COMMUNICATION MEDIA IN JAPAN - ECONOMIC AND REGIONAL ASPECTS

This article deals with economic and regional aspects of information distribution in Japan. It presents results of empirical analyses on a database derived from national censuses on information distribution. It reveals increasing costs per unit of distributed information for mass telecommunication and information transport media, and decreasing costs for many electronic personal communication media. It recognizes a widening of existing gaps between information production and consumption. Regarding regional disparities in communication, at the subscriber level a relatively low gap in telephone traffic between leading and lagging prefectures is observed. However, the overall regional telephone disparity is found to have decreased only slightly in recent years.