For years, the online newspaper JanJan News mounted a scrappy challenge to Japan’s blandly conformist press, offering articles written by readers who took on taboo subjects like whaling and the media’s collusion with the government. The site never attracted enough readers or advertising, though, and was finally forced to shut down most of its operations three months ago.
JanJan was the last of four online newspapers offering reader-generated articles that were started with great fanfare here, but they have all closed or had to scale back their operations in the past two years.
And it is not just the so-called citizen journalism sites that have failed here. No online journalism of any kind has yet posed a significant challenge to Japan’s monolithic but sclerotic news media.
“Japan just wasn’t ready yet,” said JanJan’s president and founder, Ken Takeuchi, a former reformist mayor and newspaper journalist who started the site in 2003.
While Japan’s long economic stagnation has prompted a slow dismantling of the nation’s postwar order, punctuated by an historic change of government last year, one pillar of that order, the news media, has so far been left relatively untouched. The new government has taken steps to open up some of the exclusive press clubs that dominate coverage at Tokyo’s powerful central ministries, but it has yet to follow through with more sweeping changes.
For a variety of reasons, cultural as well as economic, the digital revolution has yet to wreak the same havoc on the news media here that it has in the US and most other advanced countries. The media landscape is still dominated by the same handful of behemoths that have held sway for decades, like the Yomiuri Shimbun, the world’s largest newspaper, with daily circulation of more than 10 million.
Personal blogs thrive in Japan.But sites dedicated to news have found only a small foothold, and most of those are run by major news organizations, which often treat them as sideshows.
Most glaringly, there have been few of the alternative news blogs and news sites that have appeared in other countries, like The Huffington Post in the US. The handful of sites that have drawn attention, like J-Cast News and The Journal, have failed to garner large numbers of readers.
Citizen journalism sites have earned the most attention here, largely for taking the lead in challenging media taboos and criticizing Japan’s press clubs. But they are far from prosperous. Before JanJan, a well-financed startup from South Korea, OhmyNews Japan shut down two years ago and Tsukasa Net closed last November. Another, PJ News, has shrunk to a single editor who does not even have an office.
Takeuchi and others in the online media point to a number of reasons the sites have failed, beginning with advertising revenues that are too low to support even a skeleton newsroom staff.
But Japan, with its cultural disdain for those who stick out from the crowd, may be inhospitable terrain for the reader-turned-reporter model, Takeuchi said.
Consider the contrast with neighboring South Korea. OhmyNews revolutionized the South Korean news media with reader-generated stories that challenged the big conservative newspapers, and in 2002 it helped elect a liberal president, Roh Moo-hyun. The site has become a powerful media player, with 62,700 readers-turned-reporters and 2 million page views a day, in a population a third the size of Japan’s 127 million.
But when OhmyNews took its winning formula to Japan, it flopped. Advertising revenues never materialized, the site drew a meager 400,000 pages views a day and just 4,800 readers signed up to write stories, the site’s former editor Masahiko Motoki said.
Another reason for Japan’s resistance to alternative sites is the relative absence of social and political divisions. In politically polarized South Korea, OhmyNews thrived by appealing to young, liberal readers.
“It is only when the society sees itself as having conflicting interests that it will seek out new viewpoints and information,” said Toshinao Sasaki, the author of about two dozen books on the Internet in Japan.
Media experts say Japan has yet to see such critical questioning of its establishment press.
“Japanese are inundated with information, but they remain very naive media consumers,” University of Tokyo professor of information studies Shin Mizukoshi said.
Still, there have been growing signs that Japan’s news industry may be primed for change. The biggest has been a slow but steady decline in newspaper readership, particularly among younger Japanese.
Circulation of the Asahi Shimbun, for example, Japan’s and the world’s second-largest daily, has fallen by 3 percent over the past decade to just over 8 million
When he started JanJan seven years ago, Takeuchi, 69, said he hoped to stir up Japan’s mainstream press and its top-down, uncritical coverage of the government.
JanJan, short for Japan Alternative News for Justice and New Culture, quickly drew praise for its critical stories on topics considered off limits by Japan’s mainstream news organizations. However, the site barely earned enough to pay for its operations. The death blow came from the global recession, as advertising revenues fell to US$1 million last year from US$3 million in 2007, Takeuchi said. He reopened the site in May as a much more limited blog.
Takeuchi said one of his biggest challenges was maintaining the quality of the site’s news content. Most of the articles submitted by readers tended to be rehashed versions of news stories from major media outlets, with the readers’ opinions added.
He also had difficulty hiring experienced journalists, because most were reluctant to leave a big company for an unknown startup. Media experts said this might change, especially if big news companies begin to resort to layoffs or go bankrupt, as in the US.
“JanJan failed, but there will be others who try to do the same thing,” Mizukoshi said. “JanJan has planted the seed.”
Recently, China launched another diplomatic offensive against Taiwan, improperly linking its “one China principle” with UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 to constrain Taiwan’s diplomatic space. After Taiwan’s presidential election on Jan. 13, China persuaded Nauru to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Nauru cited Resolution 2758 in its declaration of the diplomatic break. Subsequently, during the WHO Executive Board meeting that month, Beijing rallied countries including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Egypt, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Laos, Russia, Syria and Pakistan to reiterate the “one China principle” in their statements, and assert that “Resolution 2758 has settled the status of Taiwan” to hinder Taiwan’s
Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s (李顯龍) decision to step down after 19 years and hand power to his deputy, Lawrence Wong (黃循財), on May 15 was expected — though, perhaps, not so soon. Most political analysts had been eyeing an end-of-year handover, to ensure more time for Wong to study and shadow the role, ahead of general elections that must be called by November next year. Wong — who is currently both deputy prime minister and minister of finance — would need a combination of fresh ideas, wisdom and experience as he writes the nation’s next chapter. The world that
Can US dialogue and cooperation with the communist dictatorship in Beijing help avert a Taiwan Strait crisis? Or is US President Joe Biden playing into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) hands? With America preoccupied with the wars in Europe and the Middle East, Biden is seeking better relations with Xi’s regime. The goal is to responsibly manage US-China competition and prevent unintended conflict, thereby hoping to create greater space for the two countries to work together in areas where their interests align. The existing wars have already stretched US military resources thin, and the last thing Biden wants is yet another war.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, people have been asking if Taiwan is the next Ukraine. At a G7 meeting of national leaders in January, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned that Taiwan “could be the next Ukraine” if Chinese aggression is not checked. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said that if Russia is not defeated, then “today, it’s Ukraine, tomorrow it can be Taiwan.” China does not like this rhetoric. Its diplomats ask people to stop saying “Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow.” However, the rhetoric and stated ambition of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Taiwan shows strong parallels with