The Media and the Road to Modernity | 97Regional studies of media communication in the Empire have come to the
same conclusion. In the case of India, Chandrika Kaul has demonstrated that
news articles from Reuters were often semi-official and avoided touchy sub-
jects because of the agency’s close ties with the Indian Office (Kaul 2003: 46f.).
The telegraph and the wire services fostered the emergence of newspapers
not only in the provinces but also in many parts of the non-European world.
In Asia, South America and Africa they provided easier access to global news.
After Reuters made Shanghai the base for its Far Eastern news service in 1871,
many foreign papers sprang up in the cities of China (Wagner 1995). Con-
versely, the rise of a powerful press in New Zealand, Australia and Argentina
made them attractive new markets for news agencies and telegraph companies
(Winseck and Pike 2008: 11).
The Boom of the Press in East Asia and the Colonies
Although countries such as China and Japan had a long-established culture
of writing and printing, yet it was not until the nineteenth century that they
adapted Western-style periodicals, and in quite disparate ways. No other
country in the world experienced a transformation of its media with such
lightning speed as Japan, which today has the highest newspaper density in the
world. One could point out that within a few decades Japan passed through
the entire development formerly experienced by the West, and managed to
integrate its own traditions as well. The fact that Japan had been extremely
isolated before the middle of the nineteenth century makes this even more
astounding.
The rapid expansion of modern media in Japan can be explained by the
favourable conditions there. Literacy was quite high even before the school
reform act in 1872, but especially after it: not only the urban bourgeoisie and
landowners could read, but also some of the small farmers, with differences
within the provinces (Rubinger 2007: 162–80). Also a well-established market
for books and commercial lending libraries existed. There had also been a
kind of precursor of the newspaper, the so-called kawaraban, a single-page
gazette that reported on important events. When Japan ended its isolation in
1853–54, there were already five hundred different kawarabans in existence,
with a circulation of approximately one million (Huffman 1997: 22). As Japan
was strongly urbanised, especially in Edo (later Tokyo), it already possessed an
existing market of publishers, distributors and readers.
The establishment of this new market occurred within the framework of
countless reforms during the Meiji Period (1868–1912), when Japan experi-
enced a fundamental transformation in many facets of its society and often
modelled itself on the West. As James Huffman has argued, the media played