Japan's media has had a rough couple of years under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Japan's state secret law, passed in 2013, imposes harsh penalties on people for leaking classified information — and could even be used to imprison reporters who ask about secrets.
"The Abe government has largely succeeded in emasculating the Japanese media," Koichi Nakano, a professor at Tokyo's Sophia University, told the Financial Times this summer, in explaining how the government had suppressed news of Abe being heckled at an event in Okinawa. This and other developments, according to the newspaper, had "stoked fears about press freedom in Japan."
To begin with, according to Adelstein, the nature of Japan's media landscape makes it particularly vulnerable to censorship.
Japan has a media credentialing scheme, called the press club system, which gives certain recognized major media outlets special access and reporting privileges. "Magazines, or small newspapers, or internet broadcasting sites that might report something interesting don't get a fair shot," he explains.
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