Closing The Shop

How is the relationship between the Japanese state and Japanese society mediated by the press? Does the pervasive system of press clubs, and the regulations underlying them, alter or even censor the way news is reported in Japan? Who benefits from the press club system? And who loses? Here Laurie Anne Freeman examines the subtle, highly interconnected relationship between journalists and news sources in Japan. Beginning with a historical overview of the relationship between the press, politics, and the public, she describes how Japanese press clubs act as "information cartels," limiting competition among news organizations and rigidly structuring relations through strict rules and sanctions. She also shows how the web of interrelations extends into, and is reinforced by, media industry associations and business groups (keiretsu). Political news and information are conveyed to the public in Japan, but because of institutional constraints, they are conveyed in a highly delimited fashion that narrows the range of societal inquiry into the political process. Closing the Shop shows us how the press system in Japan serves as neither a watchdog nor a lapdog. Nor does the state directly control the press in ways Westerners might think of as censorship. The level of interconnectedness, through both official and unofficial channels, helps set the agenda and terms of political debate in Japan's mass media to an extent that is unimaginable to many in the United States and other advanced industrial democracies. This fascinating look at Japan's information cartels provides a critical but often overlooked explanation for the overall power and autonomy enjoyed by the Japanese state.

Considers (72) S. 1202.

Considers (71) S. 2212.

This book presents the Ph.D. dissertation of Ilaria Canavotto. The thesis won the E.W. Beth Dissertation Prize in 2021 for outstanding dissertations in the fields of logic, language, and information. It combines modal logics of agency, counterfactuals, and norms in order to study the reasoning underlying ascriptions of causal responsibility, the responsibility an agent is subject to because of the states of affairs they have brought about. Ascriptions of causal responsibility involve both causal reasoning and normative reasoning. In order to provide a logical analysis of these components, the dissertation brings together two mainstream logics of actions, STIT (seeing to it that) logic and Propositional Dynamic Logic, and extends them with an analysis of causality, a Lewis-Stalnaker style analysis of counterfactuals, subject matter semantics, and deontic logic. The author uses the resulting logics to investigate a number of philosophical issues underlying ascriptions of causal responsibility and technical issues emerging from the unification of the above-mentioned formal frameworks.

The distribution of food played a considerable yet largely unrecognized role in the economic history of Victorian and Edwardian Britain. In the midst of rapid urbanization and industrialization, retail competition intensified and the channels by which food made it to the market became vital to the country's economic success. Illustrating the pivotal importance of food distribution in Britain between 1830 and 1914, The Social Cost of Cheap Food argues that labour exploitation in the distribution system was the key to cheap food. Through an analysis of labour dynamics and institutional changes in the distributive sector, Sébastien Rioux demonstrates that economic development and the rising living standards of the working class were premised upon the growing insecurity and chronic poverty of street sellers, shop assistants, and small shopkeepers. Rioux reveals that food distribution, far from being a passive sphere of economic activity, provided a dynamic space for the reduction of food prices. Positing food distribution as a core element of social and economic development under capitalism, The Social Cost of Cheap Food reflects on the transformation of the labour market and its intricate connection to the history of food and society.