According to the latest survey on the time-usage of the Japanese (Kokumin Seikatsu-Jikan Chosa) done in October 1995 by NHK (Japan Governmental Broadcasting Corporation), the average Japanese watches television for three hours and twenty-eight minutes a day. This nation-wide survey has been conducted every five years, and the time spent watching TV in 1995 was longer than that of 1990 by more than thirty minutes in both weekdays and the weekend. And also it was the longest since TV broadcasting began in Japan in 1953.
The same survey reports that the average Japanese reads a newspaper for twenty one minutes a day, which is so short compared to the time spent watching TV. In addition the time spent reading newspapers has not changed so much for the past twenty five years (19 min. 1970, 20 min. 1975, 21 min. 1980, 20 min. 1985, 20 min. 1990). Another survey reports that already in 1962 more than a half of the Japanese got news information mainly not from newspaper but from television, and this trend is by far more evident than ever at present.
Thus the role of the TV in the Japanese everyday life is so big, but as we will see later we cannot always say that the social position of it is high in the social information environment of Japan. And this is also the case of other developed countries like the UK, about seventy percent of whose people got news information not from newspapers but from television in 1993.
I intend to focus here on
the media of Japan at present and the media-life of Japanese, in which
the TV is so influential and also on the characteristics of it together
with some serious problems concerning the Japanese media as a whole. When
we refer to the media at present, it includes not only TV and newspapers
but also magazines and movies, and furthermore now we can not ignore so
called multimedia supported by the electronic networks of personal computers
which guarantee people the instantaneous interactive communication on a
global scale and the information on demand. But
here it is necessary to know that more than eighty percent of those who
purchased computers in Japan are still " naive users" who do
not know how to use them effectively as a tool of communication via The
Internet2).
The medium (" media" is its plural form) in itself is not the
information but is only the channel of the information flow. However it
is important to know that the media themselves play an important part in
the process of communication and that they even regulate the information
contents and the extent to which the message is spread by their characteristics
such as the necessity of visual images for TV. This is not only true in
the sense of " Media is Message" by Canadian media scholar, Marshall
Mcluhan, in 1960s, but more important still is that the media with their
characteristics is utilized by the power elite to manipulate the information
given to the audience or the reader. Therefore when we talk, for instance,
on the age of " tele-politics", we have to grasp the big influence
of TV media keeping these media characteristics in mind and then analyze
how the audience is affected by the media.
Every society whose range of communication is bigger than that of the face-to-face
communication needs mass media, and it is vital to maintain our present
society on the global scale. In this sense the modern society in which
we live cannot exist or cannot be well managed without the mass media,
as the information we get through our personal experience is so limited.
We make socio-economic judgments everyday mostly on the basis of the information
through the media, which varies from the trivial matters of everyday living
to the matters of international politics. The media are the frame of reference
of our views on society and they play so big a role in our way of living
and thinking.
This is true not only in
the developed countries like the UK, the USA and Japan etc. but it is also
becoming a fact in the rest of the world.
=Japanese Life and the Media=
From the view point of the
media-receivers we can summarize the characteristics of the media of our
contemporary society and the information given by them as follows:
=Real-time Communication on the Global Scale=
The massmedia appeared first as the newspaper with the invention of metal printing technology supported by the social needs of 15th century Europe, and after we entered the 20th century the movie with motion pictures and radio gained popularity among the people and then the TV joined the circle as the new media of the West in the 1930s. Hitler used them as a means of controlling the nation while in the United States they were used mainly for political campaigns and entertainment.
After the end of the World War, the so-called active media age began and TV seems to have taken the place of the newspaper, the movie and the radio which had been dominant for a long time throughout the world.
This situation has continued for the past forty years or so. And now the TV and the multimedia networks supported by the satellite communication and personal computers are competing with each other in their influence on people and are often work together, which is especially true in Japan.
This TV and computer network communication is called " Telecommunication" which was made possible by the development of electronic technology, through which we can enjoy world-wide real time and interactive communication. Marshall McLuhan predicted in the beginning of 1960s that this stage of society mainly moved by such electronic communication would make the world one which he called " The Global Village"3).
But this information dissemination
on the global scale is not always ideal if we consider: (a) whether it
is being hindered by social and political conflicts or something else,
and (b) whether it is producing " information-have-not" or "
information poor" people caused by economic or other physical reasons.
Internationalization of Information
The globalization of the
media naturally brings the internationalization of information, which means
that the audience get nearly the same information throughout the world,
and naturally (a) the contents of the information become global to meet
the requests of the world-wide audience and become simple and easy to attract
a large audience and (b) the audience receive a similar influence globally
and the similar social phenomena appear on the global scale. Thus the audience
is able to access the standard globalized information while keeping their
own usual daily lives at home. This situation has been realized crossing
national borders easily, which became possible through messages, sounds
and images not only of news reporting but also of dramas, movies and music
etc., which are being promoted by oral translation, super-impositions,
computers, etc.
Individualization of Information Understanding
The internationalization of information is strengthened by the audience which is getting bigger and bigger, and is crossing national borders through the telecommunications network with higher technological innovation. Through this process people come to know that they are directly accessing global matters not through their central governments but with their own hands. And in time the audience and the readers will have a more international or transnational way of thinking than ever before. This means that it is getting more and more difficult for any nation-state or government to control media information which is easily crossing national borders. This makes people understand that their information acquisition is not mediated by their governments.
This media characteristic
recently appeared so clearly in the case of the Great Hanshin Earthquake
through the voluntary offers of help from all over the world4). And it
will be getting clearer still through the introduction of the multimedia,
especially that of The Internet.
Characteristics of The Japanese
Media at Present
The media play so important role in our society today as was shown above, but at the same time the media and journalism perhaps often deviate from their key-function: they should provide the readers and the audience with the fundamental data by which people can make appropriate judgments on important social matters.
We will have a look at the
Japanese media and check how they are set up and what they are doing for
Japanese.
A) The Media Life of The Japanese
Japanese media life centers
around TV which they watch for three hours and a half a day on average
(Re: radio-20 min., newspaper-21 min., books-10 min. by the NHK survey).
And now seventy-five percent of Japanese think that TV is indispensable
in their daily lives. But at the same time we must take a note that they
watch TV mainly because they can get up-to-date information such as news
and weather forecasting, and that in most cases they access TV for entertainment
rather than reliable social information, according to the survey done by
the Yomiuri Shimbun Newspaper in May 1996. Of course it is needless to
say that the patterns of their media access vary according to their life
styles, age groups, occupations, social strata, etc.
We can understand the characteristics of Japanese media life as follows:
The younger generation prefer TV and other media with video-images rather than printed materials like newspapers or books. In case of the printed matter, the articles must be short and they must include many colourful photos. For this reason they like to read comic magazines (Manga) like " Shonen-Jump" which, surprisingly enough, sells more than 5 million a week, and other weekly magazines for entertainment5). Their favourite TV programmes are love-dramas, sports, news-shows (not news), movies at midnight, and matters of much human interest including TV and movie star scandals.
This media access pattern
makes young people have a feeling of respect for those who appear on TV
screen. The results of the latest survey done for girls aged from 7 to
18 by Dial Service Co. on what they want to become in the future, were
as follows: the top five were a TV star, an actress, a model, a singer
and a cartoonist, and then follow a nurse, a teacher of kindergarten, a
vocal actress, a school teacher and a novelist or a writer6). Especially
popular is Namie Amuro who is a TV star, actress, model, and singer at
the same time, which is called " Namie Amuro Phenomena".
Japanese housewives usually
do the cleaning and the laundry after their husbands and children leave
for their companies and schools. After one or two hours on housework, many
of them often watch so called TV wide-shows full of information of human
interest and scandals from nine or ten o'clock to three or four o'clock
even with light lunch in front of the TV set (house-wives' TV watching
time on average: four hours and twenty five minutes a day according to
the NHK survey). And it should be noted that those wide-shows never discuss
the political matters or serious social problems.
Weekly magazines of Japan are grouped into four in contents. The first
group is for men such as " Play Boy" (Shueisha Press) which is
especially for younger generation, and " Shukan Gendai" (Kodansha
Press) and " Shukan Post" (Shogakukan Press) which are mostly
for company workers, and all of these three have several pages of coloured
photos of naked women facing the reader wih sexy smiles. This first group
is now the target of criticism from the feminism movements as the latter
two especially are even now kept as a part of the in-flight magazines of
Japan Airlines as of August 1996.
Shukan Shincho (Shinchosha Press) and Shukan Bunshun (Bungei Shunjusha Press) belong to the second group, which do not have photos of naked women. They talk on social and political matters, but their way of talking on those topics is absolutely of the one of the central government of Japan and in addition they very often mislead readers politically, which is done on purpose to give advantage to the existing power structure of Japan.
I can also say that the current attacks done by " Shukan Shincho" and " Shukan Bunshun" against the lay Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai through Nobuhira Case(1996), are motivated more by the sales potential of Gakkai-related articles, than any real journalistic impulse for the truth or the betterment of our society. Tabloid stories--in Japan we have the expression " weekly magazine story" in the same sense--that claim to expose the organization and its leaders usually amount to nothing more than collections of innuendos and half-truths from disgruntled former members, with virtualy no independent corroboration of the alleged " facts" involved.
Weekly magazines for women such as " Josei Seven" (Shogakukan Press) and " Shukan Josei" (Shufu-to-Seikatsusha Press) which belong to the third group, are just like TV wide-shows full of human interest and their major topics are star scandals and the information on Japanese Royal Family or how to get slim body.
" Friday" (Kodansha Press), " Focus" (Shinchosha Press) and " Flash" (Kobunsha Press) the fourth group and they are called " Three Fs" weekly magazines composed mostly of sensational photos with stories violating privacies and human rights.
But all those weekly magazines except comics (Manga) do not sell by the order of millions. According to Japan Audit Bureau of Circulations as of 1996 they sell between 0.4 and 0.9 million, which is by far smaller that that of the " Manga".
These four types of Japanese weekly magazines have one thing in common, which is very different from the first class weekly magazines of the UK or the USA: All of them in Japan neglect the fundamental human rights and most of their stories are composed of the privacies full of human interest. And even in case of the court report which should be carefully dealt no to be biased or partial, they tend to write on one side without their own investigation and of course without any reliable evidence.
Those weekly magazines are
divided into two in the type of publishers. The ones above mentioned are
published by the ordinary publishing company but the other one such as
" Shukan Asahi" (Asahi Shimbun Newspaper), " Shukan Yomiuri"
(Yomiuri Shimbun Newspaper) or " Sunday Mainichi" (Mainichi Shimbun
Newspaper) are published by newspaper companies and their topics are mostlly
the ones that they find difficult to write on their newpapers as they sometimes
include the privacies viloting human rights. And
in general the Japanese weekly magazines are not news magazines in the
sense of the West.
The leading figures of economic, political, and social circles do not usually watch TV for two reasons: one is that they are too busy and come home late, and the other is that they do not find any necessity to watch such entertainment oriented programmes which do not give any information for their businesses.
Ordinary company workers
watch TV at home but they like mostly entertainment programmes such as
baseball games and movies.
Nearly everyday mass media especially newspapers refer to the coming of
the multimedia age and its rosy future, and as a result of this personal
computers sell so well among company workers and the young generation in
particular, with sales reaching 5.7 million in 1995 and in 1996 it is estimated
at thirty percent more than the previous year. However, as I said before,
less than eighty percent of them are used as tools of communication. And
furthermore since the Windows95 of Microsoft Co. appeared, some ridiculously
buy only the soft-ware so as to catch up with the conversations in their
working places even though they do not have computers at home.
B) Problems the Japanese Media Face at Present
[Problems the Media Have in Common]
All the newspapers and the commercial broadcasting corporations which are news reporting organs exist as ordinary business enterprises in Japan's contemporary capitalist society and this system is causing several serious problems.
It means that the TV and
newspaper business in Japan has to depend upon the sales and the income
of advertisements, and so media enterprises are managed to meet business
logics as other businesses. This commercialism makes the Japanese media
cover news items from the viewpoints and angles of sponsors, and not from
the eyes of the readers and audience. And because of this there is no really
instructive analysis or talks or discussions on really important issues
to help people make correct judgments.
Sensationalism
Commercialism in its worse
case causes sensationalism in the news reporting of the media, which can
be easily seen in the O.J. Shimpson case of the USA, the Aum Shinrikyo
Cult and its sarin-gas case of Japan and the divorce case of Prince Charles
and Princess Diana of the UK, which were reported in nearly all the media
in a very similar form. These media phenomena cause the neglect of more
important social matters which should be reported in the programmes instead
of such cases.
Rating and Sales Competition
There is very severe competition to try to get higher ratings behind the media hoaxes on one of the NHK documentary series “Mustang, Tibet" in 1992, the speech neglecting the role of the media as a fair news organ by the Chief of the News Section of the TV Asahi Co. in 1993, and the latest TBS's video problem in 1996. But the fundamental problem behind those media hoaxes is the rating competition to attract more audience to satisfy more advertisers. This is accelerated by the fact that broadcaster can sell the time for commercials at a higher price if the related programmes have higher ratings.
The same thing can be said about newspaper. The newspaper with a bigger circulation number can sell the space for advertisements at a higher price. It is a matter for regret that this type of competition is seen not only in commercial media enterprises but also in the governmental organ NHK, which is supported by the subscription of receivers and the budget appropriated by both parliamentary Houses. In order to be popular NHK is forced to pursue the same kind of activities as the commercial broadcasters. This is one of the major reasons for the deviation of the Japanese media from the key guideline of " public interest" which means, as I understand it, that the media should provide people with the fundamental data to make their decent lives possible.
[Problems of Each Medium]
" Broadcasting"
Government Control
The Japanese laws of broadcasting and the media (Dempa-Ho and Hoso-Ho, both enacted in 1950) say that only the corporation which can get a license from the Minister for Posts and Telecommunications can make broadcasts and this license must be renewed by the Minister every five years7). The government says that this system is necessary as the resources of the radio waves are limited and that it is necessary so as to make broadcasting companies contribute themselves to the public interest. But we should not simply agree with this argument because this system makes it easy for the government to control the broadcasters, especially the contents of news information. In addition this system can lead to questionable relations between the Ministry and the broadcasting corporations, some of whose bureaucrats take parts in the companies there after their retirement (Amakudari) and become the mediators between the two.
This means that commercial
broadcasting as well as NHK affiliated to the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications,
is subject to the control of political power and the power elite.
Further this license system brings the indirect control of the central
government of Japan upon the newspaper companies, because almost all the
broadcasting companies both TV and radio in Japan are invested in by the
newspaper companies and even depend upon them in news gathering, and so
if newspaper writes against the government, it can use the system as an
indirect means of controlling.
In addirion all the nationwide commercial TV networks are connected to
newspaper companies as follows:
Nippon TV--Yomiuri Shimbun Newspaper
TV Asahi--Asahi Shimbun Newspaper
TBS--Mainichi Shimbun Newspaper
Fuji TV--Sankei Shimbun Newspaper
TV Tokyo--Nippon Keizai
Shimbun Newspaper (Nikkei)
Self-Control by the Broadcasters
Japanese broadcasting corporations
both NHK and commercial stations make programmes according to the broadcasting
standards (Bangumi Kijun) set out in the Broadcasting Law. One of the sentences
of the Standards of Commercial Broadcasting based on the Law says that
broadcasting should respect the prestige of the government and government
organizations. This means that it is difficult for broadcasters to make
programmes which might criticize government decisions.
Too Much Entertainment Oriented
As the result of the two points mentioned above, Japanese media are liable to avoid referring to political or social issues or matters which might receive complaints from the government. The easiest way for them is to compose programmes full of entertainment and topics with much human interest. The 1995 Year Book compiled by The National Association of Commercial Broadcasters in Japan (Mimporen) reports that forty-two percent of all the commercial TV programmes in Japan are classified as " entertainment", though the Broadcasting Law has four categories of programmes which should be well-balanced, (a) educatgion, (b) culture, (c) news, and (d) entertainment. Worse still, when my seminar students checked the programmes of the first week of June 1995, they found that more than sixty percent of them should be classified " entertainment".
Table III VIII show Japan's TV/Radio programmes of August 9, 1996 (Friday), which were listed in an English language newspaper, The Japan Times. If this is on Saturday or Sunday there are more entertainment programmes.
On the tables Kanto means
the Tokyo area and Kansai means the Osaka area. UHF (Ultra High Frequency)
means local TV. Both Wowow as satellite television, and cable television
are pay views. Viewers have to subscribe NHK, which is ruled by national
law.
Almighty Business Logic
Japanese commercial broadcasters have to manage their business only depending upon the sponsors. There are two types of sponsors: one who pays all the expenses to make the programme and buys the time to put it on air, and the other who asks the media to put only their commercials on air.
When a sponsor wants to make a one hour drama during prime time for instance, it has to pay at least one hundred million Japanese yen (roughly 600,000 British pounds), and one commercial of fifteen seconds put on air during a prime time programme with a rating of twenty percent, costs at least two million Japanese yen (roughly 12,500 British pounds), which means that small and medium sized enterprises cannot become TV sponsors. That is to say, the message in both TV programmes and the commercials in Japan are of huge enterprises based on the almighty business logic and naturally they tend to neglect the voice of the citizens. It is worth noting that the Japanese media usually do not report the name of big businesses when they are involved in anti-social behaviour, whereas they easily name individuals in similar cases and violate their human rights.
The fact that only big businesses can become sponsors makes it difficult for the media to refer to their products such as synthetic detergents, cars, alcohol, cosmetics, etc. from negative points of view.
The following are the twenty corporations which spend the most sponsoring the media in Japan as listed in the Dentsu Advertising Annual 1995/96.
1. Kao 2. Matsushita (Panasonic) 3. Toyota Car 4. Suntory 5. Shiseido 6. Honda 7. Asahi Beer 8. Sapporo Beer
9. NEC 10. Mitsubishi Car
11. NTT 12. Nissan Car 13.
Hitachi 14. Kirin Beer 15. Daiei 16.
Lion 19. Tokyo Electric 20. Toshiba
In addition, many other
businesses including newspaper companies invest in televison networks.
According to Japan Commercial Broadcasters Annual 1995 (Minporen Nenkan
'95), in case of TBS top five investors are Sakura Bank, Nippon Life Insurance,
Sumitomo Trust Bank, Chuo Trust Bank and Mitsui Trust Bank, and their pccupancy
is about twenty percent in total. And in case of Nippon TV top five investors
are Yomiuri Newspaper, Mr. Yosaji Kobayashi, Yomiuri TV, Nomura Shoken
Stock and Teikyo Univerisity, and their occupancy in total is about thirty
percent.
Does the TV Screen Tell the Truth?
TV has its own media characteristics. One of them is that it is fundamentally difficult to make programmes without visual pictures, which means that any story without them cannot be put on air and that the audience takes any story with vivid pictures as being true. Therefore if the audience do not watch television critically, they are liable to understand everything appearing on the TV screen as a fact and this illusion makes people forget that our society is not so small as to be explained on the scale of TV screen.
Of course the skills of
shooting and editing can cover those problems to a certain degree, but
in so many cases this kind of restriction of TV making brings media hoaxes
" Yarase" together with severe rating competition.
" Newspapers"
Favouring Big Businesses
Newspaper companies depend
for more than a half of their income upon the advertisements and they also
find it difficult to criticize big business enterprises as we have seen
in case of television. And as the result of this we often see unfairness
in reporting, such as newspapers publishing the name and even the photo
of a suspect working for a rather small company right after or sometimes
even before the police makes him or her public. But in case that the suspect
is working for a big company it usually does not name neither the suspect
nor the company, reporting instead, " a man or woman working for a
big construction company".
Press Club
Every ministry of the central government and the major local governments of Japan have a " press club" (Kisha Club) which was originally organized as a friendly gathering of reporters from newspaper and TV companies who wished to join, but now it is actually functioning as the only window for the media side to get information, and it sets up even the press meetings for briefings which are closed to non members. Because of this system it is no problem for the government side not to provide information or data to the media organs which they cannot control.
This causes unfairness and
the imbalance of information dissemination. And naturally the club members
write only favourable items for the government side and furthermore it
becomes fairly difficult for the non-members to get information or data
to criticize the government or governmental organizations even when they
discover wrongdoings.
The Influential Media Make No Critical Analysis
The circulation numbers of the Japanese daily newspapers are so big. According to Japan Audit Bureau of Circulations as of February 1996, the morning edition of the Yomiuri Shimbun Newspaper sells 10.11 million (evening edition 4.4 million) and the morning edition of the Asahi Shimbun Newspaper sells 8.38 million (evening edition 4.4 million).
There are three more nation-wide circulated newpapers in Japan: the Mainichi Shimbun Newspaper (morning edition 3.99 million, evening edition 1.9 million), the Nippon Keizai Shimbun Newspaper=Nikkei (morning edition 2.91 million, evening edition 1.63 million) and the Sankei Shimbun Newspaper (morning edition 1.93 million, evening edition 0.96 million)8).
Of course it is a good thing that the newspapers are read by so many people. But these big circulation numbers of the newspapers are also the cause of several problems.
For instance when news items are selected, the consideration not to offend or interfere with any group of readers is taken first, which means that the media do choose topics not to talk about serious social problems and they do not discuss concrete matters in critical ways, being afraid that some readers might take offense. From this comes a part of the reason why the Japanese media, especially the nation-wide newspapers, have not reported the truth about the Minamata Disease caused by the mercury emitted by a factory, or the HIV infection problem of the blood disease patients. Another example is that the media campaign to help the children who lost their parents through the traffic accidents and they often refer to the people's complaints about traffic jams, but they never criticize the marketing policies of the car industries helped by the Ministry of Transport and Tourism and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry to sell more cars to people.
The HIV problem, which was
mainly caused by the corrupt relations between high ranking officials of
the Ministry of Welfare and medical industries mediated by some doctors
who get financial aid from them, and the retired bureaucrats who took on
posts in the related companies, appeared in the major media only after
the citizens' protests succeeded in the courts and the accusers got favorable
sentences. This is also true in the reports on environmental issues, which
campaign for recycling, but never refer to the responsibility of the industries
who are producing the items and industrial wastes not friendly to nature.
And instead the Japanese media sometimes put topics such as Sumo wrestling
or baseball or tennis as the headline news of the front page.
Power Oriented Local Newspapers
Then how about the local
newspapers? In each local area of Japan at least one local newspaper has
larger sales in the particular area than any nation-wide newspaper, which
means the local newspaper has the same problems regarding to the local
government or the big businesses of the area as the nation-wide newspapers
do throughout the country. For instance in case of Kyoto, the Kyoto Shimbun
Newspaper has strong relations with the governments of Kyoto City and Kyoto
Prefecture, and it usually does not criticize the decisions made by those
two governments or rather campaigns for them. And the President of Kyocera
Corporation whose head office is located in Kyoto, is the President of
Kyoto Chamber of Commerce and one of the biggest investors for the Kyoto
Broadcasting Station Co., which means that the major local media in Kyoto
do not critically refer to the matters like the big power of Kyocera, about
which some citizens' movements complain.
[The Lack of Citizens' Access
and the Improvement of the Legal System]
Japanese broadcasting, both radio and television, are under the direct control of the central government of Japan. NHK is the special legal body affiliated to the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, and commercial broadcasting business must be licensed by the Ministry according to the Radio Wave Law (Dempa-ho, 1950) and the contents of the progammes are also restricted by the Broadcasting Law (Hoso-Ho, 1950).
All the key broadcasting corporations in Tokyo have relations in terms of both finance and personnel with nation-wide newspaper companies and the local broadcasting corporations have relations with the major newspaper company of that area or they are invested in by the big businesses of the area, so that all the newspaper companies are indirectly controlled by the central government and by big business circle through the licensing system of broadcasting (See "Almighty Business Logic").
Therefore we can see from these facts that the readers or audience find it difficult to have the right and effective channels to the media through which they can participate in the policy-making of the media system and its information in Japan. The media under such strong governmental controls do not usually cover the news items which are not favorable to the government or big businesses and therefore the first principle of media management becomes to maximize profits.
In general the Japanese media do not work as the eyes and ears of the people and do not collect the data which might help people make correct judgments. Instead they are managed on the principle of sensationalism and entertainment to get higher ratings, neglecting fundamental human rights including privacy.
It is clear from the experience of the past fascism of Japan, Germany or Italy and from the analysis of the media of the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe or of China or North Korea at present that a media owned or exclusively controlled by the national government is unsatisfactory. And it is also clear from the facts of sensational reporting, thus neglecting human rights and the issues which are central to what is going on in our society, that broadcasting corporations run only by the commercial principle are not always ideal ones. Both of the two media types do not respect or even pay attention to the basic principle of democracy: the sovereignty exists in the hands of the citizens.
In order to solve those problems or in order to improve the situation we need to make better laws and regulations as well as standards of ethics and to establish a sound system of media education, both of which show the necessity for the citizens of Japan to participate in the policy-making of information dissemination and data supplies as a whole including multimedia.
My proposal on this subject is that we need to organize a "Japan Mass Media Commission" set up by the Diet, and whose members are representatives of the citizens and scholars, and whose observers are managers of the media businesses and officers of the government who can speak but do not have a right to vote. And under this commission we need to establish a "Japan Video Center" where all the TV progammes, all the movies, CD and other forms of information made in Japan or imported to Japan for sale or for public use are collected. People can go there and check them whenever they find it necessary.
At least these two organizations
are necessary to make the Japanese media system more accountable to the
people and if we have these two organizations financed by the central government,
the Japanese media, especially TV, will have to stop putting out lousy,
useless, meaningless and sometimes even harmful information based on non-reliable
sources and data as they are doing now.
[Poor Media Studies]
Both journalism and news reporting organs should always be open to studies and discussion from outside, particularly by citizens, so as to keep themselves abreast of public opinion and also to be independent of any social power, and they should fulfill their function to convey the right and correct information to the people.
To keep this ideal condition, well-balanced cooperation between the media side and the people must be built up. One of the key elements for this is that we need to have frank media analyses and studies but many of them in Japan are so called quantitative studies which are often done with the financial assistance of the government and the media themselves, and sometimes even with the support of business corporations, or they are studies of the multimedia society from only the view point of its rosy future which is financed by the industry or is at least welcomed by the industry. Further still, the studies of the social functions of media or of journalism are getting weaker and weaker.
This trend of media studies
implies that the policy of the close cooperation between the university
and the industry is being widely respected by those of both sides as an
ideal and practical way, and it also means that the media studies of Japan
are liable to accept the media and society as they are rather than considering
how they should be changed for the better.
Social Functions of the
Media
We can roughly classify the social functions of the media into seven: 1) the correct reporting of the right information, 2) comments and explanation on the difficult issues so as to be easily understood by the people, 3) providing the citizens with a forum of discussion on the important social issues and exchanging ideas on them, 4) social education and campaigns, 5) giving healthy entertainment to people, 6) advertisements to secure good products through the society, and 7) social welfare function.
Among these seven functions the most important one is 1) the correct reporting of the right information: that is to disseminate "fair and impartial" information in the society, which sometimes needs the comments from people on the important social issues by providing people with a forum of discussion on them so that they can make the right judgment on socially important news items. But the Japanese media very often sacrifice these essential aspects of their social functions on purpose and pay more attention to the role of advertising and giving entertainment only or non-political information to the people from very emotional and sensational angles, which of course comes from the socio-economie reasons mentioned before.
Japanese society puts very
high value on the spirit of togetherness or conformity (Wa) as a social
management principle and so as to keep this spirit in every corner of society
the media, too, do not want to cover controversial social issues. This
attitude is strengthened by their fear of being attacked for being "biased"
or "partial" from the government side as we have seen before.
This structure of the information environment together with commercialism
are often seen in the Japanese media especially in the major media of both
newspapers and broadcasting, which works effectively to maintain the existing
power structure of Japan.
Conclusion: Ethics of Society
and the Logics of the Media
The media of Japan and those
of the UK and the USA have so many common problems and difficulties. In
order to overcome and recover from the present pathological situation I
am now proposing to take a "Positive Principle of Fairness and Impartiality"
as the way of covering the dissemination of information by the media.
One of the most difficult things for the discussion of the media in general
is that people who watch TV and read newspaper a lot, but who are not familiar
with what is going on inside the media, are likely to believe that the
efforts by journalists or workers in the media business can correct most
of these problems. Actually the conflict between the principle of commercialism
and the that of journalism, together with the intention of the government
or the power elite to control the media to their own advantage is the main
cause of the media problems in Japan. The naive majority are given through
the media so many examples of media hoaxes and their corruptions, and are
liable to consider it natural for the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications
to control the media for the "public interest" of the whole society.
Bureaucrats prepare logical reasoning for the members of both Houses to
call the media people to the Diet, and question and tease them on their
misdemeanors in broadcasting, using the clauses of the House Testimony
Law (Giin-Shogen-Ho). Thus the public opinion critical of the media gets
stronger and stronger as media hoaxes are very often reported in other
media. And worse, the people think that they themselves are qualified media
critics who can improve the situation.
I fear the rapid increase of governmental control over the media and am afraid that the voice of the people saying that it is dangerous, is not being heard. This is a menace to the democratic management of our society, which can be maintained and supported only by the existence of a healthy media and journalism independent of the state and other powers against citizens.
"The Positive Principle of Fairness and Imparticiality" I am proposing to radically improve the media, requests the media and media related people to stand strongly against social evils and to cover any topic, even if it might not be favoured by the power elite, devoting themselves as news reporting organs for the betterment of our society. Here the media try to make our society better respecting the principle of equality of each individual and his or her human rights. This principle would never permit reports such as, "There Were No Gas Chambers at Auschwitz" which has really appeared in a major Japanese magazine Marco Polo, in the February 1995 issue. Of course it was criticised by many people throughout the world, especially by the Jewish organizations of the USA, and finally the publisher Bungei-Shunju decided to discontinue the magazine. But the important matter to be remembered here is that the publisher first contended that to say "There Were No Gas Chambers at Auschwits" is the freedom of speech and that if the argument was not accepted they would give the space in the magazine to those who disagreed.
Journalism and the media
both have to understand that if the facts of who made the gas, who carried
the gas to Auschwitz, who opened the cans of the gas and who were killed
by them are historically clear and academically proved, it is not the freedom
of speech to say that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. But it is
important for us to note that this way of behaving is still seen in the
many media at present, which is being managed by business logic, for political
reasons, and by the apathy or the ignorance of the workers in the media
who are usually but mistakenly called "journalists".
"Fairness", in my understanding, is "the social system and
the attitude of the people and for the people who compose the society,
which enable the people to help each other and to prepare the social conditions
where anybody can fully develop the talent and ability of his or her own
on the basis of the equality of individual human rights."
Media's "impartiality" could be realized by working on the basis of the principle of "fairness" above mentioned. This is not only the approach of conventional media analysis referring to the right to know of the citizens, or the duty of the media to let the public know what is going on in the society, but also it is supported by the conviction that the media should function to make our society better.
Without the positive discussion
of what type of society we want to live in, "The Positive Principle
of Fairness and Impartiality" cannot be realized, nor can the notion
of it be understood. But at the same time it is an easy and simple concept
for anybody to understand if he or she wants to belong to citizens' side.
And such "positively fair and impartial"
media logic and social ethics necessary to establish a civic society with
the citizens' sovereignty, will not change at least for the time being
and possibly in the fairly long future to come, even if the distinction
between broadcasting and communication gets vague and even if the multimedia
networks of telecommunication supported by the computers prevail throughout
the world.
Notes
1) This paper was originally prepared for MA in Japanese Studies (by Distance Learning) organized by School of East Asian Studies, The University of Sheffield, the UK. This MA course as a whole is named "Perspectives on Contemporary Japanese Society" and my paper entitled "Japan's Media at Present" is the introduction to the controversial analysis of the Japanese media. When I visited the University of Sheffield to give a lecture on the Japanese Media and Society by the arrangement of British Council in March 1996, I was asked to write this paper for the course. Then I thought that it would not be so difficult to prepare for it because I know what is happening in this field of academic studies, but when I actually began to prepare for it, I found that there were very few writings in English on this subject so far, which gives a general ideas on the media of Japan at present. Now I can say that my paper might be called one of the first papers which generally introduces about what is going on in the Japanese media and about the problems they face as news reporting organs.
2) There does not exist a reliable survey on how many computers are used for communication, but it was estimated at between 1.7 million and 2 million by computer magazines in the biginning of 1996. According to Nikkei Newspaper (Morning Edition, August 23, 1996), about two million use The Internet and 3.5 million are members of computer communication service companies in Japan. Of course this computer communication like The Internet has benefits such as for the handicapped people. According to the international satellite edition of The Nikkei, August 24th, 1996, six out of 533 surveyed handicapped people use the Internet for the reason that they can get necessary information even without going out.
3) McLuhan's idea was later published in his last publication "Global Village" in 1976 with his co-author Bruce R. Powers. Now it is available as an Oxford University Press paperback edition. I myself agree with his idea of the global village on a basic level but I do not agree with him on the point that he puts the power of media and their characteristics before the socio-economic power strategy.
4) I edited and translated a book on the voluntary work by the employees of Japan Telecommunications Workers Union after the Great Hanshin Earthquake, together with Doshisha students from five countries. This book can be ordered at every corner of the world as "THE KOBE EARTHQUAKE: OUR RESPONSE; Shinkigensha Press, Tokyo, 1996 (ISBN4-88317-269-4 ).
5) According to the moring edition of The Yomiuri Shimbun Newspaper, August 14th, 1996, the weekly comic magazine Shonen Jump sells 5.8 million and Shonen Magazine sells 4 million. And forty percent of the publications of Japan is of those comic magasines and books. The readers of those Manga are not only boys and girls but company workers in their 40s and the young generation in their 20s including university students. In this sense there already exists so called Manga culture in Japan which is symbolized by the opening of Manga museums like Hasegawa Museum of "Sazae-san" (1985) and "Tezuka Osamu Memorial Museum" (1994). And also more than ten local govenments of Japan like Ueda City of Nagano Prefecture and Omiya City of Saitama Prefecture plan to establish Manga related museums as the new industry to attract the young generation and promote tourism.
6) Asahi Shimbun Newspaper, Evening Edition, August 14, 1996.
7) This was first by every three years, but it is by every five years now. According to Nippon Minkan Hoso Renmei (The National Association of Commercial Broadcasters in Japan) there are 88 TV stations, 62 radio stations and 36 TV/radio stations in Japan and the Association has 186 members in total in 1996.
8) According to Nihon Shinbun
Kyokai (The Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association) there are
112 newspaper companies in Japan and the Association has 164 members including
some TV companies and publishers of periodicals (as of June 1996).
References
Foreign Press Center Japan, 1994: Japan's Mass Media The Third Edition, Tokyo.
The Japanese Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association, 1995: The Japanese Press, Nihon Shinbun Kyokai
Karel, Wolferen, 1989: The
Enigma of Japanese Power. (Macmilan)
#The following four are written in Japanese, which I myself wrote or edited.
Watanabe, Takesato, 1987: The Paradigm for the Civic Society, Shimin-Bunkasha Press. (Shimin-Shakai no Paradigm)
Oka, Mitsuo and others ed., 1993: Media Studies at Present, Sekai-Shisosha Press. (Media Gaku no Genzai) This book refers to the references of media studies of Japan.
Watanabe, Takesato, 1995: TV and Its Media Hoaxes, Sanseido Press. (TV-Yarase to Joho-Sosa)
Watanabe, Takesato, 1995: Sociology of Media Tricks, Sekai-Shisosha Press. (Media Tricks no Shakaigaku)
There are not many reliable
books referring to mass media of Japan in general, and in addition those
who are registered in this MA class of The University of Sheffied, understand
Japanese fairly well, and so I took only my books for the references here.
About the author: Professor Takesato Watanabe got MA in Journalism at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan in 1969 and is currently teaching Journalism and Mass Communication at Doshisha University. He is also the organizer of Doshisha Society for Journalism and Media Studies.
Doshisha Social Science Review, No.55, published in September 1996