This week ChinaCast moves its Foreign Correspondent series outside the familiar territory of Western journalism by talking with Yosuke Watanabe, Bejing bureau chief for Japan’s Kyodo News Agency. A senior foreign correspondent at Kyodo”one of the agency’s elite coterie of “China Hands””Watanabe has worked in Shanghai, Hong Kong and, most recently, Washington D.C., where he witnessed the 9.11 attack on the Pentagon. He has been in Beijing since 2004.
In his conversation with CDT editor Josh Chin, Mr. Watanabe talks about being a Japanese reporter at a time of high-tension between Japan and China, the surprise of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Beijing last year, and the popularity in China of the novelist Haruki Murakami.
Listen to the interview here.
Read an article by Mr. Watanabe on China’s taste for Japanese fiction.
CDT ChinaCast is a podcast series of short and informal conversations with journalists, business people, artists and others doing interesting work in China. For the initial series, China Digital Times bloggers will interview foreign correspondents about their lives and work. The interviews do not aspire to find solutions to the many contradictions and challenges facing China in the 21st century – rather, we hope to offer a personal look at day-to-day life in one of the most complex and dynamic countries on earth. How do foreign reporters go about the business of covering China? What are some of the most unusual stories that have come out of the country in recent years? And what do expat journalists living in Beijing or Shanghai do for fun?
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