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Asahi Shimbun

Osaka mayor won’t back away from ending San Francisco sister city status over comfort women statue

Move would end 60-year-old program between Japanese and American cities.

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Nippon TV secretly records Asahi Newspaper reporter secretly recording up woman’s skirt

“As long as everybody is videotaping everyone else, justice will be done.” (Marge Simpson)

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Asahi Shimbun’s app featuring moe school-girl broadcasters is a deceptively good study tool

As in any country, a Japanese newspaper’s credibility often rests on a very fine political line. If their reporting leans even a little left or right, they run the risk of being called a stack of toilet paper scribbled on by talentless hacks by half the population. It’s a precarious position, and one in which releasing an app wherein you dress up school girls as a reward for current event awareness only seems to provide fuel for your detractors.

And yet on October 14 one of Japan’s leading newspapers, Asahi Shimbun, released just such an app called Kikasete Tensei Jingo. It features several moe girls reading from selected editions of the paper’s long-running Tensei Jingo editorial column. However, as pointless as it may appear on the surface there is some heavy language practice potential buried in there.

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Japanese tourist injured in Tunisian terrorist attack also attacked by Japanese media in hospital

On March 18, three terrorists attacked and took hostage patrons at the Bardo National Museum in Tunisia, killing 21 people and injuring about 50 others. Among those injured was Noriko Yuki, a Japanese tourist visiting Tunisia with her mother.

Ms. Yuki sustained a gunshot wound in the attack and was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment. There, shortly after her surgery, she was immediately bombarded by Japanese media looking to interview her, with some members of the press apparently going so far as to tell the Japanese ambassador watching over her that he did “not have the authority to stop us from interviewing her.”

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