- Lecturer: Martin Fackler, Tokyo Bureau Chief of the New York Times
- Date: Friday, May 10, 2013, 7:00 pm-
- Venue: Iwasaki Koyata Memorial Hall, International House of Japan (*please note that the venue has changed)
- Language: English (without Japanese interpretation)
- Admission: Free (reservations required)
Who is journalism for? Monitoring closely the abuse of power, journalism is generally believed to be dedicated to the betterment of civil society and the protection of the people’s right to necessary information. In this lecture, Mr. Fackler will discuss the problems as well as the opportunities of Japanese journalism as seen through the experience of Japan’s triple disaster on March 11, 2011.
Martin Fackler
Martin Fackler is the Tokyo Bureau Chief for the New York Times, covering Japan and the Korean peninsula. A native of Iowa who grew up in Georgia, he was first captivated by Asia more than 20 years ago when he spent his sophomore year in college studying Mandarin and classical Chinese at Taiwan’s Tunghai University. A chance to study Japanese at Keio University in Tokyo led him to Japan, where he later did graduate work in economics at the University of Tokyo. He has master’s degrees in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and in East Asian history from the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to the New York Times, he has also worked in Tokyo for the Wall Street Journal, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Associated Press and Bloomberg News. He has also worked for the AP in New York, Beijing and Shanghai. He joined the New York Times in 2005, working first as Tokyo business correspondent before assuming his current position in 2009. In 2012, Mr. Fackler was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for his and his colleagues’ investigative stories on the Fukushima nuclear plant accident that the prize committee said offered a “powerful exploration of serious mistakes concealed by authorities in Japan.” He is the author of Hontō no koto o tsutaenai nihon no shimbun (Credibility Lost: The Crisis in Japanese Newspaper Journalism after Fukushima; Futabasha, 2012) a critical look at Japanese media coverage of the 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster.