Process as Truth: On the Career of Tahara Sōichirō and a Culture of Mass Media Critique in 1970s–2000s Japan

Abstract

Japanese politics went “live” in the 1990s, a turbulent period marked by the collapse of the bubble economy and growing public dissatisfaction with endemic corruption in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Criticized for their lack of transparency, politicians found themselves navigating a new and chaotic arena of Sunday morning television debate shows that effectively bypassed the closed channels by which they had historically communicated with journalists. At the forefront of this transformation was journalist and commentator Tahara Sōichirō, whose debate programs Asa made nama terebi! and Sunday Project pioneered the genre. Tahara described his mission at the time as unveiling the previously hidden “process” of politics to the Japanese public through candid debate. The time had come to see inside politics and media.

Critiques of mass media’s relationship with politics, however, e.g., that journalists were embedded in overly cozy relations with politicians—making critical reporting difficult, if not impossible—and that the national newspapers and the semi-public broadcaster NHK’s commitment to “objectivity” or “neutrality” made their coverage deeply unsatisfying, were decades old by the 1990s. Thus, to understand the appeal of seeing politics unfold in a less controlled media environment, it is essential to examine a longer history of journalism in Japan as practiced outside the dominant national newspapers and NHK. This dissertation constructs a genealogy of such “outsider” journalism in magazines and commercial television in 1970s–2000s Japan, one that positioned itself as critical of Japan’s closed mass media structure. At the heart of this journalism was the practice of “media reflexivity,” which I define as the act of acknowledging one’s position within the media to encourage the viewer or reader in turn to consider their own existence inside of media. This reflexivity implicitly posed several radical questions: Why was the established mass media unwilling or unable to communicate knowledge about the process by which it covered or created events? Why could it not speak about itself? I argue that such media reflexivity, as it crystallized in the 1990s debate programs, paralleled the development of “reflexive modernity” in Japan—marked by growing social literacy and precarity in response to economic stagnation and the hollowing-out of postwar social structures.

This dissertation traces Tahara Sōichirō’s career as it developed across four worlds of journalism. Chapter 1 examines 1970s investigative journalism, catalyzed by journalist Tachibana Takashi’s iconic 1974 exposé of LDP leader Tanaka Kakuei in Bungei shunjū. Chapter 2, in turn, assesses the magazine Uwasa no shinsō in the 1980s and the genre of mass media criticism (masukomi hihyō)—a group of publications that sought to reflexively document contemporary media saturation. Chapter 3 explores the influence of television station TV Asahi in pioneering a new form of opinionated “television journalism” in the late 1980s, and the related cultural figure of the anchorman or “caster.” Finally, Chapter 4 and the Conclusion analyze the rise and decline of so-called “telepolitics” in 1990s Japan, assessing how debate programs such as Tahara’s Sunday Project destabilized Japanese politics by injecting spontaneity into political communication. These programs’ influence, however, waned during the Koizumi Junichirō administration (2001–2006), which emphasized Koizumi’s impromptu and “authentic” communication style, thereby allowing the LDP to co-opt many of the criticisms made of its historical relationship with the media. Tahara Sōichirō closely backed Koizumi and served as a media fixer in this transitional period. The dissertation closes with a brief discussion of the legacy of telepolitics in post-Koizumi-era Japan.