ABSTRACT
By following the paths of history, this chapter identifies two reasons why PR is underdeveloped in Japan, a country with third largest economy in the world. One is the large power of advertising agencies. As a result of the ad agency giant Dentsu’s introduction of public relations to Japan after WWII, public relations was positioned as a sub-section of marketing, becoming a field managed by ad agencies. Another is the lack of demand for professionalism. Because of the systems of human resource management, recruiting (simultaneous recruiting for new graduates) and job rotation in particular, many fields, including public relations, lacked university-level professional education.
