Before World War II, mass communications media had penetrated little into Japanese rural areas. So the rural populace had little access to a quantity of political, economic, social and cultural information, except for those belonging to the upper classes of rural societies. However, monthly community newspapers, called sonpo, were published in some villages of Nagano Prefecture and Ehime Prefecture from the 1920s to the 1930s.
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the regional development process of sonpo publications and the spatial agenda-setting functions of the community media from the case study of Kita-uwa District, Ehime Prefecture. These agenda-setting functions are clarified by content analysis of the articles.
The following results were obtained in this inquiry:
1. When sonpo appeared in some villages, because of their periodical publication and delivery to all villagers, they occupied the main position in the rural information system. However, the distribution of these media was rare and regionally biased. We can explain the reasons of locational development of sonpo in terms of the political connections among village authorities but cannot find the reasons for the absence of sonpo in many regions. The editors and publishers of sonpo were village authorities or leaders belonging to the upper classes of rural societies. It seems that the composition of those members had an effect on the contents of the community media.
2. We analyzed the contents of Aiji Sonpo published in Aiji village, Kita-uwa District, Ehime Prefecture, by means of two approaches. One is to assess the regional characteristics of sonpo based on the aggregation of the number of news-originating places in articles. Another approach addresses the press comments of sonpo. The comments indicate whether the medium depends on the ideology of the centralized state-nationalism, or the regional ideology-regionalism. So, we tried to divide the articles into two spatially characterized groups: the central-oriented articles and the regional-oriented articles. In the former approach, it was found that the community media contents were mainly composed of local news from Aiji village and partly of news from the upper political central cities in the urban system: the district center (Uwajima), the prefectural center (Matsuyama) and the national center (Tokyo). This result suggests that sonpo were in close contact with the local community. The latter approach clarified that the central-oriented ideology dominated the arguments of the community media. Thus we found that sonpo played the role of organizer which related many villagers to the national authority (the central government in Tokyo) beyond the spatial constraints of distance.
