Alongside Japan’s buttoned-down media, lies the wacky, Wild West world of the 15 or so news weeklies (which, incidentally, neither offer all news nor are they all published weekly).
Not an insignificant part of Japan’s media world, they command circulations as large as all but the largest U.S. newspapers. Indeed many of them are owned by the same conglomerates that own Japan’s establishment media, or by a handful of reputable book publishers.
Their significance, though, is driven more by the omnipresence of their advertisements – plastered on train cars and in other publications nationwide – which entice readers to their scandalous and sometimes lurid fare. For a critical view of the weeklies, see JMR’s two-part seriesexcerpted from “A Public Betrayed, an Inside Look at Japanese Media Atrocities and their Warnings to the West.” (Note, that it has come to light since then that the book’s co-author Doshisha University Professor Takesato Watanabe appears to have his own personal problems with the weeklies, as he recently sued the magazine “Shukan Shincho” for libel. The magazine alleged, among other things, that Watanabe is a sympathizer of one of the weeklies’ biggest targets, the Soka Gakkai religious sect.)
This month, a team of four veteran gaijin (non-Japanese) translators and writers – Geoff Botting, Ryann Connell, Michael Hoffman and Mark Schreiber – are publishing an anthology called “Tabloid Tokyo: 101 Tales of Sex, Crime and the Bizarre from Japan’s Wild Weeklies,” offering a pungent taste of this other Japan.
The book contains a collection of pieces that the four authors originally translated from the weeklies and published in two English-language newspapers. Stories include accounts of businesses whose expertise it is to make people quit their jobs, confessions from straight men who like to don women’s drawers under their clothes, even an investigation of how cheap sushi restaurants mislabel their fish.
The authors say they are drawn to the weeklies because of the exuberance with which they tackle subjects ignored by the mainstream media.
“The weeklies, non-members of the press clubs, scorn politeness, defer to no one, and thumb their noses at social convention — sometimes even at the law, seeming at times almost to court legal challenges — in the primary interest of a good story, regardless of whose chicanery or peccadilloes it may expose, whatever unpleasantness it may lay bare.”
Needless to say, sex is a large part of what drives the weeklies, and Tabloid Tokyo revels in the frankness with which it is discussed. Take, for instance, this excerpt from a story about stores specializing in satisfying men’s obsessions with women’s undergarments … now reaching out to women with the opposite inclination.
”Ewwwww. Several years back, men’s briefs made a splash, so to speak, when certain squeamish housewives confided to the media that so begrimed were their husbands shorts, they eschewed handling them, using chopsticks to drop them into the wash. Sensing a business opportunity, an appliance manufacturer even marketed a two-vat washing machine so dad’s grimy shorts could be isolated from the rest of the family wash. Now, its seems, women are buying these garments to heighten their passion while practicing hitori etchi, as solitary sex is referred to here.”
Though he says “perverted voyeurism” is not their theme, co-author Mark Schreiber acknowledges that he and his cohorts love writing about sex, despite receiving the occasional complaint.
“Japan is a country where information about sex is widely generated by the media, so even if we were to stop writing about it, people would still be exposed to it in other forms. I would be sad if we had to drop sexy contents from our weekly columns, because the tabloid magazines write about it with such unashamed flair.”
But the essence of the tabloids is their portrayal of ordinary Japanese, the authors say.
“Like newsmagazines everywhere, they cover politics, business, sports, science and entertainment. But they are at their best writing about daily life and the secrets teeming beneath its surface ordinariness. That, above all, is what we look for in them.”
That appears to be why they included this story about the troubles encountered by a woman in the sex trade trying to get married.
“When the time came for Rika, 28, to tie the knot and settle down, she encountered an unexpected problem. She’d spent the past several years working as a masseuse in the “pink” industry. And — all the more cause for this bride to blush pink — she’d met her fiance on the job.
The problem was, Mr. Right came from an old-fashioned family that insisted on nothing less than a big wedding. Which meant attendance by both the groom’s and bride’s extended families would be obligatory.
But Rika had severed ties with her family years ago. What to do? Well, for a not-inconsiderable sum, Rika arranged for a professional alibi service to subcontract a small agency that specializes in booking professional actors. The agency supplied her “parents” and a dozen or so family members to attend the affair, and no one was the wiser.”
Or these ruminations, following a piece describing how children are becoming sexually active at increasingly young ages.
“Dreading isolation, kids are increasingly unable to say no,” a school counselor tells Spa!. And isolation is never farther than a snub away. Parents are preoccupied, families withdrawn, communities rootless, friendship conditional. Is it any wonder children are drawn to sex? It may well seem to them the only relationship left.”
In the introduction, the authors ask themselves whether the Japan the weeklies are portraying in Tabloid Tokyo is “the real Japan.”
“That would be a bold claim indeed for an anthology of stories with titles like ‘Pornographers Target Public Baths,’ ‘Moms Mistake Kids for Pets,’ and ‘End of World Found in Tokyo.’ Not the real Japan, but certainly a real Japan, or a part of the real Japan … The weird characters, uncanny situations, bizarre relationships and stressed-out states of mind you will encounter in these pages are as real as anything imaginable, and no understanding of Japan — or of humanity, for that matter — is complete without taking their measure.”
