Saturday, June 28, 2008

Please Don't Change the Facts

Memoirs of a Mercenary Journalist
at the World's Largest Newspaper


By Jonathan Vankin

The Yomiuri Shimbun building, headquarters of the world's largest-circulation daily newspaper, stands in the center of Tokyo's financial district, Otemachi. The Nikkei Stock Exchange sits just around the corner. The Bank of Japan, a few blocks away. Directly across the street looms KDD Kaikan, corporate home of Japan's long-distance telephone giant, its roof raked with antennae and satellite dishes.
A short stroll to the east lies the vast, imposing, moat-ringed palace grounds of the Emperor of Japan.

The blaring neon of Ginza, the Blade Runner video screens of Shinjuku, the erotic throb of Shibuya, the Westernized decadence of Roppongi -- forget it. Otemachi is sedate by day, abandoned by night.

Eleven stories of dark steel and glass, devoid of charisma, automatic doors sliding silently onto a marbled lobby. Yomiuri Shimbun headquarters oozes solemnity like the Yomiuri newspaper itself. The Yomiuri is Japan's 10-million circulation gray lady, the largest-circ daily in the world -- the voice of the Japanese establishment.

I'm not used to a necktie clutching at my trachea, especially in humidity like the Tokyo humidity. Nor is a charcoal pinstripe suit specifically my style. But Japan, they tell me, is a formal country and I've got to impress these people because within this building waits a job that would pay me more than twice my highest wage in 10 years on the alternative-weekly circuit in the States.

The job was not, of course, with the actual Yomiuri Shimbun, because I don't speak a lick of Japanese. I was headed for an interview at the eiji shimbun -- English-language newspaper, that is -- known as The Daily Yomiuri. It was May 15, 1993.

Each of Japan's three major national dailies publishes a daily English-language paper. Why they do this is not entirely clear. The English papers are reliable financial losers. Presumably it has something to do with prestige. Their motives are not important to me now. What is important is that there was some problem with my rewriting test.

Translated copy from the parent paper makes up the bulk of The Daily Yomiuri. Because the translators are all Japanese rendering stories into a language not their own, the main job of the foreign staff is rewriting those translations.

As I am about to find out, rewriting at the Daily Yomiuri is not a simple matter of craftsmanship. It is a delicate political procedure.

The Yomiuri building's facade of gravitas is just that: a facade. Inside, soot streaks the white walls, ceiling lights blink unpredictably. Ribbons of cigarette smoke waft from beneath closed doors.

A chemical scent hangs throughout the building, an insidious blend of Mild Seven cigarettes, ink, sweat and decrepit air conditioning. The Daily Yomiuri offices are on the fourth floor. I was inside the building just twice before and its labyrinthine corridors and multiple staircases confused me. This time, I went the way I had gone before -- from the third floor, through the cafeteria and up the stairs.

The elevator on the third floor opens next to the "dormitory." Late-shift workers from the basement printing plant snooze on bunked cots, snoring. When they wake up, they throw on yokota (bathrobes) and parade down the hall to the sento to wash up -- usually with cigarettes smoldering between their lips. Then they brush their teeth, cough and spit into sinks that line a stretch of the hallway.

The sink-stretch leads straight to the cafeteria where after you run a gauntlet of near-naked, smoking, snoring, spitting middle-aged men who reek of printer's ink, you dine. A mere 280 yen buys a plate of curry: a thick brown gravy loaded with stinging spices and scraps of gray pork slopped over a thick wad of sticky white rice. The curry is somewhat more edible than it looks. Somewhat. But it's got to be the cheapest meal in Tokyo.

Unqualified Stories Must Not Become Published

The Daily's newsroom is a large, open area crammed with long desks, computers and people sitting around. A few desks, occupied by people actually composing pages, are topped by large Macs. The rest have glowing, green-screen Wang terminals that look like they were state-of-the-art in about 1982.

In the far corner an small area is partitioned off by high cubicle walls. There's a couch, a small coffee table and two chairs. Here I sit, faced by Mr. Fujimoto, the managing editor whose English is fairly good, and Mr. Nakazono, the editor-in-chief, whose English is a little sketchy. The boss at the newspaper, as in any Japanese company, is addressed as the "bucho." Nakazono is definitely the bucho, his countenance as grave as the Yomiuri building itself.

Mr. Fujimoto smiles and embarks pleasantly on a lecture about the need for teamwork in a Japanese newspaper.

Mr. Nakazono appears grim. He, too, recites doctrine on the necessity of cooperation and teamwork.

"This may be different," he says, "from how you do it in America."

I don't like this. I'm already nervous. I'd been told over the phone that the downfall of my rewrite test was that I changed the lead of the story.

Changed the lead? The story had no lead. The first sentence began, "The plan states..." What plan? I didn't find out until two graphs down. So I moved that information up to the top. That's the lead. Easy as high school journalism, right?

"You must not change the facts," Mr. Nakazono says to me.

"The facts? No. Certainly not. I would never change the facts."

"Sometimes there is a problem," he continues, "with rewriters who change the facts."

"Well I would never do that," I respond. "I would never change the facts. The facts are very important."

They glance at each other suspiciously.

"The most important part of the story," I add, filling the brief but uncomfortable silence. "In my opinion. The facts, I mean."

Mr. Nakazono nods knowingly.

"You must communicate with the translators because many of the translators do not speak very good English."

"Oh."

"Sometimes," Mr. Nakazono notes ominously, leaning slightly forward, "unqualified articles will become published."

"I see."

I am sweating. Nakazono won't let up on this "changing the facts" thing. He seems to be implying that I had somehow deliberately altered the test story to suit some secret, personal agenda.

I was ready to pack up and leave -- and start looking for a cheap plane fare back home. But Mr. Fujimoto said, "When can you start?"

"How about June 1?" I reply. They then explained to me that, like all new hires, I would be placed on three months of probation. After that, I'd have a "50-50" chance of receiving a one-year contract or being told, simply, sayonara.

As I rise to leave, Mr. Nakazono tells me, "We will be watching."

The Nanjing Massacre Did Not Happen

I have never considered myself a confrontational person by nature, though my previous employment record might not bear me out on that. Nonetheless, because I was on "probation" I made a conscious decision to lay low. It was no problem for me, but for many of my new colleagues keeping an easygoing demeanor was no easy task.
My friend Al was a veteran newspaperman in his mid '50s. He'd been the editor of my hometown paper in Massachusetts when I was a kid. Somehow, these 15 years later, he had landed in Japan. It was Al who introduced me to the Daily Yomiuri management, landing me the job interview.

Now that I was hired, at least provisionally, he warned me not to take the job too seriously.

"I don't know what they're doing here," he told me. "but it's not journalism."

Al had trouble taking his own advice. An ex-Marine who'd been stationed near Mt. Fuji during his tour of duty it was his nature to be stoic and silent as a tree. Nonetheless, at least once a day he'd erupt in a paroxysm of indignation and storm out of the office. A half-hour later he'd come back and resume his position at his desk as if nothing had happened.

"Hey Al. What was that all about?" I'd ask.

"The usual."

His answer rarely revealed any richer detail than that.

Al must have seemed the prototypical rage-driven American to our bemused Japanese managers. Then there was Mark, who represented the British upper-class. He never raised his voice. He just smoked and made sardonic remarks. His father founded and edited London's Independent newspaper and was probably headed for knighthood. The Daily Yomiuri had a deal with the Independent where every week it ran a supplement consisting of several pages from the British paper. The Independent's Tokyo correspondent had an office in the Yomiuri Shimbun building. Mark had no worries about his job.

After I'd been at The Daily Yomiuri a while, a guy named John appeared out of nowhere. He was at least 40, mild-mannered, smoked -- but not as much as Mark or a Japanese person. He seemed to speak Japanese very, very well, though he claimed never to have studied. I think he also spoke Vietnamese. He said that he'd been in Vietnam -- not during the war, but recently -- as some sort of correspondent. He said he'd been all around Asia, "here and there." He was not specific about what he'd been doing, though word had it that his journalistic credentials were good. He never caused controversy. He just did his job and observed.

I think most foreign, English-language newspapers have a guy like John.

The most notorious member of the foreign staff was a tall (at least a couple of inches taller than my 6'2"), domineering Canadian whose last name was Bosnitch and who wore solid black every day, operated rave parties at night, squatted in a condemned apartment and made it his personal crusade in life to correct the (in his view) distorted media perception of the Bosnian Serbs. With Bosnitch, inevitably, any conversation devolved into a tirade on Bosnia, and how the Serbs got a bad rap.

But Bosnitch was passionate about most everything. It just happened that Bosnia was what he was most passionate about. In fact, after he finally quit the Yomiuri (a long time coming), he somehow scammed a digital camera and access to a satellite uplink and marched off to the war zone as a "freelance journalist."

Bosnitch got on everybody's bad side -- everybody on the Japanese staff, anyway -- with his quixotic crusade to set right the shortcomings of Japanese journalism. His main weapon, besides his rather obstreperous demeanor, was a bellicose sarcasm. He strutted around the office bellowing, "Please don't change the facts!" to any rewriter in sight.

I, on the other hand, attempted to affect an eyebrow-cocking demeanor of detached amusement. During the 1993 Diet elections, I rewrote a political column which purported to analyze which factions of the then-ruling (but highly factionalized) Liberal Democratic Party would support which candidates.

"The Mitsuzuka faction," the column opined, "will likely support Mitsuzuka, while the Gotoda faction is expected to back Gotoda." And so on.

The columnist was the political editor of the Yomiuri Shimbun.

Noting the obvious was a Yomiuri specialty. A story that ran on the front page soon after I started at the Daily Yo explained how 66 Japanese police with an election team in Cambodia would soon be returning to Japan. However, the one policeman killed in an ambush earlier would not be returning.

While most of the translators were young, some were getting on and had been at the paper forever. These were the men (and the older ones were all men) who precipitated most of what we foreigners interpreted as cross-cultural conflicts. In retrospect, these scuffles may have been simple ego clashes. But in Japan it is the foreigner's prerogative to ascribe broad anthropological significance to the most minor details of everyday etiquette.

The terror of the translation corps was Mr. Sugaya, a little (about 5'3") gentleman of around 60 years who, legend had it, often brought female rewriters to tears and, in male ones induced fantasies of grabbing him by the ankles and dangling his tiny body out the fourth-floor window. His criticism was ruthless, withering. He'd been known, I heard, to call rewriters "stupid," "incompetent." He'd hiss that you ought to get back on the plane and go back whatever barbarian hell you came from because you obviously didn't understand Japan.

If these bullying tactics brought him no satisfaction, I was warned, Sugaya would run to the bucho and snitch that you'd "changed the facts."

I never had a problem with Mr. Sugaya. I simply deferred to him most of the time and made sure to tell him how skillful his translations were (they were pretty decent). He returned the favor by complimenting my rewrites -- something which, by all accounts, he rarely did.

I rewrote one story of his which contained some mention of the Nanjing Massacre. Or, as his story referred to it, the "alleged" Nanjing Massacre. I wanted to cut the "alleged." Mr. Sugaya was insistent.

"There is no proof," he said. "It is a matter of opinion."

The chief rewriter that day, a 20-year Daily Yomiuri stalwart named Marty backed me up.

"There are films of it!" he said. "With soldiers throwing babies in the air and catching them on their bayonets."

"It is a matter of opinion."

I did a good job rewriting. I'd had more newspaper experience in the States than almost anyone on the foreign staff and I'd already published a book. I was careful not to cause trouble and thus upset the harmony of the office. Still, as the weeks flipped by, no one gave me any hint of whether I'd be offered a contract or not.

My Blood is Mistakenly Taken

Suddenly one day in mid-August I was told that I would be given the mandatory company physical. A few mornings later, another new hire and I were sent down to the infirmary located, without irony, adjacent to the third-floor cafeteria. I passed the physical, in excellent health. The doctor assured me that the X-rays of my lungs were "almost normal." Generally, when my lungs or other vital organs are concerned, I'd prefer the X-rays to be completely normal. But in this case, I wrote it off, after a brief moment of alarm, as a language barrier difficulty.
They took a sample of my blood, a hearty dollop. Two minutes later they took another one.

"Why are you taking a second blood sample?" I asked the nurse.

"Aaaaahhh," she said, cocking her head to one side as she searched for the correct English word. "Mistake."

"Mistake?"

"So so so so. Mistake."

"What kind of mistake did you make with my blood? What kind of mistake could there possibly be?"

It was hopeless. I spent the rest of the day feeling kind of dehydrated.

My co-hire was Alec, the son of a prominent American journalist. His mother was Japanese and he had left a career-track job on a metro daily to come here in search of his roots. His search lasted about five months, and didn't turn up much. Mr. Nakazono, in particular, had been very excited to land Alec. He was hired through the Yomiuri Shimbun's New York office (a mark of prestige in management's eyes) and granted a work visa while still in the States. I, on the other hand, was forced to work illegally on a tourist visa for six months while the Daily Yomiuri management dragged its feet on helping to set up my working papers.

But when Alec came up against the unfamiliar realities of Japanese journalism, he found he lacked the stomach for them.

There are a few basic differences between Japanese news reporting and the way it's done back here, in the United States.

In Japanese newspaper stories the lead, or what should be the lead, is almost always near the bottom, or ensconced somewhere in the middle of the story.

People are rarely if ever quoted by name, even in the most innocuous circumstances. Quotes are generally attributed to "a 42-year-old housewife," "a 27-year-old company employee" or some other maddeningly murky I.D. Politicians are hardly ever quoted directly. Even in the midst of hotly contested campaigns, reporters are content to quote candidates' spokesmen. Anonymously, of course. Even the New York Times and Washington Post, with their fondness for anonymous leakers, can't match the Japanese press for sheer vagueness.

Part of the problem may be that Japanese reporters are bound by the same codes of politeness as the rest of Japanese society. Confrontations, even the most harmless kind, are anathema.

I had a run-in with an otherwise perfectly lovely young woman named Ms. Shigesawa.

She was one of the Yomiuri regulars -- a recent Yomiuri Shimbun hire sent to the Daily Yomiuri to improve her English as they groomed her for an assignment overseas or in the business section of the Japanese paper. About one-third of the translators were Yomiuri inductees (the rest were contract employees).

Other than the fact that Ms. Shigesawa smoked those noxious Mild Seven cigarettes nonstop, I always liked her and had an easy time rewriting her stories. Unlike some of her colleagues, she seemed genuinely interested in producing good journalism, in whatever language. But she was also protective, particularly of her original stories written in English. She couldn't comprehend why those stories needed rewrites, too.

She'd interviewed the editor of a sort-of left-wing (by Japanese standards) newsweekly called Friday. I found the piece intriguing. The guy delivered some stinging critiques of the Japanese media -- opinions not unlike my own.

In her piece, Shigesawa identified the man as "a reportage writer specializing in journalism." I changed it to "journalist." Apparently, however, that's not precisely what she meant. Instead, she explained, he was an author of books about journalism. He should be correctly identified, she said, as "an author of books."

Fair enough. What books has he written?

"I have no idea," replied Ms. Shigesawa.

"Hmm. OK. Do you know, at least, how many books he's written?"

"I have no idea."

She explained that she had tried to track down any books written by this fellow, but had been unable to find any.

"I think he may be unsuccessful," she said.

I tried to convey that, in my opinion, it's not correct to identify a man who has never "successfully" published a book as "an author of books." But this concept baffled her totally.

"It is his occupation," she said.

"Um, not if he's never written a book, it's not."

"His occupation is what he says it is."

"But Shigesawa-san -- what if he's lying?"

She pondered that for a moment. Then the answer came to her. If he was lying about his publication credits, that's OK because "no one is harmed."

I detected a cultural gap between us.

This exchange went on for a while until finally, Ms. Shigesawa stated, flatly: "This is how we do it here."

And at that point she agreed to call her subject back and ask him the titles of his books. Turns out he'd written three and he did not seem particularly offended to be asked. Ms. Shigesawa was pleased that she'd called. Still, I felt like Captain Kirk, violating the Prime Directive for the millionth time.

I Am Really, Really Sorry

During my three months of probation, Mr. Nakazono -- who held my financial fate in his hands -- spoke not a word to me. He sat at a desk against the back wall of the office, dead center, where he could survey the scene. But I never saw him watching me, as promised. In fact, I never saw him doing much of anything. I did witness him remove his shoe, prop his foot on his desk and clip his toenails. Several times I saw him sleeping, which he did while sitting in his chair with his head tossed back and his mouth hanging open.
Would I be offered a contract or not? He'd be the last person to tell me.

As it turned out, all the suspense was for naught. One day, just shy of my "anniversary date," Sept. 1, the bucho strolled over to my cubicle and instructed me to wear a suit to work the next day. I was going upstairs for my "job interview" with some important men from the Yomiuri Shimbun. The interview was a formality, but a my usual T-shirt with jeans and no socks was not fittingly formal.

The next day I slid myself back into that charcoal pinstripe suit.

Mr. Nakazono, suddenly beaming with a look of pride that I found a little disconcerting, walked me to a fifth-floor conference room and introduced me to two smiling men with impossibly important-sounding titles. The important men asked me penetrating questions (through a translator) such as, "How do you like the Daily Yomiuri?" and "How long do you plan to stay at the Daily Yomiuri?" to which I gave, I assume, the correct answers.

Looking at my resume, one of the men asked if my university, Brandeis University, was named after a type of brandy. That got a big laugh all around. I said, to my knowledge, Brandeis was named after a famous judge and not after an alcoholic beverage of any kind.

I was in.

The rewriting assignment lasted until the end of 1993. Mercifully, they moved me onto the World News page where I dealt primarily with AP and Reuter wire copy and learned how to use Quark XPress. I'd also served in the sports section from time to time, whenever a sports guy went on vacation. Midway through 1994, I moved permanently into the sports department. I wrote lots of baseball stories and learned to read Japanese baseball boxscores. I still can't order spaghetti in Japanese, but give me a boxscore and I can tell you that Akiyama homered and Ichiro stole a base.

My salary was 5.5 million yen per year, which at the time, when the Yen was soaring ever upward on the exchange market, was somewhere between $57,000 and $60,000. My previous position, as news editor of a prominent alternative weekly in Silicon Valley, paid me $26,800. After one year at the Yomiuri, my contract was renewed for 5.75 million yen.

Mr. Nakazono rarely spoke to me, except on rare occasions when he thought I needed discipline. Once I had to leave the country for a visa change. After clearing everything with the management -- especially the fellow who made the daily work schedule -- I arranged to spend the weekend in L.A.

When I returned, Nakazono summoned me to his desk. Several managers gathered around, including the schedule-man. Nakazono spoke to me through a translator. He told me that I had been scheduled to work those days when I was out of the country. I insisted -- rightly -- that I had not been.

"You must come to work when you are scheduled," Nakazono told me.

"I'm aware of that. I certainly would never fail to show up for work when I'm scheduled."

"You were scheduled and you did not show up for work."

"There's some misunderstanding. I'm sure I was not scheduled."

"If you do not come to work when you are scheduled we will dock your pay."

Then, in a flash, I saw exactly what they wanted from me.

"You know," I said, "I'm very sorry. I'm just really, really sorry. I am so sorry."

"That's all right," said Mr. Nakazono. "Don't worry about it."

I didn't have much more interaction with Nakazono than that. After a year, he was promoted to his dream job: bucho of the Yomiuri Shimbun's foreign news division. The Daily Yomiuri got a new bucho who didn't say much to me either. But he seemed like a very nice guy.

At the end of September, 1995 I handed in my resignation and left the Daily Yomiuri, and Japan. In Japan, when people move, rather than selling their things they tend to leave a lot of stuff on the street where garbage collectors or stray foreigners can pick it up. That's where I left my charcoal pinstripe suit.

-30-
Copyright © 2008 by Jonathan Vankin
All rights reserved.