In the study, two leading Japanese newspapers were selected, Yomiuri Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun. Both are daily newspapers that include both morning and evening editions, and they are distributed to subscribers throughout the whole country. The circulation of Yomiuri Shimbun exceeds 9 million copies, which makes it Japan’s largest daily newspaper (Yomiuri Shimbun 2017). The huge readership is recognised by the fact that Guinness World Records credits Yomiuri Shimbun with having the highest circulation rate in the world (Guinness World Records 2017). Asahi Shimbun, on the other hand, has the second largest circulation rate among national daily papers, with approximately 6.8 million copies. Both Yomiuri Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun were first published in the 19th century targeting the general public as readers.
However, the stated position in the editorial pages in Yomiuri Shimbun is centre-right and conservative, whereas Asahi Shimbun is known for its progressive and liberal statements.
The two newspapers were chosen for analyses because of their considerable circulation and national coverage, suggesting that newspapers have an important role in Japanese society. Articles were collected from the full-text online databases Yomidasu Rekishikan for Yomiuri Shimbun and Asahi
6 Part of the work has been collaborated with other researchers. Regarding newspaper analysis on Japanese baby boomers, Assistant Professor Kathrin Komp from the University of Helsinki helped in the early stages of the study by offering advice and technical support. An academic article co-authored with her about the representation of ageing Japanese baby boomers in newspapers is forthcoming. Concerning the Finnish data, doctoral candidate Hilla Kiuru made part of her research data available to me for this study.
Shinbun Kikuzo II Visual for Asahi Shimbun. Due to the unique features of Japanese words, retrieving data required special attention. The Japanese word for the ‘baby boomer’ is ‘dankai’. However, this word originally had an entirely different meaning. The direct English translation of the word is ‘nodule’, which further indicates that it is a word illustrating a bundle of items, goods or people. The word ‘dankai’, or combination of words ‘dankai no sedai’
(generation of dankai), has become prevalent for indicating the baby boomers born in the years 1947–1949, since Taichi Sakaiya wrote a novel in 1976 about the said birth cohorts using the word ‘dankai’ (Sakaiya 2005/1976). Hence, the word nowadays encompasses both original and newly added meanings.
Accordingly, to make the search results correspond to the idea of the baby boom generation, data were retrieved by searching for a combination of the word ‘dankai’ with several Japanese words related to people’s lives, including
‘jinsei’ (life), ‘seikatsu’ (living) and ‘ikikata’ (way of living, lifestyle), and several words relevant to retirement, such as ‘taishoku’ (retirement) and
‘teinen’ (retiring age). The English translation for combined key words are
‘baby boomer AND (life OR living OR way of living OR lifestyle OR retirement OR retiring age)’.
Table 2 shows the development of the data retrieval process in several steps. With the original term ‘dankai’, the search revealed that the number of articles published between 2004 and 2014 was 4,363, many of which did not refer to the baby boom generation. Adding the other search terms narrowed the results down to 2,803 articles, with 1,056 of them identified in Yomiuri Shimbun and 1,747 in Asahi Shimbun, the great majority of which dealt with the baby boomers. In the next step, the retrieved articles were read to determine whether they indeed fell within the scope of the study objectives.
The criteria for selecting an article was whether it described the baby boomers per se, did it discuss issues intended for or related to the baby boomers, or did it explain phenomena influenced by or having an influence on the boomers.
The selected articles needed to meet one of the three criteria. Articles that did not involve any of these indicators were omitted from further analysis. Of articles introducing newly published books about the baby boomers, only those including book reviews were selected. Duplication of retrieval was removed. This manual scrutiny deleted 1,694 articles, leaving a total of 1,109 newspaper articles discussing the topic of the baby boomers.
Table 2. Number of retrieved articles by search word and newspaper, 2004–2014
Newspapers
Yomiuri Asahi Total
Search word: dankai (=baby boomer)
1717 2647 4364
Combined search words:
baby boomer and (life or living or way of living or lifestyle or retirement or retiring age)
1056 1747 2803
Relevant articles for the
study 474 635 1109
The spread in the range of articles in the two Japanese newspapers is displayed in Table 3. Domestic news, which constituted nearly 62 per cent of the total articles, included political and economic news, societal issues and topics related to daily living. Approximately 18 per cent of the articles have been classified as editorials, comment articles and opinion pieces. While comment articles are articles in which newspaper journalists comment on topical issues in line with the standpoint of that particular paper, opinion pieces express personal views on various topics written by newspaper journalists, external experts and readers.
Table 3. Distribution of articles by type in Japanese newspapers
Type of article Share in the total articles (%)
Domestic news 61.7
Opinion pieces 10.6
Feature articles 8.4
Comment articles 5.2
Arts and culture news 4.9
Interviews 4.5
Editorials 2.4
Book reviews 1.5
International news 0.7
Total (N (%)) 1109 (100.0)