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Japan THE MASS MEDIA AND POLITICS
Japan is a society awash in information. Newspaper
readership
is, by a wide margin, the highest in the world. The six
largest and
most influential national newspapers are Yomiuri
Shimbun,
Mainichi Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun, Seikyo
Shimbun, Sankei Shimbun, and Nihon Keizai
Shimbun. There are also more than 100 local
newspapers. The
population, 99 percent literate, also consumes record
numbers of
books and magazines. The latter range from high-quality
comprehensive general circulation intellectual periodicals
such as
Sekai (World), Chuo Koron (Central Review),
and
Bungei Shunju (Literary Annals) to sarariman
manga
(salaryman comics), comic books for adults that depict the
vicissitudes and fantasies of contemporary office workers,
and
weeklies specializing in scandals. Japan probably also
leads the
world in the translation of works by foreign scholars and
novelists. Most of the classics of Western political
thought, such
as The Republic by Plato and Leviathan by
Thomas
Hobbes, for example, are available in Japanese.
News programs and special features on television also
give
viewers detailed reports on political, economic, and
social
developments both at home and abroad. The sole,
noncommercial
public radio and television broadcasting network, the
Japan
Broadcasting Corporation (Nippon Hoso Kyokai--NHK)
provides
generally balanced coverage. Unlike their counterparts in
the
United States, however, Japanese newscasters on NHK and
commercial
stations usually confine themselves to relating events and
did not
offer opinions or analysis.
The major magazines and newspapers are vocal critics of
government policies and take great pains to map out the
personal
and financial ties that hold the conservative
establishment
together. Readers are regularly informed of matrimonial
alliances
between families of top politicians, civil servants, and
business
leaders, which in some ways resemble those of the old
European
aristocracy. The important print media are privately
owned.
Observers, however, point out that the independence of
the
established press has been compromised by the pervasive
"press
club" system. Politicians and government agencies each
have one of
these clubs, which contain from 12 to almost 300 reporters
from the
different newspapers, magazines, and broadcast media. Club
members
are generally described as being closer to each other than
they are
to their employers. They also have a close and
collaborative
working relationship with the political figures or
government
agencies to which they are attached. There is little
opportunity
for reporters to establish a genuinely critical,
independent stance
because reporting distasteful matters might lead to
exclusion from
the club and thus inability to gain information and to
write.
Although the media have played a major role in exposing
political
scandals, some critics have accused the large newspapers,
ostensibly oppositionist, of being little more than a
conduit of
government ideas to the people. Free-lance reporters,
working
outside the press club system, often made the real
breakthroughs in
investigative reporting. For example, a free-lance
journalist
published the first public accounts of Tanaka Kakuei's
personal
finances in a monthly magazine in 1974, even though the
established
press had access to this information.
Data as of January 1994
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