A junior high school student journalist talks to a high school student! The Hyogo Prefectural Government Election and the Moritomo Issue…Cutting through the Darkness of the Media without Fact Checking
The “current location” of the junior high school reporter who got a lot of attention.
The biggest change is my glasses.
When asked what has changed the most in his life in the two and a half years since his first interview, Daiji Kawanaka laughed and said, “My glasses.
When FRIDAY Digital interviewed him in September 2011, about six months after the launch of “Nihon Chugakusei Shimbun,” he was a boy with a serious look on his face behind the screen. About two and a half years have passed since then. This spring, Kawanaka, who just graduated from junior high school, appeared here again with his first book, “Kochira Nippon Chugakusei Shinbun” published by Kashiwa Shobo.
The publication came about after an article in FRIDAY Digital trended on SNS and created a huge response. The editor in charge told him, “If you write 10,000 words a month, you will have 120,000 words, or a whole book. However, the simultaneous process of researching and writing at the same time was difficult.
I enjoyed the research, but I wastiredbefore I got to the point where I wanted to write, and I hadschool too. Still, the desire to “publish a book by the time I graduate from junior high school” motivated Kawanaka.
Kawanaka first became interested in politics when he was in the third grade of elementary school, when an election to the upper house of the Diet triggered his interest. His interest was further deepened the following year when the Osaka metropolitan government held a referendum on the Osaka Metropolis concept. The first issue of the newspaper in March 2011 was also motivated by his desire to ask then Prime Minister Fumio Kishida (68) why he did not sign the Nuclear Weapons Convention at the G7 Hiroshima Summit, but when he applied online for coverage of the G7 Summit, he was denied permission to even apply to the G7 jurisdiction at the Foreign Ministry, saying that he was a student and had no record of achievement. Even so, he did not stop reporting. Even so, I did not stop covering the event.
No discovery! Going behind the scenes of politics with his own money
The people Mr. Kawanaka has interviewed over the past three years are surprisingly diverse. The IR problem on Yumeshima in Osaka, the Expo, the mayoral election in Kyoto, the gubernatorial election in Hyogo Prefecture, and the backroom money senator (……). He has traveled all over the Kansai region and has been in direct contact with politicians. Almost all of my coverage was in the red. But when I asked Koji Matsui, 65, a candidate for mayor of Kyoto, what he thought of Osaka’s IR, he said, ‘It’s fine to have such a town, but I don’t want it in Kyoto.’ There are many things you can’t understand unless you actually meet them, ” he says.
One person I have interacted with as a “fellow reporter” since I began my journalistic activities is election writer Rihito Hatakeyama, 53. Kawanaka, who was impressed by the questions former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe asked at his press conference, read his book and got to know him through a mutual friend.’ They met for the first time during the April 2011 local elections, and they continue to use the IC recorder they bought together that day. Hatakeyama’s words, “You should really become a newspaper reporter or something,” also remain with me to this day.
I want to write without hesitation. I write what I want to write without reservation to anyone. This is my motto. What I am most careful about is not to become a position talker. I read “Hanada,” “WiLL,” and other so-called “right-wing” magazines, as well as Iwanami’s “Sekai” magazine, and I think it is important to listen to a wide range of opinions, even those of diametrically opposed ideologies.
The candidate was rejected at the door! Persistent direct interview
Increased recognition does not always open the door for interviews. During the Upper House election, I participated in an interview with Mr. Munehide Kamiya, 48, a candidate for the House of Councillors, but was turned away because “freelancers are not allowed. Even friends who were not interested in politics asked, “What’s going on? Even when we went to interview candidates for the upper house in the primary election, we were asked to go through the party, and one candidate even refused to allow us to take pictures of him working on a public street.
On the other hand, when he was refused registration for the Ishin press list, he contacted Nobuyuki Baba, 61, a member of the Ishin Diet, directly, and was added to the mailing list the next day. The source of his energy is his belief that “nothing will change unless I act.
Anger at modern politics that ridicules the weak
One of the issues I focused on in the book was the IR issue of Yumeshima, Osaka. Through an interview with Noriko Tanaka, 61, a specialist in support for gambling addicts, the author got an idea of the “irresponsibility” surrounding casinos.
She said, “They are talking about paying an admission fee of 6,000 yen as a countermeasure, but for people who bet millions of yen, 6,000 yen is a very small amount of money.
The addiction education in schools is also a problem. The content of the textbooks used in health and physical education classes contrasts those who are addicts with those who are not addicts, and this encourages a discriminatory mindset.
The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare itself points out that “even those who have addictions think they are weak-willed, blame themselves, and make the situation worse,” and yet school education encourages this prejudice. Government should be working for the weakest, but this is not being done at all.
In the book, he also wrote about Toshio Akagi, 54, a Ministry of Finance official who died after being forced to falsify official documents in the Moritomo affair, and Hideaki Takeuchi, 50, a former Hyogo prefectural assemblyman who died after being slandered by false information spread on social networking services while confronting the issue of Governor Motohiko Saito, 48.
He was a former Hyogo Prefectural Assembly member who died after being slandered and defamed by false information on social media. So how can you call Toshio Akagi and Hideaki Takeuchi weak people? The current situation in which Mr. Takashi Tachibana (58) said, ‘If you were a politician, you deserve to be told what to do, and you are a weak person to die,’ is the most cruel thing in the adult world. It made me feel the cruelty of the adult world.
Whether Mr. Akagi or Mr. Takeuchi, there are a surprisingly large number of people, both those who are called conservatives and those who call themselves liberals, who think they are weak people. I think that is ridiculous.”
The Dark Side of Elections without Fact-Checking
Regarding the lower house election, he questions the issue of Sanae Takaichi’s (65) video, which is said to have reached “100 million views” in a few days.
“ Unless you are Mr. Hikakin, a video of the LDP with about 200,000 channel subscribers would not reach such a number in a few days like that.
It is natural to assume that he spent a huge amount of money on advertising to increase the number of views, and the fact that YOASOBI’s “Idol” exceeded 100 million views in less than 10 days, which took 35 days to achieve, is proof of this. We should find a conclusion as soon as possible in the regulation of advertising during election periods, and the monetization of political content is also distorting public opinion. I monetize YouTube myself, but I would like to support the debate on the regulation of monetization when it comes up.”
He also strongly felt the importance of facing politics on a daily basis as a sovereign citizen from his experience of interviewing journalist Hajime Imai, 71, an expert on referendums and referendum and representative of the [Referendum/Referendum] Information Office.
Regarding the Hyogo Prefecture gubernatorial election, he said, ” We reported Governor Saito’s allegations to the blink of an eye, but when it came to the election, the media did no fact-checking at all, even when candidate Takashi Tachibana spoke contrary to the facts. Now that the Internet does not have a stopper, it is important for the media to fulfill that role,” he pointed out. Regarding the media’s “neutrality,” he said, “In some cases, they are unable to act for fear of being attacked on social networking sites. Neutrality needs to be redefined.
Against the unreasonable “political taboo
Mr. Kawanaka’s starting point was his original experience of being scolded by a teacher for not discussing politics at school. When he tried to argue with the teacher using Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, “the right to express one’s opinion,” the teacher retorted, “There are all kinds of opinions, so you can’t talk about politics at school.
Many people in Japan still believe that children should be protected by adults,” said Ms. Kawanaka. It will soon be 32 years since the ratification of the Convention. I hope this book will make people think that they are the subjects of rights,” he says.
This frustration led him to launch the “Nihon Chugakusei Shinbun,” to become student body president (for a maximum of three terms), and to three years of reporting.
When Shinji Ishimaru, 43, retired as mayor of Aki Takata City, more and more people of the same generation became interested in politics through SNS. I started discussing with my friends how Japan should position itself in the wake of the Iranian attack and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. However, I still don’t see the reality that children of the same age as ourselves are being killed. I don’t think they can yet see the reality that children of their own age are being killed.”
Constitutional Law and the Moritomo Issue Challenged by a Young Journalist
As for his future, he says , “Roughly speaking, I’m either a politician or a journalist. If he were to become a politician, he would like to work on revitalizing the debate on constitutional reform and reforming the United Nations.
I think it is time for each of us to rethink what pacifism in Japan should be, rather than considering Article 9 of the Constitution as untouchable. The original meaning of Article 9 of the Constitution is that war in self-defense is not permitted.
However, the interpretation of the Constitution has been changed many times, and the government has publicly stated that the right of collective self-defense is now partially permitted. It is necessary for each and every citizen to think about what “Japanese pacifism” is and to have a thorough discussion about it so that the proposed constitutional amendment will not be an arbitrary reinterpretation by those in power, but rather a revision of the Constitution, since the people have the final say.
I think the current LDP constitutional revision proposal is no good, but what I can agree with in the draft is the obligation to hold an extraordinary session of the Diet within 20 days. Article 53 of the current Constitution stipulates that the Diet must convene if one-fourth or more of the Diet members demand it, but there is no explicit provision for a deadline for convening the Diet. That is why the LDP administration has ignored requests from opposition parties for two to three months in the past.
That binding should be included in the Constitution, and other updates are needed, such as specifying the right to privacy and the right to know, which was born in the age of social networking. If the right to know is enshrined in the constitution, I think the entire national system will change.”
The Moritomo issue is the topic that Mr. Kawanaka has been following most closely at the moment.
The investigation report released by the Ministry of Finance states that the falsification was carried out under the direction of then Finance Bureau Director General Nobuhisa Sagawa (68), but the Ministry of Finance says that the e-mails were automatically deleted after two months and that there were no e-mails from senior officials. “The report of the investigation released by the Ministry of Finance says that the falsification was ordered by then Director General Nobutoshi Sagawa (68). If there are no e-mails, how could they have given the order to falsify the documents? I hope that you will do something to realize the third-party re-investigation that Masako Akagi, 55, the bereaved family member, has been saying all along.
On April 14, the Ministry of Finance disclosed official documents related to the sale of state-owned land to Moritomo Gakuen. However, the seventh disclosure is said to be the last, with the notebooks of the officials involved remaining undisclosed, and no documents were found that would indicate when and what instructions were given by former Finance Bureau chief Nobuhisa Sagawa.
This spring, Mr. Kawanaka became a high school student. The interview took place on March 31, the day before he turned high school student. He said, “I admire and respect professional journalists,” but added , “We need to have another discussion about how to behave.
When he appeared before FRIDAY Digital two and a half years ago, Mr. Kawanaka had been a reporter for less than six months. Since then, Mr. Kawanaka has had a regular slot in “Junior High School Reporter Daiji’s Dialogue Club” on TV Osaka’s official YouTube channel, and has also appeared on ABEMA and Bunka Hoso. He has also had a series of direct interviews with former Prime Ministers Kishida and Ishiba Shigeru (69), and has grown to the point where he was able to give “Nikkan Gendai” a scoop on a National Democratic Party of Japan candidate in the Upper House election.
Kawanaka, who had a book in hand shortly after graduation, says that the FRIDAY Digital article was the catalyst for the book. There are not many interviews in which the word “triumphant” fits so well.
▼ Daiji Kawanaka was born in Osaka City in 2010. Reporter for the Nihon Chugakusei Shinbun (The Japan Chugakusei Shimbun). He became interested in politics when he was in the third grade of elementary school and launched the “Nihon Chugakusei Shinbun” in 1948. Under the motto of “Write what you want to write without reservation to anyone,” he covers elections, the Osaka-Kansai Expo, IR casinos, the Moritomo Gakuen issue, and other issues, and disseminates his coverage via SNS and YouTube. He also contributes to numerous magazines and web media. He is also an interviewer for the program “Junior High School Reporter Daiji’s Dialogue Club” on TV Osaka’s official YouTube channel “Osaka NEWS [TV Osaka News]” and published a book “Kochira Nippon Chugakusei Shinbun” (Kashiwa Shobo) in March.
Interview and text by： Wakako Tako