The asahi.com Homepage. Besides news flashes, practical information and enjoyable columns are constantly updated.

The Asahi Shimbun offers a variety of services through the Internet. At its heart is the Asahi Shimbun Internet website, asahi.com. We continue to challenge ourselves in the digital era and ensuing changes, and endeavor to create new forms of reporting and new businesses.

The asahi.com website started in 1995. It is considered one of Japan’s leading electronic news sites, distributing articles mainly from The Asahi Shimbun’s trusted coverage. The site, on average, attracts over 8 million PV per day. In addition to news stories covering fields such as politics, economics, foreign news, city news and sports, the site also offers a rich selection of special features on education, food, living and travel, and is packed with its own columns and information. Starting in April 2007, asahi.com launched its very own news gathering team and now offers a new segment, “Komimi-kuchikomi,” that lists information on new trends around town. The asahi.com is aiming at becoming a completely “integrated information site” that offers a wide range of useful information in addition to the latest news. Also, “My Town” makes the most of The Asahi Shimbun’s local news network in providing detailed local news.

In addition to asahi.com, The Asahi Shimbun started a unique entertainment site at doraku.asahi.com in June 2006. As the name “Do raku” (do what makes you happy) suggests, the site is designed to give support to people of the so-called Beatles’ generation (people in their late 30s to 60s), who are extremely active and have strong intellectual curiosity. The site is filled with interviews with front runners in different fields, information on a variety of hobbies and interests that add color and flavor to life after retirement, spotlighting people with unique tastes and interests, and useful information on travel, food and health.

The asahi.com PREMIUM is a fee-based membership site that provides special-interest information that can only be found here, in addition to original study contents unique to The Asahi Shimbun, such as Japanese/English “Tensei Jingo” (Vox Populi, Vox Dei), The Asahi Shimbun’s most popular column, and editorials, and kanji character training based on the Tensei Jingo column. Other contents include “Beru-bara (The Rose of Versailles) Kids,” a column that runs in The Asahi Shimbun’s “be” page, interviews with Takarazuka Revue Company stars, “Jazz Street,” which is jam packed with information on all things relating to jazz, and Hisaichi Ishii’s editorial cartoon column, “PNN.”

For mobile phone users, we provide a wealth of information to our hundreds of thousands of subscribers through our “Asahi/Nikkan Sports” news site. Besides news flashes, we also have features on developing crime stories and accidents, the latest on professional baseball games and J-League soccer matches, and provide exhaustive coverage of the regional national high school baseball tournaments right up to the championship rounds at Koshien Stadium.

There are other services, including such programs as “Asahi Lifeline News” for emergency news on train operations and earthquake reports, the Newspaper Article Search site, the “Asahi Mobile Station”, which provides breaking news in video images with the help of ANN group companies, special interest news sites from Nikkan Sports for entertainment, baseball, fighting sports and horse racing, and the international news site “CNN,” which is shown through collaboration with CNN. There are ten sites in all that provide information covering a wide range of fields.

The “Kikuzo II Visual” database is a system that allows users to search for and read articles in The Asahi Shimbun. The “Kikuzo II Visual” enables viewers to read articles in page form on screen, covering 40 years of articles following the end of the war. The database is in use in some 800 universities, public libraries and other facilities across the nation. We updated our “Asahi Kensaku-kun,” developed for use by elementary, junior high and senior high school students, in September 2007, to further promote use in classroom studies.