Promoting The Empire: The Mediatization of The Japanese Foreign Ministry in the Interwar Period, 1919 – 1936

In August of 1921, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ (MOFA) Department of Information (Gaimushō Jōhōbu) was officially created. Since the second half of the Nineteenth Century, advances in communications technologies had allowed for the global rise of a general public that followed along with the events of domestic and international politics via the consumption of mass media, and which was perceived by political actors as constituting a ‘public opinion’. While this concept was only vaguely defined, the perceptions political actors had of it nonetheless had a real impact on the political policy-making process. The Department of Information was created within the Ministry as a response to this phenomenon. Its mission was to centrally steer and unify the propaganda, information management, and public diplomacy efforts of the Ministry. The department’s birth was the result of an increasing awareness in the early Twentieth Century among MOFA officials that the Japanese Empire’s geopolitical condition needed to be supported by seeking acceptance of its foreign policy in the international public opinion.

There is a decided lack of scholarship that has considered the nature and activities of the department in a focused way. The extant research that does touch upon it has broadly described the press office as having had a limited impact on the overall propaganda efforts of the interwar Japanese imperial state. The thesis at hand seeks to fill a gap in the literature by closely examining the Department of Information’s activities in the 1920s. In doing so, the dissertation finds that the department was in fact a significant addition to MOFA’s structure, and represented a key step forward for the Ministry’s interwar public diplomacy capabilities. The department allowed for the accumulation of know-how on foreign propaganda methods and the international news industry, and this process was a prerequisite for the growth of MOFA’s public diplomacy capabilities.

The dissertation comes to this conclusion via an examination of MOFA in the period from 1904 until 1928, utilizing the theoretical framework of ‘mediatization’. This is a concept that allows for the exploration of political and diplomatic actors’ awareness of the impact of (mass) media, and the effects this consciousness has on their own messaging and agenda-setting. This thesis employs a hybrid approach, combining two conceptions of mediatization: the ‘four phases of the mediatization of politics’ by Jesper Strömbäck (2008) on the one hand, and the ‘mediatization of diplomacy’ by James Pamment (2014) on the other. Via this prism, conclusions are drawn on the significance of the department’s institutional importance for the Ministry’s interwar public diplomacy capabilities. Conversely, this study also provides valuable data for the growing body of empirical work on mediatization, as mediatization scholarship focusing on a non-Western, pre-war context is still exceedingly rare. In this way, the dissertation contributes to the historical dimension of this theoretical framework.

The dissertation first examines the path toward the creation of the Department from 1904 on, as well as its characteristics at the time of its creation in the early 1920s. After this, chapters follow that, respectively, explore the presence in the Department of Information of non-career bureaucrat experts of the international news industry, as well as the department’s concrete public diplomacy actions in the contexts of the Washington Conference (1921-1922), the United States Immigration Act of 1924, and the Ji’nan Incident (1928.) Existing scholarship has paid more attention to Japanese imperial propaganda in the 1930s and 1940s than to Japanese state propaganda in the 1920s. However, focused analysis of the department in the 1920s is foundational to an understanding of the Japanese state propaganda institutions that would follow in later decades. Throughout its six chapters, the thesis argues that the 1920s Department of Information constituted an important institutional addition to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that made possible the improvement of the Ministry’s public diplomacy capabilities, and prepared the way for the more powerful and centralized Japanese state propaganda institutions of the 1930s and 1940s.