About 10 years ago, I did a study for the Japanese Foreign Ministry on American images of the Japanese economy in American media. Among other things, I made an explicit comparison with other countries using data on articles in newspapers and TV. (If anyone wants a copy of the study, let me know and I will send it out.
Earl already has it.)

However, that is not what I want to discuss here. While reviewing hundreds of news articles, i was struck by the appearance of themes that were repeated in almost every article of a particular period. For analysis, I read every Lexis-Nexis news article featuring Japan over three separate periods. The final period I examined was June 1998. Extracts from my study are pasted in below:

The predominant theme in June 1998 was a sense that Japanese politicians and government officials could not be trusted to implement "pledges" and other economic policy commitments. "What Treasury Secretary Rubin got last week was a new commitment from Japan-one that may or may not be worth any more than previous commitments." (The New York Times, June 20, 1998) The Times' Tokyo bureau was more ambivalent: "The central question was simply: How much has changed? ... Has Japan, in making pledges Wednesday on an economic program to strengthen its economy, really committed itself to far-reaching changes? Or are they merely warmed-over promises from yesterday? ... There is evidence for both propositions. ... Almost all the elements of the economic program are already longstanding elements of Japanese policy." The Boston Globe (June 18, 1998) raised concern in an interpretative passage: "Some analysts said they had little faith that Japan was finally ready to act."

When did this theme arise? Were there specific events that seemed to trigger this response? To answer these questions, I reviewed all news stories on the Japanese economy in June 1996 and June 1997 in the northeast region. In these forty-one stories, there was not a single example of a cynical or skeptical tone of Japanese government policymaking. I then moved forward to September and October 1997. The emergence of distrust can be traced to these months.

A September 12, 1997 New York Times article on the GDP figures by Cheryl Wu Dunn contains the first skeptical evaluation of policy: "So, as the economy of the United States gallops along, with Europe cantering behind, the drop in Japan stands out as a major policy failure and underscores the enormous challenges that Japan still faces in trying to recover from its economic mess." She went on to declare: "Today's figures are embarrassing for policy makers, particularly because the Government had repeatedly insisted that the economy was strong enough to bear the sales tax increase."

Returning for a moment to 2011, I was particularly struck by the absence of a theme until one article appeared that seemed to crystalize opinion. Following that one piece, almost every article used the same imagery. Returning to my 2002 study, I tried to come up with an explanation:

Journalists were sometimes too ready to use available images without going very deeply into their origins.
Moreover, they often develop their own shorthand and code words to explain ongoing stories that they write about regularly. It is easier to pull the old formulas out of the file than to reinvent new ones, even if they are not the most appropriate explanations. Writers who did not cover Japan were even more likely to accept the images created by more informed writers and to build on them inappropriately.