Tofugu» Kaitlin Stainbrook

The Secret World Of Kisha Clubs And Japanese Newspapers

Kaitlin Stainbrook — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 17:00:23 +0000

Other parts of the world might be gloomily declaring that print news is circling the drain, but not in Japan, where newspapers have morning and evening editions and newspaper circulation rates are the highest in the world. (Japan’s top newspaper, the Yomiuri Shinbun has a circulation of about 10 million. Compare that to the 2 million of The Wall Street Journal and you start to get a sense of scope.)

But even though Japan is rocking the Casbah when it comes to the number of newspapers people are reading each day, there’s some serious work to be done with the reporting in those papers. According to Reporters Without Borders, Japan dropped 31 places in the World Press Freedom Index in 2013. Kind of strange for a liberal democracy, right? Welcome to the secret world of “kisha clubs.”

Kisha Clubs: What They Do And How They Do It

Photo by M M

Kisha (記者) or “reporter” clubs are exclusive groups of reporters from major Japanese newspapers, like the Yomiuri Shinbun and the Asahi Shinbun, who set up camp in government and political party offices. The clubs receive press releases from whatever agency or business they’re assigned to cover. (Usually the agency’s PR offices are right down the hall from the kisha club – so convenient!)

The reporters in the club then edit or paraphrase those press releases to publish in their respective newspapers. Besides reading and revising a whole lot of press releases, kisha clubs also organize press conferences. (The life of a kisha club member: So excite; much report.)

And if you ask the Nihon Shinbun Kyokai (Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association), there are super duper awesome reasons for keeping kisha clubs around. For one thing, they sort through gobs of boring political information, for which everyone is grateful. And although it leads to some pretty homogenous news articles – sometimes quite literally, with identical articles being printed in competing newspapers – kisha clubs receive news incredibly fast. After all, they’re in the same building as their sources.

They’re also a united front: plucky reporters against shifty politicians. Who would dare withhold political information when you have an entire kisha club staring you down? Kisha clubs run on the Wildcats principle…

We’re all in this together.

Majorly Bad Business

The problem is, well, journalism doesn’t really work that way. A journalist’s role is to hold feet to the fire, not give foot massages. (Okay, that metaphor got a little weird.) What I’m trying to say is that journalism works best when it works for the people and not for politicians. Kisha clubs, by their very nature, go against journalistic principles of working independently and maintaining an objective distance from news sources – not acting as a mouthpiece for them. And when these ideals get thrown out the window, all sorts of sketchy things start to occur.

We don’t even need to look very far for one particularly glaring example: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011. (To catch everyone up to speed: A terrible domino effect occurred in March 2011 when the Tohoku earthquake hit Japan, which triggered a tsunami, which resulted in a catastrophic failure at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, releasing all sorts of radiation into the surrounding area.)

There was not much investigative reporting following the disaster and very little transparency from the government about subsequent radiation levels, evacuees, and how this disaster could have been averted.

The company in charge of these Fukushima power plants, TEPCO, has its own kisha club, but funnily enough, those kisha club reporters never quite got around to asking the questions the Japanese public most wanted and needed to know. Independent and foreign journalists also reported on the disaster. But, because they aren’t part of any kisha clubs, they were often barred from press conferences – one of the many kisha club rules – making reporting that much harder. Those independent journalists who did make it into these press conferences were often shouted down by kisha club members if they dared to ask any off-script questions.

Blackboard Agreements

Whether it’s your 1998 kid detective club devoted to Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen (cough) or your standard, government lapdog kisha club, clubs gotta have rules. (Insert your own Fight Club joke here.)

Besides not often allowing journalists from independent and foreign newspapers to participate in press conferences (let alone join a kisha club), there are also these things called blackboard agreements. Sometimes literally written on a blackboard, these are news items and topics that the club has agreed not to report on until a specific later date. The kisha club golden rule? You don’t “scoop” your fellow club member, even if he’s from a competing newspaper. (This is completely counter to how journalism normally works, where reporting a news story first is how many news media survive.)

Following blackboard agreements means having to maintain friendly relations with your sources as well as rival journalists. As with any club, you can get kicked out for not heeding club rules. Some kisha club members do break the rules on rare occasions, because sometimes it’s totally worth it. If a story is huge enough to be worth temporary club banishment because of all the papers it would sell, a kisha club member might just break the story anyway. Of course, there are ways to have your mochi and eat it too.

Weekly Magazines

Japan’s weekly magazines provide an outlet for news stories that may be stuck in blackboard agreement purgatory. A kisha club member will sometimes sell a blackboarded scoop to a weekly magazine, occasionally even writing the magazine article himself. (Club members have been known to sell news stories to foreign presses as well.)

The problem with having your news bombshell break in a weekly magazine as opposed to a newspaper is that Japan’s weeklies aren’t the most respected game in town. Weekly magazines are usually printed on cheap paper and are a whirlwind mix of news, sports, manga, celebrity gossip and porn. Sort of like if The New Yorker and The National Enquirer had a baby.

But, in the most roundabout way ever, once a story breaks in a weekly magazine and gains enough traction, the blackboard agreement becomes null and void and everyone can cover the story in their own newspapers.

But The Internet!

Photo by Hobvias Sudoneighm

The Internet has decreased some of the power kisha clubs hold, and may yet be a game changer. Independent presses, foreign news sites and citizen journalists have all been part of a movement to provide news outlets that aren’t heavily influenced by government channels.

Independent online news sources like Days Japan and Free Press Association of Japan have started to pop up, but they’ve had some difficulty gaining traction with a Japanese public who are somewhat reluctant to trust online news media over traditional news outlets.

Photo by Masayuki Kawagishi

Unfortunately, things are probably going to get worse before they get better. In December of 2013, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe enacted a state secrets law, a move many consider a major step backwards for civil liberties in Japan. Under the new law, those who leak classified information will now face 10 years in prison and anyone found guilty of abetting a leak will get five. Kisha clubs also show no signs of going away.

But there have been some victories in all of this, too. For example, in 2001 Nagano Prefecture’s then-governor, Yasuo Tanako, abolished kisha clubs in the prefectural office. Any journalist, whether they were associated with a major newspaper or a small website, were given the same opportunities to gather information, no blackboard agreements required. And even though Yasuo Tanako has moved on from his Nagano roots, the kisha clubs he pwned haven’t come creeping back.

It’s been relatively easy up until now for kisha clubs to party down without anyone noticing. But with the continuing controversy over how the Fukushima catastrophe was reported in the news and the public outcry against Abe’s new state secrets law, the days of the kisha club may be numbered after all.

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Sources

A Short History Of Japanese Sign Language

Kaitlin Stainbrook — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 17:00:01 +0000

Signing my name in Japanese Sign Language (JSL) for the first time was not easy. Even after I figured out the five signs I needed, it took some practice to gracefully string them together. Luckily my JSL instructor was very patient with me and the rest of the students in my JSL circle as we tried to force our hands into hiragana signs. Yep, I was in Japan… learning Japanese Sign Language.

It All Begins With A Leech Baby

Deafness in Japanese history goes way back. We’re talking the Kojiki (one of Japan’s oldest Shinto texts) and Japan’s Shinto creation myth. (For the uninitiated: there’s a god and a goddess named Izanagi and Izanami who take it upon themselves to form the islands of Japan).

After Izanami and Izanagi create Japan, they figure they need to create baby-gods and goddesses who can enjoy it. The ceremony of god-making involves walking around a pillar and greeting each other. Not too complicated, right?

Well, Izanami (the lady god) greets Izanagi (the dudely god) first, which is against the ceremony rules and they end up with what the Kojiki describes as a “leech child.” I’ll just let your imagination do the work of what this kid looks like. (Here’s a hint: no bones!)

Izami and Izanagi do what any good parents would and send their leech baby off in a reed boat, never to be seen again. Then, they walk around the pillar once more and get their hellos in the right order. They go on to create a whole slew of Japanese gods, none of which look like bloodsucking worms.

But despite being the sole captain and crew of his own reed boat, Leech Baby grows up and becomes Ebisu, the Shinto god of fishermen, merchants and wealth. Not bad for such humble beginnings, eh?

Ebisu is usually portrayed as having very large ears, which don’t do him a lot of good because he’s deaf (one of the side effects of being a leech baby, I guess). But don’t worry, according to some local customs, you can always bang some pots and pans to get his attention.

Japan’s Spotty History

So you would think with Ebisu being a pretty cool god who happens to be deaf Japan would historically be a decent-ish place for Deaf people, right?

(Spoiler alert: Not so much.)

First of all, there’s not much info on being deaf in Japan. In 1862, we know that the Tokugawa Shogunate sent out some envoys to Europe to learn more about deafness by having them visit schools for the deaf. Then, sixteen years later the first Japanese school for the deaf was built in 1878 [Wikipedia].

But, just because there was a school for the deaf didn’t mean that deaf people were treated well, though. Being deaf was thought of as more of a disease or disability, so if you were deaf you weren’t thought of as the same as everyone else. In fact, we don’t even have to reach that far back in time to see some pretty less-than-stellar actions against deaf Japanese people. For example, in 1965, a deaf man was accused of murdering the owner of a sushi restaurant. The defendant, Kido Takashi, wasn’t provided with a sign interpreter during the police interrogation, had a hearing lawyer who couldn’t sign, and when an interpreter was finally allowed, the police argued the interpreter wasn’t official legal counsel. Therefore, they were able to listen in as Kido’s lawyer tried to build his defense.

Luckily for Kido, he was given an appeal and a reduced sentence, because the judge felt he was developmentally disabled. Of course, if the judge had only understood sign language, he would have been able to see Kido could understand and communicate perfectly well.

People like Kido Takashi didn’t have a whole lot of rights under Japanese law. In fact, people who were deaf and mute were considered financially incompetent in Japan and had the legal status of minors until the Japanese Federation for the Deaf (JFD) challenged those laws in 1979. Up until then, a deaf person in Japan wasn’t able to have a driver’s license, sign a contract or write a will. It certainly was not a good time to be deaf.

JFD vs D-Pro: Fight!

But things have been getting better. The JFD was formed in the 1950s to help Japanese people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing come together and foster a sense of community. But the JFD also exists to defend the rights and freedoms of deaf Japanese, like the case with Kido Takashi. JFD’s philosophy is that deaf Japanese are Japanese people who happen to be deaf. This includes people who are hard-of-hearing, deaf since birth, or who use a hearing aid or cochlear implant.

However, as with any self-respecting activism group, they do have an arch-rival: ~~Team Rocket~~ D-Pro.

D-Pro came together in the 1980s and they argue that they’re part of a different culture and use a different language than a hearing Japanese person does. In their minds, they’re deaf first and Japanese second. They also believe that a person born to deaf parents and raised using sign-language is “more deaf” than someone who becomes deaf later in life.

One of the biggest battles between them is over the definition of JSL. D-Pro insists that there’s a pure form of JSL and that it’s a completely separate language from spoken Japanese and that to be deaf is to be of a different culture entirely.

The JFD say signing is another form of spoken Japanese (which, coincidentally, helped to get JSL taught in public schools to deaf kids without invoking the wrath of the Ministry of Education). During one particular argument between the two groups, a member of the JFD accused D-Pro of “sign fascism.”

You might say there’s some serious tension there.

JSL And Japanese

Not to choose sides or anything, but as a foreigner (and a hearing person), I felt as though the style of JSL I dabbled in was distinctly Japanese. (We’re still cool, D-Pro! Don’t hurt me!).

If you want to sign “hello” in American Sign Language, you tap your fingers against your brow in a pseudo-salute. But in JSL, the sign for “hello” is holding your two pointer fingers a few inches apart and then bending them towards one another – kind of like two people bowing to each other.

When I was learning JSL, our instructor told us it was okay to make up our own signs as long as they were clear and straightforward. At one point, I was trying to brag about my mastery of the piano, but didn’t know the sign, so I pretended to play a scale on a keyboard. Turned out my off-the-cuff sign was the right one. A language where I could intuitively figure out vocabulary? Sign me up! (Pun shamelessly intended.)

Of course, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere and even the JFD has taken issue with signs being made up willy-nilly by hearing people, particularly in the ’80s and ’90s when NHK started airing two television shows that featured JSL. One was called Everyone’s Sign and the other was Sign News.

JFD had no beef with Everyone’s Sign, which taught hearing people the basics of signing. Sign News was where things got troublesome. Sign News would run the news headlines from earlier in the day and translate them into sign. The problem was sometimes there would be words in the reports for which there were no signs and the news report voice-over was so quick that finger-spelling was out of the question, so the newscasters had to invent their own signs. Then, people learning JSL or training to be interpreters would watch Sign News and later integrate the signs used on the show into their own signing. See where all this is going?

There are some other interesting cases of signs being made up as well. Some deaf college students are signing in ways that reflect the onomatopoetic styling of spoken Japanese and manga. People who speak Japanese pepper their sentences with lots of interjections like そう (sou) and ね (ne). Kind of like how in English we can’t, like, stop using the word like.

And although a whole word can be represented with a single sign, spelling things out is sometimes necessary, like if you’re telling someone your name. JSL has a whole alphabet of signs representing individual hiragana/katakana. And JSL learners have an edge over written Japanese learners – there’s no difference between hiragana and katakana in JSL! Whether you mean や(ya) or ヤ(ya), for example, the sign is always the same: holding your pinky and thumb out and touching the fingers between to your palm.

Young Japanese signers will fingerspell their conversational interjections and drag them across their body to look like the sound effects in manga frames. They might sign へへへ (heh heh heh) for a creepy laugh or さ (sa) when they’re confused. (If you want to sign your own creepy laugh, the sign for ヘ(he) is basically the sign for ヤ(ya), but with your wrist bent down.) The most interesting thing here is how the sign gets positioned as if it they were in a frame of manga. It doesn’t get any more Japanese than that.

To keep up with all this creativity, one of the JFD’s new goals became to research and create new signs for words that up until then didn’t have a counterpart in spoken Japanese. About 100 new signs are generated each year and then those signs are later incorporated into the JFD’s other projects, like their textbook series for JSL learners called Our Sign Language or わたしたちの手話 (watashitachi no shuwa) and their JSL-interpreters training program. They also hold training seminars throughout Japan specifically to encourage people to use these hot-off-the-presses signs. And all of these projects help spread the use of JSL and hopefully promote a sense of community among everyone, Deaf and hearing alike.

The JSL Future

As the number of sign language interpreters and signers increase, the better things seem to be getting for people who use JSL. In 2002 the National Training Institution of Sign Language was established. In 2006 Japan amended the “Supporting Independence of People with Disabilities Act” to encourage local governments to have more JSL interpreters.

Even the Imperial family is getting involved… well, at least one of them. Kiko, aka Princess Akishino is a student of JSL and attends various sign language events around Japan. In 2008 she even participated in the National Deaf Women’s Conference. The future of JSL is looking up and up, and although things were pretty terrible for deaf people in Japan not all that long ago, they’ve made some big recent strides to help make amends.

Whether they agree with the JFD or D-Pro or neither, I think we can all rest easy knowing that Japanese people who are Deaf are making their homeland proud.

Before you go, I want to share with you what is easily the best sign I’ve seen so far. Popular at the Tsukuba College of Technology, the sign for “pizza” involves you making a “P” sign on your knee, which is 膝 (hiza) in Japanese. Get it? P – hiza? Sounds just like Pizza.

Editor’s Note: I hope you learned a little bit about JSL! Tomorrow’s post is also about JSL, focusing more on actually learning it as well as using it to help with your regular Japanese learning. So until then, I guess it’s…

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