98 | Mass Media and Historical Change
a defining role in these changes (Huffman 1997: 2). After Western merchants
had established the first newspapers, numerous Japanese newspapers and mag-
azines appeared during the 1860s and broadened people’s awareness of the
outside world, for example the Magazine of the Western World (after 1867).
Japanese travel to the United States and Europe also increased knowledge of
the Western press. As early as the 1870s the media had begun to bring politics
into the public sphere and promote societal debate. This new press landscape
in Japan revealed parallels to Germany. On the one hand there were party-af-
filiated ‘big newspapers’ (o-shimbun) for the elites, which focused on politics
and political positioning rather than on commercial interests. On the other
hand there was a popular press of ‘small newspapers’ (ko-shimbun) with sim-
plified script, which concentrated more on societal news (Huffman 1997: 41,
69–73; Nojiri 1991: 35f.). In the 1870s, bonding and censorship gave rise to
prosecution, with 144 journalists being incarcerated between 1875 and 1877
alone. But in fact the political leadership focused more on financial but often
covert support for the press (Huffman 1997: 53–57, 374).
The Japanese press finally came close to Anglo-Saxon standards around
- Relaxation of censorship and the wars against China in 1895 and Russia
in 1903/05 forced the pace of this change because the numerous Japanese corre-
spondents professionalised their journalistic work and made it more news-ori-
ented. The wars also promoted an increase in circulation and strengthened
the influence of a few powerful publishers. Furthermore, it fostered the rise of
populist nationalism that pushed for imperialistic expansion while blocking
out Japanese war crimes. Larger newspapers now attained circulations of over
ninety thousand copies (Nojiri 1991: 35; Huffman 1997: 387).
This turn towards Anglo-Saxon ‘new journalism’ was evident not only in its
focus on facts, sensationalism and classified advertisements but in its confident
journalistic self-image and modus operandi. Several journalists now made
names for themselves as advocates of the lower classes, publishing reports con-
demning the exploitation of mineworkers, prostitutes and rickshaw drivers.
Some individual campaigns against forced prostitution in particular, were very
similar to W.T. Stead’s world-famous articles that had appeared in London
(Huffman 1997: 247–59). Beyond that, apolitical popular papers enjoyed
huge circulation, just as they did in the West. The magazine Woman’s World
with its four hundred thousand copies (1909) had the highest circulation, and
the children’s magazine The King set a record in 1925 when it reached a circu-
lation of 1.5 million (Nojiri 1991: 28).
A process of media modernisation such as Japan’s was in no wise a matter
of course, even for a country with a long written tradition. This also holds true
for China, which had a well-established book market and a newspaper-like
tradition of Court news. Moreover, beginning in the 1840s, missionaries and
traders had introduced independent newspapers to the port cities where they