Short Abstract

This article explores the entangled relationship between the history of print media and representative government in prewar Japan through interactive newspaper and magazine supplements (furoku); including a variety of mail-in questionnaires, ballots, and petitions.

Long Abstract

In 1889, over a year before Japan's first ever national election, the Tokyo-based Yomiuri Newspaper circulated a mail-in "supplement" (furoku) along with its May 1st issue. In the context of highly restrictive suffrage requirements, an included postcard enabled any purchaser of the paper to cast a virtual ballot for hypothetical candidates running for office in local districts in a mock election. Yomiuri's campaign was just one of many "private elections" (shisen tōhyō) staged by newspapers throughout Japan in the buildup to the first real election to the Imperial Diet. More than a passing effect of the novelty of national elections, I argue that the history of such supplements have much to tell us about the broad relevance of high politics and political culture beyond the narrow socioeconomic stratum allowed to vote in elections and run for office. In doing so, I seek to contribute a new perspective to a growing body of scholarship investigating the mediatisation of politics in Japan from a historical perspective.

Close attention to the diachronic and synchronic contexts in which such print supplements were embedded within enables a more nuanced understanding of the entangled relationship between print capitalism and representative government. Besides ballots, mail-in supplements found in the pages of prewar newspapers and magazines also included questionnaires and petitions, and their history links up to the rise of opinion polling and market research during and after the Second World War. They circulated in a media context that encompassed ballots and sweepstakes pertaining to subjects less directly related to high politics, including popularity and beauty contests. Newspaper ballots eventually became embroiled in controversy and were targeted by the authorities in the early twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, proletarian newspapers and magazines circulated questionnaires to use as the basis of petitions and included mail-in petitions to enable readers to demand changes to government. My presentation shows how the shifting challenges encountered by the enterprising promoters of "virtual" elections and print-led petition movements have much to tell us about popular and elite views of "real" elections before and after the passage of universal male suffrage in 1925.