JAPAN'S DAILY PRESS came into being as a progovernment, insider institution. Determined to use the miraculous speed and scope of newspapers as a means for spreading enlightenment, numerous officials exerted their influence early in the 1870s to secure official support for a press that had only seen the light of day a decade before. Indeed, every daily newspaper formed prior to 1873 got its start with the assistance, or under the sponsorship, of some government office or official. And nothing gave those early papers more prestige than the slogan “goyō shimbun” or “patronage paper,” used by Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun at the top of Page One in 1874 to publicize its own insider status.

But the cozy government-press relationship did not last long. In 1973, just as the government's press-sponsorship patterns were becoming fully developed, a budgetary dispute in the Finance Ministry prompted the losing faction to air its grievances in public, through the press. Half a year later, in the wake of Saigō Takamori's departure from official life over the Korean episode, papers such as Nichi Nichi and Yūbin Hōchi Shimbun led an acrimonious, public debate over the creation of a popular assembly, with the majority of the journalists attacking the government's “gradualist” position vigorously. As a result, most government offices began severing their journalistic ties with the haste of offended lovers, and the day when all papers were part of the government batsu quickly became a bitter memory.

This did not mean, however, that Japan's journalistic establishment would now adopt the stance of the outsider, at least in any conscious or simplistic sense of that word. On the surface it often might seem that way during the decades that followed – with Japan's press damned by more than a few officials for “irresponsible” pandering to the people and with hundreds of journalists jailed or fined for opposing official policies. Indeed, more than a few scholars have painted the Meiji press in just such a light – as an opposition medium engaged in unrelenting combat with the official world on behalf of “the people.”