Japanese Mass Communication Studies

Abstract

Japanese mass communication studies were started to be influenced by the American mass communication studies after the second world war. I. Shimizu published “Social Psychology” (1951). The book was very influential to the early studies of mass communication. He argued the tremendous impact of mass communication on the modern society. That work was the Japanese theory of the mass society. Most japanese researchers of mass communication studies tried to seek the breakthrough of “Shimizu theory”. They warns against the tendency of overemphasizing mass media's effects and saw the active cognitive aspects of audience and personal communication networks as the source of the power of people's resistance against the power of a huge mass communication. These studies have produced the Japanese native perspective of mass communication process. That was a perspective which grasped the mass communication process including total social communication process as the multi-layered structure of conflicts and contradictions.
From '60 to' 70, Japanese mass communication studies of “audience research” were stagnated partly because at this time American empirical studies were dominated by the “limited effects” model. But the studies of media industry, production and making process of media content and freedom of journalists had accumulated many fruitful works.
From the end of '70 to the present time Japanese mass communication studies, especially “effects studies” have gradually revived the media sociology, influenced by American empirical approach which have proposed the “powerful effects” models; “agenda-setting function” model, “dependency” model and “spiral of silence” model and soon. And the critical approaches in Britain have also influenced Japaness mass communication studies. Now Japanese mass communication studies aim to create a new phase of studies at the modern information society.