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All that may make for prestige and excitement, but a Japanese reporter's ambition to change society—which lures so many applicants—is hardly realistic. Japan's press feels free to criticize, and indeed reduced ex-Premier Eisaku Sato to tears of anger when he left office last month. But editors operate under self-imposed restraints that make muckraking in the Western sense all but impossible. For fear of ruining a man's reputation, the papers tend to pussyfoot and stop short of exposing suspected scandal or wrongdoing. The Japanese press has no Jack Andersons, and those who make it through the exams into journalism are apt to find their high ideals swallowed up by the system.