A popular Japanese variety show on Nippon Television apologised after editing a street interview with a Chinese woman in a way that implied people in her country ate crows.
The inflammatory segment aired on 24 March and was part of Monday Late Night’s street interview section about living in Tokyo.
According to The Asahi Shimbun, a Chinese woman interviewee said she rarely saw crows in her country and, in a separate conversation, mentioned that some Chinese people ate pigeons.
The show spliced the two statements together to falsely imply that she was saying Chinese people ate crows.
In the final edit, the woman made her observation on crows and followed it up with, “It's because everyone eats them. Just stew and eat them, that's it.”
The show sparked instant backlash, with several viewers criticising the negative stereotype it was propagating, as also the misrepresentation.
The network issued an apology last week in both Chinese and Japanese on its official website and removed the episode.
“This is something that should never happen in television broadcasting. We sincerely apologise to the interviewee and all viewers. We will thoroughly review our production process to prevent a recurrence,” it said in a statement.
“We deeply regret this incident.”
Subsequently, the network revealed the segment had been edited by a freelancer to falsely suggest the interviewee had made the controversial statement because they believed it would make the show more entertaining.
Network president Hiroyuki Fukuda apologised on Monday and clarified that street interviews for the show in question would be suspended.
“This was due to intentional editing, with the desire to make it as entertaining as possible,” he was quoted as saying by public broadcaster NHK. “Everything about it was inappropriate.”
Japanese media reported that during the pre-airing review, production staff did not realise the interviewee’s comments had been edited.
Nippon TV explained that the show’s director had instructed the production team to fact-check the remark. A staff member reportedly checked a government website and other sources and found that eating crows was a tradition in some regions of China. A caption was then added to clarify that the practice was not common across the country.
It was only after the segment aired and controversy erupted on social media that the staff learned that the footage had been deliberately manipulated.
In a widely shared screenshot of her response to the controversy, the Chinese woman clarified that she had been misquoted, the South China Morning Post reported.
“They asked what I usually ate for dinner,” she explained, noting her direction to ”stew and eat them” was about hot pots. She further said: “I said we eat pigeons so there were few pigeons on the street. But it was maliciously edited.”
Pigeons are considered a delicacy in several parts of the world, including China.
“It causes discrimination. It should not be permitted, regardless of genre,” Takahiko Kageyama, a professor at Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts, told The Asahi Shimbun, adding that the show not only ridiculed Chinese people but it contributed to distrust against street interviews.
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