Last Tuesday, when Tokyo prosecutors raided the offices of YouTube in order to find the person who leaked those videos of a Chinese fishing boat ramming a Japan Coast Guard vessel near the Senkaku Islands, the Asahi Shimbun published a letter from a man who said he had worked in media for 30 years. He wrote that had the press first made those tapes public it would have been a major scoop, but implied that it probably wouldn't have happened, since the government had said the videos were off limits.

That night on TV Asahi's "Hodo Station," anchorman Ichiro Furutachi commented that the media had basically ceded the job of safeguarding the public's right to know to YouTube. The fact that the videos had been posted on the website for everyone to see gave TV news shows license to show them (and show them and show them . . . ) because they were now "part of a story." Actually, the videos are the story, but by tying them to the government's search for the person who leaked them (a Coast Guard officer, it turns out), the media could broadcast them without taking any responsibility.

In order to answer the question of whether or not the public has a right to see these videos, one first needs to know the government's reasons for keeping them under wraps. Though Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara stated firmly that there is no "territorial dispute" over the Senkakus, the government knew that the release of the videos — which clearly show the Chinese fisherman to be the aggressor — would only make China more angry, and Japan needs those rare-earth materials it imports from China and whose export China stopped after the Japan Coast Guard arrested the skipper of the fishing boat.