Because journalists from the weeklies are banned from the press clubs, they are unable to offer their readers the same timely official information provided by press club journalists. Instead, they have to gather material through a variety of alternative methods. Although this may sound like a difficult situation for shukanshi writers and editors, it actually suits them just fine -- so much so that their industry-wide organization, the Japanese Magazine Publishers Association, does not even complain about its members' exclusion from the clubs. In fact, if weekly magazines did belong to Japanese press clubs, not only would they have to pay much more money to support the staff required, but one of their presumed raisons d'?tre would be eliminated -- they would no longer be able to pose as an "outsider" or alternative press. Of course, the best way for magazine reporters to get material outside the press clubs is to follow the traditional journalist work ethic of chasing leads and tracking down information. Excellent journalism often requires that reporters go around official sources anyway. Also, it is not impossible for non-press club reporters to arrange interviews with government and corporate sources in Japan; it is just more difficult and time consuming. Author and press club critic Tatsuya Iwase, who has many years of experience writing for Japanese newsmagazines, prides himself on performing just such investigative reporting. Iwase believes that good investigative reporting is gaining favor with the Japanese public because readers have grown increasingly frustrated with the establishment press and overloaded with the barrage of sensationalism coming from television, radio and elsewhere. Although Iwase is no starry-eyed optimist, he says that the newsmagazine industry is slowly starting to improve. In an interview for this book, he predicted that investigative journalism will eventually make up as much as 20 to 30 percent of the contents of many Japanese weekly newsmagazines. However, Iwase also estimates that currently only about 3 or 4 percent of all the material in a given weekly newsmagazine could be categorized as solid investigative reporting. He qualified this statement by estimating that, unlike in the establishment press where 90 percent or more of all stories are derived from government and corporate sources, as many as half of the stories (at least in non-newspaper-published weeklies) are on original topics that were not initiated by a press release or similar official source. However, if Iwase and the many who agree with him are correct, and only a tiny percent of all the reporting in Japanese weekly newsmagazines is worthwhile, how do these publications fill their pages each week?
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"Weekly magazines are very influential, and the reason is the advertisements. The headlines reproduced in ads on trains and in other publications are nationwide. Millions see them every week." -- Jun Kamei |
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One common information-gathering method employed by weekly newsmagazines is simply to bribe press club reporters to "leak" information from the clubs. Indeed, newsmagazines commonly pay press club reporters to write entire stories anonymously, a fact confirmed repeatedly in interviews with numerous newspaper and magazine reporters. Although frowned upon by establishment-media companies, this practice can be a boon for the press club reporters themselves. Not only are they able to earn extra income while plying their trade, they also are provided a much-desired outlet for the hottest insider information, which they can obtain as club members but which club rules and other restrictions often prevent them from disclosing in the establishment press. Yasunori Okadome, the publisher and editor in chief of the monthly scandal magazine Uwasa no Shinso (Truth of Rumors) for 25 years, until its discontinuation in 2004, has estimated that 30 to 40 percent of all the articles in his magazine "come from information leaked by newspaper reporters who feel they cannot write about much of the information they have in their own publications."Another method is simply to repackage public information already reported in the establishment news media by putting a different spin on it. This usually means making the information somehow more sensational. A good example is a Shukan Shincho article that repeated accusations already widely reported against an innocent man, Yoshiyuki Kono. It is obvious that writers working for the magazine simply added to this public information by interviewing some of Kono?s neighbors and acquaintances and researching his parents' and grandparents' histories. Although the information collected was fundamentally innocuous and had no bearing on the validity of the accusations against Kono (all of which later proved false), Shukan Shincho ran its story about "The Originator of the Poisonous Gas and His Macabre Family Line" as though it had achieved an inside scoop that demonstrated Kono's guilt in an original way. A variant on this technique is to rehash news already reported elsewhere in the media and then simply hire experts to comment on it. This can be a popular format among Japanese readers, who do not often encounter detailed news analysis in the opinion-shy establishment press. A Shukan Shincho article opens with a criticism of Asahi newspaper's coverage of the "comfort women" story and then simply recounts the opinions of so-called experts (some of whom are nothing but neonationalist cranks), who variously accuse the surviving women of being prostitutes and opportunists. Yet another popular shukanshi method for gathering material is simply to report hearsay, rumors, or other unreliable sources as news. Such unsubstantiated claims, collected from various neo-Nazi and other Western sources, became the basis for a freelance writer's "proof," published in a Japanese newsmagazine, that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz.
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