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Trends in Communication Research in Japan
Publication Date:199203
Book title: MEDIA, CULTURE, AND EDUCATION IN JAPAN [A COLLECTION OF PAPERS]
Publisher : National Institute of Multimedia Education
Though Communication research in its American sense was not known to Japanese social scientists until the end of World War II, the history of studies in social communication, in terms of 'journalism', can be traced back to the 1930s, when the commercial media of mass communication in Japan showed an extraordinary development in penetration as a result of economic prosperity after World War I and the spread of high school education. It seems worth while, therefore, to look briefly through the scope and methodology characteristic of studies of journalism during that period.
At least four types of journalistic research can be distinguished among the works published in the 1930s. The first trend may be classified as the 'ideological' approach, which is represented by Jun Tosaka, a philosopher. Tosaka, under the intellectual influence of Marxism and the sociology of knowledge, developed an original theory of ideology, in which the concept of 'journalism' is included as an important form of contemporary ideology. He defined journalism as 'a form of ideology rooted in the daily life of common people' and assumed that it stands at the opposite extreme to 'academism' which 'exists outside of ordinary daily life'. The former is the reflection of mobile common sense, the latter the absolute universal truth. In journalism, information is meaningful in as far as it satisfies the interests focused upon limited areas in time and space. In other words, journalistic information which is meaningful today does not bear the guarantee that it will be meaningful tomorrow too. According to Tosaka, this limited range of meaning is the nature of the function of journalism. On the other hand, in 'academism', another form of knowledge, the meaning-span must be eternal and universal. The search should be for laws applicable to any area in time and space.
On the basis of this journalism-academism dichotomy, he stressed that the two forms of ideology have, and must have, a complementary relationship. 'Academism', he says, 'can control journalism, which has the defect that it is apt to become superficial in handling problems; and on the contrary, journalism can stimulate academism, which tends to be detached from the world of reality and to confine itself in an ivory tower.' A careful reader might have seen in Tosaka's argument the similar points suggested by Robert Merton in regard to the relationship between American mass communication research and European sociology of knowledge.
The second trend may be called historical, and by 'historical', the author means the unique studies in communication by Kunio Yanagita. As a folklorist, Yanagita has been collecting oral folklore since the early years of the century, and has later become very much interested in socio-cultural changes brought about by the modernization of traditional rural communities. He has frequently pointed out how regional oral tradition has faded with the spread of newspapers, and how modern educational institutions have changed the nature and function of folklore. One of the most interesting of Yanagita's suggestions for the students of communication research, however, is to be found in his interpretation of journalism in the context of cultural history. 'In a closed traditional rural village', he noted, 'verbal expression among the members of the community was hardly necessary. Since people knew each other so well that one could understand what his neighbor was intending to communicate even from his facial expression or his slightest move. However, as the result of the development of transportation and economic activities, it became necessary for the villagers to keep contacts with people whom they did not know well. Strangers, such as travellers, peddlers and entertainers came into such communities, and at this stage, communication purely in terms of verbal expression became necessary. Until that stage, people were not communication-conscious as far as expressive words were concerned.' Thus Yanagita defined the concept of journalism as a form of communication, in the modern industrial period, where the participants are all unknown to each other. In a word, Yanagita has explored the field of non-verbal communication from the viewpoint of cultural history, and many of his points coincide with those raised by Robert Hall in his book Silent Language.
The third trend is characterized by its 'popular culture' orientation. From the early 1920s, Yasunosuke Gonda, a non-academic sociologist, has been working on the empirical survey of popular cultural institutions, such as vaudeville theaters, cinemas, restaurants, and so forth. Among his works, two books are important: The World of Entertainers and The Problems of Public Entertainment. The former is, as its title suggests, a study of popular artistes and entertainment service personnel, and in this book he gives a very interesting description and analysis of the economic situation, relief system, and social organizations of actors, actresses, vaudeville artistes, waiters, etc. The latter is a book of motion picture audience research. The survey was done with the informal co-operation of the Ministry of Education, and this book is the first piece of statistical audience research to be made available in Japan. Though his methodology of statistical analysis is too simple from a contemporary viewpoint, Gonda should be noted as the pioneer in this field.
The fourth trend is essentially 'technical'. As mentioned before, Japanese mass communications showed great progress in the early 1930s, and interest in journalism on the part of the communicators, i.e., editors, writers, and critics, also increased. In this connection, in 1931, a series of books under the title Unified Studies in Journalism was published. The series includes 12 volumes, of 400 pages each, and the subjects of newswriting, the organizational aspect of the newspaper industry, the training of reporters, typography, and other technical problems of journalism were discussed by more than 100 contributors, mostly journalists of practical experience. Among the writers, the name of Hideo Ono can be mentioned. Ono was born in 1883, and after graduation from Tokyo University, he started his career as a newspaper reporter. In 1925, he was appointed as the first lecturer in journalism at Tokyo University, and after that he acted as the pioneer in newspaper research in Japan. He has been particularly interested in the history of newspapers, and his History of Japanese Newspapers is still one of the basic textbooks in this field of research. He worked energetically as the president of Nihon Shinbun Gakukai (Japan Society of Journalism), and he has recently published A Study in Kawaraban, which deals with 'Kawaraban', a type of clay-block newsprint used in the eighteenth century.
So much for a brief summary of Japanese communication research in the 1930s. After that Japan entered World War II. During the war, for obvious reasons, social communication in Japan was very much suppressed by the militarists, and there was practically no progress in communication research, except for the borrowing of propaganda theory and technique from Nazi Germany, and the mobilization of authors and publishers to write about the war and to 'educate the natives'.
Communication research in Japan has developed very rapidly since World War II, and today even laymen often talk about 'Masu-Komi' (popularized Japanese abbreviation for mass communications). An obvious reason for this is the fact that American communication research methodology and technique have been imported by Japanese academic circles and the interest of Japanese social scientists in this field has deepened. But that is not the only reason. In the background, we must look at the new communication environment, a product of post-war Japan.
First of all, the post-war situation was new to the Japanese public in the sense that for the first time in the history of modern Japan they acquired freedom in social communication. The New Constitution of Japan says in Article 21: 'Freedom of assembly and association as well as of speech, press and other forms of expression is guaranteed. No censorship shall be maintained, nor shall the secrecy of any means of communication be violated.' This philosophy is in direct contrast to the old Imperial Constitution in which freedom of speech was the right of Japanese subjects 'within the limits defined by law'. And many 'laws' were enacted. For instance, the Chian Iji Ho (Public Security Act), practically prohibited all communications which, in form or content, were critical of government policies. The writers and publishers who held liberalistic opinions were often arrested and sometimes imprisoned. Jun Tosaka, whom we have already mentioned, was one of the victims of this law, and he died in prison a week before Japan's surrender.
In this connection, it is safe to say that freedom of speech was a revolutionary idea for the Japanese, and this new idea stimulated very active social communications in post-war Japan. For instance, the number of periodical publications, including many leftist magazines, increased overwhelmingly after 1945. Book publication and broadcasting were also very much activated and, as a result, the Japanese people came to have abundant exposure to all kinds of information through the various media of mass communication.
In the second place, the Japanese people learned that democracy in their social life must be based on a mutual understanding which is possible only through personal interaction. Thus, 'talk together' has been one of the basic slogans in the public life, even in the family life, of post-war Japanese. The election system, committee system, and other democratic institutions were adopted by more and more organizations, and in order to manage such institutions, people had to learn the technique and philosophy of effective interpersonal communication. The principles of general semantics, for instance, gained wide acceptance among the people who were in charge of such communication institutions. Tadatoshi Okubo, and other members of Nihon-Kotobano-kai (Japanese Society of Speech) were the promoters of this movement.
In the third place, we have to keep in mind that communications in terms of advertising and publicity have developed dramatically in post-war Japan. In the year 1946, one year after Japan's surrender, the total advertising expenditure was approximately 15,000 million yen (roughly 40 million US dollars), but by 1959 it had increased to 1,500,000 million yen (4,000 million dollars). In other words, advertising expenditure in Japan increased one hundredfold in thirteen years. No other industry can show figures even approaching this rate of growth. Commercial broadcasting stations, both radio and television, were established (during and before the war, the only radio broadcasting facilities were monopolized by the government), as in the United States. This huge amount of commercial information has also been a new experience for post-war Japan.
These three phenomena form the social background which stimulated and necessitated scientific research in social communication. To meet this necessity, scientists have been able to refer to American developments in communication research, and they have found that what their American colleagues were doing during and before the war has been of considerable help, both suggestive and practical, in solving present-day communication problems in Japan. They had no hesitation in learning from the United States, and Japanese sociologists and psychologists thus began to 'take in' from American research procedure.
There are many types of communication research being done in Japan today. At one extreme, we have the epistemological theory of symbols, and at the other, very practical market research. One sociologist may be studying the political function of television broadcasting, and another may be interested in communication within a small experimental group. It is thus almost impossible to draw a comprehensive picture of contemporary Japanese communication research. But if we look at the varieties carefully we soon see that at least four trends are recognizable.
It is very important to remember that one of the driving forces of post-war Japanese communication research is to be found in reactions to the experience of the war years. During the war, for obvious reasons, all Japanese news services were mobilized by the militarists to present a biased and untrue picture of the war to the public. Every day, through the newspapers and the radio, people were told that Japan was winning the war, and as a result of this propaganda, most of the people came to believe firmly that Japan really was winning the war. But they had to learn, on 15 August 1945, that all they had been told through the mass media was grossly untrue. The memory of this bitter experience was carried over into the post-war period, and most of the people still adopt a skeptical and critical attitude to mass communication. And implicitly, at least, disbelief in or doubts about the contents of mass communication have been constantly present in the minds of contemporary Japanese social scientists as well. Of course, one would not say that students in communication research in other countries too were not critical of their subject matter, mass communication. But this critical attitude is much more marked among Japanese researchers.
For instance, in June 1951, Tembo, an intellectual magazine no longer in existence, published a special issue on 'newspapers', and it is interesting to note that the contributors, mostly intellectual leaders, all discussed the question 'whether or not the newspapers were reporting the truth?' Their opinions were all, to a greater or lesser degree, negative, and some of them talked of the 'tyranny of newspapers', that is, the tyranny of one-sided information and manipulation of facts. The name of Ikutaro Shimizu, now a professor of sociology at Gakushuin University, should no doubt be mentioned in this connection. He has been described as a liberal sociologist, and is at the same time well known as a leading social critic and author who also has experience as a newspaper columnist. In his book entitled Journalism, which was, and still is, the starting point of the major trend in Japanese communication research, he gave his basic and unvarnished ideas on journalism, its necessity, management, social effects, etc. But one of his points was that in contemporary society it is hard to expect newspapers to report the truth, because of political and economic pressure.
These ideas he took up again in another book, Social Psychology, where he expressed a much more pessimistic view of the possibilities of mass communication. The idea of the manipulation of mass communications was more clearly expressed in the series of papers presented by Michio Inaba. According to Inaba, contemporary communication industries, such as newspapers and radio and television broadcasting stations, are directly or indirectly connected with monopoly capitalists. For instance, the management of many commercial radio and TV stations is often the same as the management of big industries, and the information purveyed by such media is thus very often distorted by capitalist interests. It would be wrong to take Inaba's points as indicating a Marxian deterministic interpretation, because (a) the monopolistic trend has always been strong in Japanese business circles (one many recall the 'Zaibatsu' organization); and (b) unlike the United States, Japan has few medium or small communication industries able to speak for interests other than those of the big industries.
Besides the works of Shimizu and Inaba, many other studies have been made along these lines. Newspaper Revolution by Matao Nagashima, The Function of Newspapers by Yoshimi Uchikawa, Television and Mass Manipulation by Akira Takahashi are a few of the representative works in which an attempt has been made to analyse the control aspect of mass communication.
Another trend is the interest in popular culture materials. In this field we can distinguish two main approaches. The first is the tendency to consider research primarily with reference to politics. The consensus of the researchers' opinion seems to be that popular culture in contemporary society is a very sophisticated form of political manipulation. For instance, Joji Watanuki, in his paper 'The structure of social psychology in the age of mass society', states that the mass media today are transforming political issues into non-political issues by trivialization, fragmentation, or personalization. 'Politics is becoming a theater stage, where political figures behave as if they were actors.' In a word, he points out that a serious interest in politics is disappearing from the contemporary scene because such interest is being shifted by the mass media to entertainment values. As one can easily imagine, his discussion is very much influenced by Riesman, Mills, Lowenthal, and other contemporary American sociologists. But it is important to note here that at the same time Watanuki is cautious enough to add that in the context of Japanese society it is possible that phenomena which are regarded as crises in the democracy of the United States may have a progressive function in Japan. He says: 'In the case of Japan, entertainment and consumption orientation can serve as a resistance against the re-establishment of the old totalitarian value system where individual happiness was subordinated to the welfare of the Japanese Empire....Even the voters' political apathy is much better than the traditional boss system which is still the dominant characteristic of Japanese politics.'
If one approach is to study mass culture in terms of politics, another is to consider it as an independent cultural problem. Needless to say, this subject has been a very controversial issue here as in any other country, and there are many facets to research on popular culture so viewed. The present author, however, is particularly interested in the studies published by the members of the Siso no Kagaku Kenkyu Kai (Institute for the Science of Thought). The institute was originally established in 1946 by scholars who had studied in the United States, and its major interest has been the study of Japanese ways of thinking and behavior. In this connection the members were interested in various forms of communication on the assumption that the contents of communications are the reflection of Japanese culture. Popular Arts, a collection of essays by Shunsuke Tsurumi, one of the founders of the institute, is probably the most representative work along this line. In this book, Tsurumi revealed considerable and original insight into the characteristics of Japanese communication, and his suggestions have since been inherited by Tadao Sato, Michitaro Tada, and many other younger researchers. The institute published a book on popular culture, under the title of Dream and Illusion, which includes empirical studies on motion pictures, popular songs, popular fiction and so forth, and some of the papers printed in this book were, along with several original papers, translated by Hidetoshi Kato into English with the aid of a grant from the Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and published as a book under the title, Japanese Popular Culture.
Another organization which has been interested in popular culture studies is Gendai Geijutsu no Kai (Society for Contemporary Arts), a group of younger writers, critics and artists. This group has a periodical, Gendai Geijutsu, and the papers published in this magazine are mostly concerned with the proper and positive uses of the technology of mass communication for artistic purposes. Unlike old-fashioned artists who regard modern technological progress as the enemy of the individualistic philosophy of art, this group is seriously concerned with the possibilities of new art forms in motion pictures, television, electronic music and so on. Two books written from this point of view, The Arts in Television by Kiichi Sasaki and The Energy of Masses by Kiyoteru Hanada, were both seen as attempts on the part of artists to take up the challenge of technology of mechanical communication devices.
So far as the amount of money spent is concerned, the most well-funded branch of communication research in Japan is the audience and effect research carried out by mass media industries, advertising agencies, and other commercial institutions. Today, most of the major mass communication industries, especially commercial broadcasting stations, have their own research departments and many publish their periodical research reports. For instance, the Tokyo Broadcasting System has a well-equipped research department, and its research reports on such things as the listening or viewing rates of its programmes are regularly sent to its sponsors and advertising agencies. The basic research procedures are imported from the United States.
As a source of statistics concerning commercial broadcasting, Mass Media Research (MMR) is the most authoritative publication available in Japan. It is published monthly by Chuo Chosa Sha (Central Research Bureau) which is financially supported by a limited membership of subscribers, i.e., stations, sponsors, and agencies. The publications of a similar nature are so numerous that it is impossible to list them all. However, to mention a few, The Mainichi Consumer Report, and The Mainichi Readership Survey, both published by the advertising bureau of the Mainichi Press, and The Statistical Monthly Report of the Dentsu Advertising Agency are representative source materials.
Another new development in the field of commercial communication research was the establishment of the Japan Research Center in January 1961. This institution was founded by several big firms in order to carry out market and communication research for their products. Hiroshi Minami, a psychologist, is acting as the chairman of the center, and students in psychology and sociology at graduate school level have been recruited to work on fundamental and practical research in this field.
Apart from audience research for commercial purposes, there is much audience and effect research being done from the educational point of view. For instance, as in many other countries, the possible impact of television upon younger people has been one of the most serious problems for educators and broadcasters. On this subject it will be worth while to mention the recent survey done by the Japan Association of Broadcasters. The members of the association in the Osaka area, namely the Asahi Broadcasting Corporation and the Mainichi Broadcasting System, in co-operation with the Faculty of Education of Kyoto University, carried out the research. The major findings were: (a) that there was practically no relationship between television programming and juvenile delinquency; (b) that potential delinquents and potential non-delinquents showed no difference in their selection of programmes; and (c) that the family to which a child belongs has more determining influence than the mass media. In addition to this research, the book entitled Mass Communication Change our Children (1960) can also be recommended as an interesting source of facts. It is a collection of papers written by school-teachers who observed empirically the changes in the culture of Japanese children brought about by movies, popular songs, and television programmes. The staff of the Osaka Metropolitan Institute of Education, headed by Hikaru Ishida, directed this research project on the theoretical aspects of attitude changes in children as the result of exposure to mass communication.
With regard to the effects of mass communication upon children, the series of papers by Kanji Hatano also must be mentioned. His major interest is in audio-visual education both in the classroom and in society as a whole, and it seems to be his consistent opinion that the effective use of audio-visual media, such as movies, television, radio, and slide projection are a promising field of educational technique. His paper on Japanese comics for children is included in Kano's Japanese Popular Culture.
Another important survey of the effects of television is the series of studies conducted by the Newspaper Research Institute at Tokyo University, which has been going on since 1957. One of the institute's interim reports found that there is a very significant relationship between television programming and the shopping and cooking habits of housewives. In Japanese television it is usual to broadcast cooking lessons about midday and housewives who see these programmes have a strong tendency to prepare supper on the lines suggested in the midday broadcast. However, in a series of studies, Akira Takahashi has developed a theory of 'three-step communication', adding one to the 'two-step' theory of Katz and Lazarsfeld. Takahashi agrees with Katz's contention that the small group to which an individual belongs functions as a 'filter' of information communicated by mass media, but he considers the system of intra-personal communication (predispositional pattern of perception of the individual) to be another filter again. In other words, according to the 'three-step theory' the system of intra-personal communication should be counted as a variable in the study of mass communication effects, just as much as the system of inter-personal communication.
The problems of mass communication effects have also been studied by several government offices. For instance, Nogyo Gijutsu Kyokai (Society for Agricultural Technology) has made a survey, under a grant from the Ministry of Agriculture, of mass media effects in rural communities with regard to the dissemination of information concerning innovations in agricultural technology. Another example is the Ministry of Education's special committee on the influence of television with Kanji Hatano and other educators and psychologists as committee members.
To close this part of the discussion, I think it necessary to mention the unified mass media research carried out by Nihon Shinbun Kyokai (Japan Newspaper Association) in 1959. The object of this research was to observe 'the division of labor' among various mass communication media, and by so doing to ascertain the function of printed media in the age of electronic journalism. The major findings were (a) that people tend to get their first information from the radio, and (b) that newspapers are used to confirm such information and to supply further details.
One of the crucial problems for students of communication in Japan is the problem of language. As most readers will know, the Japanese language, especially the written language, is very complicated. It consists of several thousands of Chinese characters and fifty phonetic signs so that it is not easily adapted to certain types of communication technology, for instance, the typewriter. The simplification of the language, or the development of devices for simpler communication has long been a subject of research in Japan. The History of the Problems of Japanese Language and Ideography by Masao Hirai tells us that the problem has been discussed over and over again since the middle of the nineteenth century. The discussion has been carried over to the post-war period. One of the post-war works in this field was Nihonjin no yomikaki noryoku (A literacy survey of the Japanese), sponsored by the Ministry of Education and published in 1948, which is the first statistically valid piece of research of this kind. This research showed that though the literacy rate among the Japanese people is very high (97.7 per cent), the complexity of the written language is a barrier to exact understanding.
A continuing survey of the linguistic aspect of Japanese culture is being carried out by Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyusha (The National Language Research Institute). This institute was established in 1948 by the government 'in order to study the linguistic life of the Japanese with a view to proposing basic information for language simplification and for the betterment of the linguistic culture of Japan'. A series of reports were published by the institute, of which A Linguistic Survey of the Island of Hachijo (1950), Research in Newspaper Vocabulary (1952) and Research in Colloquial Japanese (1955) are the more important.
In the author's personal opinion, there seem to be at least three problems which must be solved by Japanese students of communication research in the future.
Furthermore, the basic philosophy of communication (the system of metacommunication) current in Japan is somewhat different from that adopted in the United States -- but this is a field which still remains to be explored.
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