The text below is a slightly edited version of the author’s remarks to the M20 Media Freedom Summit held online in Delhi on September 6, 2023 by the M20 Organising Committee, which comprises 11 editors from India and a former judge of the Supreme Court.
Good evening, everybody, it’s very nice to you again, especially Ken. It’s been some time since we met in Australia for the IPI meeting. Today, I’d like to describe the Japanese media in a phrase, which is well-suited – it is in a slow motion of deterioration as a healthy and in terms of the freedom of the media. I will explain three points.
First of all, it’s the same in your countries, that is the financial situation. We are in a very difficult financial situation. Of course, there’s the newspaper circulation that is plummeting so hard and just in the last 20 years. Apart from that number of copies of the Japanese traditional media has decreased by half. Another 20 years. we will have another half. So maybe in some time, traditional news media will disappear for good. Also, the TV audience is declining because the young people – they are the same in your own country – are now no longer watching TV and they are watching just YouTube or social media. That is first the problem and we don’t know how to solve it. We don’t know how to get the good copyright deals from Google, other social media, or big tech companies.
The second question is maybe something unique in Japan because that is something we are, especially I am, facing every day – how to report about the national security issues, which we have not focused on so much in the past. That is about how to report on China. As you know that China has expanded so much and it is quite the threat from the Japanese standpoint. This is of course affecting the direction of the Japanese media coverage. I would say, since the end of World War II and especially after the end of the Cold War, we have been living in a very peaceful regional and international environment so we have not faced this kind of problem of how to report this possible strife which is now Japan’s point of view of China.
The Japanese government has its strengths and its defence budget and a modernised defence doctrine. The trend is that Japanese government policy and public opinion about China are getting worse and worse. Those conditions inevitably and naturally affect the course and overtone of the media coverage of Japan. We, especially journalists, know that we have to make much more nuanced stories, including many faces, and many aspects of China, which sometimes we see.
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On the other hand, sometimes it is kind of a very friendly and familiar space for the Japanese, but most of the cases nowadays are about the threat from China. Especially after the release of the contaminated or I would say treated water from the Fukushima nuclear power plants and that is a big issue in this region. China strongly opposed the idea of the release of the water but without clear evidence from the scientific standpoint.
That is why we concretely had some kind of conclusion that China is acting against or opposing whatever Japan does, without a point of negotiation. With that kind of attitude of China, the Japanese public is very strongly opposed to China, especially the part of the question of international or national security reporting.
People in Japan are maybe a different case. People in the defence department, foreign ministry or national security office of the Japanese government say this is a kind of secret information and that is why they cannot disclose all the information. And so that information to media people like me leads to reporting which in most of the cases is not based on some kind of fact or first-hand information of Chinese threat.
This is a very hard job for us because we know that we have to put in much more effort from various angles. Most of the reporting is very one-sided which is a very nationalistic and sometimes chauvinistic and militaristic. I think that our reports are not well qualified at this time, which sees a very difficult situation with China.
Another problem is with recruiting future journalists from colleges or universities in Japan. Most of those talented, young people don’t choose journalism as a vocation or as a profession. They like to go to the banking sector or consulting sector or trade companies. They say journalism is very hard and that kind of a job does not make enough money for them so that’s why they try to get into other sectors. That is the kind of situation in Japanese media. We need to generate good and talented young journalists.
On the other hand, I think that those youngsters who are interested in the media have started doing some kind of non-profit journalism in Japan. They are actually young people and financed by crowdfunding the organisation, so they are not affected by commercial companies. So they are much more likely to challenge authorities, which our traditional media has refrained from doing. So, I think that this is kind of a positive sign of Japanese journalism. We see that we are in the middle of transformation or transit. Sometimes, you know, changing the media culture from the traditional media to the new media is something I take some hope from.
I’ll stop here. Thank you.
Hiroki Sugita is columnist at the Kyodo News Agency, Japan.