How did this project begin?

Back in April 2020, like many people in Japan and in other parts of the world, I was working from home. The situation was uncertain and I began to notice that many members of the foreign community in Japan were struggling to get information. There were English newspapers, websites, English subchannels on some of the Japanese news shows, and even an English news service run by national broadcaster NHK, but stories tended to appear hours or even days later in the English press.

Moreover, one thing that I noticed was often missing from the English translations was infographics. I’d personally found the various graphs and maps that were liberally included in the Japanese news and “magazine format” shows (known as “Wide Shows” here in Japan) to be extremely useful for grasping the situation, but these were often noticeably absent from the English translations.

The reasons for that are quite simple and obvious when you think about it. While text can be copied and pasted, run through machine translation engines and polished up quickly, images are usually in the form of JPGs, PNGs and PDFs. The text couldn’t easily be extracted and replaced with English. Providing infographics in English would probably mean having to create the image again from scratch. Most newspapers, websites and net-based English TV shows didn’t want to go to the trouble, so there was a lot of English text but no visuals.

From around April 20 2020, I was photographing information tidbits directly from my TV screen, giving them a rough (and often slightly humorous) translation and posting them up on my Facebook. From April 27 2020, this became a regular daily ritual which I continued for over 2.5 years — stopping after 900 days as the 8th wave subsided. My Facebook profile and these posts are public, and I also shared them with the Japan Covid19 Discussion Group and the Return to Japan Support Group on Facebook, and I’ve had a lot of positive feedback from readers.

Originally, I was taking screenshots live off the TV. I got up every morning in time to be in front of the 7am news bulletin. If I overslept, I had to scramble around the website and get my news elsewhere. I didn’t have any recording device.
Sometime during the process, I discovered that NHK actually did a streaming service and that meant I was able to take the relevant screenshots any time during that day and make sure I got the best ones for the story.

When I had a lot of time at home at the start of the pandemic, I could pick up items from the magazine shows, know as “Wide Shows” that make up large stretches of daytime TV here. These tended to be a bit more sensationalist in tone and content — foreboding music, dramatic fonts, salty hosts and outraged panelists. The quantity of photos and daily posts was considerably higher back then, due to a combination of media novelty and a climate of genuine fear.

However, as time went on, I had less time for this, as I needed to get more actual work done, and I generally wanted a single, sober source of news with a consistent pallet. For these reasons, I found myself gravitating more and more towards using NHK information almost exclusively, even though they had a tendency to just follow and quote the government line without asking the difficult questions or expressing much in the way of doubt. (There is also a running joke in my posts that the real reason for my loyalty to the channel was that I was smitten with the regular morning news female anchor, Maho Kuwako.)

I tried to balance the NHK line with my own salty commentary, links to articles from other sources, and simply by relying on my readers to supply a healthy dose of skepticism and sarcasm in the comments. Where time allows, I will try to add the highlights from the comments section of each post. Unfortunately, the news articles for the Mainichi newspaper are archived after about a year, so a lot of the content of the links has been lost.