The Yomiuri Dispute : war accountability and editorial authority in postwar Japan, and the case for emancipatory journalism
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Journalists from the Yomiuri Shimbun in Tokyo instigated one of the first labor struggles in postwar Japan and reckoned with the company's role in facilitating Japan's descent into militarism. Once US occupation officials imprisoned their wartime newspaper leader, Japanese journalists, for the first time since the start of Japan's Pacific War, could contribute to Japanese democracy. Yomiuri journalists' approach to newsgathering, however, eventually clashed with US officials' ideals of press freedom. US officials' reforms on paper championed press freedom, but in practice, they asserted control over and suppressed the Japanese press by imposing American values such as objectivity and social responsibility. Although the Yomiuri Dispute has been researched, how these Japanese journalists imagined or practiced communication to ensure emancipation from wartime and other Western controls is less clear. Consequently, this thesis relied on historical analysis and Hemant Shah's normative model of emancipatory journalism as a theoretical framework to analyze various journalistic depictions of the dispute. Two key findings emerged. Journalists conveyed an understanding that the dispute represented a labor struggle wherein journalists transformed corporatized mass media's approach to newsgathering. The dispute was also understood as a larger struggle for editorial autonomy, one that resisted US understandings of press freedom. From these findings two key takeaways emerged: 1) US officials' press freedom values essentially resembled a return to status quo of wartime media control from Japanese journalists' perspectives and 2) contemporary normative frameworks surrounding journalism should abandon the assumption that US conceptualizations of journalism and press freedom were foundational to realizing democracy in postwar Japan.
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M.A.