Japan's Total Empire. Louise Young

Скачать книгу

prefecture, 10 percent to Shiga, Wakayama, Mie, and Nara prefectures in the Kinki region, 7 percent to Ishikawa, Fukui, Toyama, Aichi, and Gifu prefectures in the Chbu region, and 6 percent to the southern island of Kysh.⁸ By 1923, 70 percent of Tokyo's newspaper production was sold outside the city.⁹

      Yet even though the metropolitan press had penetrated provincial cities and villages by the end of the Taish

period, in many areas a resiliant provincial press proved able to resist the incursions of metropolitan cultural institutions. Indeed, the rapid development of the Osaka and Tokyo papers was matched in the provinces with a flourishing local press. Most provincial cities supported several newspapers; prefectural and regional papers complemented their numbers. For example, Toyama prefecture on the Japan Sea coast produced, in addition to 26 regional periodicals, 3 daily and 2 evening papers.¹⁰ When the metropolitan papers tried to take over the provincial markets, in all but a few districts, such as Saitama and Kana-gawa which bordered the big cities, the local press was able to withstand the challenge.¹¹ This was accomplished in large part by imitation of metropolitan technologies of marketing and production, something which often required mergers and other institutional restructuring. Another key factor aiding the survival of the local press was the growing tendency to subscribe to more than one paper. A 1930 nationwide survey of 13,688 youth groups found that each group took an average of 3.3 newspapers; almost 50 percent were local papers.¹²

      Through the diffusion of mass marketing technology as well as the development of national markets for the metropolitan dailies, the growth of the newspaper industry fostered the formation of a nationally integrated mass culture. This meant that news coverage of events of national significance like the Manchurian Incident was disseminated quickly throughout the country. It also guaranteed a degree of uniformity of coverage, as competing papers picked up each other's stories and imitated new marketing techniques. Most of all, it meant that by 1931 Japan was a nation of news hounds. In upper-, middle-, and working-class households, in urban and rural Japan, men, women, and even children informed themselves of the events of the day through the commercial news media. Thus it was natural that the press became the medium through which the influence of the Manchurian Incident first penetrated the home front, infecting Japanese society with war fever.

      For the press, the war fever offered great opportunities for market expansion. With urban markets largely saturated, the goal at this stage was a more thorough penetration of the rural market. Historian T

yama Shi-geki described the inroads made in his own village at the time: “My father's family were farmers. Before the Manchurian Incident we had not taken a paper, but after articles about the local unit began to appear and articles about the war-dead in our village came out almost everybody began to take the newspaper, even tenant farmers.”¹³ The drive to expand circulation was pursued, as in earlier imperial wars, through innovations in format, production, and marketing techniques. During the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, the enormous expansion of the newspaper market had been accomplished by the increased use of, first, illustrations and, later, photographs to accompany news stories from the front, the merging of “hard” (political) and “soft” (entertainment) journalism, the switch to advertising as a primary source of revenue, and other changes.¹⁴ Now, the Manchurian Incident news war ushered in an era of high-speed news production.

      Leading the way were the Mainichi shinbun and Asahi shinbun news-paper chains.¹⁵ Both Osaka-based with various fairly independent regional editions, their respective flagship papers—the Tokyo Asahi, Osaka Asahi, Osaka Mainichi, and Tokyo Nichinichi—dominated the national news market.¹⁶ The four large dailies deployed recently purchased fleets of airplanes and cars, and mobilized the latest printing and phototelegraphic machinery in their drive to win the news war. The Osaka Asahi had demonstrated dramatically the potential of airplanes to accelerate the delivery of news when it flew a photograph of the bombed-out train in which Zhang Zuolin was killed in 1928 from Seoul to Osaka, reaching the streets within twenty-four hours of the explosion.¹⁷

      In 1931 and 1932, both companies used their airplanes to shuttle teams of correspondents and equipment back and forth between Japan and Manchuria. On September 20, the Osaka Asahi boasted it had already “put several planes into operation and dispatched 8 special correspondents” to the scene.¹⁸ By November 15, the Asahi had sent at least 33 special correspondents to Manchuria, and by January 1, the Mainichi chain had sent 50.¹⁹ Of course, long before airplanes, newspapers sent special correspondents to cover important stories. During the Sino-Japanese War in 1894–1895, for example, sixty-six newspapers sent a total of 114 reporters, 11 artists, and 4 photographers to China.²⁰ But the advent of the airplane changed the news-gathering process, extending the possible scale and speed of coverage.

      The wedding of new technology with older practices was apparent on the production end as well, reflected in the Manchurian Incident “extra” [ggai) war. Just as they sent correspondents to cover the earlier imperial wars, newspaper companies had used extras to break stories from the front. Now, victory in the race to break the news was decided by two new machines, the high-speed cylinder press and the wire photograph transmitter. With their capital advantages, the Asahi and Mainichi dominated the field in this new technology. Together with the news service Dents

, they imported the nation's first telephotograph machines in 1928.²¹ Between their four Osaka and Tokyo papers, the two newspaper companies owned 74 of the nation's 108 high-speed cylinder presses in 1930.²² Hence, the Asahi and Mainichi were able to overwhelm smaller papers through sheer numbers of costly extras—sometimes putting out two separate multipage extras between the morning and evening editions—and by featuring the latest photos from the front. Writing in late October 1931, one observer commented that “after the opening of the extra war…all the papers put out extras. However, after the initial extras, the subsequent editions were not news so much as photographs. Therefore, the extra war was dominated by the two large papers, the Asahi and the Mainichi, and the rest were left to look on from the sidelines.”²³

      Unfortunately for the large dailies, their weaker competitors were not the only contenders in the news war of 1931–1932. No sooner had the fighting broken out on the continent, than the newspapers found themselves face to face with an upstart rival in the battle for the “scoop”: radio. The fierce competition between radio and newspapers was a new development. Since its founding in 1926, Japan's national broadcasting monopoly, Nihon h

s kykai (NHK), had taken a back seat in news production and concentrated its efforts on pursuing an educational mission. NHK relied on the newspaper companies and wire services for their news; in return for a free supply of this information, it surrendered editorial rights and left the press to break all the stories. In 1930, however, in a move to get out from under the shadow of the press, radio began to contract directly with the wire services for news, retaining the right to edit their own stories.²⁴ During the Manchurian Incident, NHK moved aggressively to carve out a new position for itself in the news industry.

      Radio competed with the press by increasing their regular news programming from four to six times a day, as well as through rinji nysu—special unscheduled news broadcasts, or news flashes. This device was first employed, appropriately, to scoop the big dailies on the events of September 18. In a special

Скачать книгу