I obtained this link from this blog entry:
Asada Mao and The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan

For the same reason I believe native English speakers should receive harsher criticism for not knowing Japanese when they live in Japan (i.e. speaking very few words and being complimented), so should the standards for English, regardless of the setting. Playing off a few words of English as being “internationalized” and somehow more cultured is just overblown.

Like he said, “Sort of like making a big news story of some popular American sports player saying Konnichiwa to Japanese reporters in America.”

When are these things going to be givens in Japan? There are native-English speakers, now naturalized, running for public office in Japan; does news coverage have similar highlights saying something to the effect of: “Ooooh! His Japanese is so good!”?

If this is what the media and the public majority really want, then we’re probably better off knowing exactly ten words in Japanese.

Some “tarento” are cited as being good English speakers, whereas they often have poor pronunciation, intonation and fluency, but speak loudly. Somehow, volume equates to ability…

As for for the questions, many of them were out of place. A poor attempt by some journalists to ask the penetrating questions…

How about finding out if the poor girl is even interested in baseball before giving her a closed question on which team she likes? Again, too many assumptions made before a question is asked.

Conversely, how many times do you see the Japanese press asking a newly-arrived vistitor, “What’s your favourite Japanese food?” while snickering at their poor level of Japanese?

I’m not convinced this kind of infotainment rates any amount of airtime.

Of course, had the Japanese government declared that all foreign nationals would be rounded up an placed in internment camps on they day Matsuzaka faced Ichiro, guess which would have been headline news…

It says that Japanese reporters can’t ask questions like the ones asked.

Really? I just don’t know.

I think that press conferences by Japanese reporters are far more scripted and organized. I know that the press clubs for politicians are tightly controlled. It may be that some people in the media want to ask outrageous questions, but there are institutions in place which prevent this. If it’s even true that Japanese reporters don’t ask sixteen year old media figures about boyfriends, then this is one plausible explanation.

Of course, the video just makes Western reporters seem kind of … I don’t know the right word to use here .. crude?

By the way, who were these reporters? Were they ice skating reporters? Or were they even sports reporters? Or were they reporters who usually cover ALL of Japan?

You know, maybe many of these reporters were not sports reporters and that was part of the problem. Some of them are responsible for reporting all news in Japan, and so they aren’t familiar with how to handle a situation like this. They might have been looking for some kind of angle to give them a news story. Again a more plausible explanation for the questions, rather than stereotyping Western reporters. (Were there any Asian reporters present at all?)

Maybe the guy who asked the question was even (financially?) encouraged to ask such questions by a Japanese source.

Who knows?

Again, the interview was an hour long. The Japan Times reports:

“My goal from a young age has been to get a gold medal at the Olympics,” Asada told reporters at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo on Friday.
“I have been practicing hard in California, and am really looking forward to Vancouver, where my goal is to have a flawless performance that the audience will love and I will hopefully win the gold.”

Her goal is to go for the gold in 2010. Would anyone have realized that watching the video? Not at all, they would have come away with the idea her primary goal was to improve her English.

Of course, this was probably on some kind of infotainment program. We are what we watch!