1937.08.23 “Puppet Journalism”
by Lucius Curtis “Lute” Pease, Jr. (1869 -1963)
14 x 16 in., crayon and ink on board
Coppola Collection
Pease was a cartoonist for the Newark Evening News from 1914 to 1954 and received the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. He was a miner in Alaska for 5 years before beginning a career in art. He was an illustrator for the Oregonian and famously interviewed Mark Twain. From his retirement in 1954 until his death in 1963, he devoted himself to fostering his skills as a painter of portraits and landscapes.
From: Elliot J Hahn, California Western International Law Journal, 1981, 11 (2), 189-222.
One freedom that is clearly enshrined in the Constitution of Japan is freedom of the press. The Japanese Constitution does, however, allow for a limiting of the freedom of the press. This freedom is expressly limited by the requirement that it be exercised for and within the limits of the "public welfare."
The Meiji Restoration brought a termination to the Tokugawa policy of seclusion. Japan's self-imposed isolation ended, and the Japanese people were exposed to Western ideas. One Western enterprise which was readily integrated into Japanese society was the modern newspaper.
Unlike totalitarian countries, there were no government or party newspapers in Japan. The wartime government expected newspapers to demonstrate loyalty by exercising their own self-control, but did not fully trust them.
In 1936, an Information and Propaganda Committee was created within the Home Ministry, which issued all official press statements, and which worked together with the Publications Monitoring Department on censorship issues. The activities of this committee, a consortium of military, politicians and professionals upgraded to a Cabinet Information Division in September 1937, were comprehensive. Besides applying censorship to all media and issuing detailed guidelines to publishers, it made suggestions that were all but commands.
In 1937, shortly after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese government began to centralize control over the press, aiming to promote a unified national image and suppress dissent. This involved tightening censorship, reducing the number of newspapers, and forcing smaller publications to merge with larger ones.
Marco Polo Bridge Incident (July 7, 1937): The conflict began with this event, and the Japanese government's propaganda efforts and control over reporting started to be scrutinized in the West.
Battle of Shanghai (August 13, 1937): The scale of the conflict and the nature of Japanese actions, such as the Bloody Saturday incident, further raised concerns about Japanese control over the narrative.
