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About mePublishing shenanigans
- An Australian journalist writes a book on Princess Masako and the Japanese imperial family.
- Japan Times writer Eric Johnston announces that he has been grossly misquoted in the book, registers his disappointment in shoddy reporting from a Walkley Award (prestigious Australian journalism prize) winner. This announcement was available here until Arudou removed it, apparently at Johnston’s request.
- Japanese publisher Kodansha is working on the Japanese translation of the book.
- The Foreign Ministry complains about the book’s factual inaccuracies to the author and publisher, sending letters via the embassy in Australia (one from Ambassador Ueda and one from the Imperial Household Agency). This is described in Japanese on the MOFA site but it hasn’t been translated into English.
- Kodansha announces it has called off publication of the Japanese version of the book.
The Japan Times has an article in which Kodansha explains its reasons for calling off the project:
Kazunobu Kakishima, an editor at Kodansha, denied the company was scrapping the translation because of the government’s protest. The decision, he said, came after Hills refused to acknowledge making factual errors during an interview with Japanese television earlier Friday.
“We have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to maintain trustworthy relations with the author and thus we were forced to cancel the book,” he said.
Kakishima said a “substantial number of factual errors” have been corrected through fact-checking and meetings with interviewees quoted in the book. Kakishima declined to describe any specific errors, citing privacy.
Hills, Kakishima said, acknowledged the errors in discussions with Kodansha, approved corrections in a translated draft and even thanked the publisher for the changes.
It’s interesting to compare this with the translation project for Iris Chang’s book some years ago. The Japanese publisher pointed out problems in that text and offered to make corrections in the translation, but the deal got scrapped when Chang refused to let anything be changed. (At least this is the version I’ve heard.) In Chang’s case, though, I don’t believe there was any governmental pressure brought to bear.
Which is as it should be. The MOFA person at the February 13 press conference noted that the government had to step up and say something about Hills’s book because the imperial family is the symbol of Japan, and to write terrible things about the clan is to humiliate the entire nation. But if the government intends to make this a part of its job, it’s got an awful lot of book policing ahead of it, even assuming it only intends to pay attention to books that are about to get translated into Japanese. Best just to stay out of the whole fact-checking process.
(Every once in a while I get asked to translate or proofread a letter to the editor of some publication, usually a newspaper or weekly newsmag, that has written something going against the grain of Japan’s official position on some matter. Maybe this is a normal part of the everyday duties of a diplomatic corps. Does the State Department ever draft letters in Japanese to send off to the Yomiuri and Asahi et al.?)
Jun Okumura writes that “journalists should be held to the same standards that they hold the rest of us to.” Which is true, but according to that Kodansha editor above, he was being held to those standards, and the Japanese version of the book was going to be an improvement on the flawed English one. But then he went on TV and made an ass of himself, which is apparently reason enough for the government to get involved in making pronouncements on which books are and are not worthy. I don’t see it. It’s a waste of effort when you have that fleet of black trucks out there to do the publisher-pressuring job for you.
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7 Responses to “Publishing shenanigans”
Posted by: Adamu - 02/19/2007
If the J-government doesn’t respond directly to negative coverage they will often have proxies do it for them. But I have to say those LTEs and op-eds almost always sound defensive and make the government look worse, not better. This recent incident is no exception. If MOFA didn’t try to bully the publisher, the author wouldn’t have felt the need to defend himself so poorly. I mean, the press might have made his comments sound worse than he intended, but that’s their job. He should have kept his mouth shut.
The US, on the other hand, receives so much negative press that merely responding with an LTE could never manage it all. It’s much more efficient to wage major efforts to discredit critics and brand respected media institutions as traitors. Or if we’re talking about foreign media, we have major efforts to pipe in our own message through Voice of America, buy off newspapers to print our stories, and wage other intelligence-based media manipulation. And we’re much better at it than the Japanese, too, though it can certainly backfire.
Posted by: Durf - 02/19/2007
I agree that these efforts are ineffectual and can even backfire, even at the letter-writing level. (You have time to write something like this, but not to go spend five minutes fixing the damn problem in the first place?)
Come to think of it, I’ve written things like this for Keidanren as well. Of course the things I put together are stylish and amazingly effective pieces of propaganda. *cough*
Posted by: Ａｃｅｆａｃｅ - 02/19/2007
It is now NO.1 best selling “Non-Fiction”foreign book at Amazon Japan.
“I agree that these efforts are ineffectual and can even backfire, even at the letter-writing level.”
It happened when J-embassy at The Hague wrote LTE to NRC Handelsblad about an article by Van Wolfren.I read this episodes from almost all of the “gang of four” writings in late80’s.
Posted by: Ken - 02/20/2007
So there’s been no pressure on Amazon Japan to stop selling it?
Posted by: Durf - 02/20/2007
No, nothing I’ve heard about. I’ll go trolling through the righty blogs today and see what sort of shrieking is taking place.
Posted by: Bryce - 02/24/2007
I doubt the government would pressure amazon into not stocking a publication. Genron no jiyuu and all.
Posted by: Antinori - 02/26/2007
That’s exactly it, Iris Chang refused to have anything changed because as an author she was confident of the depth and accuracy of her book, whereas Hills’ Japanese version that Kodansha was trying to produce was an abdridged and revised version that sort of duffed the inaccuracies of the original, and Hills agreed and even thanked Kodansha for the corrections. Hills’ problem is that he knows how shallow and full of factual errors his book is and all the more he’s now criticising the imperial authority for revealing the inaccuracies which probaly were corrected in the Japanese version. Now, Kodansha who was trying to camouflage the errors in the Japanese version has lost it’s face because with the imperial authority’s letter to Hills which is posted on their HP in English and Japanese, the credibility of the original book now has a huge question mark. If the Japanese readers are going to read this in Japanese, the translated version should be unabridged and the errors kept as they are. Otherwise the inaccuracies and shalowness of the original will be blinded.
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