CLOSING THE SHOP

INFORMATION CARTELS AND JAPAN’S MASS MEDIABy Laurie Anne Freeman

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2000 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05954-9

Contents

List of Tables and Figures…………………………………………………………………………….xiPreface……………………………………………………………………………………………..xiiiOne Bringing in the Media…………………………………………………………………………….3Two Press, Politics, and the Public in Historical Perspective…………………………………………….23Three Japan’s Information Cartels: Part I. Competition and the Closed Shop…………………………………62Four Japan’s Information Cartels: Part II. Structuring Relations Through Rules and Sanctions…………………102Five Expanding the Web: The Role of Kyokai and Keiretsu………………………………………………….142Six Why Information Cartels Matter…………………………………………………………………….160A. Regulations for the Diet Press Club………………………………………………………………….181B. Kitami Administration of Justice Press Club Agreement………………………………………………….187C. Chronology of Agreements between the Imperial Household Agency and the Magazine Kisha Club…………………191D. A Comparison with the British Lobby………………………………………………………………….194Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………….199Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………229Index……………………………………………………………………………………………….247

Chapter One

Bringing in the Media

A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. (James Madison, 1822)

Between consciousness and existence stand communications, which influence such consciousness as men have of their existence. (C. Wright Mills, 1951)

Perhaps no institution in democratic society has the same Janus-faced image as the media. On the one hand, they profess and are believed by many to exist for the good of the public. Their job is to inform their readers and audiences about important events and help them interpret those events. They are also to guard against the unrestrained exercise of power by vested interests—their famous role as the “fourth estate” in democratic society. On the other hand, in order to get the information that would enable them to play this role, they must locate themselves within the political and economic centers of state power. This position exposes the media to possible cooptation by those same powers and affects their ability to remain independent and objective.

Our normative image of journalism in a free society reflects the idea of market competition—one of an intense rivalry for information and audiences, and of adversarial relations with sources and competitors. The idea is that this competition is important to the development of “a vigorous and diverse marketplace of ideas”—one that nurtures and sustains the social and political life of its citizenry. This is an ideal type that is perhaps nowhere fully accomplished. Yet the degree to which theory and reality diverge varies substantially across countries, making this an important, if underdeveloped, component in comparative political analysis.

This study challenges the applicability of this marketplace metaphor to the press-politics relationship in Japan. Through arrangements such as press clubs, industry associations, and intermedia business groups, the media in Japan are dominated by what I refer to as information cartels: institutionalized rules and relationships guiding press relations with their sources and with each other that serve to limit the types of news that get reported and the number and makeup of those who do the reporting. By reinforcing close ties with official sources while restricting competition among journalists, Japan’s information cartels have redefined the relationship between political elites and news outlets. Instead of anticipating stories and shaping emerging news, the Japanese press primarily responds to an agenda of political discourse that has already been set.

Why should we care about this aspect of the press-politics relationship? Because the cartelization of information that results from the institutionalization of close relations between reporters and official news sources limits the ability of journalists and newspapers to carry out independent reporting and standardizes news reporting within the mainstream press. While these cartels have no doubt proven mutually beneficial for political and media elites in Japan—the first by controlling access to and the dissemination of information about political events, and the second by limiting rivalry among ostensible competitors—the consequences of cartelization for other groups inside and outside of Japan are more problematic.

Consider the following events that have occurred over the past decade, each of which saw the Japanese press play a role not as anti-establishment critic but as active participant:

• In the Recruit stock-for-favors scandal that broke in the summer of 1988, executives from three of Japan’s major news organizations were implicated and later forced to resign.

• In the Itoman loans-for-favors scandal two years later, the Prosecutor’s Office charged that a defendant in the case had paid a collaborator in the Nihon keizai shimbun (Japan’s Wall Street Journal) and a lesser-known weekly magazine the equivalent of $75,000 to write favorable stories about the scandal-tainted company.

No doubt blatant abuses of media power such as these are relatively rare, yet their existence requires explanation. So too do instances where the press has failed to report stories of obvious importance.

• In January 1992, for example, when U.S. President George Bush collapsed at an official dinner in Tokyo, the American public was the first to see the video of the incident—the Japanese press having acquiesced in toto to a Japanese government demand that it not air the piece.

• A year later, in January 1993, it was again the American public who were the first to learn that Owada Masako, a career diplomat, would wed the Japanese crown prince—the Japanese press having agreed months earlier to an Imperial Household Agency request that it impose a complete news embargo on the crown prince’s search for a bride, a ban that lasted for close to a year.

• In a more alarming case, in 1995 a major Japanese national broadcasting station, TBS, shared with members of the Aum cult (responsible for gassing Tokyo subways) video footage of a critical interview with a lawyer representing families who had grievances against the cult. Several days later, the lawyer, his wife, and their infant son disappeared, never to be heard from again. But TBS never revealed to the police (or its viewing audience) its activities preceding the disappearance, though timely reporting might have saved lives.

Although at first glance these appear to be disparate events, they reveal both the strength of the symbiotic bond between Japanese news organizations and their sources and the peculiar relationship that has formed between ostensibly competitive news organizations in Japan. By looking at press clubs and other cartel-like arrangements, one comes to understand the process by which the flow of information in Japanese society is controlled and regulated. These arrangements also, at the theoretical level, point to limitations in received democratic theory more generally, especially regarding the function the press is presumed to have as the “fourth estate” in democratic societies.

While numerous studies of Japanese political economy have sought to explain the marked degree of state-society interpenetration in Japan, frequently labeling Japan a “strong state,” few have sought to explain the role the media play in maintaining state strength. I argue that it is through the various institutional arrangements constituting Japan’s media system that the Japanese state, its political leaders, and its bureaucracies are protected from intensive scrutiny. Mechanisms such as Japan’s press clubs provide political (as well as economic and intellectual) elites with a convenient means of filtering news and information and socially constructing the worldview held by the public. At the same time, this influence is at least partially reciprocated, as the media provide an important prism through which elites obtain news and information. Indeed, it is in the interaction between the political and media worlds, organized within long-term and often intensive relationships among individuals and institutions, that fundamental features of Japanese state-society relations are evident.

Why the Media Matter

Although the press has long been regarded as a key component of political and social life, its function, power, and effects are not well understood. One of the earliest social scientists to recognize the importance of the media was Max Weber, who in 1910 submitted a proposal to the Congress of German Sociologists to conduct an analysis of the press’s role in modern society. Unfortunately, the plan was shelved when he became embroiled in a lawsuit. In the period that followed, scholarship on the media moved forward in fits and starts before finally taking a giant leap backward.

During the interwar period, media scholars, recognizing the potential the mass media had to influence public opinion, turned their attention to the study of propaganda techniques and deception. By 1940, however, and well into the 1960s, the field came under the influence of the work of Paul Lazarsfeld and other media scholars. These observers did media studies—and the fields of political science and sociology—a great disservice by concluding that the media had “minimal or no effects.” In spite of considerable evidence to the contrary, Lazarsfeld’s Columbia school maintained that the media are merely neutral conduits transmitting information and, therefore, of marginal significance.

While it is difficult to understand how their arguments could have been so influential in the face of competing data, one thing is clear: they had a tremendous impact on the direction of the field. The conclusions reached by Lazarsfeld and others influenced not only academics conducting sociological studies of the media, but also those interested in the press’s role in the political process. The impact on political science was so profound that “for years many political studies scarcely bothered to consider the role of the mass media in the crystallization of votes or, more generally, in the formation of public opinion.” The media had been so thoroughly marginalized as an area of academic inquiry that even today, on the rare occasions when they are incorporated into studies of the political process, their impact on that process is frequently considered peripheral at best.

By the early 1960s, perhaps weakened by the advent of broadcast media and the dissemination of television, this minimalist view was overtaken by a contrasting idea that held that the media had the potential to exercise power in their relations with both state and societal actors. While vestiges of the minimal effects argument remain, this is the generally accepted view of the media today. It contains, however, two competing strains. On the one hand is the belief—based on a notion first espoused by Edmund Burke—that the media act as the fourth estate to the political process (i.e., as an autonomous force). On the other is the notion of the press as a servant of the state (i.e., as a dependent entity). In either case, the media are seen as playing an important role in the political process, whether as watchdog or government mouthpiece. And in that sense, a good case can be made for “bringing the media (back) in” to studies of contemporary politics.

While each of these is satisfactory as an ideal type, such characterizations belie the complex relationship the media have with state and society. Rather than assuming a priori that the media are neutral transmitters of facts, agents of the state, or pillars of democracy, a more heuristically useful approach, and the one used here, is to accept that the media play all of these roles at different times and in different contexts. In this synthetic view, the media are not only neutral conveyors of information; more importantly, they have multiple institutionalized linkages—patterns of relations with other actors in contemporary society and the state—that serve to limit, constrain, or, alternatively, amplify their role by influencing the messages they convey. By positing that the press’s role and impact are variable, we are able to gain a more balanced understanding of their place in contemporary politics and society.

If we accept that the media’s role varies, what does this say about our understanding of press power? Ben Bagdikian has suggested that “media power is political power.” Political power it may be, but it is not power in the Weberian sense of “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance.” Nor is it power over the allocation of political (or monetary) resources (unless we consider knowledge a political resource), another common definition of power. The power of the media resides instead in their ability to channel information and ideas (both to and from elites, to and from society), to influence the setting and framing of political and social agendas, and to legitimize certain political, economic, or social groups and ideas as they delegitimize others.

The media are powerful because, as C. Wright Mills noted in the introductory quote, “they influence such consciousness as [people] have of their existence.” To use more contemporary sociological vernacular, they are powerful because they play a central role in “the social construction of reality.” A precondition of organized social life, as McQuail has pointed out, is a degree of common perception of reality; the mass media contribute to this on a daily, continuous basis probably more than any other institution. Gitlin begins his analysis of how the mass media “made and unmade” the New Left with the same basic premise:

The media bring a manufactured public world into private space. From within their private crevices, people find themselves relying on the media for concepts, for images of their heroes, for guiding information, for emotional charges, for a recognition of public values, for symbols in general, even for language. Of all the institutions of daily life, the media specialize in orchestrating everyday consciousness—by virtue of their pervasiveness, their accessibility, their centralized symbolic capacity.

In short, the media do not just transmit information, they provide us with an ongoing framework for interpreting that information and for defining our social world.

Deriving power from their messages, the media retain that power whether they serve state, societal, or their own interests. Consequently, when groups of nongovernmental elites are asked to situate themselves within a power hierarchy composed of other elites, they have tended to place the media at the apex of that hierarchy. In a comparative study of elites in Japan, Sweden, and the United States conducted by Sidney Verba and his colleagues, “established” elites (labor, business, and farm organizations, etc.), “challenging” elites (disadvantaged minority groups and feminist groups, etc.), and “mediating” elites (political parties, the media, intellectuals) consistently rated the media at the top of an influence hierarchy. As illustrated in figure 1, in Japan all groups except the media (who put bureaucrats slightly ahead of themselves) chose the media as the most powerful elite actor in society—in some cases by a wide margin; in the United States, all groups except the media rated them among the top two; and in Sweden, all groups rated them among the top three. Verba’s conclusion concerning the importance of the media is worth quoting in detail:

That the media are viewed in the same way in three nations so diverse is an arresting finding. The debate about who governs has generated an enormous political science literature, but almost all of this literature, whether of the pluralist or “power elite” school, centers on the political influence of economic classes or of interest groups organized along (mostly) economic lines. Virtually none of this vast literature highlights the influence of the media—a group that makes no campaign contributions, controls no factors of production, and has few votes—much less suggests that the media might be the most influential elite group in society.

The Media and the Political Process: A Relational Approach

In focusing on the linkages among state, media, and society, I adopt a relational approach. As that term has been used by Theda Skocpol, states are examined “in relation to particular kinds of socioeconomic and political environments populated by actors with given interests and resources.” When applied to studies of the state, the relational approach makes it possible to incorporate into the analysis the notion of state capacity, a necessary counterpart to discussions of state autonomy. By recognizing that the state operates within a larger environment composed of actors having their own interests and resources, we can develop explanations for why putatively autonomous states have been unable single-handedly to implement independent goals.

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Excerpted from CLOSING THE SHOPby Laurie Anne Freeman Copyright © 2000 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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