What do these Japanese people have in common: A neighbor of people whose house has burned down; an uncle or aunt of someone who has been the victim of a crime; a person who has had food poisoning?

The answer is that they are all likely to appear headless on Japanese television, perhaps with their voices altered to such a high pitch that they sound as if they were coming from the squeeze box inside a stuffed koala.

All Japanese channels, government-run and commercial, claim to have stringent rules about the protection of people's privacy. I know of no other developed country where witnesses to events appear so often in such a state of decapitated incognito. It used to be that their faces were blurred out. Then, during the 1980s -- no doubt thanks to improved technology -- the people interviewed on TV whose identity was deemed "compromised" bore a countenance made up of little mosaic squares, somewhat in the style of the early Braque.