ON JUNE 7, 2000, two men called at the cluttered Shinjuku offices of the magazine Uwasa no Shinso (The Truth Behind the Rumour) and asked to see the editor, Yasunori Okadome. The men, right-wing extremist members of the Japan Youth Federation, had come to complain about a one-line article claiming Crown Princess Masako might be pregnant. What angered many people was not that the magazine had broken a taboo of reporting on the imperial family against its wishes, but that it printed the princess' name without the correct honorific, hi.
After haranguing Okadome and his deputy and demanding a published apology, the visitors split his head with a glass ashtray and stabbed him in the leg. They then told the bleeding, half-conscious editor to call the police before sitting down in his office to wait for their arrival. The men were arrested and sentenced to 16 months' imprisonment each. Why didn't they flee? 'They wanted to send out a message to others I suppose,' says Okadome. The message: 'Don't challenge taboos.'
After a quarter of a century, the monthly magazine Okadome founded in 1979 is rolling out its last issue on Saturday. Dressed in his trademark dark glasses, black outfit and looking a little like the yakuza gangsters he sometimes covers, Okadome says the job has worn him out. 'I've spent 25 years challenging taboos, and the stress has been considerable, so I'd like to take it easy from now on,' says the 54-year-old editor. 'It's been a great period but I've had enough. I started the magazine because there are so many things in Japan that the press is scared of covering. But I'm not getting any younger and I don't have the energy any more.'
A self-confessed anti-establishment figure, Okadome was a student activist before taking up journalism in the 1970s. He has no wife or family because, in the words of one office colleague, 'he's married to his job'. Like many other so-called guerilla journalists who came of age during the turbulent late 1960s and early 70s in Japan, Okadome believed in the famous dictum of Finley Peter Dunne, that journalism should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Unlike most of them, he has lived up to it.
The imperial family, the police, organised religion, top politicians, big business and Japan's pampered, overpaid 'talent' have all had to dodge missiles from Uwasa. And although its approach - a mixture of gossip, sleaze, scandal and smut - is often more carpet bomb than surgical strike, when Uwasa is on target, it hurts. Tokyo's chief prosecutor, Mamoru Norisada, was forced to resign in 1999 after the magazine published a story about his publicly funded affair with a 28-year-old hostess, and former prime minister Yoshiro Mori was badly wounded by a story a year later alleging he had been caught by police in a brothel in 1958. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has taken flak for abandoning his pregnant wife and cutting off his children.
Thousands of other targets have had to run for cover over the years. 'Uwasa starts the ball rolling with so many stories in Japan by just putting them in print,' says media commentator Dave Spector, who writes for the magazine. 'They are the first to go into battle, then all the others pick up the story because once something gets into print it's like a green light for everyone. But Okadome has been attacked and sued so many times. If you're the only game in town, the only one with balls, it's hard to bear the burden.'