By Henry Hilton

Arts & Culture Oct. 09, 2010 - 05:58AM JST ( 5 )

“Rat-like cunning” is what the late, great Murray Sayle saw at the heart of the journo’s craft. Just as mere hack work can’t deliver a decent newspaper, a quick run through the nearest archives won’t produce real scholarship. You need a smell for the story, guts and staying power in both trades.

Peter O’Connor, who teaches at Musashino and Waseda universities, has got printer’s ink in his veins. It shows repeatedly in this thoroughly documented saga that traces how the foreign press in Japan, Korea and on the China coast responded to multiple crises in the Asia-Pacific region through the first half of the 20th century. By examining what he terms competitive press “networks” that pushed contrasting British, American and Japanese versions of events, O’Connor has written a pioneering and important tale.

No other academic has been as brave and diligent in tracking down mildewed copies of long-defunct newspapers. No one else has been able to marry the enormous detail involving dozens of papers and hundreds of journalists - look out for Edgar Snow, the “Missouri Mafia” of China hands and Hugh Byas, the man who wrote “Government by Assassination” - with an ability to place this data in the wider context of changing political fortunes for Japan and its rival powers in our region.

The result is a cracking story. We get suicides, scoops, subsidies,and sleaze galore. Even those lily-white liberals down in Kobe, who printed what Bertrand Russell once reckoned to be “the best weekly journal in the world,” turn out to be receiving backhanders from the Japanese Foreign Ministry before Pearl Harbor. In exchange for dosh, the Kobe Chronicle promised to go easy in its criticism of Imperial Japan’s advance into China, demonstrating that no newspaper is a hero to the unblinkered historian.

Curious Tokyoites will want to follow O’Connor on the chequered history of the Japan Times and check out his stance on the long-debated question of its links to officialdom. Others may note the theme of “international victimization” and the author’s comment that “the world had it in for Japan, whatever it did” in the 1920s and early 1930s. Surely a feature that would reappear in later trade wars and attempts by others to press Japan to revamp its current foreign and defense policies.

Professor O’Connor has delivered the theoretical and detailed goods on what today is trendily known as the global information highway. Journos and historians of east Asia should order their copies pronto. Satisfaction guaranteed.