The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), Stanford University’s hub for the interdisciplinary study of contemporary Asia, invites nominations for the 2025 Shorenstein Journalism Award. The award recognizes outstanding journalists and journalism organizations for their significant contributions to reporting on the complexities of the Asia-Pacific region. The 2025 award will honor an Asian news media outlet or a journalist whose work has primarily appeared in Asian news media. Award nomination entries are due by Saturday, February 15, 2025.

Sponsored by APARC, the award carries a cash prize of US $10,000. It alternates between recipients who have primarily contributed to Asian news media and those whose work has mainly appeared in Western news media. In the 2025 cycle, the award will recognize a recipient from the former category. The Award Selection Committee invites nominations from news editors, publishers, scholars, teachers, journalists, news media outlets, journalism associations, and entities focused on researching and interpreting the Asia-Pacific region. Self-nominations are not accepted.

The award defines the Asia-Pacific region as encompassing Northeast, Southeast, South, and Central Asia, as well as Australasia. Both individual journalists with a substantial body of work and journalism organizations are eligible for the award. Nominees’ work may be in print or broadcast journalism or in emerging forms of multimedia journalism. The Award Selection Committee, comprised of journalism and Asia experts, judges nomination entries and selects the honorees.

An annual tradition since 2002, the award honors the legacy of APARC benefactor, Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein, and his twin passions for promoting excellence in journalism and understanding of Asia. Throughout its history, the award has recognized world-class journalists who push the boundaries of reporting on Asia. Recent honorees include The New York Times' Chief China Correspondent Chris Buckley; India's long-form narrative journalism magazine The Caravan; Burmese journalist and human rights defender Swe Win; and Maria Ressa, CEO of the Philippine news platform Rappler and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

Award nominations are accepted electronically via our online entry form through Saturday, February 15, 2025, at 11:59 PM PST. For information about the nomination rules and to submit an entry please visit the award nomination entry page. APARC will announce the winner by April 2025 and present the award at a public ceremony at Stanford in autumn quarter 2025.

Please direct all inquiries to aparc-communications@stanford.edu.

APARC Deputy Director and Japan Program Director Kiyoteru Tsutsui recently joined Nippon TV host Atsushi Tamura for a conversation in an episode of the series "Another Sky."

The conversation included an overview of Tsutsui’s research on international human rights, the reasoning behind his decision to study human rights as a sociologist, and other topics. One issue that Tsutsui identified over the course of the interview is the tension between international human rights institutions and the vested interests of powerful governments, a topic that he addresses in his award-winning book Human Rights and the State (Iwanami Shinsho, 2022). The book received the 44th Suntory Prize for Arts and Sciences and the Ishibashi Tanzan Prize and was recognized by the Shinsho Taisho Award.

Tsutsui's book traces the origins and evolution of universal human rights principles and the establishment of a human rights framework that curtails the influence of nations averse to external involvement in their domestic matters. In it, Tsutsui examines the effectiveness of international human rights since the collapse of the Cold War system and examines the quality of Japan's human rights diplomacy and education.

Watch the full interview below:

Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) announced today, May 3, World Press Freedom Day, that The Caravan, India’s premier magazine of long-form narrative journalism, is the winner of the 2023 Shorenstein Journalism Award. The Caravan publishes reportage, commentary, investigations, and literary criticism spanning the worlds of politics, culture, and society. It is known for its exhaustive stories that shine a light on India’s socio-political realities and for demonstrating an unflinching commitment to truth-telling amid India’s democratic erosion and declining press freedom. APARC will present the Shorenstein Award to Hartosh Singh Bal, the magazine’s executive editor, at a public ceremony and discussion at Stanford in autumn quarter 2023.

Sponsored by APARC, the annual Shorenstein Award honors journalists or journalism organizations that have contributed significantly to a greater understanding of Asia through outstanding reporting on critical issues affecting the region. Emulating this purpose, The Caravan and its editors and reporters have unveiled groundbreaking stories with persistence and courage, taking on issues such as the persecution of religious minorities in India, farmer suicides, labor rights, and the increasing threats to democratic institutions.

The Caravan was established in 1940 as a general-interest magazine and was favored by India’s intellectual elites before it shut down in 1988. Two decades later, it was relaunched by Anant Nath, the grandson of the founder of its publisher, Delhi Press, as a monthly on politics, art, and culture, drawing inspiration from long-form American magazines at a time when long-form journalism was relatively unheard of in India. In addition to a monthly print issue, the magazine presents web-exclusive stories on its website, as well as multimedia features and a Hindi section. Since the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party under Narendra Modi in national politics, The Caravan has garnered recognition for its political investigations and daring commentary.

The decline in press freedom and growing threats to democratic institutions in India under the Modi government have been well-documented. “The violence against journalists, the politically partisan media, and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis in ‘the world’s largest democracy,’” according to Reporters Without Borders’ latest World Press Freedom Index, which ranks India as “one of the world’s most dangerous countries for the media.” In this environment, where media organizations are under constant pressure to toe the government line and critical reporting is often suppressed, The Caravan has kept its commitment to editorial independence. Facing violence, sedition charges, and imprisonment, the magazine has continued to produce investigations exposing Hindu extremist terrorism, political assassinations, gender and caste inequality, and ethnic violence against the Muslim minority in the country.

“Despite intimidation and harassment from the government, The Caravan continues to document the erosion of democracy and human rights in India,” said Stanford sociologist Gi-Wook Shin, the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea and the director of APARC. “The magazine’s team of intrepid editors and reporters demonstrates the highest level of journalistic integrity and excellence. It is our honor to recognize it with the 2023 Shorenstein Journalism Award.”

The award also recognizes the contributions of The Caravan’s executive editor, Hartosh Singh Bal, who formerly worked as the magazine’s political editor for ten years. An incisive commentator on Indian politics and society, Bal was the political editor of Open magazine and has worked with The Indian Express, Tehelka and Mail Today. He is the author of Waters Close Over Us, A Journey Along the Narmada and co-author of A Certain Ambiguity, A Mathematical Novel. He is trained as an engineer and a mathematician.

Presented annually by APARC, the Shorenstein Award, which carries a $10,000 cash prize, honors the legacy of APARC’s benefactor, Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein, and his twin passions for promoting excellence in journalism and understanding of Asia. The selection committee for the award, which chose The Caravan as the 2023 honoree, noted that the magazine and Mr. Bal have led the last bastion of bold investigative journalism in India under extreme duress.

The committee members are William Dobson, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy; Anna Fifield, Asia-Pacific Editor of The Washington Post and recipient of the 2018 Shorenstein Journalism Award; James Hamilton, Hearst Professor of Communication, chair of the Department of Communication, and director of the Stanford Journalism Program, Stanford University; Louisa Lim, senior lecturer, Audio-Visual Journalism Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne; and Raju Narisetti, Publisher, McKinsey Global Publishing, McKinsey and Company.

Twenty-one journalists previously received the Shorenstein award, including most recently Emily Feng, NPR’s Beijing correspondent; Swe Win, editor-in-chief of the independent Burmese news organization Myanmar Now; Tom Wright, co-author of the bestseller Billion Dollar Whale and a veteran Asia reporter; and Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, CEO and executive editor of the Philippines-based news organization Rappler.

Information about the 2023 Shorenstein Journalism Award ceremony and panel discussion featuring Mr. Bal will be forthcoming in the fall quarter.

View a Japanese version of this announcement.

Survey results from the Stanford Japan Barometer, launched by the Japan Program at Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), indicate that the Japanese public supports women’s advancement in society. In addition to this broad support, the survey found that, on the issue of married couples with the same last name in particular, roughly 70% of the Japanese public support a change to accommodate women who do not want to use their husband’s last name.

Led by Professor of Sociology Kiyoteru Tsutsui, the Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor and director of the Japan Program at APARC, and Charles Crabtree, an assistant professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College and a former visiting assistant professor with the Japan Program, the Stanford Japan Barometer is a periodic public opinion survey on political, economic, and social issues concerning contemporary Japan with three main parts: (1) questions about respondents’ demographic background; (2) a stable set of questions about support for policy issues, political parties, public institutions, and international entities; and (3) a thematically focused set of questions and experimental studies on topics of great relevance at the time of the survey. The survey is conducted with a national, quota-based sample of 8,000 Japanese residents.

In its first installation of the survey conducted in late November 2022, the Stanford Japan Barometer examined issues around gender and sexuality in Japan and found, among other results, that most Japanese support same-sex marriage, as reported in an earlier press release. The survey also examined the issue of married couples’ last names, which has emerged as a potent symbol of gender inequality in Japan over the past years.

In Japan, married couples are legally required to have the same last name. While the law does not require wives to adopt the last name of their husbands, in reality, more than 95% of married women do so. Many argue that this creates a hurdle for women to advance their careers, as they have to change their last name when they get married, and if they get divorced they have to change it back to their maiden name. Known to lag behind other highly developed economies when it comes to gender equality, Japan has struggled to place women in positions of authority and raise their earnings to a level closer to those of men. Many argue that changing the law to enable married couples to maintain different last names, i.e. keep their own last name, would facilitate a movement toward gender parity as a symbolic sign of support for women’s autonomy in public spaces and a means of practical support for them to advance their career.

The government has tracked public opinion on this issue, with a cabinet office periodically conducting a survey on this topic. In the most recent government survey from 2022, there was a decline in support for a legal change to allow couples to maintain different last names and an increase in support for facilitating the use of a maiden name as the common name in workplaces, compared to the previous survey by the same office conducted in 2017. These results triggered a controversy around this issue, and media allegations surfaced that the survey question was manipulated in such a way as to decrease support for a legal change and increase support for use of a maiden name as a common name, hence pleasing the conservative ruling party LDP leaders. A debate followed as to whether the changes in the question format and answer options contributed to the results that suited what the ruling LDP wanted.

To test the validity of these allegations, Tsutsui and Crabtree conducted an experiment randomly assigning respondents to answer two versions of the government survey under scrutiny, from 2017 and 2022. They found that the survey question and answer format significantly affected the results, as support for a legal name change was at 57% when the respondents were assigned the 2017 version but 30% when they answered the 2022 version, while support for using maiden names as common names found only 19% support in the 2017 version but 39% in the 2022 version. These results provide strong evidence that it was the question format that changed the results between 2017 and 2022. The exact level of support among the Japanese public for a legal change on this issue and how public opinion might have changed over the recent past remain to be seen.

Another thing to note about these results is that in either version of the survey, support for the status quo — married couples having the same last name with no accommodations — is low, at 23% in the 2017 version and 30% in the 2022 version. This indicates that the Japanese public largely recognizes that a change is needed on this issue of married couples’ last names in order to accommodate women seeking career advancement. Tsutsui and Crabtree further examined who still resists the change and found, in their multivariate analysis, that status quo supporters have completed fewer years in school, are currently married, have children, and support Prime Minister Kishida at higher levels. Interestingly, they find a quadratic relationship when it comes to income, showing that both those at the low- and high end of the income distribution are more likely to support the status quo.

Next, Tsutsui and Crabtree conducted an experiment on different arguments that might influence support for a legal change to allow married couples to keep different last names. These arguments focused on several themes. In terms of tradition, some respondents read a prompt that argued that the custom in Japan is for married couples to have the same last name, while others read an argument that married couples in Japan kept different last names up until the first decades of the Meiji era and that is more of Japan’s tradition. Similarly, the researchers presented both pro and con arguments in terms of the social and international reputation costs of legalizing married couples with different last names, as well as the fairness of the practice from the point of view of gender equality and human rights principles.

The results show that an argument about social costs — how allowing married couples to maintain different last names would weaken family bonds with harmful effects on children — is the only one that seems to substantially change public attitudes, reducing support for a legal change. The effect is substantial, roughly 1/7 of a standard deviation, and suggests that it is easier to mobilize opposition to than support for changing the law, a finding with consequences for advocates and opponents of the legal change.

These results reflect complex gender politics at play in Japan. Whatever the intentions of the survey designers for the 2017 and 2022 government surveys, the question and answer formats they used have a significant impact on how much support can be found for married couples keeping different last names. On the other hand, the Japanese public largely recognizes that a change is needed, demonstrating broad support for some kind of change to accommodate calls for women to use their maiden name even after marriage.

As the debate on this issue continues, there is a need to observe how future surveys ask questions about it since public support for a legal change can be influenced by the question framing, format, and answer options.

For media inquiries about the survey, please reach out to:
Noa Ronkin
APARC Associate Director for Communications and External Relations
noa.ronkin@stanford.edu