Media and Politics in Japan

12. The Mass Media and Japanese Politics: Effects and Consequences

355 12 The Mass Media and Japanese Politics: Effects and Consequences ELLIS S. KRAUSS What role do the mass media play in Japan’s political democracy ? As in all less-than-ideal democracies—which is to say, all existing ones—the question may be better phrased as, To what extent do the media play a democratic role, and how, and to what extent do they not, and why? The stereotype of Japan views it as a coherent, consensual society with a powerful state, ruled by a single party for most of the postwar period. How are the media helping to create pluralism , conflict, and diversity in Japan, and how are they reinforcing the homogeneity, consensus, and maintenance of authority? Another way of phrasing that question is to ask how the “trickster” role of the media, as outlined by Susan Pharr in chapter 1, actually works in the context of Japanese democracy. Related to these questions of the media’s role in Japanese politics are questions about how universal or variant the media’s impact is in different societies. The question of whether the media make a great difference anywhere probably has elicited as much contradictory argument and evidence in academic research and in everyday political conversation as any other intellectual issue. In our daily conversations about politics, it seems that everyone has an opinion about what and how much the media have done to the political quality of life in the United States, usually attributing to them great, and negative , effects. As Pharr points out, however, when academic research on politics has not ignored the media completely, it has tended to minimize the media’s power to affect the polities in which we live. As several of the authors in this volume indicate, the “minimal effects” model of media such as television has been particularly dominant in the study of American politics; little evidence has been offered of the media’s ability to change citizens’ basic political attitudes and beliefs, and 356 Ellis S. Krauss therefore their behavior. Lately, there has been a scholarly reevaluation of the media’s role in politics, as social scientists use more sophisticated conceptual approaches to the media. Does the nature of technology drive process and outcomes so that the roles, behavior, and effects of mass media in relation to politics are the same everywhere? Or is the effect of the technology subject to the intervening factors of different journalistic organizations and the institutions of society, economy, and polity? Japan is a particularly good context to try to answer these questions of the universality or difference in the impact of the media. It is the society most similar to the United States in media use, but most different from Western democracies in societal, political, and journalistic institutional arrangements. Japan thus provides an especially interesting laboratory for evaluating the universal or variant consequences of the media on politics. The authors of this volume cannot answer all these questions, nor can they answer any definitively. They do, however, take the first step toward evaluating the role and impact of the mass media in Japanese political life. Let us look more specifically at what they have found in relation to these questions about media’s role in, and effect on, Japan’s political democracy.1 We will consider first the structure and autonomy of the mass media in Japan; second, the role the media play in elite politics in Japan, including an evaluation of how the “trickster” personae of the mass media may affect democratic politics ; and finally, how media messages affect the social life and democratic participation of the average citizen. Japan’s Media Structure: How Independent? How Diverse? American scholars and journalists writing about Japan have presented contradictory images of Japan as a society and polity, and of the relationship between the state and society in Japan. Some observers have emphasized the coherent, consensual, and controlled aspects of Japanese life; others, the more pluralist, conflictual, and democratic nature of that social and political system. The various views of Japanese politics include the following: An autonomous and powerful bureaucracy at the heart of a centralized Japanese state2 A more or less unique “elusive state” because power is diffused among the many power centers that make up public-private rela- The Mass Media and Japanese Politics 357 tionships in Japan but that do not operate according to democratic law or process and instead repress or coopt...