In 1998, David Butts made press freedom history by doing something reporters around the word do every day: He went to a press conference. Butts, the former Tokyo bureau chief for Bloomberg Business News, knew very well he wasn't invited to the press conference, held by then Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto. In Japan, many press conferences aren't open to just anybody who wants to attend: Instead, every official agency has a press club, and only reporters who are members of each press club can attend press conferences held by each agency. Generally, only journalists from one of 20 or so major domestic media outlets are admitted to most of Japan's press clubs. If you're foreign or work for a magazine that falls outside the mainstream, you can find yourself cut off from official sources because they often won't talk to non-club reporters. Butts -- a serial gatecrasher -- often refused to play by club rules. In 1998, Butts walked in to the prime minister's conference, took a seat, and soon was surrounded by "beefy security guards ... debating whether to pick me up." Finally, the prime minister walked in and the guards backed away, not wanting to create a scene.
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"By denying foreign correspondents first-hand access to briefings, the (press club) system ... unfairly makes them slower to bring information to their audience ... the system works as a restraint on free trade in information."
-- October 2002 EU report |
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Butts' protest against the kisha club system was just one battle in a years-long war -- waged by foreign journalists, smaller domestic media outlets, press clubs and press freedom organizations -- to bring down the members-only system.Recently, the kisha club opponents acquired a powerful new ally: The European Union. In their annual wish list of regulatory reforms, the EU asked Japan last year to abolish the kisha club system, saying that it is an unfair barrier to free trade of information. "By denying foreign correspondents first-hand access to briefings, the system acts as a de facto competitive hindrance to foreign media organizations," states the October 2002 EU report "Priority Proposals for Regulatory Reform in Japan." "It unfairly makes them slower to bring information to their audience than domestic organizations, and, unable to put questions on the spot, forces them to rely on second hand information. In effect, the system works as a restraint on free trade in information." Japanese government officials replied that they actually don't control the kisha clubs -- they come under the authority of The Japanese Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association -- known also as Nihon Shinbun Kyokai, or NSK. The NSK writes the recommendations for kisha club behavior, but says it doesn't actually control the system -- the individual kisha clubs are responsible for membership selection. For now, the EU is giving Japan time respond officially, which it has not done yet. But eventually the issue could be brought before the World Trade Organization where it could be judged a trade barrier. The kisha system, which has staunchly withstood criticism and complaint for over 50 years, has never faced such powerful opposition. How the System Works The kisha system has been foiling foreign and small domestic press for decades. "I personally will never forget going to the police station at which the suspect accused of stabbing Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer in the right leg was being questioned," veteran correspondent Sam Jameson wrote in an essay on the press in Japan. "I was banned from attending a press conference at which police officers announced the results of their interrogations." Though the few dozen press clubs that generate most of the major economic and political news now allow foreign correspondents -- including the prime minister's press club -- the rest of Japan's 500 to 1,000 press clubs still do not admit foreign journalists, which sometimes makes it impossible to get important stories. "Foreign media organizations, feisty weekly magazines and freelancers can be shut out completely," Tokyo-based journalist Jonathan Watts wrote in an article for the UK's Guardian last year. "In the wake of the Tokaimura nuclear accident in 1999, I was told I could not ask questions at a kisha-club press conference inside the science and technology agency," Watts wrote. "When the British hostess Lucie Blackman went missing in 2000, it was not possible to attend briefings by detectives given at the kisha club of the Tokyo metropolitan police. Last year, foreign media were completely excluded from a kisha-club press conference about the massacre at a primary school in Ikeda, Osaka." Watts is the vice president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, one of the main organizations that has been battling for improved press access here. The NSK updated the kisha guidelines in January 2002 to answer criticisms; the guidelines say that "kisha clubs should be 'open entities.' ? Kisha clubs are also open to foreign media organizations, and in fact the number of clubs with foreign journalists as members is increasing." While the clubs are nominally open to any reporter who meets the individual club standards, in practice, few foreign reporters have been allowed full membership status. Many foreign correspondents say being cut out of the club system hasn't mattered much to them: Most of the time, they say, they're able to get the stories they?re after anyway. (See sidebar) "I have not had a lot of direct experience or run-ins with the kisha club system because our coverage is less oriented toward the split second/breaking news genre required by, say, a Bloomberg or other wire services," said Mark Magnier of the Los Angeles Times. "Instead, we tend to look more toward what any particular development means or the broader implications. Often sources, or alternate sources, will give us an interview for this sort of information." "Most good journalism doesn't get done in kisha clubs. They're inimical to everything that good journalism is," said Howard French, who has covered Japan for the New York Times for four years. "They allow the source to set the agenda and control the details of what gets released." Even so, many journalists working in Japan are determined to change the system. "What we would like from Japan is very simple -- free access to press conferences," said Hans van der Lugt, president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, which held a symposium on the kisha system in March.
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