American Newspapers: Do They Have A Future?

What does the landscape of journalism look like today—or more specifically, the world of newspaper journalism?

In one of the most famous quotes about newspapers, Thomas Jefferson once said: “…were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.”

Today we are dangerously close to having a government without newspapers. At least that is what some people believe.

Think about it: The Tribune Company (my old employer for 25 years) which operates The Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times, the Baltimore Sun and five other daily papers, has filed for bankruptcy protection.

Average profit margins at the Washington Post in the past five years have been 25% less than what they had been in the previous 15 years. At the New York Times, the decline was 50%.

Last week brought more news of impending doom. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune filed for bankruptcy protection, the Hearst Corporation announced it would close the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer unless a very unlikely buyer is found, and a few weeks earlier, E.W. Scripps made the same announcement about the Rocky Mountain News.

Newspapers from coast to coast are struggling to refinance debt, issue equity and dispose of nonessential assets—all short term solutions to a long term problem.

Most major newspapers have trimmed their staffs resulting in the loss of some 20,000 jobs last year and the number of American correspondents reporting from abroad (something I did for 17 years at the Chicago Tribune), fell by 25% between 2002 to 2006 and only a handful of newspapers operate foreign bureaus.

Incredibly, the Tribune Company has even entered discussions aimed at “outsourcing” its foreign coverage at all of its papers.

A recent story in Time Magazine offered up the following dire analysis of the media landscape:

“During the past few months the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions. It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.”

There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers are still the best-staffed news organizations and remain journalism’s brightest hope.

Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.

The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines.

Who can blame them? Many old print junkies have stopped subscribing to newspapers, because if they don’t see fit to charge for their content, they feel like fools paying for it.

This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising was booming. But when Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008 all that changed.

It has been pointed out that newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession — the stool can't possibly stand.

So, given that rather gloomy picture what are the prospects for the printed newspaper we all have come to know and love? Is it doomed to go the way of hot type, telex machines and green eye shades? Are newspaper newsrooms as we have known them on the verge of extinction?

Most industry observers tend to agree on what is killing US newspapers. Print advertising revenue is steadily declining and circulation is falling as readers go online to get news for free. Online advertising revenue has been rising but is not keeping pace with the drop in print advertising revenue.

What they do not agree on is the solution.

(NEXT TIME: WHAT ARE THE SOLUTIONS?)

OUTSOURCING FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE: SAY IT AIN’T SO, SAM

By Ronald E. Yates

The other day I came across a story that really disturbed me. The headline read: “Newspapers Move to Outsource Foreign Coverage.”

“Outsource foreign coverage?” What does that mean?

As I read further I was horrified to discover that my old employer, the Chicago Tribune, was one of those organizations contemplating this drastic move. And Sam Zell, the paper's owner, was apparently behind this scheme.

I had spent most of my 25 years at the Tribune as a foreign correspondent, covering stories all over Asia and Latin America—from the fall of Saigon in April 1975 to the guerilla wars in El Salvador and Guatemala.

The Tribune had a long tradition of fielding some of the best foreign correspondents in the history of American journalism. There was Floyd Gibbons who lost an eye covering World War I and Stanley Johnston, who was aboard the U.S.S. Lexington when she was sank by Japanese planes and earned the respect of American sailors by helping to save several who had been blown into the water.

There was William Shirer, who covered the birth of Nazi Germany for the Tribune and who later would write the seminal book: “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” and Sigrid Schultz, one of the finest women correspondents to cover World War II.

These were legendary correspondents who served as an inspiration to a young and eager correspondent like me when I was posted to Tokyo for the Tribune in 1974.

I wonder what it must feel like today to be working for a paper whose leadership is on the verge of shutting down its foreign bureaus and eradicating its international news staff?

While I fully understand the traditional business model of the American newspaper is changing almost daily and that the print version of many of these organizations may have a short horizon, it seems incredibly myopic to jettison a critical area of journalism at a time when the American public needs to know as much as possible about the rest of the world—and how it relates to their communities and lives.

If the Tribune and its 7 sister newspapers outsource their coverage to the Washington Post, which is what it is considering, it will lose a critical connection between the local communities the papers serve and the broader global landscape.

While I have the upmost respect for the Washington Post and its international reporting staff, asking it to make complex international stories understandable and relevant to a local audience in Chicago or Naperville is asking a lot.

Maintaining an informed public during tough economic times is difficult and unrewarding work. No doubt it impacts the bottom line significantly because foreign reporting is the most expensive of all reporting.

When I was based in Tokyo in the 1990s it was costing the Tribune about $300,000 per year to keep me there. Today, I suspect that annual outlay is more like $500,000. If you are the publisher and you have 10 bureaus around the world, you are talking about $5 million per annum—and probably more like $15 million by the time you factor in the cost of travel, hotels, food, editorial assistants, translators, technology costs, etc.

In an era of ever-shrinking bottom lines, that is not chump change. Nevertheless, running a newspaper carries with it more responsibility than fattening the bottom line for stockholders.

In the 21st Century when governments and their leaders are already exercising immense power to justify national interests, thoughtful foreign correspondents with insight and expertise will be needed to help promote critical comprehension between disparate populations by finding and delivering more meaningful news between nations.

Often it is the information gathered and provided by foreign correspondents that makes all the difference between a world at war or a world at peace.

What will happen in 2009 on the various news fronts? For example, whither the economy—both national and global? What about international events? Where will the news come from? Where will the hot spots be? What will be the major national stories? I have shaken the bones and cast them upon the sands. Here’s what they say.

By Ronald E. Yates

The World

Without a doubt the big story in 2009 will continue to be the global economy. As the U.S. economy goes, so goes the world. There is a wonderful saying in Mexico: “Mi Pobre Mexico! Tan lejos de Dios, y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos!” Translation: Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.”

Much of the world will feel the same when it comes to the U.S. in 2009. Geographic distance will not protect the economies of other nations. The global economy is too intrinsically linked to American financial institutions, policies and markets.

With the global economy contracting, the river of capital that provided life for so many developing nations will dry up significantly thereby exacerbating already fragile and damaged political systems. That in turn will lead to more unrest in regions already suffering from violence, instability and economic depression.

Sorry to be so gloomy, but this is reality as 2009 begins. Perhaps—but don’t count on it—things will be a bit better by the end of 2009.

Those expecting a miracle from newly elected President Barak Obama will be sorely disappointed. When it comes to the economy, he is faced with an almost impossible task. It’s a bit like trying to turn an aircraft carrier around in the Panama canal. It is possible, but in order to do you will have to destroy a large section of the canal.

Because so much of the U.S. economy has already disintegrated, much of the destruction has already happened. But Obama must still get the ship turned around. And while he is working on that, he will be faced with a litany of global challenges, not the least of which will be America’s military adventures in Afghanistan.

I covered Afghanistan back in the late 1980s when I was the Chicago Tribune’s Chief Asia Correspondent. I can tell you this is a place that repels invaders like a duck repels water. We may not view ourselves as invaders, but believe me, the Afghanis do—even those who actually like us. True, they consider us “benign” invaders as opposed to the Russians who were anything but benign. But we are still the hated foreign presence. Why do you think the Taliban—who were almost as brutal to their people as the Khmer Rouge were in Cambodia—have actually grown in power and population?

Ultimately, the Afghani people are always motivated to drive away the foreign invader—benign or not. It’s been that way since Alexander the Great sent his army into the Hindu Kush mountains and through the 33-mile Khyber Pass almost 2,500 years ago.

Nevertheless, President Obama has already said he plans to at least double the number of American troops currently on the ground in Afghanistan. As a result, I predict that Afghanistan will be to Obama what Iraq was to President Bush—a perilous liability.

What else can we expect in 2009?

• The conflict between Israel and Hamas will not go away and the Gaza Strip will continue to be a blood-soaked reminder that Jews and Muslims simply cannot co-exist under current political arrangements. As a result the existing rift between the United States and the Muslim world will continue to widen.
• Iraq will continue to suck billions of dollars from the U.S. treasury while the U.S. military will sink deeper into the shifting sands of Iraq’s fractured political center. Iran will continue to exert some kind of influence over the Shia regime in Baghdad and over the physical region of eastern Iraq.
• Pakistan and India will continue their dangerous nuclear faceoff over the Kashmir where three major wars/conflicts have been waged since partition in 1947. The recent tragedy in Mumbai, most likely carried out by Kashmiri separatists, was an indication of just how tense and unstable this region is.
• Russia will remain under the iron grip of Vladimir Putin and as a result, its relationship with Europe and the U.S. will likely grow even more irritable. NATO’s idea of bringing the Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance will likely lose some traction, but the damage—at least in the eyes of Moscow, has been done. Look for Russia to try to pull both politically unstable countries back under its influence.
• Iran will be high on the radar screen as it continues push ahead with its nuclear program—and the ability to make weapons. This will continue to be a concern to Israel and it is not unlikely that Israel might engage Iran in some kind of military operation. That scenario could be disastrous for the U.S. because it will then likely be pulled into the conflict creating a situation where the nation has combat troops in three Middle Eastern nations.
• The world will not be able to ignore the crises in Africa—specifically Dafur, Somalia and Zimbabwe where hundreds of thousands are either starving or being killed in some of the worst genocide the world has ever seen. Some expect British and possibly U.S. military intervention in one or all of these nations.
• China has ridden the global economic boom into new and uncharted territory with annual double-digit growth. But the express train that has been the Chinese economy has already begun to slow down considerably as China feels the impact of global recession. The engine if the Chinese economy is its enormous growth in exports. With the world no longer buying what China makes, this will create more and more pressure on the Chinese government to keep the domestic economy humming. When it becomes obvious that it can not do that—despite the many infrastructure projects it has on tap—the Chinese people will be restive if not downright riotous.

Not a pretty picture to be sure. And I am not a pessimist by nature. In fact, I am normally wildly optimistic. But of course, as someone once said: “An optimist is someone who thinks the future is uncertain.”

What’s Ahead in 2009?

By Ronald E. Yates

What will happen in 2009 on the various news fronts? For example, whither the economy—both national and global? What about international events? Where will the news come from? Where will the hot spots be? What will be the major national stories? I have shaken the bones and cast them upon the sands. Here’s what they say.

The Economy

In the mid 1980s and early 1990s when I was covering Japan for the Chicago Tribune, much of the world had written off the United States as the planet’s leading economic power.

Japan had assumed that position, went the conventional wisdom. Its automobile, electronics, computer and high tech industries had left Uncle Sam in the dust. It’s financial and stock markets were more robust, it’s people more industrious and productive, it’s government more in tune with business—hence, the appellation: Japan, Inc.

“America should stop making things all together,” a Japanese businessman told me one day. “Let Japan make all America needs and the U.S. should provide Japan with the resources it needs and concentrate on being a service economy. You can’t make things as well as we can.”

At first glance, he seemed to be correct. American companies such as machine tool manufacturers, steel producers, ship builders, consumer electronics, automobile manufacturers, etc. were simply not able to compete with their Japanese competitors. Indeed, America’s manufacturing base was woefully inept, poorly run and out of touch.

Those were pretty dismal times.

Then, something happened. American industries began to turn themselves around. They did it by improving the quality of their products. They listened to such quality and management gurus as W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran and Peter Drucker and in a few years American companies were competitive with their Japanese counterparts—at least up to a point.

Japanese automakers continued to produce better vehicles than Detroit—both in Japan and here on American soil. But American companies were mostly competitive again—and that’s the way things stayed until the past couple of years.

Then, beginning in 2007 and continuing into 2008 came one financial crisis after another—the subprime loan crisis, the credit crisis, bank failures, the real estate market collapse, bailouts, etc. While we were intently focused on making things better, we allowed financial hucksters to enrich themselves at the nation’s expense. There was too little oversight and governance.

Now, with the U.S. economy in the worst shape it has been since the Great Depression, many American businesses are back where they were in the late 1980s. Only this time, they are not alone.

Japanese companies are right there with them—and so are German, British, French, Italian and Chinese companies. In fact, the once mighty U.S. economy has pulled the rest of the world into the same economic abyss it has fallen into.
So what’s ahead for 2009? Don’t look for a miraculous turn-around simply because somebody named Obama has taken possession of the White House.

There isn’t a messiah on the planet—human or otherwise—who can turn this mess around overnight.

In early December the National Bureau of Economic Research officially declared the U.S. to be in a recession—something that is likely to be with us for at least another year, if not longer.

Unemployment is running at close to 7 percent and is likely to hit 9 percent in 2009. The housing market will take at least two years to begin its upward tick. (Hint: watch California closely. It is usually a bell weather (good or bad) for the national housing market).

The liquidity crisis is far from fixed—even by all the bailouts. Banks will slowly begin to loosen sealed purse strings but not at the rate we would all like. After all, once burned twice cautious.

By the end of 2008 some 91 public corporations had filed for bankruptcy and Lehman Brothers became the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. To make matters worse, venture capital funding has dried up and that will in turn lead to slower job creation and higher unemployment.

It is estimated that the new loans, purchases, and liabilities of the Federal Reserve, the US Treasury, and FDIC that were brought on by the financial crisis now total more than $5 trillion. That includes $1 trillion in loans by the Fed to broker-dealers through the emergency discount window; $1.8 trillion in loans by the Fed through the Term Auction Facility; $700 billion to be raised by the Treasury for the Troubled Assets Relief Program; $200 billion insurance for the GSEs by the Treasury; and $1.5 trillion insurance for unsecured bank debt by the FDIC.

Not a rosy picture for 2009. So what to do? My predictions:

· Unemployment will hit 9%--if not double-digits be the end of 2009 and nervous Americans will start saving--possibly as much as 10 per cent of their incomes. (Increased saving is often a reaction to tough economic times).

· The housing market will continue to tank in 2009 and into 2010—simply because it was a bubble market to begin with and because there is so much inventory on the books. New housing starts will be flat and prices will drop another 25% nationwide.

· Obama will implement new fiscal policies and (much to the chagrin of many fellow Democrats) will provide tax cuts—the quickest way to jump start any comatose economy.

· The administration will look to stimulate the economy through new public works projects—inflation be damned. 2009 will not be a time to worry about inflation because the government is pumping billions and billions of dollars into new public works projects such as improved interstates, bridges, rail and air networks, etc. In spite of all those dollars the nation’s $14 trillion bubble economy will continue to deflate.

· Spending—especially on large ticket items (houses, automobiles, major appliances, etc.) will continue to decline and enter negative territory, thereby further exacerbating the economic downturn. For example, automakers will not be able to find money to build cars and consumers won’t be able to borrow money to buy cars.

Proof of that final bullet came this week in the form of bleak sales figures from auto manufacturers in the US. According to General Motor's, its December sales fell 31 percent to a 49-year low—fueling fears that the company may be on the verge of total collapse. Other automakers are no better off. Chrysler's sales last month fell a shocking 53 percent and Ford Motor Co.'s sales were down 32 percent.

A retrenchment in the critical US market is also creating financial pain for foreign automakers.

According to a recent report from Forex Capital Markets, Toyota Motor's deliveries fell 37 percent while Honda Motor sales were curbed 35 percent. If figures like these continue, the US government's bailout efforts may fall well short of the basic need to keep these firms solvent. And, should this sector fail, it could easily send the world's largest economy to a far deeper recession than policy officials and Americans are ready to consider.

So where’s the good news in all of this? Well, there could be a lot of great buying opportunities in undervalued stocks in 2009. Houses that were 60 and 70 higher in value just two or three years ago, will be bargains.

And of course with the economy at the bottom of the trough, there is really only one way to go, and that is up.

(Next: What will be the major international issues in 2009?)

Note To Loyal ForeignCorrespondent Followers

I promised in this blog to write about areas of international interest in general and the work of foreign correspondents in particular. If you have followed the blog thus far you have been treated to some pieces I wrote while a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. While these may be interesting stories they were meant to provide some content while I geared up to begin writing in earnest about current issues, international affairs and the people who cover them.

In the next few days I will finally follow through on the stated purpose of my blog: ”This is a blog for those interested in international news and affairs. It is produced by a former foreign correspondent, who is now a dean and professor teaching journalism.”

So thank you for your patience and stay tuned!

Ron Yates

Profile: Tokyo

(This is a profile of Tokyo, Japan done in the 1990s. Not much has changed in one of the world's biggest, loudest, most expensive cities)

CITY LIMITS: TOKYO HAS REACHED THEM

IN HUMAN PERSEVERANCE

By Ronald E. Yates

It's the world's biggest, noisiest, most expensive and arguably least livable city. But for Toshio Isa and the 30 million other people who are jammed into its 850 square miles, Tokyo is, for better or worse, home.

"I've lived in New York, Singapore and San Francisco," said the retired businessman, "and none of those requires the patience and perseverance needed to live in Tokyo. One doesn't live in Tokyo. One endures."

Relief is on the horizon, however. Tokyo is preparing to transform itself from an unattractive and often obnoxious nerve center conceived to do little more than nurture a rigid and ascetic Japan Inc. into a city actually designed for human habitation. In the first major restorative surgery since it was flattened by U.S. bombers during World War II, Tokyo is being prepped for a series of facelifts, transplants and the urban equivalent of wart removal.

Afflicted with intolerable overcrowding, inadequate housing and the world's worst traffic jams, more than 100 plans aimed at making Tokyo a more appealing place are being passed with unprecedented urgency from one government agency to another for study and approval.

They range from proposals to relocate the nation's capital to the hinterlands, a la Brazil's Brasilia, to a $26 billion project that would create a new city center of 27 towering buildings on 1,100 acres of reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay to a plan to construct a forest of 60 skyscrapers in the heart of the city that would overlook Emperor Hirohito's sprawling Imperial Palace.

"Tokyo is on a resuscitator, and the prognosis for its survival as a quality environment for people is not good," said Akira Furusawa, a Tokyo architect. "We may have let the patient go too long without treatment."

A journey through the urban coagulation of man, machine and concrete that Tokyo has become appears to confirm Furusawa's pessimistic appraisal. As the sun rises over the city that was originally designed in the early 17th Century to be the seat of power for Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japan's most famous shogun, the negative byproducts of Tokyo's ascendancy as a world financial, cultural and political center are easily visible.

• Narrow, twisting streets are hopelessly choked with cars, trucks and buses, and on the city's woefully inadequate system of expressways, traffic, according to a recent government study, is moving at an average speed of 12 m.p.h.
• Trains and subways are dangerously overfilled as rush-hour commuters are literally stuffed into cars by pushers-white-gloved railroad and subway officials whose jobs are to see that every inch of space in a subway or commuter train car is occupied by a body or extremity thereof. (In 1984, overzealous pushers crammed so many people into one train that doors on the opposite side gave way, spilling dozens of people onto the tracks.)
• Noise pollution, already well above tolerable limits because of the excessive number of cars and trucks on the roadways (3.5 times the acceptable number of vehicles for Tokyo's land area, according to one government study), is further exacerbated by the city's relentless network of public and private loudspeakers barking instructions and pitching goods and services on just about every corner.
• City parks, the city's few oases from the din and crowds, are almost continuously teeming with people desperate for a little solitude and greenery. (Tokyo has about 9 square feet of parkland per person, compared with Chicago's 110 square feet per person.)
• A blue-gray cloud of nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide smog hangs perpetually and dangerously over Tokyo, obscuring what 50 years ago was the city's most famous landmark-Mt. Fuji, the dormant, snow-capped volcano about 70 miles southwest of the city.
  

At dusk, little changes. About 8 million commuters clog railroad and subway stations, and the city's elevated two-lane expressway system seems to groan under the weight of the city's 4.3 million registered vehicles inching their way toward poorly constructed and uninsulated homes that are an average of 1 1/2 hours away in teeming, nondescript suburbs with the collective ambiance of refugee camps.

Unlike cities such as London, Paris, New York and Chicago, which project a unique style, personality and even charm, Tokyo is a hopelessly unattractive, schizophrenic place that defies description. Quaint Japanese- style buildings and homes have been replaced by unremarkable blocks of stucco and ferrite. Unsightly power and telephone lines obscure the sky, and a logic-defying system of uncoordinated stoplights ensures that traffic will lurch from one corner to the next rather than flow in an orderly manner.

Instead of becoming a positive symbol of Japan's well-planned and balanced transformation into an economic superpower, postwar Tokyo has been allowed to become a vast maze into which the nation has unwisely crammed both the fruits and debris of its success. Instead of creating a city reflecting such prized Japanese virtues as tranquility and harmony, Tokyo looks like it is under perpetual attack from Godzilla and Mothra.

Urban planners such as Kenzo Tange, president of the Japan Architect's Association, look back at the bombed and burned pile of rubble that Tokyo was in 1945 and bemoan that, instead of rebuilding a city of logical grids after the war, Tokyo was allowed to regress to an era when the shogun purposely created a city of villages connected by winding, often dead-end streets designed to confound his enemies. Today's Tokyo frustrates friend and foe alike.

"For us, young architects and officials working for the Metropolitan City Planning Bureau, the immediate postwar period held dreams and opportunities of a lifetime," Tange wrote in a recent newspaper essay. "We dreamed of unscrambling the hodgepodge and making a fresh start. We had grand dreams for transforming Tokyo into an orderly metropolitan area."

Instead, over the next five years, millions of Japanese driven out of Tokyo by U.S. bombing raids returned to rebuild their homes. Squatters' shacks eventually gave way to ugly low-slung concrete buildings pressed against one another like interlocking Lego blocks. Bitter Japanese who blamed their government for the destruction of their homes and families were in no mood to listen to its grand schemes for a New Tokyo. The city simply grew out of control in an environment of urban anarchy with little zoning and a minimum of intervention from the government. It was the same pattern following the devastation of 1923 when the Great Kanto Earthquake killed 100,000 people and destroyed 30 percent of the city's buildings.

In the 1950s and early 1960s Tokyo's rapid, unrestrained growth mirrored the explosive industrialization of Japan and the spectacular expansion of the Japanese economy. Yet with the exception of a few new glass-and-concrete skysrapers, Tokyo somehow never progressed beyond the heady days of the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, which the Japanese used as their economic and political cotillion.

During the Games and in the years immediately thereafter while Japan wallowed in the international acclaim generated by its newly built 135 m.p.h. Shinkansen (Bullet Train), the forward-looking architecture used in constructing Olympic venues and an expressway system that today has become the world's biggest proving ground for auto and truck brakes, long-range planning for the core of Tokyo was allowed to wane.

While the population of Tokyo's 23 wards, 27 cities, 6 towns and 8 villages was exploding, the city itself failed to create a plan to accommodate or restrain the growth. Without a consistent pattern of zoning, Tokyo was allowed to become a clutter of incongruous, inefficient, poorly planned buildings, many of which look like something out of an architect's worst nightmare.

Individual housing was neglected in favor of commercial office buildings. Land prices spiraled out of control, jumping by 95 percent in 1986 and 1987 alone, so that today the average price of residential property in Tokyo's central 23 wards is an incredible $25,000 per 10 square feet. In the commercial Ginza District in the heart of downtown Tokyo, that same plot of land sells for $250,000.

The high cost of land translates into rents for offices and homes that have gone into orbit. Modest 800-square-feet houses and apartments in Tokyo, most without central heating and cooling, rent for more than $3,000 a month, while American- or European-sized dwellings of 1,500 square feet and larger begin at $5,000 a month and climb quickly into double figures.

A few years ago, 31 foreign embassies, staggered by the dual dilemma of high rents and a soaring yen, appealed to the Japanese government for help. A delegation of diplomats from the 31 nations asked the Japanese foreign ministry to construct or make available at a reasonable rate a special diplomatic compound. Otherwise, they said, they would be forced to close their embassies and move to less expensive neighboring countries such as South Korea and Hong Kong.

It was the first known case in which the diplomatic community of any country has made such a request for economic reasons. An obviously alarmed Japanese government has promised to find a solution to the problem.

"Tokyo is on the verge of apoplexy, with its housing, land and traffic jammed to the limits," said Keijiro Murata, a member of parliament who also belongs to the Conference on New Capital Problems, a bipartisan group formed by the Japanese government to study the idea of moving the capital out of Tokyo. "It is best to transfer everything, from the Diet (parliament) to the Imperial Palace out of Tokyo," Murata continued, echoing a growing sentiment within the Japanese government.

Japanese Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita has already ordered one bureau from each of 31 government ministries moved out of Tokyo and into less congested areas of Japan.
But as one Tokyo newspaper editorialized recently, most of those 31 offices are small and relatively insignificant ones. Thus, it said, the initial efforts to decentralize Tokyo are disappointing.

More ambitious and more appropriate would be the transfer of the entire central government to a new capital on a 50,000-acre site about 125 miles from Tokyo, said a report prepared last month by Takeshita's ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Such a plan could be accomplished over the next 20 years at a cost of $153 billion, said the report. If that monumental task were undertaken, it would be the biggest public works project in Japan's 2,000 years of history, and it would raise Japanese economic growth by 1 percent a year.

Decentralizing Tokyo and moving the capital has been a recurrent dream of bureaucrats, politicians and construction industry leaders for years, all of whom are quick to point out reasons for doing so:

In addition to being both the Washington, D.C., and New York City of Japan, Tokyo accounts for 30 percent of Japan's gross national product, which is equivalent to 4.5 percent of the world GNP. The city holds 50 percent of the nation's savings and accounts for 80 percent of its stock trading. It has 40 percent of the nation's scientific research facilities; 25 percent of Japan's 122 million people live within Tokyo's metropolitan area.

The city is also home to more than 75,000 restaurants, 45,000 bars, 2,800 hotels, 184 colleges and universities and 255 movie theaters. It is the world's largest retail market, with 160,000 shops and 185 department stores, and many consider it to be on the leading edge in fashion, design, music and nouveau theater. At the same time, Tokyo is a safe, relatively crime-free city with less crime than any of the world's largest metropolises. New York, for example, had 11 times as many murders, 23 times as many rapes and 200 times as many robberies as Tokyo last year.

But the strain on Tokyo's collective psyche created by overcrowding, high prices (a cup of coffee is now at least $5 at most downtown coffee shops) and a general, ceaseless pandemonium is becoming more and more noticeable. Young Japanese-the so-called shinjinrui (new human beings) of Japan-are less able or willing to subvert frustrations caused by living in Tokyo and have begun striking out.

Cases of teenagers pushing older Japanese down subway steps or even into the paths of trains are increasing, along with spray-can graffiti on walls and buildings and an alarming increase in alcohol and drug use-all formerly unheard-of forms of behavior in a nation where conformity and politeness have long been considered national virtues.

"The relocation of people, power and money from their current concentration in the capital is a task of historic proportion," said the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's largest newspaper. "Now is the time for the government and political parties to work toward 'creative demolition' of that old system."

While that is going on, several other attempts to alter the face of Tokyo are already underway.
Not the least of these is something called the Tokyo-Manhattan Plan, so named because it would create a Manhattan-sized island in Tokyo Bay, upon which a cluster of skyscrapers housing offices and condominiums would be built. Planners envision 115,000 people living and working there.

This plan, backed by the Tokyo metropolitan government, has come under criticism by Japan's Environmental Agency, which has warned that it could irreparably damage the bay's already delicate ecological balance and affect water quality. Fishermen add that important spawning grounds for many species of marine life would be destroyed by the new city.

While the argument over Tokyo Bay rages, another battle is shaping up in Tokyo's Marunouchi district, Japan's version of Wall Street.

In the early 1990s Japan's giant Mitsubishi Corp. recently unveiled a $46 billion plan to redevelop the overcrowded 280-acre financial district into a forest of 60 skyscrapers, each with an average height of 50 stories. Mitsubishi Estate Co., the largest landowner in the district, says that by ripping down the district's old buildings, including venerable red-brick Tokyo Station, the district's usable floor space would increase 2.5 times, to almost 3,000 acres.

That argument has failed to assuage an army of foes, including most of the nation's newspapers, which do not want to see the 94-year-old Tokyo Station or any of the area's other turn-of-the-century buildings demolished.

Japanese engineers and architects have raised other questions about the plan to transform downtown Tokyo's skyline into a mirror image of New York or Chicago. They question the availabilty of the water that would be needed to supply such a collection of buildings and worry that despite new engineering techniques that allow skycraper construction in earthquake-prone Tokyo, a tremor the size of the one that leveled Tokyo in 1923 (8.0 on the Richter scale) could be cataclysmic if that many tall buildings were concentrated in one spot.

Others point out that the plan runs counter to a consensus that Tokyo's population should be dispersed, not further concentrated in its already congested heart.

While a plethora of schemes to move Tokyo into the 21st Century continue to make headlines in Japan, Tokyo's government is still wrestling with the immediate problems of overcrowding, people movement and traffic decongestion. Last month the Tokyo metropolitan government announced plans to construct by the early 1990s a new $1.2 billion subway line and the world's longest underground expressway, a 6.5-mile long, 4-lane roadway that would run 140 feet under Tokyo's congested streets.

Why build the expressway underground? Because, say Tokyo planners, the $6.2 billion needed to build the subterranean expressway is still 20 percent less than the cost of buying land and buildings above ground. It is not a new concept in Tokyo, which is catacombed with hundreds of underground shopping arcades, some stretching for miles.

"When land gets as expensive as it is in Tokyo, you have no choice but to go underground," Furusawa said. "Tokyo is becoming the first city on the planet to create two living environments-one above ground and the other below."

Profile: Japan's Takarazuka Theater

(This is a 1990s profile of Japan's "all girl" theater--immortalized in the book "Sayonara" by James A. Michener and the classic film of the same name starring Marlon Brando)

Japan's Takarazuka Theater makes women, and men, of talented girls

It is late afternoon and 18 teenage girls, wearing simple jackets and long, gray flannel skirts that reveal just the barest trace of their white cotton stockings, file across the "bridge of tears" spanning the Muko River.

The girls in their demure, street-length costumes look like they have marched right out of 1914. In a way, they have.

On the other side of the bridge in this small town in western Japan lies the 76-year-old Grand Theater, home of Japan's all-female Takarazuka Revue Company and one of the most tradition-bound institutions in this nation of 123 million.

"Some people call this the bridge of tears because in the winter, when the wind blows along the river, the cold air brings tears to your eyes," said a girl named Mayumi. "But for others it is the bridge of tears because when a girl makes up her mind to devote herself to the Takarazuka, she has to give up romance."

Those who have read James A. Michener's 1951 novel "Sayonara"--or seen the Oscar winning movie of the same name staring Marlon Brando--know exactly what Mayumi is talking about. The heroine of the book, a Takarazuka actress named Hana Ogi, sacrifices her happiness by declining to marry the American Army major she deeply loves, to dedicate herself to the Takarazuka.

It is an immutable rule that a Takarazuka girl must leave the company if she marries.

It is something that the 85 specially selected girls attending the grueling two-year Takarazuka music school already have come to grips with-as have all the members of the Takarazuka Revue Company.

It has been that way since the theater was started in 1914 by Ichizo Kobayashi, a Japanese businessman and politician who founded the Hankyu Electric Railway Co., forerunner of Japan's Hankyu Corp.-one of the nation's largest private corporate conglomerates.

What began as a troupe of 15 women hired to sing and dance for Japanese who were lured on weekends from Osaka to suburban Takarazuka's hot springs and amusement park via the Hankyu Railway has grown into four troupes totaling 360 "Takarasiennes." They are supported by 300 instructors, producers, directors, writers, costume designers, and stage and lighting technicians, as well as two 35-piece orchestras.

Since Kobayashi introduced his all-female Takarazuka Revue as a counterbalance to Japan's all-male Kabuki theater, more than 100 million Japanese have watched the lavish, brassy, campy and sometimes kitschy performances that combine bits of Busby Berkeley, flashes of Florenz Ziegfeld, elements of European operetta, samples of Japanese classical dance and fragments of Viva Las Vegas (with the feathers, but without the toplessness).

The revue, which is broken into four troupes called Flower, Moon, Snow and Star, does eight major productions at the Grand Theater in Takarazuka and seven at the Tokyo Takarazuka Theater each year.

That schedule was altered a bit last October when the Takarazuka Revue Company made its first American appearance in 30 years with six sold-out shows at New York's Radio City Music Hall.

What the bemused but appreciative American audiences saw was peculiarly Japanese entertainment floating in a sea of sexual ambiguity that has delighted Japanese audiences for seven decades.

With women playing the roles of men on stage (even to the point of wearing mustaches and goatees) Takarazuka musical adaptions of Western musicals such as "West Side Story," "Kiss Me Kate" and "Guys and Dolls" as well as Western literature such as "Gone With the Wind," "A Tale of Two Cities" and even "War and Peace" unfold on stage with eye-popping energy.

Nevertheless, Takarazuka, like sashimi and sushi, can be a bit daunting to the American palate at first.

Women who play men (called otokoyaku) have been trained to shove their feminine voices down as many octaves as possible and belt out tunes with as much male lustiness as their feminine genes will bear.

What emerges is often a kind of semi-virile warbling that falls between a weary Robert Goulet and a pubescent boy going through the agony of voice change. Women pretending to be men as they prance about the stage wearing adhesive facial hair, tuxedos and top hats takes some getting used to. But once you do get used to it, you cannot help but be struck by the general competence and talent arrayed on the stage.

That prowess and stage savvy are no accident, says Keiko Miho, 20, one of the latest crop of graduates from the Takarazuka Music School, where the motto "modesty, fairness and grace" is drummed into the heads of students.

Like her 40 classmates, Miho, from nearby Osaka, was chosen from about 850 girls who auditioned for a panel of Takarazuka judges two years ago. Like other applicants to the Takarazuka school, Miho had to pass a singing test, do sight reading of musical scores, then danced, impromptu, to a choreographer's instructions.

But getting into the school was easy compared with what she endured for the next two years. First-year students, called "juniors," are not allowed to wear makeup or curl their hair and must cut it or braid it in back.

Their temperate school uniforms are closer to the 1890s than the 1990s. When they meet an upper class "senior" or Takarazuka Revue member, they must bow and move quickly out of the way.

"You get up every morning before 7 and if you are a junior you clean the school and dormitory until about 8:30," Miho recalled.

"Then, seven hours a day, six days a week you have classes in drama, ballet, tap dancing, koto (a zitherlike stringed instrument), classical Japanese dance, musical theory, piano, samisen (a banjolike stringed instrument) and voice. It's physically demanding and tough. But the one thing that keeps you going is the realization that after two years you will be finished and will be on the stage."

Not quite. In their first year as full-fledged members of the troupe, music school graduates are known as "debutantes" and find themselves on the bottom rung once again, working as stagehands or taking bit parts as walk-ons. By the time they graduate, they also have been assigned their sex in the tightly controlled world of the Takarazuka-either as otokoyaku or as female-role players (musumeyaku).

It is a peculiar aspect of the Takarazuka that it is the smaller number of male role players (there is one "male" lead for each troupe) who attract the most fans-usually young girls and middle-aged women who see the otokoyaku as perfect gentlemen: safe, sexless, delicately handsome and cloaked in a veil of romantic fantasy.

"We tried to introduce men to the Takarazuka stage, but our audiences hated it," said Masao Hashimoto, a producer who has been with the theater since 1956. "We finally stopped trying just after World War II."

Every day, usually before 9 a.m., young girls, middle-aged women and even wealthy dowagers armed with video cameras and autograph books begin collecting outside the revue's theaters in Takarazuka and Tokyo, hoping to catch a glimpse of one of their Takarazuka favorites.

Many of the stage door Joannies belong to the 50,000-member "Takarazuka Tomo no Kai" (Friends of the Takarazuka), but all who gather outside the theaters are known in Japan simply as "zukas."

"Young women who aren't yet women go to see-and moon over-men wh aren't really men," wrote Tadashi Usami, author of a history of the Takarazuka Revue.

"Women start going to Takarazuka in their early teens, at a time when they are aware of the existence of men but not yet ready for sex or even dating. Takarazuka offers them a safe introduction to the opposite sex."

Mizuki Oura, a 13-year member of the Flower Company and one of the Takarazuka's most popular male role players, sees nothing anomalous about her "maleness" on stage, though she admits that it is sometimes disconcerting when men and women refuse to recognize her real sex.

"I am a woman and some day I want to get married," Oura said. "Yet many who see me on stage in the role of a man regard me as a man. They suspend reality."

In her case, Oura, who joined Takarazuka as a 15-year-old trainee, made that suspension a bit easer when a few years ago she became the first Takarazuka otokoyaku to wear a goatee on stage (in "Kiss Me Kate").

"Oura-san is my favorite," gasped 13-year-old Hideko Miura of Osaka as Oura and her leading lady, Mito Hibiki, left the Grand Theater in Takarazuka. "She is so . . . powerful . . . so unique."

Takarazuka's uniqueness in Japan was brought to the public's attention about three years ago when a former Takarazuka actress named Hiroko Hayashi was elected to Japan's Upper House of Parliament and began pushing for tax-exempt status for the revue.

"Takarazuka is very special in Japan and actually it is unique in the world," Hayashi said. "For that reason it deserves the same tax-exempt status as other traditional Japanese art forms like Kabuki and Noh theater." Kabuki theater, in which men play all roles, is exempted, so why not a theater in which women play all roles, she asks.

Although Hayashi's dream of giving the 76-year-old Takarazuka the same status as Japan's centuries-old Kabuki and Noh theaters was cut short when she lost in last summer's Upper House elections, she has not given up the idea and still pushes it whenever she has the chance.

"Takarazuka changed my life; it made me strong and gave me the guts you need to survive, not only in politics but in life," Hayashi said.

"Mr. Kobayashi, who founded Takarazuka, always said that Takarazuka made the best oyomesan gakko (bridal school). And he was correct. But to me, Takarazuka was also a school of life."

Hayashi, who left Takarazuka in 1957 to marry Senjaku Nakamura, one of Japan's top Kabuki actors, insists that giving Takarazuka tax-exempt status like that of Kabuki would guarantee its future when so much of Japan's culture is vanishing in an increasingly high-tech world.

Indeed, Takarazuka seems almost like a reaction to the smugness of modern Japan, where sophistication and wealth have become prime pursuits and where some Japanese lament what they insist are the increasingly blurred male-female roles in Japan's culture.

It is a theme of the Takarazuka's most popular stage show ever-a musical drama based on an 82-week Japanese comic-book series called "Berusaiyu no Bara" ("The Rose of Versailles") set in the French court at the time of the French Revolution.

The stage drama, which first ran from 1974 to 1976, then again in 1988-89 and which drew an audience of about 4 million, centers on a royal guard commander who is really a girl who was reared as a boy and who disguises herself as a girl to woo a Swedish count away from Marie Antoinette in an effort to derail some political intrigue in the Palace of Versailles.

The premise is perfect for the largely female Takarazuka audiences, because it provides them with a certain sense of sexual justice in a society where women have yet to achieve any major political power.

Takarazuka audiences sometimes come close to losing their storied Japanese reserve, as when these lines were delivered by a disgusted duchess:

"Men! I'm totally bored with them. Sticky as oil, to say the least. Inconsiderate and ever hungry for more power, conceited animals!

Overconfident as if no sex is superior to theirs, shamelessly do they resort to violence against us. Oh, that filthy sex, holding themselves so superior, the pride unsubstantiated. Don't they kneel begging for love of women? Erotic beasts, that's what men are."

What men are not and what they never will be, apparently, are members of Takarazuka. And for the elite group of 3,380 women who have passed through the Takarazuka's school and appeared on its stage since 1914, that is just fine.

"Takarazuka belongs to us and we don't need men changing its character," said "zuka" Yoshiko Himeno as she stood outside the Takarazuka Grand Theater.

"Well, maybe when Japan gets a woman prime minister, then we might consider allowing men to become members of the Takarazuka." players, and her leading lady in a recent show, "Mito Hibiki." lavish, brassy and campy.