We Only Sympathize with People "Like Us," But it is Possible to Make Unrelatable People More Relatable

Before the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics began, the Japanese media provided a very subdued report on the preparation of the Games. Consistent with the politics focus nature of Western media outlets covering the Olympics, the Japanese news media reported on the extent to which the Chinese authorities have tried to execute the Games amidst uncertainties surrounding COVID-19. Any and all sense of Olympic unity that was gathered at the Games quickly dissipated after Russia promptly invaded Ukraine after its end, prompting speculation that China asked Putin to hold off the invasion until the Games ended.

But there was one topic that the Japanese media differed much from their Western counterparts when it comes to the coverage of the Beijing Winter Olympics. A curious large amount of coverage was devoted to the Chinese fandom of Japanese professional figure skater Yuzuru Hanyu. While Hanyu is also popular among Japanese females for his good looks as well as medal-winning prowess on the ice, Japanese media has been particularly keen to track down Chinese fans of Hanyu for interviews, sharing of goods relating to their idol, and even following their trips to the Beijing airport to meet Hanyu as he arrived in the city.

The length at which Japanese reporters followed individual Chinese citizens in their hobby is decidedly unusual for their employers. Japanese media have often focused on the high level in their coverage of China, speaking of political and socioeconomic trends, rather than being concerned with the day-to-day of individual citizens. Those who follow Japanese media coverage of China would be forgiven for seeing Chinese citizens as merely the extension, or at least pawns of the Chinese state or major conglomerates as they play up nationalism, capitalism, and other ideologies that supposedly drive China forward.

The uncharacteristic portrayal of Hanyu fans in China shows that media coverage of the individual is more likely to be about subjects that are "like us" rather than people who are perceived to be utterly unrelatable in looks or culture. The fact that Hanyu has a large fandom in Japan means that Japanese news coverage of Hanyu fans in China would have a ready audience at home, making it a safe topic that would drive viewership even as the overall interest in the Winter Olympics and China as a whole remains lukewarm or even outright hostile. 

The "like us" mentality is one that also drove much Western coverage of individual Ukrainian refugees in the past few weeks of the Russo-Ukrainian War. While this war is by no means the only one that led to extensive suffering of civilians caught in the crossfire, it is the only one in recent memory that involved so much on-the-ground coverage targeting individual Ukrainians at the grassroots level. By profiling each person extensively, Western media have inadvertently drawn parallels between the livelihoods of Ukrainians and the audience back home.

While the likes of Syrians, Burmese, Libyans, Ethiopians, and various West Africans suffering from their own wars also warrant similar comparisons with people back home, media coverage of their suffering would not have drawn nearly as much interest. Whiteness, of the average Ukrainian certain help. Europeans regard Ukrainians as European, Americans regard Europeans as Western, and some non-whites, including the Japanese, regard themselves as firmly in the Western camps. The Ukrainians, as such, are "like us" in ways that people in non-Western places like Africa and the Middle East will never be.

But the fact that the Japanese media will go out of their way to cover the Chinese fandom of Hanyu shows that the difference between "like us" and not "like us" is often wafer-thin. Japanese opinion of China has consistently declined in recent years due to perceived hostility of the Chinese government and fear of Chinese firms and citizens operating in Japan as doing possibly illegal and immoral bidding of the Chinese government. But once a commonality is found, even as trivial as a shared love for a figure skater, the "like us" mentality can be established.

Building the "like us" mentality, then, would be needed for non-Ukrainian sufferers of armed conflicts to get as much global attention as Ukrainians today are getting. If Syrians, Libyans, and the Burmese find something in common with Americans, Europeans, and the Japanese, then surely international news media would be keen to cover the commonality in the battle for viewership and readership. Making faraway people relatable is difficult without shared skin color and geographical proximity. But if one chooses to dig deeper into the daily lives of the average individual, as the Japanese media has done with Hanyu fans in China, making the unrelatable relatable is still possible.