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 […
Special Reports
[Mythbusters] The Ghosn Show: Commentators See Through ‘One-Man Study in Executive Entitlement’
(Last of two parts) Part 1: [Mythbusters] The Ghosn Show: Less Than A Full Court Presser An […]