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Introduction: Media and Politics in Japan: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
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3 Introduction Media and Politics in Japan: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives SUSAN J. PHARR Few questions are as intrinsically fascinating and of obvious importance for understanding the present and the future of industrial democracies as those that concern the role of the media in society and politics. At the U.S. political conventions in the summer of 1992, media representatives far outnumbered the presumed “real” players, the delegates. Lingering television images of town halls, memories of billionaire Ross Perot on camera with graphs in hand, and news of a media-stung Democratic president’s 1994 moves to reshuffle his team of spokespersons and spin-doctors once again: these are vivid reminders of the omnipresence of the media in politics today and of their centrality to politicians and the public alike. The role of the media in the political upheavals in Japan in the summer of 1993 offered similar reminders. Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s fall, sealed by a no-confidence vote in Japan’s parliament , or Diet, on June 18, began on May 31 with some ill-advised remarks in a television interview.1 As new conservative parties rose to challenge the long-standing dominance of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had held power since 1955, their leaders raced from one talk show to the next positioning themselves for the July 18 lower house election. No sooner had election results confirmed the demise of the LDP’s solid majority than leading politicians from all of Japan’s parties rubbed shoulders on two- and three-hour television specials discussing coalition formulas. In the political rumble of summer 1993, tarento (literally, “talents”)—media celebrities turned candidates—trumped Japan’s aging generation of conservative leaders who were more skilled at backroom deal making than talking on camera. 4 Susan J. Pharr In industrial societies today, some politicians—no matter how intelligent their grasp, how astute their political judgments, or how incisive their issue positions—cannot be packaged successfully, while others can. This has led numerous scholars and other observers to conclude that the media are recasting political leadership itself, at least in the case of national political elites. Meanwhile, media-borne scandals—whether over nannies in America or stashed gold bars in Japan—thin the ranks of those who would serve the public. As the bureaucracies of the advanced industrial societies “note, register, inventory, tax, stamp, measure, enumerate, license, assess, authorize” (to quote the French anarchist Proudhon) by way of policies that reach into ever increasing domains of human behavior, the media become powerful screening devices for vast flows of information . Only a tiny fraction of the work of the state in the United States, Japan, or elsewhere becomes exposed to public scrutiny, and many of the struggles within bureaucracies and among and between interest groups represent efforts to capture or deflect media attention or to turn it to advantage. Not only do politics and bureaucracy feel the media’s presence and power; so, too, does the public. Despite a vast amount of research, mystery surrounds the simple act of voting in a media age: from what confluence of forces and factors do voters make their decisions on candidates, and how do the media confound the process? A broader issue for the 1990s and beyond is whether the media—especially television and new electronic media technologies—foster political community or, instead, breed apathy and alienation. If media saturation is well advanced in most industrial societies, Japan is no exception. The case can be made—and indeed has been made in works by scholars such as Ezra Vogel—that Japan leads the world in the information revolution and in the breadth of coverage and sophistication of the media.2 The circulation of Japan’s largest daily newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, is greater than that of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, and New York Daily News combined.3 Over 72 million newspapers are published each day in a country where 90 percent of the public, according to one study, reads newspapers on a daily basis.4 Japan’s per-capita newspaper circulation (581 copies per 1,000 persons) is the highest in the world, more than twice that for the United States (250 copies per 1,000 persons).5 The penetration and influence of the print media are even greater than these figures suggest, since five newspapers (Yomiuri, Asahi, Mainichi, Sankei, and Nihon Keizai) are national papers, each with a circulation of more [44.200.196.114...