Referring to Masayuki Takayama’s column in Weekly Shincho, this article looks back on the rigorous era when newspaper reporters trained in local bureaus, police beats, courts, and specialized press clubs. It criticizes calls to open press clubs, foreign correspondents, freelance reporters, and Asahi-style reporting without real investigation, asking what a genuine journalist truly is.

April 3, 2020
During my days at the Mito bureau, a reporter from the Yomiuri Shimbun committed suicide, and after I was transferred to the head office, a colleague from my year and a senior hanged themselves.
It was a workplace with many dead.
No half-hearted work would ever bear fruit.
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s serial column, which adorns the closing pages of Weekly Shincho released yesterday.
He is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
Are freelancers really reporters?
Half a century ago, I aspired to become a newspaper reporter and applied to several companies.
The competition ratio was nearly three digits.
Miraculously, I was caught as an alternate by the Sankei Shimbun, but the real ordeal began from there.
Even after joining the company, there was selection, and only one in five was sent to a local bureau, the first step toward becoming a reporter.
The rest were assigned to the copy-editing desk, general affairs, and other departments.
It was also a threat: “If you are no good, we can replace you at any time.”
So one could not utter a single word of complaint.
From morning to night, I went around the police stations, prefectural police headquarters, and courts.
While making those rounds, I learned how to write copy.
For the first six months, I could not even take a day off.
A newspaper comes out every day.
Every day was, so to speak, an examination.
One was compared with reporters from other companies, and if one wrote poorly, the entire day was miserable.
Some reporters became completely exhausted by it.
During my days at the Mito bureau, a reporter from the Yomiuri Shimbun committed suicide, and after I was transferred to the head office, a colleague from my year and a senior hanged themselves.
It was a workplace with many dead.
No half-hearted work would ever bear fruit.
Within the bureau’s jurisdiction was Tokai Village, where no one went.
I went there repeatedly and studied nuclear energy.
After three years of going there, I came across an experiment in uranium enrichment by the centrifuge method.
There were cylinders lined up like washing tubs, the same kind used at Oak Ridge in the United States to make the Hiroshima-type atomic bomb.
Today, North Korea is desperately spinning them.
It was the result of walking around.
After accumulating such work, I was finally able to move up to the head office.
The good thing about moving up was that one could be assigned to a highly specialized press club.
I was assigned to the aircraft club.
Soon Lockheed invited us to a presentation of a new aircraft, and I flew to Los Angeles.
I attended the press conference at Lockheed and was astonished.
Reporters from each company, without interpreters, were asking Lockheed sharp and detailed questions about the new aircraft.
Only after becoming such a skilled hand could one cover aircraft accidents and write explanations.
A press club was not a place where one could get by while playing around.
Unless one studied everything from the basics of aircraft to air-traffic control, one could attend a press conference and still understand nothing.
At that time, Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways still had pilots from the prewar generation, and one could hear living aviation history.
Among those stories, I heard a secret account: “Hired by the U.S. military, we penetrated deep into the Soviet Union and Communist China and parachuted spies down.”
One of those who flew spy planes was Sumitoshi Nakao, then director of Haneda Airport.
It was a scoop that made me tremble.
Including the economic and political departments, press clubs were places where seasoned warriors who had accumulated rigorous training gathered.
A press conference could fairly be called a quiet battlefield.
Today, there are 20,000 reporters from 129 companies registered with the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association.
About 5,000 reporters go to the front line and write articles.
Only about one-tenth of them can be assigned to the central press clubs in Tokyo.
That is fewer than the number of Diet members.
In the Heisei era, voices began to say that these press clubs were closed and should be opened.
The source of those voices was the anti-Japanese foreign correspondents’ club, which writes nothing but lies.
Freelance reporters joined in and made a fuss as well.
They had no intention of entering the clubs and sharpening themselves through competition with front-line reporters.
Their only purpose was to attend press conferences that took the form of being hosted by press clubs.
It was like bringing amateurs with no recruit training onto a battlefield.
At the time, I thought it must be a joke.
However, the Asahi Shimbun joined the side calling for press conferences to be opened.
Why?
Because Asahi reporters do not conduct interviews or train themselves.
They write articles based on whims and shallow cleverness.
Katsuichi Honda of The Journey to China and Takashi Uemura of the comfort women issue are good examples.
Occasionally, they write facts.
Those are off-the-record remarks by politicians.
Otherwise, they simply wait for politicians to make verbal slips.
In that sense, their level is similar to that of freelance reporters.
There was a freelance reporter who repeatedly asked Reconstruction Minister Imamura long-winded and ignorant questions.
Even if that person had been an Asahi reporter, there would have been no sense of incongruity.
Thanks also to the efforts of such an Asahi Shimbun, foreign reporters and freelance reporters now attend press conferences and play at being reporters.
At the press conference over the Monju accident, they made such a commotion that two people involved committed suicide.
At the TEPCO Fukushima accident, a question was thrown out: “Who will commit suicide next?”
The age changed from one in which reporters killed themselves to one in which reporters drive others to death.
The other day, there was a prime ministerial press conference about the coronavirus calamity.
After nearly an hour, when it was about to end, freelance reporters made a fuss, and 12 people stood up and endlessly hurled questions even more meaningless than those of Kiyomi Tsujimoto.
Make someone angry, or drive someone to suicide.
Press conferences have changed a great deal.