and Editors Association, and in the late 1990s admitted Reuters as a member of the Kabuto Club. Since then, foreign-owned media organizations such as Bloomberg and Dow Jones with large-scale information-gathering networks have joined the majority of kisha clubs, and are involved in their administration. However, this has only been possible for a handful of foreign-owned media organizations, and as most foreign media organizations with representatives in Tokyo have only a few reporters there, it is impossible for them to have reporters join and remain present at kisha clubs. In fact, the EU has criticised kisha clubs for being exclusive, and the opinion has been stated that the kisha club system should be abolished, and all journalists with a reporter's pass issued by the Japanese Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs allowed to collect material for stories at public institutions. This exclusivity is the reason why foreign journalists were not allowed to attend the police conference on the disappearance and murder of the British woman Lucie Blackman, and that when Prime Minister Koizumi visited the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, non-members of the kisha club were not allowed to accompany him. (Statement by Private Secretary Isao Iijima.) Reporters Without Borders, a journalists' organization which campaigns to protect the rights of journalists to freedom of speech, is calling for the Japanese government to abolish the kisha club system. Moves to abolish kisha clubs At a national level, in 1994, Ichirō Ozawa, the head of the Japan Renewal Party, undertook a groundbreaking experiment by allowing magazine reporters not in the kisha club to participate in press conferences, but this never took off, in part due to disagreements between Ozawa and the media. In 2002, the then head of the Democratic Party of Japan, Katsuya Okada, introduced a format of press conference where all types of media, including sports newspapers, weekly magazines and foreign media organizations, could take part. Until then, only media in the could take part. Some heads of local public bodies, business or financial groups have also closed press rooms, having realized the disadvantages of the kisha club system. In June 1993, the , the kisha club for the Tokyo Stock Exchange, reformed its rules, which until then had restricted membership to Japanese media organizations, to include "foreign media organizations which perform media work equivalent to that of the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association", a move which in practice opened