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Media : Japanese Press Taking a New Look at World : Once relegated to the back of the paper, foreign developments now merit front-page play. The move reflects a vast change in the way the Asian giant views itself and its place in international affairs.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Before Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Yomiuri Shimbun, the newspaper with the world’s largest circulation, had three correspondents in the Middle East. Now, there are nine, plus two staff photographers.

To cover the Houston summit of advanced industrialized nations July 9-11, the newspaper that prints 14.5 million copies a day dispatched a deputy managing editor, a photographer and 15 correspondents, including at least one from each of the seven participating world capitals except Rome.

“The Rome correspondent was too busy with Albania news,” said Takemoto Iinuma, the Yomiuri’s foreign editor.

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Overall, Japanese media dispatched more than 400 people to Houston.

Foreign news that once was relegated to Yomiuri’s inside pages now often fills more than half of the front page and a fifth of the news space of the entire newspaper. Even on routine news days, two of the 28 or 32 pages in morning editions are devoted to foreign news.

Quantitative expansion is only part of the change. Japanese media also have a new outlook on the world now.

No longer do the media pressure the government to stay out of foreign political commitments, as they did in the early rounds of the annual economic summits. And no longer do Japanese newspapers flinch at referring to Japan as a “Western nation” in a political sense. Indeed, they do it regularly.

Until former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone came on the scene in 1982, no newspaper or TV announcer ever called Japan a “Western nation.”

And the Japanese people, who in former years feared getting entangled in foreign commitments, take a more relaxed view of their leaders’ attempts to forge a political place in the international sun.

When Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu announced sanctions against Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait, including an embargo on oil imports from both countries, not a single newspaper or TV commentator criticized the action--even though it would clearly hurt the country, which had been getting 11% of its petroleum from those two nations.

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The new look has accompanied the emergence of Japan as the world’s leading creditor nation and biggest aid donor, with a per capital gross national product surpassing that of the United States.

“The rest of the world is beginning to need Japan,” Iinuma said.

Foreign leaders who once turned down requests for meetings are increasingly granting exclusive interviews to Tokyo-based media. The practice is now so common that the Asahi newspaper last month buried an interview with Commerce Secretary Robert A. Mosbacher at the bottom of its third business page.

An outpouring of Japanese tourists--more than 10 million will go overseas this year--has broadened the outlook of the reading public, said Keiichi Katsura, a professor at Tokyo University’s Newspaper Research Institute.

Even pupils in junior and senior high schools are making school trips abroad nowadays, he noted.

Farmers in northeast villages who can’t find Japanese wives have begun marrying Filipinas and Thais--spurring interest in Southeast Asia throughout the once isolated area, added Fumio Kitamura, managing director of the Foreign Press Center in Tokyo.

“Foreign news has become interesting,” said Yomiuri’s Iinuma.

It also has gained a prestige within the news organizations that formerly was reserved for domestic politics. Foreign sections that once were staffed by reporters disdainfully called “Eigo-ya” (English language clerks) by their colleagues are now the training grounds for top executives at both TV networks and newspapers.

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“The foreign section has become fashionable. It’s the section that newly employed university graduates want to join,” Kitamura said.

Competition for prestige among readers is focusing more and more on foreign news, the former journalist added. Last year, Eastern Europe became “the battleground for competition among Japanese newspapers,” he said.

And top management is willing to pay the price.

“We really don’t have to worry much about spending” when deploying correspondents, said Iinuma, whose foreign-section staff now numbers 96, including 55 correspondents. A decade ago the staff was half that size, and Yomiuri had only 30 correspondents.

Japanese correspondents in Washington now routinely join White House trips such as the one that President Bush made to Bermuda last spring to meet British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Previously, only American reporters and correspondents from the other nation involved in such an event would have been on hand.

Iinuma said the Yomiuri now rarely uses any foreign wire service stories to cover the United States, West Germany, France, Britain or the Soviet Union. Its own correspondents do the job.

NHK, the semi-government radio and TV network, earlier this year aired a debate it arranged between Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, and Gennady I. Gerasimov, spokesman for the Soviet Foreign Ministry. Interest in foreign countries has generated a host of documentaries and even TV quiz shows that focus exclusively on questions about foreign countries.

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The pendulum of change, however, has swung only halfway.

Reporters, in questions at news conferences, and critics, in newspaper editorials and TV commentary, do not press the nation’s leaders to adopt an aggressive foreign policy.

Kaifu, for example, remained silent for more than 24 hours before making his first statement about Iraq’s invasion. His chief Cabinet secretary issued a short declaration branding the attack “extremely regrettable,” and no reporter asked Kaifu to elaborate.

It took an evening, a morning, and another evening edition before the Asahi published its first front-page story about Japanese policy on the crisis.

Also, Kitamura complained, provincialism is still frequently apparent in the style of the Japanese media’s foreign coverage.

“The media look at international news in its relationship to Japan. Interest in places with little direct connection to Japan is still low,” he charged. While CBS’ Dan Rather flew to South Africa to cover--live--the release of Nelson Mandela, “Japanese TV wasn’t all that ardent about the event.”

But when, say, a Japanese is kidnaped overseas, coverage explodes, he complained.

Kitamura said the media frequently report world news in which Japan is a participant with “wishful thinking that gives the impression the world is paying more attention to Japan than it really is.”

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Tokyo University’s Katsura said newspapers too often focus on the weaknesses of foreign countries, which, he said, promotes the feeling among readers that “Japan is a good country.”

Katsura said newspapers publish many foreign news items but few with insight and depth. “For unique viewpoints, one has to look for stories reproduced from foreign newspapers,” he said.

Neither the public nor the mass media, Kitamura said, has reached a consensus on how Japan should assume more responsibility in world affairs. “As a result, media comment is still restricted to abstract logic,” he said.

“America is an optimistic culture . . . a ‘let’s-try-again-if-we-fail’ spirit. But Japan is a culture that fears failure. Americans like decisive, clear-cut actions . . . and feel Japan should be more bold. But Japanese find that hard to do. They can’t forget the great mistake of (World War II),” Kitamura said.

Greater international activism in the media, therefore, isn’t likely, he said.

“The atmosphere for that doesn’t exist,” he added. “It’s not only difficult for the media to make bold, direct proposals. It’s also commercially risky.”

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