This study explores the role that news coverage plays in the allocation of Japanese development aid. Conceptually, it is expected that democratic foreign policy officials, including those working in bureaucratic governmental structures will try to match the magnitude of their actions with what they expect is the public's perception of the importance of the recipient. News media salience serves an easily accessible indicator of that domestic political importance and, in the case of foreign aid, this suggests that higher levels of news coverage of a less-developed country will lead to higher aid commitments. The statistical analysis demonstrates that the level of news coverage is a statistically significant factor in Japanese aid distributions. More significantly, the analysis demonstrates that separating grant aid from other forms of aid is critical for the empirical examination of the determinants of Japanese aid.Foreign aid allocations are generally explained in terms of international politics or state-centric models of foreign policy. Comparative analyses have demonstrated that aid allocations tend to reflect the international political roles and interests of individual aid donors (see, for example, Schraeder, Hook, and Taylor (1998);Meernik, Krueger, and Poe (1998);Noël and Thérien (1995);Hook (1995);Lumsdaine (1993);and McKinlay (1979)). Studies of how foreign policy influences from sources other than the international political arena affect foreign aid allocations are underrepresented in the scholarly literature on foreign aid. Moreover, despite differences in national aid programs and the well-known political differences between the various donor states,