林中斌 部落格 / Blog Chong-Pin Lin

The ad caught the public’s eye, but it garnered overwhelmingly negative reactions, ranging from befuddlement to anger. As one freelance journalist argued, the newspaper’s self-portrayal was at odds with the so-called Canon of Journalism adopted by the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association in 2000. Those guidelines state, among other things, that “the public’s right to know” in a democracy “cannot be ensured without the existence of media, operating with the guarantee of freedom of speech and expression, while being totally committed to a high moral standard and fully independent.” The Asahi Shimbun has yet to respond satisfactorily to this criticism.

The implications of this peculiar ad are troubling. And they seem to be borne out by several incidents that have taken place in its wake, which raise serious doubts about just how “fully independent” Japanese papers really are.

One galling example occurred on Dec. 26, 2013, when Mr. Abe became the first sitting Japanese head of state in seven years to visit the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, the controversial memorial said to house the spirits of Japan’s war dead, including those of convicted war criminals. That very evening, Mr. Abe had dinner with the political editors and writers of Japan’s most prominent newspapers, including Asahi, Yomiuri and Mainichi. The next day, only one of the prime minister’s dinner companions wrote about his visit to the shrine.

The sole exception, Mainichi’s political editor, criticized the visit for harming the national interest by predictably causing an international stir. But he also noted “the significance of the prime minister’s motivation, which was to express his veneration for the spirits of the heroes who sacrificed their lives for Japan.” The piece was noticeably gentler on Mr. Abe than the papar's editinal  of the same day, suggesting that the author’s personal interactions with Mr. Abe may have swayed his views in the prime minister’s favor.

There was a good deal of popular outrage when news of this dinner came to light, but not one of the newspapers whose editors dined with Mr. Abe that evening has yet offered an explanation for why it happened.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. My own survey of publicly available information about the prime minister’s movements reveals that in the 17 months since he has come to power, he has broken bread with prominent media figures on no fewer than 36 occasions. The list includes the presidents and chief editorial writers of numerous news agencies and national and local newspapers. Every one of these meals took place not in the prime minister’s official residence, but in the more intimate, convivial atmosphere of private restaurants.

Mr. Abe has made a priority of cultivating relations with the media. He has increased his cabinet’s media budget for this fiscal year by almost one-third over the previous year, to a total of roughly $64 million. And he is becoming increasingly blatant in his approach. Before the Yasukuni Shrine dinner, there was one on Dec. 16, not long after the enactment of the Special Secrets Protection Bill, a controversial law that could be used to jail journalists who publish, or just try to obtain, information that the government considers to be sensitive. Since then, he seems to have taken to holding meals with the media after all important political events.

The prime minister dined with former political editors on April 2, the day after Japan’s sales tax was raised from 5 percent to 8 percent. (It is a controversial move: A bill proposing such a hike brought down the previous administration, led by the Democratic Party of Japan, paving the way for the return of Mr. Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party.) On May 15, the very night the prime minister announced that his administration was considering reinterpreting Japan’s pacifist Constitution to allow it to exercise its “right of collective self-defense,” the prime minister went out for sushi with many of the same editors he had dined with after the Special Secrets Protection Bill became law.

Even worse than Mr. Abe’s efforts to ingratiate himself with the media is the media’s willingness to play along. Ever since the Meiji period, when Japan began struggling to transform itself into a modern nation-state, the media has been dominated by organizations known as “press clubs.” There are about 800 of these clubs in the country now, at levels ranging from the local to the national. Members gain privileged access to politicians and information, as well as the use of office space rent-free; freelancers are limited. As a result, many journalists naturally drift closer to authority over time. And the more established they are, the more incentive they have to act like “citizens the prime minister will respect.”

Mr. Abe has outdone previous prime ministers in exploiting this tendency. How much further can he go before Japan has no more newspapers its citizens will respect?

Norihiro Kato is a literary scholar and a professor at Waseda University. This article was translated by Michael Emmerich from the Japanese.