Beyond the Metropolis. Louise Young
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the early twentieth century saw standardization of cultural forms like the newspaper through the integration of local into global and national markets, this did not spell the end of cultural diversity. Nor did it produce a simple bifurcation of metropolitan and second-city variants on the newspaper form. Rather, local conditions in Japan’s cities, large and small, led to different configurations of the local news market and generated a variety of newspapers with distinctive local flavors. It is important to keep this heterogeneity in mind when exploring the nature of regional cultures. Since the newspaper, together with schools, libraries, and museums, provided the main institutional base for regional cultural movements in this period, local difference determined the particular characters of the provincial bundan as social and cultural formations.
For good reasons, most accounts of the newspaper in Japan focus on the two major markets of Tokyo and Osaka. With the model of the English-language press in Yokohama and a long history as a center of book publishing in the Tokugawa period, Tokyo quickly emerged as the center of the modern newspaper industry in the 1870s. Blessed with the same advantages—proximity to Kobe’s treaty port press and the Tokugawa legacy as a book market—Osaka became a competing center in the 1880s. Discussing a measure of metropolitan dominance of the newspaper trade, Eleanor Westney notes that, in 1884, 54.5 percent of Japan’s daily newspapers were published in Tokyo, while Osaka accounted for 21 percent of newspaper production the same year. The lion’s share of this production was locally consumed. Together, the two cities represented 6 percent of the national population.50
Less well known is the story of the regional press. Even though they lacked the overwhelming advantages of the two metropolitan news markets, provincial cities provided the base for an energetic local press, which emerged virtually simultaneously with that of the center. Like Tokyo and Osaka newspapers, the provincial press in its early years was enormously diverse, borrowing from western press models as well as indigenous sources of publishing culture such as the kawaraban, or woodblock broadsheet. Not until the pressures of competition intensified in the 1890s with a major expansion drive by the metropolitan papers did the rich varieties of newspaper form begin to converge toward a national standard.51 The history of the newspaper in Kanazawa Exemplified both the influence of metropolitan publishers on the Kanazawa news market and the power of local conditions to generate the singular features of the provincial press. One newspaper history lists at least thirteen different local papers established during the Meiji period. Many of these were short lived; even papers with a longer shelf life went through multiple reorganizations, often reinventing themselves four or five times over the course of a few years. The crooked path taken by Ishikawa prefecture’s first newspaper, the Kaika shinbun (Enlightenment News), was typical of the shifts and starts of the early Meiji press.52
The Enlightenment News was established in 1871, one year before Tokyo’s first three dailies entered circulation. Founded by a Tokugawa book publisher, Kaika shinbun embraced the mission of the new government’s Charter Oath, engaging to “enrich our grasp of new knowledge and leave behind the taint of the past . . . to strengthen our capacity to use new information and expunge persisting resistance” to change.53 From its first incarnation as a champion of cultural reform, Kaika shinbun went through a series of transformations over the 1870s and 80s. When its editors became too partisan in the government debate over the invasion of Korea in 1873, the paper was forced to close. It quickly reemerged as the Ishikawa shinbun, transmogrified into a kind of official gazette that devoted itself to publicizing prefectural government policy and directives. Later the paper was bought up by a local politician who turned it into an organ of the Ishikawa Kaishintō, the local wing of the Progressive Party. In his hands the Ishikawa shinbun became a highly effective political tool, facilitating his ascent to leadership of the prefectural assembly. Though it maintained its party affiliation, the paper subsequently passed through the hands of a series of owners and editors, was acquired by another prefectural assembly leader, and changed its name twice before it was reorganized in 1893 as the Hokkoku shinbun—which it remained through the end of World War Two.54
The mercurial shifts in the early life course of the newspaper company that finally settled down as the Hokkoku shinbun were typical of the instability, diversity, and flexibility of the early newspaper form in Japan. As was the case for this Kanazawa paper, innovation and experimentation sought a formula for institutional longevity within a particular setting. Certainly, Tokyo represented an important resource in these early years of the provincial press. As company histories recount, early founders of local newspapers drew inspiration from reading copies of Tokyo papers such as the Yomiuri shinbun while on trips to the capital; they recruited staff from Tokyo to help set up the machinery of publication.55 By the early twentieth century, most provincial papers were allied with one of the two leading Meiji period news services, Teitsū (Teikoku Tsūshinsha) or Dentsū (Nihon Denpō Tsūshinsha), which provided access to metropolitan news and a network of connections to the press world in the capital.56 Nevertheless, in this critical early phase, local newspapers reinvented themselves to address the vicissitudes of their immediate environment and not simply to replicate metropolitan models of cultural modernization. As in the case of Hokkoku shinbun’s affiliation with the Progressive Party and the emergence of a different paper to espouse the cause of the rival Liberal Party, much of this was driven by local politics.57 Indeed, a large fraction of the early provincial newspapers rose from the froth of political activism that attended the establishment of prefectural assemblies in 1878 and the national assembly in 1890.
Thus the early history of the provincial press was very much a local story intimately connected with the dynamics of local politics. The point when the encounter with metropolitan models became decisive was around the turn of the century, with the first big push by Osaka and Tokyo papers to expand into provincial markets. Driven by the saturation of the metropolitan markets and the increasingly fierce competition among big city newspapers, and made technologically possible by the extension of communications infrastructure like the railroad and postal system, the metropolitan press moved aggressively to promote their news products across the country. The war fevers touched off by the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars of 1894–95 and 1904–5 provided a fortuitous opening for their marketing campaigns. In the wake of the Sino-Japanese War, the results of these efforts were still quite modest. In 1899, for example, the largest circulation of the Ōsaka mainichi shinbun outside its home base was 330 in the city of Ōgaki, Gifu Prefecture, and elsewhere much less. After the Russo-Japanese War, however, the provincial press felt the impact of this expansion more keenly. As the metropolitan dailies intensified their competition and brought out regional editions, local papers began to fail in Saitama, Ibaragi, Chiba, and Kanagawa, the prefectures that surrounded Tokyo. By 1907, only 31.5 percent of the circulation of the Osaka asahi shinbun fell within city limits. Another 36.3 percent went to nearby prefectures, and the remainder to more distant locales.58
Provincial newspapers mounted a vigorous response to what they called “papers from the center” (chūōshi) and, except in the immediate environs of Osaka and Tokyo, were generally able to survive the test. In Kanazawa, for example, the local press sought to match the technological advantages of the metropolitan dailies by upgrading their own production. The Hokkoku introduced its first high-speed Marinoni rotary printing press in 1912 and bought a second in 1916. In 1915, when the metropolitan press began to publish morning and evening versions of their regional editions, possession of a high-speed press allowed the Hokkoku to quickly follow suit, adopting this hallmark feature of the big city press. In 1921, the Hokkoku established new departments and expanded its staff, hiring an editor away from the Osaka mainichi. Competition with the metropolitan dailies spurred the consolidation of the provincial newspapers, which put their own rivalries to bed in order to fend off the more serious threat from the center. By the 1920s, the field had shaken down to two main regional papers, the Hokkoku shinbun and the Hokuriku mainichi. Like the Hokkoku, the Hokuriku brought in famous figures such as Nagai Ryutarō, a local son who had made a name in national politics, to enhance its public profile. It also raided the metropolitan papers for talented staff and added new features and divisions to match the formats of the big dailies.59
This process encouraged the standardization of the newspaper form, which stabilized around certain technologies, format, and marketing strategies. At the same time, the ability of the provincial press to withstand