Japan

New York, November 8, 2010--Burma must immediately release Toru Yamaji, a reporter with Tokyo-based APF news agency, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Yamaji, 49, was detained Sunday in Myawaddy, on the country's eastern border with Thailand while trying to cover the country's first elections in two decades, according to international media reports, which quoted Japan's embassy in Rangoon. He was flown to the capital after being detained, the embassy was reported as saying.

"In life, we only encounter the injustices we were meant to correct."
-Igari Toshiro, ex-prosecutor, leading lawyer in the anti-organized crime movement in Japan (1949-2010)

Igari Toshiro was my lawyer, my mentor, and my friend. In the sixteen years I've been covering organized crime in Japan, I've never met anyone more courageous or inspiring--or anyone who looked as much like a pit-bull in human form.

New York, April 2, 2010—The Committee to Protect Journalists expressed concern today after a Japanese official said freelance Japanese journalist Kosuke Tsuneoka had apparently been kidnapped in northern Afghanistan. 

Kensuke Nishioka, 42, looked different from the other Japanese journalists I encountered in Tokyo during a February trip. Maybe it was the pink hair. “Don’t believe any journalist who says they’re at risk in Japan,” he declared, shrugging off the time, at age 32, when two members of a nationalist group cornered him in his office, broke his ribs, and injured three others in protest against an article he wrote. (Police arrested and charged the attackers.) Or the following year when the Japanese mafia, the yakuza, kidnapped him for a day and threatened him to stop reporting.

Kazuo Hizumi holds his hands up before him, shoulder-width apart. He is demonstrating the size of the blade he kept under his pillow when sleeping at the bureau in his days as a rookie reporter in Osaka in 1987. The journalism community was still reeling from a shooting attack on Asahi Shimbun’s Osaka bureau the month before, which had left one writer injured and another, Tomohiro Kojiri, killed. No one was prosecuted for that murder and the statute of limitations for initiating legal proceedings has passed. 

  A polite man in a suit gave investigative reporter Jake Adelstein the message from a leader of one of Japan’s organized crime groups when he was first working on the story back in 2005: “Erase it, or be erased.” Adelstein backed off, but he didn’t stop researching Tadamasa Goto, a thuggish leader of the Japanese mafia, or yakuza. The second time, there was no message. In 2008, it was Adelstein’s sources who informed him his relentless inquiries had crossed a line. Don’t go home, they told him—Adelstein is originally from Missouri—America would not be far enough.

“The e-mail came in at 8.48 p.m.,” Philippine journalist Maria Ressa told a hushed audience at CPJ’s panel discussion, Press Freedom: On the Frontlines and Online, this morning at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan in Tokyo. She was describing how the first photo from the November massacre in Maguindanao province reached the mainstream Philippine media. Thirty-two journalists and media workers were slaughtered in the deadliest single attack that CPJ has ever recorded.

CPJ’s six-city launch of Attacks on the Press began today in Tokyo, where we hosted a panel discussion with Maria Ressa of ABS-CBN TV in the Philippines, Asahi Shimbun deputy foreign editor Nobuyoshi Sakajiri, NHK Middle East correspondent Nobuhisa Degawa, CPJ China expert Madeline Earp, and me.