Abstract
This paper deals with the development of the modern mode of news reporting by newspapers in the early Meiji era. It has been said that modern news can be characterized by its “actuality”, which means that news should report “facts” themselves on the spot. Complete pursuit of “actuality”, however, would render the news itself impossible, because “facts themselves” cannot be defined in principle. How did new-born modern newspapers in the Meiji era break this bottleneck? To explore this question, I analyze several newspaper articles on two murders in this period that indicate different attitudes towards “facts”. In conclusion, I point out that an actual resolution of the impossibility of news at that time was to appropriate texts written by “others”, such as testimonies in the court, as “facts”.
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