Digesting Postwar Japanese Media

Abstract

In June 1946 the first-ever Japanese-language version of the popular U.S. magazine Reader's Digest hit newsstands all over Japan. Its impact was immediate and spectacular. The magazine quickly filled store racks, and within a few years circulation topped 1.5 million copies. Japanese citizens from all walks of life read Reader's Digest. Youths in the capital of Tokyo claimed they enjoyed the journal because they wanted to “break free from the bonds of the feudal mindset” that plagued wartime Japan, and cash-strapped families in the western prefecture of Toyama wrote in that they gladly spent their hard-earned money on the anxiously awaited monthly periodical with its informative content, superlative layout and fine graphics.1 Famed Japanese author Ozaki Yukio likened the magazine's arrival to “a friend come from afar.”2 The Reader's Digest phenomenon was not only an enormous publishing success story in the cataclysmic aftermath of World War II in postwar Japan, but it also served as a barometer of geopolitical relations between Japan and the United States. As an implement of the Cold War, and propaganda tool designed to ally Japan toward U.S. interests in Asia, Reader's Digest and its rise and fall in popularity directly mirrors US-Japan foreign relations in the latter half of the twentieth century.