Title: Tomoko Akami. Japan's News Propaganda and Reuters' New Empire in Northeast Asia, 1870–1934.
Abstract: In a recent, welcome addition to the “History of International Relations, Diplomacy, and Intelligence” series, Tomoko Akami argues that the existence of a near imperial monopoly, or “news empire,” over news propagation run by the British media firm Reuters existed in Northeast Asia and spurred Japanese foreign policy elites to create their own news agencies. However, this complicated process without a top-down consensus took several decades to come to fruition. Meiji Japan, as a late-developing nation with its own imperial ambitions, initially lacked the infrastructure either to compete with Western national media organizations or to create its own, and thus had to rely on loyal “foreign experts” or foreign news sources. In the late nineteenth century, when Western powers extended their colonial possessions throughout Africa and Asia via the “New Imperialism,” they expanded their telecommunications networks and linked continents to imperial metropoles. Akami's early chapters complement Daqing Yang's Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883–1945 (2011) with regard to Japan's use of telecommunications in its quest for empire, but they also highlight its disadvantages as imperial latecomer. After World War I, wireless technologies began to supplant cables, and news propagation and the messages foreign policy elites hoped to spread via their media followed suit. The war accelerated but did not start this process. Nevertheless, even preceding the advent of widespread propaganda during WWI, entrepreneur Shibusawa Eiichi and prominent politicians like Konoe Fumimarô grasped the potential of new telecommunications developments as cheaper and more versatile wireless bands began to supplant cable, while mass-based politics increased news media's importance. Thus, as early as 1913, Shibusawa championed an independent national news agency. Its prototype, later named Kokusai, eventually evolved into Rengô and then Dômei, which had also absorbed Tôhô in China by 1935.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-11-25
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot