Let's Japan.org Debunking Eikaiwa and Ramblings in Japan

I'm no prude, but I wonder what the Japan Times is thinking when they run two articles in the Sunday paper about porn actress awards and hostess clubs with porn stars. How are these "specials" or even relevant to a newspaper? Or is it that they miss the readership they used to get with the Tokyo Confidential column they ended not long ago?

Tokyo Confidential wasn't nearly as salacious as the Mainichi's WaiWai column, but I wonder why any newspaper that wants to be taken seriously and portends to be "the world's window on Japan" would legitimize porn by running "specials" that essentially advertise an awards show.

Like WaiWai, the problem with running this kind of content is that it reflects poorly on the Japan Times. Do they really not care about what they print or are they more interested in attracting eyeballs to their website?

Now we know why The Japan Times pulled its Tokyo Confidential column last year--it apparently was taking a page out of the Waiwai playbook and selling stories it did not own:

ジャパンタイムズ、朝日・読売週刊誌から無断翻訳・掲載

2009年1月6日12時4分

英字紙ジャパンタイムズや講談社インターナショナルが、朝日、読売の両新聞社発行の週刊誌の記事を無断で翻訳、掲載していたことがわかった。両社は著作権侵害を認め、コラムを中止し、単行本の在庫を廃棄した。

ジャパンタイムズ社は０６年３月～０８年８月のＡＥＲＡや週刊朝日の記事計１１本と、０１年４月～０８年７月の読売ウイークリーの記事１１９本を、許諾 を受けずに英訳しコラムとして掲載。講談社インターナショナル社は、週刊朝日２本と読売ウイークリーの記事２１本を単行本「タブロイド・トーキョー」「タ ブロイド・トーキョー２」に無断利用していた。

無断利用には共通する複数の外国人ライターがかかわり、単行本の著者には、毎日新聞社の英文サイトのコラム「ＷａｉＷａｉ」に不適切な記事が掲載された問題にかかわったライターも含まれていた。

The Asahi article says The Japan Times and Kodansha International translated and reproduced stories from AERA, Shukan Asahi, and the Yomiuri Weekly without permission.

The Japan Times violated the copyright of the Asahi and Yomiuri newspapers by translating and publishing 11 stories from AREA and the Shukan Asahi between June 2006 and August 2008, and 119 articles from the Yomiuri Weekly between April 2001 and July 2008. Kodansha International apparently translated 2 articles from the Shukan Asahi and 21 from the Yomiuri Weekly, and printed them in the books Tabloid Tokyo and Tabloid Tokyo 2.

The article concludes by singling out the foreigners involved, noting that several foreign writers were involved in reproducing the stories and that the author of the books (while not explicitly stated in the article, I assume it' s Mark Schreiber) also had a hand in producing the WaiWai column for the Mainichi Daily News.

The foreign writers undoubtedly played a role in this, but the Asahi doesn't provide any details beyond implying that they are the guilty ones. Will we find out that the Japanese management, just as with the WaiWai at the Mainichi, were derelict in their managerial and editorial duties, too?

There's no doubt that the WaiWai column caused everybody in the newspaper industry to sit up and take notice and start covering their asses. The Japan Times took the Tokyo Confidential columns offline last fall. Trying to access the column results in a message saying that it is under editorial review.

The WaiWai scandal was brutal for it exposed the pervasive rot within the Mainichi that extended from the Japanese management, who were indifferent to complaints and did not know what was going on with the column, to the sheer hackery of the column's editor, who deliberately chose stories for their sexually depraved content and then embellished their translations. Are we to assume the Japan Times has been just as bad? Were they aware of what they were doing over the past seven years? The newspaper has some explaining to do.

A little bit more on the WaiWai scandal, this time from the inside.

Adam Richards from Mutant Frog Travelogue provides a translation of an article by Toshinao Sasaki posted in August at CNET Japan about the scandal that illustrates what went on inside the newspaper.

In it, we see that the Mainichi circled the wagons, daring its critics to bring it on, instead of coming clean about WaiWai. As Sasaki writes about the backlash, "its destructive force has created an astonishing situation. This incident may well be the milestone that turns the relationship between the Internet and the mass media on its head."

Why was the post-scandal management so inconceivably horrible?

I am sorry if this sounds like I am turning my back on my mentor, senior reporters, and bosses, but the Mainichi’s handling of the post-scandal management was just terrible. This has been pointed out several times elsewhere, but first off is the fact that the following passage was included in the June 22 “apology” article: “In a related development, a flood of messages and images have appeared online that gravely defame and slander a number of our company’s female staff writers and other employees, who are in no way accountable for this matter nor subject to punitive measures. The Mainichi Newspapers Co., Ltd. is determined to take legal action against such clearly illegal acts that constitute defamation.”

Second, their responses to media coverage of the scandal were awful. For example, they acted snobbishly toward J-Cast News, the first media organization to report the scandal, and this attitude became even clearer with their unbelievable response to a citizen journalist for PJ News.

Thirdly, it has never been made public how Mainichi views this issue internally, what sort of debate is taking place, or how employees see the reactions from the Internet. A two-page examination of the scandal was printed in the July 20 edition of the newspaper, but this article only describes the series of events leading up to the scandal, and contains nothing whatsoever about the company’s views after the scandal broke. Far from it — the article contains a shocking comment from freelance journalist Kunio Yanagita: “The fact that these attacks on a failure are taking the appearance of violence caused by Internet agitation make me fear that the dark underbelly of the anonymous Internet is no longer a distant phenomenon.”

Read Part I.

When the WaiWai scandal exploded on the internet, the Mainichi Daily News quickly pulled the column and its archives to the chagrin of many readers.

Maybe I'm beating a dead horse now, but an article in the Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan's No.1 Shimbun [PDF] completely misses the point about why people have complained about the Mainichi running the WaiWai column.

I'll throw my hat into the ring about the end of the WaiWai column. Rather than a story of an Internet mob bullying a newspaper and its foreigner writer, WaiWai is an example of a massive failure in corporate governance.