Just about every journalist who covers Japan for a non-Japanese media outlet is totally clueless. NYT's Martin Fackler, CNN's Kyung Lah and WIRED's Lisa Katayama are particularly bad, in the sense that they tend to take outlier stories and spin them into an overblown "look at how crazy and/or dead Japan is!" narrative.

The only one who I would call "really good," or even just "good," is NYT's Hiroko Tabuchi, who churns out interesting non-sensationalist articles regularly and captures all the amazing things that Japanese companies and individuals are doing on a daily basis.