A Sixty Year History and Analysis of the Japanese Publishing Industry: A Statistical Analysis of Circulation

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how changes in the social environment of print media have affected the history of the Japanese publishing industry in the postwar period. Data on the circulation of books, magazines, and newspapers are analysed on a population basis. The results of these analyses show that per-capita circulation of these media increased almost monotonically until the 1980s, but then began to decrease after peaking in the 1990s. After conducting statistical correlation analyses, we conclude that per-capita circulation was affected by economic trends indicated by the GDP growth rate. Our analyses also show a positive correlation between the pace of change in per-capita book and magazine circulation, and this reciprocal relationship is investigated in detail.