Around the world newspapers are having a rough time as circulation continues to drop, thanks in part to the changes brought on by the Internet. This isn’t really the case in Japan, where circulation at newspapers still remains high, around 10 million for the Daily Yomiuri and 8 million for Asahi Shimbun. Part of the reason for the relative health of the industry is related to how connected the large media companies are to everyone’s lives here: Yomiuri, for example, also owns the Nippon TV broadcasting company and the Tokyo Giants. Also, newspapers sell for a higher price in Japan, $2 for the daily editions, making Japanese newspapers less dependent on advertising for profits. Finally, they benefit from people like my father-in-law who gets five newspapers each day, including three dedicated sports newspapers. While I like to sit back with a paper occasionally, I get most of my news from the net thanks to RSS feeds, which make it easy to follow just the information you want from news sites, blogs and other sources of information using dedicated RSS readers or services like Google Reader. (J-List also has an extensive RSS feed system too, allowing you to automatically view all updated products on the entire site, view new bento items only, and so on.)
