For better or worse, Japan has made a dramatic return to the news headlines in the United States during the past six months.

Between the historic election of the Democratic Party of Japan, the foreign policy conflict over the future of Futenma and the Toyota recall crisis, Japan has become a hot story line in a way not seen for many years.

Ironically, this renewed attention comes at a time when the ranks of Western media reporters in Japan are growing rapidly thinner. In January, Time magazine shuttered its Tokyo bureau and Business Week laid off its two senior Japan correspondents in a consolidation after the magazine was bought by the Bloomberg news organization. These decisions saddened the close-knit community that makes up the foreign press corps in Tokyo, but it was hard to say we couldn’t see the moves coming.

Over the years, even the biggest Western news organizations have downsized their coverage of Japan. The Washington Post, where I work as a staff writer, had three reporters in Tokyo through much of the 1980s and 1990s, including one solely dedicated to covering business issues. The newspaper also had three or four native Japanese staff members in the Tokyo office. Now, the Post has just one correspondent and one native Japanese, both of whom work from home after the Post closed its small office inside the Yomiuri Shimbun building to save money. By contrast, we have three full-time correspondents now based in China, including two in Beijing and a business writer in Shanghai.

Newsweek, owned by the Post Co., closed its Tokyo bureau years ago, and the Los Angeles Times moved its East Asia Bureau to Seoul, a move being considered by others as well because it remains less costly to house an operation there than Tokyo. The Japan Times recently reported that the membership of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan has fallen from 250 two decades ago to 144 last year. (The New York Times retains two-full time correspondents, including one dedicated to economic and business news.)

The drop in reporters has been driven by the double whammy of? falling advertising revenue and the fact that Japan’s long-sluggish economy and declining birthrate have made the country a less dynamic story than a rival such as China.

What this means for Japan, and by extension Japanese companies, is that it will become increasingly difficult to gain news coverage in the West. Though Toyota probably wishes that was true right now, the sad truth is that only the biggest scandals or quirkiest culture stories will draw attention from increasingly distracted reporters. And it also means that expecting nuance and a depth of understanding in Western coverage of Japanese issues -- especially complicated business and economic matters -- will become that much rarer, as reporters with sparse Japan experience “parachut in” from elsewhere when news breaks here.

Take my newspaper, the Washington Post, for example. The company retains one of the best reporters in the business here in Tokyo, a terrific writer who has been a foreign correspondent at the top of his game for years. That’s great for Japan. The down side is that, because he is bureau of one, he has been pulled away frequently to write about perhaps the biggest story in the region -- North Korea. He has been producing ground-breaking, front-page stories about the Hermit Kingdom, but that has meant less coverage of Japan in the Washington Post. In 2009, he wrote 68 stories focusing on either North or South Korea compared to 30 focusing on Japan.

We used to have a reporter based in Southeast Asia -- either in Bangkok or Jakarta. But that office was closed several years ago, so our Tokyo correspondent is also responsible for that region, as well as Australia. The Washington Post recently announced that a new reporter will take over in Tokyo this summer and he will be expected to cover not just those areas, but also help out in China or even the Middle East, depending on where the hottest news is breaking at any given time. This is because our resources across the world are shrinking and we need to maximize the scope of the reporters we have in the field.

Last month, I had lunch with a public relations officer at a major Japanese company who was frustrated that he had been unable to make contact with a Washington Post reporter in order to establish a relationship for potential future stories. I explained that our reporters and editors are busier than ever and that it will only get more difficult to make contacts with Western reporters because there are fewer of them and they have more to do.

That’s not to say there is no hope for Japanese companies to get well-rounded coverage. Perhaps the final holdouts in the Western press are the economic- and business-oriented media, including Bloomberg, which retains a large Tokyo presence, the Financial Times, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal. (The Associated Press also retains a sizable staff.) Bloggers and online only news sites also might be a way to fill in the coverage, such as the new online venture called GlobalPost, a foreign news site co-founded by a former foreign reporter for the Boston Globe. But the ability of those entities to pay good salaries to support top-notch quality reporters might be limited.

The trick for Japanese companies going forward is not just to learn better crisis management in the wake of the Toyota recall disaster, but also to understand the limits of the foreign press and engage it in a way that can help add nuance, texture and depth to the reporting. In my opinion, as the Toyota situation shows, openness is always a better course than defensiveness, and starting now is better than later.

David Nakamura is a reporter for The Washington Post spending a year in Tokyo on a Council on Foreign Affairs’ International Affairs Fellowship sponsored by Hitachi, Ltd.