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overview
holdings
landmarks
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overview
This profile considers the Yomiuri media conglomerate
of Japan.
It covers
introduction
The Yomiuri group of Japan is
a broadcast, film, press, sports and property development
conglomerate.
Its flagship newspaper - the Yomiuri Shimbun
- claims to have the highest circulation in the world.
Like rivals such as the Nikkei,
Fujisankei and Asahi
groups, most revenue comes from operations in Japan.
evolution of the group
The group's flagship - the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper
- was founded in 1874. At the end of the US Occupation
the group expanded into radio (from 1951) and television
(from 1953).
The extended Yomiuri group currently comprises subsidiaries
and affiliates concerned with television, radio, newspaper
and magazine publishing, book publishing, film/video production,
travel agencies, business schools, sports and of course
property.
The latter featured in the so-called Yomiuri Land Scandal
of 1983, in which sokaiya (gangsters) extorted money regarding
the company's annual general meeting.
An indication of the holdings is here.
Its Nippon Television Network (NTV), competing with Fujisankei's
Fuji TV and Asahi's NBC, is a leading television network
with 30 stations. Services include a 24-hour news channel.
It is active in international television production and
broadcasting through its US-based NTV International, engages
in feature film and video production, and owns leading
baseball and soccer teams such as the Yomiuri Giants.
the flagship
The Japan Media Review indicates
that the daily circulation of Yomiuri Shimbun
is around 10 million for the morning editions and 4.3
million for the evening editions. Its readership is reported
as are 50.1% female and 49.9% male, with the largest cohort
of readers being in their 50s (21.2% of the women and
22.4% of the men) and 40s (18.4% women and 17.5% men.
30% of Yomiuri readers consider themselves homemakers.
Household income is split among those earning 2-4.99 million
yen pa (19.6%), 5-6.99 million (22.4%) and 7-9.99 million
(21.6%).
The English-language The Daily Yomiuri, launched
in 1955, is skewed toward expatriates (72.2%) and men
(57.2%); over 36% of foreign and 27% of Japanese readers
as of 2001 were businessmen and women. Over 75% of readers
reportedly have undergraduate or postgrad degrees. 68%
of foreign readers were in their 30s and 40s, versus around
50% of Japanese readers.
The Yomiuri Shimbun is supposedly the top online
newspaper, reporting around 4.5 million unique hits from
users accessing the site at home and over 2.1 million
from work as at early 2005.
studies
There is no major English-language study of NTV or Yomiuri.
For the group's early history see Gregory Kasza's The
State and The Mass Media in Japan 1918-1945 (Berkeley:
Uni of California Press 1988). A perspective on more recent
developments is provided by the essays in Media and
Politics in Japan (Honolulu: Uni of Hawaii Press 1996)
edited by Susan Pharr & Ellis Krauss, Jayson Chun's
'A Nation of a Hundred Million Idiots'?: A Social
History of Japanese Television, 1953-1973 (London:
Routledge 2006) and by Laurie Freeman's Closing the
Shop: Information Cartels & Japan’s Mass Media
(Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2000).
For sports see Robert Whiting's You Gotta Have Wa
(New York: Macmillan 1989). Other sectors are discussed
in Anne Cooper-Chen's Mass Communication in Japan
(Ames: Iowa State Press 1997).
For the Yomiuri Land scandal see Carl Kester's Japanese
Takeovers: The Global Contest for Corporate Control
(Boston: Harvard Business School Press 1991).
Memoirs of Tsuneo Watanabe (Tokyo: Chuo-Koron
Shinsha 2000) - not sighted by the authors of this profile
- is an account by Yomiuri's Washington correspondent
in the mid-1960s and president from 1991.
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