Jiji Press

Jiji Press appears in the book as a comparatively small wire service and as a touchstone for the pressures of Japanese journalism. Its clearest profile is brief: it has fewer reporters and a smaller readership than Kyodo News, but is characterized as industrious. The book’s references to Jiji Press also place it within a competitive reporting culture in which access depends on more than simply showing up.

Profile in the News Industry

Jiji Press is described in relation to Kyodo News as a smaller, less widely read counterpart with fewer reporters. A newsroom joke held that Jiji reporters wrote their stories after reading Kyodo News, a barb the narrator presents as typical of a cruel industry. The joke says more about the competitive hierarchy among news organizations than it establishes about Jiji Press’s actual reporting practices.

The Police Beat as a Test of Reporting

A former police-beat supervisor’s memo uses a first-year reporter at Jiji Press as a hypothetical comparison. The memo argues that repeatedly visiting detectives at home, waiting for them to return, flattering them, and occasionally bringing baseball tickets is a routine that almost any new reporter could manage. It is not evidence that Jiji reporters specifically relied on those methods; rather, the example illustrates the memo writer’s claim that such gestures alone do little to distinguish a reporter or turn a detective into a reliable source.

The memo contrasts those easy rounds with the more attentive work of learning about a detective’s family and important dates, then offering appropriate greetings or gifts. In this account, Jiji Press functions as the benchmark for an ordinary first-year reporter, sharpening the supervisor’s argument that police reporting requires more than mechanical persistence or institutional reputation.

Narrative Role

The book gives Jiji Press no extended institutional history or sustained account of its own operations. Instead, it appears at two points in a portrait of journalism: first as a smaller competitor to Kyodo News, then as a shorthand measure of what a novice reporter might accomplish through routine effort. That limited presence makes the organization useful less as a developed subject than as a reference point for the book’s broader depiction of newsroom rivalry and the labor of obtaining information.