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Why the papers are so large, and who gets into the room
Japan's national dailies have long been among the largest-circulation newspapers in the world, and the reason is not that more people read than elsewhere but that almost everybody who reads has it delivered. A 販売店 brings the 朝刊 before breakfast and, where it still exists, the 夕刊 in the late afternoon, on a subscription that renews without anyone thinking about it. That model made the five 全国紙 — 読売, 朝日, 毎日, 日経 and 産経 — enormous, and it is also why their decline since the 2000s has been so steep: a subscription is easy to keep and easy to stop, and nothing replaced it. The other thing to know is the 記者クラブ. Each ministry, agency, police headquarters and big company hosts a press club, and briefings and documents go to its member organizations, which in practice means the established papers and broadcasters. Member journalists get access no outsider gets; freelancers, magazine writers and foreign correspondents have long argued that the arrangement trades access for closeness and is why coverage of a given day can read so similarly across titles. Clubs have opened up somewhat, unevenly, since the 1990s. Read two papers on the same story and you will form your own view.