Japan Media Review Update: October 5, 2004

JMR Staff (Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California)

Review
The following reviews are posted at: http://www.japanmediareview.com/japan/digest/digest.php

Oregon Woos Japanese Press
From OregonLive.com: The U.S. state of Oregon is trying to improve its image in Japan after a spate of bad publicity in the wake of harsh treatment of Asian visitors by INS inspectors. To help restore the state's image, the Oregon tourism industry is offering free hotel rooms and meals to Japanese journalists. Their lobbying appears to be paying off: Several Japanese magazines, including Dime and Rasin, have featured the state prominently. In the 1980s, the television series "From Oregon With Love," set in the state's high desert, made Oregon a household word in Japan. But in 2000, the state was attacked in the Japanese press after U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials strip-searched and jailed a number of Asian travelers arriving at Portland's airport.
-- By Japan Media Review Associate Editor Eric Ulken

Future of Baseball: Online?
From the Asahi Shimbun: Two entrepreneurs are hoping Japan's professional baseball league will bet on the Internet as the content distribution channel of the future. Hiroshi Mikitani of Rakuten Inc. and Takafumi Horie of Livedoor Co. are in competition to establish a franchise in Sendai, where they hope to take advantage of their companies' new media expertise to pioneer new forms of sports content delivery. Both say they expect the Internet to eventually replace television as the largest revenue generator for teams. In particular, both are bullish on the potential of wireless delivery of sports content. Nippon Professional Baseball is in the process of selecting a winner for the franchise.
-- By Japan Media Review Associate Editor Eric Ulken

Japan's Sports Media Chase Ichiro
From MLB.com: More than 30 Japanese print reporters have been in the U.S. covering Ichiro Suzuki's quest to break Major League Baseball's single-season hit record. Since not all of them could get access to the Seattle Mariners slugger, they nominated three pool reporters to interview Suzuki and share quotes. Keizo Konishi, a Kyodo News writer who covers the Mariners and is one of the three reporters with access to the star hitter, says he shares all of the quotes he gathers with his fellow reporters. When Suzuki's record-breaking hit came Oct. 1, the mainstream American media finally took notice of what the Japanese press had been covering all along.
Meanwhile, Junglecity.com, a Seattle-based Japanese-language site that carries Japanese translations of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Mariners coverage, has seen a spike in traffic from Japan.
-- By Japan Media Review Associate Editor Eric Ulken