The Magazine of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan

March 2021 · Volume 53 · No. 3

AFTER THE TSUNAMI

Koizumi, Kan, Karen Hill Anton,
and Tadaaki Shimizu

Your March FCCJ kicks off with former prime ministers Junichiro Koizumi and Naoto Kan marking the 10th
Anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. On March 17, Karen Hill Anton discusses her memoir in an
evening Book Break with a delicious dinner and drinks, courtesy of our new Iron Chef, Tadaaki Shimizu.
Your FCCJ has never been a better place to eat and enjoy high profile press conferences, Book Breaks, andSaturday Night Live. Every week of every month, your Club serves up topical presentations from politicians,
writers, and cutting-edge specialists in and on the news of the day.
The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan. Home from home for the intelligent and hungry. Come join us soon.

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THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS’ CLUB OF JAPANMarunouchi Nijubashi Building 5F, Marunouchi 3-2-3 Chiyoda-ku Tokyo 100-0005, Japanwww.fccj.or.jp E-mail: front@fccj.or.jp Tel: +81-3-3211-3161 Fax: +81-3-3211-3168

03 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

In this issue
March 2021 · Volume 53 · No. 3
Contact the Editors
no.1shimbun@fccj.or.jp
Publisher FCCJ
Editor Justin McCurry
Designer Julio Shiiki
Editorial Assistant Naomichi Iwamura
Photo coordination Hiroko Moriwaki, Norio Muroi
Publications Committee
Justin McCurry (Chair), Peter O'Connor, Suvendrini
Kakuchi,Monzurul Huq, Robert Whiting, David McNeill
FC C J B OA R D O F D I R EC TO R S
President Isabel Reynolds, Bloomberg L.P.
Special Advisor to the President
Monzurul Huq, Prothom Alo, Dhaka
1st Vice President Andy Sharp, Nikkei Asian Review
2nd Vice President Walter Sim, Straits Times
Treasurer Mehdi Bassiri, O.B.M. Co., Ltd
Secretary Ilgin Yorulmaz,
Freelance/BBC World Service Turkish
Directors-at-LargePeter O’Connor, Freelance
Simon Farrell, Custom Media K.K.
Mary Corbett, Cresner Media
Daniel J. Sloan, Freelance/Nissan Motor
Kanji Gregory Clark, Freelance
Associate Kanji Vicki L. Beyer, Freelance
Ex-officio Khaldon Azhari, PanOrient News
Regular Reserve Director: Pio d'Emilia, SKY TG 24
FC C J C O M M I T T E E C H A I R SDiversity Co-Chair and Board, Liaison: Ilgin Yorulmaz
Co-Chair and Board Liaison: Walter Sim
Publications Chair: Justin McCurry,
Board Liaison: Peter O’Connor
Website Chair and Board Liaison: Simon Farrell
Associate Members’ Liaison Chair: TBA
Board Liaison: TBA
Entertainment Chair: Sandra Mori,
Board Liaison: Walter Sim
Exhibition Chair: Bruce Osborn,
Board Liaison: Peter O'Connor
Film Chair: Karen Severns, Board Liaison: Dan Sloan
Finance Chair and Board Liaison: Mehdi Bassiri
Food & Beverage Co-Chair: Robert Kirschenbaum,
Co-Chair: Pio d'Emilia, Board Liaison: Mary Corbett
Freedom of Press Co-Chair: Justin McCurry,
Co-Chair: Simon Denyer, Board Liaison: Ilgin Yorulmaz
House & Property Chair and Board Liaison: Andy Sharp
Human Resources Chair and Board Liaison: Walter Sim
Information Technology Chair: TBA
Board Liaison: TBA
LAW Co-Chair: Koichi Ishiyama,
Co-Chair: Suvendrini Kakuchi
Board Liaison: Peter O’Connor
Public Relations (incorporating Marketing
Membership)
Chair and Board Liaison: Simon Farrell
Membership Co-Chair: Andrew Horvat
Co-Chair: Monzurul Huq, Board Liaison: Peter O'Connor
Professional Activities Co-Chair: Tetsu Jimbo
Co-Chair: David McNeill, Board Liaison: Andy Sharp
Special Projects Chair: Haruko Watanabe,
Board Liaison: TBA
DeRoy Memorial Scholarship Co-Chair: Abby Leonard
Co-Chair: Kazu Takada, Board Liaison: Ilgin Yorulmaz
Compliance Chair: Kunio Hamada, Board Liaison: TBA
Election Chair: Reed Stevenson

JUSTIN McCURRYT

en years ago this month, Japan was shaken by the strongest earthquake in its recorded history. The resulting tsunami killed more than
18,000 people and triggered the world’s worst nuclear crisis since
Chernobyl a quarter of a century earlier. For those of us who were in
Japan at the time, the triple disaster was the single most important – and themost challenging – domestic story we had ever covered. To mark the anniversary, Jonathan Watts, then the Guardian’s East Asia editor, recalls the fear and hope
he encountered amid the 3.11 tragedy, and Chie Matsumoto, fixer extraordinaire,recounts her experiences making sense of the chaos for a stream of visiting writers and broadcasters.
For foreign correspondents in Japan, the troubled preparations for the Tokyo
2020 Olympics have also generated acres of copy. But few of us could have anticipated the uproar created by an Asahi Shimbun account of a meeting of the Japan
Olympic Committee. Karyn Nishimura, in her first piece for the magazine, looks backat how the foreign and Japanese media covered the events that led to the downfallof Yoshiro Mori as president of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics organizing committee.
After the New Yorker was hoodwinked while researching an article about Japanese rent-a-families, regular contributor David McNeill looks at the pitfalls of feeding
foreign news organizations’ huge appetite for the more unusual side of life in Japan.
I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to this issue, and encourage you
all to pitch stories - after all, this is your magazine. Please feel free to contact me
at no.1shimbun@fccj.or.jp. I look forward to hearing from you.

THE FRONT PAGE
04 From the President
Isabel Reynolds

COVER STORY
05 Into the unknown
Jonathan Watts

09 A fixer’s story
Chie Matsumoto

FE AT URES
11 Seen … and finally heard
Karyn Nishimura

13 Down the garden path
David McNeill

16 Under the influence
Fred Varcoe

CLUB NEWS19 Lunch with Shakespeare
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan
Marunouchi Nijubashi Building 5F
Marunouchi 3-2-3 Chiyoda-ku Tokyo 100-0005
Tel: (03) 3211-3161 Fax: (03) 3211-3168 fccj.or.jp
Published by the FCCJ All opinions contained within
Number 1 Shimbun are those of the authors.
As such, these opinions do not constitute an official
position of Number 1 Shimbun, the editor or theForeign Correspondent’ Club of Japan.
Please pitch and send articles and photographs, oraddress comments to no.1shimbun@fccj.or.jp
Read the Number 1 Shimbun online:

www.fccj.or.jp/number-1-shimbun.html

Haruko Watanabe

22 New members, Join the Film Committee,
New in the library, Regular by eggs
EXHIBITION

24 An Oath with Tomodachi
Cover: The tsunami-hit town of Ishinomaki, taken from Hiyoriyama Park on March 20, 2011.
Photo by Kazuma Obara (kazumaobara.com)

INDEX04 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

THE FRONT PAGE

From the President
Dear Members,

A©FCCJ / JULIO SHIIKI

s I write, I’ve just finished watching aBook Break with the award-winning
writer Yu Miri, whose commitment
to working with the survivors of the2011 Fukushima disaster led her to take up residence in Minamisoma, just up the coast fromthe Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Whilemaintaining a literary career that brought her
the National Book Award for translated literature last year, Yu now runs a bookshop and acommunity theater, in the hope that access tothe arts can help plant the seeds of recovery for
a community still devastated by the events ofa decade ago. Her courage and resilience certainly put my own challenges into perspective.
Many of our press conferences this month
are related to the triple disaster on Japan’s
northeast coast and its myriad after-effects,
as we remember the more than 18,000 people
who died and the tens of thousands still evacuated from their homes. We’ll have two former
prime ministers – Junichiro Koizumi and Naoto Kan – in a rare joint appearance for former
political rivals brought together by their shareddetermination to rid Japan of nuclear power, anidea for which the government has expressed
little enthusiasm. We’ll also be hearing fromthe governor of Fukushima prefecture on how
the reconstruction process is faring, as well asfrom Kiyoshi Kurokawa, who led parliament’s
investigation into the handling of the disasterat Fukushima Daiichi.
Speaking of investigations, this seems likea good moment to remind you to make yournominations for the Freedom of the Press
Award. All Club members, regardless of category, are eligible to nominate journalists
or media outlets for this year’s awards: one
for Japan coverage and one for work in the
Asia-Pacific region.
Closer to home, we’re looking forward to
the end of the state of emergency in Tokyo,
which may come on March 7 as the numberof new virus cases falls in the capital, albeit alittle more slowly than we had hoped. It’s not
yet clear what that will mean for our bar andrestaurant hours, so please keep an eye out for
further announcements. Please note that therequirement to wear a mask in the Club, except
while eating or drinking, will remain in place
regardless of the emergency.
You will have noticed the survey recently
sent out to members by our Japan Market
Expansion Competition team. I hope mostmembers took part and I’m looking forward toseeing the results, which will help us map out
our plans for the future. But there are regular
opportunities to make your voice heard andto learn about what’s going on at the Club.
The General Meeting is coming up on March
22, at which we ask members to approve ourfinancial report and budget. Please mark yourdiaries and be sure to attend, whether online orin person – this is your Club and it can’t function
without your participation.

● Isabel Reynolds has been reporting for
Bloomberg in Tokyo since 2012. She has lived inJapan for more than 20 years and been a Regular
Member of the FCCJ for most of that time.

INDEX05 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

AFTER THE TSUNAMI

INTO
THE

JONATHAN WATTS

UNKNOWN

THE GUARDIAN’S THEN EAST ASIA CORRESPONDENT RECALLS FEAR,GRIEF AND HOPE AMID THE RUINS OF THE TRIPLE DISASTERJONATHAN WATTS

M

Top image:
Jonathan Watts
in Ishinomaki in
March 2011

ujō. If there is one word that I carrywith me from my years in Japan,
it may well be this Buddhist concept, conveying impermanenceor transience. I first came across it in Japanese
literature classes at university, where it struck achord, reminding me of Shelley’s poem, Mutability. I celebrated it every hanami season, alongwith the throngs revelling in the short-lived
beauty of the cherry blossoms. I worried about
it whenever I felt the FCCJ building in Yurakucho sway in the wake of an earthquake. But
it was only after March 11, 2011, that I did not justunderstand the meaning of mujo. I felt it. I wasenveloped by it.
The magnitude-9 earthquake, tsunami andnuclear meltdown that struck Tohoku that day
and eventually took more than 18,000 lives wasa disaster of epic proportions. But it was not
the scale that made the biggest impression. As
the Guardian’s East Asia correspondent, I had
already covered the Indian Ocean tsunami thatkilled 227,000, and the Sichuan Earthquake, inwhich 68,000 died. But catastrophes are far
more than a matter of death tolls. On a personalrather than journalistic level, what really struck
me was the emotional proximity of Tohoku.
I was living in Beijing at the time, but had spent
most of my adult life in Japan. My wife was Japanese, my half-Japanese daughters had spent
their early years in Tokyo. This disaster felt disturbingly close to home.
I first heard the news when I touched downin Beijing airport on an afternoon flight from
Hong Kong, As soon as I switched on my phone,
it pinged with a swarm of new messages about
the earthquake and tsunami. The most urgent
was from my foreign editor: “Don’t bother goinghome. Get on the next flight to Japan.” I called
my wife and asked her to bring clean underwear,
money, a battery charger and other equipment
I might need in a disaster area. The Guardian
photographer Dan Chung joined me and I set
about trying to plot a route to Tohoku. It was theINDEX06 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

JONATHAN WATTS

AFTER THE TSUNAMI

The Statue of Liberty
in Ishinomaki

usual journalistic challenge: how to get into anarea that everybody else is trying to leave.
This was no simple task. My flight wouldn’t
get into Tokyo until close to midnight. Manyflights to airports in the Tohoku region had
been cancelled, roads had been blocked andtrain services disrupted. I could not hire a rental
car because my Japanese license had expired.
There was only one thing to do: beg for help.
I posted an appeal on Twitter, asking if anyone was willing to drive me to the area. I didn’t
expect a positive response and had begun toplan for an overnight stay in the capital and a
new effort in the morning. But to my surpriseand delight, an assiduous blogger who wentby the handle @NoFrills, had taken my cause as
her mission. Even though we had never met, she
spread the word far and wide, eventually finding
me a guardian angel in the unlikely shape of areporter for Playboy magazine, Kiyomu Tomita.
I could not have been more fortunate. Tomita-san was an indomitable travelling companion, a superb journalist and a thoroughly
decent human being. Even before my call-out,he had been preparing to head north, mappingout a route around known road closures, andfilling the tank in his car, along with two spare
gasoline containers, in the expectation that
petrol station supplies would be disrupted. He
had even arranged a half-way stop at a friend’s
house to collect extra supplies. In a small car, it
was a tight squeeze with him, us and so muchluggage and equipment that Dan and I had
suitcases on our laps. We drove through thenight, listening to the NHK news on the radio
and stopping frequently when the broadcast
was interrupted by a warning of an imminent

aftershock. Dawn broke just before we reachedSendai and began reporting.
There is no need to describe the scenes there
and - over the following days – in Ishinomaki,
Kamaishi, Kesennuma, Rikuzentakata, Minamisanriku, Fukushima, Otsuchi, and Onagawa.
Everyone has seen what happened. The imagesof destruction saturated TV news programmes
and social media websites at the time and longafter. Ten years on, it may be more interesting
to describe what didn’t go into those reports - atleast not directly. In particular, how it felt to witness this not just as a journalist but as a human.
As well as horror, unease and sympathy, themost surprising sensation was of wrongness.
Even more than in Phuket and Sichuan, theworld seemed upside down and inside out. Giantships were stranded in car parks, cars bobbed
about in harbour waters, houses floated free of
their foundations, buses were rammed into thefourth-floor of apartment blocks and children’s
toys lay scattered among the ruins. Nothing was
where it should be. This was all the more disorientating because the setting was otherwise sofamiliar. After a while I realised this "wrongness"
was in my mind. This was simply an alternative
way for things to be. It may not seem right or
normal to humans, but it was real.
At first sight, all disaster areas are thesame – rubble, twisted steel, shattered glass, intimacies exposed to the public, mega-ambitions
reduced to ashes, and a stench of death that islittle affected by geography or race. But there
are also infinitely different patterns and stories
from place to place and from person to person.
It quickly became clear that demographics werean important factor. Many of the victims were
elderly and too frail to escape quickly when thetsunami warning sirens sounded. This was far
more evident in the countryside of ageing Japan
than it had been at the beach resorts of Thailandor the cities of Sichuan. Survivors told harrowing
stories of being trapped in flooded buildings or
torn from the arms of loved ones. Parents pinned
up missing-children signs on noticeboards inshelters. Fishermen recounted in awe how thetsunami had ripped through massive coastal
defences. Emergency teams winched an injured
man from the rubble of an office block. Firefighters fought blazes that had burned throughthe night. One local mayor said shelters were
overcrowded and the authorities did not haveenough manpower to bury the dead. There wereINDEX07 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

JUSTIN MCCURRYJONATHAN WATTS

AFTER THE TSUNAMI

Top: Cars swept away by
the tsunami in Otsuchi;bottom: The Asia
Symphony freighter after
it rammed into a seawall
in Kamaishi

so many powerful stories, it was impossible to do
justice to them all. But I didn’t feel helpless. Thereis no time when I feel more useful as a journalist
than in disaster zones, finding out where help isneeded and sharing the stories of those affectedwith those who might be able to provide relief.
It is almost like being part of the emergency
services, though often we were ahead of themby several days. The work felt essential and raw.
Perhaps I just told myself that to get throughthose grim, exhausting days, but that sensationof utility was motivating.
In the first three or four days, we fell intoa routine. After an early start and a full day’sreporting, we’d drive a couple of hours to aryokan deep in the mountains of Yamagata
or Akita, where we could find internet to send
stories, electricity to charge batteries, hot water
for baths and enough food to keep our energy
levels up. Just as importantly, we figured, thislocation was relatively sheltered from any radiation clouds that might have been spewed out
by the wrecked nuclear reactors of Fukushima

Daiichi. Many journalists had the same idea.
During those days, I bumped into several old
friends, including Rupert Wingfield-Hayes of theBBC, Mure Dickie of the Financial Times, Brad
Olsen of CNN, Calum Macleod of USA Todayand Mark Magnier of the Los Angeles Times.
We’d share notes on which roads were open
and what the likely risks were of contaminationfrom the reactors, which appeared to be getting
worse. Some major international news organisations had withdrawn to Tokyo or even further
afield. Dan also decided to leave. Everyone hada different view on whether to stay or go. I felt
a duty to stick around, influenced largely by myattachment to Japan and sense of gratitude foreverything the country had done for me.
We were constantly updating risk assessments, but information was sketchy and constantly changing. I called nuclear experts in theUK, a friend who worked as a weather forecasterto check wind directions from Fukushima andkept up with the latest reports from my colleague
Justin McCurry, but we were never entirely sure
if we were safe. One morning, I recall setting out
with Tomita-san, Calum and Chie Matsumoto,who was working as Calum’s fixer. On the way tothe disaster area, we heard an NHK emergency
bulletin telling us another reactor had exploded
at Fukushima Daiichi. Tomita-san stopped the
car and we discussed whether to go on or headback. Nobody should be obliged to go on if theyfelt uncomfortable. The view was unanimous –we would keep going. An hour or two later as weapproached the coast, there was another emergency NHK bulletin, this time with a tsunami
warning. Another debate. Another decision to
go on. It felt worthwhile then and on the following days. In Koriyama, the mayor was gratefulto get the word out to the outside world aboutfood and fuel shortages. It was a similar story
in Ishinomaki, where the deputy mayor said his
community felt cut off. He told us he was getting
by on one onigiri a day.
Every day revealed new challenges andgripping stories. In that situation, meeting survivors who have reached the limits of humanendurance, pretensions are stripped away.
Conversations are concentrated at a fundamental level. It is remarkable how much people
help one another, how love and courage shine
through. I can no longer remember the exact
sequence of events, but what follows are some
vivid flashbacks from that time:INDEX08 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

AFTER THE TSUNAMIJUSTIN MCCURRY

Rikuzentakata

which mysteriously survived the tsunami,
though everything around them was inruins. The sights of those brightly coloured,seemingly indestructible superheroes amid
the carnage made it look like the aftermathof a violent invasion by aliens.
● Spending a restless last night at a crowded
evacuation shelter at Minamisanriku, a fishing town that was pulverised by the tsunami. More than 700 people were crammed
into the corridors, stairwells and offices of
the Ocean Plaza gymnasium. By this time- eight days after the earthquake - relief
teams had arrived, people were getting
three meals a day and some were evenstarting to talk about recovery.

● A trip to Fukushima to cover the evacuationof British residents in a bus arranged by theembassy. I was so nervous of radiation, I ran
between my car and the shelter to makesure as little snow fell on me as possible.
I interviewed a courageous young English
teacher who decided at the last moment tostay behind because he was in love with anequally brave local woman, who did not wantto leave her parents. “We have a full tank ofpetrol and if things get worse, we will drive
further north,” he said.
● An argument with a German photographer
who was grumbling about the stoic demeanour of the survivors. “They don’t seem tohave feelings,” he said. “Give me Africans
any time.” I resisted the urge to punch him
and tersely replied that people express theiremotions in different ways and nobody was
obliged to perform for the camera. “Gaman”
was being pushed to its limits. As food andfuel ran short, I feared social breakdown,but, apart from one or two reports of looting, this never transpired.
● The surreal scenes around the manga
museum in Ishinomaki, which is dedicatedto the work of artist and author Shotaro
Ishinomori. The city dubs itself “Mangattan” and has a replica Statue of Liberty todrive home this pun. The streets are linedwith human-sized statues of Kamen Rider,
Ecchan and characters from Super Sentai,
Cyborg 009 and Ganbare!! Robocon - all of

Leaving was strange. I was happy to go homeand see my family, but after such an intense experience it was not easy to focus on anything else
for some time. So I continued to put my thoughts
and efforts into the disaster zone - sending video files, writing opinion pieces and organisinga Tohoku relief fundraising event at the Beijing
Bookworm. Some media organisations arrange
counselling for journalists who return from disaster zones. I can’t recall if that was ever proposedby my employers, but I probably wouldn’t havetaken them up on it. I didn’t feel traumatised. I felt
like I had learned an important truth: that the concrete and cities and certainties on which we build
our understanding of normality are far more
ephemeral than we realise. Don’t take anythingfor granted. Don’t waste a moment. Whenever
you start getting cocksure or downhearted, keepa healthy awareness of impermanence in theback of your mind. Nothing new in that, of course.
It’s the essence of mujō. Or as Shelley put it: Man's
yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought
may endure but Mutability.
Postscript: I returned to Fukushima a few
months later at the invitation of Tomita-san.
He took me inside one of the most-irradiatedareas in the town of Namie to interview alovely couple of dairy farmers who had defied
government advice to leave. Fearless as ever,Tomita-san had visited frequently to cover
their story. Generous as ever, he wanted toshare what he had learned.
● Jonathan Watts is the Guardian’s global
environment editor.

INDEX09 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

AFTER THE TSUNAMIA FIXER’S STORYKAZUMA OBARA

LOCAL MEDIA ORGANISERS BECAME INDISPENSABLE
IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE DISASTER

Ishinomaki

CHIE MATSUMOTOA

few hours after one of the strongest
earthquakes ever recorded hit theeast coast of Japan, I got a call on mycellphone. Night was falling and I wasstanding at the Yurakucho intersection. The
phone network had crashed and nobody had
been calling anyone - I had not even talked tomy husband.
The call was from the Beijing bureau chiefof USA Today asking me to go up to Tohoku toreport on the disaster. My battery was runninglow but the phone kept buzzing afterwards,
each call from a different overseas editor. Some
desperately wanted a fixer, others a report filed
on the spot.
This is how life would be for weeks.
A fixer is required to be a journalist, interpreter, travel agent, driver, porter (for TV crew), a
friend and, sometimes, enemy of the journalist
she is helping. This disaster posed challenges
in all of those roles.
After a long journey back home to Kita-Kamakura that ended at 6 a.m., I grabbed a few
hours’ sleep, took a quick shower and wentstraight back to Tokyo. Although I and theforeign correspondent with whom I would beworking intended to drive up to Tohoku the fol-lowing day, expressway entrances throughout
Tokyo had been barricaded. Instead, we flew
to Shonai Airport in Yamagata Prefecture andcrossed the country to the Pacific coast by car.
After a five-hour drive through snow, we
arrived at the flattened landscape of Rikuzentakata. The view, as many remarked, resembled Hiroshima after the atomic bombing ofAugust 1945. Self-Defense Force (SDF) personnel had already cleared a path through debris
that had been swept inland by a 9-meter-hightsunami. I could see the light of a minivan that
had nosedived into the sludge and I felt a chill
run through my body as I realized that its passengers may have been buried.
Survivors were aimlessly wandering throughwhat was left of their neighborhood. In the last
few hours of daylight, a group of SDF members
returning from a search-and-rescue mission
led us to the local elementary school, which
had been turned into a makeshift morgue.
The following day, we joined up with a
Guardian correspondent and a Japanese freelance photographer. Journalistic competition
had been suspended - the more brainpowerand experience the better. They told us that
Ishinomaki had also suffered terribly, as had
the entire northeast coast.
For a while, the car radio was pretty much
all we had to learn about what had happened.
During the six-hour drive to Ishinomaki, wecaught an announcement by Naoto Kan, theprime minister, that there had been an accident
at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
The correspondents’ phones started ringing.
Their head offices had heard about the plant
and tried to convince them not to go to Tohoku,
but we were already there. We heard that the
CNN crew had left.
We stopped the car to talk. “It’s nice that theyprioritize your safety,” I said enviously. But no,
the companies were only worried about insurance, they replied. Maybe, but as freelancers,
the photographer and I had no insurance whatsoever. It had never occurred to me to think
about my own safety.

INDEX10 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

AFTER THE TSUNAMI“I feared for mylife many times
in the tsunami
aftermath”

We voted to continue heading north as we
figured we were safe from the southerly winds
carrying the radioactive plume from the plant.
Two full days after the tsunami, we foundpeople in Ishinomaki still wearing wet
clothes. It was snowing. Every one of thesurvivors had a story to tell and begged us tolook for their missing family members. Therewas still no electricity. Traffic lights and city
lights were dead. At night, the streets were sodark that it was impossible to see even a few
meters ahead.
Even though I was with two tall men, a different kind of fear gripped me. I recalled how
rapes and other sexual assault cases had beenreported after the Great Hanshin Earthquake in1995 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I thought
about the safety of the survivors, especially
the women. The city hall was the only placethat was lit, thanks to an emergency generator,and locals huddled near electricity sockets torecharge their mobile phones.
I feared for my life many times in the tsunami
aftermath. We fled up a hill in Kesennuma after
a huge aftershock occurred while we wereinterviewing a survivor near the shore.
Gasoline was scarce from the outset. Theoretically, it was my job as a fixer to find any
excuse to cut the long lines and secure gas, but
this was one job both the photographer andI refused to do. Knowing that local survivors
deserved it more than we did, we didn’t havethe courage or the desire to jump the queue.
We watched the foreign correspondents
approach the gas station owner. They said they
had a mission to report this devastation to therest of the world so that the rescue effort andrelief goods would arrive as quickly as possible. I would have failed miserably at that. As
we watched them from the car, the Japanesephotographer told me how he couldn’t bringhimself to take a picture of a dead motherembracing her baby as the SDF dug their bodies out of the mud.
I later covered the nuclear disaster with adifferent reporter. It was snowing again, andwe fretted about standing in what may havebeen radioactive snow. Later, it was reported
that survivors had inadvertently followed
the radioactive plume to Nihonmatsu, where
they thought they would be safe. I tried not toremember which day we had been there andthe position of the plume at the time.

Accompanying a TV crew through a heavily contaminated part of Fukushima, mydosimeter beeping furiously. I thought again
about insurance – and my safety. Did I needto demand a higher daily rate? “It’s not about
the money,” my husband said. His words havestayed with me ever since.
By then, Tokyo Electric Power had alreadyissued a gagging order to its employees.
Walking through a makeshift evacuation shelter in Nihonmatsu, we discovered that practically everyone there had worked, in one way
or another, at one of the two nuclear power
plants in Fukushima Prefecture.
My work as a fixer continued on and off fora month after the disaster with print, radio
and TV journalists, as well as a documentarycrew, from several countries. One night in
Ichinoseki, which had turned into a hub forinternational journalists covering the disaster, eight of us - mostly Tokyo correspondents– found ourselves eating dinner together. We
shared stories about meeting tsunami survivors, how we learned not to trust the car GPS(ours had almost made us drive off the end ofa damaged road) and hints for staying awake
during the long drive each night.
We joked and laughed, and agreed that it
was good to let off steam after days of covering such a terrible tragedy. One of our groupsaid that he could not help cry, even wail, atthe end of each day. We all fell silent, thenadmitted that we did the same.
I am still glad that I am driven by curiosity
and the urge to see things with my own eyes,
and then to report on them. But those assignments – and most of my fixing jobs – made me
realize that long after my journalist clients haveflown home, I am still here with the people wehave interviewed and got to know.
I usually don’t read articles or watch TV
programs that I helped produce (except thosethat are sent to me) as I don’t really consider
them my work. But my experiences during thedisaster taught me that I had a professional
responsibility to see this work through. This
year, on the 10th anniversary, I will return to
Tohoku for the first time since the disaster.

● Chie Matsumoto is a journalist and an adjunctmedia instructor in the Faculty of Law at Hosei
University.

INDEX11 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

F E AT URESEEN … AND
FINALLY HEARDWIKIPEDIA - CC BY 4.0

HOW THE FOREIGN AND JAPANESE MEDIA
COVERED THE OLYMPIC SEXISM ROW

KARYN NISHIMURAI

t may come to be seen as a turning pointin the battle against sexism in Japan. The
resignation of the Yoshiro Mori as president of the organizing committee of theTokyo Olympics and Paralympics less than six
months before they were due to open was justone of several obstacles confronting Tokyo
2020. But for at least two weeks, it dominatedcoverage of the Games.
Soon after the first reports about Mori’s sexist
comments emerged, the story turned into a crisis. For foreign correspondents based in Japan it
was one that we could not afford to ignore.
The saga began on February 3 with an article in the Asahi Shimbun whose headline canbe translated as: "Meetings that many womenattend take time." Those words were attributed
to Mori, who uttered them during a 40-minute speech at an online meeting, attended byseveral reporters, of the Japanese Olympic
Committee (JOC). At one point, Mori seemedaware that his remarks were politically incorrect, telling his audience: “The TV networks arehere so it's a little hard to say, but ..." And thenhe delivered the line that would end his careerat the head of Tokyo 2020.
No one attending the meeting protested
at the time. “If more women attend meetings
you’ll have to impose time limits … otherwise
the meetings will never end,” Mori said. He suggested that the seven women on the organizing committee “knew how to behave,” adding:“Women have a strong sense of competition.
If one of them raises her hand, the others willprobably think they have to say something too.
And all of them will speak.”
The Asahi emphasised the most unacceptable excerpts for effect, but surely even it
could not have anticipated the huge wave ofcondemnation that followed.
Mori wasn’t the first Japanese man fromthe generation born just before or after WorldWar II to lay bare their sexism. But not all ofthem were forced to resign. In February 2007,
the then health minister, Hakuo Yanagisawa,
declared that women were “machines formaking babies". The comment angered many
Japanese, but the then prime minister, ShinzoINDEX12 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

SEEN … AND FINALLY HEARD

The angry
reactions ofJapanese womenon social media
also helped
focus the mindsof Japanesenewspapers andbroadcasters,some of whichsought out foreign
reporters in Tokyo
to contextualize
the outrage being
voiced outside
Japan.

Abe, while condemning his minister, said heshould remain in his post. Yet on reflection,
Yanagisawa’s comments were arguably worse
than Mori’s. Why, then, did Yanagisawa survive, while Mori stepped down a week later?
There were four factors working against
Mori. First, as president of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee, his position had
a strong international profile and he was
expected to display the spirit and ethics of the
Olympic movement. His remarks clearly ran
counter to that spirit. This was not the casewith Yanagisawa, who was viewed as a politician with a limited shelf life and most of his
career behind him.
Second, the foreign media reacted strongly
to Mori, driven by the recognition that his attitude towards women was unacceptable, evenamong many people belonging to his generation, in a civilized society. Back in 2007, Yanagisawa's remarks were regarded as scandalous,of course, but also as somewhat unsurprisingcoming as they did from a Japanese politician
of a certain type.
Third, Yanagisawa made his remarks long
before the birth of the #MeToo movement andthe emergence of social media as a campaigning medium. Both were key factors in determining Mori’s fate.
Finally, the day before that fateful JOC meeting, Mori had told colleagues at the headquarters of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) thatJapanese public opinion was the main obstacle
to Tokyo 2020, given that several opinion polls
have shown that a clear majority of people
oppose holding the Games as planned thissummer. By denigrating women – not just inJapan – Mori simply made an even bigger enemy of the Japanese public.
Mori’s words alone did not cause his
downfall; rather, his fate was sealed by a
combination of sexism, media coverage anda society perhaps more willing to air its frustrations after more than a year of living withthe coronavirus.
While the international media response wasunambiguous, what of the Japanese media?
As is often the case with this type of crisis,
the Japanese media were not immediately
critical. The Asahi article that kicked off thestorm was short, straightforward and lacked
context. It was only later, especially after the
New York Times and other global media cov-

ered Mori’s remarks that their wider implications gained traction in domestic coverage.
The angry reactions of Japanese women onsocial media also helped focus the mindsof Japanese newspapers and broadcasters,some of which sought out foreign reporters
in Tokyo to contextualize the outrage being
voiced outside Japan.
The media coverage that followed highlighted the damage being caused the crisis, particularly Mori’s “apology” during a testy encounter
with reporters and the inability of the Tokyo
2020 organizers and the International Olympic
Committee (IOC) to defuse the situation.
Mori’s apology, prepared by officials andread out at a press conference – to which foreign journalists were not invited because nointerpretation was provided – was so insincerethat he ended up making matters worse.
In its first public response, the IOC issued apress release on February 4 in which it noted
Mori’s apology and haughtily declared the matter closed. But by now, Mori had managed toalienate the Japanese media to such an extent
that even the Olympic organizing committee
was unable to come to his rescue.
Before he officially resigned, Mori attempted to appoint his own replacement – Saburo
Kawabuchi, a fellow octogenarian and “mayor” of the Tokyo 2020 athletes’ village. The
Japanese media issued news flashes that all
but confirmed that Kawabuchi would succeed
Mori as head of the Olympic committee. Few in
the Japanese media appeared to believe there
was anything untoward about the manner of
his appointment.
It took an intervention from the prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, and other government
official to block Kawabuchi’s anointment
and call for a more transparent transfer of
power. But here, too, the organizing committee came up short. The selection process, conducted by a hastily formed panel,
was opaque, and Seiko Hashimoto’s quick
emergence as the frontrunner – probably
via official leaks – only go to show that if theMori episode shone a light on sexism, it also
exposed poor standards of governance at
the heart of Japan’s Olympic movement.

● Karyn Nishimura is a correspondent for the
French daily newspaper Libération and Radio FranceINDEX13 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

F E AT URE

DOWN THEGARDEN PATH
WHEN “WEIRD” JAPAN CATCHES OUT
CORRESPONDENTS – AND FOOLSTHEIR AUDIENCE

CHARACTERS USED ONLY FOR EDITORIAL PURPOSE.

DAVID MCNEILLA

now infamous 2018 article in the New
Yorker headlined “Japan’s Rent-A-Family Industry” features people who, withno relatives of their own, are happy to
pay for the company of complete strangers.
Before you can get to the piece by award-winning staff writer Elif Batuman, however, a long
editor’s note warns that the credibility of its
key sources has been “broadly undermined.”
It turns out that supposedly lonely clients of a
firm called Family Romance, which rents out
actors to play wives and children, were in fact
married. In January, the New Yorker admitted
Batuman had been hoodwinked and returneda National Magazine Award, the Oscar of theAmerican magazine industry.

Among those pouring salt on the New Yorker’s wounds, the New Republic asked how “sucha skewed depiction of a country sailed right overthe heads of writers, fact-checkers, editors, andaward-givers alike”. While acknowledging that,
unlike previous journalistic fraud at the New
York Times, the Atlantic, and, indeed, the New
Republic, Batuman was as much as a victim as
perpetrator (her sources had repeatedly lied toher - though she apparently ignored nagging
doubts about their veracity), her piece belonged
to a “tiresome journalistic genre”, lamented
writer Ryu Spaeth. In the Western imagination,
he said, “Japan is rife with shut-ins, celibates,
loners and obsessive geeks”, a place where
Western writers and correspondents play upINDEX14 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

DOWN THE GARDEN PATH

The problem, says
Chie Matsumoto,who has worked
as a fixer withdozens of foreign
journalists, isoften not the local
beat reporters but
editorial desks
thousands ofmiles away. Her
heart sinks when
editors call asking
for quirky Japan
stories, which
she says are often
the “door into
more interesting
stories”, if only
editors would
listen.

the oddness of Japan as they project their own
concerns about the atomization of modern life
and the dissolution of the family.
Batuman was not alone in being fooled by herinterviewees. Japanese media companies fell
victim to the plausible charms of Yuichi Ishii, theman who runs Family Romance. In 2019, NHK
World produced a show in which a “client” (later
proved to be an actor) had rented a wife, sonand daughter from Ishii’s company. Ishii also
appeared in at least one Japanese documentary, and his unusual services were featured in thesurreal 2019 tragicomedy “Family Romance” byWerner Herzog. The New Yorker is more alert
than most to accusations of objectifying Japan.
A recent piece notes, for example, that Japanese
actors in Western movies about the country are“either sterile, or soapy and naked, or satirized
as types: a bowing suit, a kimono clutching adesigner handbag”.
All the same, the suspicion persists that editors, even at highbrow publications, are more
willing to drop their journalistic guard when it
comes to Japan, or that their default setting isto presume every odd rumor about it is true until proved otherwise.
Among the more notorious examples was
eyeball licking among Japanese teenagers
for “erotic gratification,” widely reported in
the British media in 2013. The story, which isstill on the websites of several newspapers(though it did elicit a detailed mea culpa fromthe Guardian) was traced by former FCCJ stalwart Mark Schreiber to a single article, based ona single anonymous source on Bucchi News, asite for subculture enthusiasts. The source wasa “teacher.” A website (Naver Matome) copied
the story, cherry-picking the more salacious
bits and embellishing them.
Similarly colorful, and improbable, stories
about Japan abound. In 2007, the British tabloid The Sun and other foreign newspapers
reported how thousands of gullible Japanese doglovers had handed over as much as¥150,000 pedigree poodles that were, in fact,cleverly disguised sheep.
The scam was uncovered when the owner ofa sickly “toy poodle” that refused to bark took
it to a vet, who delivered the bad news that themalingering pooch was, in fact, a lamb. The
details of the story were, well, woolly. For astart, lambs don’t act or look like poodles, evenin tabloid newspapers. The story was traced

back to film star Maiko Kawakami. Stuck for ayarn during an appearance on a TV show, she
had told a version of the story after overhearing it “from a friend of a customer” in a beauty salon. “I was amazed to see what I’d heard
reported all over the world,” she said.
The problem, says Chie Matsumoto, who
has worked as a fixer with dozens of foreign
journalists, is often not the local beat reporters
but editorial desks thousands of miles away.
Her heart sinks when editors call asking forquirky Japan stories, which she says are often
the “door into more interesting stories”, if only
editors would listen. “Robots, the sex industry,
pedophilia, sex dolls, cosplay, manga culture,
groping – they all exist,” she says. “But there isa reason behind that quirkiness, which exists inevery culture and country. We need to dig into
it, because we’re journalists, not entertainers.”
Matsumoto recalls trying to argue this pointwith a former editor, who told her: ‘Well, that’s
what people want to read’. Says Matsumoto: “I
think Ishii (of Family Romance) feeds off that
attention and the foreign media.”
The Japanese media can play this game too,of course. Over the years, Japanese people
have been treated to TV stories on Jack the Ripper and his links to Queen Victoria, the “faked”
1969 moon landing, Princess Diana’s murder
by MI5, and magazine articles on “Jewish conspiracies” to control the Japanese economy.
The overwhelmingly negative coverage ofwhaling in the Western media was often shallowly framed as cultural imperialism. Then
there was the story of yakuza conspiring with
the Russian secret services to alter the weather in the U.S. via a "weather-control" systemleased from the Russians.
Much of this is arguably harmless, but there
is a more sinister element to foreign coverageof Japan.
In many stories carried by international coverage of the murder of British teacher Lindsay
Hawker in 2007, Tatsuya Ishihashi, the man
eventually convicted of killing her, came to represent creepy Japanese men, casting sly looks
at the unattainable Western fantasy female.
Foreign journalists covering the story for British tabloids were inexplicably sent to interview
white hostesses in Roppongi. The Daily Mail
said that many of the hostesses were also worried about “weird” Japanese men. “While some
British women described the attitude of theINDEX15 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

DOWN THE GARDEN PATH
“While some British women described theattitude of the men they encounter here as strange,
uncomfortable and unpredictable, others talked of
the awe and mystique the “taller, more liberated”
Western women hold for the Japanese male,” thereporter wrote. “They want you to belong to them,but there is a frustration there because they know
they can’t have you,” said one hostess.
men they encounter here as strange, uncomfortable and unpredictable, others talked of
the awe and mystique the “taller, more liberated” Western women hold for the Japanesemale,” the reporter wrote. “They want you tobelong to them, but there is a frustration there
because they know they can’t have you,” said
one hostess. Another said: “The Japanese areso very different to us that I wonder if we will
ever really understand them”.
The helpless British woman, all alone in aterra incognita of menacing Japanese, was astaple of several stories about the murder. Sharon Flaherty described how she was stalked
by a man with “cold black eyes” while teaching
English in Tottori Prefecture, where the men“ogle all the Western women and wouldn’t
look away even when they were obviously not
enjoying the attention”. No Japanese voice wasallowed to interrupt the sinister narrative. It
was widely reported (without evidence) that
Hawker planned to leave Tokyo because she
was uncomfortable around Japanese men. It’s
hard to avoid concluding that such stories areprofoundly prejudiced.
Every culture has its idiosyncrasies, cubbyholes and dark corners - the writer’s trick iscovering them in a way that treats the subject
with respect, while also providing a good read.
As Spaeth noted in the New Republic, Americans, too, are having less sex, or kinkier sex,
dying alone and killing themselves in record
numbers. “Yet I don’t get the sense readingthese stories that these trends are indicative of
the fathomless mysteries of the American soul
but rather the product of identifiable materialand social circumstances.” Trying to get spacefrom a harried British editor, however, to explain
the background to quirky or controversial phenomena in Japan can be a struggle.

My old newspaper, the Independent, was not
terribly interested in the nuances of whaling,as I found in 2006, during a reporting trip to
St. Kitts for the annual conference of the International Whaling Commission. The conference
included a discussion on Japan’s plan to kill 50
humpback whales. I wrote an article explainingthat the plan may have been a negotiating tactic
by Japanese delegates to boost its quota forwhales (such as minke). My copy was sent to
London where it was transformed. Out went myarguments, and in went “outrage” by Australia
and other anti-whaling countries that Japan
would press ahead with the killing of humpback
whales (it never did). The word “slaughter”
appeared three times in 500 words.
Over time, I grew so frustrated by the vitriol of
the whaling debate and the niggling worry thatI – however inadvertently – was contributing toit that I spent weeks talking to experts, scientists and politicians to try to explain the driving
force behind the pro-whaling campaign, which
seemed to come down to wounded national
pride. Yasukazu Hamada, then a leading member of the Parliamentary Whaling League, said.
“I think whaling is the only issue that shows Japanese diplomacy can achieve something when
it sticks to its guns. Usually for Japan in relation
to China and other countries, all the diplomatic
cards tend to be held by our opponents. The
whale negotiations are the only area where
Japan can take the initiative.”
I wrote up the article for my newspaper. The
following day I got a note from my editor. He
couldn’t run the piece because it was “toopro-whaling”.
Ironically, Batuman’s article was an attempt
to contextualize a potentially sensationalist subject. She spent months researching it, trying tobring out the humanity of people who use therent-a-family service, and was by all accounts
mortified that she had been duped. In her last
tweet, in 2018, she wrote that she was goinghide in the wilderness and avoid social media.
As Matsumoto notes, there is only so much you
can do when a source is intent on lying.
● David McNeill is professor of communications
and English at University of the Sacred Heart,Tokyo, and co-chair of the FCCJ’s Professional
Activities Committee. He was previously acorrespondent for the Independent, the Economist
and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

INDEX16 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

F E AT URE

UNDER THE
INFLUENCE
FROM TRAVEL TO FOOD, YOUTUBERSSHARE THEIR JAPAN OBSESSIONSFRED VARCOE

I

Top image: The “Trash Taste” trioof Garnt (left), Joey (right) andConnor (second from right) explore
Japanese culture in a sweary
YouTube podcast. Between them,
they have 8 million subscribers.

n the old days, if you wanted to find out
about a country or culture, you would
probably have bought a book or a magazine. Now the internet will tell you everything you need to know, things you don’t needto know and things that aren’t remotely true.
When I say “the internet,” I really mean Wikipedia or the websites of English tabloid newspapers. But it could be argued that the go-toreference library is now YouTube.
YouTube delves into areas that simple images or minute-long videos, which you mightfind on Instagram, rarely reach. For a start,
YouTube videos are usually long. The standard is 10 minutes as that triggers advertising,but good vloggers might go to 20 or 30 minutes and live streams even longer. Secondly,
people talk to you, either directly or by voiceover. The success of a YouTube channel isoften down to its presenter’s appearance andcharacter. So, to some extent, it’s a young person’s medium. Thirdly, and somewhat obviously, you get video. Vloggers are basically
documentary makers and entertainers, often
rolled into one. They educate (hopefully) andthey entertain.
And it’s easy to grasp the extent of theirappeal. While English-language media such as
the Japan Times or the Japan News might have
100,000 readers, Chris Broad, arguably the
top foreign YouTuber based in Japan with his“Abroad In Japan” channel, has over 2 million
subscribers. Many of his videos get millionsof views and his total viewing figures to dateexceed a quarter of a billion. But he’s not the
only YouTuber with a huge following.
Trash Taste (800,000 subscribers) is a video
podcast by three well-known YouTubers inspiredINDEX17 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

UNDER THE INFLUENCE

Bilingual Japanese comedianMeshida pushes the envelope as hefocuses more on the seedy side ofJapan with a brutal sense of humor,and occasionally brutal English.

by Japanese culture (anime, manga, cosplay,
Takeshi’s Castle) who have gravitated to Japan.
Japanese-Australian Joey, “The Anime Man,”
has nearly 3 million subscribers, Briton Connor(“CDawg”) has close to 2 million and Thai-Brit Garnt (“Gigguk”) has almost 3 million. That’s a huge
media outreach and a fairly obvious reason why
these people are called “influencers”.
Ah, you say, but they’re not journalists. Maybe that’s the point and actually the key to their
popularity. Too many outside observers ofJapan – print, TV, movies, YouTube – focus on
the same narrow points of interest: weird sex,
weird TV, weird food, weird people. Legendary
English DJ John Peel once described Japan
this way: “It’s as near as you can get on thisplanet to being on another planet.” So perhaps
the obsession with alien concepts is not reallysurprising. Some YouTubers play to their audiences and this can lead to drivel, while others
go where the mainstream fears to tread.
YouTubers naturally gravitate toward theweird side of Japan. CDawg seems to be cornering this market as he’s pretty much open totrying anything, and damn the consequences.
Englishman Broad, who has serious ambitions
to be a filmmaker, seems to be more protectiveof his image, but still manages to cover a wide
range of topics without compromising on content and humor while remaining politely English.

The Trash Taste trio, on the other hand, are happy to swear their way through their podcasts.
But the queen of potty-mouthed content is
Garnt’s partner, Sydney (“Sydsnap”), a blondAmerican anime/manga/gaming follower who
vulgarizes her way through her videos. “I cherish anime titties like I cherish my own life,” sheblurts out in one expletive-filled video. What’s
not to like?
Going beyond the voyeurism of most YouTubers is June Lovejoy, a bilingual American adultfilm actor plying her trade in Japan. Not yourcup of tea, you might think, but on her YouTube
channel, Lovejoy delves into Japan pornography industry via some excellent interviews withactors and directors. You have to move past her
squeaky voice, but the (usually) bilingual content
does a good job of revealing the reality of the livesof Japan’s pornography actors and directors.
YouTubers do try to tackle serious issues.
It was surprising to see a recent report by ananime YouTuber (“Akidearest”) on notorious
child-killer Tsutomu Miyazaki. It’s also beenreassuring to see English-speaking JapaneseYouTubers tackle issues in their own country.
Leading the field in this category are “ThatJapanese Man Yuta,” “Nobita from Japan” and“Let’s ask Shogo – Your Japanese friend in
Kyoto,” three somewhat serious men – irritatingly so, in truth – who tackle issues such as

INDEX18 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

UNDER THE INFLUENCE

Top image: Chris Broad’s “Abroadin Japan” channel has over 2
million subscribers. Bottom: Cathy
Cat has her own channel andalso appears in “Ask Japanese,”
exploring various aspects ofJapanese life.

racism, education, prostitution, LGBTQ+ issues,
the police, and so on. Taking a very different
approach is Japanese stand-up comedianMeshida, who tackles mainly off-color issues
with equally off-color humor.
Moving upscale in terms of documentary
quality, “Paulo from TOKYO” (1.96 million subscribers), “Life Where I’m From” (1.42 million)and “Tokyo Lens” (206,000) have some excellent content on life and travel in Japan. Photographer Norm Nakamura, the guy behind“Tokyo Lens,” may have the edge in quality production, but Paolo’s slick “Day in the Life” series
has attracted up to 12 million views for a single
video. Also, keep an eye out for “Tokyo Dealer,”a relatively new channel started by two young
bilingual Japanese guys with some thoughtful
and visually fantastic video reports.
Moving down the food chain, some presenters lack charisma and on-screen charm, whileothers are just a little too much into Japan(Cathy Cat on “Ask Japanese”) or come across as
amateurish. But with some creators attracting
huge amounts of views – in the millions for themost popular ones – English-language YouTube
reports on Japan can’t be ignored. They are
opening up Japan in ways that the print media
can’t do, and which TV and movies have tried,
but failed to do (don’t get me started on “Lostin Translation”). The reason is that YouTubers
aren’t mainstream, although the more creators
rely on sponsorship and subscribers, the lesslikely it is that they will want to rock the boat.
Politics is notable by its absence, but then that’s
probably not what the YouTube audience is looking for. And the YouTube audience is somethingthat can no longer be ignored or dismissed as
frivolous. This is a serious business.
● Fred Varcoe is a British freelance journalist. He
was formerly sports editor of the Japan Times andMetropolis magazine, and has written on sports,
music, cars and other topics for the Daily Telegraph,
the Daily Mail, Billboard, Automobile Year, Reuters,
the Japan Football Association, the International
Volleyball Association and various websites.

INDEX19 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

CLUB NEWSLUNCH WITHSHAKESPEARECLUB EVENTS CELEBRATING THE BARD
ARE MUCH ADO ABOUT SOMETHING

From left: Haruko Watanabe (SPC Chair) Elizabeth Handover (guest lecturer), Geoffrey Tudor (coordinator)

HARUKO WATANABEOn April 24, the day after the Bard’s birthday,
the FCCJ’s long-running Shakespeare lunch
lecture series will begin showing its second round of programmes from the BBC’s
Shakespeare DVD collection, with Japanese subtitles
provided by Yushi Odajima, a leading drama critic andprofessor emeritus at Waseda University. This will allow
audiences to follow the English audio and refer to thesubtitles if and when their English fails them.
I acquired the DVD collection – a genuine BBC treasure – and used them as the basis for a cultural program,
Saturday Lunch with Shakespeare, under the umbrellaof the Special Projects Committee.

Opening night Macbeth
The committee launched the series on April 21st, 2012,
with Macbeth – often referred to as the “Scottish play” toavoid bad luck – with Makoto Ozaki, professor emeritus
of Doshisha Women’s College and the then presidentof the Japan Shakespeare Globe Center attending as a
special guest. Professor Ozaki was my classmate when
I was an undergraduate student and attended an English
drama class at Kyoto’s co-ed Doshisha University.
I am personally and professionally in love with theBard of Avon. My deep admiration for the playwrightruns through my family. My father, a banker, loved
both Western and Japanese theater – so much so thatINDEX20 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

LUNCH WITH SHAKESPEARE

From left: Andrew Horvat,
Paul Snowden, Geoffrey Tudor,
James House, David Nolan, John
Bamforth, Stuart Varnam-Atkinhe would often quote Shakespeare and kabuki plays in daily conversation.
He collected all of the translations by Shoyo
Tsubouchi of the complete works of Shakespeare, published in 1935 by Chuo Koronsha.
I started reading some of them when I waslearning how to read, as there were hardly any
new books for young children after the end of
the war.
As a student at Doshisha, I turned part ofMacbeth into a Noh play as a class term paper.
I later found a similar presentation in Akira
Kurosawa’s film Kumonosu-jo (Cobweb Castle)
and, in my youthful naivety, convinced myselfthat he had stolen my idea.
Shakespeare’s works, of course, lend themselves to myriad forms, encompassing all of
the performing arts. Take West Side Story, amodern reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet.
Professor Ozaki, now one of Japan’s leading scholars of Shakespeare, shared my passion for Macbeth and agreed to be a guest
at the lunch series’ inaugural screening andhelp the committee launch this special cultural program.

Bard-inspired lunch
When I initiated this program, I decided itshould observe two principles: to be enjoyablefor people of all ages, and to include a lunchmenu inspired by the Shakespeare play to bescreened that day.
Geoffrey Tudor, an FCCJ life member andformerly international public relations director of Japan Airlines, kindly advised the chef
on how the menu should be put together,including locally sourced ingredients that
could be substituted for those not available
in Japan. The menu for Henry VI Part III, forexample, included cock-a-leekie soup, withTudor on hand to explain the meaning of“leekie” to a relieved chef.
Tudor has several reasons for supporting
the Shakespeare lunched over the years. “It’sis impossible to ignore Shakespeare as he liesat the heart of the English language, which
for practical purposes is the language of the
FCCJ,” he said.
“And many Japanese associate members
studied English and formed a love for thegreat poet. Our Shakespeare program is a wel-INDEX21 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

LUNCH WITH SHAKESPEARE
Varnam-Atkin, an Oxford graduate, has given
several lectures at the lunch event. An actor,
director and playwright, he can be heard commenting on grand sumo for NHK World.
Varnam-Atkin grew up in Warwickshire,
not far from Shakespeare’s birthplace Stratford-upon-Avon, and, accompanied by his
parents, made childhood visits to Royal Shakespeare Company productions that included up-and-coming actors who would later
become international stars, including Judi
Dench, Ian Holm, Ian McKellen, Helen Mirren
and Patrick Stewart.
His own acting talent comes to the fore
during his masterful introductions to the plays,
when he transforms himself into characters
apparently on a whim, much to the delight of
his audience.

An ad for theClub’s 2019
screening of
The Taming of
the Shrew“My college days,
when I crammedusing books anddictionaries, areover. Now I canrelax and watch
performancesby the best
Shakespearean
actors on DVD
while enjoying
the food.”

Cake and ale
come opportunity for them to maintain theirlanguage and cultural interest. And finally,
foreign members who teach in Japanese universities can use this program as an excellent
chance to enhance their English studies andhelp their students.”
We both believe that the lunch program is in
keeping with the club’s official status as a public interest organization.
Tudor said his favourite play, Richard III, “setsthe record straight by proving that “Tricky
Dicky” truly was a nasty piece of work, despite
post-1485 Yorkist attempts to whitewash his
image. I have an interest in fair play, but these
Yorkist claims were little more than anti-Tudor
ploys to give Henry VII a bad name”.

Oxbridge connection
We have been fortunate enough to welcome
two distinguished lecturers over the years:
Paul Snowden and Stuart Varnam-Atkin.
Snowden, a Cambridge graduate and professor emeritus at Waseda University, has adistinguished background in liberal arts andcollege administration, and his expertise is ingreat demand in Japan and overseas. But it is
his love for Shakespeare that has brought him
to the FCCJ.
His favorite Shakespeare play is Macbeth,
one of the first plays he studied in depth atgrammar school, and he played Banquo in aschool performance when he was 17.

Our Shakespeare lunch-goers are to be foundoutside Tokyo, including those who come all
the way from Kansai to attend. Most are former
members of English literature departments
and the English-speaking society at Doshisha,and see the lunches as a quarterly meeting ofalumni where they can indulge their love of
Shakespeare and brush up their English.
The food and drink on offer at the FCCJ
restaurant have helped make these gatherings even more enjoyable. One of our associate members, a female executive at a trading
company, said she had finally found somewhere to study Shakespeare and enjoy good
food. “My college days, when I crammed using
books and dictionaries, are over. Now I canrelax and watch performances by the best
Shakespearean actors on DVD while enjoying
the food.”If pandemic measures allow, the committee plans to screen The Merchant of Venice,accompanied by Italian cuisine, on April 24th,while A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with a
Greek lunch, is in the works for June. We arealso looking at possible dates for The Tamingof the Shrew. We look forward to getting backto the pre-coronavirus days, when each screening attracted about 50 people, united by a loveof Shakespeare.
● Haruko Watanabe is president of HKW, a former
Tokyo bureau chief of the Press Foundation of Asia,and chair of the FCCJ Special Projects Committee.

INDEX22 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

CLUB NEWSNew members
REGULAR MEMBERS

JINHEE LEE is NurPhoto Agency's
contributor, covering politics, society
and culture. Before joining NurPhoto,
he covered North Korean community
in Japan as a fixer. He earned a M.A. insocio-information and communication
studies from The University of Tokyoand started his career as a news writer for the Ryukyu Shimpo,
Okinawa's most widely-read broadsheet. His writing now
appears in domestic news outlets, including Shueisha imidas,
Fusosha Harbor Business Online, among others. He is a third
generation ethnic Korean resident in Japan.

SHINTARO KANO is a producer/reporterfor the Olympic Channel (https://www.
olympicchannel.com/en/), fronting thecoverage in Japan ahead of the Tokyo
2020 Olympic Games for the official
media of the Games since June 2019. He
previously spent 21 years covering sports
for Kyodo News, the Daily Yomiuri (now the Japan News) andthe Asahi Evening News (International Herald Tribune/Asahi
Shimbun). He has covered every soccer World Cup since 2002,
the last four Olympics and three Rugby World Cups. Shintaro
has worked in an official capacity for World Rugby, the AsianFootball Confederation and Japan Racing Association, while
contributing to the Associated Press, Time magazine andSports Illustrated. Born in Tokyo, he was educated at Columbia
University, New York University and the American School
in Japan before beginning his career in 1998.

TADAO ONAGA, senior diplomatic
writer for the Asahi Shimbun, has been
the newspaper’s foreign news editor
since October 2020.
He was deputy editor of foreign news
from July 2018 to September 2018,
and served as the Middle East andAfrica editor, including a stint as as Cairo bureau chief from
September 2014 to June 2018. He is also a former Jakarta
bureau chief. Onaga joined the Asahi in 1990 after completing
his B.A economics at the University of Tokyo. From 1998 to1999 he studied Indonesian at the University of Indonesia. He
has covered many regional issues, including the first generalelection after the fall of the Soeharto regime the independence
referendum in East Timor as well and the conflicts in Acehprovince. He returned to Japan in July 2000 to cover domestic
issues as a staff writer in Osaka and Hiroshimam, where hewrote about local politics and survivors of the atomic bombing.
Onaga is married with two children.

KAZUHIKO WATANABE worked
in the banking sector for more than
20 years, and as an economist inTokyo and London. He counts many
journalists among his acquaintances andunderstands the pressure of a looming
deadline. Watanabe is a regular visitor to
the FCCJ main bar, usually at the invitation of his senpai. He isdelighted to join a club that hosts important press events andserves good food.

PHOTO BY YOSHIKAZU TSUNO

Daruma Ceremony
The FCCJ Board and staff are all working hard to
make sure the Club continues to thrive during
the pandemic. But, just to be on the safe side, we
decided to ask the Daruma to help us out. We
plan to paint in the other eye when the pandemic
is fully under control.
From left: Peter Langan (former FCCJ President),
Mary Corbett (Director), Vicki L. Beyer (Kanji),Isabel Reynolds (FCCJ President), Gregory Clark(Kanji) and Walter Sim (Second Vice President)INDEX23 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

CLUB NEWSNew in the library
1
Tokyo Before Tokyo: Power and Magicin the Shogun’s City of Edo
Timon Screech
Reaktion Books
Gift from Timon Screech

2
Memoirs of a Kamikaze: A World War II
Pilot’s Inspiring Story of Survival, Honorand Reconciliation
Kazuo Odachi; Shigeru Ohta; Hiroyoshi Nishijima;
Alexander Bennett (trans.); Shigeru Ohta (trans.)
Tuttle Publishing

Join the Film Committee…

©KOWATANDA FILMSOn Thursday, March 11 at 6 pm for a sneak preview screening of Kontora, the first Japanese film to receive the Grand Prizeat the venerable Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF). Made in Japan, in Japanese, by a mostly Japanese cast andcrew, the film was helmed by a professional Indian animator and shot by an Estonian cinematographer, and it went on toreceive major awards at the Osaka Asian Film Festival and the Skip City International D-Cinema Festival, as well as winning
the inaugural Obayashi Prize (named after late, great filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi) at Japan Cuts in New York City. The hauntingly
monochrome Kontora is both a richly layered family drama and an allegorical depiction of the inextricable ties binding past to present,
and features one of cinema’s oddest-ever characters, a man (Hidemasa Mase) who walks backwards. This enigmatic stranger appears
one day in the rural backwater where Sora (Wan Marui) is hunting for buried treasure after reading her grandfather’s WWII journal,
and each will change the other’s life. Director Anshul Chauhan and his two stars, Marui and Mase, will be joining us for the Q&A session.
(Kontora, Japan, 2019, 144 minutes, in Japanese with English subtitles).
● Karen Severns

INDEX24 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

EXHIBITIONAN OATH WITHTOMODACHI
EXHIBITION ORGANIZED BY
JAPAN DISASTER RECOVERY SUPPORTMARCH 8 - APRIL 2, 2021

To mark the 10th anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, we will exhibit about
25 photos showing scenes of devastation in the disaster-hit region. Selected from morethan 2,000 photographs, these images have been kept as internal records of relief
activities conducted by the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and U.S. Forces in Japan.
The exhibition is an expression of gratitude to all those who took part in relief activities, and areminder of the importance of preparing for disasters.
The exhibition is supported by the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, the Reconstruction Agency, theCabinet Office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defense.

25 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

EXHIBITIONINDEX

An Oath with Tomodachi: March 8 - April 2, 2021

26 | FCCJ | MARCH 2021

EXHIBITIONINDEX

An Oath with Tomodachi: March 8 - April 2, 2021

www.fccj.or.jp