WATCHING AMERICA WATCH JAPAN

Up through the 1970s, before the Japanese economy came to be seen as a threat to America, the Japanese were fond of saying that Japan and the United States were “looking at each other through opposite ends of a telescope.” The Japanese viewed events across the Pacific through a powerful lens, examining the United States closely. But looking through the other end of a telescope presents a much tinier image. Japan’s impact on the American consciousness was much smaller than the country’s actual size warranted.

Fujiwara Sakuya, deputy governor of the Bank of Japan, is a former journalist who was stationed in Washington, D.C., from 1968 to 1971. In a dialogue carried in the March/April 2000 issue of Ronza he looks back on his Washington days, describing the tendency among Japanese journalists at the time to file self-tormenting reports positing Japan as the victim. These pieces, according to Fujiwara, were little more than frantic cries about America’s criticism of Japan and an excessive sounding of warning bells for the home readership. The majority of the Japanese of the time viewed the United States through press coverage like that brought up by Fujiwara—that is to say, through a powerful telescope. There was certainly no shortage of overstated articles.

This situation changed in the 1980s, as the world became aware of Japan’s rise to economic power. Since then both Japan and America have sought constantly to get the “life-size” picture, free from the distorting influence of lenses, and gain a real understanding of the other. The numbers of Japanese reporters in the United States and of their American counterparts stationed in Tokyo have risen sharply. But the truth about the two countries still does not seem to get accurately transmitted across the Pacific. The Japanese media has proven unable to shake free from the tendency toward exaggeration, and American reporting, too, has seen its share of errors.

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Charles Burress, a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, puts his finger on many of these problems in his article carried below. He got his start as a reporter in Japan, where he came as a journalist-in-training in 1980. Since the period of “Japan bashing” about 10 years ago, he has been researching the American media’s treatment of Japan. Chûô Kôron published an article of his in its December 1997 issue—“Naze yugamu Amerika no Nihon hôdô” (Why Is American Coverage of Japan Twisted?)—in which he broke prejudiced U.S. reporting on Japan into four main types: excessive use of war metaphors, describing Japan as a monolithic entity, a culturally condescending tone, and failing to relate the Japanese side to a story.* As examples of warlike language used in reportage on Japan, he notes the frequent descriptions of Japanese corporate activities in America as an “invasion” and other terminology used to paint Japan as “the enemy” and a country to be opposed.

With respect to the second manifestation of bias, describing Japan as monolithic, he notes that European companies are called by name, while Japanese firms are glossed simply as “Japan,” “the Japanese,” or “Japan Inc.” A few corporations are taken to represent the entire nation, and individual Japanese are amalgamated into a faceless mass.

Burress’s third form of bias is encapsulated in the photo caption discussed in his article below, which claims that Tokyo residents angry about the nuisance factor of the U.S. Air Force base near their homes “say they don’t get much sleep, but . . . found the energy to parade yesterday against noisy planes.” The journalist also notes a tendency to tie every story on Japanese women to the nation’s “backwardness” in the arena of sexual equality.

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The fourth form of bias, one that can be difficult to discern at times, encompasses reporting that focuses solely on one portion of a matter, leaving the position taken by Japan completely out of the picture. Underlying all four types of prejudice, states the author, are factors including latent anti-Japan sentiment on the part of an America confronted by the threat of Japanese economic prowess and the desire of the American people to affirm Japan’s inferior status and thus bolster their belief in the United States as number one.

In the second half of the 1990s, the Japan-U.S. economic conflict ebbed as Japan saw its economy stagnate. This brought about an overall decrease in American media coverage of Japan. Burress expected that Japanese interest in these journalism issues would have similarly plummeted, but a visit to Tokyo in August 1999 showed him otherwise. He was surprised at the chorus of criticism directed at the U.S. media’s treatment of Japanese stories. The essay below is the fruit of his reconsideration of the problem and his efforts to bridge the media gap between the two countries.

Burress describes a speech given by Kiyoi Mikie, a former director of the Foreign Ministry’s International Press Division. Kiyoi pulled no punches in her critique of U.S. media organs. But this sparked little in the way of rebuttal from the American journalists at her presentation, a development Burress found disappointing. He does, however, note that with respect to Japanese dissatisfaction with U.S. media coverage of their country, “many complaints are valid.”

Why, then, do the foreign media—in particular American organs—write such shoddy stories on Japan? Is there a solution to this problem? According to Burress, yes: Foreign journalists reporting on Japan should learn more about the nation’s language, history, and culture; Japanese readers should speak out more forcefully against distorted coverage; and debates should be held to focus specifically on the concerns of these two parties. He is optimistic about the idea of “prob[ing] into the psyche of the East-West encounter,” seeing there the chance to get at “some of the roots of the problem.” As he himself is quick to point out, however, “East” and “West” are by no means clearly defined entities. An extended task for both Japan and the United States will be the thrashing out of these definitions. (KONDÔ Motohiro, Professor, Nihon University)

*An English version of this article appeared in the Japan Times, August 18 and 23, 1997.–Ed.

© 2000 Japan Echo Inc.