Wednesday, 30 June 2010

Emily, Lauren and I visited the two Fukushima city newspapers yesterday and made their middle pages! Our pictures were in both the Minpo Journal and the Minya Journal. Journalists from both papers asked Emily and Lauren about the differences between their papers and those in the USA. They did a good job answering their questions, discussing the paper size, use of color, potential political bias and such. Both papers are nearly as old as Converse, and both gave us very good tours. I am not sure that there was any real difference between the two, as both told us that they were not biased politically, especially as a Parliamentary election is about to take place here on July 11th (my birthday). The Japanese characters in both were very tiny. Reading a Japanese newspaper is done vertically, and also from right to left. There was lots of very local news (i.e. little league scores) in both, plus prefecture news and national news. Of course Japan's loss to Uruguay in soccer made the headlines in both. Afterwards we went to the sushi-go-round restaurant in the train station and one man kept staring at us, making us very uncomfortable. He finally left. That has been my only experience with gawkers here.... or at least obvious gawkers.