Mass Communication Theory Studies in Post-War Japan

Abstract

Theories of mass communication in post-war Japan have been developed from three schools : social psychology, mass society theory and Marxism. The first school has analyzed empirically media offects and media uses corresponding with mass communicasion research in America. The second school warned of the strong impact and mobilizing power of mass communication assuming the omnipotent mass media on the one hand the dispersed mass audience on the other. The third emphasized that mass communication was an apparatus of ideological control by the ruling class and focused on the political economic structure of mass media. Until the early 1960s, mass communication theory was constructed and received in the actual context reflecting people's experience during war time and under the radically changing society in Japan. But along with stabilization of society, theoretical study of mass communication became inactive and stagnat for a while. Since the later 1970s the study has been encouraged again by the stimuli of the new movement of empirical studies in America and cultural studies in Europe. However, the introduction of those foreign theories does not seem to find an echo in the actual situation of Japanese society today. We are confronted with a changing map of information media due to technological innovation. Now we are required to develop theories suitable to analyze and understand the mass communication system of Japan.