An international press-freedom organization is highlighting a decision by a Japanese prosecutor to suspend criminal-contempt proceedings against a freelance journalist.
It concerned a tweet that Mari Takenouchi made about a group’s efforts to get people to return to areas contaminated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
The head of a group called Ethos filed a complaint against Takenouchi after claimed that having these people return constituted an “experiment on human beings”.
“The decision to suspend the proceedings against the journalist Mari Takenouchi is obviously encouraging, but we persist in calling on the authorities to abandon them altogether and not just suspend them,” Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.
Japan likes to portray itself as a free country, but it only ranks 59th in the World Press Freedom Index compiled in 2014 by Reporters Without Borders.
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Freelancers are often barred from news conferences, the press-freedom group adds. And the owner of the Fukushima plant, TEPCO, has “denied access to the information available to the mainstream media (which censor themselves)”.
“Now that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government has tightened the legislation on ‘state secrets’, their fight will get even more dangerous.”
Japan’s lousy press-freedom ranking puts it behind countries such as Niger, Serbia, Haiti, Romania, and Burkina Faso, which are hardly seen as bastions of liberty by people in the western world.
The ranking fell in the wake of Tokyo winning permission from the International Olympic Committee to host the 2020 Summer Games.
Finland is first on the World Press Freedom Index and Canada ranks 18th.
Read more at Japan halts criminal contempt case against freelancer raising alarm about return to Fukushima
