Makoto Watanabe has never forgotten the day when his previous employer, one of Japan’s biggest newspapers, retreated from its biggest investigative scoop about the Fukushima nuclear disaster: that workers had fled the plant against orders from the plant’s manager.
It was 11 years ago, and the Asahi Shimbun had come under fire from other media and government supporters, who said the newspaper had misrepresented what were just garbled instructions. After proclaiming that it stood behind the story, the Asahi did an abrupt about-face at a news conference and retracted it.
The newspaper later gutted the investigative group he worked on that produced the article, telling reporters to be less contentious toward authorities. Mr. Watanabe quit his job at the leading newspaper, a rare move in Japan. But what he did next was more unusual: Mr. Watanabe started Japan’s first media nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism.
“The newspaper was more interested in protecting its privileged access than informing its readers,” Mr. Watanabe, 50, recalled. “I wanted to make a new media that wouldn’t fold.”
Eight years later, his Tokyo Investigative Newsroom Tansa remains small. As the editor in chief, he supervises a staff of two full-time reporters, a volunteer and an intern. On a recent afternoon, they worked in a spartan room with two small tables and bookshelves on the second floor of a nondescript Tokyo office building.
But Tansa, which roughly translates as “in-depth investigation,” is finally making a mark. Last year, it published a series of articles that exposed decades of forced sterilizations of mentally disabled people, forcing the government to issue an apology and pass a law to pay compensation to the victims. Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK, signed a deal to use some of Tansa’s content.
The nonprofit, which had a 2024 budget of 60 million yen, or about $400,000, was funded entirely by donations and private grants, has seen a steady increase in the number of readers supporting it with monthly contributions. Mr. Watanabe plans to hire two new journalists this spring, including one from another big newspaper.
“People are starting to recognize that we stand for something different,” Mr. Watanabe said, sitting in his newsroom while a reporter nearby scanned an online archive for data on industrial pollutants.
Like Mr. Watanabe, the reporters were drawn by the chance to do more independent journalism and seek out voices ignored by Japan’s mainstream press. “Only at Tansa do we start stories by asking, ‘Who is hurt by this?’” said Mariko Tsuji, a reporter who left a prominent magazine to join the nonprofit.
It’s an approach that Mr. Watanabe said goes back to an experience in middle school, when he saw classmates picking on a girl with physical and mental disabilities. Outraged, he wrote a description of how the behavior was hurting her feelings and posted it on a school wall. To his own surprise, the bullying stopped.
“It taught me that I could bring change with words,” he said.
Decades later, Mr. Watanabe still has the cherubic features of a boy on a playground, with the energy and eagerness to match. But it was through trial and error that he found his passion for challenging official narratives, which remains rare in Japanese journalism.
He experienced the first thrill of journalism when he joined the Asahi in 2000, after working briefly at a television network. He exposed vote buying in rural areas and failures by air traffic controllers that resulted in near misses.
In recognition of his scoops, the Asahi accepted his request to join a new group that the newspaper created to undertake longer-term investigative projects. He loved the freedom to jump from topic to topic, but as he did so, he started running into resistance within his own newspaper.
He was stepping on the toes of reporters at the newspaper who were stationed in the so-called press clubs, which were offices inside the government agencies that they covered. These Asahi reporters complained internally about his group’s critical stories angering their sources, but Mr. Watanabe dismissed them as too dependent on authorities for information.
In May 2014, the group published the Fukushima scoop, which rival media and political supporters of then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe faulted as overly sensational. The press club reporters inside Asahi, whose resentments had been building, used this to strike. Mr. Watanabe said they convinced the newspaper to disavow the article four months after it appeared and later to disband the investigative group.
In response to questions, the Asahi said that it had made a renewed push into investigative journalism led by a different section of the newspaper.
Mr. Watanabe joined another ex-Asahi reporter in launching the startup, which they at first named the Waseda Chronicle after a university that gave them early support. They made it a nonprofit to demonstrate their autonomy — from both corporate sponsors and the political establishment.
“We wanted to show that we stand next to our readers outside the circle of power,” Mr. Watanabe said.
To drive that point home, the nonprofit tackled media corruption in its first series of articles, which exposed payments made to major news companies by a big advertising firm in exchange for positive coverage of its clients.
Ever since, Mr. Watanabe has showcased deeply reported investigations not seen in most mainstream media. In a current series about chemical pollution by a major manufacturer, Tansa has published 75 articles. Another series, about a suicide brought about by bullying at a high school in Nagasaki, has reached 48 installments.
While the co-founder later left, Mr. Watanabe stuck with the tiny operation despite its reporting being ignored by establishment journalists. It has taken years, but Tansa is finally starting to stand out in a media landscape that has long been dominated by legacy newspapers and television networks.
Tansa is also winning recognition overseas, where it is the only investigative nonprofit from Japan in the Global Investigative Journalism Network, an international group with some 250 members.
“Japan is still controlled by established media that don’t give other narratives any space,” said William Horsley, the international director of the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield. “Tansa is an exception that fills the gap.”
Mr. Watanabe hopes the reporters he is recruiting will allow him to do more cross-border collaborations. But he also sees storm clouds on the horizon at home. Like other parts of the world, right-wing populism and media-bashing politicians are rising in Japan, and last year police in the city of Kagoshima raided a small online media after it published stories criticizing an investigation.
In such an increasingly hostile environment, “the need will be stronger than ever for a media outlet that won’t surrender,” he said.
