By Matt Rusling
Despite all you’ve read over the years about Japanese people being whacky, it’s not they who are weird. Rather, it’s a bunch of foreign journalists who make them look that way.
Japan can at times be a difficult place for foreign reporters looking for a story. The country is stable, the jobless rate is low and mass protests are rare. So what’s a foreign correspondent to do?
One way to jump that hurdle is to write about something isolated and pass it off as a trend. A story in September about Japanese people getting saline injections in their foreheads in the shape of a large, protruding bagel caused a short-lived U.S. media frenzy. Originally reported by National Geographic, the story appeared in numerous places including Anderson Cooper’s RidicuList, which referred to it as a “new cosmetic craze.” It is not.
Listen, no Japanese person in their right mind would be stupid enough to get their forehead bagelized. None of my Japanese friends have heard of the treatment, and I suspect only a handful of people have ever had the temporary procedure. But in a bid to titillate the audience with the eccentric and bizarre (and sell stories) it becomes news. Voila!
The truth is that many American journalists in Asia speak very little of the local language and have limited involvement with locals. Whereas during my nearly three years in Japan I shunned most Westerners and refused to speak English in a social setting, many foreign reporters I knew spent their off hours at bars teeming with expats. The same is true in other Asian countries in which I have spent time.
Readers of major U.S. publications, of course, assume what they are reading is penned by those with a finger on the pulse of the country they cover. Granted, if the story is on business or economics, you don’t have to be an anthropologist to write it, nor do you have to live overseas for a decade. But for reporters writing on issues involving culture, society, social trends and values, a foreign correspondent who associates only with other expats is just a tourist, not a journalist, and is likely misinforming readers.
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