Читать книгу Foreign Correspondents in Japan - Charles Foreign Corresponden - Страница 10

Introduction

Half a century, they tell me, is a considerable length of time. In fact, it was fiftytwo years ago when I paid my first visit to the Tokyo Correspondents Club as a twenty-one-year-old Navy lieutenant. My excuse was that I had just been named public information officer for Commander Naval Activities Japan as collateral duty-I was already the admiral's flag lieutenant and aide. The Club had just been set up in one of the old Mitsubishi buildings, dingy but unbombed-off what later became known as Shimbun Alley-and it had already acquired a reputation for reasonably good food, an ample supply of drink, and intermittently raucous behavior. As the Navy's official spokesman in Occupation Japan, I thought it only fitting that I visit the locale to which my press releases were directed and, if possible, meet some of the recipients.

For me the camaraderie of Shimbun Alley offered considerable added value: a welcome release from the "by-the-numbers" Occupation society in which I worked and lived. Here at the bar were the people behind the names I had been reading in the war reporting. By and large, they were friendly and approachable. Most had shared some of my own war experiences. (Some even offered to buy the drinks while discussing them.) Furthermore, theirs seemed like an interesting profession. Why go back to start at a dreary law school when I could, maybe, get a job reporting Japan, learn more while I earned, and, ultimately, exchange stories with the cognoscenti at the bar?

It took me a few years and a bit of pavement-pounding to make the round trip between Tokyo, New York, and back-by way of Time magazine's editorial offices in New York and near drowning in a total immersion course at foreign correspondenting in the London and Paris bureaus. Happily, Shimbun Alley was still in place. Jimmy was serving the drinks, Mary "manned" the world's most efficient telephone exchange, and many of the same denizens gathered around the somewhat refurbished bar. There had been some changes, it is true. The abrupt dismissal of "Father" Dick Hughes, for a time the Club's genial correspondent-manager, had occasioned a bitter controversy among the members. Some had left the Club altogether. The marks of the Great Schism remained for some time, with various anathemas-serious press club disputes are best described in theological terms-still echoing in the corridors.

By and large, however, the Club remained a kind of band of brothers, with sisters now added-Nora Waln the matriarch, Charlotte Knight the indefatigable military expert, and Allen Raymond's wife, Maggie, our unofficial duenna. (Marguerite Higgins, the Herald Tribune's femme fatale with the ever-available notebook, would soon join them.) Keyes Beech dug out the embarrassing stories, Joe Fromm kept up our contacts with academic theorists, Burton Crane told the Occupation generals how badly they were running the economy. Over it all loomed the shadow of Douglas MacArthur, a k a "the General." If there was ever a marshal with a PR release folded inside his baton, he was the one. A firm believer in the deployment of numerically superior forces, he kept the wire service bureau chiefs close by his side. (As a very junior magazine reporter, I was never given an audience.)

In June of 1950 the shock of the Korean War exploded our closed little universe and overnight turned the Club into an international institution. We all became war correspondents-which most of us had been for starters-and with a mixture of excitement and reluctance got the old uniforms out of the mothballs. (I myself went off on the last Air Force flight into beleaguered Seoul without my typewriter-that precious instrument having already been sent off to the countryside in Karuizawa, along with my tennis racquets, for use on a long-planned vacation.) Like Dalmatians running after fire trucks, the big names of journalism started flying in to join us. We even attracted Randolph Churchill, who exited the war rather quickly, as I recall, with a minor wound in the foot. The networks dispatched their best and brightest-vast stores of camera equipment became the Club's unanticipated baggage problem. Life sent in a small platoon of photographers to supplement Carl Mydans (who had previously run Time Inc.'s bureau) and Dave Duncan, who originally came to Tokyo to photograph the Ueno museum's art collections. Competition was rife. At one point, following the Inchon landing in September 1950-one of MacArthur's better ideas-I had to report to New York that five of Life's best photographers were with one Marine company, which they assumed would be the first to break into Seoul. Enough of reminiscence.

However badly the war ground on-and we lost some fine correspondents there, my friends Wilson Fielder, Ken Inouye, and Ian Morrison among them-the Tokyo Correspondents Club remained an indispensable outpost and staging area for those who covered it. For visitors to Japan, whether newsmen, business people, or VIPs in general, the Club was the place to go and, indeed, to learn something. For over the years the Club functioned as the one forum in Tokyo where people of some news value went to make statements, to answer questions, or even to announce policies. It thus fulfilled much the same function for Japan as the National Press Club in Washington, even though its origins and membership remained largely international in character.

One reason for the delay in organizing an official (or, as always, semiofficial) national press club in Tokyo was the peculiar organization of Japan's Fourth Estate. Despite the intense business competition among Japan's huge national dailies-which continue to dwarf the press organs of other countries in circulation and subsidiary publications-actual reporting was done by hundreds of kisha kurabu, literally, "reporters clubs," composed of representatives of all the newspapers and other publications covering particular offices or institutions, e.g., the Foreign Ministry or the Prime Minister's Office. Covering their chosen area in groups, the reporters in the clubs acted as a kind of journalistic pool, developing in the course of their daily round a symbiotic relationship, to put it mildly, with the prominent folk they reported on. Membership was restricted to Japanese reporters-and with some exceptions still is. Given the parochial nature of this institution, it is easy to understand that an all-embracing national press club was slow to emerge.

Emerge it did, however, and in time to channel the numbers of reportable VIPs journeying to Japan for Osaka's Expo 70 in that year. Later on in the seventies, the new Nippon Kisha Club, along with the offices of the Newspaper Publishers Association (Nihon Shimbun Kyokai) and a Foreign Press Center, moved to a handsome new building in midtown Tokyo. The Press Club had moved, as well. In 1955 the old building was given over to the cranes and bulldozers; Shimbun Alley is now only a long-faded memory. After several temporary moves, the Club established itself in its present ample quarters at the Mitsubishi Denki Building, in downtown Tokyo's Yurakucho. It remains a permanent presence in Tokyo, with an ambience and influence probably unique in the world-certainly in East Asia.

One asks: Why? Press clubs tend to be volatile but generically fragile organizations, quick to organize but hard to maintain. Their governance is not easy. Reporters, indeed "media" people in general-I suppose we must use that all-inclusive and slightly demeaning term-tend to be individualists or at least like to think that we are. Despite all the communal story-telling of the happy hour, strong and often intractable opinions will invariably surface at club meetings. Shouts, imprecations, frantic arm-waving, and widespread gnashing of teeth are not unknown. For years I have marveled at the Jekyll-Hyde transformation that occurs in normally affable, agreeable journalists given unsupervised access to Robert's Rules of Order. Finances pose a constant problem. As bills mount and membership shrinks, the fateful question that has slain its ten thousands arises: "Should we admit advertising and PR people?" generally followed by "Are we losing our character?" or "What is truth?"

The Foreign Correspondents Club has skirted both these pitfalls with some skill over the years. Associate members have been cheerfully welcomed, while successive treasurers and their accompanying staff-can one ever forget the days when the redoubtable Mr. Ling held the fort for financial rectitude?-have kept the organization reasonably solvent. There have been bumps and crises all along the way. There will doubtless be more. But members have generally rallied around at moments of crisis. And officers and Board members have taken their responsibilities seriously. No mean feat in an all-volunteer organization.

But there is a larger reason, I submit, behind the Club's success, not to say survival, through more than five decades of activity, when so many similar organizations have faltered or failed. That is our abiding sense of mission. In the early years of its existence the Press Club stood for free expression and an open exchange of views-a free market of public opinion-against the Father-knows-best restrictions of a U.S. military Occupation whose generals and colonels sometimes forgot the democracy they were preaching. Despite its many flaws, history will judge the Occupation a uniquely successful experiment in transplanted principles. The reporters who told its story, critically and honestly, deserve their share of this credit.

Once the country's independence was restored, a renewed and in its way unique Japanese ruling establishment-business, bureaucracy, and politicians working in tandem-went on to write a new chapter in world economic history. For all the bumbling of Japan's political leadership at present, the high-growth "economic miracle" of the sixties and seventies still deserves the name. Yet material prosperity gradually brought with it a pervasive political lassitude on the part of voters and politicians. Even in the midst of a continuing economic depression and a growing social malaise, one observes a national tendency to coast and self-congratulate on past achievements, while overlooking the challenges and opportunities of a globalizing economic and political world.

In all of this the Japanese press has been something less than a vigilant watchdog of civil liberties and a crusader against political malfeasance. Information is generally spoon-fed to the electorate, particularly if it is derogatory. Foreigners remain relatively unwelcome in Japan's public conversation, except when quoted as exemplars of "outside pressure." Even today the kisha kurabu system continues to shut out foreign reporters from what is regarded as purely domestic business-in sharp contrast to the freedom given to foreign reporters in the United States and other developed countries. Here the Foreign Correspondents Club continues to fight the good fight against censorship and the suppression of news, however indirectly this may be done. Thus foreign reporters, often with individual Japanese journalists as allies, represent a force for ventilating the closed air of Japan's still tight island society. The Press Club has in a sense institutionalized their influence. Through its news events and meetings as well as its continuing protests against the seclusiveness of Japanese media institutions, the Club has continued the advocacy of a free and unhampered press which it began in the old days of the U.S. Occupation. It is thus far more than a social institution. It has a role to play in the life of the country whose hospitality it enjoys.

True, the old free-swinging exchanges at the bar are infrequent. So is the conspicuous alcoholic intake which marked the ancient war correspondent. At some point in the early seventies, when I asked why there was no portable bar at one of the regular members' interview sessions, John Rich, then the Club president, took me aside and explained, "It's a different crowd now." There is much to be said for the new crowd. Correspondents in Tokyo now tend to be fluent or at least passable in Japanese, with a good deal of academic Asian studies behind them. Some know Chinese as well. The new breed's reporting I find good and stimulating, if often different from the old. The real fun of being a journalist in Japan is that you can discover the country for yourself and report your findings. The search for the real Japan is rewarding and without end. You are after all in a nation society with possibly the world's strongest cultural gravitational pull. And yet the story of Japan can no longer be told without constant reference to the other Pacific Basin nations (America included) around it.

With "virtually" everyone on the Internet and computer traffic between correspondent and home office almost incessant, the Club is not the same trading post of stories and sources that it once may have been. But it remains a marketplace of ideas as well as a meeting place of people. Even those smiling pictures of long-gone members seem to be struggling to come off the wall, anxious to horn in on the conversation. Fifty years on, it's still a good place to come to.

-Frank Gibney