The Asahi Shimbun

• 1. Introduction

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  The Asahi Shimbun first appeared on the 25th of January 1879, sold for one sen a copy, and fit everything it had to say on four pages. That single sen was a hundredth of a yen, barely more than a token, and yet it bought a paper that would grow into one of the largest circulating newspapers anywhere on earth. Nearly a century and a half later, its morning edition reaches more than three million readers. How does a four-page illustrated sheet from Osaka become a national institution, a lightning rod for controversy, and a paper whose reporters sometimes made the news they were supposed to be covering?

• 2. A Paper Built in Osaka

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  Kimura Noboru served as company president when the Asahi opened its first office at Minami-dori, Edobori in Osaka, with a staff of twenty people and a founding circulation of approximately three thousand copies. Two founding partners joined him: an owner whose name the record preserves alongside him, and Tsuda Tei as managing editor. On the 13th of September 1879, just months after the first edition, the paper ran its first editorial.

  Ueno Riichi came on as co-owner in 1881, the same year the Asahi shifted to an all-news format. Financial support from the Government and from Mitsui followed from 1882 onward, and under the joint leadership of Ueno, whose brother worked inside Mitsui, and Murayama, the paper began climbing toward national reach. The Tokyo edition launched on the 10th of July 1888 from an office at Motosukiyacho, Kyobashi. Its first issue was numbered No. 1,076, because it incorporated three small existing papers: Jiyu no Tomoshibi, Tomoshibi Shimbun, and Mesamashi Shimbun.

  On the 1st of October 1908, the Osaka and Tokyo operations merged into a single company, Asahi Shimbun Goshi Kaisha, capitalized at approximately 600,000 yen. That consolidation locked in the structure that would carry the paper through war, occupation, and the digital age.

• 3. Natsume Soseki and the Literary Moment

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  On the 1st of April 1907, Natsume Soseki, then forty-one years old, walked away from his teaching posts at Tokyo Imperial University to join the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun. He had just published Wagahai wa Neko de Aru, known in English as I Am a Cat, and Botchan, and those novels had made him the center of literary attention in Japan. His move to the paper was not a retreat from literature. It was a recognition that a newspaper with national ambitions needed writers who could anchor cultural life, not just report on it. Soseki's presence at the Asahi gave the paper a literary gravity that outlasted his years on staff and deepened its reputation among educated readers.

• 4. War, Suppression, and Complicity

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  In 1918, government authorities suppressed an article in the Osaka Asahi during the Rice Riots, targeting the paper's critical stance toward Prime Minister Terauchi Masatake's cabinet. The suppression worked. The paper's liberal views softened, and many staff reporters resigned in protest. That retreat proved to be a turning point toward something darker.

  From the latter half of the 1930s, Asahi ardently backed Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe's wartime government under Editor in Chief Taketora Ogata. Ogata was a leading member of the Genyosha, an ultranationalist group formed in 1881 by Toyama Mitsuru that drew in organized crime figures and far-right politicians. Among Ogata's close associates was Koki Hirota, who was later hanged as a Class A war criminal. Hirota chaired the committee for Toyama's funeral; Ogata served as vice-chairman.

  Influential editorial writers at the Asahi were not bystanders. Shintaro Ryu, Hiroo Sassa, and Hotsumi Ozaki were core members of the Showa Kenkyukai, a political think tank advising Konoe. Ozaki was also an informant for the Soviet spy Richard Sorge. Sassa went further still, aligning with far-right generals of the Kodoka, or Imperial Way Faction, who had been involved in the assassinations of former Finance Minister Junnosuke Inoue, Mitsui zaibatsu chairman Baron Dan Takuma, and Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi. In 1944, that same faction attempted to assassinate Prime Minister Hideki Tojo.

  On the 9th of April 1937, Asahi sponsored a more public kind of spectacle. A Mitsubishi aircraft called the Kamikaze, flown by Masaaki Iinuma, arrived in London, becoming the first Japanese-built plane to fly to Europe. The Western world took notice. The paper had wrapped its wartime nationalism inside an aviation triumph.

  On the 1st of January 1943, the government shut down the Asahi's publication after the paper ran a critical essay by Seigo Nakano, himself a prominent Genyosha member and close to Ogata. The shutdown lasted until Nakano's essay could be dealt with. On the 5th of November 1945, with the war over, the Asahi's president and senior executives resigned en masse, accepting collective responsibility for how the paper had compromised its own principles.

• 5. Postwar Reinvention

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  On the 21st of November 1946, the Asahi adopted the modern kana usage system, shin kanazukai, signaling a deliberate turn toward the postwar order. A few years later, on the 30th of November 1949, the paper began publishing Sazae-san, a serialized cartoon strip drawn by Machiko Hasegawa. That strip became a landmark of Japan's postwar popular culture.

  Between 1954 and 1971, the Asahi published a glossy, large-format annual in English called This is Japan, projecting a curated image of the country outward. The paper also entered a partnership with the International Herald Tribune that produced an English-language daily, the International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun, running from April 2001 until February 2011. That venture replaced an earlier English-language daily, the Asahi Evening News. The partnership ended in 2010 because of unprofitability; the paper shifted English-language readers to the Asia and Japan Watch online portal. A separate collaboration with the Tribune, now called The International New York Times, continued through a glossy magazine called Aera English, aimed at Japanese readers learning English.

  The Asahi Prize, established in 1929, became a formal institution in 1992 when it transferred to the Asahi Shimbun Foundation. It recognizes achievements in scholarship or the arts that have made a lasting contribution to Japanese culture or society.

• 6. Controversies That Shook the Newsroom

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  On the 27th of September 1950, an Asahi reporter published what appeared to be a solo interview with Ritsu Ito, a Japanese Communist Party executive then in hiding. The interview was later shown to be a fabrication by the reporter himself.

  In the evening edition of the 20th of April 1989, an article described damage to the world's largest Azami coral in a protected sea area near Okinawa, with the scratched initials "KY" as evidence of human vandalism. Local divers who doubted the story investigated and found that the Asahi's own photographer had made the scratches to manufacture an article. President Toichiro Hitotsuyanagi resigned to take responsibility. The episode became known as the KY case.

  In August 2014, the Asahi retracted articles from the 1980s and 1990s that had relied on the testimony of Seiji Yoshida about the forcible recruitment of comfort women. The paper reaffirmed in its retraction that women had been coerced into serving as sexual partners for Japanese soldiers, while also noting that no official documents had been found directly proving forcible recruitment by the military in Korea or Taiwan. Conservative media and the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe used the retraction to argue that the broader history had been fabricated, a position the paper rejected.

  The same mid-September 2014 period brought a second crisis. The Asahi's Special Reports Section, called the Tokubetsu Hodobu, had published a firsthand account by Masao Yoshida, the plant manager at Fukushima Daiichi during the March 2011 triple meltdown. The testimony, kept hidden by government investigators, said that 90 percent of the plant's employees had left despite Yoshida's instructions to stay, and that Yoshida believed the instructions had not reached them in the chaos. The headline the Asahi ran stated that workers had evacuated in violation of the manager's orders. Journalist Ryusho Kadota, who had previously interviewed Yoshida and plant workers, criticized the paper for implying cowardice when many in Japan viewed those workers as heroes. The Yomiuri Shimbun, Sankei Shimbun, Kyodo News, and NHK all obtained the same testimony and used it to attack the Asahi rather than illuminate the disaster. President Tadakazu Kimura resigned. The reporters responsible were punished, the Special Reports Section was reduced in size, and many of its members were reassigned. Two of its top reporters later left to found the Waseda Chronicle, subsequently renamed Tokyo Investigative Newsroom Tansa, one of Japan's first non-profit organizations dedicated to investigative journalism.

• 7. Political Stance and Public Trust

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  The Asahi Shimbun has been called the intellectual flagship of Japan's political left, with a long tradition of investigating political scandals more aggressively than its conservative counterparts. The paper is critical of right-wing nationalism and leans progressive on cultural and diplomatic questions, while taking a neoliberal stance on economic issues. That economic orientation separates it from the Mainichi Shimbun, which holds a relatively Keynesian position. In general terms, the Asahi represents the viewpoint of Japanese social-liberals.

  The paper has consistently defended Japan's postwar constitution, and specifically Article 9, which bars the use of war to settle disputes. It opposed the 2014 reinterpretation of the anti-war provision that allowed Japan's Self-Defense Forces to assist an ally under attack, the so-called right of collective self-defense.

  According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report for 2018, public trust in the Asahi ranked lowest among the five largest Japanese newspapers, with a score of 5.35 compared to 5.68 for the Sankei Shimbun. Further analysis from the institute found that the distrust was driven heavily by sharp criticism from Japan's political right. Trust was declining across all major Japanese papers at that time, not only at the Asahi. The paper's registered circulation as of June 2025 stood at 3.26 million for its morning edition and 892,295 for its evening edition, placing it second in Japan behind the Yomiuri Shimbun and second in the world by print circulation. Its digital reach trails many global papers, including The New York Times.