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1920s, the habit had spread to the laboring classes in urban and rural Japan. Thanks to a universal compulsory educational system in place since the 1870s, literacy rates were high among even the most economically marginal groups. For example, of the predominantly male population of day laborers in a Tokyo slum in 1922, 92 percent of the single residents and 89 percent of the heads of household could read and write.³ For people that could not afford to subscribe, newspapers were available in bars, restaurants, barbershops, and at the meeting houses of local youth groups and reservist associations. Readership was, of course, higher than subscriber rates, and it is clear from the limited survey data available that subscriber rates themselves were high and rising. For example, 80 percent of 659 worker households surveyed in the Tokyo working-class neighborhood of Tsukishima in 1919 subscribed to newspapers; 18 percent took two or more papers.⁴ Similar surveys of Tokyo working women (nurses, teachers, clerks, typists, shop attendants, and tram workers) revealed that 88 percent subscribed to a paper. In a Kysh mine, about half the workers surveyed subscribed, and in farm villages near Tokyo the subscriber rate was 87 percent.⁵

      From its beginnings as a political press in the 1860s, the modern newspaper industry had expanded rapidly into a collection of mass-circulation news organs in the 1890s and 1900s. By 1911 there were 236 newspapers nationwide and the 7 largest dailies had circulations of over 100,000.⁶ This process accelerated in the 1910s and 1920s, as the number of journals and newspapers registered under the newspaper law rose from 3,123 in 1918 to 11,118 in 1932. By 1927 the circulation of the nation's 2 leading dailies, the Osaka Asahi shinbun and the Osaka Mainichi shinbun, were over a million, and 9 other dailies boasted circulations of between 100,000 and 500,000⁷

      Increasingly, the newspaper industry was an instrument of national integration. The expansion of the railway and the stimulus of two wars had spurred the expansion of the large dailies outside their metropolitan markets of Osaka and Tokyo. In 1909 only 31.5 percent of the Osaka Asahi's circulation fell within the Osaka city limits; of the remaining 68.5 percent, 14 percent went to Kyoto, 12 percent to the neighboring Hy

bu 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

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