THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT came close to shutting down the country's largest newspaper, the Osaka Asahi Shimbun, in the fall of 1918, in response to the paper's harsh criticisms of official handling of the rice riots that engulfed more than 140 communities that year. The Asahi episode, known as the White Rainbow Incident (hakkō jiken), stands today as a major turning point in the domestication of Japan's modern press, the event that symbolized the transformation of a feisty, adversarial newspaper establishment into a relatively docile institution. The Asahi editor's decision to capitulate to government demands rather than risk suspension or banishment is seen by Uchikawa Yoshimi, the dean of Japan's press historians, as the beginning of a new era of press “cooperation and submission” to government policies, an era in which “the newspaper enterprise became synonymous with the capitalist enterprise.”

The White Rainbow episode drew its name from the fiery attacks that Asahi and other papers initially made on the government's efforts to control the widespread rioting. When press reports of women demonstrating over rising rice prices in Toyama seemed to officials to incite similar protests elsewhere, the Home Ministry on August 14 forbade all reportage on the spreading popular movement. Aghast, reporters in Tokyo called a general meeting on the fifteenth and labeled Home Minister Mizuno Rentarō's “suppression of free discussion … the most improper act ever seen.” Mizuno responded with an announcement that the Home Ministry would issue daily summaries of the disturbances, which papers would be allowed to reprint. The press complied, but the papers in the major cities held large reporters’ rallies (kisha taikai) and a number of editors wrote stinging columns criticizing the government's approach. Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun suggested on August 17, for example, that the cabinet's “resignation is the only way.” And Yūbin Hōchi Shimbun asked in an August 22 editorial whether the Japanese people might not have “come to realize that the power of the masses is capable of destroying the wide gulf separating rich and poor and of bringing down the wall of bureaucratic secrecy.”