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Paper short abstract:

Around the turn of the century, Japan observed the industrialization of publishing and shifts in modes of expressing “reality.” Analyzing reporting articles in pictorial magazines published around the Russo-Japanese War, this paper examines ideas and perceptions of the “realities” expressed there.

Paper long abstract:

The period between the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, around the turn of the 20th century, is known for the industrialization of modern print periodicals in Japan. After the end of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, newspapers, including those that used to be known for their political columns, increasingly prioritized news reports and entertainment rather than political columns in order to expand their circulation. Big publishers such as Hakubunkan started publishing diverse magazines ranging from “general” magazines like “Taiyō” (the Sun), to literary magazines like “Bungei kurabu” (Literature Club), women’s magazines like “Jogaku sekai” (The World of Female Learning), and others, targeting different readerships in terms of gender, age, and interest.

This is also the time when modes of expressing “reality” gradually changed with the establishment of colloquial writing styles and developments in printing processes. Increasingly more reports directly quoted the featured or interviewed people, a phenomenon that can be observed in the “new journalism” of their contemporaries in the UK and the US. New printing technologies, halftone in particular, allowed periodicals to include photographic images more easily than ever, while, at the same time, they also continued to use highly sophisticated woodblock printing.

Emerging pictorial magazines, launched around the Russo-Japanese War, were the center of such changes in modes of expression. Best known among them were “Kinji gahō” (also Tōyō gahō, Senji gahō), “Shashin gahō” (also Nichiro sensō jikki, Nichiro sensō shashin gahō), and “Teikoku gahō” (also Nichiro senpō, Gunkoku gahō). While employing different editing policies and styles, the editors and contributors—i.e., writers (reporters), artists, and photographers who contributed to these pictorial magazines—showed great interest in different ways of expressing “reality” in their news reporting articles, which, in turn, arguably affected the readers’ perceptions of “reality.” As goes without saying, their realities were not homogenous, suggesting an intriguing co-existence and mixture of old and new modes of expressions and perceptions.

Focusing primarily on pictorial magazines published around the Russo-Japanese War, this paper examines the various “realities” expressed in the periodicals of the time and considers the implications of their diversity.