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August 23, 2005

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Top 10 Toughest Jobs in the World

I'll need to think about the other 9, but I read today about one of them, held by a Mr. Keiji Ide: press relations minister at the Japanese Embassy in Beijing:

Because most of China's news on Japan is negative, Ide said, any reporter's effort to contact him for a balanced news report is a milestone.

He gets 12 or 13 citations a month, usually quotes or sidebars inserted into China-dominated news packages about Sino-Japanese political or historical issues.

"It's a very difficult job for me," Ide said. "The overwhelming majority of articles is very negative. My job in China is not the same as my colleague's in the U.S."

That's got to be the understatement of 2005. Japan is taking a battering this year, and there is not much they can do about it as other nations take them to task about their wartime history on the 60th anniversary of WW II. But then a certain quote caught my eye:
But after a series of mass anti-Japan rallies in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities in April, the embassy received "several e-mails a day" from Japanese citizens calling China's discontent a failure of Japan's diplomacy, Ide said.

He has responded by stepping up Chinese media outreach, the best way the Foreign Ministry believes it can influence China's opinions on history and modern politics.

This reminds me of the Bush administration fuming about its negative PR in the Arab world and the belief that a coordinated, well-directed PR campaign will turn the tide. But the fact remains for Japan as well as for America, there is at its base reason why so many people in China and the Arab World, respectively despise them so much - and no amount of good PR will change the fact that their decision-making on key issues continues to be incredibly insensitive to their target audience in these PR campaigns. Until Japan really takes these history book publishers to task or takes them off public school curricula, Mr. Keiji Ide will remain the figurative finger in the dike.

 posted by HK Dave on 08.23.05 at 09:43 AM in the




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Comments:

Deal with the causes of discontent? Like that would ever catch on.

 posted by: Bromgrev on 08.23.05 at 06:28 PM [permalink]

It reminds me of our great leader C.H. Tung, who thought nothing but PR had gone wrong.

 posted by: Letters from China on 08.23.05 at 09:24 PM [permalink]

Yes, accountability in the modern world to real concerns is ever so passe. Spin, spin spin the wheel.

Thank goodness for the honest old autocrats in Beijing to replace squeaky wheels!:)

 posted by: HK Dave on 08.23.05 at 11:14 PM [permalink]

"It reminds me of our great leader C.H. Tung, who thought nothing but PR had gone wrong."

:-D

 posted by: sunbin on 08.24.05 at 07:03 AM [permalink]




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