War & Media in Modern Japan

“War marked the beginning of the modern newspaper in Japan at the time of the Restoration, or the opening of the era of Meiji. Since then the newspapers have progressed by wars.”
— Frank L. Martin, The Journalism of Japan, 1918

The era of peace that Japan experienced under Tokugawa had strengthened the national infrastructure and economy, making the country ripe for advancements in news media. Key to its growth was that Japan in the latter third of the nineteenth century was one of the more literate countries on earth. Already, news sellers catered to patrons eagerly awaiting penny broadsheets that combined often-sensationalized imagery—such as depictions of Commodore Perry’s fire-breathing steam vessels that arrived in 1853—with pithy news accounts.

Several elements of the Meiji reformation, however, allowed news media to become mainstream. Censorship laws eased, allowing for the first time contemporaneous news to be published; Japanese printing techniques had evolved into high-level woodblock multicolor printing; compulsory education was established; and technological advances and methodologies from around the world entered the nation. Some of the earliest newspapers printed in Japan were published by Americans in the open port of Yokohama, where Westerners enjoyed extraterritorial privileges.  Locals were soon to follow suit.

Joseph Heco (1837–97), a Japanese castaway and naturalized US citizen who became a translator at the US consulate, published the translated newspaper Kaigai shinbun in 1864. Eugene M. Van Reed together with Kishida Ginkō (1833–1905) issued one of the earliest Japanese newspapers, Yokohama shinpō moshihogusa, in 1868, featuring original content and reporting news in Japan and abroad. By 1873, records show 79 newspapers in service, a number that grew to 192 in the following six years—a surge in part attributable to the eagerness for news as the 1877 civil war, the Satsuma Rebellion, was waged.

Although movable-type presses had been introduced to Japan centuries earlier, by the Meiji era woodblock printing was deemed most effective for printing the cascading Japanese text. It wasn’t until the 1870s that mechanical printing presses from the West began to be used by newspapers like Tōkyō nichi nichi, Ōsaka Asahi, and Yomiuri. By the turn of the century, mechanical printing presses were churning out daily newspapers and publications throughout Japan, many beginning to feature reproductions of illustrations and photographs through the halftone process.

With the growth of news media came a rise in journalists. For the first few decades of the Meiji era, the government was the single largest source of the news. Reporters were dispatched daily to government agencies to collect and disseminate official reports. This tacit control by the government unsurprisingly meant that the first correspondents abroad were approved by official government parties and accompanied them. In 1872, a member of Prince Iwakura’s entourage was engaged by the Tōkyō nichi nichi to send home stories about their trip to the United States. The 1874 Taiwan expedition was accompanied by Japan’s first war correspondent, Kishida Ginkō, who wrote the series “News from Taiwan” (Taiwan shinpō) also for the Tōkyō nichi nichi. Unforeseen newsworthy events overseas were thus reliant on official government reports—such as Minister Hanabusa Yoshitada’s telegrams to Minister of Foreign Affairs Inoue Kaoru during the Imo Incident of 1882, which were printed verbatim or in conjunction with minutes from ministerial meetings.

Even while facing censorship, the Meiji era saw a growing public demand for journalism and news media. Reporting contemporary events was a fresh venture for Japanese journalists and nishiki-e artists alike, and Japanese consumers demonstrated a strong appetite. James Huffman argues that the First Sino-Japanese War redefined Japanese journalism and helped Japanese journalists form three central ideas: that news was central to journalism, that support for Japanese overseas expansion was paramount, and that readers’ demands should drive content. Newspapers, strictly watched by the Japanese government, played a significant role in providing nationalist rhetoric and a timely reporting of battles to ordinary Japanese. Photographs were not yet the mainstream visual media used in newspapers, although illustrations using the newly introduced Western techniques of lithography and halftone printing started making inroads into the press, eventually causing the decline of woodblock prints. Woodblock prints, affordable to most Japanese even at the lower rungs, had been widely distributed and filled the gap in reportorial coverage by satisfying the public’s visual curiosity.

One hundred fourteen members of the Japanese press, eleven artists, and four photographers accompanied the Japanese Army for about one year from July 1894. The Jiji shinbun newspaper dispatched a “visual” team consisting of painters like Asai Chū, Anzai Naozō, Asai Kaiichi, and photographers. Its rival paper, Kokumin shinbun, sent Japanese painters including Kubota Beisen and his sons, Beisai and Kinsen. Journalists and artists even made appearances into Japanese nishiki-e (multicolored woodblock prints). The woodblock artist Kokunimasa (Utagawa Kunimasa V, 1874–1944) depicted two newspaper reporters in Chōsen Heijō rakujō wagahei daishōri (Our great victory: The fall of Korean Pyongyang castle), 1894 (image below).

Mizuno Toshikata (1866–1908) illustrated a painter in Dai Nippon teikoku ban banzai: Seikan shūgeki wagun taishō no zu (An attack on Seonghwan and banzai to the great Japanese empire), January 8, 1894 (image below).

Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847–1915) did not forget to illustrate far fewer photographers in Waga guntai Nyūchanjō shigaisen satsuei no zu (An illustration of photographing a battle in the city of Niuzhuang), 1895 (image below).

Special correspondents were also dispatched from Europe and America. Illustrated London News, known as the first illustrated newspaper, featured a foreign journalists’ dining scene lithographed by Richard C. Woodville Jr. (1856–1927) on September 29, 1894.

^{Walter Gifford Smith (San Francisco Chronicle correspondent) Wartime Notes, 1894-95. Hoover Institution Archives (99045)}

War fever was initially limited to the elites. Only former samurai enthusiastically viewed the First Sino-Japanese War as an opportunity to combat their depressive downfall, and intellectuals like Fukuzawa Yukichi and Uchimura Kanzō in Japan and pro-westernization Chinese officials were enamored with the war. The masses in both countries initially showed muted interest. The large-scale production of war nishiki-e and photographs, made possible by the development of printing techniques like lithography, collotype printing, and photoetching, inundated the market and swallowed the masses into war fever. In Japan, nishiki-e became fashionable again as if beaming in its last moments of glory. Nisshin sensō jikki (True accounts of the Sino-Japanese War), featuring the rising media of photographs, had record sales. In China, Dian shi zhai hua bao, a lithographic magazine, introduced the new nineteenth-century technique of lithographs and swept the Qing world. Against the backdrop of fashionable Japonism, Western nations showed a strong interest in the war, which occurred only ten years after the Sino-French War. They, too, illustrated the war with distinct visual media, using new plate-making and printing techniques.