Japan Navigator

There are three English paper-based newspapers in Japan plus one published exclusively on the internet.

I rank them as follows:

Paper-based:

- My favorite is The Japan Times. The only independent English paper, with lots of new content (not translated from the Japanese press) and many articles on Japanese society and culture. Regular contributors are also famous, such as Donald Richie for book reviews in The Asian Bookshelf, Mark Schilling on Japanese film, Philip Harper on sake and Mark Schreiber on Asian thrillers and as one of the contributors of seamy Tokyo Confidential.

The weakest point of the Japan Times is that the news is usually old and stale. The paper apparently is written the day before - not during the night - and so carries stories that already have been two days before on TV and on the internet. In other words, you read it for the background stories and articles about Japanese culture, not for the news.

The website is excellent, containing many major articles and freely accessible (after a period of compulsory registration in the past). It is also getting more and more geared to the net, with opinion polls and a list of its articles that are “most blogged.” What is missing is still the possibility to comment on articles on the site.

- In second position comes The Asahi Shimbun, which has been incorporated into the International Herald Tribune. The Asahi mainly features translations from articles published in the Japanese Asahi, although there are a few original pieces on culture in the weekend as well. Although I like the Japanese Asahi, the English version has never been my favorite - it has too much the nature of an extract, not of a paper with its own character. That I still put it in second place is only thanks to the IHT: together these papers form the ideal combination of international news with a section of local stories at the end.

Most interesting (original Asahi) parts are the Vox Populi, Vox Dei column, translated from the Japanese paper, interesting opinions on pressing contemporary affairs; and the Asahi Haikuist Network, where Japanese and foreigners send in their original English haiku.

With just a few translated articles from the Japanese Asahi, the web version is not very special, although both above-mentioned columns are available on the website.

- In third place comes the Daily Yomiuri. This paper is also mainly translated from the Japanese version, while adding large numbers of whole pages and stories from U.S. or U.K. papers as well. I find the English version a paper with little character of its own - in one word “boring.” The only thing that goes for it and that ensures it a large number of subscribers is the fact that this is by far the cheapest of all English papers published in Japan.

For the website the same holds true - its is mainly remarkable for being padded with numerous syndicated articles and stories from AP.

Web-based:

- The Mainichi Daily News is a special case, as this paper some years ago stopped publishing its English paper version and converted wholly to the web. After the WaiWai debacle and with no original content, it remains to be seen whether even the website will survive.

Do you need a paper for news and background on Japan?

Although I occasionally buy one of the above newspapers, I am not a subscriber to any of them. There is a much better source of news on Japan than what you get on “dead trees:” the internet, made accessible by that fantastic service News on Japan. This website contains daily updated links to major (and sometimes obscure, and therefore all the more interesting) news stories, not only in the above-mentioned English press in Japan, but also to a wide variety of news sources elsewhere. Instead of opening a newspaper every morning, I log on to this site and click on the articles that seem interesting. The only thing I miss is the smell of ink.

Of course, a few handfulls of links is not enough for your daily take on the news, but the rest is also out there on the web. I read Shisaku and Observing Japan for political background (I know no better commentators, not in any paper newspaper!), Pink Tentacle for news on technology, What Japan Thinks for insights on Japan via opinion polls, Tokyo Art Beat, Metropolis and PingMag for art and design, Midnight Eye and Jason Gray for Japanese film, Japan Probe and Japundit for a humorous take on Japanese culture… what else do you need? My best newspaper is the internet!

Do you still read newspapers?