In Japan, the kisha-clubs are the focal point between the authorities and the media - they are not the counterpart of the leisurely, informal nature of western press clubs of which the free access to information is of the essence.

This book represents an in-depth analysis of journalism in Japan during the golden era of the daily press and the gradual introduction of digital technology starting from the mid-1980s to the late 2010s. By presenting firsthand testimony from journalists and field notes collected from fieldwork in the newsroom of one of the country's largest newspapers, this book provides a unique insight into Japan’s highly active yet relatively under-institutionalized journalistic profession. It also explores the changes experienced by the organizational development of Japanese journalism in response to broader changes in Japanese society, such as the emergence of social networks, the evolution of reading practices, the demographic situation, and the new aspirations of the Japanese youth. Based on an extensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out by the author over several years, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese society, journalism, and media studies.

No institution did more to create a modern citizenry than the newspaper press of the Meiji period (1868-1912). Here was a collection of highly diverse, private voices that provided increasing numbers of readers - many millions by the end of the period - with both its fresh picture of the world and a changing sense of its own place in that world. Creating a Public is the first comprehensive history of Japan's early newspaper press to appear in English in more than half a century. Drawing on decades of research in newspaper articles and editorials, journalists' memoirs and essays, government documents and press analyses, it tells the story of Japan's newspaper press from its elitist beginnings just before the fall of the Tokugawa regime through its years as a shaper of a new political system in the 1880s to its emergence as a nationalistic, often sensational, medium early in the twentieth century. More than an institutional study, this work not only traces the evolution of the press' leading papers, their changing approaches to circulation, news, and advertising, and the personalities of their leading editors; it also examines the interplay between Japan's elite institutions and its rising urban working classes from a wholly new perspective - that of the press. What emerges is the transformation of Japan's commoners (minshu) from uninformed, disconnected subjects to active citizens in the national political process - a modern public. Conversely, minshu begin to play a decisive role in making Japan's newspapers livelier, more sensational, and more influential. As Huffman states in his Introduction: "The newspapers turned the people into citizens; the people turned the papers into mass media." In addition to providing new perspectives on Meiji society and political life, Creating a Public addresses themes important to the study of mass media around the world: the conflict between social responsibility and commercialization, the role of the press in spurring national development, the interplay between readers' tastes and editors' principles, the impact of sensationalism on national social and political life. Huffman raises these issues in a comparative context, relating the Meiji press to American and Japanese press systems at similar points of development. With its broad coverage of the press' role in modernizing Japan, Creating a Public will be of great interest to students of mass media in general as well as specialists of Japanese history.