Ups and Downs: Define Your Goals Clearly
Pros
The job can certainly be a big boost to your career if you clearly think about what you can gain during your time here. There are two types of people that usually take this job, those following the "Japan path" and those following the "Journalism path." NHK is a huge brand name that will stay with you for your entire life if following the Japan route. For those more interested in journalism, not so much, but it’s still a big organization that will give you a boost. While working here you can expect to travel quite a bit around the USA, at least for a few days out of every month. You'll gain experience researching topics in a wide variety of areas that might be unfamiliar to you and will burn away any shyness that you may have in contacting/interviewing strangers. Japanese reporters are very devoted and you can learn skills from them that will stay with you in your future career. You'll learn how the hot dogs of news stories are made from start to finish and the way its done here is pretty parallel to the way its done in US outlets. You'll have the opportunity to improve or learn the Japanese language. You'll have at least a few chances while here to report for NHK World and these clips will help you in the future if you're pursuing a career in journalism. My ratio has been around four of these per year.
Cons
During my job interview, I was asked where I saw myself in five years in the company. I replied by saying that I want nothing more than to have a company where I feel can devote my entire life and heart to, and turned this into a question to them of where it is possible to be in five years. Their response was point blank: nowhere. There is no ladder in this company for foreigners. This position, they told me, was designed to be a stepping-stone to another company. Japanese companies are still very ethnically insular and NHK is no exception. Your job here is basically to serve as an assistant for a Japanese reporter and there is no pathway for you to one day become a reporter or real part of the team as they are. In this sense, NHK maintains a permanent underclass to support their “real” employees who are paid several times more than you are, have their housing subsidized by the company, and are assured that their entire family is living comfortably. Your pay here is barely enough to survive and if you find out how much more the respected staff here are making you will feel sick to your stomach. If you are not ethnically Japanese, you can expect many times where you will feel left out and that you are an outsider here. NHK has no intention of being a truly internationally company. On the other hand, if you are full or half Japanese descent, I would warn you that you will be taken advantage of in ways that foreign staff are not. This is the case with one of my coworkers and it’s truly horrible. The management will give you lip service about personal responsibility and loyalty and you will be expected to work much harder than your foreign counterparts, but will still only ever be a second-class employee to them. NHK is by technicality not state-media (funding is from subscribers, who by chance are required by law to subscribe if they have a TV or anything capable of watching NHK (like a smartphone) in their house). As a journalist I often felt that the topics that we reported on were tame and purposely avoided anything that would criticize Japan or prompt any real thought. People who try to push the envelope like former NHK reporter Hiroko Kuniya are pushed out. If NHK does report on anything that portrays Japan in a negative light, It feels as if it is only doing so because it would be criticized by other Japanese media they we didn’t. Another problem with NHK that is rooted in its funding issue is that it has a 0% incentive to innovate because its funding is taken care of. The only thing that it has to do to survive is to not anger the Japanese government. NHK feels like a time capsule in terms of the lack of innovation and presence on the internet. Reporting on stories, NHK often has a very clear idea of the point that they’d like to prove through their story, and then will reverse-engineer the story by finding all of the people that they need to interview and the scenes they need to make this a reality. It is the opposite of what real reporting is. The point that they try to prove is in their minds already there, and is often at odds with reality. I thought that NHK World would be a pathway where I would have greater opportunities for employment, respect, and responsibility, but by design it isn’t. Unlike NHK, NHK World is almost fully funded by the Japanese government and because of this can never truly be a real media outlet. The purpose of NHK World is simply to serve as a PR program for tourists wishing to visit Japan. I don’t mean to be too doom and gloom about this position. There are certainly things to gain while here, but it isn’t a place where you should hang around waiting to see where you’ll float to within the company because the answer, by design, is nowhere. Define your goals, think of where you’d like to be after this, work hard to help the company, and then pull out to get to where you want to go.
