Watanabe never forgot the day his former employer, one of Japan's biggest newspapers, retreated from the biggest research scoop on the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
It was 11 years ago, and Asahi Shinbun had fired fire from other media and government supporters. After declaring that it was behind the story, Asahi suddenly appeared at a press conference and retracted.
The newspaper later broke the investigative group he had worked on, wrote articles and told reporters not to be too controversial with the authorities. Watanabe quit his job at a major newspaper. This is a rare move in Japan. But what he did next was even more unusual. Watanabe has started Japan's first media nonprofit organization dedicated to investigative journalism.
“The newspapers were more interested in protecting privileged access than notifying readers,” recalls 50-year-old Watanabe. “I wanted to create a new media that won't collapse.”
Eight years later, Tansa in his Tokyo Investigation Newsroom remains small. As editor-in-chief, he oversees two full-time reporters, volunteer and intern staff. On a recent afternoon they were working in a Spartan's room, with two small tables and a bookshelves, located on the second floor of the Tokyo Office Building.
However, Tansa, which is roughly translated as a “detailed investigation,” has finally made a mark. It published a series of articles from 2018 to 2021, exposing decades of forced sterilization of people with mental disabilities, and passed a law that forced the government to apologise and pays compensation to the victims last year. Japan's public broadcaster NHK has signed an agreement to use some of Tansa's content.
Nonprofits with a 2024 budget of ¥60 million or about $400,000 are fully funded by donations and private grants, and the number of readers supporting it with monthly donations is steadily increasing. Watanabe plans to hire two new journalists this spring.
“People are beginning to realize that we represent something else,” Watanabe sat in his newsroom, as a nearby reporter scanned an online archive of data on industrial pollutants.
Like Watanabe, reporters were drawn to the opportunity to perform more independent journalism and seek out voices ignored by mainstream Japanese press. “Do you start the story only in Tansa by asking, 'Who is hurt by this?'” said reporter Mariko Tsuji, who left a well-known magazine to join a nonprofit.
This is the approach that Watanabe said he returned to his junior high school experience when he saw his classmates choosing girls with physical and mental disabilities. Infuriated, he wrote an explanation of how the actions hurt her feelings and posted them on the school wall. To his own surprise, the bullying stopped.
“I taught me that words can make a difference,” he said.
Decades later, Watanabe still possesses the cherubic features of a boy on the playground. However, it was through trial and error that he found his passion for challenging official stories that remain rare in Japanese journalism.
He experienced the first thrill of journalism when he joined Asahi in 2000 after working briefly for a television network. He exposed the purchase of votes in rural areas and the failures of air traffic controllers, which led to a near-term mistake.
Recognizing his scoop, Asahi accepted his request to join a new group that the newspapers were created to carry out long-term research projects. He loved the freedom to jump from topic to topic, but as he did, he began to bump into resistance in his newspaper.
He was stepping on the toes of newspaper reporters stationed in the so-called press club, the office within the agency they covered. These Asahi reporters complained internally about the critical narratives of his group angering their sources, but Watanabe dismissed them as being too dependent on the authorities for information.
In May 2014, the group announced the Fukushima Scoop. Fukushima Scoop was overly sensationalized by the media and political supporters of then Minister Shinzo Abe. Press Club reporters within Asahi used it to attack because its responsiveness was being constructed. Watanabe said he persuaded him to deny the article four months after the newspapers appeared, and later persuaded him to disband the investigative group.
In response to questions, Asahi said he has made a new push to investigative journalism led by another section of the newspaper.
Watanabe launched the startup with another former Asahi Reporter, who initially named the Waseda Chronicle after the university that gave early support. They have made it a nonprofit organization, both from corporate sponsorship and political establishment, to demonstrate their autonomy.
“We wanted to show that we were standing next to our readers outside the circle of power,” Watanabe said.
To deliberately drive that point, the nonprofit worked on media corruption in its first series of articles. This exposed payments made to major news companies by large advertising companies in exchange for positive reporting from clients.
Since then, Watanabe has introduced in-depthly reported studies that are not found in most mainstream media. In the current series on chemical contamination by major manufacturers, Tansa has published 75 articles. Another series about suicides brought about by bullying at a high school in Nagasaki reached 48 installments.
While the co-founder later went left, Watanabe stuck to a small tactic despite the report being ignored by founding journalists. It took years, but Tansa finally stands out in a media situation that has been dominated by legacy newspapers and television networks.
Tansa also has gained recognition overseas and is the only research nonprofit from Japan on the Global Research Journalism Network, an international group with around 250 members.
“We've seen a lot of effort into the media freedoms,” said William Horseley, international director of the University of Sheffield's Center for Media Freedom. “Tansa is the exception that fills the gap.”
Watanabe hopes that the reporters he employs will allow him to collaborate more across borders. However, he also sees storm clouds on the horizon of the house. Like other parts of the world, politicians raiding right-wing populism and media have risen in Japan, and last year, police in Kagoshima City raided small online media after releasing stories criticizing the investigation.
In this increasingly hostile environment, “for a media outlet that doesn't surrender, the need will be stronger than ever,” he said.
