Coffee and sashimi with a journalist

"With its vast and direct influence on public opinion, journalism cannot be guided only by economic forces,profit, and special interest. It must instead be felt as a mission in a certain sense sacred, carried out in the knowledge that the powerful means of communication have been entrusted to you for the good of all" (Pope Jean Paul Second, June 2000).

After a four and a half hour chat with a lovely, cambridge type chap freelancing for the BBC I wonder again at how I can possibly justify the persuit of journalism. It seems so individualistic and single minded. It's all about getting your 'break' , selling your soul for as much work experience as possible, blagging your way through stories you know nothing about, focusing on the job before you and not on the long term implications of what you write. So much of it seems like white noise spurted out in the way that any machine processes and spurts out information.

(Here comes the idealist in me). I believe in the power of communication. I believe in making people's voices heard and taking microphones and notebooks into people's lives so that they can record and explain and empower themselves. I don't pretend to have the answers to social injustice, spiritual and financial poverty or the absurd oppression of people that our world seems endlessly caught up in. But I want those people who are making those decisions (which, is not only politicians but every single one of us in every tiny daily choice we ever make), to have as much knowledge and understanding as possible.

I do know that I have been fortunate enough to travel and meet so many wonderful and diverse people. And I do know that I now feel an obligation to talk about them and attempt to let other people share a little glimpse into that banana plantation in Ecuador, the Republican Moussouri twins understanding of Bush as Moses, the families and the smell of tortillas in the little village in the north of guatemala, the school room, come refugee camp in Tbilisi and the woman who begged me to 'tell the world about us'. I'm not an expert on these people, I can't talk on behalf of them - but I can give a little (and I do mean very very little) impression of what it means to have the government only paying you 11 lari a month, or to live in a place where the police and authorities carried out civil war against you, or how it's normal to commute two and a half hours a day with a social pressure to attend work that leaves your face white and your soul absent from your family, homelife or even yourself. These people have changed my life and so I guess I want them to change other people's lives too. My world has been lashed together so that, although I forget all too often, the impact of my action stretches way beyond the simple reverberations close to. And I want to share that and use it.

Yesterday, listening to what it takes to become a journalist I yet again began to doubt whether it is truly something I have the drive to do. Do I really believe that I can write about the things I care about in almost any main stream media outlet? Would I be able to write endless business news and 'gadgets and gizmos' articles just so that ten years down the line I could do a feature on aids in Africa? Of course it also links up to my own self doubts as to whether I'm good enough to be in such a sparkling, competitive career?

It's the inevitable question that so many of us budding idealists are asking; what must we sacrifice? What can we compromise? What is more important to us? Where can we make the biggest difference? What is activism? What is peace? And even, what is my motivation for wanting to feel like I am making a difference? How selfish is that in itself? A postcolonial mind frame that wants to 'help those less fortunate' in that patronising old school kind of way? How can we truly do something that changes people's lives?

The journalist I spoke to yesterday spoke about his motivations for going into journalism; good stories to tell the grand children, variety, speaking with people from different walks of life, the challenge, the excitement. He didn't mention the broader good for society. He was a small cog in a giant media machine. And yet, I realise that here in Japan I too have learnt to keep silent on much of my idealism. It feels like I am overstepping the mark - attempting something too ambitious, too self righteous. Perhaps, everyone I meet has an idealist buried within them, an idealist that we are too embaressed to show for fear of ridicule. And perhaps all it takes is for enough of us to keep that idealist buried, for the world to continue in its cycle of devastating cruelty and neglect.