The Big Tree

In a Tokyo suburb one day last week, near the spot where a sabotaged railroad train had just killed six people, a ramshackle automobile flying a tattered red Rising Sun flag drew up with a screech of brakes. Like the celebrated clown act in the Ringling Bros, circus, nearly a dozen reporters and photographers poured out of the jampacked car. After hastily pitching a brown tent by the roadside as a temporary city room, the journalistic task force spread out to hunt for clues. Asahi (Rising Sun), the Far East's biggest and best newspaper, was out to crack the crime.

Few Japanese doubted that Asahi would succeed. Only five months ago, when escaped War Criminal Shigeyoshi Ikeda had managed to elude all official efforts to recapture him, another Asahi task force tracked him down in less than a week at his hiding place on a remote island off southern Kyushu. This saturation system of covering the news (Asahi has a staff of 1,374 reporters, 4,066 other employees) is one of the reasons why yo-year-old Asahi (circ. 3,610,209) has an even bigger audience than the New York Daily News (circ. 2,254,644), the biggest paper in the U.S.

Another reason for Asahi's success is the interest it takes in its readers' welfare. It underwrites orphan asylums, conducts a free tuberculosis clinic, distributes Christmas presents to the poor, supports the annual All-Japan Baseball Series, has sponsored concert tours by such foreign artists as Violinist Jascha Heifetz. In the 1923 earthquake that wrecked its own Tokyo plant, Asahi raised 2,000,000 yen ($970,000) for disaster relief.

But there is a still bigger reason for Asahi's unique position: its reputation for integrity. Says Chairman of the Board Chu Hasebe: "Asahi is like a big tree. It stands alone and conspicuous, where any wind can find and blow against it. We have had our friends and our enemies, but we have never distorted the facts for either."

Bombs & Bayonets. The man who planted the big tree was Ryuhei Murayama, art collector, patron of the No dance, and, until his death in 1933 at the age of 83, Japan's most vigorous and imaginative publisher. In the 52 years that lean, white-bearded Murayama ran Asahi, he built it up from a struggling lo?al sheet to a national institution with editions in Osaka, Tokyo and Kokura.

He was the first publisher to use rotary presses in Japan, the first to install a newspaper-clipping morgue, the first to run a picture supplement. In 1923, Asahi inaugurated Japan's first regular airmail service--with its own fleet of planes--to link the Osaka and Tokyo editions.

Murayama also gave Asahi such a liberal and antimilitarist tone that nationalist gangsters beat him and bombed his house and, in 1936, soldiers with bayonets invaded Asahi's modernistic seven-story Tokyo offices and assaulted some of his successors. In World War II, the militarists "purged" Asahi, but the interlopers were ousted after Japan's surrender.

The new managing editor of Tokyo Asahi is Makoto Takano, 47, who was free of any war-party taint. Meticulous and scholarly, Editor Takano landed a job with Asahi in 1929 by winning a competitive examination for graduates of Tokyo Imperial University. He recently spent three months in the U.S. as the guest of the New York Times.

Baseball & Blondie. He has plenty of problems. Handset Asahi, which before the war published a ten-page morning newspaper and a six-page evening edition, is now down to two pages because of newsprint rationing. But it still manages to pack in news about the rice shortage, baseball scores, reports on Diet debates, Chic Young's comic strip Blondie (Dagwood and Cookie talk fluent Japanese) and thumbnail-size photographs.

In pre-war Asahi, stories about Emperor Hirohito were cluttered with stilted, formal language; once 100,000 copies were destroyed because a single honorific had been dropped by mistake. Now Editor Takano assigns a task force of nine reporters and seven photographers to get detailed, folksy coverage of the Emperor's doings. Asahi's proud boast: "Any big news not appearing in Asahi is not believed by the general public."

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