Baylor University Student Journalists Visit Sankei and Japan Forward 

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Thirty students from Baylor University visited The Sankei Shimbun's Tokyo headquarters in July, where they met with editors from The Sankei Shimbun and Japan Forward to discuss the state of Japanese media and the journalism industry.

During the session, Japan Forward Editor-in-Chief Yasuo Naito explained why the English-language outlet was launched in 2017. At the time, he said Japan's presence in the English-language news landscape was limited, with coverage often dominated by a narrow range of perspectives, particularly from liberal-leaning outlets. Japan Forward was created to present a broader view of Japan to readers overseas.

The launch came at a challenging time for journalism. Social media was rapidly reshaping how people consumed news, public trust in the media was being questioned, and the publication was built almost from scratch. 

Many of Naito's colleagues at The Sankei Shimbun, where he was working at the time, doubted the project would survive, predicting it would fold within a few years.

Nearly a decade later, Japan Forward has established a global readership. Naito said the publication's core team itself reflects that growth, bringing together people of diverse backgrounds and ages. 

Readership data shows that Japan Forward's core audience is between 18 and 44 years old, in contrast to The Sankei Shimbun, whose readership is predominantly over 50.

Its three largest audiences are in India, the United States, and Japan. Naito noted that many of its readers in Japan are foreign residents from countries including Bangladesh, the Philippines, Nepal, the United Kingdom, Algeria, Pakistan, and Singapore, who follow Japanese news in English rather than Japanese.

Cognitive Warfare in Modern Media

Sankei editor-in-chief Makiko Takita opened the historical thread that shaped a lot of the discussion. 

In the 1960s and 70s, during China's Cultural Revolution, a Sankei correspondent in Beijing was among the first to sense from outside China that something serious was happening within the Communist Party. He pieced it together from dazibao, the handwritten posters ordinary citizens used to air political grievances. He reported it, and Sankei was expelled from China as a result, not returning until 1998. 

It remained, throughout that period, the only Japanese paper with a bureau in Taipei, which Takita said is why Taiwan still treats Sankei differently from most other Japanese media.

Asked directly where the paper stands politically, Takita's answer was short: "We don't want to side with either the right or left. We believe that reporting facts matters the most."

The Trouble With Labels

One participant asked why, if reporting facts is the priority, Sankei is so often described as a conservative newspaper, with Wikipedia even calling it "far-right"? 

I gave them a concrete case. For decades, Sankei was one of the only Japanese outlets that kept reporting on Japanese citizens abducted by North Korean agents in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and was written off for years as a conservative paper chasing an unproven, anti-Korea story. 

In 2002, the abductions were confirmed. A label like conservative or liberal, I told the students, says a lot less about whether a story is true than about which topics make people uncomfortable.

A colleague of mine picked up the point from another angle, describing a newsroom that doesn't look anything like the one people assume sits behind a conservative Japanese paper: a video producer from Sri Lanka, an editor raised in Hong Kong, and a staff member with Taiwanese, Chinese, and Korean heritage, among others.

A team built like that, he said, would be unlikely to carry a single national or ideological slant even if it tried to.

Delivering News in the Video Shift

The liveliest stretch of the session was about format rather than politics. When Naito asked how many students get most of their news from social media, nearly every hand went up; asked how many read physical newspapers, the number dropped to two or three. 

Most said their daily reading is now mostly reels and short clips rather than full articles, which led to the sharpest question of the afternoon: as the industry's center of gravity shifts to video, how does something as layered as a historical dispute or a security debate hold onto its depth?

I took that one. I shared with them that I was drawn to this work partly out of frustration with how much English-language coverage of Japan is written from outside the country and leans reflexively negative. 

I was also motivated by the same historical disputes Sankei has spent decades covering—the Comfort Women issue, Nanjing, and the abductions—precisely because China and Russia continue to revive them in an effort to drive a wedge between Japan and its allies. 

Fitting that kind of material into a sixty-second clip is genuinely hard. I don't think it's impossible. Rather than cling to a format at the cost of losing readers, I told them we'd treat the challenge of conveying real context on new platforms as something to be excited about.

By the end, the questions had drifted well past the day's agenda, into the yen, Japan's social problems, and, for a few students, their own hopes of coming back to work here one day. 

I've knocked on more doors than I'd like to admit to get here, and the job is harder than it looks from the outside. But it's worth it, and if that's the one thing those students walked away with, I'll take it.

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Author: Daniel Manning

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