Charlotte1
Courtier
- Joined
- Jul 9, 2005
- Messages
- 801
- City
- Sydney
- Country
- Australia
Elspeth said:I'm not sure about her position specifically, but apparently if any of the Japanese photographers overstep their bounds in trying to get photos of the royals, they and their employers are made to suffer for it. Same for the journalists who write articles. So the IHA has a lot of control over the press too; if the press was told that certain sorts of photos of Sayako Kuroda were unacceptable, then almost certainly they wouldn't be taking them.
You're attributing too much to the IHA, they don't have control over the press. What they do have control over is the press's access to the Imperial Family members. The IHA press office gives journalists permission to attend or not attend the press conferences that the royals give for their birthdays and before foreign tours. The Japanese media itself is a 'closed shop', Foreign correspondents in Japan complain about the fact they are shut out of the "kisha" clubs, Japanese reporters clubs, Japanese organisations and the government have a tendency to only release information only to the kisha clubs and therefore leave the Foreign correspondents out of the loop of the information that is given out. It's not just that the IHA press office is selective as to who receives their information other Japanese organisations, including the government is as well.
Japanese journalists self-censor when it comes to the royals, as one journalists put it, 'If I write something that's wrong about a person I have to publicly apologise, if I write something that is wrong about a member of the Imperial Family then the publisher of my paper has to apologise'. Public apologies by officials are part of Japanese culture, 2 years ago there was a train crash, the first in 40 years. Within hours the directors of the train company were on TV publicly apologising to the general public for the fact that there had been an accident.
There's no paparazzi in Japan, none trying to take photos of royals or Japanese celebrities, it's all part of the Japanese culture of respect. Photos of Sayako Kuroda are taken, there's a recent one where she was at the same concert as the Empress and Princess Kiko and there also have been photos of Sayako driving through the Imperial Palace gates visiting her parents. But there are no paparazzi stalking her when she leaves her appartment, goes about her daily routine as all that goes against the whole respect culture.
And it's not because there's a threat of punishment or the IHA will make the photographers or their employers suffer. It's more to do with Japanese societal values of respect.