Paper short abstract:

I will address the issue of how popular protest in the regions (Kochi) in early Meiji Japan was given a voice, not only through modern media such as newspapers, but also through the public visualization of dissidence, in this case the staging of real but also highly symbolic "newspaper funerals".

Paper long abstract:

Most attention in existing research on popular protest in the early Meiji period has been devoted to violent eruptions in the Kantō region, or to how that protest affected political decisions and discussions in the major newspapers of the capital. I will show that the regions were more than sites of destructive uproar by discontented farmers. In my paper I will focus on Kōchi that stands out as a center for peaceful and progressive protest, boasting a disproportionate number of active political associations and a steady supply of vociferous newspapers. Relentless suppression by censorship authorities forced newspapers to come up with strategies to keep their presses working: "stand-in" editors were quite common as well as substitute newspapers that could immediately fill in if a publication ban had been issued. In May 1882 journalists and activists organized "newspaper funerals" to protest such a ban against the Kōchi Shimbun. Doing so, they were able to make their recalcitrance vis-à-vis censorship authorities visible to a wide group of people. The ideal of freedom of speech was given a recognizable form that marked the inclusion of an ever wider readership in a city of 30,000 people, 900 km away from Tokyo.