For many years, the Mainichi Daily News, the English website of Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, was the place to go if you wanted to read salacious articles about the sexual habits of the Japanese. The stories, which were featured in the site’s “WaiWai” column, frequently stretched believability. Here’s a list of stories published on its site, as collected by the blog, The Truth From Japan (some links/headlines are from external sites that picked up on the Mainichi stories):
- “More moms going down, to ensure grades go up!”
- Japanese housewives do prostitution in the coin shower in suburbs.
- The nurse in Japan is lewder than the prostitute.
- 55% of the women in Japan sleep with men on the day at the first time of meet.
- Japanese teens are screwing like rabbits on viagra.
- The latest Japanese fad: hiring 70-year-old prostitutes.
- Also pre-teen prostitutes are still finding work in Japan.
- Japanese high school girls no-panty, just for kicks.
- Fast food sends schoolgirls into sexual feeding frenzy.
- There is a bestiality restaurant in Tokyo.
After what appears to be a thorough internal investigation, the paper yesterday issued an apology and announced that the website would “start over again.” (Credit to Fark for spotting the apology.)
This means the company has taken “punitive measures” against managers and staff responsible for the content and will, in effect, relaunch the website with a new focus and commitment to accuracy. From the paper’s apology:
…We continued to post articles that contained incorrect information about Japan and indecent sexual content. These articles, many of which were not checked, should not have been dispatched to Japan or the world. We apologize deeply for causing many people trouble and for betraying the public’s trust in the Mainichi Shimbun.
The Mainichi Newspapers took punitive measures on July 20 against Managing Director Yoshiyuki Watanabe, who previously served as general manager of the Multimedia Division, and another senior official, to hold them responsible as supervisors, in addition to those who were earlier punished.
We will take the following measures to prevent a recurrence of the problems pointed out to us through the criticism and opinions received from many readers, through our in-house investigation, and as indicated by the Open Newspaper Committee of experts:
On Aug. 1, we will reorganize the MDN Editorial Department, and on Sept. 1, under a new chief editor, the MDN will be transformed into a more news-oriented site. We will translate Mainichi Shimbun editorials and commentaries by prominent figures, such as “Jidai-no-Kaze” (Sign of the Times), and post them on the site in an effort to deepen the understanding of Japan among readers overseas.
At the same time, we will set up an advisory group to the MDN comprised of Megumi Nishikawa, an expert senior writer, and other staff writers specializing in international news coverage. The group will check the MDN’s editorial plans and the content of articles in the MDN.
We are determined to try our utmost to regain the public trust that we have lost as a result of this incident and rehabilitate the English site into one that can dispatch information about Japan to the world in an appropriate manner.
A second apology, also published yesterday and viewable below the first, offers additional details about how the paper will change the way it produces and checks articles. One priority is to “appoint a female employee as the new chief editor, based on our realization that the lack of a woman’s point of view, in addition to the lack of a checking system, helped to create a situation in which inappropriate articles continued to be published in the column.”
At the bottom of the page containing the apologies is a series of links to material from the paper’s investigation. It rivals the New York Times’ report on Jayson Blair as one of the most detailed and revelatory internal investigations of journalistic malfeasance. For example, you can read the findings of its internal investigative team, which lists “Defects in the checking system,” the “Absence of an editorial quality control system,” and “Deficiency in journalistic morals” as a few of the factors that contributed to the site’s failures.
There’s also a “Chronology of problems” and links to comments from the members of the paper’s Open Newspaper Committee (1, 2, 3, 4).
This could very well be the first time that a modern news organization has decided to “start over” due to irresponsible reporting.
Some additional reading:
- Mainichi promises new start following criticism of online English column
- “WaiWai is Dead”
- Mainichi closes controversial English-language Web page
- Japanese set the blogs on ’sleazy Australian’ writer
3 Comments
I’d seen some of that coverage pointed to from around the web; I assumed they were a tabloid.
They were trying to be a legit news outlet?
Baylink, the Japanese newspaper is legit. This is like if the New York Times hired someone to create a Japanese website, giving the Japanese staffer free rein to print whatever he wanted without editorial oversight, and he took that opportunity to do nothing but translate articles from Hustler and the Weekly World News that showed women in as bad a light as possible, editing the articles when they weren’t bigoted enough.
As a former alien resident of Japan for twelve and a half years during the 1980s and 90s, I notice that the story about Mainichi has a context not remarked upon: that the Japanese media is a product of/based in a culture traditionally quite different from that of the US, so there are unexplored dimensions to the controversy.
I suspect that an over-riding, motivating issue of the described Mainichi “controversy” was probably national embarrassment because the admittedly sensationalized stuff was being published in English. Differences in “sexual habits of the Japanese” have presented a problem for Japan ever since the first Westerners arrived in Yokohama and started reacting to traditional practices like mixed public bathing and open, socially integrated prostitution
Of course, Mainichi’s Wai Wai no doubt “stretched believability” tabloid-style, but while we lived there, Japanese media standards clearly appeared to reflect essential cultural differences about the place of sexuality in human life. Legitimate Japanese-language papers routinely published a daily crotch shot or other obscene (to Western eyes) photo or graphic, often on the front page. They were everywhere you looked on the train, actually could not be avoided…
Japanese attitudes toward sexuality do not correspond to Western ideals, and why should they? Americans, formed by the Victorian overlay of sexual shame on Judeo-Christian ideas about gender relations, are accustomed to living with a different set of assumptions from Japanese culture, where sexuality seems historically to have been kept in its place as a bodily function like eating, not loaded with moral baggage.
Fact is that many Asian cultural perspectives (non-Muslim anyway) on sexuality are in general just fundamentally different from the West’s. And Japan, though experiencing rapid cultural transformation, is not an exception.
Judging from translations of Japanese literature, both traditional and contemporary, sexual activity in adolescence appears to have been accepted/ignored, not seen as a social problem, and sexual experience or virginity in a bride was/is not considered nearly as important as good ancestry.
Abortion has historically been a standard birth control method. The pill was not approved yet when we were there (80s and 90s) and IUDs were considered unacceptable for Buddhist reasons having to do with body integrity.
A popular genre of comic books - purchasable from vending machines by any age group (as were beer and whiskey) - featured sexual practices considered perverse in the US.
Prime-time television programming - especially comedy/variety - was remarkably different regarding sexuality, in ways that could provide hours of anecdotal material.
So the list of topic examples in the story about the Mainichi reformation is not that surprising if you have lived in Japan.
(Note: although prolonged exposure to Japanese pop culture impressed me that our cultures may share fewer values than one might have assumed before living there, I emphasize that we unquestionably share a common humanity worthy of mutual honor and respect. We just can’t expect to look at other, usually older, cultures and expect to see a mirror image of our own.)
A final observation: our local Nebraska paper is currently running a long, ongoing front-page series on sensational (and solved) murder cases of the last fifty years in the state… Now that’s American.
The primary difference - in what is after all the universally profitable media exploitation of sensational topics - is that until now the Japanese press operated in a cultural context that allowed them to be more explicit about sexual content.
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