III. JOINING YOMIURI NEWSPAPER —Before joining Yomiuri, I heard you worked for another newspaper. Yes, I spent a short time at a newspaper called Niroku Shibun. Yomiuri’s Nakamitsu told me he would hire me, but things stopped there because it was a time of bad unemployment. And then an acquantance advised me to work at […]
III. JOINING YOMIURI NEWSPAPER
—Before joining Yomiuri, I heard you worked for another newspaper.
Yes, I spent a short time at a newspaper called Niroku Shibun. Yomiuri’s Nakamitsu told me he would hire me, but things stopped there because it was a time of bad unemployment. And then an acquantance advised me to work at Niroku as practice until a spot opened, so that’s what I did. Niroku was a standard small paper with only a handful of reporters, using material from news agencies for daily news. However the editor, Tatsuo Mitarai, was famous for once editing Houchi and after he quit there, came to Niroku as if taking a break. The paper had some history, and was famous for being a source of anti-war opinion during the Russo-Japanese War under the direction of president Teisuke Akiyama. However, although its office was on a main street leading to Shinbashi Station, the newspaper was in a rundown state and Mitarai seemed bored with it.
–How long were you there?
Only three months. After doing proofreading for a short time, I suddenly became responsible for covering the prime minister’s residence. It was a rough time. Soon after I entered into the Society Section at Yomiuri and was put on the police beat.
–How did you come to settling on newspaper reporter as your occupation?
During my student days, having been punished by the courts and expelled from school, I felt I had to become a lawyer or a journalist, and I remember telling my friends that. However, truthfully I had nowhere else to go. Much like in the movie “I Graduated But…”, the city was overflowing with the unemployed. Even if I graduated university, there was no guarantee that I could find a place at a company or the civil service. There was inflation and sometimes one couldn’t buy food. It was those kind of conditions. Even now thinking about it, it was a tough time. Whether or not being a reporter was desirable was a secondary issue.
Working on the Police Beat for 33 Yen
–Anyway you were relieved to find a job.
That’s right. My starting wage when entering Yomiuri was, if I remember correctly, around 33 yen. At the time new graduates generally made 50 yen or 60 yen.
–Then 33 yen was cheap.
Yeah, it was half. There was something like an overtime bonus too, but it was only a little bit. With that bonus, it was just enough to feed one young man. At Asahi, even if you were just on the police beat, with the bonus you could make over a hundred yen. The wage at Yomiuri was around a third of that.
–You could say that between Yomiuri and Asahi that gap exists even now.
Since back then Yomiuri has been cheap. On top of that Shouriki knew those of us involved in left wing movements had nowhere else to go. He was part of the Home Ministry bureaucracy, and had previously worked in the Home Ministry Police Affairs Bureau as a sort of commander of Tokkou, so even if he hired veterans from the movement, he had no sympathy for us. Takeo Takagi, a former reporter at Yomiuri and my senpai, wrote about this in a book. According to what he wrote, Shouriki thought that it was more likely he could continually use movement veterans than new graduates, and that he would say this openly. When he was warned that the cartoonist Masamu Yanase was a “red”, he calmly replied, “So what? Whether he’s red or white, as long as he draws well I don’t care.” Takagi also wrote,
“One of the many expelled students who came flowing into the Society Section at Yomiuri was Tarou Miyamoto. It seems that he he was expelled as a result of entering a sociological research group at Suiko College. He was always sitting there smiling at the Society Section’s desk for roving reporters, but he was a skillful writer. The editor of the section, Mitsuo Miyazaki, who was known to fraternize with anarchists, said, “Those who obediently passed their three years and graduated without any ambitions can’t be helped. Even if they messed around in college, those who dropped out and jumped head-first into the world where results matter are much more dependable.” This again sounded like something Shouriki Matsutarou might say…”
–Yomiuri gained a reputation at the time for its Society Section, didn’t it?
During the strike, the main source of its power among the editors was in the Society Section, and this was a source of popularity for the paper since before the war. I don’t know a lot about Yomiuri’s history going all the way back, but traditionally the paper was known for its moderate and soft, or nanpa as it was called, approach popular among common people. That is, unlike the hard-liner, or kouha, newspapers dedicated to politics, the material in the Society Section was heavily emphasized. It was a newspaper that focused on things like literature and art. From the time of Shouichi Ichikawa, who wrote for the newspaper before becoming one of the executives of the pre-war Communist Party, the Society and Art sections had many writers and were the center of the paper, propelling it to its success.
–Maybe this is a bit of a digression, but with Yomiuri now being a leader of right-wing journalism under the influence of Editor-in-Chief Tsuneo Watanabe, those times were quite different, right?
Right, Yomiuri became that way only relatively recently. In other words, even though it became one of the standard newspapers, during our time it had those special flavors that appealed to common people, and it was especially known for its coverage of scandals and incidents. Looking at its history, even many Editors-in-Chief came from the Society Section.
–You started your career as a reporter on the police beat (satsumawari).
Normally you do the police beat at various branch offices for a year or two to start, but because I had experience at Niroku Shinbun, my time there ended after 3 months. I was first responsible for Totsuka, Waseda, and Mejiro Stations. After that I did Yotsuya, Yodobashi, Nakano Stations for a month, and then lastly I was put on Nihonbashi, Hisakata, Kyoubashi Stations. Also I was doing both the morning and evening editions. So when the evening edition was done I’d go home to sleep a little, and then come back to work on the morning edition. It was hard work beyond what was normal. Everyone would lodge next to the police station and between the morning and evening editions go to the bath or something. Work would start around 6 to 8pm and last until 2 at night, and then there was the evening edition which we would start at 10 the next morning. It was 1936, and two incidents that year were unforgettable: the February 26th Incident and the Abe Sada Incident.
Right when I was working Yotsuya Station, Makoto Saitou, the Keeper of the Lord Privy Seal, was killed in their jurisdiction. I immediately ran to Saitou’s residence, but the authorities had already shut the press out and I couldn’t get close. Although it was outside Yotsuya, I tried to get some material from the Prime Minister’s residence. With another reporter from Houchi named Horikawa, I remember wading knee-deep through snow until we got to the hill at the side of the National Diet Building. In the end we were caught by the rebel forces and driven out.
–During the Sada Abe Incident, what was the atmosphere like as society reacted to it? [1936, a bizarre incident in which a brothel worker murdered a regular customer, cut off his privates, and then absconded with them.]
It was right after the February 26th Incident and martial law had been implemented, so there was still a tense feeling in the air, but because of the bizarre incident, that changed a little. As the atmosphere of a quickly expanding war came into prominence, among people there was a contrary desire to run away from it. The newspapers cleverly took advantage of this feeling, and guided everyone so that their attention did not shift towards criticizing the war. That was the kind of role the incident played, I think. At the time, I had just left the police beat to become a roving reporter for the Society Section.
The veteran Yoshikazu Koyama, who was born for the job was our captain, and so I stuck to him and took in his teachings as a fresh student. Sada’s birthplace was a big tatami maker in Kanda, so we pursued her under the assumption that surely she was a depending on them while on the run. It was reporting that everyday wasted all of the resources of the Society Section. While soaking in the teachings of my senpai, we investigated the tatami maker. There we gained the cooperation of an apprentice who wanted to start his own store. According to him, she was surely hiding under the protection of one of the tatami makers. So we visited them one by one, competing with the police investigation for leads. The ability of Yomiuri at that time to gather material on crime incidents was particularly impressive. Koyama said that surely we would find her before the police, and so the two of us whittled down our possible targets one by one. When the culprit was finally found in the middle of her escape at a ryokan in Takanawa, I remember being disappointed.
That’s only one example, but although the imperial government and the military were pursuing a war that entangled the Japanese people, the newspapers didn’t publish even the littlest criticism, and instead performed the role of distracting them.
–You can even see examples of that today. Right when big political problems are happening and the close attention of people is necessary, the newspapers sensationalize whatever scandalous rumors you hear on the street, and thereby distract them. It really is scary.
Yes, it is scary. That’s one way the ruling class uses mass media. And it kept us reporters immersed in this stuff too.
–As you said, looking back at Japan’s history, the year of the February 26th Incident, 1936 was a critical time when things became particularly distorted. It was absolutely necessary that people look closely and draw various lessons, and yet in the middle of it all people were directed to look at these kinds of bizarre incidents.
Thinking about it now, that was certainly the case. At whatever newspaper, it’s the same: there is an allocation of responsibilities. With the Sada Abe case, club reporters at the police station would get the basic plot, while the roving reporters would look for angles and bring out the most sensational aspects. And that’s what roving reporters had to do. As a first-year roving reporter, I would call the office. The guy at the desk was the famous Takeo Takagi. “Talk! Tell me exactly what you heard!” he would say, and then he would write it down. Every one thing I said, he would make into three or four things and in that way he would write all at once. This would fill up about half the Society Section. He was a cunning guy.
–That was how the newspapers trained people then.
Yes. To give another example, there was the time, right after I became a roving reporter, that there was a relatively large earthquake in Niijima. I was dispatched as a junior reporter in his first year. Nakamitsu, the vice editor I mentioned before, told me to go. When I went, battleships were there and there was quite a commotion. However, there wasn’t very much serious damage from the earthquake itself. And then at the time there wasn’t a telephone line in Niijima, so I sent the manuscript by telegraph at the post office. And I wrote, “The damage from the earthquake wasn’t serious.” When I returned, they were really mad. “How could it not be serious if the battleships were there? This is nothing like what’s written in the other papers. You were there yourself, how you could say that?” they said. Of course there were some injured and there were places where the road was split. But probably the purpose of the battleships was training the military for emergency situations and as part of the sale of militarism, to make people understand the necessity of the military being there to save them. And for that purpose, the newspaper wanted me to report that Niigata was in trouble and that the battleships were there to save it. This was just one more example of the sensationalism that made up the atmosphere of that time. It didn’t have the influence that the Sada Abe Incident did, but this was another experience I had as a first year reporter. And by my own decision, I inserted myself into the middle of all this.
How the Paper Expanded During War Time
–When you were first trying the job, did you think it was interesting?
Yes, it seemed agree with my personality, so I enjoyed it a lot. Especially when you’re young, writing articles and seeing competition between the various papers and the daily results of your articles are all interesting. This is a feeling probably everyone in the job has had, but when you’re working a job you’re interested in, you tend to get caught up. You could say it’s the charm that newspapers have, but it can hold you prisoner as well.
Shouriki entered Yomiuri at the end of the Taishou era, right after the earthquake. At that time the paper’s circulation was 40-50,000 copies, but when I entered, it had increased to around 6-700,000 copies. It was a time of rapid growth for the paper. Tokyo papers like Houchi and Jiji were in their decline, while Kansai papers like Asahi and Mainichi were growing steadily. These two papers had a much larger circulation than Yomiuri. Thus it was a time when Yomiuri was trying to catch up, an issue that often came up in my work as a reporter.
In the book A Hundred Year History of Yomiuri (Yomiuri Shinbun hyakunen-shi), it’s written that in 1938, three years after I entered the paper, circulation broke the 1,000,000 copy threshold. In 1939 it was 1,200,000, 1941, the beginning of the war, it was 1,600,000, in 1944 it was 1,910,000 copies, and then in 1945, when the war ended, it was at 2,000,000, shoulder to shoulder with Mainichi and Asahi. According to the book, Yomiuri surpassed Asahi, but it’s hard to come to an exact number when counting circulation, so it’s better to say they were at the same level. So through those years Yomiuri came to be a large paper.
If one were to ask what was most important to the background of this circulation, I would have to say the paper’s total cooperation with the invasion, the glorification of war, and the way the paper entangled the Japanese people in it all.
However, it wasn’t just the war. There were other tricks the paper used to spur the interest of readers. It was Shouriki in particular who put Tadao Ichioka, the coach of the Waseda University baseball team and later manager of the Giants, in charge of the sports section, and then planned the first Yomiuri sponsored Major League Baseball All-Star Japan Series (Nichibei Yakyuu). In 1931, American professional baseball teams were called to join this series. In the second series held in 1934, Babe Ruth came. And then in 1936, by Shouriki’s initiative, Japanese professional baseball began. Shouriki was certainly someone with great powers of foresight.
There was also effort put into Go and Shogi. The matches between famous Shogi masters Sankichi Sakata and Yoshio Kimura was one example. We also did investigations of Mount Mihara. Being a period of high unemployment, there were many suicides, and among these, a large number were those who threw themselves into the mouth of Mihara’s volcano. In 1933, when I was in my second year at Yomiuri, the paper built a gondola lift to descend into the mouth of the volcano that was the center of attention and investigate. Koyama had me write countless articles from the news he gathered regarding the background of the suicides.
Another source of popularity was the creation of thorough local editions. The first of these was the Koutou Edition. As in, the area at the mouth of Tokyo’s Sumida River. One pillar of Yomiuri’s growth was the Koutou area. There was a time when if you went there, every home was a reader of the paper. Even now I’m sure that tradition remains.
There was a reporter named Masuo Ureshino whom I was close to. He, together with the Foreign Desk’s Toumin Suzuki were two of Yomiuri’s famous reporters that headed the Berlin and Nanking offices. Both of them began as reporters for the Koutou Edition. Masuo would often tell me that the way the local editions were edited was one of a kind.
When I was working the police beat at Nihonbashi, there were canals connected to the Kanda River, and boats carrying large barrels of sewage would use these canals. The barrels were filled two or three days before being loaded and were lined up along the canal until then. This was the source of distress for the district’s inhabitants and so they would complain to the Ward Office, but not much was done.
Police beat reporters would pick up voices of dissatisfaction like these and use that material for Koutou and other local editions. This was very well received. There was a time that this was the main draw of the paper. This along with coverage of Shogi, Go, and sports expanded the scope of the paper, combining into one force. In other words, the paper was made by gathering the interests of those closest to it. This led to praise and the steady expansion of the paper to all of Tokyo’s districts.
–In today’s terms, you could say they put resources into promoting sales.
Until then the first page was all advertisements, and Yomiuri was first to get rid of that. This started at the beginning of 1936, the year I became a roving reporter. From New Years Day onward all the first page advertisements were replaced with news. From then on, the paper not only increased its news, but also lent its platform to various opinion-makers. Looking back now, it often used very well meaning members of the intellectual class. The Arts Section was enriched by contributions from the likes of Hakuchou Masamune, Saneatsu Mushanokouji, Kaoru Osanai, and Kazuo Hirotsu. In the Sunday Criticism section columnists like Tsunego Baba, Tanzan Ishibashi, Hiromi Arisawa, and Kiyoshi Miki (who was called left wing) were serialized under Kiyoshi Miki’s direction. Along with the writings of Nyozekan Hasegawa and Koushin Murofuse, Yomiuri gathered first-class intellectuals, and it was perhaps the paper that most focused on columns, criticism, and the arts. So it wasn’t just the war, there were various facets to the rapid growth in circulation.
And so with the war cooperation there were good intentions mixed in to a degree. But the most important problem was the paper becoming a tool of the authorities in the imperial government. When faced with pressure from the military or superiors at the newspaper, rather than quit writing, one would try to mix in intellectual points or good intentions, and by doing so rationalize it while fitting into the paper. But there was no eye for the biggest problem involving the fate of the Japanese people. In regards to the imperial government and the war of invasion, objectively we cooperated.
Today too, journalists will put their good intentions into various work, but then feeling at ease that they were right in small matters, ignore the bigger picture and allow themselves to become paralyzed. What I think is really scary in the world of journalism is the way the need to directly confront authority becomes distorted by these smaller issues as the flow of history is being molded.
–Certainly there is a flow to history, and a process in which people are swept by it. But unlike readers, the side that creates the newspaper has a role of directing this flow.
That’s right.
The Danger of Swept Up in Progress of Events
–Those who pick up the brush have a large responsibility.
Therefore, it’s extremely precious that that newspapers reflect a large diversity of opinions, particularly those voices that are being suppressed. At the time the Communist Party was stubbornly fighting to oppose the war in its activities. Of course the newspapers, even though it was their responsibility not look away, joined in with the ruling classes in an anti-communist witch hunt.
–Back then the press treated the Communist Party as just another class of petty criminals.
It was the communists that stood against that torrent, even in prison and when their lives were in danger. That’s the weight the Communist Party has even now. These days, when you say that it was only the Communist Party that opposed the war, it goes in one ear and out the other for many people. But for those of us who were around then and got swept up in the tide, the existence of a party that fought back despite the risks has an incomparable grandeur. In the world there is an unceasing fight by repressed democratic movements against injustice and authoritarianism, and so to be passive and go with the flow is what is most dangerous, I think.
At the beginning of the war, among those where worked at the paper there were some smalls moves to resistance. In 1937, 38, there was a study group made with Teruji Kasawara, a reporter from the society section, and Masuo Ureshino, my old friend from college at the center that met once a week. The other members were Tamaki Shibukawa and myself from the Society Section, Tatsuichi Hishiyama from the editorial board, and Toshio Yamanushi from the copyreading department. Someone would choose a topic relating to current events and give a report, we would debate about it, and then we would finish with a drink. It wasn’t much.
–It was that kind of era, so even just writing objectively required a lot of courage. A journalist from the same time, Asahi‘s Takeji Muno wrote a book called 16 Years at The Torch (Taimatsu Juurokunen). In it he writes that reading an article you wrote about the state funeral of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, he “tasted the feeling of defeat” when seeing your “will to stand against the total deluge of uniformity”. Were you acquainted with him then?
Sometimes we would see each other when gathering news from the same sources. Someone told me about the book, and it made me think about that time again. Even if there was some attempt to be objective in my article, of course I was caught in the “deluge of uniformity” as he said, and that article too performed the role expressed in the slogan “One Hundred Million, One Heart”. At the time I was writing a serial story titled “America in the Nude” (Amerika Razou) based on the interviews with diplomats, artists, and religious leaders who had lived there and books I had read about the country. Rafu Shinpou, a Japanese newspaper published in Los Angeles, had turned the series into pamphlet. I heard this from my friend Toshio Kanchi, who wrote editorials there but had to return because of the war. He showed me the pamphlet and told me he thought it was written by a journalist who lived there. But even if there were some objective parts, I think it also played the role of slogans like “American-British Savages” (kichiku beiei) and “Shoot to Kill” (uchiteshi yaman). As I was saying before, falling into self-satisfaction in a time like that is easy and extremely dangerous.
“The state funeral began at 7 am with a wake at Suikousha, the Navy friendship association, followed by a funeral procession to Hibiya Park. There a memorial service was held until 6 pm, when the burial service was performed. Everything proceeded according to a schedule, which was planned almost to the minute. Because the first printing began around 1 pm, no matter what a “predictive manuscript” had to be prepared. However, there was one thing that happened that didn’t occur according to the schedule. Although the plan was for the 1500 attendees to enter the site of the ceremonies at 9:05 lead by Prime Minister Tojo, Foreign Minister Shigemitsu entered five before, leaning on a cane. Shigemitsu, in 1932 when he was still an ambassador, had a bomb thrown at him by a Korean during a ceremony for the Emperor’s birthday in Shanghai and lost a leg. Now he was dragging his artificial leg across the new gravel path with his usual heavy expression now a shade darker, entering the still empty memorial site as slow as a snail. When he sat in a row of seats next to the memorial, he faced the sky with his eyes still shut. Because he couldn’t match the pace of the other attendees he had entered early, creating this snapshot with no relation to the ceremony. However, viewing this little deviation from the schedule from my reporter’s seat, it seemed to represent the whole ceremony or the condition Japan was in that day. How could I report this feeling welling up within me? It was totally different from the article prepared to the morale boosting specifications and already being printed by the copywriting department with the headline “100 Million Broken Hearts Offer Their Earnest Prayers”. When the ceremony ended and the reporters separated and hopped on the company vehicles that were waiting for them, I, a reporter from Asahi passed through the back of the site and walked out. My destination was close, and more than anything else I felt like walking. Then, a car waving the Yomiuri flag pulled up. From the car a voice called out, ‘Why don’t you ride with us?’ It was Tarou Miyamoto, with whom I had just brushed shoulders during the ceremonies. In the middle of the fierce competition between the two papers, it was outside the normal personality of a reporter to show this sort of kindness to the enemy side. I felt moved, and stopped walking.”
“Among the evening editions that reported the funeral, the scene of Shigemitsu entering the site by himself was only written in Yomiuri. “9 am– into the empty pavilion, Foreign Minister Shigemitsu entered alone. […] Seeing some impoliteness in his disabled leg, the Foreign Minister had an air of seriousness. Of course, everyone there exhibited the very definition of seriousness.” As one would expect, his writing pushed the idea of “100 million resolved to revenge”, but anyhow, the article had presented the facts as they were without preparation. In this one fellow reporter I saw the will to stand against the total deluge of uniformity. After the war, I heard that Tarou Miyamoto took the toughest stance in the Yomiuri Struggle and soon after became a lead editor of Akahata. At that moment, the man who previously made me taste defeat gave me a feeling as sure and refreshing as the sunrise. I said to myself ‘Tarou Miyamoto, ganbare’.” – Takeji Muno 16 Years at The Torch
–Could you summarize your activities as a reporter during the war?
During the war, I wasn’t allowed to become a war correspondent because of my history as a student and I needed the approval of the Ministry of War. Aside from being sent as a special correspondent right after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937, I spent the war the inside the country. During final stages of the war, or the “decisive battle for the homeland” as they called it, when the battle of Okinawa was being fought and it was said that there would be an invasion of Kyushu, I was stationed in Kyushu for two or three months. From my post as Vice Editor of the Society Section which I received in 1941, I was transferred to Fukuoka and made Bureau Chief in Kyushu . As the Bureau Chief I spent a lot of time covering the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
–Tell us about your special correspondence.
When the Marco Polo Bridge Incident happened, the first group to go were reporters attached to the Ministry of War and from the East Asia Department. The second group to go was Koyama and I. The incident happened on July 7th 1937, and we went around August or September. We took a military plane from Fukuoka, stopped in Keijou (present day Seoul), and then from there we flew to Mukden (present day Shenyang). Lastly, we entered Tianjin by steam train. At the time there were still parts of the foreign held areas that were in ruins.
Less than a month had passed when I caught dysentery and I entered a military hospital in Datong. Being a military hospital, the soldiers around me were dying one by one. Sick and wounded soldiers were laid out on beds stacked like shelves of silk worms. I had bloody stools and could barely eat anything. In the morning I would wake up to a thud that indicated a soldier next to me had fallen out of his bed and was dying below. It was a hospital in name only with almost no treatment and in terrible conditions. I thought I was going to die. After some days passed and I was passing in and out of consciousness, I remember a medic letting me drink some juice from a can of pineapples and how delicious it was. It really brought me back to life. From there I recovered little by little and in October I was sent to back to Tianjin, where I stayed for month until I was sent to Japan, still barely able to function.
By March or April of 1938 I had completely recovered and returned to work as a roving reporter. I covered the Ministry of Finance for the Society Section and entered the Kasumi Press Club to cover the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Politics Section. From 1941 I stayed at the Society Section desk, while going out for big events like Yamamoto’s state funeral. Working at the desk I assisted the section head while checking and putting the finishing touches on articles before they were published. I did that for 3 years. Then 1942, 43, 44 came, and the American counterattack progressed with the battles for the Philippines and Guadalcanal, until they finally arrived in Okinawa.
–What were you doing in 1945?
I was the Bureau Chief at the Kyushu Bureau, where there were ten people with me. At the end of the war, the structure was 4 or 5 in the Society Section, 3 people in News, and 1 in the Politics Section. That’s the history of my career at Yomiuri up until the struggle began.