Kind of. The Japan Times is interesting. It's an English-language publication, but it is written for Japanese people by Japanese people. Despite their target audience being Japanese people, the fact that it is an English-language publication kind of makes it a default paper (well, figurative paper) of record for what's going on in Japan for people outside of Japan that don't really speak Japanese.
They also make textbooks for Japanese-language learners.
I don't know about that. If you look at the bylines more than half the writers come from anglophone countries, and a lot of the feature articles seem aimed at foreign settlers in Japan. They take breaking news from the Kyodo newswire and mostly do features.
My Japanese isn't good enough to read the news at speed, but I can manage TV news; there's a lot of stories that don't show up in the Japan Times until a week later. They do cover major political, economic, and crime (if it's a murder) news in a timely fashion.
It is possible my information about The Japan Times is basically historic and out of date at this point since organizations do change. This is the premise upon which the paper was originally founded and continued to operate on for most of its history, but I also don’t follow The Japan Times anymore.
