Impartiality Gone Haywire

At the annual convention of the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association in Sendai City, the nation's top newsmen gladdened the hearts of the geisha by spending yen as if they were sen. It was expense account money, handed out by their hard-pressed business offices with orders to spend it as conspicuously as possible. The object: to achieve the utmost face and to give the impression that Japanese newspapers were doing just great.

The face-saving in Sendai City, 190 miles north of Tokyo, was a symptom of the ills that have turned Japan's press into a flabby-muscled giant. The 186 Japanese dailies have built up a daily circulation of nearly 36 million, trail only the U.S. (58 million) and Russia (57 million), exceed the rest of Asia, Africa and South America combined. In ratio to population, the Japanese circulation approximates that of the U.S., far exceeds Russia's. Biggest Japanese daily is Tokyo's outsized Asahi, which has four regional publishing plants and a staff of more than 7,000, turns out a grand total of 109 morning editions, for a circulation of 4,500,000.*

Into the Red. The competition to reap these bustling sales has nudged most papers into the red. "Since the war ended, our costs have exceeded our revenues," admitted Association President Chikao Honda. Subscription prices are fantastically low: 84-c- will buy a month's home delivery of morning and afternoon editions. Promotion prizes are so big that they often cancel out any gain in circulation. Cried Honda: "Our excessive competition is like pulling the legs of a man who is hanging himself."

To build prestige, the papers spend lavishly on such extracurricular flings as importing the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals, financing deep-sea bathysphere explorations. To save their employees' face, publishers give out biannual bonuses amounting to some 40% of salaries, automatically move their best reporters into administrative jobs at around 35. Not only do the overstaffed papers hardly ever fire anyone, but, as a sort of national face-saving gesture, they yearly hire unnecessary help from Japan's crop of new college graduates.

With such manpower on tap, the Japanese press can turn loose hordes of newsmen, gives the cops more trouble than the rioters at demonstrations. Japanese photographers vault graves and straddle coffins to get good shots of mass funerals. A reporter once got into Premier Nobusuke Kishi's bedroom. In addition, Japanese papers use flashy modern trappings such as airplanes, walkie-talkies and monotypes that can set some 2,200 Japanese syllabaries and Chinese ideographs.

Aid for the Reds. In sharp contrast to these alert, aggressive techniques, the Japanese press has abdicated its responsibility to espouse, attack or even examine the variety of political opinions that are the stuff of democracy. It is in the grip of impartiality gone haywire. Only two of the nation's papers--the daily Communist Akahata (circ. 30,000) and the thrice-monthly Socialist Shakai Shimpo (circ. 80,000)--advance any creed. The rest of the Japanese press has only one policy: to attack the government. The rationalization is that the government is the press's traditional enemy, must be fought even though the papers are remarkably free from official restraint.

This policy plays Japan's conservative-owned papers into the hands of left-wing staffers, who have so discredited Premier Kishi that last month he made the face-losing appeal: "Is it all that bad--is there nothing good?" To many readers, Japan's industrious, irresponsible press has made it all seem that bad. Says one student: "We learn from the press that the conservatives are thinly disguised reactionaries and the socialists are weak and ineffectual. Perhaps the Communists are really the only people who have something."

*Biggest U.S. newspaper: the New York Daily News (circ. 2,014,542).

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