"It is the end of an era"
Watanabe Tsuneo, 1926-2024
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Reflecting on the role of social media in Japanese politics the other day, I noted the collapse in newspaper readership among young Japanese, a portent of changes underway in Japanese politics.
Perhaps there is no better sign of the end of an era of Japanese news media and politics than this:
Tsuneo Watanabe, representative director and editor-in-chief of The Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings, died on Thursday. He was 98.
Watanabe died of pneumonia at a Tokyo hospital at 2 a.m. His funeral will be attended only by close relatives, with his eldest son Mutsumi serving as chief mourner. A farewell ceremony is scheduled to be held at a later time.
(Japanese version of Yomiuri’s obituary here)
Watanabe, who began his career as a reporter (and the author of several books about the Liberal Democratic Party during the golden age of the “1955 system”), rose to become the newspaper’s editor-in-chief and boss of the broader holding company, which includes not just the newspaper, but also the Yomiuri Giants and the Chuokoron publishing company and is a partial owner of Nippon Television. Under Watanabe’s stewardship, Yomiuri became not only the world’s largest newspaper by circulation but reached a peak of a daily circulation of 10 million, an extraordinary proportion of Japan’s reading public. As Watanabe told Kyodo News, “I have the 10 million circulation. I can move the prime minister with that. Political parties are in my hands and the reductions in income and corporate taxes were carried out as the Yomiuri reported. Nothing is more delightful than that.”
As such, Watanabe was a press baron wielding extraordinary political influence but whose influence depended on print media to an extent that will be unthinkable going forward. The tributes to Watanabe from Japan’s politicians following his death, from Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru on down, speak to the sense that Watanabe’s passing marks the passing of an age. In fact, former prime minister Kishida Fumio, reflecting on Watanabe’s passing, actually said, “It is the end of an era.”
“I learned a lot from him about the last war and various perspectives on Japan’s history,” Ishiba said.
…
“I was fortunate to meet him several times and was able to learn a lot from his extensive knowledge and insight into politics,” said Chief Cabinet Secretary Hayashi Yoshimasa.
…
LDP Secretary-General Moriyama Hiroshi added, “There is no doubt that he has contributed greatly to Japan’s development.”
Watanabe exemplified the role that the press played in the development of democracy in postwar Japan, earning the trust and confidence of political leaders (Asahi discusses his relationships with politicians here) that would enable him to wield power as a political agenda-setter as he climbed the ranks of the newspaper, a role that Watanabe had virtually no equal in fulfilling. But, for better or worse, that age is over. Even if Yomiuri’s circulation remains extraordinarily robust – while estimates are difficult its gross circulation matches the New York Times in a country with 200 million fewer people – the ability of Japan’s newspapers to shape how information is conveyed to the public, how the public’s views on major issues are formed, and how the public votes may be in irreversible decline as the Japanese people lose faith in the media establishment and turn to other sources of information.
As several elections in 2024 demonstrated, for many voters media institutions like Yomiuri are as much a part of the hidebound establishment standing in the way of progress as the politicians themselves. As distrust of traditional media grows, it is difficult imaging any publication — or any executive — playing the kind of role that Yomiuri and Watanabe played during the decades that he led it.