The
Yomiuri was launched in 1874 by the Nisshusha newspaper company as a small daily newspaper. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s the paper came to be known as a literary arts publication with its regular inclusion of work by writers such as
Ozaki Kōyō. In 1924,
Matsutarō Shōriki took over management of the company. His innovations included improved news coverage, a full-page radio program guide, and the establishment of Japan's first professional baseball team, now known as the
Yomiuri Giants. The emphasis of the paper shifted to broad news coverage aimed at readers in the Tokyo area. By 1941 it had the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in the Tokyo area. In 1942, under wartime conditions, it merged with the
Hochi Shimbun and became known as the
Yomiuri-Hochi. The
Yomiuri was the center of a labor scandal in 1945 and 1946. In October 1945, a post-war "democratization group" called for Shōriki's removal, as he supported Imperial Japan's policies during World War II. When Shōriki responded by firing five of the leading members of this group, the writers and editors launched the first "
production control" strike on 27 October 1945. This method of striking became an important union tactic in the coal, railroad, and other industries during the postwar period. Matsutarō Shōriki was arrested in December 1945 as a
Class-A war criminal and sent to
Sugamo Prison. The
Yomiuri's employees continued to produce the paper without heeding executive orders until a police raid on June 21, 1946. The charges against Shōriki were dropped and he was released in 1948. According to research by Professor
Tetsuo Arima of
Waseda University on declassified documents stored at
NARA, he agreed to work with the CIA as an informant. Under the leadership of
Tsuneo Watanabe, who served as editor-in-chief from 1991 until his death in 2024,
Yomiuri would gain considerable international prominence. By 1994, it would have a daily circulation which topped 10 million. In February 2009, the
Yomiuri entered into a tie-up with
The Wall Street Journal for editing, printing and distribution. Since March 2009 the major news headlines of the
Journal's Asian edition have been summarized in Japanese in the evening edition of the
Yomiuri. The
Yomiuri features an advice column,
Jinsei Annai. The
Yomiuri has a history of promoting
nuclear power in Japan. In May 2011, when
Naoto Kan, then Prime Minister of Japan, asked the
Chubu Electric Power Company to shut down several of its
Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plants due to safety concerns, the
Yomiuri called the request "abrupt" and a difficult situation for Chubu Electric's shareholders. It wrote that Kan "should seriously reflect on the way he made his request." It then followed up with an article wondering how dangerous Hamaoka really was and called Kan's request "a political judgment that went beyond technological worthiness." The next day damage to the pipes inside the condenser was discovered at one of the plants following a leak of seawater into the reactor. In 2012, the paper reported that
Nobutaka Tsutsui, the Minister for Agriculture, had divulged secret information to a Chinese enterprise. Tsutsui sued the
Yomiuri Shimbun for
libel and was awarded 3.3 million yen in damages in 2015, on the basis that the truth of the allegations could not be confirmed. In November 2014, the newspaper apologized after using the phrase "sex slave" to refer to
comfort women, following its criticism of the
Asahi Shimbuns coverage of Japan's World War II comfort women system. The
Yomiuri newspaper said in an editorial in 2011 "No written material supporting the claim that government and military authorities were involved in the forcible and systematic recruitment of comfort women has been discovered", and that it regarded the
Asian Women's Fund, set up to compensate for wartime abuses, as a failure based on a misunderstanding of history.
The New York Times reported on similar statements previously, writing that "The nation's (Japan's) largest newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, applauded the revisions" regarding removing the word "forcibly" from referring to laborers brought to Japan in the pre-war period and revising the
comfort women controversy.
Yomiuri editorials have also opposed the
DPJ government and denounced denuclearization as "not a viable option". On 7 August 2025,
Yomiuri filed a lawsuit in Tokyo against the U.S.-based AI firm
Perplexity, alleging "free-riding" on 120,000 articles for the publication from February to June 2025. In September,
Yomiuri apologized for a false report on an
extra on 23 July that Prime Minister
Shigeru Ishiba decided to resign on 22 July. ==Other publications and ventures==