Shinohara, Seoul bureau chief of Japan’s Fuji Television network, was sentenced to two years in prison on December 22, 1993, for illegally obtaining classified military documents and showing them to Japanese Embassy’s personnel. Korean officials had detained Shinohara on June 26, and had arrested him on July 13 on charges of violating the country’s military secrets law. Shinohara, who contributed to Japanese defense periodicals on a freelance basis, maintained that the had collected the information for his own research purposes.