TOKYO, Feb. 3, 2024—I’ve been an avid reader of the New York Times, both print and on-line, and being in Japan, only on-line now. And I have lots to say, complain, and salute about NYTimes – except its chronically biased coverage of anything to do about Japan.
In writing this article, what I stumbled into was by accident; The Dec. 13, 2023 article about the Red Bull Formula One team, ‘For Red Bull and Max Verstappen, 2023 Was a Dominant Year.’ Motorsports fans know the Red Bull’s season achievements are more than being outstanding.
‘He set the record for most wins in a season, 19 from 22 Grands Prix; for consecutive number of victories, 10; and the highest percentage of wins in a season, 86.36 percent, beating the previous best of 75 percent by Alberto Ascari in 1952, an era when there were only eight races,’ the Times lauded him.
‘As a constructor, Red Bull won 21 Grands Prix, overhauling Mercedes’ record of 2016 when it won 19 of 21 races. With a 95.5 percent success rate, it also beat the 93.8 percent of McLaren in 1988 when it won 15 of 16 Grands Prix.’
I went through the whole article but did not find any reference at all – about the engine supplier, Honda, which retired from F1 in 2021 yet continued its powertrain technical support very actively, for the Red Bull and Scuderia Tauri teams, absent the Honda logos on the machines and driver uniforms.
Was the Times reporter an F1 amateur or his editors were ignorant about how the powertrain plays a vital part – many believe it’s what makes F1 teams – in the series? I won’t know. But Yuki Tsunoda and his Scuderia Tauri team mate Daniel Ricciardo did well, placing 14th and 17th in points ranking – that underscores the Honda engine power.
In September, the Sports Illustrated’s on-line article wrote how significant a role an F1 engine plays for competing teams, introducing comments of a Honda Racing Team executive explaining why the Red Bull continued to grab the victory flag in the 2023.
The Red Bull victory episode is not alone in the Times’ benign neglect of Japan news coverage.
The K-Pop rage is another case. It originates in J-Pop of the 1990s but that’s totally ignored by the Times, as well as that the newspaper’s introduction of Korean cuisines as the country’s traditional, when in fact, many if not most are spun off from Japanese cooking.
I do not recall other similar cases involving the Times’ coverage of Japan now but vaguely recall many. In some cases, it was as if the Times wanted to remind Japan – quite correctly – that the country is no match to China in all dimensions. How Japan looks now from the Mars relative to China is exactly as the Chinese label it: Tiny Nippon. And Japan has become even smaller now than 30 years ago, when the bilateral trade spat ended and nudged Japan’s economic ranking below China and probably below the currently struggling Germany.
So it’s no surprise that the United States views Japan as a small island archipelago tjat happened to be close to a geopolitically vital area of the East and South China Sea, thus is strategically important for maintaining military balance.
As a citizen of this Tiny Japan, I have a personal dignity and am of the opinion that this country deserves to be covered fairly
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