Creating a Public: People and Press in Meiji Japan by James L. HuffmanTakashi Fujitani

Excerpt

This important work provides the most thorough English-language introduction to date to the history of the Meiji press. As the author himself notes, while English-language scholarship has already told us a great deal about censorship policies in prewar and wartime Japan and their implications for the issue of freedom of　speech, there has been little attempt to delve into other questions regarding the relationships among politics, society, and the press. James L. Huffman has sought to do just that–to write a history of the press in Japan that locates it within the larger flow of social and political events in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan.

After an introduction that sets out the central issues and a background chapter on the Tokugawa period, Huffman’s book follows a straightforward chronological scheme. Each chapter focuses on key developments within short frames of time: the period around the Meiji Restoration (1868), the beginning of the “civilization and enlightenment” era, the early “freedom and popular rights” years, and so on. By the last chapter, most readers will surely be convinced of the general truthfulness of Huffman’s central argument–namely, that the press was of fundamental importance in creating an informed citizenry for the modern nation-state, a “public,” and that, just as importantly, the people, or the minshū as the author sometimes describes them, in turn transformed the press.