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Reporters Without Borders on Discrimination Against Freelance Journalists in Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

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“Kisha (reporter) Clubs” are a much-discussed and controversial part of Japan's media environment. Laurie Anne Freeman's Closing the Shop: Information Cartels and Japan's Mass Media argues that these groups, which organize press access to officials in government, police and other areas of Japanese public life, limit contact to a core of “approved” journalists from Japan's big media organs, effectively cutting off freelancers and foreign journalists and freezing out anyone deemed too critical. Since the March 11, 2011 disasters, several of Japan's major newspapers, notably the Mainichi and Tokyo Shimbun, have provided critical reportage on TEPCO and government silences and irresponsibility. Freelancers, as outlined in a May 23 press release from Reporters Without Borders, however, have been denied adequate access and another potential avenue for critical examination of the government and TEPCO response to the nuclear disaster has been cut off. The Paris-based international organization is dedicated to defend freedom of the press, journalists and netizens world wide.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 54 , December 2012 , e114
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2012

Footnotes

Between 2012 and 2014 we posted a number of articles on contemporary affairs without giving them volume and issue numbers or dates. Often the date can be determined from internal evidence in the article, but sometimes not. We have decided retrospectively to list all of them as Volume 10, Issue 54 with a date of 2012 with the understanding that all were published between 2012 and 2014.' As footnote