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Kensuke Nishioka, 42, looked different from the other Japanese journalists I encountered in
In general, Nishioka confided through a translator, he selects his stories with an eye to readership, not social justice—a strategy that keeps him safe and once garnered him an industry award for writing about a prostitution scandal involving former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori. Mostly, yakuza violence is like a nuclear weapon. The chance it’ll be deployed is deterrent enough.
Lawsuits seem to be going the same way. Nishioka co-authored
a book, Getting
SLAPPed, due out in
Nishioka and Ugaya have identified a trend of unnecessary or
inappropriate lawsuits used to punish Japanese journalists and bloggers for
reporting, and fear tools intended to defend privacy and reputation have the
potential to muzzle investigative reporting. Each learned the hard way what
it’s like to get hit with an avalanche of litigation. Nishioka was recently
indicted on 50 counts of defamation—one for every district court in the
country. The union of
Ugaya was in
Fast forward to 2006, when another magazine, Cyzo, called him out of the blue for comment about Oricon. Ugaya responded, and was, Cyzo confirmed much later, misquoted in an article that tried to establish an irregular link between Oricon and a prominent talent agency. It was Ugaya’s first mention of the company in three years, made in an even more critical context, and Oricon sued for 50 million yen (about US$561,000) in damages—not the journalist, editor, or publisher of the Cyzo piece, but Ugaya himself, now freelancing, a notoriously hand-to-mouth endeavor in Japan. What’s more, the charge sheet listed the AERA article among his crimes, until the very end of the proceedings when it was excised because the three-year deadline for filing suit had already passed. The slip was telling. “They got nervous,” Ugaya explains, “presumably because they had never been checked or criticized in public before. They used the lawsuit as a means to intimidate me.”
In April 2008, Oricon was awarded 1 million yen (US$11,000) in the case, and Ugaya’s subsequent countersuit was dismissed. But he was vindicated on appeal, at least on paper. A Tokyo High Court judge negotiated a settlement in August 2009, in which Cyzo (not Oricon) paid Ugaya 5 million yen (US$56,000) and corrected the record about his published remarks. All parties paid their own legal fees. As victories go, it rang hollow: Ugaya estimated his costs (Kazuo Hizumi was one of his three lawyers) and loss of income came to almost double that amount.
The specter of massive legal damages, like yakuza violence,
threatens to puts a damper on the Japanese media. But Nishioka and Ugaya are still
going out of their way to make themselves unpopular with all the wrong people. “I’ve
stopped putting my name into Google,” Nishioka grinned as we conclude out
meeting in
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