In the pre- and early war years, the big three newspapers at the center of the networks in Japan were The Japan Times, Japan Advertiser and the Japan Chronicle.
Historian Peter O'Connor traces the aims of the Japanese Foreign Ministry in seeing the press function as a device to make the country better understood and respected abroad, to the iron resolve of the authorities to determine content in the immediate years before Workd War II.
In a book that is both history and analysis, we learn that the first foreign newspaper in Japan was the long forgotten Nagasaki Shipping List, a treaty port publication which first appeared in 1861.