Comments on the End of WaiWai

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.

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth has taken place over the Mainichi's decision to pull the sleazy-but-popular WaiWai column from its English website. The consternation stems from the Mainichi's apparent caving-in to the demands of an Internet mob who wanted to put the kibosh on content that shows the ugly side of Japan and the singling-out of Ryann Connell, the chief editor, who is portrayed as a foreign writer just doing his job.

What hasn't been discussed are the results of the Mainichi's in-house investigation into the matter released over a week ago. The report shows that the furor over WaiWai is more a tale of a complete failure in corporate governance than it is about bullying the Mainichi and persecuting a foreigner writer.

The investigation reached five conclusions:

1. There were defects in the checking system
2. There was no editorial quality control system
3. There as a deficiency in journalistic morals
4. There was insufficient understanding of the English Web site
5. The MDN was slow response to criticism

I want to focus on the poor response to complaints, the lack of editorial supervision, and the problematic translations that appeared in the WaiWai column.

Poor response to complaints

Between April 2001 and March 2008, the MDN received at least 15 complaints about WaiWai, but complaints were not met with serious responses.

It seems that problems with the content of the column were pointed out at an early stage, but nothing was done to address the issue. Similarly, complaints from readers were also ignored. The MDN had received complaints from two women, but inexplicably never got around to answering them:

The staff writer in question also saw this e-mail, but made no specific response. "I wanted to reply, but it needed some consideration. I was bogged down by work and just couldn't get around to it," he explains.

In March, an e-mail in Japanese was sent from a person living in Japan, indicating similar doubts about the propriety of the content of WaiWai, but this too went unheeded.

The content of these two e-mail messages were relayed by e-mail not only to staff writers, but to other members of the Digital Media Division, including those in supervisory positions such as the General Manager, the Deputy General Manager and the managing editor.

Both Atsushi Hasegawa, Director and Digital Media Division Executive Supervisor, and Takahashi say they did not notice the e-mail message at all. Takahashi admits, "That was my biggest mistake. I regret very much that I did not respond properly to those messages."

Even when the managing editor himself found some columns to be vulgar, no action was taken to correct the situation:

After assuming his post, [Managing Editor Hiroshi] Takahashi perused the WaiWai column and found it vulgar and overly focused on sex. He soon spoke to the staff writer in charge and listed up some of the magazines with extremely ribald content and gave him a strong verbal warning against using smutty articles. He also admonished the writer two or three times to ease up on the sex-related articles, but did not check the Web site to see if it had improved.

In a final analysis, warning signs from within the section were not met with any seriousness and did not lead to any changes.

One reason for the lack of response may have been the immense popularity of WaiWai.

"It was a popular column that had continued since the Mainichi Daily News was published as a printed newspaper. Therefore, we couldn't easily decide to shut it down because we thought there are many regular readers," [Managing Editor Hiroshi] Takahashi explained.

It's unusual for newspapers to ignore complaints since their readership is their bread and butter. Fewer readers means less advertising revenue. For the Mainichi to sacrifice its journalistic integrity by printing trash is extremely irresponsible. Had the Mainichi responded to the complaints, it could have avoided this scandal altogether.

Lack of editorial control and checking

The lack of any kind of oversight or fact-checking system shows that there were serious problems with the way the Mainichi was being run. Content was not checked:

In the case of the Japanese version of the Mainichi Shimbun, all articles written by individual reporters are checked by desk editors, who confirm the facts and expressions in the articles by questioning reporters in detail about their articles. The articles will then be passed on to the page editing process. The articles then undergo repeated checks -- in the newsroom to determine positioning and headlines, in the proofreading section and by that day's senior editor -- until they are finally carried in the newspaper.

However, there was no such scrupulous checking with the WaiWai column. No one other than the writer of the column checked the translated articles against the original magazine articles, and most of the editing process was completed by the foreign staff.

Moreover, the Japanese managing editors were nowhere to be found:

The Japanese editorial staff mainly checked the straight news, and as a result the articles in the WaiWai column were carried on the Web as they were, without being checked by an editor in charge. The articles were only checked by foreign staff called "revisers," who mended the grammar and flow of the English sentences.

While the Japanese side of the newspaper was fact-checked and edited, control was much looser at the MDN.

What kind of roles did the successive Japanese managing editors of the MDN play? The managing editors customarily doubled as chief editor of MDN's sister paper, the Mainichi Weekly, and left most of the affairs regarding the MDN to staff members.

A former managing editor, who assumed the post in October 2002, said, "I read the WaiWai articles from time to time after they moved to the Web, but not all of them. There were some extreme expressions, but in general, the column picked up stories that foreign readers interested in Japan would want to read."

An editorial staff member from those days recalls, "The managing editor was intent on the reform of the Mainichi Weekly and didn't involve himself in the MDN very much."

The lack of oversight is further illustrated in the MDN's use of meta keywords in articles, which suggests that the MDN made a deliberate effort to boost hits for the sleazy articles in WaiWai:

On every page of the Mainichi Daily News site, there were 41 keywords used as "meta tags," which were embedded into pages to make it easier for them to be picked up by search engines. Among these keywords were the words "hentai," "geisha," and "japanese girls."

As far as I know, meta keywords are no longer used by search engines since keywords are easily abused, but the inclusion of "hentai," "geisha," and "Japanese girls" makes it look like the aim was to attract people who were surfing for porn. Again, the management at the Mainichi was unaware of what was going on:

An e-mail from August last year indicates that a foreign Mainichi Daily News staff member designated these words as keywords and conveyed them to a technical staff member. The keywords were designated in conjunction with the renewal of the Mainichi Shimbun site in October last year. The staff member said, "I was busy and I don't remember clearly, but I think it was me who added them." With regard to the meta tags, arrangements were made solely between the people involved, and superiors were not aware of them.

More than straight translations

It is generally assumed that WaiWai columns were straight translations of articles appearing in the Japanese tabloids. The investigation, however, notes that that was not necessarily the case:

Approximately 30 publications served as sources of the articles, including monthly magazines, news weeklies, pictorial weeklies, men's and women's weekly magazines, and evening-edition dailies.

Generally speaking, WaiWai stories identified the name of the source publication and carried a photo of the magazine's cover. The lead paragraph summarized the article, and went into more detail from the second paragraph. Most stories were around 600 words, and 60 to 80 percent were essentially translations of the original.

The columns were embellished with extra content:

The lead paragraph of a story about a manga introducing the Defense Ministry's policies, which features a young girl character, adds a description of the ministry not found in the original article, claiming it is "the successor of the government ministry that gave the world Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking." The explanation given by the column editor for this addition was that it served to accentuate the gap between the ministry and the manga character.

Aki at Fusou Note, adds to this by describing changes to a WaiWai column on bestiality. Nonfiction Writer, Michiko Yoshinaga's observations get to the heart of the matter:

The WaiWai column lent credibility to articles that Japanese readers would ordinarily take with a grain of salt. Foreign readers cannot tell whether or not the Japanese magazines that originally published the articles are reputable and can be taken at face value. There was a danger, therefore, that the column could invite great misunderstanding. It is frightening to think that the responsibility for such a column was left completely in the hands of an individual staff writer. A company that gives precedence to the number of web hits over consideration of what information should be conveyed cannot be properly called a newspaper.

Claims have been made that the column shed light on certain aspects of Japanese society. This claim is unsupportable, for rather than shedding light, it provided something close to misinformation. The articles resorted to generalizations about the behavior of "Japanese mothers" and "Japanese schoolgirls." A simple disclaimer that the information was based on magazine articles does not ensure immunity from responsibility. If it did, it would condone the simple discharging of unedited information.

In other words, to assume that Waiwai was harmless bullshit is naive. How do WaiWai columns shed light on Japanese society? What insight is gained from generalizations of society and tales of lurid sex? When the Japanese public sees something in the Shukan Post or Jitsuwa Knuckles, they know it's bullshit. The public understands this, but the same cannot be said for the larger readership online around the world. They don't live in Japan or speak the language, and they lack the frame of reference readers in Japan have. So when the Mainichi, one of Japan's top newspapers, runs a story about having sex with animals before eating them, they are giving the story legitimacy by virtue of their reputation as a leading newspaper.

David Marx sums how the world learns about Japan in six succinct steps: Dubious articles are printed by the Mainichi, which then get copied and posted on forums and blogs all over the world, and form the basis of a conventional wisdom that Japan is a depraved nation. Repeat this process enough times and the stories in WaiWai start becoming real.

It is almost unthinkable that the Mainichi did not know what the MDN was publishing. The MDN was a ship without a rudder. The complete lack of sensitivity to complaints by all levels of management and its inability to understand and control what was published undermined the newspaper's credibility. Given the behavior and attitudes revealed in the investigation, it seems that those involved with running the MDN should have been disciplined or fired a long time ago.

Pulling WaiWai was not a sad day for journalism because running the translations in the Mainichi was a mistake in the first place. The column was an embarrassment to the newspaper. Rather than make Japan look bad, WaiWai reflected poorly on the Mainichi.

Further reading

(Because nobody seems to have noticed this.)

Investigation of problems with English site (1) Results of in-house investigation into WaiWai column

Investigation of problems with English site (2) Pursuit of WaiWai popularity drove column to extremes

Investigation of problems with English site (3) External warnings were ignored

Chronology of problems with English-language site

Analysis of the investigative team

Comments from Members of the Open Newspaper Committee (1) Michiko Yoshinaga, Nonfiction Writer

Comments from Members of the Open Newspaper Committee (2) Kunio Yanagida, Writer

Comments from Members of the Open Newspaper Committee (3) Akira Tamaki, Freelance Journalist

Comments from Members of the Open Newspaper Committee (4) By Yasuhiko Tajima, Sophia University Professor

Image of Japanese newspaper (Page 1) showing results of the investigation [PDF/1.7MB]

Image of Japanese newspaper (Feature Page 1) showing results of the investigation [PDF/966KB]

Image of Japanese newspaper (Feature Page 2) showing results of the investigation [PDF/696KB]