The AP on Japan: Childish and inexcusable
Posted by ampontan on Friday, July 20, 2007
THE TOKYO DISTRICT COURT sentenced fund manager Yoshiaki Murakami to two years in prison for insider trading on Thursday.
The Associated Press published a detailed news story on the case. It included this sentence (emphasis mine):
Japan has long tended to frown upon get-rich-quick schemes, fostering docile conformist salarymen.
- Legal systems in most countries do tend to frown on get-rich-quick schemes. Japan is no exception.
- The sentence contains an obvious non sequitur. How does frowning on those schemes foster “docile, conformist salarymen”?
- Put aside the puerility of the statement for the moment. What is a rank generalization of this sort (regarding a nation of 120 million people) doing in a news story to begin with?
- Are we to take this to mean the salarymen in other countries are wild, untamed non-conformists living life on the edge?
- Why does the Associated Press accept and distribute content that a high school English teacher would reject as drivel if it were to be submitted in a composition?
As Michael Crichton has said, “We need to start seeing the media as a bearded nut on the sidewalk.” There’s a reason I’ve put that on the sidebar at right.
I’ll say it again: If your knowledge of Japan is derived from what you read or see in the mass media, then everything you know is wrong.
kyklops said
If your knowledge of Japan is derived from what you read or see in the mass media, then everything you know is wrong.
Unfortunately, it sometimes seems as if the Western media continually cite themselves (NY Times cites AP cites Reuters etc.) as “objective” sources of information when in fact none of them have any idea what they’re talking about. The first few years I lived here I bought into this a bit, mainly because my Japanese wasn’t good enough to get things from “the horse’s mouth.” My Japanese is still bad, but after 9 years my instincts are a lot better, and I can generally tell “shit from shinola” (so to speak).
The quote cited in this post is clearly of the “shit” variety…
James A said
Yes, as everyone knows, illegaly scamming people out of their hard-earned money is the sign of true individualism and an enlightened and advanced society.
The AP and most journalists (as well as academics) still have this rather misguided anarchic 60’s-era ideal of individuality drilled into their heads. And of course the stereotypical view of Japanese as “Teh Borg” goes against their outdated ideology.
slim said
That was an egregious bit of editorializing, to say the least.
But the large majority of the staff of any of these news wires in Tokyo are local hires, mostly bilingual Japanese.
Ken said
Slim is correct about the staffing; the majority of wire service reports out of Japan are written by Japanese nationals. This piece was written by Yuri Kageyama…once again, hitting on the foreign media is a cheap, easy attempt to shoot the fish in a different barrell – the post is so easy it alsmost writes itself. I don’t see that as an excuse for such bad media content, I see it as a lack of management level (the foreigners, like most of the the foreign bloggers) demand for quality content.
That said, this is a stupid statement. It is pretty much groundless and simply a jibe at Japanese workers. They hardly need anyone to defend them, though, since they will simply go on excelling at their work, despite what Ms Kageyama would like to believe (perhaps she is divorced, though I would hate to get into speculation).
I’ll say it again: If your knowledge of Japan is derived from what you read or see in the mass media, then everything you know is wrong.
Lol. Even simple math? You mean, “everything you know [about Japan] is wrong.”
Right?
Paul said
I thought Japan’s population was closer to 127 million.