‘Newspaper in Education’ in Rural Japan: Education and local identity creation in the practice of locally scholastic NIE

In addition to its role in news dispersal, the newspaper has been cited for its potential in both education and identity creation and confirmation. This paper will examine the Newspaper in Education columns in a rural Japanese setting, revealing how these columns, while framed toward education, also address local identity creation through what is termed ‘locally scholastic’ content. The Newspaper in Education (NIE) practice is dated in America to the 1930s and in Japan to 1988. This paper will briefly outline the NIE concept and general NIE activities in Japan before hypothesizing the role of NIE in local identity creation and presenting a case study of NIE columns from two newspapers in Aomori Prefecture, Japan — one prefecture-wide and the other a local newspaper — over the period from January to May, 2002. The examination used a team of native-speaker readers in order to establish the readability and balance of ‘scholastic’ versus ‘local’ content and orientation of the columns. This paper ultimately contextualizes how the NIE columns of these two newspapers contribute to both education and local identity creation in this rural Japan setting.