For 89 years — with one significant interruption during the 1940s — The Asahi Shimbun has had its own space in the headquarters of The New York Times.
Times Insider shares historic al insights from The New York Times.
The New York Times has the biggest newsroom at 620 Eighth Avenue. But not the only one.
Most Times employees would be surprised to learn that on the 18th floor of our headquarters is another newsroom that looks like the rest of our space. It’s furnished identically. The journalists maintain their desks with equal fastidiousness. The resemblance ends there.
This is the New York bureau of The Asahi Shimbun , a venerable and influential Japanese newspaper and website. Four correspondents, three assistant reporters and an office manager are stationed here. They cover, for their readers who are primarily back in Japan, American society, politics, business, culture, immigration policy, terrorist incidents and mass shootings, supplementing the work of their colleagues in Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
It sounds like a very contemporary kind of arrangement: two large international media companies sharing quarters.
In fact, it goes back 89 years.
That was when an agreement was reached between Adolph S. Ochs, the publisher of The Times, and Kichinai Kitano, The Asahi’s New York-based correspondent, for the lease of office space in our headquarters at 229 West 43rd Street.
“As a result of this,” The Asahi told its readers on July 1, 1928, “our New York correspondent will be in The New York Times newsroom and able to use all of the communication advantages provided, and along with our relationship with The London Times, there is no doubt that our foreign news will be furthermore even more brilliant .”
The relationship between the newspapers can be traced to a meeting a year earlier between Seiichi Ueno , whose father was a co-founder of The Asahi, and Mr. Ochs and his son-in-law and eventual successor, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Mr. Ueno had stopped in New York on his way back to Japan from an international newspaper conference in Geneva, said Daisuke Nakai, 45, a correspondent currently stationed here.
The Times charged The Asahi $50 a month in rent (roughly $700 today) and $250 monthly for the use of its news wires. Telephones and typewriters were furnished at no charge.
Mr. Kitano returned to Japan in 1929 aboard the Graf Zeppelin. He went on to be a senior editor and board member, then a board member of The Asahi Evening News, an English-language publication that is now defunct.
Relations between the companies were quite amicable. When the time came to send a letter by air over the Pacific Ocean in 1931, Ryuhei Murayama , a co-founder of The Asahi Shimbun, chose Mr. Ochs as the recipient of his greeting.
