Japanese media

A dog without a nose? So asks Michael Hoffman in an article in the Japan Times. I can answer that offhand. Yes, it is. The media is not really free to investigate much that would oppose mainstream or government beliefs. For example, the Japanese hostages and North Korea, as is discussed in the article:

..."Reporting on North Korea," Byon tells Dacapo, "is extreme, exaggerated, distorted. There is no digging, only regurgitation. Anyone who deviates even a little [from the government line] is liable to get 'bashed.' Many commentators are afraid to express their true opinions. They express instead what they feel is expected of them."...

...In the 1930s and early '40s, Dacapo hears from Rikkyo University media scholar Naoki Kadona, Japanese newspapers championed war and absolutism. The war ended, and they espoused peace and democracy. The transition was abrupt and, he feels, not entirely convincing....The full article is here.

A reflection of Japan, not the media alone. The sudden complete reversal of beliefs after the war was not and is not entirely convincing....except for those such as the long dead sugar-coater Edwin Reishauer.

Speaking of Whaling

It has been mentioned in several articles in the English language press in Japan and many overseas, that the so-called whaling tradition in Japan really began after WW2 during the US Occupation when the US pushed Japan to use more whale meat in schools and other places. If I remember correctly, one reason was to reduce the food costs.

This type of information most likely never reaches the average Japanese. According to an article in the Canberra Times:

Earlier this year, I had a chance to talk to a Japanese journalist who specialises in fishery and whaling issues. According to this journalist, who asked to remain anonymous, whaling articles in Japan are usually written without getting the views of either environmentalists or government officials from the anti-whaling countries.

It is not their restricted English that stops Japanese journalists from making an inquiry (all major international environmental organisations and major anti-whaling countries are equipped with Japanese speaking PR specialists in Tokyo). Rather, there is an ongoing Japanese media practice that prevents Japanese journalists from crossing horizons to hear the word of their "adversaries."

This means that the Japanese public are very ill-informed about the whaling issue. Canberra Times article (editorial) here.

This type of "coverage" seems to apply across the board. I rarely speak to people no matter how international or educated who seem to be aware of much of the rational behind the debates concerning Japan from overseas governments or organizations. This kind of information is readily available in English, but obviously not so readily discussed in Japanese in the Japanese media. One cannot in any way assume that the same is included in a Japanese-language newspaper as in the English-language version. Some, like the Japan Times, do not have a Japanese language version.

One important example is the fact that Nature magazine published an article calling into serious doubt that a Japanese scientist was able to identify remains said to by those of one of the Japanese kidnapped by North Korea as not belonging to the Japanese victim. The Japanese scientist himself admitted flaws and doubts with this finding. It has not received much if any coverage in Japan. Naturally, the Japanese government pretends the controversy never happened or is not significant.

Japanese government manipulation of science

I suspect most people know of the kidnapping of Japanese citizens by the North Koreans. Perhaps you even know of Ms. Megumi Yokota whom North Korea claims to have committed suicide in North Korea. When what were said to be her remains were returned to Tokyo, DNA tests were conducted which supposedly showed the remains were of 2 different people, not Megumi.

This has caused the tensions between the two countries to continue to rise. North Korea obviously cannot be trusted very much here, but how about the Japanese government? But did you know that 2 DNA tests were conducted, the first by the government which determined that it was not possible to determine whose remains they were or weren't after they were cremated at 1200 degrees centigrade. The second test was conducted by a lecturer at Teikyo university who had no experience testing cremated remains for DNA. The same scientist later told Nature magazine that the test really proved nothing. The Japanese government, as is their custom, did not debate the point, but instead attacked the magazine. You can read the full story at http://www.japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=306 (Sorry, dead link, article has been removed by Japan Focus. Why?)

The story in short, available from several sources on the web, including Time and Wikipedia:

An article in the 3 February 2005 (Nature) issue revealed that the DNA analysis on Megumi's remains had been performed by a member of the medical department of Teikyo University, Yoshii Tomio. Yoshii, it later transpired, was a relatively junior faculty member, of lecturer status, in a forensic department that had neither a professor nor even an assistant professor. Remarkably, he said that he had no previous experience in the analysis of cremated specimens, described his tests as inconclusive and remarked that such samples were very easily contaminated by anyone coming in contact with them, like "stiff sponges that can absorb anything." In other words, the man who had actually conducted the Japanese analysis pronounced it anything but definitive. The five tiny samples he had been given to work on (the largest of them 1.5 grams) had anyway been used up in his laboratory, so independent verification was thereafter impossible. It seemed likely as a result that nobody could ever know for sure what Pyongyang's package had contained.

When the Japanese government's chief cabinet secretary, Hosoda Hiroyuki, referred to this article as inadequate and a misrepresentation of the government-commissioned analysis, Nature responded, in a highly unusual editorial (17 March), saying that:

"Japan is right to doubt North Korea's every statement. But its interpretation of the DNA tests has crossed the boundary of science's freedom from political interference. Nature's interview with the scientist who carried out the tests raised the possibility that the remains were merely contaminated, making the DNA tests inconclusive. This suggestion is uncomfortable for a Japanese government that wants to have North Korea seen as unambiguously fraudulent. ... The inescapable fact is that the bones may have been contaminated. ... It is also entirely possible that North Korea is lying. But the DNA tests that Japan is counting on won't resolve the issue. The problem is not in the science but in the fact that the government is meddling in scientific matters at all. Science runs on the premise that experiments, and all the uncertainty involved in them, should be open for scrutiny. Arguments made by other Japanese scientists that the tests should have been carried out by a larger team are convincing. Why did Japan entrust them to one scientist working alone, one who no longer seems to be free to talk about them? Japan's policy seems a desperate effort to make up for what has been a diplomatic failure ... Part of the burden for Japan's political and diplomatic failure is being shifted to a scientist for doing his job -- deriving conclusions from experiments and presenting reasonable doubts about them. But the friction between North Korea and Japan will not be decided by a DNA test. Likewise, the interpretation of DNA test results cannot be decided by the government of either country. Dealing with North Korea is no fun, but it doesn't justify breaking the rules of separation between science and politics."