This essay looks back on more than thirty years of Asahi Shimbun through its circulation figures and its reporting, focusing on a paper that closed the Heisei era with an anti-Abe front page.
Beginning with the fabricated coral article scandal, it sharply questions Asahi’s journalistic posture and its impact on Japanese society.

2019-06-06
Ordinarily, even this single incident alone should have been enough to drive the newspaper out of business, yet at the time Asahi Shimbun boasted a circulation of 8,108,004 for its morning edition and 4,756,037 for its evening edition (ABC data, July–December of Heisei 1).

The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
What Heisei Meant to Asahi.
For Asahi Shimbun, which closed the Heisei era with a morning front page topped by anti-Abe coverage and kept making sarcastic remarks toward the people celebrating the imperial transition, what kind of era can these thirty years be said to have been?
On that same day, its “Soryushi” column said this.
Sa: More than thirty years, many things happened.
Yo: One unforeseen disaster after another.
Na: We were drowned in tears by the Great East Japan Earthquake.
Ra: The decommissioning of nuclear plants cannot be viewed optimistically.
He: The pacifist constitution was reinterpreted and changed.
I: Now even the exercise of collective self-defense.
Se: Regular workers decreased and non-regular workers increased.
I: Before we knew it, we had become a society of disparities.
Re: Through the wasteful finances of successive administrations.
I: The national debt balance now stands at 897 trillion yen.
Wa: The burden was passed on to the younger generation.
He: With a declining population, where is this shrinking country headed?
Reading it made me dizzy.
Not because it pierced my heart.
It was because I felt pity.
It seems that the writer of this “Soryushi,” who remained at the top of the disparity society and in the end was abandoned by the “younger generation,” is entirely unable to see the path his own company has taken over these more than thirty years of Heisei.
So, though it may be meddlesome of me, I decided to look back over more than thirty years of Asahi Shimbun through the figures and through the content of its reporting.
First of all, when I think of Asahi Shimbun’s reporting in Heisei 1, the very first thing that comes to mind is the “fabricated coral article incident.”
This case, also known as the “K.Y. incident,” may not be known to younger readers, so I will write a brief outline of it.
On April 20 of Heisei 1 (1989), an evening edition article with a photograph appeared in Asahi Shimbun under the headline, “Who is K.Y. who damaged the coral?”
The article, which claimed that initials reading “K.Y.” had been carved with a knife into the world’s largest thistle coral in Okinawa, a coral also listed in the Guinness Book, spread with great shock.
It also contained a passage lamenting the decline of Japanese morals, speaking of “the spiritual poverty and desolate hearts of the Japanese people.”
However, in fact, this photograph was part of a malicious fabricated article, shot after an Asahi Shimbun cameraman himself carved the coral with a knife.
Asahi Shimbun’s response until the fabrication was exposed was also abysmal, but I will omit that course of events here.
Any media outlet may make mistakes or publish false reports, but there is surely no other newspaper company that would go so far as to carry out such nonsense in order to demean the Japanese people.
Ordinarily, even this single incident alone should have been enough to drive the newspaper out of business, yet at the time Asahi Shimbun boasted a circulation of 8,108,004 for its morning edition and 4,756,037 for its evening edition (ABC data, July–December of Heisei 1).
To be continued.