It’s not about learning—it’s about unlearning

“It’s not about learning—it’s about unlearning” names the central discipline Matsuzaka urged on a new reporter: not simply acquiring skills, but stripping away assumptions, preferences, and pride that could distort the work. His advice links a reporter’s personal remaking to a public responsibility—to find and report the truth, even when it is unwelcome.

Origin and Setting

Six months before beginning work at the Yomiuri, the narrator worried that Japanese-language interviews might exceed his abilities, despite feeling prepared for reading and writing. In October, he approached Matsuzaka, the Sophia graduate who had lobbied for his hiring, to ask for a preliminary internship. The counsel itself came later, after the April 1 ceremony at company headquarters where all sixty rookies were sworn in as employees. At a Ginza shot bar, with John Coltrane playing from speakers buried in the ceiling, the narrator ordered a Coke—he still did not drink alcohol—and spoke eagerly about being assigned to an office and “learning the trade.” Matsuzaka stopped him with a wave of his hand. The refined bar, unlike the dives Yomiuri reporters usually favored, gives the exchange a composed setting; the advice that follows is equally deliberate. Matsuzaka spoke quietly and evenly, without pausing, as though he had considered these demands for a long time.

What Unlearning Requires

Matsuzaka defines the first task as “cutting off ties, cutting out things, getting rid of preconceptions.” The language makes professional preparation sound less like adding knowledge than removing attachments. Pride, free time, hobbies, preferences, and opinions all become things a reporter may have to relinquish. Even a girlfriend, he warns, might be gone when the reporter is rarely around. The point is not that these losses are desirable in themselves, but that the job will claim time and attention that a newcomer might expect to keep for private life. His examples make that demand concrete. A reporter must act cordially toward people whose politics, social conduct, or ethics he dislikes, defer to senior reporters, and assess the value of information without judging its source as a person. Sleep, exercise, and reading books are all liable to shrink. The daily cycle becomes reading the paper, drinking with sources, watching the news, checking whether another outlet has scooped the story, and meeting deadlines. Even work that seems meaningless or stupid must still be done. In this account, unlearning is an ongoing discipline of subordinating personal preference to the tasks and standards of reporting.

Truth and Public Duty

The maxim culminates in a distinction between wanting a claim to be true and finding out whether it is true. Matsuzaka tells the rookies to “report it as it is, not as you wish it was.” That standard gives his severe instructions an ethical purpose: the reporter is not meant merely to endure long hours or conform to newsroom hierarchy, but to resist turning belief into fact. His formulation joins personal humility to professional judgment—the reporter must let go of certainty about what he already thinks and remain answerable to what the information shows. Matsuzaka presents that work as consequential beyond the newsroom, calling journalists “the final guardians of this fragile democracy we have in Japan.” His closing condition returns to the lesson’s image of subtraction: “Let go of your preconceptions, dignity, and pride and get the job done.” Unlearning is thus both the cost of entry into reporting and the safeguard he offers against reporting only what one wants to believe.