[Mythbusters] NYT Reporter Goes Round and Round Looking for Ways to Denigrate Japan
Shortly before the Toshimaen amusement park in Tokyo closed on August 31, Motoko Rich expressed an interest in the [&h
Culture
[Mythbusters] If You Want to Understand Fertility Rates, Stop Focusing on Japan
After more than a decade of creeping up from a historical low of 1.26 in 2005, the Japanese fertility […]
[Mythbusters] Tokyo Re-elects a Woman, Yet Foreign Media Sticks to Stereotyping ‘Backward’ Japan
On July 5, Yuriko Koike, the first female governor of Tokyo, won re-election by a wide margin. As widely […]
[Mythbusters] Voting in Japan: Pencils-and-Paper System Isn’t Broken, Don’t Fix It
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, foreign commentators have been ridiculing the Japanese people for reliance on retro
Culture
[Mythbusters] Reporting — and Exploiting — the Tragic Death of Hana Kimura
On May 23, Hana Kimura, a member of the cast for the Fuji Television series Terrace House distributed […]
[Mythbusters] Paper Jam: Foreign Reporting is Short on Facts About Fax in Japan
In the two decades I taught my course “Japan in the Foreign Imagination” at Keio and other Japanese universities, [&he
Court Battle Over Comfort Women Film Taints Japanese University’s Research Ethics Record
Until countries went into various levels of lockdown, a film dealing with the comfort women issue was being screened [
Coronavirus
[Mythbusters] Self-righteous Foreign Correspondents in Japan Claim Freedom to Be Offensive
On May 21, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan (FCCJ) announced that it had removed from its website the [&helli
Coronavirus
[Mythbusters] Why Trash-Talk Japan and Feed the NYT’s Blatantly Racist Editorializing?
On February 26, the New York Times (NYT) published an opinion piece by Koichi Nakano, identified only […]
Special Reports
[Mythbusters] ‘Comfort Women’: The Chilling Effect of Letting the Courts Settle Historical Issues
In 1991, Takashi Uemura wrote an article based on a recording that was made by the first of the […]
Coronavirus
[Mythbusters] Cliché Journalism Infects Foreign Reporting on Japan
English language coverage of the coronavirus issue shows once again the poor quality of English language reporting on
Special Reports
[Mythbusters] First, A Flag. Now, A Moustache. What Will South Koreans Whinge About Next?
In the last two months of 2019, two South Korean complaints — allegedly based on the period during which Korea […