Researcher Tom Brislin is a professor at the University of Hawaii Department of Communication, where he directs the Parvin/Freedom Forum Fellowship Program in Journalism Studies. The following is his examination of the events following the publication of a Holocaust denial article in the mainstream magazine Marco Polo in 1995: Introduction Two months before the March 20, 1995 Aum Shinrikyo attack on Tokyo's subways using Nazi-developed sarin poison gas, a leading Japanese news magazine published a story "There Were No Nazi Gas Chambers!" in World War II. Ironically, large ads for the Holocaust-denial article hung in hundreds of subway cars throughout Tokyo's myriad mass transit system. The magazine, Marco Polo, was on sale at numerous newsstands in the cavernous Kasumigaseki station, the gassing target where three major subway lines meet and thousands of officials and workers disembark beneath the metropolitan government complex. Anti-Semitic books and articles are not uncommon in Japan. Most tend to favor conspiracy theories of international Jewish control of political and economic forces and attempts to subdue the Japanese economy. Most, like the Marco Polo article, are one-sided, riddled with historical inaccuracies and lack any semblance of substantiation. They are met with official protests from the Israeli Embassy, and occasionally the U.S. Embassy, who traditionally ask for a public, published apology and a subsequent corrective article that cites historic record. The "No Gas Chambers" article also brought a strong protest from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, who called for an advertiser boycott.
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"For whatever reason, anti-Semitism sells. The challenge is understanding why it sells and what we can do to change that." -- Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Los Angeles Simon Wiesenthal Center |
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The response by the Marco Polo parent company, publishing giant Bungei Shunju, was as surprising as it was swift: In abject apology, Marco Polo would cease publication. The magazine would be completely disbanded. All unsold issues would be recalled. Its editor would be transferred to a non-publishing research section, and its staff dispersed to other Bungei publications.The top officials at Bungei Shunju would take hefty salary cuts as personal penance. One would resign. Officials, editors and staff would attend a series of seminars conducted by the Wiesenthal Center to atone and correct their misconceptions of Jewish history. The termination of the 250,000 circulation Marco Polo was an unprecedented response, stunning both its admirers and critics. But was the killing of the magazine a symbolic seppuku -- ritual suicide as the ultimate apology -- on the part of Bungei Shunju, or was it more of a case of cosmetic surgery -- to rid the publishing house of what had become an increasingly irritating, unsightly and unprofitable lesion on its otherwise respectable product and record? The Marco Polo incident offers a case study in contradictions, conflicts and paradoxes in intercultural communication. Japanese publications seem to simultaneously delight in and decry Jews based on a construction of deep-seated conspiracy theories and shallow stereotypes. The structure and value systems of the Japanese press produce extremely uniform and conservative mainstream newspapers and wildly sensational "news" magazines, neither comfortable with any attempt to impose a Western framework of "objectivity." Japanese systems of internalized management decision-making and conflict resolution are traumatized in the face of a Western style of confrontational politics, such as the advertising boycott that forced the Marco Polo case into the harsh glare of international publicity. The extreme action of killing a magazine left a lingering question: Did it communicate the need for more tolerance, diversity and education in Japanese publications, or did it send the offending messages of conspiracies underground, to replenish and sprout anew? This study was conducted primarily in Tokyo, Japan, at two intervals: three months after the demise of Marco Polo, and three years later. Japanese and American journalists and embassy officials from the United States and Israel were interviewed, as were leaders of the Jewish Community Center. Additional interviews were conducted with, and materials gathered from, the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center. News stories about the Marco Polo controversy were analyzed in the English-language editions of four Japanese newspapers as well as from reports filed by the Tokyo bureaus of four major American newspapers, one wire service and the international edition of one news magazine. A search for subsequent news stories in the three years following the controversy was done through the databases for newspapers of the Foreign Press Center and for magazines of the Ooya Sooichi Library in Tokyo. Background information on the Bungei Shunju publishing company and its nine magazines, including Marco Polo, was obtained from Japanese magazine and advertising sources and from the Foreign Press Center. The "No Gas Chambers" article in Marco Polo was analyzed for content, as was advertising in one of Japan's leading national dailies and a leading weekly magazine, for an anti-Semitic book. Background was gathered and analyses made of Japanese perceptions of Jews from several Japanese- and U.S.-published books and articles, and from interviews with Japanese, U.S. and Israeli officials.
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