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Over the past century, Japan's position in the world has been dramatically transformed several times, but the challenges facing English-language magazines produced in Japan have changed little. The raison d'tre and aim of these periodicals was to make Japanese opinion and information better known overseas. No matter how many years publishers persisted in that endeavor, however, their footsteps were always dogged by high costs and inadequate personnel and financial resources.
According to the Nihon Oji Shimbun-Zasshi Shi (A History of Western-Language Newspapers and Magazines in Japan, 1934) by Ebihara Hachiro, the first magazine to be published in a Western language in Japan was the comic monthly the Japan Punch, founded in Yokohama in 1862. The scholarly journal transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan began coming out in 1873 and continues today. One of the oldest journals for a general readership was the Far East, begun in 1896 as the monthly English edition of Kokumin no Tomo, a magazine for intellectual readers featuring essays on current affairs and literary criticism. Kokumin no Tomo was started by critic and historian Tokutomi Soho (1863-1957) in 1887 and became Japan's most progressive forum for criticism of the then-powerful cliques controlling the government as well as for the advocacy of populism, an emerging social force. But in a matter of only two and a half years and 30 issues, the Far East ceased publication. Another journal that made a valiant effort during the same period was the Hansei Zasshi (Self-Reflection Magazine, founded in 1897), an English monthly advocating Buddhist teachings, though it too succumbed not long after the Far East.
In May 1934, journalist and liberal economist Ishibashi Tanzan (1884-1973) founded the monthly Oriental Economist. It was a time of a global upsurge of totalitarian ideology, the rise of Hitler in Europe, Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations, and the eve of the Japanese Imperial Army's incursions in China. Ishibashi wrote in the June 1954 issue that he first planned to publish the magazine to appeal to the world to realize the "complete abolishment of armaments of all nations" (P. 293). He had feared what would happen if Japan did not explain itself adequately to the world, and his misgivings were realized in the Pacific War. He argued...