In postwar Japan, newspapers, amid sanctimonious arguments invoking “human rights” and the “presumption of innocence,” placed restraints on real-name reporting and the publication of photographs, and in doing so lost their power to approach the core of reporting.
This essay sharply probes the degeneration of the press world centered on The Asahi Shimbun, the collapse of reporter training, and the weakening of newspapers that kept invoking “human rights” while ceasing to ask about the essence of the issue.

2019-07-01
To begin with, can human rights really be protected by such measures.
Are they human rights that ought to be protected to that extent.
The essence of the matter was never discussed at all.

The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Though They Cry Human Rights.
Takayama
Around Japan there is a mountain of diplomatic problems involving China, South Korea, North Korea, Russia, and others.
Without considering such important perspectives, they are preoccupied with producing trivial, short-sighted articles.
That is why, at open press conferences, they launch criticism as if they had seized a demon’s head over some careless slip of the tongue.
They have come to think that such things are the true path of a reporter.
Kadota
That is delusion at its worst.
Takayama
In my days at the Haneda press club, I had various dealings with executives of airline companies.
In the case of an accident at Company A, there were times when executives of Company B would tell us the cause and other details.
So at press conferences where even bereaved families would be present, the reporting had already been completed, so none of the principal reporters asked any questions.
Only poorly informed reporters would make a fuss, asking, “What was the cause?”
I think political reporters’ press conferences are exactly the same.
The politicians they cover do not say unnecessary things in front of television cameras.
Now that this has disappeared, reporters like Mochizuki Isoko come to run rampant.
We understand the direction announced by the Chief Cabinet Secretary at the press conference, but we think, what is the point of probing any further on the spot.
In Newspapers as a Disease, there is a passage where, when asked where the major difference lies between newspapers in the past and newspapers today, it cuts straight to the point and says, “It lies in the photographs.”
At the time of an incident, the first job of a police-beat reporter was to find photographs of the victim and the perpetrator.
Kadota
For a rookie reporter, that is the hardest job of all.
Ashtrays are thrown at you by the desk, and salt is scattered at you at the places you cover.
Only relatives or close friends have the photographs.
That is why obtaining photographs means getting to the core of the case.
However, in the 1970s, the “Mass Media Ethics Conference” (founded in Tokyo in 1955 for the purpose of improving media ethics and securing freedom of speech and expression) expressed opinions regarding the publication of photographs and came to exert a major influence on newspaper companies.
This conference holds a national convention every year, and lawyers from the Japan Federation of Bar Associations’ Human Rights Committee came to deliver its keynote lectures.
Not only newspaper companies, but television and publishing houses as well, listened obediently, as if to say, “Your argument is entirely reasonable.”
The only person who protested, saying, “What are you talking about!”, was Akatsuka Hajime, deputy editor of the Weekly Shincho editorial department at Shinchosha.
His protest was against the lawyers’ claim that “because of the presumption of innocence, real-name reporting must not be done until the sentence is finally confirmed.”
Through the sanctimonious discussions of this Mass Media Ethics Conference, newspaper companies steered themselves in the direction of strangling their own necks.
They loudly cried, “Human rights, human rights,” and before long began saying that photographs too violate human rights, and that perpetrators must be protected.
Along with that, photographs disappeared from newspapers, and the place where young reporters were trained was lost as well.
At the center of it all was, as expected, The Asahi Shimbun.
Takayama
In the early 1980s, when I was a desk editor in the city desk, the managing editor came and told me, “From today, even suspects may no longer be referred to without honorifics.”
I said, “What?” It was truly like hearing something out of the blue.
Until then, there had been a fixed form to city-desk crime articles.
They would read something like, “On the ○ day, the ○○ police station of the Shizuoka Prefectural Police arrested Kim Hi-ro, alias Kondo Yasuhiro (61), unemployed, with seven prior convictions…”
Then suddenly it became forbidden to write prior convictions, forbidden to omit honorifics, and The Asahi Shimbun even forbade the use of Korean names.
In the case of Kazuyoshi Miura, they came to insist on putting in some title no matter how much trouble it took, such as “former company president.”
If it was a person who had only graduated junior high school, was unemployed, and did nothing but bad things, what were they supposed to do.
There were serious discussions about whether one should write something like “former junior high school student” (general laughter).
It sounds like a joke, but things like that came to be allowed.
To begin with, can human rights really be protected by such measures.
Are they human rights that ought to be protected to that extent.
The essence of the matter was never discussed at all.
Kadota
That is how the trend developed, and the publication of photographs gradually became taboo.
To be continued.