The media are undergoing rapid changes in Japan and elsewhere in the industrialized world, particularly with regard to the increase in multimedia technologies and the introduction of digital services. The importance of the media for everyday life in modern, industrialized societies is reflected in an ever-increasing number of publications on the media, media ownership and media control. In addition, the media's roles in political and social change, their function as promoters of commercialism, their importance for information and entertainment, and their use of language are some of the topics that have been and continue to be widely discussed. Media studies is a large and continuously growing interdisciplinary field of research that touches upon political science, sociology, psychology, linguistics, discourse analysis and cultural studies. However, the media in Japan have not received adequate attention from scholars within the field of Japanese studies. The lack of interest is evident from the relatively small number of publications by non-Japanese researchers on the media in Japan, compared with other core areas of Japanese studies, such as politics, history, art or literature. This paper provides a short introduction to the Japanese media environment, followed by an overview of the current state of research in some of the major fields of media studies in Japan and suggestions for further discussion and research. The author hopes this paper may encourage other Japan scholars to take up media research. The Japanese media environment: newspapers
Japanese readers have a choice of approximately 120 daily newspapers, with a total of 50 million copies of set papers (1) (or 70 million if morning and evening editions are counted as separate copies), with an average subscription rate of 1.13 newspapers per household. (2) The biggest Japanese newspapers are the Yomiuri Shimbun with a daily circulation of over 10 million copies, followed by the Asahi Shimbun with more than 8 million (morning edition), the Mainichi Shimbun with close to 5 million copies, and the Nikkei Shimbun with over 3 million copies. (3) According to a survey conducted by The Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association (Nihon Shinbun Kyokai) in June 1999, 85.4 percent of men and 75 percent of women read a newspaper every day. Average daily reading times vary from 27.7 minutes on weekdays to 31.7 minutes on holidays and Sundays. (4) For a long time, newspapers were regarded as the most influential information medium in Japan, although audience attitudes towards television changed with the emergence of commercial news broadcasting in the mid-1980s. However, Western research on Japanese media continued to focus mainly on newspapers until the mid-1990s (e.g. Feldman 1993) and neglected the growing size and importance of the broadcasting industry, in particular of commercial television.
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