Issue:
March 2024 | Cover Story
The rise of online media has fractured American politics. Could the same happen in Japan?
The recent election of William Lai as president of Taiwan was not only a possible step toward independence from China. It was also another landmark in the slow death of the print media. A post-election survey found that just while television (65%) was still the main source of news for voters in Taiwan, YouTube (29%) and Facebook 29% totally eclipsed newspapers (5%).
That’s a worldwide trend, of course. Newspaper circulation in the U.S. is down to about a third of its mid-1980s heyday. Television viewing there, since peaking in 2010, is also declining. In Japan, a country known for its highly literate population, daily newspaper circulation has dived by about 23 million since 1997. Japan’s flagship liberal daily, the Asahi Shimbun, has lost nearly half its readership since 2003.
The figures are more striking for youthful media audiences. Many young Japanese have abandoned their parents’ habit of reading a newspaper every day. One survey suggests that 10% of young Japanese people watch no TV at all as the internet siphons off audiences. Instead, they hang out on Instagram, YouTube or TikTok and get their news, if they read it at all, sliced and diced on aggregator portal sites such as Yahoo and Line.
For better or worse, American citizens were once united around a shared monoculture, dominated by three television channels and a handful of prestigious newspapers. They now live in a fragmented media universe, “divided into fractious, alienated subcultures”, argues James Poniewozik in Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America.
Confidence in the American mainstream media, along with other liberal institutions, is historically low (and often for good reasons). Meanwhile, the online world overflows with misinformation, fake news, and conspiracies. A large section of the American public no longer agrees on simple provable facts, such as President Barack Obama being an American citizen, or his successor, Donald Trump, losing the 2020 presidential election. Nearly 15% of Americans think climate change is a hoax.
Like the old media, the online world is also vulnerable to a billionaire class, represented by the likes of Elon Musk, that stokes culture wars to divert attention from themselves. As Samuel Earle, author of Tory Nation: How One Party Took Over, says: “They claim ordinary people and free speech are under threat from the shady influence of elites but focus their ire almost entirely on progressives – with comparatively little to say about either the burgeoning profits of the ultra-wealthy or how their financial interests shape and subvert democracy.”
Democracy, said Thomas Jefferson, depends on a well-informed citizenry - the “best defense against tyranny”. What happens to liberal democracies, he might have wondered, when citizens are so catastrophically misinformed? When, instead of uniting around shared facts, they are divided into what one author calls “epistemological tribes”, where truth is replaced by emotion and the main concern is whether your “tribe” is right or wrong. Trump had over 90 million followers on Twitter, where he made over 30,000 false or misleading claims, including one that famously summoned his tribe to Washington on January 6, 2021.
Trump has been called a morbid symptom of his country’s failed institutions and, of course, compared to America, Japan’s institutions appear stable. But don’t be complacent, warns Masaru Seo, the president of Slow News, an online media outlet set up in 2019 that supports investigative journalism. Distrust in the establishment media, which clusters around press clubs disgorging official information, is growing here too, he says. “The media views themselves as watchdogs monitoring those in power but the public sees the media as a vested interest group.”
Left and right can now bypass the mainstream media (the Japanese equivalent of the conservative smear “lamestream media” is masugomi) and speak directly to disciples. Rightwing YouTube channel Toranomon News, for example, has 890,000 followers (dwarfing left-wing channel Democracy Times, or the progressive channel run by Professor Koichi Nakano of Sophia University. Naoki Hyakuta, a neoconservative author and one time NHK governor, has 457,000 followers.
Nihon Bunka Channel Sakura has 530,000 subscribers. Channel Sakura and its activist wing, Ganbare Nippon, have been behind some of the biggest rightwing demonstrations in postwar Japanese history, notes Jeffrey Hall, author of Japan’s Nationalist Right in the Internet Age: Online Media and Grassroots Conservative Activism.
The online right has helped take erstwhile fringe ideas into the mainstream – and overlaps with establishment politics. Channel Sakura has repeatedly hosted politicians from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), including former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Regular commentator Toshio Tamogami, former chief of staff of Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force, built up a cult following that he leveraged into a campaign for Tokyo governor in 2014. He bagged 12.5% of the vote.
There is evidence, too, that factions within the LDP are trying to manipulate public opinion by artificially amplifying rightwing online topics, especially on Twitter. Social media, notes Fabian Shafer, helps “marginal and even extremist political positions (as we have seen with regard to the populist term ‘anti-Japanese’).
“And normalizing radical positions via social media is a central tool of what right-wing populists and others on the far right describe as ‘metapolitical” strategy’: the strategic dissemination of extremist ideas and discourses in the ‘pre-political’ sphere of culture in order to pave the way for their inclusion in the political public sphere.”
It will be difficult to stop the drift away from the big Japanese news gatherers, especially since they rely so heavily on access to government agencies. Information from such sources has shrinking value, says Susumu Shimoyama of Sophia University, because with online platforms “flooded with free news, even if one newspaper gets information faster than others, the others will soon catch up”.
Scoops in recent years, such as influence peddling and corruption, have come from outside the press club system, via Shimbun Akahata or the weekly magazines, he adds.
It remains to be seen how far this media fracturing will go. There are several important differences between Japan and the U.S. One is that there are still few online news outlets in Japan (such as Politico or The Hill) that do original reporting: most websites are parasitic or commentary. Notable exceptions are Tansa, founded by ex-Asahi journalists, and Slow News. In addition, the Japanese media, especially NHK, are still unifying institutions, partly because of their vital role covering Japan’s numerous natural disasters.
What seems likely, therefore, is that the decline of mainstream media will lead to a further popular disengagement from political and social issues, as people turn online mainly for entertainment and distraction. As Kaori Hayashi of Tokyo University says: “The biggest concern in Japan’s case is not that people distrust the media, but they are indifferent to them. And by extension, they are liable to be indifferent to their society.”
David McNeill is professor of communications and English at University of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo, and co-chair of the FCCJ’s Professional Activities Committee. He was previously a correspondent for the Independent, the Economist and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
