Stop Me if You’ve Heard this Before…

You’re a reporter visiting from overseas, and around the tenth day into your visit, it dawns on you that the piece about Japan you’re preparing isn’t even up to the standard of the complimentary magazine you’d read aboard the limousine bus from Narita and Tokyo Station.

Blame that parsimonious budget. Nobody expected Japan would be so bloody expensive. Once the hotel bills, three daily meals and the obligatory Shinkansen round-trip fares to Kyoto were settled, precious little remained for the other incidentals. Like the services of an interpreter.

So you take the easy way out and produce a feature about 1) the yakuza; 2) love hotels; or 3) the consumption of uncooked marine life, based on a predawn jaunt to the Tsukiji fish market.

As for deep background, you can always pick the brains of us local writers. We come cheap and are usually good for a quote or two.

“They’re just using you,” former Tokyoite Peter Hadfield once admonished me, many years ago. “You have got to insist they pay you up front, or you’ll never see a penny from them.”

Mixed in with the moochers, spongers, schnorrers and other assorted charity cases have been a couple of world-class fraudsters who saw it as a genuine challenge to contact the locals, invoke “professional courtesy” and stroke their egos until they ejaculated useful information.

One, a British tabloid journalist for the Star with the same surname as a famous literary spy, arrived in Tokyo as part of a contingent covering a G7 summit meeting. Not surprisingly, he decided to digress from political coverage and do a feature piece about love hotels.

He was given my phone number from a club member in good standing who had vouched for his bona fides, and subsequently tied me up on the telephone for over an hour with questions. I thought that was the end of it, but after returning to London he called again and read me his entire draft, all 1,600 words of it, over the telephone.

“Listen, my editor is asking for photos,” he implored. “Can you get me some?”

Against my better judgment, I obtained them. A couple were irreplaceable color slides, and others required the photo editor of a vernacular weekly magazine to spend an hour or so in the darkroom making new prints. I dispatched these to London by DHL.

By this time I’d run up considerable expenses and of course was obliged to pay the people who had supplied the photos. But Agent 007 wasn’t responding to my e-mails.

“He’s a kind of prickly character,” advised the member who’d made the initial introduction. “Better not write to him – let me handle it.”

The days became weeks, but 007 never responded. The individual who made the introduction eventually wound up compensating me with a considerable outlay from his own pocket.

This incident should have dissuaded me from responding to any further offers of assistance, but I foolishly continued. And I admit there were one or two people over the years who I really enjoyed meeting, and who were genuinely grateful for my assistance. But they were the rare exceptions.

Then came straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. An American freelance writer approached me about a book project related to Japan’s weekly magazines – a subject with which I have some familiarity. He dropped the names of two FCCJ regular members who I know well. And who, he said, held
me in high esteem.

After several trips down to Yurakucho to provide him with clippings and other materials, he offered me money, an unprecedented act of generosity that immediately put me on my guard.
After a few microseconds of digging with Google I discovered, to my growing chagrin, that 1) his claimed affiliation appeared specious; and
2) he had contributed articles to a newsletter with ties to one of Japan’s “new religions.” (And a very wealthy one I would add.)

This particular sect was well-known for its adversarial relationship with Japanese weekly magazines, and it soon became clear he had undertaken the book project to denounce the weeklies before a foreign audience.

After my run-in with the new-religion phony, I decided that drastic action would be needed to protect my future sanity.

So now whenever I get cold calls from visiting reporters, my response is to invariably affect a quavering voice and inform them, “I’m really sorry, but I’m legally blind, confined to a wheelchair, and never leave my house.”

Four advisories from Kamiyama’s school of hard knocks:

1. Don’t accept anyone’s claims at face value – Google first and ask questions later. Check out their background, and if you can’t confirm it or it’s more trouble than it’s worth, beg off.

2. If they drop the name of someone you know as a reference, verify it with the person concerned. There’s a fairly good chance you’ll be told "I don’t really know the guy, I just gave him your name to get him out of my hair."

3. Be sparing in your dispensation of information. Make people understand you expect to be compensated for anything more than a phone conversation.

4. Once they depart Japan, don’t expect to ever hear from them again. (If they still owe you money, this means you’re almost certainly not
going to collect.) ❶