was the official

news agency A news agency is an organization that gathers news reports and sells them to subscribing news organizations, such as newspapers, magazines and radio and television broadcasters. A news agency may also be referred to as a wire service, newswir ...

of the

Empire of Japan The also known as the Japanese Empire or Imperial Japan, was a historical nation-state and great power that existed from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 until the enactment of the post-World War II Constitution of Japan, 1947 constitu ...

History and development

Dōmei was the end result of years of efforts by Japanese journalists and business leaders to create a national

in Japan that could compete with (and if necessary counter)

Reuters Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world. The agency was esta ...

and other internationally recognized news agencies on a global basis. After the Manchurian Incident of 1931, president Yukichi Iwanaga (岩永裕吉 ''Iwanaga Yūkichi'') of the Nihon Shimbun Rengosha (日本新聞聯合社 Associated Press, or “Rengo”) proposed the merger of his news agency with the Nihon Dempo Tsushinsha (日本電報通信社 Japan Telegraphic News Agency, or “Dentsu”). Despite government backing for the move, the merger was resisted by Dentsu president Hoshio Mitsunaga ( 光永星郎 ''Mitsunaga Hoshio''), who was reluctant to give up control of his company’s lucrative

advertising Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers. It is typically used to promote a ...

business, and by concerns that a merger would threaten his advertising customer base – the provincial newspapers who competed against Rengo. As a compromise, Mitsunaga agreed to split Dentsu, and separate the news agency from the advertising agency. The news agency was reorganized in a merger with Rengo on 28 December 1935 to form the Dōmei Tsūshinsha. During

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

, Dōmei News Agency came under the control of the Ministry of Communications (Japan), a pre-war cabinet level ministry in the Japanese government. Domei maintained a network of offices outside Japan, dispatching reporters to all allied and neutral countries, and was also involved in film and radio work. It also collected news and information from various sources to pass on to the government and military, and produced various works of propaganda aimed at foreign countries. Dōmei issued news to the public that was censored along government-approved lines, and broadcast news in Japanese and in major European languages through an extensive network of

radio station Radio broadcasting is transmission of audio (sound), sometimes with related metadata, by radio waves to radio receivers belonging to a public audience. In terrestrial radio broadcasting the radio waves are broadcast by a land-based radi ...

s in east Asia, Manchukuo and in Japanese-occupied China. It was later authorized by the Japanese military to develop a news network and radio stations in Japanese-occupied

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bor ...

and Malaya. A number of documented incidents from the period around the outbreak of the Pacific War show that on a personal level Dōmei's staff had good relationships with foreign journalists. Under the

Allied occupation of Japan Japan was occupied and administered by the victorious Allies of World War II from the 1945 surrender of the Empire of Japan at the end of the war until the Treaty of San Francisco took effect in 1952. The occupation, led by the United States w ...

Dōmei was disbanded, and its functions divided split between Kyodo News (共同通信社) and

Jiji Press is a news agency in Japan. History Jiji was formed in November 1945 following the breakup of Domei Tsushin, the government-controlled news service responsible for disseminating information prior to and during World War II. Jiji inherited Dom ...

(時事通信社) in 1945 following the end of World War II.

References

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Domei Tsushin News agencies based in Japan Empire of Japan Defunct companies of Japan Dentsu British Malaya in World War II Organizations established in 1935 Organizations disestablished in 1945 1935 establishments in Japan 1945 disestablishments in Japan