Look Japan

In September 1991, I finished my Canon internship and started a new job at Look Japan, Inc., an English-language magazine dedicated to explaining Japan to the outside world. A product of the free-wheeling post-Occupation days when independent entrepreneurial ventures sprouted like mushrooms after the rain, Look Japan was started as a newsletter by our president, Kimura-san (or shacho ("president"), as we called him), who neither spoke nor read English, but saw the value of getting Japanese business news to the outside world back in the 1950s.

By the time I arrived, 35 years later, Look Japan had developed a unique business model. We had a circulation of 50,000 copies per month, which later rose to 75,000. But we only had about 200 subscriptions. The remainder of the issue was purchased by the Foreign Ministry and then distributed for free to universities and libraries around the English-speaking world. When the company wanted to sell more copies, it went to the Foreign Ministry and lobbied for them to buy more.

Because of its connection with the government, Look Japan was hardly impartial. With an editorial staff of seven people, and a business side staff of about the same number of people, we had three separate editorial review panels consisting of 15 people each. All of the panel members were former government officials, university professors, and businessmen with a government connection or a pro-government agenda. Whenever we published any article giving that tried to balance the good with the bad of Japan, no matter how much more emphasis we gave to the good, we were criticized for being partial. In other words, any deviation from the Japan-is-great message was perceived as an attack. I would have been perfectly happy getting paid money to write Japanese government propaganda -- if that's how the job was presented to me. But the company maintained the fiction that we were completely independent journalists, so working under these constraints was irritating, to say the least.

Although we wrote a few regular columns in house, most of the articles were contributed by outside authors drawn from the same pool of pro-government academics and businessmen as our editorial review panels. The magazine paid very generously for articles -- a great way of lubricating relations with people who had influence with those who controlled the Foreign Ministry's budget. Some of these authors insisted in writing in English to show their erudition and sophistication. Others wrote in Japanese and had their articles translated by our staff. My job, in addition to writing a piece per issue of my own, was to turn these articles into coherent English. Sometimes this led to fights with a Japanese author who believed that, because he was a Tokyo University professor or government official and therefore outranked me in hierarchical Japanese society, he outranked me in deciding what constituted proper English grammar or vocabulary as well. Fortunately, since we edited the galleys of the magazine, we had the final say, and we were backed up by our editor-in-chief, Nishimura-san. And, since the business staff, which had the relationships with these authors did not appear to read the magazine, we were almost never challenged on the text of the final edition.

I spent a year in total at Look Japan, which had its ups and downs, but which I mostly remember favorably two decades later. I made some good friends there, like Nishimura-san and my co-editor Seo-san. I also got to meet some interesting people as a result of working there, from a government economist with whom I am still friends, to foreign baseball players active in Japan, to Akebono, the first non-Japanese Grand Champion (yokozuna) in sumo. I'll be blogging on my experiences at Look Japan over the next few weeks, until I run out of stories. Stay tuned.