Why Sony hack isn't front page news in Japan

[Jesus Malverde]

The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s biggest newspaper, featured a story about Sony Corp. on its website Friday. It wasn’t about hacking. It was about its struggling tablet business.

Over at wire service Kyodo News, just after the FBI formally blamed North Korea for the cyberattack, pop group AKB48 topped headlines online instead.

While American journalists have extensively covered the fallout from the unprecedented hacking attack on Sony Pictures, it hasn’t exactly been massive news here. Stories certainly surfaced after President Barack Obama weighed in on the issue at his year-end press conference Friday. But overall it has received relatively modest attention, mostly in short stories on the inside pages of the major dailies here.

This might all be perplexing to the rest of the world since Sony is one of Japan’s most iconic global brands. But there are a few good reasons why the story hasn’t gotten major play in the mainstream media:

Read More: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/12/21/business/sony-hack-isnt-front-page-news-japan/

[Turbineguy]

1. That may be because in Japan

entertainment is not the most important thing there is. The U.S. news agencies here are covering their own on this one.

[Blue_Tires]

6. Really?

If Nintendo or Sony Computer Entertainment (PlayStation) suffered a hack of this magnitude at their respective headquarters in Kyoto and Tokyo, and terrorist threats made them halt the production and release of an upcoming video game, I'd guess the Japanese folks would rightly be losing their shit about now...

[davidpdx]

2. The only thing I can think of is that the Japanese are trying to downplay the whole thing

because of their proximity to North Korea. If they started making a fuss about it, North Korea would start threatening them.

[Jesus Malverde]

3. That and they have a large population of Korean descent. Most of whom hail from the north.

Koreans in Japan are the ethnic Korean residents of Japan. They currently constitute the second largest ethnic group in Japan. The majority of Koreans in Japan are Zainichi Koreans, often known simply as Zainichi (在日?, lit. &quot non Japanese) residing in Japan&quot , who are the permanent ethnic Korean residents of Japan. The term "Zainichi Korean" refers only to long-term Korean residents of Japan who trace their roots to Korea under Japanese rule, distinguishing them from the later wave of Korean migrants who came mostly in the 1980s, and from pre-modern immigrants dating back to antiquity.

The 2005 figures are as follows:

Those with permanent resident status (general and special categories): 515,570
Naturalized Japanese citizens: 284,840
Long-term visitors: 82,666
Korean students in Japan: 18,208
Total: 901,284

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koreans_in_Japan

[davidpdx]

4. Oh, yeah that is true as well

It certainly is possible that some of them could harm Japan if they made a big deal about the whole thing.

[Fred Sanders]

5. One corporation gets hacked, out of hundreds a year? Of course it is blown up here, the media here

is predictably fear mongering, the hackers and ISIS rely on that business model and piggy back on it to spread their messages.

The American media are willing tools of terrorism, cyber or real.