Makoto Watanabe has never forgotten the day when his previous employer, one of Japan’s biggest newspapers, retreated from its biggest investigative scoop about the Fukushima nuclear disaster: that workers had fled the plant against orders from the plant’s manager.

It was 11 years ago, and the Asahi Shimbun had come under fire from other media and government supporters, who said the newspaper had misrepresented what were just garbled instructions. After proclaiming that it stood behind the story, the Asahi did an abrupt about-face at a news conference and retracted it.

As more people rush to see glaciers before they melt, places like Iceland have benefited from a booming tourism economy. Half a million people now visit Iceland for glacier tours every year, according to Elin Sigurveig Sigurdardottir, chief of operations for Icelandic Mountain Guides, an agency that leads trips on a separate glacier within Vatnajokull National Park, where the accident took place.

Dilemmas like hers are roiling orthopedic medicine as obesity levels soar, and with them arthritis. What should orthopedists do when confronted with patients whose B.M.I. is very high?

The newspaper later gutted the investigative group he worked on that produced the article, telling reporters to be less contentious toward authorities. Mr. Watanabe quit his job at the leading newspaper, a rare move in Japan. But what he did next was more unusual: Mr. Watanabe started Japan’s first media nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism.

“The newspaper was more interested in protecting its privileged access than informing its readers,66br” Mr. Watanabe, 50, recalled. “I wanted to make a new media that wouldn’t fold.”

Eight years later, his Tokyo Investigative Newsroom Tansa remains small. As the editor in chief, he supervises a staff of two full-time reporters, a volunteer and an intern. On a recent afternoon, they worked in a spartan room with two small tables and bookshelves on the second floor of a nondescript Tokyo office building.

But Tansa, which roughly translates as “in-depth investigation,” is finally making a mark. It published a series of articles from 2018 to 2021 that exposed decades of forced sterilizations of mentally disabled people, forcing the government to last year issue an apology and pass a law to pay compensation to the victims. Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK, signed a deal to use some of Tansa’s content.

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