After the huge catastrophe that hit Japan this March, the country is in need of a freer media culture. A less restricted media would allow more people access to information at press conferences. In the name of this aim, in April 25, a group of Japanese freelance journalists launched a new organization called the Free Press Association of Japan (FPAJ).
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Here is a selection of photos by Japanese freelancer Hiro Ugaya showing the devastation in northeastern Japan caused by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Photos are copyright Hiro Ugaya and used with permission. View his full Picasa gallery here.
In an interview on the CPJ Blog, Ugaya tells CPJ's Madeline Earp how he covered the catastrophe.
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The Japanese government upped the danger rating
for the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station to its highest
level, 7, on Tuesday, a month after an earthquake and tsunami devastated the
country. It was not yet clear whether the administration or the Tokyo Electric
Power Company, which runs the plant, withheld the extent of the risk. But the
local media's habitual allegiance to officials who arrange press conferences
and companies that buy advertising makes it hard to tell, and freelancers who
are eager to probe deeper say their questions have been suppressed.
Following up on our post about the difficulties of covering the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake from outside the mainstream media, CPJ spoke with intrepid freelancer Hiro Ugaya, whom we first interviewed in 2010. "From April 2 to 8, I was traveling in tsunami-destroyed area in Tohoku, northeastern Japan," he told CPJ by email from Tokyo.
"In life, we only encounter the injustices we were meant to correct."
-Igari Toshiro, ex-prosecutor, leading lawyer in the anti-organized crime movement in Japan (1949-2010)
Igari Toshiro was my lawyer,
my mentor, and my friend. In the sixteen years I've been covering organized
crime in
Kensuke Nishioka, 42, looked different from the other Japanese journalists I encountered in
Kazuo Hizumi holds his hands up before him, shoulder-width apart. He is demonstrating the size of the blade he kept under his pillow when sleeping at the bureau in his days as a rookie reporter in 
A polite man in a suit gave investigative reporter Jake Adelstein the message from a leader of one of Japan’s organized crime groups when he was first working on the story back in 2005: “Erase it, or be erased.” Adelstein backed off, but he didn’t stop researching Tadamasa Goto, a thuggish leader of the Japanese mafia, or yakuza. The second time, there was no message. In 2008, it was Adelstein’s sources who informed him his relentless inquiries had crossed a line. Don’t go home, they told him—Adelstein is originally from Missouri—America would not be far enough.
On February 16, CPJ held an ambitious international launch of our annual report Attacks on the Press. We coordinated events in six cities on four continents in order to expand the reach of our international headlines while also focusing on specific issues in each region. So how did we do?
“The e-mail came in at 8.48 p.m.,” Philippine journalist Maria
Ressa told a hushed audience at CPJ’s panel discussion, Press Freedom: On the Frontlines and
Online, this morning at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan in
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