Setting up a kisha club allows bodies such as government agencies to communicate official announcements rapidly to the media.
If, for example, local authorities want to provide information, it is easy to convey it by communicating with the kisha club for a higher-level body.
Defenders of the system also argue that the kisha clubs' influence is used to open up the institution they are covering to scrutiny, although this argument would seem self-contradictory.
In one representative criticism, Jonathan Watts, the former Tokyo bureau chief for The Guardian, said the kisha club create a problem of "watchdogs becoming lapdogs" because "the kisha-club system rewards self-censorship, fosters uniformity and stifles competition.
[5] There is criticism that press rooms set up for kisha clubs by government agencies, local public bodies and the police are paid for with taxes, but can only be used by the member companies, leading to corruption.
It was discovered that newspaper reporters attending the city hall and Tokyo Metropolitan Police kisha clubs had also been bribed, an event condemned by public opinion.
In 1974, when the weekly magazine Bungei Shunshū reported on the Kakuei Tanaka funding problem, the allegations were already well known in the kisha club but the media was silent about the story.
In 1998, during the broadcast of TBS' TV program Sōri to Kataru (総理と語る), "A Conversation with the Prime Minister", News 23 anchor Tetsuya Chikushi suggested to the prime minister of the time, Keizō Obuchi that, given the success of the Town Meetings held by President Bill Clinton, also shown by TBS, perhaps Obuchi would also like to take part in Clinton-style Town Meetings.
Obuchi was keen, but the plan was scuppered due to opposition from the kisha club, and in the end Sori to Kataru continued to be shown in the same format as before.
Even though weekly news magazines published the name of the media organization (NHK) responsible for writing the document, the Cabinet Kisha Club did not take an active efforts to investigate the cause of the incident.
In addition, there is criticism that the kisha club system decreases the distance between reporters and politicians, leading to improper relationships.
In addition, during the Matsumoto sarin incident, reports based on information given by the Metropolitan Police to a kisha club treated the first witness as a criminal.
Since then, foreign-owned media organizations such as Bloomberg and Dow Jones with large-scale information-gathering networks have joined the majority of kisha clubs, and are involved in their administration.
Some heads of local public bodies, business or financial groups have also closed press rooms, having realized the disadvantages of the kisha club system.
The then mayor, Ken Takeuchi, formerly of the editing committee of the Asahi Shimbun, and currently head of the internet newspaper "janjan", stated that this was done as it was felt that "it was not reasonable for a city institution funded by tax money to be monopolized by a kisha club which represented only one section of the media".
This kisha club was focused on reporting related to industrial work such as electrical machinery, shipbuilding, semiconductors and automobiles.
The Governor of Tokyo, Shintarō Ishihara, also questioned the policy of not allowing magazines or foreign media organizations to participate in press conferences.
One of the biggest moves against the kisha clubs came in the autumn of 2009, when the opposition Democratic Party (Japan, 1998) took power from the long-governing LDP.
“They think they are the only real journalists, but they are wrong.”[8] On May 15, 2001, former mayor of Nagano, Yasuo Tanaka, announced a "Declaration of the End of Our Kisha Club System".
On October 3, 2006, the current mayor, Hitoshi Murai, announced that the "Expression Center" would be renamed the "Press Conference Area" (会見場).
These reforms include change by the media itself, such as the event on June 11, 2001 when 11 local newspapers attending government offices in Seongnam, Gyeonggi-do, including the "Kyongin Ilbo" and "Jeonmae", disbanded the club and withdrew from the conference room, and events such as that in the same year, where the internet newspaper OhmyNews was expelled from a press conference at Incheon International Airport, and issued a lawsuit appealing against its expulsion.
On the other hand, in order to obtain a press pass, journalists have to undergo strict security checks from all departments, and the process can take several months.