Raw Japan

Oops, that was a secret?

It seems to have been an honest mistake for a new minister and Japan’s new government.

“I didn’t know about that (the release time). I’m sorry. Don’t make much of a fuss” Japanese Trade Minister Masayuki Naoshima told a TV reporter on Monday, right after he accidentally revealed the GDP figures ahead of their official release.

The minister looked sincerely surprised when informed of the official release time, but the light tone of his comments suggested that he did not fully understand the gravity of the error. 

He later offered a more formal apology, and Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano reprimanded Naoshima for his leak of the market-sensitive data, which showed Japan’s economy grew much more than expected in the third quarter.

Still, I was surprised to see Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama smiling when asked about Naoshima’s mistake.

“I can understand his wanting to spread the good news to the public,” Hatoyama told reporters.  “But the rule should be maintained. If you say he was careless, he surely was, and in that sense, it was regrettable.”

Naoshima made the blunder in a speech to the oil industry, but the small crowd of domestic reporters covering his event did not report it, and in that sense, the new minister was lucky.

Police, media get their suspect

Japan’s police can finally tear down the wanted posters for Tetsuya Ichihashi, after two-and-a-half years spent chasing down the 30-year-old suspected in the death of Briton Lindsay Hawker, whose body was found buried in a bath filled with sand.

Ichihashi is in custody, but Japan’s media are far from finished with the case, which has dominated news reports and daytime chat shows since police discovered recently he had changed his appearance with plastic surgery.

Video footage showed shouting police struggling through crowds of photographers to put Ichihashi on a train to Tokyo from Osaka, where he had been spotted waiting for a ferry to the southern island of Okinawa.

Media had already been hunting down details of Ichihashi’s life on the run, during which he concealed himself so effectively that many had speculated he must be dead. A TV Asahi news programme showed the tiny dormitory room where he had lived for 14 months while working as a building labourer, interviewing a colleague who noted that he focused on saving money and spent all his free time holed up in his room, we may well find out soon.

TV reporters chased down Ichihashi’s parents, who denied that they had provided any form of support for their son since Hawker, an English teacher, was found dead in the bathtub on his balcony.

It remains unclear how Ichihashi funded the remainder of his time on the run, including the extensive plastic surgery that rendered him unrecognisable for a while. But with the Japanese media’s reputation for tracking down clues, sometimes before the police, we will likely find out soon.

Cracks at Japan’s press clubs

Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada got a rapturous round of applause and a gift of a T-shirt when he made a speech at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Tokyo a few days ago. The reason had nothing to do with his diplomatic skills.

Reporters were simply grateful for his decision to open up his twice-weekly news conferences to journalists, including foreigners, who are not part of Japan’s rigid system of kisha, or press, clubs.

Access to news conferences and briefings at Japanese government ministries has long been at least partly restricted to members of the press clubs, which in general means the country’s mainstream media — not freelancers or foreigners.

Member reporters from the top newspapers and television networks have their own desks within the ministries they cover, including at the Imperial Household Agency, and pay a nominal fee for the privilege.

Not surprisingly, the Japanese media  tend to defend the press clubs, saying they have enabled the mass media to combine forces and push the sometimes secretive bureaucracy to reveal more information. 

But the novice Democratic Party government has begun to chip away at the system, which has been criticised for creating too cosy a relationship between reporters and those they write about. Several ministries have improved access for non-members.

The move has been welcomed enthusiastically by foreign journalists. But some reporters say opening up news conferences to non-press club members or even abolishing the clubs altogether, as one provincial governor did in his corner of Japan several years ago, will make little difference in the long run.

It’s only been a week

Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama stepped onto the world stage last week, just days after formally being voted into his post. After his party’s decade in the obscurity of opposition, the sometimes dour academic seemed exhilarated by the whirlwind of top-level meetings at the United Nations in New York and the Group of 20 in Pittsburgh.   Some other party officials along on the trip appeared a little lost. “We’ve only been doing this a week,” followed by an embarrassed chuckle, was the answer to some of the more probing questions put by the Japanese press corps flying with the prime minister.   Hatoyama’s Democratic Party has made much of its determination to do things differently from the long-ruling Liberal Democrats, including how they treat the media.   Signs of change appeared almost immediately his official plane took off from Haneda airport bound for New York, when Hatoyama made an appearance among the journalists at the rear of the plane. That’s a rarity in itself in status-conscious Japan, but he caused even more of a stir by bringing along his wife, former musical star Miyuki, who handed out boxes of cakes for reporters to share.   Buns aside, the biggest sign of change was the regular briefings during the trip, which were given by a politician, rather than a bureaucrat. Some sessions turned into a bizarre game of Chinese whispers, with the briefer passing on information passed on by a bureaucrat present at the meeting.   But Hatoyama himself seemed eager to talk to reporters in person. After a detailed run-down of his first meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama left one interviewer speechless, he caught himself in mid-flow with: “Oh, did I go on too long?”He also chatted freely with reporters off the record.   Less of a joker than popular former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, who initially attracted popstar-like adulation, Hatoyama could yet win fans in the press with sheer enthusiasm.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Brian Snyder

3D images you can touch

In Sci-Fi films, there’s one thing you never see people use: a mouse and keyboard. In our 21st century world, technology is supposed to have advanced to where all you need to do is talk to a computer for it to respond.

Well, reality may now be catching up with fantasy as a Tokyo University research team takes the first step towards redefining how we interact with electronic machines.

Taking a page from Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report”, they’ve made 3D holograms that you not only can see, but touch.

Three-dimensional images are nothing new, as anyone who has a credit card will likely have a hologram on the card to prevent forgery, but they’ve been no more than optical tricks up to this point.

“Up until now, holography has been for the eyes only, and if you tried to touch it, your hand would go right through, but now we have a technology that adds the sensation of touch,” Hiroyuki Shinoda, a professor at Tokyo University and one of the developers of the technology, explained when asked about the invention.

An emitter that delivers localised pressure on a surface matched to where the hologram is projected tricks the brain into thinking the pressure comes from the object that appears to be there.

Dodging reporters?

When a prime minister is in trouble, especially before an important general election, it is never wise to upset reporters.

But that seems to be exactly what unpopular Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso did when he departed for a G8 summit in the central Italian city of L’Aquila this week.

When I was heading to the airport to board a charter flight for the Japanese delegation and accompanying media on Monday, I got a last-minute call from a foreign ministry official who told me Aso’s office had decided not to hold a special briefing during the summit to discuss domestic issues.

Japanese prime ministers usually hold a briefing, called naiseikon in Japanese, when they travel overseas, granting access to only a small group of accompanying reporters. 

Sometimes prime ministers cannot hold one if the trip is very short, but it is rare to cancel the briefing during a summit of leaders from the Group of Eight (G8) industrial nations. Speculation is swirling over whether the struggling prime minister will soon call an election, which has to be held by October, or be ousted by his party before the poll.

Many media outlets had reported that Aso, whose support rates have fallen close to 20 percent amid doubts about his leadership capabilities, may call an election or at least give a hint about the election timing during such a briefing in Italy.

News that there would be no special briefing spread quickly and some newspapers took it as a sign that Aso would delay a decision on the election timing.

Japan’s Tiger in the tank?

What goes up must at some point come down.

The world of sports is full of examples of bright lights who shone briefly before crashing back down to earth.

Tennis burnout used to grind teenage sensations into the dust with alarming regularity, with even all-time greats such as Bjorn Borg stressed into premature retirement, albeit the Swede was 26 when he made his shock decision to quit.

Every sport has them, prodigious talents who flew too close to the sun, destroying their chances of joining the pantheon of mega-greats.

Japanese sports fans are hoping teenage golfer Ryo Ishikawa does not join the growing list, just two months after making his major debut at April’s U.S. Masters.

The 17-year-old has struggled since his fame has soared beyond the confines of Japan, while his face continues to be splashed across commercials for everything from chocolate bars to language schools and celebrities trip over themselves to be photographed next to the Boy Wonder with the ultra-bright smile.

The memory test for Japanese media

A furore over anonymous comments by a senior Japanese bureaucrat that landed him in the middle of a political funding scandal has highlighted an unusual practice in Japan of “no memo” briefings, where journalists can listen but are forbidden to take notes.

“Off-record” briefings are common in Western journalism. These conversations between reporters and contacts will never see the light of day but can be used by sources to get their points across and some would say spin the story.

“Background” briefings, in which comments can be quoted and attributed to a “senior official” or some such but without a specific name or title, are also well-known in many countries.

But the “no memo” briefing appears to be a uniquely Japanese twist — a chat from which comments can be quoted anonymously but where reporters are forbidden to record the briefing or even take notes by hand.

That means any article must be based on their memory of the discussion.

The affair of the “no memo” briefing began when Japanese media quoted an unidentified senior government official about the probe into illegal corporate donations.

The source said the scandal, which could cost the opposition leader his job just months before an election his party was on course to win,  would not spill over into the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.