Civic Engagement Projects
Youth Civic Engagement: The case of Asahi Shimbun
By Yohtaro Hamada, University of Minnesota
Jul 29, 2002, 12:40am

In August of 2001, Asahi Shimbun, a national newspaper in Japan with circulation of 8 million, carried a four-part series of story written by high school students on social security and welfare issues. Titled as ‘High School Students Reporting’, the series aims to portray how our rapidly aging society would look like and how increasing cost of sustaining aging population would affect the society in the year 2025 (the year most of official forecasts use), from the perspectives of future generations. This essay is a brief explanation of this project conducted by the two reporters who are members of Section for Civic Welfare, a team of 30 reporters that was established to cover social security and insurance, environment and safety and health care.

There have been numerous stories in the news media about the ‘crisis’ of social security and grim forecasts of the need to raise burden on the citizens to finance the nation’s fiscal deficit. I myself wrote such stories as a reporter when covering Ministry of Finance. However, those stories, written from the perspectives of policy makers, rarely resonate with our readers because newspapers failed to show how an average citizen could be affected by those large national problems. There seems to be a broad consensus that the aging population is the biggest challenge our society faces. Yet, it is difficult for the people to grasp the magnitude of this challenge especially because its ramification would be spread out across many generations.

In this project, we decided to identify present high school students as the biggest stake holders of this problem. Because of the demographic shift, there will inevitably be more recipients of social security check and smaller number of workers to pay premiums. In the year 2025, when those teenagers become in their 40s, the overall tax burden they have to bear would be 3 times heavier than that their parents pay.

As in any society, people in Japan strongly oppose both raising tax and cutting down benefits and entitlement. The desire to procrastinate any kind of reforms on social security and entitlement program is very strong. But should voters maintain this same attitude even if it would jeopardize the future their children live? This question could be more powerfully conveyed by the real stake holders (high school students are among them) than professional reporters.

Even though this series carries a label of NIE (Newspaper in Education) because of funding under the program, we intended to make ours different from the conventional NIE stories in Japan, which are too often just ‘dumbed down’ version of normal news articles.

Stage 1: selection of schools
We looked at the list of schools that have won the contests of high school newspapers regularly and picked two public schools located in the prefectures of Hokkaido (northern tip of Japan) and Shiga (near Kyoto and Osaka). These schools are located in medium sized cities and considered to have turn out graduates who take leadership roles in an each community. Most of students go to college. Since both of them are public schools, we expected to see students with various backgrounds. Five students from each school participated in this project. Two reporters from the Section for Civic Welfare volunteered to coordinate and oversee the entire project.

Stage2: Tapping into Families and Communities
In order to find the connections between the problems of the aging society and the students’ everyday lives, we asked them to interview their own family members, friends and relatives on this issue. One of the students talked to her mother who has been looking after her frail grandmother for more than 10 years and learned how the recently introduced government-run `nursing care insurance’ really works. A friend of one participant live in the apartment which house both high school students and elderly folks who need somebody to help them eat and go to bathroom. They also visited a nursing home in their community and learned that there is a long waiting list. They had lunch with the elderly in the community center and learned how dependent their lives are on the benefits of entitlement program run by the government.

Some students thought that one of the solutions for aging society is to fully utilize women as workforce, thereby increase the number of taxpayer. So they visited a local company that has a reputation for providing female employees favorable condition that allows them to raise children while working full time. One student interviewed her mother, a kindergarten teacher in the hospital, who sometime has to work a night shift. They also interviewed the college students about the social security system and were appalled to find out that most youngsters believed the social security system would go bankrupt.

At the same time, we provided the students with reading materials about social security and welfare, to help them to put their experience in the context and to deliberate the problem.

Stage3: Asking high ranking officials in Tokyo sharp questions
We invited the participants to come to Kasumigaseki, Tokyo, where all the central offices of national ministries reside. The newspaper financed the transportation and stay for 3 days. We, by using our connections and influence of the newspaper, arranged the series of meeting with high ranking officials in Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labor and Ministry of Finance, and a college professor who study the impact of aging population. Well armed with the first hand experience in their communities, those students were not intimidated. They asked sharp questions and were never satisfied with anything short of hard, real answers.

The students sensed that there are many gaps between paper works and the reality. They understood that there are competing interests that need to be compromised. In short, they understood the complexity of the problem.
In the last day, students from both schools sat down and had discussion about what they had learned and what they had identified as problems.

Stage 4: Writing Stories
The last and perhaps the most difficult part was writing the stories. The students had learned very much, but organizing all the information into coherent stories was an entirely different ball game. Some students felt at loss because they did not know what to write about. This was when the roles of coaches were very important.

Fortunately, by the time the news gathering process was over, we, the coaches, had some story ideas that students would be able to write. We did not want to push our own ideas onto students. We wanted some fresh insights that flow out of the minds untainted by the convention. This was the most challenging part of this project.

While the students were in the process of interviewing people both in their own communities and in Tokyo, we asked them to take detailed notes, type them up with their own reflection and the new set of questions that might arise from an each set of interview. It was very important that they recorded their honest reflections in their own words, because this allowed us, coaches, to grasp the deliberative process that the students were going through. What bothers the students, that’s the story. All we had to do was to find the tips of ideas among those reflections and encourage the students to develop them. We found e-mail be a very powerful tool to do this kind of coaching.

Then, the reporters and the students spent a whole weekend together, discussing, writing and editing the stories. We asked the students to revise their stories average three times. They eagerly followed our requests.

At the end of this series, we asked two schools jointly write an open letter to the prime minister Koizumi. The letter showed strong concerns for the situation in which no one seems to have the guts to urge the nation to face the harsh reality. It went on to say that it is not fair to push the burden incurred by the past and present generations onto the future generations like the high school students now who do not even have rights to vote.

Here are some ideas that were developed into the stories.

1) One of the students was really bothered when the ministry’s official who explained why, in the newly created nursery care insurance, the old people have their premium withheld from their social security check. The official said that even the elderly would want to participate and contribute to the society by paying. However, she had talked many old people about this new premium, but none of them expressed any sense of “participation”. She thought that this was a fiction which sugarcoat the newly imposed burden.

2) Because of the budgetary constraints, both the national and local government want to cut down the level of services for the old people, but never explicitly say they intend to do so. Meanwhile, the old people have strong trust on their governments to maintain present level of service indefinitely. This situation disturbed one student because he thought the saddest thing is to see the old people feeling betrayed by the governments that, sooner or later, would have to cut down the expenditures across the board.


3) One male student, who lives with grandparents, found it repulsive when he saw many people readily send their old family member into nursing home, even though they are capable of giving care at home. He was afraid that the ties binding family members would disappear if the government made too many of those nursing homes available. He met strong opposition from his female friend who think that all the care giving would be forced upon women. He wrote a story arguing that the government should provide much more incentives for the families that are capable of giving care to an old family member.

4) In Japan, the people, once reached 20 years old, are obliged to pay social security tax, even if they are students. But many of them evade the payment, taking advantage of the local governments’ reluctance to vigorously enforce the law on the young. Through interviewing college students who live in their community, the participants found out that the adults have great influence on the attitude of young people. Some college students did not pay because their parents told them not to pay, while other understand the obligation to pay because their parents or adults close to them told so. This experience was developed into the policy suggestion that more resource should be allocated on the education on adults, rather than young people. Also, the high school students sharply pointed out that the government is wasting money on producing brochure and web site few would look at.

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