Japan News-Week Online
Japan News-Week was the last independent, foreign-owned English-language newspaper published in Japan before the Pacific War. Brill’s exclusive holding runs from the first issue of November 1938 to within 6 months of the newspaper’s closedown on November 30 1941. A week later, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, the 8th November issue was scrapped and publisher W.R. “Bud” Wills and editor Phyllis Argall were arrested by Special Higher Police (Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu) on espionage charges.
Each issue, published on Saturdays, ran for 8 pages across 7 columns, with the weekly schedule giving Wills and his team time to commission features excavating issues rather than simply reporting news, journalism desperately needed between the breakout of all-out war in China in July 1937 and the competing drumbeats of the press on both sides of the Pacific in the run-up to Pearl Harbor. The weekly edition carried a conventional mix of news reports and interpretative features, arts reviews, cartoons, light entertainment columns, radio schedules and advertising. Besides its editorial priority on balanced coverage from all sides, almost all Japan News-Week features carried by-lines and the newspaper declared that it was entirely “written by foreigners”.
• Impartial but US-tinged perspectives from Tokyo in run-up to Pacific War 1938-1941
• Last independent English-language newspaper published in Tokyo before Pearl Harbor
• 1368 pages
• Full-color 300 ppi pages from high-quality originals
• Fully text-searchable
• Sourced largely from founding family’s original holdings in USA
• Brill exclusive: there are no other holdings of comparable duration and quality
Each issue, published on Saturdays, ran for 8 pages across 7 columns, with the weekly schedule giving Wills and his team time to commission features excavating issues rather than simply reporting news, journalism desperately needed between the breakout of all-out war in China in July 1937 and the competing drumbeats of the press on both sides of the Pacific in the run-up to Pearl Harbor. The weekly edition carried a conventional mix of news reports and interpretative features, arts reviews, cartoons, light entertainment columns, radio schedules and advertising. Besides its editorial priority on balanced coverage from all sides, almost all Japan News-Week features carried by-lines and the newspaper declared that it was entirely “written by foreigners”.
• Impartial but US-tinged perspectives from Tokyo in run-up to Pacific War 1938-1941
• Last independent English-language newspaper published in Tokyo before Pearl Harbor
• 1368 pages
• Full-color 300 ppi pages from high-quality originals
• Fully text-searchable
• Sourced largely from founding family’s original holdings in USA
• Brill exclusive: there are no other holdings of comparable duration and quality
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Historians of 20th c. China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Historians of the 20th century, WW I and WW II studies, Cultural Historians, Propaganda Studies
"Brill Asian Studies Primary Source Database promises to bring Japan’s modern history closer to scholars and students, affording a deeper understanding of contemporary biases and hitherto unknown rivalries. This collection is certainly an essential source of information for the study of Japan and Asia in the first half of the twentieth century." - Tsuchiya Reiko, in: Japan Review: Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies 2022-02