Are Japan’s press clubs closed institutions protecting vested interests, or are they reporting organizations through which experienced journalists with specialized knowledge confront public authority?
Through Masayuki Takayama’s Shukan Shincho column “Are Freelancers Journalists?”, this article examines reporter training, the role of specialist correspondents, the opening of press conferences, the responsibility of freelance reporters and the ethics of those who ask questions.

This article was first published on April 3, 2020, and republished on August 3 of the same year.
Its source is “Are Freelancers Journalists?”, an installment of Masayuki Takayama’s Henken Jizai column published in the April 9, 2020 issue of Shukan Shincho, released on April 2.
Drawing upon his own career, Takayama describes the severe competition for employment at newspapers, the further selection that followed recruitment, the training received at local bureaus and the years of study required before a reporter could enter a highly specialized press club.
He then severely criticizes what he regards as the transformation of press conferences after they were opened to people who lacked specialist knowledge, sustained reporting experience, verification skills and a sense of journalistic responsibility.
The Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association defines a press club as an autonomous reporting organization composed of journalists who continuously cover public institutions.
It also states that the clubs should be open to experienced journalists outside established media companies, while requiring participants to share a public reporting purpose, accept responsibility for club operations and comply with journalistic ethics.
The essential question raised by this article is therefore not limited to whether a reporter is employed by a company or works independently.
It asks whether only those who continuously study their subjects, verify facts and accept responsibility for their questions and articles should properly be called journalists.
Key Quotation
“During the Heisei era, people began demanding that the press clubs be opened because they were supposedly closed institutions. The demand originated with the anti-Japanese foreign correspondents’ club, which writes nothing but lies. Freelance reporters joined the agitation.”
Full Text
August 3, 2020
During the Heisei era, people began demanding that the press clubs be opened because they were supposedly closed institutions.
The demand originated with the anti-Japanese foreign correspondents’ club, which writes nothing but lies.
Freelance reporters joined the agitation.
At the press conferences concerning the Monju accident, they created an uproar, and two people involved committed suicide.
At the Tokyo Electric Power Company press conferences concerning the Fukushima accident, someone asked, “Who will commit suicide next?”
I am republishing the chapter issued on April 3, 2020 under that title.
The following is taken from Masayuki Takayama’s regular column, which brought yesterday’s issue of Shukan Shincho to a close.
He is a journalist without equal anywhere in the postwar world.
Are Freelancers Journalists?
Half a century ago, I wanted to become a newspaper reporter and took the employment examinations of several companies.
The competition ratio was nearly one hundred applicants for every position.
By a miracle, I made it onto Sankei Shimbun’s supplementary list, but the real struggle began only after that.
Further selection continued after entering the company.
Only one in five recruits was sent to a local bureau, the first step toward becoming a reporter.
The others were assigned to the copy desk, general affairs or other departments.
The message was a threat: “If you are not good enough, you can be replaced at any time.”
There was no room to complain.
From morning until night, I made the rounds of police stations, the prefectural police headquarters and the courts.
I learned how to write articles while making those rounds.
For the first six months, I could not even take a day off.
A newspaper is published every day.
Every day was an examination.
My work was compared with that of reporters from competing newspapers, and when I wrote badly, I spent the entire day feeling miserable.
Some reporters were completely exhausted by the strain.
During my time at the Mito bureau, a Yomiuri reporter committed suicide.
After I was transferred to the head office, a colleague from my intake and a senior reporter hanged themselves.
It was a workplace in which many people died.
No one could succeed through half-hearted work.
Tokai Village lay within the bureau’s coverage area, but no one wanted to go there.
I kept visiting and studied nuclear energy.
After three years of visits, I encountered an experiment involving uranium enrichment by centrifuge.
Rows of cylinders resembling washing-machine drums stood there, the same type used at Oak Ridge in the United States to produce the uranium for the Hiroshima-type atomic bomb.
North Korea is now desperately operating the same kind of machinery.
It was the result of walking around and doing the work.
Only after repeatedly achieving such results was I finally transferred to the head office.
The advantage of reaching the head office was the opportunity to join a highly specialized press club.
I was assigned to the aviation press club.
Soon afterward, Lockheed invited us to Los Angeles for the unveiling of a new aircraft.
I was astonished by the press conference at Lockheed.
The reporters from the various companies asked detailed and penetrating questions about the new aircraft without interpreters.
Only after becoming that skilled could a reporter cover an aircraft accident and write an authoritative analysis.
A press club was not a place where one could survive by idling.
Unless a reporter studied everything from the fundamentals of aircraft to air-traffic control, he could attend a press conference without understanding a word.
Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways still had pilots from the prewar generation at that time, and they could recount living aviation history.
One of them told me the secret story of being hired by the United States military to fly deep into the Soviet Union and Communist China and drop spies by parachute.
One of the men who piloted those spy aircraft was Sumitoshi Nakao, who later became director of Haneda Airport.
It was an astonishing exclusive.
In the economic and political departments as well, press clubs were gatherings of formidable reporters who had trained and studied intensely.
A press conference could properly be described as a quiet battlefield.
Today, approximately 20,000 reporters from 129 companies are registered with the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association.
Around 5,000 work on the front lines and write articles.
Only about one-tenth of them can be assigned to the central press clubs in Tokyo.
Their number is smaller than the number of members of the Diet.
During the Heisei era, people began demanding that the press clubs be opened because they were supposedly closed institutions.
The demand originated with the anti-Japanese foreign correspondents’ club, which writes nothing but lies.
Freelance reporters joined the agitation.
They had no intention of entering the clubs and improving their skills through competition with front-line reporters.
Their only objective was to attend press conferences formally hosted by the press clubs.
Untrained amateurs were entering a battlefield without even having undergone basic training.
At the time, I wondered whether it was a joke.
The Asahi Shimbun nevertheless joined the campaign to open press conferences.
The reason was that Asahi reporters did not conduct proper reporting or undertake serious study.
They wrote articles from passing ideas and shallow cleverness.
Katsuichi Honda, author of Travels in China, and Takashi Uemura, associated with reporting on the wartime comfort women, are good examples.
Occasionally, they write facts.
Those are politicians’ off-the-record remarks.
Otherwise, they simply wait for a politician to make a verbal mistake.
In that sense, their level is similar to that of freelance reporters.
A freelance reporter repeatedly subjected Reconstruction Minister Masahiro Imamura to long and ignorant questions.
There would have been nothing incongruous had that person been an Asahi reporter.
Thanks in part to Asahi’s efforts, foreign correspondents and freelance reporters now attend press conferences and act out the role of pseudo-journalists.
At the press conferences concerning the Monju accident, they created an uproar, and two people involved committed suicide.
At the Tokyo Electric Power Company press conferences concerning the Fukushima accident, someone asked, “Who will commit suicide next?”
The age in which reporters committed suicide has been replaced by an age in which reporters drive other people to their deaths.
A prime ministerial press conference concerning the coronavirus crisis was held recently.
It had continued for nearly an hour and was about to end when freelance reporters created an uproar.
Twelve of them stood up and endlessly hurled questions even more meaningless than those of Kiyomi Tsujimoto.
Their purpose was either to provoke anger or drive someone to suicide.
Press conferences have changed greatly.
Notes on Sources and Terminology
The original Japanese text dated August 3, 2020, has been reproduced without alteration.
Masayuki Takayama’s “Are Freelancers Journalists?” was published as an installment of Henken Jizai in the April 9, 2020 issue of Shukan Shincho.
Official records confirm that a sodium leak occurred at the Monju prototype fast breeder reactor on December 8, 1995, and that the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation was strongly criticized over its editing of accident footage and its handling of public information.
A legal case summary records that a deputy general affairs director who investigated the video controversy and appeared at a press conference on January 12, 1996, died by suicide the following day.
The broader statement that two people committed suicide because of the conduct of reporters at the press conferences is Takayama’s assertion.
The public materials reviewed for this edition were not sufficient to establish independently either the stated number or a direct causal relationship between the questioning and both deaths.
The reference to a recent prime ministerial press conference during the coronavirus crisis appears, from the publication date, to concern Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s press conference held at the Prime Minister’s Office on March 28, 2020.
The phrase at the beginning of the Japanese text appears to omit the final syllable in the title “Who Will Commit Suicide Next?”, while “小ー時間” appears to be a typographical error for “小一時間,” meaning “nearly an hour.”
Both have been preserved in the original Japanese text.
The evaluations of the Asahi Shimbun, foreign correspondents, freelance journalists and individual reporters, as well as the claimed relationship between press-conference conduct and the deaths of those involved, are the opinions expressed in Takayama’s quoted column.