The Press and Japanese Thought

Abstract

N NO RESPECT has Japan shown its capacity for adopting foreign ideas so readily as in the creation of a popular press. China, which has had a much longer and less interrupted intercourse with Europe, is about a generation behind; in India the growth has been much slower, and is evennow not very remarkable. The publication of anything in the way of news had been prohibited in Japan ever since the art of printing had been known. In some ways this was to the benefit of literature but not of truthfulness. For instance, the famous crime of the Forty-seven Ronin, which would have been a great newspaper sensation (though at that date the sensational press had not begun its career even in England), could not find publication of any sort, but was of course the subject of endless gossip. In England the affair would have been recorded and discussed in pamphlets; Defoe might have immortalized it. In Japan it became the subject of dramas-which were antedated, mixed up with mediaeval Montague-and-Capulet stories, and presented on the stage to a thrilled audience. A vast literature sprang up, with complete heroic biographies of each individual Ronin. This sort of thing is still done, and some current happenings, suitably bedizened, are seen on the cinematograph screen. In i872 the first Japanese newspaper, in the accepted sense of the word, appeared, edited by an Englishman, J. R. Black, and soon there were many imitators in the field. Newspapers were used, in the beginning, for the advertisement of their founders, who were generally high government officials. At an early date it was found that the public had a taste for Opposition newspapers; and not much later the phenomenon appeared of the able editor changing his views to comply with those of his proprietor. Soon it became more convenient for the statesmen who wished for support in the press to purchase it by a subsidy; and as they could handle much more money when they were in office than when they were in Opposition, a change in the government sometimes meant the extinction of the