Posts Tagged ‘waiwai’

Mainichi announces third-party investigation into inappropriate articles in WaiWai column

With Japanese bloggers and 2-channelers continuining to rage over Mainichi’s “hentai” column that translated (and sometimes embellished) racy stories from Japan’s tabloid weeklies, the newspaper has added yet another announcement to its homepage:

Mainichi to announce results of investigation into inappropriate articles in WaiWai column

The Mainichi Newspapers Co., Ltd. is conducting an in-house investigation into the publication of inappropriate articles in the WaiWai column of the Mainichi Daily News.

We will announce the results of the investigation, such as why inappropriate stories were run on the site, in the middle of this month.

We will ask the “Open Newspaper” Committee, a third-party organization comprising of outside experts, for opinions on the investigation results and report it.

Mainichi had previously announced that it had punished several employees it deemed responsible for the WaiWai scandal, but that did little to reduce the anger on 2-channel and the blogosphere. Because many of those internet users did not trust Mainichi’s internal investigation, the newspaper now seems to have consulted a third-party organization.

Meanwhile, English language Japan blog Stippy.com has been reposting old WaiWai articles with the following explanation:

…[WaiWai] was a much loved form of entertainment amongst foreigners in and outside of Japan. To any reader it was obviously not serious news, but it was a set of articles that portrayed quite well how the Japanese tabloids actually write about their own country. In 2008, a small number of Japanese people bought it to the attention of rival news groups that Mainichi was running an anti-Japan column on its website. With the bad publicity, Mainichi was forced to shut the page down, and take punitive measures against the journalists that were working on it, claiming that it was receiving opinions that were critical of the column, such as “its contents are too vulgar” and “the stories could cause Japanese people to be misunderstood abroad”. A perfect example of how Japanese consider what they write in their own script to be an acceptable secret code, that the rest of the world cant understand. When that same tabloid rubbish gets inconveniently translated to English to make light of some aspects of the Japanese people, it gets canned. Stippy.com finds this unacceptable, and will reproduce as much of the Waiwai content as possible in order to bring it once again to our computer screens for a good laugh.

Quite a few of the articles have already been posted, including some of those that most angered Japanese internet users (“Fast food sends schoolgirls into sexual feeding frenzy,” “More mums going down, to ensure grades go up!”, etc.), but it still hasn’t posted the article about Japanese tourists shooting children for sport in Ecuador(update: they’ve got it).

[thanks to Julián Ortega Martínez for keeping us up to date on the latest developments in this story]

Anger over Mainichi WaiWai column continues…

Last month, Japanese bloggers and 2-channelers scored a major victory by bringing public attention upon Mainichi’s WaiWai column, a popular section of Mainichi’s English language website that reported on some of the wildest and most perverted stories from Japan’s weekly tabloid magazines. Mainichi’s English language WaiWai column has since been discontinued and the company has apologized and punished employees that were deemed responsible for the column.

Many of those that had called and e-mailed complaints to Mainichi about the WaiWai column were probably satisfied with the result. However, some don’t think it’s enough. Blogs that called for the end of Mainichi’s WaiWai column are continuing their attacks on the paper and demanding that individual authors be outed and punished for writing WaiWai pieces.

There are also videos popping up on YouTube about the issue, such as this one that calls for a hanging of some sort (its description specifically names Ryan Connell as the author of WaiWai):

I also came across this blog post about a protest held yesterday. They include videos of the demonstration:

The man talking on the loudspeaker expresses anger over the “perverted” [hentai] column on Mainichi’s English site. Towards the beginning of his speech he implies that the disinformation being spread by Mainichi’s English website has caused crimes against Japanese women in other countries, a claim so idiotic I stopped watching the video at that point.

Meanwhile, Mainichi seems to be taking some additional measures. A source connected to GPlusMedia, the company that runs GaijinPot.com and JapanToday.com, has informed us that Mainichi has been pressuring the company into censoring some forum threads and articles that mention WaiWai and the controversy over it.

Update: The demonstration mentioned above also made TV news (including a mention of Japundit as a foreign website running WaiWai articles).

Update 2: The Aussie press has an article about Ryan Connell, claiming that he “has become one of the most reviled figures in Japan,” and that he is under police protection after numerous death threats directed at him and his family have appeared online. [via Marmot's Hole, hat tip to Julián]

Mainichi will ‘severely punish’ employees who contributed to WaiWai column

The first notice about the shutdown of Mainichi’s WaiWai column has been updated with a lot more information and an apology to readers. Here is an excerpt about the measures Mainichi is now taking:

Following criticism of WaiWai in late May, we decided there was a problem with listing the stories on the Mainichi Daily News site, even though they were transcriptions of articles that had appeared in magazines published in Japan. Stories were withdrawn from the site and we halted access to problematic archived stories. We also asked search engines to prevent past WaiWai stories from being displayed.

We then changed WaiWai’s editorial policy and drastically altered the standards used in story selection. However, there were problems with how past stories had been presented, so to avoid similar criticism from arising, we decided that we needed to come up with a sound editorial structure. This led to a fundamental re-think about WaiWai and on June 21, the decision was made to cease publishing the corner. On the Mainichi Daily News site, we listed the following notice: Some readers pointed out that various articles published in the WaiWai column were inappropriate content for the Mainichi Daily News. We respond to this criticism by halting publication of this column.

While explaining the process in both Japanese and English and apologizing, the Mainichi is poised to severely punish the head of the Digital Media Division, which is responsible for overseeing the site, the manager responsible for the corner and the editor involved with the stories.

Mainichi Daily News, and its publisher the Mainichi Newspapers Co., sincerely accepts readers criticism and will work to provide, edit and publish reliable information.

The longer statement was probably a response to 2-channelers and Japanese bloggers that were unsatisfied with Mainichi’s decision to pull the column without an apology. They had been specifically targeting editor Ryan Connell for some time, and many of them wanted him to apologize and face punishment. I suppose it’s okay for Mainichi to apologize after offending so many of its Japanese readers, but is it really necessary for Mainichi to severely punish the three individuals directly responsible for the WaiWai column?

Are we to believe that the rest of Mainichi’s management was unaware of the popular English language column, which had been appearing for years on Mainichi’s English site? Will the punishments actually lead to improvements in Mainichi’s journalism? Or are they just aiming to satisfy the internet mob by throwing a few employees under the bus?

note: Several hours ago, close to 80% of readers opposed severe punishment. We’ve since been linked by 2-channel, and the results have predictably changed.

[hat tip to Julián Ortega Martínez]

Update 2: Kyodo news has details on the punishments. An unnamed reporter has been suspended for 3 months and four executives have been reprimanded.

Update 3: Yet another update of the waiwai page!