Japanese news conferences illustrate government's struggle to grasp social distancing
With the pandemic showing no signs of abating, government and ministry officials are scrambling to rectify the high-risk nature of their news conferences.
Who suffers the most from the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics?
Media outlets have long been trying to figure out what cancellation or postponement of the games would mean to Japan economically. They now have a much better idea.
As media layoffs grow, U.S. newspapers are pleading for urgent relief
The ailing U.S. news industry, struggling during a pandemic-induced economic slump, is pressing for new government relief as media outlets scramble to keep covering the health crisis. News outlets have begun layoffs, furloughs and pay cuts even as readers increasingly turn to the media for ...
Winning the media battle against COVID-19
On March 12, the Sankei Shimbun ran an editorial urging the media to refrain from criticizing the government for its handling of the coronavirus emergency. The Sankei Shimbun was elaborating on a complaint made by former TV announcer Yoshiko Sakurai that the press was ...
Face masks can foster a false sense of security
What’s happening in Japan is written all over our faces — our blank, expressionless, masked faces. Never before, it seems safe to say, have so many people gone about masked. Thus we confront the microbes that assault us. Are the microbes disconcerted? It seems not. “As self-protection, ...
Postponement of 2020 Olympics sends social media into a frenzy
It was only a matter of time before the COVID-19 pandemic forced the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics to change tack. After months of speculation, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced Tuesday night that the games would be postponed until 2021. Online media in Japan and ...
Dramatizing the reality of a nuclear meltdown
As with many feature films based on real-life incidents, "Fukushima 50," which opened nationwide March 6 and depicts the actions of the men who struggled to contain the disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant following the Great East Japan Earthquake of ...
Why are Japan’s millennials shunning alcohol?
Some time before the coronavirus outbreak put a damper on this year’s hanami (blossom viewing) parties and other social activities, the media had already noted that the decline in alcohol consumption by younger Japanese has been accelerating. This phenomenon even made the front page ...
China on Wednesday expelled American journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal in the communist government's most severe move against foreign media in recent memory. The drastic move came as the two powers feud over the coronavirus pandemic, ...
Facebook Inc. said a filter for combating spam on the social network was beset by a bug that mistakenly eliminated legitimate news stories and other posts, miscategorizing them as content that violates its rules. Several users complained on social media that their posts, including those ...
The panic buying of toiletries: It's like 1973 all over again
Where are all the masks? And where's the toilet paper? Nikkei Business (Feb. 28) suggested that panic buying in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, which also occurred in eastern Japan following the catastrophic earthquake of March 2011, may be influenced in part by ...
Tokyo organizing exec says he will bring up possible delay of Olympics, stoking confusion
A member of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee's executive board said Wednesday he will raise the topic of a possible delay of this summer's games due to the coronavirus outbreak during a board meeting later this month. "We need to deal accordingly with (the crisis) ...
