Interviewed by Rachael Small
CIME Staff

Dr. Tom Brislin is the Chairman of the Academy for Creative Media at the University of Hawai'i. He has written many articles on the media in Japan and international media ethics, as well as providing newsroom ethics training in Hawaii and Guam. He is currently teaching a class in Media Ethics at the University of Hawai'i.


CIME:How long have you been studying the media in Japan? What inspired you to focus on that part of the world?

Tom Brislin: I first visited Japan in the 1960s while I lived on Guam, attending the University of Guam. This was the dawn of the age of Japan-Guam forgiveness (Japan's occupation of Guam during World War II was marked by cruelty) and Japanese tourism to Guam as an inexpensive tropical alternative to Hawai'i. I was also working for the Guam Daily News at the time, whose editor was a close friend of the editor of the Tokyo Shipping and Trade News. I visited the TSTN editor, who regaled me with stories about the trials and tribulations of running an English-language daily (British tabloid style) in Japan.
  I maintained an interest in Japanese culture and political affairs, and kept the editor's anecdotes in mind, but did not return until the late 1990s on my first research trip, which focused on the intercultural skills needed, and ethical issues faced by, foreign correspondents. I interviewed several U.S. correspondents from such news agencies as Newsweek, the New York Times, L.A. Times, NBC, AP, NPR, and Bloomberg News Service.
  During this period Shoko Asahara, of the Aum Shinrikyo cult that released sarin gas in the Tokyo subways, had just been captured, which provided a good case study for the coverage differences between Japanese and U.S. media. While researching coverage in the library of the Japan Foreign Correspondents' Club, the sarin gas connection led me about the case of Marco Polo, a People-style magazine that had recently been shuttered as a result of international protests to its running of a Holocaust-denial story.

CIME: In your opinion, what is the most prevalent ethical problem currently facing journalists in Japan?

TB: The initial (foreign correspondents) study found one of the significant differences in U.S. and Japanese reporting styles to be the Kisha Kurabu, or press club system of Japan, which was an industry practice that seemed to limit both individual journalistic action and story coverage. It also led to several creative, if Byzantine, practices, such as leaking stories to U.S. correspondents that Japanese journalists could not publish in their own papers (exclusives are virtually banned by the press club system). They could then report on what was reported in the U.S. press.
  I noted, through interviews with Japanese journalists who worked on both the English and Japanese language editions of the major newspapers, that younger journalists seemed to want to buck the system, while the older journalists and editors were quite comfortable with it.
  The Marco Polo case became a broader study of anti-Semitic publishing in Japan, which also noted Kisha Kurabu influences on what could not be reported in a major daily newspaper, but could be handed to a subsidiary or aligned magazine [that was] not allowed press club entry. One result, captured by a key quote from one journalist: Our newspaper covers our politicians from the waist up, while our magazine covers them from the waist down.
  My work in these two studies attracted the attention of two colleagues in Japan, one from Hiroshima City University and the other from Doshisha University in Kyoto.
  With my colleague from Hiroshima City University, we designed a study, funded by the national broadcasting system NHK, on differences in the coverage of youth crime in the U.S. and Japan, where the identities of youthful offenders under the age of 20, regardless of the severity or notoriety of the crime, perpetrator, or victim, are kept absolutely confidential. This is another press club dictum, as the Japanese Supreme Court ruled that the government could not prevent the publication.
  My colleague from Doshisha quoted my earlier studies, particularly the Marco Polo case, at length in his book about the problems in the Japanese press. He invited me to be a keynote speaker on the issues raised by the Kisha Kurabu system in Japanese journalism at the annual Doshisha conference on the media.
  The youth crime study was published in both the U.S. and Japan and presented at an international ethics conference in Australia. My colleague in that study, Yasuhiro Inoue, and I have undertaken further studies, including one on the perceptions of Japanese culture, language, and history through Anime.

CIME: Can you propose a method for journalists to deal with this problem?

TB: The press club system had its advantages post World War II as it promised a self-censorship system to avoid any overt censorship from first the U.S. military government, and the subsequent return to Japanese rule. It is so ingrained in the Japanese press system that it could never be completely eliminated. But in an era of globalization, it has become obsolete, and antithetical to a truly free press. The press clubs themselves (there are separate ones for the coverage of government, political parties, courts, financial systems, etc.) will need to loosen their restrictions on individual initiative and restricted membership.

CIME: What are the most important ethical concerns for any journalist to take into consideration, regardless of where they are writing?

TB: Obviously truthfulness and full-disclosure reporting - not holding back for any personal or corporate conflict of interest. They should also keep in mind their fundamental purpose is to empower the citizenry to promote self-governance at all levels.

CIME: How does writing about international issues affect a writer's ethical responsibilities?

TB: Too often foreign correspondents - and their editors back home - want to lapse into stereotypes. For example, one correspondent in Germany told me that his editors wanted to see some reference to Hitler or the Berlin Wall in the first graf of every story. They thought that was the only context the readers had for such a dynamic and democratic country. While the Germans want to be forward looking, some journalists want to keep them chained to their past.

CIME: Could you share an ethical dilemma you have faced and how you approached it?

TB: We had knowledge of a potential collapse of a financial institution if it did not receive an immediate and immense infusion of capital. We wanted to protect those readers who had invested their life savings in this institution, and to inform all readers on the impact of all financial institutions if one failed. We also knew that if we ran the story, that saving capital would not materialize, and the institution's failure would be a foregone conclusion from the publicity. We opted to give the institution one week to gather that capital. They did, and the crisis was averted. On a personal level, though, my fiancee (now gratefully my wife) had her savings in that institution. Should I tell her to withdraw her funds when I was unwilling to share that information with the thousands of other depositors? I kept silent. Once the dust had settled, though, it provoked some lengthy and heated discussions. She did silence me with the question: "Would you have told your mother, if her entire savings were wrapped up there?" At what point does protection of family override protection of the audience?

CIME: In what ways can media editors help to maintain a high ethical standard in their publications? To what extent must the responsibility fall solely on the shoulders of the journalists themselves?

TB: I have discovered in my outreach work as a newsroom trainer that very few newsrooms engage in ethical discussions. The most they do have are defensive rationalizations after having published or broadcast something that has come back to haunt them. The "jargon" of ethics should be as common as the jargon of publishing or broadcasting in the newsroom. Editors should conduct in-house training, and take advantage of the short case studies and critical incidents that are included in many professional magazines and journals.
  Journalists, of course, must have a deep and abiding sense of professionalism. They daily hold people's reputations in their hands. All too often ethical dilemmas arise from a lack of communication between journalist and editor. Ethics needs to be a "front-loaded" discussion, not an after-the-fact defense.