Is the Yomiuri newspaper a CIA-owned news outlet? No, that's not true: the former owner of Yomiuri newspaper, Matsutaro Shoriki, just so happened to be a CIA cooperative, but his actions with the CIA have nothing to do with the foundation and the current activities of the publication.
The claim initially appeared on a video (archived here) published on TikTok on July 23, 2023. The video features Takashi Okuno, the leader of the Burdock Party, a fringe party with staunch beliefs in the deep state and several general conspiracy theories. Here, he discusses the deep roots between the Yomiuri newspaper and the CIA, stating at the 00:16 mark (Translated from Japanese by Lead Stories Staff):
In 2017, May 8th, Shinzo Abe has advocated for everyone to "eagerly" read the Yomiuri newspaper in the Budget Committee's meeting [...] Why would the Prime Minister strongly advocate for the Yomiuri Paper? It's because it's a CIA paper. We can't fight back or complain against this media control because we lost the war.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Jul 26 14:49:18 2023 UTC)
The former owner of the Yomiuri Shimbun ("Shimbun" means "newspaper" in Japanese), Matsutaro Shoriki, was a former politician who was released from Sugamo Prison and began cooperating with the CIA from 1947 onward. Shoriki was a highly controversial figure throughout politics. One of the several reasons that warranted his arrest by the US was because he used the Yomiuri Shimbun to strongly promote the Axis Alliance and spur pro-Nazi propaganda in Japan. Though Shoriki, under the codename "podam," was the CIA's most significant asset in the agency's psychological operations to establish a pro-US TV network and introduce US nuclear technology across Japan, it was the creation of the Nippon Television Network Cooperation rather than the Yomiuri Newspaper that was actively used throughout this operation. Furthermore, the Yomiuri Newspaper was bought and managed by Shoriki in 1924, which predates its involvement with the CIA. Lastly, although Shoriki has used the Yomiuri Newspaper in his operations under the codename "podam," this doesn't mean that the CIA owns the newspaper to this day, nor was it owned by the CIA when Shoriki used the publication to further the CIA's agenda in Japan. This was a one-off cooperative effort between Shoriki and the CIA as a condition for his release from trial in 1947.
Yomiuri Holdings currently owns the Yomiuri Shimbun, and in the list of previous representatives, Shoriki's tenureship only lasted between 1925 to 1945, making him a short-term CEO figure of the publication.
