Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs' curiously passive communications response to the Ji’nan Incident (1928). It argues that the Ministry’s ostensible inaction during the incident actually reflects its growing understanding of propaganda and public diplomacy messaging.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses the public diplomacy and propaganda measures taken by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the face of the ‘Ji’nan Incident’ (May 1928). Although this incident has already been the object of wide-ranging scholarship, the paper brings an original approach to its analysis by focusing on an understudied communications department within the Ministry, the ‘Department of Information’ (Gaimushō Jōhōbu, est. 1921). The measures taken by this Department, as well as the ways it stayed curiously passive during the Incident, are furthermore viewed in the paper through the lens of the media studies theory of ‘mediatization’, bringing new insights to the Ministry’s response.

During the second leg of its ‘Northern Expedition’ (1928), the National Revolutionary Army under Chiang Kai-Shek came into conflict with the Japanese Army in the city of Ji’nan. The Japanese Tanaka Gi’ichi Cabinet had sent Japanese troops to the Shandong Peninsula in order to ‘protect Japanese interests’ in the region. Both armies blamed each other for having incited the fighting, and the Ji’nan Incident became the object of significant international propaganda pushes by both sides.

Within the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Department of Information had steadily been increasing its output of public diplomacy and propaganda messaging throughout the 1920s. However, its actions during the Ji’nan Incident were comparatively passive. By contrast, the Japanese military did take a strongly proactive propaganda approach to spreading the narrative that the National Revolutionary Army had caused the fighting to erupt.

Viewing the Department’s measures through the lens of mediatization theory, however, this paper argues that the Ministry’s inaction was no mere idleness, and instead demonstrated a deepening understanding of effective propaganda methods. The Department’s officials smartly forewent a heavy-handed propaganda response and instead allowed the China-facing Tōhō News Agency, which was Ministry-controlled, to manage the news messaging around the incident. The Department’s restraint in this instance was made possible by its investments into Tōhō in the previous years, and by its growing consciousness of the fact that, under certain conditions, proactive propaganda can hurt rather than help public diplomacy messaging.