The best way to find news from Japan is as below. Let us know if
there is a better way.
1. Go to the Wall Street Journal Interactive's homepage for a free database search for over 6,000 publications, including the Asahi Evening News, the Daily Yomiuri, the Mainichi Daily News and other publications/newswires from Japan. This is part of the limited access service to Dow Jones Interactive's databases, and you have to have chosen free registration, instead of regular paid subscription. (To do free registration, try any recent article search in "The Wall Street Journal" or "The Top Business Publications" (situated on the right top of the homepage), and you will find an "register or login" option to click.) A keyword search brings you a list of articles with first 3 lines of each article. The Asahi Evening News has articles since 12/02/96, the Daily Yomiuri since 2/20/95, the Mainichi Daily News since 6/11/97. If you click an interesting article on the search output, you can read its full text. Then you pay $2.95 per article.
2. After searching Dow Jones Interactive, go to the Japan Times site. They have articles since January 1996, piled up chronologically with a calendar-like selection system. You can read full texts for free. They don't offer a keyword search. But with information you got from Dow Jones Interactive, you can figure out what news you expect on which date.
3. For those of you who read Japanese, the following Japanese newspaper
sites offer free database search, three of which with free full text access.
Saga
Shimbun, one of the three full text databas newspapers, is particularly
interesting because it has local as well as national news provided by Kyodo
Newswire. Okinawa
Times also provides substantial national news coverage. (Newspapers
in Okinawa seem to be active in reporting mainland news.) The other
full text database is Shimotsuke Shimbun, based in Tochigi Prefecture.
Another interesting site is Japan Press
Index, operated by Kyodo News. The site provides aggregated search
for 43 regional and local newspapers. The special beauty of it is you can
read full text articles from newspapers which do not provide archive databases
on their own sites.
List of Free Newspaper Databases in Japan
(As of 4/99)
National Papers and News:
Mainichi Shimbun http://www.mainichi.co.jp/old-news/index.html
Nonsearchable articles since 8/95
Japan Times http://www.mainichi.co.jp/old-news/index.html
Nonsearchable articles since 1/96
Kyodo News http://www.kyodo.co.jp/cgi-bin/newssearch/go
Searchable database since 12/98
Japan Press Index http://jpi.kyodo.co.jp/JPI/JPI.html
Aggregated Searchable database for 43 regional and local newspapers
+ FULL TEXT access to some articles
Regional Papers:
Hokkaido Shimbun http://search.hokkaido-np.co.jp/
Searchable database since 12/28/98
Kahoku Shimpo http://www.kahoku.co.jp/news/newsdb.htm
Nonsearchable articles since 1/99
Nishi-Nihon Shimbun http://www.nishinippon.co.jp/DB/DB_news2.html
Searchable database since 12/28/98
Local Papers (partial list):
Kushiro Shimbun http://www.hokkai.or.jp/senshin/index.html
Nonsearchable articles since 1/96
Iwate Nippo http://www.iwate-np.co.jp/
Nonsearchable articles since 8/97
Shimotsuke Shimbun http://so.lancenet.or.jp/cgi-bin/web-db/wsr0
Searchable database since 9/95 + free FULL TEXT access
Chiba Nippo http://www.cyberlink.co.jp/chibanippo/news-box/news-box.html
Nonsearchable articles since 6/97
Niigata Nippo http://www.niigata-inet.or.jp/nippo/bak/bak.html
Nonsearchable sumarries since 8/96
Yamaguchi Shimbun http://www.minato-yamaguchi.co.jp/yama/digest/ysearch.html
Searchable articles since 1/98
Shikoku Shimbun http://www.shikoku-np.co.jp/html/newsfind/c_calendar/todaycal.htm
Nonsearchable articles since 1/97
Saga Shimbun http://www.saga-s.co.jp/pubt/ShinDB/search.html
Searchable database since 1/1994 + FULL TEXT access
Okinawa Times http://db.okinawatimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/search.pl
Searchable database since 1/97 + FULL TEXT access
4. Most of the American newspapers provide free access to their archive databases. Many of them provide full text access. Bigger newspapers and West Coast newspapers have some coverage on Japan and Asia.
List of Major American Newspaper Databases
(As of March 1999)
Articles
starts from Search Full Text
(Year)
Baltimore Sun
90 free free up to 2 weeks ago
Boston Globe
80 free Day:$2.95/article, Night:$1.50/a
Chicago Tribune
85 free $1.95/article
Detroit News
97 free free
Houston Chronicle
85 free free
Los Angeles Times
90 free $1.50/article
Miami Herald
82 free $1.95/article
Minneapolis Star Tribune
90 free free up to 3 weeks ago
New York Times
(past 1 year) free $2.50/article
Philadelphia Inquirer
78 free $1.95/article
San Francisco Chronicle
95 free free
San Francisco Examiner
95 free free
Seattle Times
96 free free
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
88 free free
USA Today
87 free $1.00/article
Wall Street Journal
84 free free
Washington Post
86 free free up to 2 weeks ago
I am amazed at what extensive information a publishing company can provide. With the article database from more than 6,000 publications, the Dow Johns Interactive easily surpasses some of the smaller commercial databases provided by/at American public libraries (No commercial database access at Japanese public libraries). Dow Johns does not do that for altruism. It is their sales promotion. If more people come to use their free search, more people will pay for downloading full texts.
Here I see a challenge to the public library. In the print media age, we needed to build many buildings (libraries) all around the nation with tons of books distributed to every remote corner on the land. That costly project was only done by the public sector. But with a ubiquitous global network of the Internet, publishing companies themselves can easily distribute information around the nation and world. Without total reliance on the government sector, they may be able to provide a minimum level of universal information service, which was done only by pulbic libraries in the print media era. Corporations may do that as their corporate citizen services or just as sales promotion tactics.
Not just corporations. Citizens, nonprofits, government agencies all can provide information directly to the global market place on the Internet. The Internet itself could be becoming a huge global library. What is the role of building-based libraries?