Mainichi Shimbun

Mainichi Shimbun is identified as Japan’s third-largest newspaper, a major national outlet whose role in the book illustrates both the competitive force of the press and its limits. It appears as a rival able to beat another paper to a developing police story, but also as part of a Japanese newspaper establishment that declined to publish Adelstein’s investigation of Goto’s travel to the United States for a liver transplant.

Position in the Newspaper Landscape

At the time described, Mainichi ranked behind Yomiuri Shinbun and Asahi Shimbun. The account sketches the papers through political caricatures: Yomiuri was associated with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Asahi with the Socialists, and Mainichi with anarchists, a joke that cast it as a paper unable to settle on a side. The characterization is presented as a popular saying, not as a statement of the newspaper’s formal affiliation.

The comparison also establishes the scale of the market in which Mainichi competed. Yomiuri had a circulation of more than ten million a day, the largest in Japan and the world; Asahi remained second, though less close to Yomiuri than before. Mainichi’s third-place status placed it among the country’s largest papers, while the description of its supposed political indecision gave it a distinct, if wry, public image.

Competition on the Police Beat

Mainichi appears directly in Adelstein’s account of a case he was investigating while working on the police beat. After he pursued the case, Mainichi and Sankei published articles suggesting that Abdul, the Iranian boyfriend, was the killer and was already in custody. Their reports beat Adelstein’s paper, which had taken a more cautious approach. He recalls the outcome as a professional defeat: competitors had moved ahead while his paper had not yet published the same account.

The episode makes Mainichi more than a name in a ranking. Its reporting could shape what readers encountered first about an active investigation, while the contrast with Adelstein’s slower approach shows the risks and costs of different editorial judgments. He could not determine whether the police’s reluctance to share information had been affected by his own undercover stunt at a fitness club, so the account does not establish why the competing papers obtained or published their claims when they did.

Press Institutions and Editorial Limits

Mainichi’s work belongs to a press environment organized around access as well as circulation. At Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department headquarters, the ninth floor housed press clubs for newspapers, television, and radio and local newspapers; foreign media had no representation there. The account describes the Japanese mainstream outlets as having little incentive to challenge that exclusion. This is a structural feature of the reporting environment, not evidence of a specific decision by Mainichi.

The book later places Japanese newspapers within a different kind of gatekeeping. Adelstein sent Yomiuri a copy of his investigation into Goto’s access to the United States through FBI assistance, but Yomiuri ignored it, as did every other Japanese newspaper. Editors and potential publishers raised the story’s age, the prospect of embarrassing the National Police Agency, doubts about whether the FBI would confirm it, and the cost and danger of retaliation. Mainichi is not singled out as the source of any one objection; its significance here is as one of the newspapers encompassed by the account of collective non-publication.

Scoops, Silence, and Public Record

The contrast between the police-beat scoop and the suppressed Goto investigation defines Mainichi’s limited but revealing narrative role. In the first episode, it appears among papers that published claims before Adelstein’s paper and thereby won the immediate contest for readers’ attention. In the later episode, the Japanese newspaper field—including Mainichi—did not provide a venue for his account, despite the reporting and corroboration he had assembled.

That silence did not end the story. Adelstein ultimately wrote the piece in English and worked with the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post; after the latter’s front-page publication, Japanese outlets began reporting on the matter, often attributing it to the Los Angeles Times rather than independently investigating it. Mainichi’s appearance across these episodes thus marks two different powers of the newspaper system: the ability to accelerate a developing story through competition, and the ability, through refusal or inaction across the field, to delay a consequential account from entering public discussion.