Japan's Wall Street Journal

The fastest-growing newspaper in Japan is not one of its five giant dailies with circulations of a million or more, but the Wall Street Journal of Japan's business world, Nikon Keizai Shimbun (circ. 850,000).

Like the fast-moving Journal, Nikkei gives most of its editorial space (75%) to business and economic affairs. It also provides its readers a well-edited daily dose of general news. But there the comparison ends.

Art & Haiku. Interspersed with Nikkei's business surveys, stock tables and industry profiles are features that seem to stretch its avowed policy to "inform the public of economic affairs." Each 16-page issue, for example, devotes one page to general news, including crime and the weather, one page to sports, another page to culture. Nikkei's art criticism is rated as the best of any newspaper in Japan. And it even finds room for those familiar staples of all Japanese newspapers : a serialized novel and an assortment of haiku, the classic three-line poem whose origins go back centuries.

But it is as a business paper that Nikkei excels. There are 136 reporters assigned exclusively to economic beats, covering every facet of commerce, including agriculture (68,000 of Nikkei's readers are farmers). The paper keeps correspondents in Hong Kong, New Delhi, Bonn, Paris, London and New York. Key reporters undergo an intensive two-to three-year training program during which they earn the equivalent of a graduate degree.

Zaibatsu & Politics. Tokyo's business journal was born 86 years ago, just after the country itself burst from feudalism with a bang that startled the world. Nikkei's own progress to distinction was by no means as swift. A creation of one of the zaibatsu, or business cartels, that dominated Japan's early industrialization period, Nikkei struggled for years against public apathy. Its proprietors, the Mitsui interests, finally tired of their experiment in 1901, sold the paper to its staff (it remains a staff-owned paper today). When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Nikkei's circulation was an unimpressive 120,000.

But Japan's postwar boom quickened a new national interest in business and financial affairs, and Nikkei at last began to grow. On the sound premise that politics and business are inseparable, Naoji Yorozu, 60, who joined the staff in 1927 and became president in 1956, improved the paper's political coverage -with such success that it is today among the best in Japan. The paper sorted out a recent Cabinet reshuffle with such concise and almost clairvoyant accuracy that it was able to name the next Foreign Minister before any other Tokyo paper.

Yorozu is expansion-minded. The paper is building a $15 million headquarters in Tokyo (completion date: 1964), will come out this fall with an English-language weekly edition that will be printed on rice paper for easy air shipment to the U.S.

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