An English window onto a Japanese-language market
The Japan Times is Japan's oldest English-language daily, covering national news, business, politics, culture and sport for a readership that largely does not read Japanese.
Its usefulness as a data source comes with a scope condition that has to be stated first. Japan's news market is overwhelmingly Japanese-language, with national dailies whose circulation dwarfs any English outlet. An English-language paper is a selection from that market, made with a foreign audience in mind, and it is not a sample of Japanese news in any statistical sense.
That does not make it less valuable - it makes it valuable for different questions. What reaches an international audience, how Japanese events are framed in English, and what a foreign business reader is told are real questions that this source answers directly and that the Japanese-language press cannot.
Section pages respond with substantial content, and everything they and the article pages show can be collected: headline, standfirst, section, topic tags, byline or agency credit, and both timestamps.
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