JAPAN'S TREATY-PORT PRESS

By the time of the Meiji restoration’ the foreign language press, the majority of whose journalists were British, was an established feature of Japanese treaty-port life. This was not surprising. From humble beginnings at Canton in 1827, newspapers had spread to most foreign settlements in East Asia. They were sometimes little more than advertising sheets but they met a local need and ‘mail editions’ gave the foreign communities an international voice. Their history is often obscure, though much can be gleaned from the publications themselves, especially from the editorial quarrels which enlivened their pages and from the court cases which sometimes resulted. John Reddie Black was the only journalist to write a book on local history.

The first foreign-language newspaper in Japan, the Nagasaki Shipping List and Advertiser, started at Nagasaki in 1861. Its founder was A.W. Hansard, an auctioneer and jobbing printer. The annual subscription was $20 Mexican, the accepted currency in the Japan ports, for four sides of news and advertisements four times a week. In subsequent years, over forty newspapers and some thirty magazines and periodicals were published in settlements whose foreign population, excluding the Chinese, was at its maximum about 5000. Most were produced in Yokohama where, by the mid-1890s, some 2500 Western residents lived. One contemporary noted, perhaps tongue in cheek, that this showed ‘a remarkable degree of journalistic activity’, indicating ‘a positive craving for news on the part of the public’. Other factors included international rivalries, personal ambitions and subsidies. A craving for news was probably low on the list.

Even successful papers seldom sold more than five hundred copies. The result was high subscription rates averaging $24 per year, with overseas or special editions extra. Advertisements were lucrative; Yokohama rates in 1882 were up to four times those of major London newspapers. Also important was job printing. One British official in 1885 claimed this was the chief source of profit for many papers, and another wrote in 1897 that it was ‘highly lucrative … far more so than the newspaper’, for one Nagasaki publisher. Capital equipment was cheap. The Japan Gazette was still printed on hand presses in 1891. In 1893 the presses of the Rising Sun and Nagasaki Express were valued at only $1000, although paper and binding materials were worth $7000. Salaries were a major cost.