went on the offensive. His target: American domination of international television. In a speech at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, Keiji Shima, the chairman of Japan's largest television network, singled out Ted Turner for CNN's incursion into Asian skies.

"I don't mean to bad-mouth Mr. Turner, but CNN is trying to force U.S. news on the rest of the world," Shima said. The unusually blunt chairman of Japan's public network went on to criticize all American networks for belittling the Pacific: "When Asian news is treated by Western broadcasters, it tends to be given a low priority."

It was time for Japan to take the lead in bringing Asian news to the rest of the world, he said, and NHK was going to create a global network to compete with CNN.

The ambitiousness of the scheme was surprising to me, sitting in the audience. Shima was my boss. I had been hired six months earlier to begin what had been billed as a modest experiment in English-language broadcasting, to test whether NHK -- the initials stand for Nippon Hoso Kyokai, or Japan Broadcasting Corporation -- could produce daily news programming that was acceptable to a Western audience. It was a reasonable gamble, considering NHK's enormous technical and financial resources and its attempt to forge closer relationships with the world's other major broadcasters.

The idea Shima outlined in his speech was to join together an American network, a European broadcaster, and NHK to cover the globe twenty-four hours a day with eight-hour shifts each in Tokyo, New York, and Europe. It was an audacious plan coming from a company known abroad, when it was known at all, for being the most stodgy network in Japan.

Coproductions between NHK and foreign broadcasters had often dissolved when both sides saw the gulf between Japanese and Western journalism as too great to cross in the often contentious and always frenzied environment of television production. But Shima decided it was time for the 15,000 employees of NHK to make the leap. He would bring Japanese and Western journalists together to create a new kind of multicultural reporting that would deepen international understanding of Asia. Looked at from the top down, it seemed like a good theory. The reality in the trenches, as I quickly learned, was different.

I was the first non-Japanese ever hired at NHK to create and produce daily English-language programs for international distribution. Japan Business Today, the flagship program, was seen on NHK in Japan, CNBC in the United States, Sky Channel in England, and Superchannel across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

I was drawn to the idea of working with Japanese journalists, mostly because, as a foreign correspondent, I was tired of always getting beaten by local media. The idea of combining Japanese access to information and Western production know-how seemed unbeatable. I was given editorial control of the programming directly from Chairman Shima.

Learning a new set of rules On my first day at NHK a Japanese producer asked what was the most important quality of an American reporter.

"If I had to choose one," I remember saying, "it would be inquisitiveness."

I posed the same question back to him and, after a long pause, he said, "Patience" -- with no detectable trace of irony.

In one way he was right. At the beginning of an experiment in grafting American and Japanese journalism it was necessary to be patient. So I made accommodations I never would have considered making in the West. I didn't challenge Japanese producers when they left out the name of a Japanese man who paid more than $ 28,000 in reparations to United Airlines for making a bomb threat. They insisted he was "quite humble" because of previous publicity.

There were other conventions that rankled me and many of the thirteen foreign producers and reporters hired for the business programming unit. Bowing at the end of an interview and giving the subject a small present; submitting all interview questions in advance to the person to be interviewed or being scolded by NHK colleagues for straying from the agreed-upon agenda; giving editorial decision-making to the oldest member of a team, even if he happened to be the cameraman. I told my foreign staff to ignore many of these conventions, but to go along with those essential for reporting the news.

I was bemused by NHK's news agenda, which was skewed by the unending calendar of seasonal festivals across the island nation, excruciating hours of talking heads, and soft documentaries about Japan's beautiful places. Because so many of NHK's resources were allocated to this kind of news, it was not easy to fill an all-business program in a country that prided itself on being the world's second-most powerful economic engine. That was the first hint that the news agenda at NHK was being shaped in accordance with a set of standards not usually present in the newsrooms of America's television networks.

When news is not news Corporate news was more concerned with product innovations than consumer protection or business malfeasance. When Japan's largest brokerage house -- Nomura -- decided to lay off workers for the first time ever, NHK refused to report the story. The head of the network's stock market reporting team explained that "NHK won't single out Nomura" since the entire industry was suffering.

But NHK did single out Nomura for special treatment in July 1991. When high-ranking executives of the company were arrested for agreeing to make up losses for major clients, NHK agreed to let Nomura out of its commitment to provide daily stock market commentary. Executives said they acted to "punish" Nomura. But the effect was to allow the company to avoid answering questions about the scandal. Japanese producers blocked my attempts to get Nomura back on the air, relenting only when the scandal subsided.

NHK producers often took it upon themselves to decide whether a subject or individual was worthy to appear on TV. One person deemed unworthy was an employee of Fuji Bank who had written a book about the life of a Japanese "salaryman." In it, he criticized Fuji Bank for its treatment of employees. Managers, he said, often told employees to "work until you urinate blood" in an effort to bolster company profits. It was a natural story for Japan Business Today, but managing editor Masahiro Ohta insisted that we get "cooperation" from Fuji Bank. When I asked what that meant, he said the bank must agree to participate in the story.

"When they say, 'We must get cooperation,' that means the story is dead," a young Japanese producer warned me.

As the weeks wore on, Ohta found different reasons for delaying the story. "He doesn't speak English," Ohta said of the book's author. We had four translators working in our office.

A week later: "We cannot confirm what he has written about." We hadn't tried.

Two weeks later: "He sounds like a troublemaker." The story died.

The pressure to keep stories about Japan's minority groups off the air is even greater. Reporter Kevin Smith stunned editors at one meeting when he suggested a story on how U.S. trade pressure to open Japan's leather market would hurt the burakumin, a minority considered ethnically Japanese but held in the same low regard as untouchables in India. Many burakumin work in the meat and leather industries.

At first, one Japanese producer said the story was too sensitive. That only piqued the interest of the Western reporters. So senior producer Hitoshi Imaizumi said to the group of slack-jawed Westerners that the government did not recognize minority groups in Japan, and, furthermore, that to call attention to minority groups would only make their situation worse. The pregnant pause that followed was finally filled by another NHK producer, who suggested the story be aired during the then-upcoming Barcelona Olympics, when the program would be preempted in Japan and only shown overseas.

When push comes to shove As the differences between Japanese and Western producers became more apparent, it was easy to lose sight of similarities. "I would say that 90 percent of what we put on the air was equal to what you would get in the United States," says Kevin Smith, who now works for the PBS program Nightly Business Report in Los Angeles. "There was sometimes 10 percent that was somewhat questionable in terms of withholding information or, more frequently, pulling punches. It was that 10 percent that made me uncomfortable."

Smith, an aggressive reporter, often drew puzzled looks and embarrassed laughter from his Japanese producers. When he pushed too far, they blindsided him. On a story about alternative energy sources, Smith learned how far his Japanese producer would go to keep controversial information off the air. The producer ordered a translator to expunge any references to nuclear energy when translating an interview into English for Smith, who did not speak Japanese. Knowing that the producer wanted to ignore the nuclear energy issue, Smith doublechecked the original interview with another translator. Confronted with the deleted material, the producer included it in the final story.

But NHK has some reporters who are committed to getting the news out and who will go to great lengths to do so when they are thwarted by their own organization. The most memorable example of this occurred during President Bush's January 1992 visit to Japan. As the world soon learned, Bush became ill during a state dinner and collapsed onto the floor, but not before vomiting into the lap of Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa. An enterprising NHK cameraman had ignored orders to keep his camera off, and recorded the event.

NHK was in a tight spot, because it had agreed not to videotape the dinner. It ran a heavily edited version of the tape, which it then released, saying it was complete. Only after The Washington Post reported that the most graphic portions of the tape had been cut did NHK admit it had the complete tape, and only after ABC News obtained a copy and ran more of the tape did NHK follow suit, saying the tape had already been broadcast by ABC News.

How did ABC News get the tape? The truth is known only to a few producers in NHK and ABC, but one plausible answer is that someone inside the Japanese network who wanted the complete story known supplied a copy to the American network. It is a scenario often played out at the network when contrversial topics are involved.

Just before Bush arrived in Tokyo a similar incident occurred at Japan Business Today. The speaker of Japan's lower house of Parliament, Yoshi Sakurauchi, made a speech in far-western Japan in which he called American workers lazy. Our Japanese news editors stonewalled the story all the next day, but finally, at my insistance, cobbled together enough information to report the story on Asia Business Now, a show we produced for ABC News. The following day NHK ran the story, quoting ABC.

This contortion of the editorial process is often a result of gaiatsu, or "foreign pressure," generated by NHK when needed. While NHK did not want to offend Bush or Sakurauchi, it could force itself into running the story if a foreign broadcaster ran it, even if that broadcaster was running an NHK story secondhand.

Of course, the editing of the George Bush tape is not as black and white as it may seem. ABC News also edited out some of the more vivid scenes of the president vomitting on the prime minister. Both American and Japanese producers made editorial judgments. The difference is in the editorial reflex. At NHK, that reflex is, when push comes to shove, to be pushed and shoved before reporting a story. This is particularly true in reporting on the Japanese government.

Don't bite the hand that funds you In August 1992, a political story rocked the nation. In a startling break from the tradition of soft-pedaling on government corruption, a competing network, Tokyo Broadcasting System, reported that many of Japan's most powerful politicians had taken money from a package delivery service known as Sagawa Kyubin, which was widely reported to be connected to the Japanese mob. It was one of the revelations that would later lead to the unprecedented indictment of political boss Shin Kanemaru and the disgrace and fall from power of Japan's ruling party. NHK had no immediate report on the subject. When I asked why, managing editor Masahiro Ohta said, "You know NHK's seijibu [political desk] reporters. They will be the last to report this. You know how they are."

NHK is in a difficult position. It is a public television network, supported nearly 100 percent by a government-imposed user fee on every television set in Japan. Because of that system the government plays a potent advisory role at the network. The prime minister appoints the board of governors, who in turn appoint the chairman of the network. The NHK budget is vetted by the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and must be approved by Japan's parliament.

When a political story is edited at NHK, the editing booth is always crowded by the ghosts of bureaucrats, ministers, and ruling and opposition party politicians who may be offended. The 1991 Tokyo gubernatorial election was a good example. The election was a referendum on Governor Shunichi Suzuki and his pet project, the new Tokyo City Hall, a controversial skyscraper that cost more than a billion dollars. His major opponents were calling it Suzuki's "Tax Tower."

A report prepared by one of our Western correspondents, Janice Fuhrman, focused on Suzuki and his main rival in the election, Hisanori Isomura, a former NHK anchor. During editing, she was told that election laws required all twenty-one gubernatorial candidates to be included in the story.

"It seemed absurd to include twenty-one candidates when most of them had nothing to do with the tonic of the piece, which was City Hall," Fuhrman recalled recently, "I was finally able to finish editing by adding footage of the candidates from the two other major parties. Even that wasn't relevant to my story. But I agreed to compromise."

But one senior Japanese producer still was not satisfied with the bicultural compromise. He complained to managing editor Yoshinori Imai thirty minutes before the broadcast.

"No one could say for sure whether we were breaking the law, some journalistic convention, NHK policy, or just the whims of one of our Japanese editors. So we stood by the story," Fuhrman said. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that Fuhrman is now my wife.)

The compromise held and the piece was broadcast. Later, I was told that the Japanese backed down because they figured NHK executives would be too busy to watch the program.

Because of Japan's militaristic history in Asia, NHK reporters are deeply concerned about the reaction of important foreign governments to their reports. Japan Business Today, for example, was forced to revamp an entire graphic design when senior Japanese editors said the Taiwan flag could not appear on NHK because it might offend Chinese leaders in Beijing. An American reporter, Douglas Williams, was asked while writing a script about the Taiwan stock market to refrain from using "government officials" or "leaders of Taiwan" to avoid offending the mainland government.

In May 1992, after months of planning, a week-long series of shows from Thailand was postponed because of bloody pro-democracy riots in the streets there. It was a unanimous decision, based on the safety of the staff and the shared belief that doing business programming during such a tense political moment was inappropriate. When calm was restored a few months later, the project was revived.

But then strange directives began appearing. First, the week-long series was cut back to three days. Then the focus of the program was changed from Thailand to the Association of South East Asian Nations, or ASEAN. Questions were asked about moving the program to Kuala Lumpur or Singapore. Finally, after weeks of negotiations, we decided to broadcast the program for three days from Bangkok, Thailand's capital. But top NHK executives insisted that critical reports about the country be surrounded by other reports from ASEAN, and the most critical report -- on AIDS in Thailand -- was removed from the series. It finally aired separately. The reason for this micromanagement was made clear in a heated editorial meeting on the broadcast.

"We have good relations with Thailand," said Masahiro Ohta, mnanaging editor of Japan Business Today. The "we" he was talking about was not NHK, but Japan.

Over and out When Keiji Shima was ousted as chairman of NHK in July 1991, Mainichi Shimbun asked, "Is it the end of perestroika at NHK?" The newspaper went on to say that NHK had not been ready to accept Shima's challenge. Five months later, NHK's new chairman, Mikio Kawaguchi, announced that the Global News Network was dead, although "we are going to keep the concept and the spirit of the project alive."

"You are safe for a while from interference," said a senior NHK producer, one of the few who privately sympathized with the American journalists. "That's because they've spent so many millions on it. Just as it took a long time to build, it will take a while to shut it down."

But finally it became clear that the era of editorial perestroika was coming to an end. Two and a half years into producing Japan Business Today, my co-executive producer, Kenichi Endo, said it was time to make some changes. The style and pacing of the programming should remain Western, he said, but the editorial content must begin to follow NHK rules. And those are hard rules for an American-trained journalist to follow. I left NHK soon after that conversation.

Most Japanese journalists live in what I have come to call a culture of censorship, where constant concern about their role in society leads them to hide shocking or unpleasant news, particularly about powerful institutions and corporations. Japanese journalists I know believe American reporters live in what one calls a culture of abandonment, by which they mean we refuse to consider the effect our reporting has on our society -- a belief for which they cite much evidence, particularly the Amnerican media's preoccupation with, if not glorification of, violence.

When Japanese and Americans work together, they tend to call editorial conflicts "misunderstandings" or "technical differences." But that belittles the problems facing journalists from different cultures. Most important conflicts between journalists from East and West are now shallow misunderstandings about terms of art, but reflect deep differences in the way they see their role in society.

If I learned anything from my time working inside Japan's media giant it was that, while video images purport to reflect facts, they are actually highly malleable, subject to the cultural, political, and social backgrounds, biases, and prejudices of the camera crews, reporters, producers, and editors who fashion them for broadcast. TV journalists and viewers should keep this in mind as cooperation among broadcasters across the globe continues to expand and we lose track of who has collected and edited the images we see.

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