For this campaign, the second so far, 10 “Happy News” nominees were selected as the best, with one taking the grand prize, and one getting the newly-created “Happy News Young” prize for readers in high school and below. Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi and a junior high school boy were chosen as the top “Happy News People” who brought happiness to readers.
A total of 8,262 nominations were received. That's more than twice the number in the previous campaign. The total included 4,651 applications in the “Young” category.
Takuo Takihana, president of the Yomiuri Shimbun Tokyo headquarters, headed the selection committee. He said the committee saw lots of news items that drew a happy response from readers and commented that newspapers should do more to report some happy news for every reader.
The grand prize went to a nomination by Osamu Ishida, 66, a resident of Kanazawa City, Ishikawa Prefecture, who submitted a news article about a junior high school boy in Shiga town, Ishikawa Prefecture, who volunteered to put out the trash in the morning twice a week for an elderly woman neighbor. The woman runs a tiny molded confectionary shop but has trouble walking. Ishida mentioned in his comment that he is upset about the recent spate of heinous crimes by teenagers victimizing infants or other juveniles. “This article caught my eye. It was sparkling news and I read it over and over again,” he said.
Ayaka Mutsukawa, 14, of Nagano City submitted the winning article for the “Young” category with a sports news article from the Shinano Mainichi newspaper about the “One School, One Country” drive. Under the campaign for the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics, each school picked a foreign country or area and cheered for its athletes at the games to help schoolchildren deepen their international perception. Mutsukawa submitted an article about how the “One School, One Country” idea was picked up for the Turin Winter Olympics. She said in her comment that she was overjoyed to learn that pupils at an elementary school in the Italian city of Turin were studying Japan, adding that learning about each other is the first step toward friendship.
As the “Happy News People” for 2005, the selection committee picked astronaut Noguchi and Masashi Okushita, 13, the junior high school boy who helps his elderly neighbor put out her trash.
Ishida and Okushita attended the awards ceremony. Noguchi sent a recorded video message from the United States, where he is training for a future mission.
NSK Urges Review of Personal Information Protection Law
NSK has again demanded a full review of the Personal Information Protection Law. That demand came in a written submission to the Cabinet Office on April 7 as part of the reconsideration of the law that went into force in April 2005.
In its submission, NSK summarized a fact-finding survey of 57 member media companies conducted by the NSK Editorial Affairs Committee that found police are tending to favor concealing the names of victims of accidents and crimes at the same time as administrative offices and local governments become even more reluctant to disclose information.
NSK warned against excessive secrecy due to the law and deliberate concealment of information by public institutions. It said the government must make a full-fledged review of the system to achieve a balance between protecting and allowing the legitimate use of personal information.
When the law was enacted, the Diet agreed to review it in three years after it took effect. The Cabinet Office is monitoring the law's implementation and hearing from interested parties. It plans to take a year to review the praise and complaints received by this July in order to compile a report by next summer.
At the hearing, the NSK representatives complained of an overreaction by public institutions to the law. They say public servants have been refusing to supply required personal information out of a misunderstanding of the law. They also cited cases in which central government offices and local governments intentionally concealed information that has long been freely provided to the media.
In a positive comment on the law, NSK praised the mounting public awareness about the importance of protecting personal information and the implementation of measures to prevent improper leaks of such information. However, NSK warned that the stipulated exemption of the media from some terms of the law is not being fully respected by the general public and there is a prevailing misunderstanding that people cannot say anything about information that is not even subject to protection under the law. NSK concluded that the media sees nothing but trouble from the law in terms of news reporting activities.
Tokyo Court Backs Reporter's Refusal to Reveal Source
The Tokyo District Court on April 24 accepted in principle a Kyodo News reporter's refusal to reveal a source in connection with a U.S. health food company's lawsuit filed in the United States over tax evasion .
Noting that the source fall into the category of “professional secrets,” stipulated in the Civil Procedure Code, which exempts witnesses from testifying in cases where professional confidentiality might be undermined, the ruling endorsed the reporter’s refusal to answer questions that could directly or indirectly identify the source. But the ruling did not accept the reporter’s refusal to respond to 10 out of the 41 questions that pertained to the number of sources and other issues. Both Kyodo News and the U.S. health food company have appealed the ruling to the Tokyo High Court.
Quoting a 1978 Supreme Court ruling on a case in which a Mainichi Shimbun reporter obtained a classified diplomatic document from an employee of the Foreign Ministry, the district court ruled that a reporter’s acquisition of inside information from a civil servant, although a breach of confidentiality by the civil servant, does not immediately justify canceling the reporter’s right to protect his source.
A spokesman for Kyodo News said they were happy that the district court accepted their reporter’s refusal to answer questions that might indirectly identify the source. But they regretted that the court did not accept his refusal to answer questions related to the process of newsgathering, including one on the number of news sources.
In a series of depositions before the Japanese courts in connection with the same lawsuit, a Kyodo News reporter and an NHK reporter also refused to identify a source. The Niigata District Court on Oct. 11 last year and the Tokyo High Court on March 14 this year ruled that the NHK reporter was justified in refusing to reveal his source. On the other hand, the Tokyo District Court, in a ruling on March 14 of this year, did not accept the Yomiuri Shimbun reporter’s refusal to testify on most of the questions, instead giving priority to civil servants’ confidentiality obligations over the need to protect news sources and the people’s right to know. NSK and the National Association of Commercial Broadcasters in Japan have both protested the disputed court ruling.
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