Japanese newspapers

In 1862, the Tokugawa shogunate began publishing the Kampan batabiya shinbun, a translated edition of a widely distributed Dutch government newspaper.

The first Japanese daily newspaper that covered foreign and domestic news was the Yokohama Mainichi Shinbun (横浜毎日新聞), first published in 1871.

People commonly referred to Ōshinbun as "political forums" because these papers were inextricably tied to the Popular Rights Movement (自由民権運動, Jiyū minken undō) and its demands for establishing a Diet.

Koshinbun, on the other hand, were more plebeian, popular newspapers that contained local news, human-interest stories, and light fiction.

In the 1880s, government pressure led to a gradual weeding out of Ōshinbun, and the koshinbun started becoming more similar to the modern, "impartial" newspapers.

In the period of growing militarism to the outbreak of total war in the 1930s to the 1940s, newspapers faced intense government censorship and control.

After Japan's defeat, strict censorship of the press continued as the American occupiers used government control in order to inculcate democratic and anti-communist values.

These historical newspapers are available in three major forms, as CD-ROMs, as microfilm, and as shukusatsuban (縮刷版, literally 'reduced-sized print editions').

A much more expensive full-text searchable database is available only at the Harvard-Yenching Library at Harvard University, which notably includes advertisements in its index.