Early last month, dozens of journalists and editors from the Japan Times gathered for an emergency meeting in a glass-walled conference room in their brand-new 14th-floor office.
On the agenda was a single, incendiary issue: the newspaper’s new descriptions of how Japan compelled thousands of foreigners into military brothels and labor during World War II.
In the past, the Japan Times described Korean workers as “forced laborers” and “comfort women” as those “forced to provide sex for Japanese troops before and during World War II.”
However, a five-sentence note published on Nov. 30 last year said that the country’s oldest English-language paper would refer to the Korean workers simply as “wartime laborers.”
The newspaper also said that because of the varied experiences of comfort women, it would describe them as “women who worked in wartime brothels, including those who did so against their will.”
Such terms are social flashpoints in Japan and a topic of bitter dispute with South Korea, whose government has argued that comfort women were clear victims of wartime abuse.
The changes come amid simmering tensions — the South Korean Supreme Court in October last year ruled that Japanese companies must compensate South Koreans forced to work during the war.
Japan Times executive editor Hiroyasu Mizuno told staff in the meeting last month that he had two goals: to avoid creating the perception the paper was “anti-Japanese” and to increase advertising revenue from Japanese companies and institutions.
Some readers said that the change glossed over Japan’s wartime actions.
Meanwhile, prominent Japanese conservatives applauded the move, calling it a coup for nationalist activists agitating for English-language news outlets to change such descriptions.
In an e-mail, Mizuno told Reuters that he and senior editorial managers decided to revise the newspaper’s descriptions to “better reflect a more objective view of topics that are both contentious and difficult to summarize.”
The Nov. 30 note did not signal a change in the newspaper’s editorial direction, he said, adding: “I categorically deny any accusations that the Japan Times has bowed to external pressure.”
The Japan Times has an outsized impact on how the country is perceived abroad — it is distributed in Japan with the New York Times — and is seen domestically as an unofficial style guide for other English-language outlets.
A New York Times representative said that the editorial operations of the two organizations were separate and that the newspaper used precise language on the topic and would continue to do so.
Reuters interviews with nearly a dozen Japan Times employees — all of whom requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal — along with hundreds of pages of internal e-mails and presentation materials, showed that the editorial changes started taking shape when the newspaper changed hands in June 2017.
Some media critics have said that self-censorship is a problem in Japanese newsrooms, fed by fear of losing access, advertising revenue and subscribers.
In the past, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga have singled out the liberal Asahi Shimbun for criticism, including over its articles on comfort women and the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant disaster, some of which it later retracted, citing errors.
Suga told Reuters that the Japanese government would not comment on media companies’ editorial policies, including those of the Japan Times.
Conservative groups in Japan have pushed hard to change how Japan’s World War II activities are described.
For instance, an Australian-Japanese organization that protests comfort women statues, saying that the monuments feed anti-Japanese sentiment, along with Kent Gilbert, a well-known conservative commentator and lawyer who has worked in Japan for decades, last year petitioned the Asahi Shimbun to remove “forced” from its description of comfort women.
The newspaper did not amend its wording, saying in a public statement that it took care “to use the most appropriate phrasing” for stories.
Similar pressure led the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun to apologize to readers in 2014 for using “sex slaves” to refer to comfort women in its English-language edition.
“The Yomiuri Shimbun apologizes for having used these misleading expressions,” the newspaper’s English site said in a statement at the time.
The chilling effect in newsrooms often comes from within the organization, experts said.
“It’s less a result of direct government pressure and more from people inside newsrooms looking to their superiors and the public,” said Minako Beppu, a journalism professor at Hosei University who studies media censorship. “It’s things like: ‘Let’s not criticize them too much,’ or ‘let’s tone things down a bit.’”
At the Dec. 3 staff meeting, Mizuno said that the changes were not political.
“I want to get rid of criticism that Japan Times is anti-Japanese,” he said, according to a transcript and audio recording.
He added that the decision would attract advertising.
A senior manager in charge of sponsored content then said that the newspaper had already increased government ad sales and scored an exclusive interview with Abe after dropping a column by Jeff Kingston, director of Asia studies at Temple University’s Japan Campus, who had been writing weekly on what he saw as the Abe administration’s historical revisionism.
“From a journalistic standpoint, that’s fatal, really,” a senior Japan Times reporter said, according to the transcript.
On Jan. 18, the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement: “We regret that some Japanese media organizations have adopted terms that distort the historical facts regarding the victims of comfort women for the Japanese military and forced labor, which is merely an attempt to sidestep the essence of the problems.”
Reuters last month received a letter from a Japanese government official objecting to the term “sex slave” in a Nov. 22 article about South Korean comfort women.
Reuters removed the term, because the wording breached the agency’s style book guidance on “comfort women.”
Founded in 1897, the Japan Times has a circulation of just 45,000.
After years of losses and the death of its previous owner, the newspaper — published under the banner “All the news without fear or favor” — was sold in 2017 to News2u, a public relations company.
It is not unusual in Japan for new management to shift a newspaper’s editorial stance and readers might miss subtle changes.
However, a few months after the sale, some long-time contributors, including Kingston, were told their regular columns were being cut.
“I got an e-mail out of the blue saying: ‘We’re terminating your column,’” Kingston said.
Mizuno said that the newspaper was open to future submissions from Kingston, but did not say why the column was canceled.
“We have retained commentary writers and columnists that are, when appropriate, critical of the Japanese government,” he said in an e-mail.
Several reporters also said that they felt more editorial pressure.
In August 2017, when a local newspaper reported that Tokyo’s governor would snub an annual memorial for Koreans killed by mobs after an earthquake in 1923, reporters rushed to cover the news.
However, the reporters said that they were particularly shocked when, in an e-mail seen by Reuters, Mizuno told staff: “I think there is absolutely no value for us to report on this.”
A few months after the newspaper’s exclusive sit-down with Abe in February last year, Mizuno tried to revise the newspaper’s style on comfort women and other sensitive topics, presenting editors with more than 100 meticulously annotated articles and columns.
In the notes, seen by Reuters, Mizuno objected to calling comfort women “victims” or mentioning that they included girls; questioned referring to Japan’s occupation of Korea as “brutal”; and criticized the newspaper’s reporting and stories by wire services, including Reuters, as generally “pro-Korea” and not adequately reflecting Japan’s view.
“We’re not historians or arbiters of history, nor are we judges,” he wrote.
Ultimately, he failed to persuade others and the matter was put on hold.
However, the South Korean court ruling in October led to a swift denunciation from the Japanese government and a flurry of coverage.
Mizuno turned to senior managers and the board of directors to make broader changes, Japan Times employees said.
At about the same time, ultra-conservative think tank the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals called on English-language media and specifically the Japan Times to refer to plaintiffs in the Seoul case as “wartime Korean workers,” leaving out references to coercion.
Two weeks later, the editor’s note appeared in the Japan Times.
Additional reporting by Hyonhee Shin
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