Fear is mounting within Japanese journalism circles, especially among publishers of popular weekly magazines, that their reporting may be severely constrained by the recent tendency of courts to award large compensation claims to plaintiffs in libel suits.
A case in point is the litigation against Kodansha Ltd., the publisher of the weekly Shukan Gendai magazine, by the Japan Sumo Association, the organizer of Japan's national sport of sumo.
The plaintiff, a group of prominent sumo wrestlers, demanded that the publisher pay more than ¥700 million for defamation resulting from a series of articles in 2007 alleging that some matches had been "rigged."