JAPAN'S EARLY-MEIJI press exuded elitism. Founded in the wake of the Meiji Restoration, its leading lights saw themselves, in the words of a Tokyo nichi nichi shinbun editorial, as instruments to “awaken people from their foolish dreams … and assist in governance.” The result was that from the launching of Japan's first daily in 1871 until well after the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution nearly twenty years later, all of the country's leading papers were gray, weighty, and dull. The Confucian-bred editors felt themselves responsible for “leading the people to enlightenment.” This meant using their papers to shape political policv with lengthy Page One essays, while avoiding most fiction, news, advertising and entertainment, that is, anything that smacked of the popular or vulgar. It also meant that the papers focused overwhelmingly on political issues and attracted many of Japan's future government leaders to their staffs. And it meant that circulations remained tiny (typically under ten thousand per paper into the mid-1880s), staffs small, and equipment rudimentary. Newspapers could be launched for a mere four thousand yen in these years, and several leading papers used hand-operated presses until almost the end of the second Meiji decade. Readers may have been sophisticated and influential, but the papers never could have been called “popular.”

This elitism began to change in the 1880s, partly because of the decline in popular political interest in the middle of the decade and partly because of the determination of a new generation of editors such as Fukuzawa Yukichi of Jiji shinpō and Murayama Ryōhei of Asahi shinbun to eschew partisan politics and pay more attention to balance sheets. But the overriding characteristic of the major papers until the latter part of the decade was a continuing preoccupation with politics. Even Jiji used a gray, headline-less format, and Asahi gave more ink to political issues than to anything else. As Kojima Kazuo, a writer for Nihon (founded in 1889) notes: “In our concern for guiding society, our paper emphasized editorials and slighted news. Everything focused on discussion … We scorned third-page news articles [sanmen kiji].” Even news sections typically had few headlines, only groups of paragraphs lumped together in a zappō (miscellany) section.