what it has to be, or what it wants it to be). Successfully subverting the meaning of orientalism by pointing out that it isn’t about the “other” but about the consciousness of the “subject” itself, is Edward Said’s noteworthy achievement. The notion of orientalism, therefore, is closely connected with issues of gender. Because the subjects casting such a gaze are exclusively male, there is a tendency to feminize the other. And male subjectivity is established through the female “other”. Orientalism isn’t situated in the Orient. It’s in the heads of Europeans, and nowhere else. Likewise, the Japan featured in such kind of the New York Times or something only exists in the heads of journalists.

The fourth problem is the way in which orientalism is paradoxically supported by the Japanese, in a kind of reversed orientalism. During the hype of Japan bashing, Japanese theorists on Japan chose to criticize the United States on its deteriorating states of familial relationships. The logic they used to do this was exactly the reverse of orientalism. They advertised that the success of Japanese society is due to the stability of familial relationships in the country. In this kind of discourse, the Japanese family or marriage is idealized, in a reversed direction from that of the orientalist discourse. You could call this reversed orientalism. The logical structure in both discourses is the same.

Japanese cultural theory that reinforces orientalism by reversing it was never in short supply. Those cultural theorists (most of whom are men) go around making statements along the lines of “once you get married, it’s the wife who calls the shots,” or “women are more than happy with the way things are, so why bother with women’s liberation?” Orientalism and reversed orientalism mutually reinforce each other. I think the orientalism that surfaces in the media is dangerous, but the Japanese discourse on Japan which reinforces it from the other side is equally dangerous. We have to do something about it.

If we would like to discuss issues of sexuality and gender in both countries, it is necessary to compare the two through a careful examination of historical and/or cultural differences. But in reality, “women” are used as being emblematic of a “backward Japan.” I am tired of such a schematic way of thinking. Both history and culture always have their own specificity, and it is impossible that only the United States and Europe can be universal.

The fifth point is concerned with the nature and credibility of representation in those articles. People often say that the writing in Japanese media lacks a sense of distinctive individuality, when compared with its Western counterpart. But I have the impression that the American press, always determined to increase readership, is very arbitrary. There is a specific style in American journalistic writing. A journalist would write, for example, “Hanako Yamada, a 22-year-old office worker, says…” This style is part of a method firmly established in American journalism, to attract the reader’s attention and to make identification of the subject of the article easier. But when Hanako is quoted, no mention is made about Hanako’s representativeness as an example. There is no guarantee that Hanako is a typical example.

Another characteristic of American journalistic writing is that articles are signed by their writes. It is rather favorable as they don’t pretend that there is such a thing as objectivity or neutrality, notions which the Japanese media are so much obsessed with. However, those people or the words they are reported to have said are only arbitrarily chosen, in order to give the article, with a byline on it, a seeming credibility. I have a lot of doubts about the storytelling and sensationalist style of American journalism. Even in such an influential medium as the New York Times or something, there often appear very exaggerated articles, written in such a style that may more appropriate in tabloid magazines. If they are to use a particular informant, they should also give readers the necessary contexts. For instance, how many more people are there who hold the same or similar point of view as the informant? Or, what kind social, class, or cultural background has this informant come from? These pieces of information should also be given alongside the actual report. The article is probably based on actual facts, but I can’t keep from having the impression that examples are chosen to fit the story already formulated in the writer’s head.

Problem number six is the commercialization of media. This is also a serious problem in Japan. Media sources always justify this phenomenon by claiming that they publish what the readers want to read-the kind of information they are looking for. The press likes to say that there are no complaints from their readers, and that their publications are well-read. At the moment the commercialization of media might be even more severe in the United States than in Japan, although it will surely get worse in Japan. It’s hard to say what one could do about it, but in any case it is better to be conscious of the fact that the media is rules by commercialism.

Lastly, I have to point out that there is a desire behind orientalism to construct a universal “Western subjectivity.” Japan is often ridiculed through such ways of identification as “In the West…” or “We, Westerners…”and there is something perverse about the way in which these words are used by Americans. Americans are not aware how particular their society really is, when it is looked at in the larger scheme of world history. Especially in the way in which the population of the contemporary United States is constituted of immigrants from all over the world, one can hardly say that American is representative of the “West.” The American gaze directed towards the uniqueness of Japan is reflected back onto itself in order to prove the universality of the United States, and this alleged universality is referred to through the sign of the “West.” There is a kind of parochialism to the American national media and they have no idea how their face is read by others.

This is, of course, also the case for the Japanese media. It would be better if journalists were more conscious of the fact that national media crosses borders.