3 - Freedom and the Press in Meiji-Taishō Japan

Summary

GEORGE AKITA ASSERTED in a 1972 address to the Asiatic Society of Japan that “the relationship between governors and the governed in modern Japan … is one that stimulates not only the academic interest of scholars but their adrenal glands as well.” He was right, because few topics are more crucial to Japan's prewar history; few speak more directly to the social and political arrangements that give that era its particular character. Akita also suggested that the press is one of the best tools for evaluating the ruler-ruled relationship. And he was right again. From the last days of the bakufu until the dark years of the 1930s, no other institu tion stood more directly, or more consciously, astride the gulf between the government and the people, channeling opinions up ward from the populace, publicizing and critiquing directives aimed downward from the authorities, debating public issues, and serv ing as a focus of both struggles and settlements between government and people.

The development of a far clearer picture of the relationship between the press and the government thus is essential to our ongoing effort to understand how out-of-power groups in general interacted with the official world – and what role they played in shaping that entity we call Prewar Japan. For while journalists may not have been as singlemindedly political or as doctrinaire as those in some institutions in the non-governmental world, they more than any other group represented all shades of opinion and encompassed the varied means of private, nongovernmental struggle for power and influence. As a result, their study casts helpful light on both the development of a popular will and the govern ment's attempts to lead, serve, and control that will.

The pages that follow will examine the unfolding, complex relationship between the government and the press through the Taishō era. Owing to space limitations, it will be necessary to focus on the culmination of the process – the late-Meiji and Taishō years in which the press-government relationship reached relative maturi ty. The focus also will be on the newspaper press, which reached the broadest masses of people (although it is important to note that journals and magazines also became significant vehicles for public debate in these years).