MIDDLE SCHOOLERS IN the late Meiji years found this idyllic bit of verse in their authorized language textbook:

The sentiments were sanitized, the prose more palatable than the targets of Shimada's or Onishi's invective might have thought accurate. The poem suggested nonetheless much of what the Meiji papers actually had become: a conveyor of information from regions both foreign and familiar, a packager of reality-at-a-glance, an educational tool, a publicist for the good and the interesting, a spotlight on the murky backrooms of corruption. To say that this institution, non-existent half a century earlier, had helped to change the world of the average city dweller is to understate the case many times. To explain just how it stimulated change is more difficult. But a few observations about several press characteristics that persisted, and several that underwent a transformation, may prove useful in concluding this analysis.

Let us begin with the press’ self-identity, the way Japan's leading journalists perceived their own profession. On one point – the journalists’ sense of the press as a defender of the public interest – there never was much wavering. The earliest editors took up the brush as a cudgel, to defend the nation, as they saw it, against the usurping Meiji “rebels.” By early Meiji, they were talking about themselves as society's “uncrowned kings,” not so much because they sought personal power as because they saw newspapers as tools for shaping political policy. “Newspapers are teachers,” wrote Chōya's Narushima Ryūhoku, “the new kings of the imperial court and the friends of all people. They make trouble for the former samurai (shizoku) and make light of the nobility (kazoku).” And the press’ leaders kept on saying such things, with obvious conviction, to the end of the era.