Bigger & Better than Anyone

Along the banks of Tokyo's Tama River, battalions of leathery Japanese laborers are busy transforming a 1,000-acre site into the greatest fun-farm since Disneyland. When it is completed in 1964 at a cost of $20 million, it will feature two 18-hole golf courses, a chain of fish-stocked ponds, an artificial 50-ft. waterfall, a 725-ft. ski run sprinkled with synthetic "ever-snow," a marine theater for bubbly underwater revues, an open-air music bowl seating 5000, a 120-ft. parachute jump, even an orchard where customers will be able to pluck fresh fruit right off the trees. It is an almost absurdly grandiose undertaking, but egg-bald Publisher Matsutaro Shoriki, 78, who dreamed it up, is not used to doing anything on a scale smaller than cosmic. "The people of Japan," says Shoriki, "expect Shoriki to do things bigger and better than anyone else."

Pray Boru! Immodest as his words may sound, Shoriki is right. His optometrists consider him terribly myopic, but time after time he has proved himself dazzlingly farsighted. In the 1930s he introduced besuboru to Japan by bringing Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmy Foxx and Lefty O'Doul to the Orient for a barnstorming tour. An ultranationalist fanatic later hefted a broadsword and hacked a 16-in. scar into the left side of his head for permitting foreigners like the Bambino to desecrate sacred Meiji Stadium, but Shoriki went on to form Japan's first professional baseball league. In the early '50s he popularized television by planting 220 receivers in key public areas, soon had so many sponsors clamoring for broadcast time that he turned a profit the very first year. Despite gales of protest from Hiroshima-haunted citizens, he pioneered a drive to supplement Japan's insufficient coal and hydroelectric resources by harnessing the power of the dread atom.

On top of all that, Shoriki is also Japan's biggest newspaper publisher. The Yomiuri, a dying daily with a circulation of 40,000 when he bought it with borrowed money in 1924, is now tops in Tokyo, with 2,440,000.* His Hochi Shimbun (circ. 600,000) is the country's biggest sports daily. With two other dailies and three magazines, Shoriki's empire grossed $74.5 million last year, and though post-tax profits were a rice-paper-thin $550,000, he had no complaint. Shoriki's television ventures in Tokyo and Osaka netted $2,300,000, while his horse-racing and golf-course enterprises and his Yomiuri Giants batted in another $1,000,000.

No Hara-Kiri. After graduating from Tokyo University in 1911 with a degree in German law, Shoriki flunked the civil service exam that would have opened the way to a government career; he joined the Tokyo police force instead. By 1924 he was a deputy police chief, but that year he was sacked in disgrace after having inadequately guarded the prince regent (now Emperor Hirohito) during a botched assassination attempt.

In an earlier age hara-kiri would have been required after such an incident, but Shoriki went out and bought Yomiuri instead. Though friends warned that he was committing financial suicide, Shoriki hypoed the sluggish paper with such Western-style circulation builders as a radio section, women's pages, a mah-jongg column, race results and color comics. He eliminated all ads from the front page, a revolutionary step. Fascinated with the successful sensationalism of William Randolph Hearst (he is sometimes called "the Hearst of Japan"), he once had two gas-masked staffers descend 1,250 ft. into the bubbling, sulphurous crater of the active Mihara Volcano on Oshima Island, a favorite lovers' leap, to photograph the bodies of suicides. By 1936 Yomiuri was Tokyo's biggest paper.

Because of his editorial support of Tojo, Shoriki was jailed in grim, dank Sugamo Prison for 21 months after World War II as a war crimes suspect. But he was never charged with an offense or brought to trial. After occupation authorities removed him from their "purge" list in 1951, he resumed open direction of his paper. By sponsoring successful exhibitions of Matisse, Picasso and Van Gogh, a Yomiuri Symphony Orchestra, and an "Atoms-for-Peace" display that drew 360,000 visitors, Shoriki managed to keep the names Yomiuri--and Shoriki--before the public. In 1955 he won a seat in Japan's Diet as an independent; one year later he was being mentioned as a dark-horse candidate for Premier. But the brambly publisher had made too many enemies in his career. He had to settle for a Cabinet job as Japan's first Commissioner of Atomic Energy.

At the Helm. "In the Far East." says Hearst Columnist Bob Considine, "whenever editors speak of the great press lords of our age, they often mention Hearst and sometimes Beaverbrook. But they always mention Shoriki." Not that Shoriki has to rely on anyone else to mention him. Yomiuri faithfully records all of his activities, and his personal publicity corps has standing orders to invite all visiting VIPs to meet him for a headline-making chat and photos.

"I control the entire operation," says Shoriki of his role as chairman of Nippon Television, but that goes for his other operations as well. "No one questions my authority or my policies," he says. "And why? Because everyone knows that the company can't go wrong with Shoriki at the helm."

* Far behind in Tokyo are the Asahi, with 1,590,000, and the Mainichi, with 1,230,000, though both boast larger nationwide circulations than the Yomiuri Shimbun (yomiuri means "reading for sale"; shimbun means "newspaper"), which got a much later start in other cities. Asahi sells 3,990,000 papers a day all over Japan, Mainichi 3,700,000, Yomiuri 3,600,000.

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