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Reporting the Nationality of Criminals/Victims

There’s an article today in the English edition of Mainichi Shinbun with the headline “Japanese man arrested for knife attack on foreign lover and son.” Knowing that there is often a difference between the style of reporting the same stories in Mainichi’s different language editions, I checked the original article in Mainichi’s Japanese edition:

Sure enough, there was a significant difference. The English article reported that those involved were “foreigners,” while the Japanese version directly stated that they were Chinese. I’m not really sure what prompted them to shift the article from “Chinese” to “Foreigner,” or why they chose to mention that the attacker was a “Japanese man” in the headline (nationalities are not mentioned in the Japanese headline). Anyone got a theory about why they changed it?

17 comments - What do you think? Posted by James - January 1, 2008 at 11:33 pm

Categories: Foreigners in Japan Tags: chinese, foreigners, japan, mainichi, media

http://son-of-gadfly-on-the-wall.blogspot.com Jun Okumura

There is no discrepancy, unless you consider the substitution of “foreigners” for “Chinese”. What the Japanese article says is that “all the members of the household of the [35 year old] man” were Chinese.

James

unless you consider the substitution of “foreigners” for “Chinese”.

That is the primary difference I see. In the Japanese language version of the article, their nationality is specifically mentioned, while the English version uses the term “foreigners.”

For some reason Mainichi’s English editorial staff felt their country of origin should not be mentioned, but they still felt it important enough to make the distinction that they were foreigners. Moreover, they wrote a headline that emphasized the Japanese attacking foreigner angle of the story.

http://son-of-gadfly-on-the-wall.blogspot.com Jun Okumura

add “as such” to the end of the first sentence.
ひろ

英語ではうまく説明ができないので日本語で失礼します。

毎日新聞はやや左翼的な位置の新聞です。
日本の左翼メディアの特徴は反米、親中国、親韓国で、時に反日とも取れる行動をしています。

中国人を外国人と表記する目的はよくわかりませんが、
理由の一つには記者の思想が反映したんでしょう。

http://www.equinoxio.org/ Julián Ortega Martínez

Left-wing? Mainichi maybe somewhat “left-of-centre”, but not “leftist” like Asahi or, obviously, Akahata.

If they’re so “pro-China”, why do they publish stuff like this or this?

Besides, if it were so “pro-China”, why does MDN hide the Chinese nationality of the victims? I’d understand if they were the “criminals”…

As James says in another comment here at this same post, it seems MDN tries to “clean” their headlines for some kind of “political correctness”. Is “political correctness” a “leftist” thing? Is Mainichi Daily News more “leftist” than Mainichi Shimbun?

mozo

Mainichi is not so ideollogically consistant newspaper and it is said that its journalists can write what they want more freely than those of Asahi and Yomiuri. They may range from leftists to moderate conservatives. I agree that Mainichi is generally left-of-centre newspaper, but the apparent inconsistancy of its op-ed sometimes surprises me.

http://www.japaneconomynews.com/ Ken

I think mozo’s right here – the Mainichi can be all over the place at times.

And the Asahi leftist? I dunno – they’re pretty infamous for using union-busting techniques.

ひろ

“やや左翼的“ is “left-of-centre“.
sorry,i can’t explain well.

うまく英語で説明できないです…
もともと派閥があって記者によって大きく揺れるんですよ。
上村幸治さん(元中国総局長)のように中国批判をする人もいるんですが、
全体的に見ると少ない印象です。(mainiti have more left-winger than right-winger )

mozo

ひろさん
　毎日の日本語版と英語版の内容はけっこう違いますね。逐次的な翻訳ではなく、英語版スタッフはある程度の裁量権をもって記事を構成しているみたいです。編集体制がどうなっているのかよく分かりませんが、善かれ悪しかれ、なんといいますか、外国人にウケそうな紙面づくりになっていますね。
　毎日は日本語版の方でも外国人が関係する犯罪報道についてそれほど明確なガイドラインはないような印象を受けますし、また英語版だと外国人スタッフも多いでしょうから、全体として社としての一貫性みたいなものは特にないんだろうなと思います。おっしゃるように記者さん次第でしょうね。
　それとこのケースに関しては加害者が日本人で被害者が外国人なわけで記者さんがPC的配慮から国籍を伏せるというのもなさそうな気がしますけれども。たぶん。

J-ude

Well, I think the general reason is that Japanese businesses tend to have some knowledge of political correctness in the west, and thus simply used foreigner to avoid criticisms that arise whenever non-Japanese nationality is mentioned.
…

The woman was Japanese?
http://myso-calledjapaneselife.blogspot.com/ Shari

I don’t think too much should be made of this. I worked in publishing for over a decade in Japan and things like this tend to be idiosyncratic and reflect the personal beliefs about the way things “should” be said by the editor and translator involved. The likeliest explanation is that whoever edited it had a preference to be vague based on what he or she felt was best and there was no authority that could or cared to override that choice.

There was almost certainly no policy at work and trying to assign meaning to this would be tantamount to speculating about one person’s thought processes. People would be surprised at just how little deep consideration goes into these things and how much of it is personal style choice.
http://son-of-gadfly-on-the-wall.blogspot.com Jun Okumura

I see. What you could do if you want to draw any kind of conclusion from this is to go through past Mainichi articles and see how it treats Japanese-on-gaijin crime. If you can establish a pattern, you can take it and ask Mainichi why. Otherwise, speculation is idle. Sometimes, an anecdote is powerful enough to serve as a metaphor, or even a parable,but this is not one of them.

http://www.japanprobe.com James

Perhaps it’s just idle speculation, but this is not the first time I’ve seen Mainichi do something similar:

http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=2784
http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=1124

I wouldn’t have posted this post if I hadn’t been getting a feeling over time that Mainichi’s English editors clean-up the English version of their articles to make them more politically correct.

Bruce Smith

The media should report the nationality of both perpetrator and victim. Nationality is just a simple fact – I don’t see the problem.
http://www.victorymanual.com Alex

In my opinion, it has nothing to do with newspaper bias and everything to do with shock journalism. News involving Chinese living in Japan is very sought after by Japanese who want sensational news headlines. (Like the exchange student who murdered his host family, for example)

For the English version, I think the newspaper assumes the largest reader base consists of white foreigners from English speaking countries, and so changing “Chinese” to “Foreigner” makes the story hit closer to home. They want the reader to think, “Hey, I’m a foreigner, too! That could have been me!” News is money, after all.

http://bonesworld-gooch.blogspot.com/ Bones

I think you hit the nail on the head. It would not be unreasonable to assume, IMHO, that the majority of the readership of the English-language Daily Mainichi (whose name was apparently chosen by the Department of Redundancy Department) is not Chinese. Therefore if the headline were “Japanese man arrested for knife attack on Chinese lover and son” a good chunk of the readership would just yawn and go on to the next article. “Doesn’t concern me” etc. Change it to “foreigner” and you hook people into reading it all the way through.

Reporting the Nationality of Criminals/Victims

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