Creating a Public: People and Press in Meiji Japan

Conclusion

359 Conclusion Newspapermen are not fair-minded social critics so much as they are selfish capitalists. Murobushi Kòshin, 19111 Bringing a study of the Japanese press to a conclusion in the summer of 1912 is a bit like stopping at the ninth stage of a climb up Mt. Fuji. We have seen and felt nearly all of the terrain—the enticement of higher profits on ahead, the energizing winds of populism, the treacherous, unending threats of the authorities—yet we have not reached the summit. To stop with the death of the emperor, just before so many of the late-Meiji trends reached their fullness, seems artificial. Written history is like that, demanding that one start and end processes that never begin or conclude neatly, all in the name of helping ourselves organize and “understand” things that really are too complex to be managed. Even knowing that, however, does not make a 1912 ending point quite palatable; so I have opted for a compromise: a brief glimpse at the major features of the press in the decade following the Taishò emperor’s ascension, followed by an equally brief discussion of the major patterns that marked Meiji journalism as a whole. THE AFTER YEARS Looking first at the institutional side of the press, the most important single characteristic of the post-Meiji years was the maturation of the process of commercialization. Òsaka Mainichi’s Motoyama 360 Creating a Public Hikoichi told his employees early in the 1920s, as he had said so often before, that economics had to figure prominently in any editor ’s thinking. “A newspaper is a . . . commercial product,” he said; “some people speak scornfully of commercialism (shòhinshugi) and capitalism (shihonshugi) . . . but unless we pursue profits, we will not remain independent.” He added on other occasions that while it was important for journalists to provide “leadership in the development of society” (shakai no shidò keihatsu), they could do so only if their product were profitable.2 It was for this reason that the typical newspaper company had developed a clear division between editorial and business departments by the end of World War I, with the business side carrying the greater weight.3 It also was for this reason that nearly all of the major newspapers followed Chûgai Shògyò Shinpò’s late-Meiji lead and became joint stock companies, often with massive capital bases. Asahi, for example, which became a joint stock company in 1919 with 1.5 million yen in capital, had nearly tripled its holdings to 4 million yen by the end of Taishò. Kokumin Shimbun went public after the Great Kantò Earthquake of 1923, with holdings of 3 million yen; Mainichi had 5 million yen of capital then, Jiji 4.5 million, Miyako 1.35 million, Hòchi 1.1 million , and even small local papers between 300,000 and 500,000.4 With capital on that scale and the interests of public shareholders to guard, editors simply had no choice but to look after the balance sheets. It was no wonder that Tokutomi, ever the purist at heart if not in practice, worried over how newspapering seemed to have lost its editorial soul by the end of the Taishò. “Once,” he said, “the dominant figure in the world of journalism was the newspaperman who wielded the pen; today, it is the businessman who fingers the abacus. . . . Newspapers once served a learned minority; today they are for the masses. The newspaperman was once the leader of the masses; today, he provides them with one more source of amusement .”5 Nor was it any wonder that Tòkyò Asahi editorial chief Matsuyama Chûjirò would say in 1914, when informed that Kuroiwa had offered grandly to “sacrifice his paper” for his principles: “I have been entrusted with a paper managed by others; I am not allowed that much conviction.”6 One of the more dramatic examples of what capitalists the newspaper managers had become was the eruption of labor troubles in the Tokyo press world in 1919. Until then, editorialists consistently had supported the struggles of laborer readers, but when the printers applied the editorialists’ principles to their own newspaper Conclusion 361 companies, the managers’ core values became abundantly clear. Printers at all the Tokyo papers organized the country’s first newspaper union, the Shimbun Insatsukò Kumiai Kakushinkai (Newspaper Printers Reform Association), in June with nearly eight hundred members, and in late...