Japan’s Citizen Kane: A media mogul whose extraordinary life still shapes his country, for good and ill

In its year-end double issue, The Economist has an interesting short biography of Matsutaro Shoriki, the long-time owner of Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's most popular newspaper, and the founder of a media empire, which includes Japan's largest private TV network. Mr. Shoriki also was a founder of Japan's leading conservative political party, the LDP, and the founder of its best professional baseball franchise, the Yomiuri Giants.

Here is an excerpt regarding the time Shoriki brought Babe Ruth to Japan:

The melding of commercial pragmatism with ideological dogma shaped much of Shoriki’s career. But another factor also defined the second half of his life: his relationship with America.

Baseball was its first manifestation. Shoriki was no baseball fan, but he knew he could use the sport to sell newspapers. The trouble was that Japan had no professional baseball teams. So, on the advice of a rival newspaper proprietor, he set out to bring Babe Ruth, the legendary Yankees slugger, to Tokyo. At first, Ruth was too busy: he did not join the all-star team that came out to Japan to play for capacity crowds in 1931. But in 1934, past his prime and noticeably overweight, he finally arrived.

It was a tense time, both within Japan and in its diplomacy. Soldiers burning with fascist zeal were assassinating government moderates in a bid to rekindle the traditional “spirit” of Nippon. The visit was controversial, coming just as Japan appeared to be turning its back on the outside world. But Shoriki’s intuition worked: ordinary Japanese went mad for Ruth and his team. Tens of thousands packed the streets of Ginza to see them parade in open-top cars. People thronged the Meiji stadium to watch them play, most barely minding (though Shoriki did) that the home sides usually lost.

Ordinary Japanese went mad for Ruth and his team. Tens of thousands packed the streets of Ginza to see them parade in open-top cars. People thronged the Meiji stadium to watch them play, most barely minding (though Shoriki did) that the home sides usually lost.

Not everyone was so thrilled: a madcap group called the “War God Society” protested at the Americans’ “defilement” of grounds sacred to the Meiji emperor. Not long afterwards Shoriki was stabbed in the neck with a Japanese sword by an ex-policeman who professed to hate his pro-Americanism. He lost a litre of blood and nearly died. Undeterred, Shoriki founded the Yomiuri Giants baseball team, which has dominated the sport in Japan ever since.

Mr. Shoriki's life after World War 2 could have gone far worse. He was imprisoned for 21 months as a war criminal. He might have served much longer. If so, he would have lacked the opportunity to take advantage of Japan's rapid growth in the 1950s and '60s and all the benefits brought by technological change. But he convinced American authorities that the crimes he was guilty of were of an “ideological and political nature” by left-wingers and they set him free.