Japanese Mass Media Buries Self-Immolation Protest Over Abe Government's Constitutional Coup

The reverberations of the act of self-immolation next to Shinjuku Station on June 29, 2014 seem akin to the sound of one hand clapping. Japan's mass media reliably jumps all over any sensational story, but not this one. While not ignored, it was certainly not pursued, as the story of a man reciting an anti-war poem by Yosano Akiko, a national legend, before igniting himself in front of throngs on a Sunday afternoon at Tokyo's most crowded commuter station somehow failed to gain traction. It was a remarkable political statement without precedent in the Japan I have lived in since 1987 making the negligible coverage all the more newsworthy

Linguistics · Mass media · Political science · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy