Mainichi Shimbun

• 1. Introduction

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  Mainichi Shimbun has been printing daily newspapers in Japan since 1872, making it one of the oldest surviving daily papers in the country. It runs twice a day across several local editions, operates an English-language news website, and publishes a bilingual weekly magazine called Mainichi Weekly, along with a separate weekly news magazine called Sunday Mainichi. It sits alongside the Asahi Shimbun, the Yomiuri Shimbun, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun as one of just four national newspapers in all of Japan.

  But what does it mean to be a national newspaper in a country where the press is intensely competitive? And how does a paper that can claim a Pulitzer Prize also find itself issuing a public apology for content it admits should never have been published? Those contradictions are at the heart of what Mainichi Shimbun actually is. The paper's history involves two founding companies, a wartime merger, a celebrated photograph of an assassination, and a column written by an Australian journalist that eventually provoked a national controversy. Each of those threads tells a different story about the paper's place in Japanese public life.

• 2. Two Roots, One Masthead

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  Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun was founded in 1872, four years before the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun came into existence in 1876. These were two distinct newspapers, born in two different cities, serving two different readerships. They merged in 1911, but even then the two companies continued printing their papers under separate identities. It took until 1943 for both editions to finally appear under a single Mainichi Shimbun masthead.

  The Tokyo office did not stay in Yurakucho. In 1966, it relocated to Takebashi. The Osaka office followed a similar path, moving from Dojima to Nishi-Umeda in 1992. These are not small logistical footnotes. They signal how a paper that started as two separate regional institutions gradually consolidated into a single national organisation with a unified physical presence in Japan's two largest cities.

  Today, Mainichi employs around 3,200 people working across 364 offices inside Japan and 26 bureaus overseas. It has 79 associated companies, among them Tokyo Broadcasting System and Mainichi Broadcasting System, though the paper does not hold majority ownership in either broadcaster.

• 3. A Pulitzer in Tokyo

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  In 1960, a photograph taken by a Mainichi Shimbun photographer captured the assassination of Inejiro Asanuma, chairman of the Japan Socialist Party. The image was titled "Tokyo Stabbing." It won a Pulitzer Prize, making Mainichi the only Japanese newspaper company ever to receive that award.

  The Japan Newspapers Association, a body made up of 180 news organisations, has awarded its Grand Prix to Mainichi on 21 separate occasions. The association has been giving out that prize since 1957, and no other newspaper has won it more frequently. That record places Mainichi in a distinct position among Japanese press institutions, recognised not just by international judges but repeatedly by its domestic peers as well.

• 4. The WaiWai Controversy

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  Australian journalist Ryann Connell wrote a column called WaiWai for the Mainichi Daily News. The column translated and adapted stories from Japanese tabloids, and it carried a disclaimer from the 19th of September 2002 onward: the Mainichi Daily News stated explicitly that it could not be held responsible for the original articles and did not guarantee their accuracy. Despite that disclaimer, content from the column was picked up and reported as fact by blogs and foreign media outlets.

  In April and May 2008, an organised campaign against WaiWai appeared on Japanese internet forums, including the major platform 2channel. Critics accused the column of spreading a racist stereotype of Japanese women as sexual deviants through its coverage of incest, bestiality, and debauchery. On the 20th of June, a news site called J-CAST covered the story publicly. The Mainichi editorial board responded by deleting controversial articles and restricting archive access, but the column itself remained in the Sunday Mainichi print edition at that stage.

  On the 21st of June, Mainichi's Digital Media Division shut down WaiWai entirely. The paper also announced it would severely punish the head of the Digital Media Division, the manager responsible for the column, and the editor involved with the stories. On the 25th of June, Mainichi apologised publicly to readers of the Mainichi Daily News. Some advertisers pulled their advertising from Mainichi's Japanese-language site in response to the campaign.

  The consequences were formal and specific. On the 28th of June 2008, Mainichi announced its punitive measures. Connell, who was not named in the announcement, received three months of disciplinary leave. Other personnel involved were either docked between 10 and 20 percent of their salary or stripped of their titles for periods of one to two months. On the 20th of July 2008, Mainichi released the findings of an internal investigation. The paper announced it would reorganise the MDN Editorial Department on the 1st of August with a new chief editor, and relaunch the site on the 1st of September as a more news-oriented operation. In its statement, the paper said: "We continued to post articles that contained incorrect information about Japan and indecent sexual content. These articles, many of which were not checked, should not have been dispatched to Japan or the world. We apologize deeply for causing many people trouble and for betraying the public's trust in the Mainichi Shimbun."

• 5. Racial Profiling Exposed

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  On the 30th of April 2024, Mainichi published an investigation into racial profiling by Japanese police departments. The reporting found that numerous departments had high rates of incidents involving profiling against foreigners. Since 2022, the number of people filing police brutality complaints against Japan's National Police Agency had grown rapidly.

  One former officer inspector from a prefecture in western Japan, speaking under the pseudonym Taro Yamada, told the newspaper that senior officers had given explicit orders to target foreigners for questioning, ID checks, and searches. Yamada described the attitudes he encountered among fellow officers: "People with Black roots, Southeast Asians and so on study ways to kill people. So use your service revolver if you have to! You have no idea what they're going to do." He also described how officers approached an area with many Korean residents, saying colleagues believed they needed to be careful "because there's no telling what they'll do."

  Yamada drew a clear distinction in how officers perceived different groups of foreigners. In his account, people of European descent were typically assumed to be tourists or to have a Japanese partner, while people with darker skin were routinely assumed to be visa overstayers. That asymmetry, documented through a whistleblower inside the police system, represented a significant piece of accountability journalism from a paper that traces its identity to the democratic press culture of the Meiji period.

• 6. Sponsorship and Cultural Reach

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  Mainichi hosts cultural events and sporting competitions in a pattern common among major Japanese newspaper companies. Among its most prominent sponsorships is the Senbatsu High School Baseball Tournament, held every spring at Koshien Stadium. The paper also sponsors non-professional baseball tournaments held every summer at Tokyo Dome, a venue that replaced the earlier Korakuen Stadium, and at the end of autumn in the Osaka Dome.

  On the road-running side, Mainichi sponsors several prominent annual competitions, including the Lake Biwa Marathon and the Beppu-Oita Marathon. These are not minor local races. Both are serious competitive events on the Japanese distance running calendar, and the paper's involvement in them extends Mainichi's public presence well beyond the newsroom and into the rhythms of Japanese athletic life.