Just to remind people that what you read in papers about foreign countries is not always correct

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. I find all sorts of inaccurate "information" about Japan in the U.S. press

even--or especially--in the New York Times. I know that they keep sending reporters who do not speak Japanese, so they make statements like, "No one in Japan knows about the Nanjing Massacre," when if they could have read the titles on the magazines on the newsstands at the time, they would have seen that there were featured articles in political magazines of all stripes debating whether the Massacre had happened or how bad it had been. (Predictably, the right-wingers were claiming either that the Massacre was Communist propaganda or that "only" 10,000 people had been killed.)

Another report was that Japanese women were taking up smoking. No, they were just violating the former taboo against women smoking in public.