> Sorry, Earl, I read the TIMES of London and if you
look at the
> comments of the readers of that illustrious paper,
they are some of
> the most parochial, mental stereotyping I have ever
seen and far worse
> than almost anything I have ever seen outside of the
most ignorant
> Americans. Read some of the comments about the EU
sometimes in that
> paper. Make Americans look like the most cosmopolitan
people on earth!

That one can find still worse examples in Britain in no way negates or elevates the pattern to be seen in the American press. Citing the crimes of others is generally not an accepted defense in courts of law and is not in my view an acceptable defense here either.

Some years ago, Charles Burress did a careful study of American press covereage of Japan. Here is a partial summary of his findings.

Charles Burress, a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, puts his finger on many of these problems in his article carried below. He got his start as a reporter in Japan, where he came as a journalist-in-training in 1980. Since the period of "Japan bashing"
about 10 years ago, he has been researching the American media's treatment of Japan. Chuo Koron published an article of his in its December 1997 issue-"Naze yugamu Amerika no Nihon hodo" (Why Is American Coverage of Japan Twisted?)-in which he broke prejudiced U.S. reporting on Japan into four main
types: excessive use of war metaphors, describing Japan as a monolithic entity, a culturally condescending tone, and failing to relate the Japanese side to a
story.* As examples of warlike language used in reportage on Japan, he notes the frequent descriptions of Japanese corporate activities in America as an "invasion" and other terminology used to paint Japan as "the enemy" and a country to be opposed. With respect to the second manifestation of bias, describing Japan as monolithic, he notes that European companies are called by name, while Japanese firms are glossed simply as "Japan,"
"the Japanese," or "Japan Inc." A few corporations are taken to represent the entire nation, and individual Japanese are amalgamated into a faceless mass.

http://www.japanecho.com/sum/2000/270216.html

I have a Google key word watch set for Fukushima. I have been struck by how many of the headlines are still of the monolithic pattern noted by Burgess.

The "culturally condescending tone" is also very much in evidence. I tell my students in my course "Japan In the Foreign Imagination" that if you compare coverage of similar issues in the US and Japan, one must come to the conclusion that "Americans ain't got no culture."
By this I mean that the American press (primarily The NYT and the Washington Post in my monitoring) almost invariably cite some imagined peculiarity of Japanese culture (or society) to explain anything and everything that happens in Japan whereas reporting on similar events in the US (or
Europe) almost never mention culture. So the Olympus accounting scam gets explained in terms of Japanese culture whereas Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, or Bernie Madoff apparently exist in a cultural vacuum.
I've also casually compared coverage of events in Britain and Italy in those two papers with their coverage of roughly analogous events in Japan. Again, Britain and Italy seem to lack "culture" when it comes to corporate malfeasance and governmental failures whereas everything that goes wrong in Japan seems to be a product of its culture.

And, in anticipation of a probable question, "Yes, despite the name of this course, I also deal with Japan in the Japanese Imagination and in this context deal with stereotypes of foreign countries and stereotypes of foreigners that are frequently voiced by Japanese."

EHK