Toyohiro Akiyama, the first Japanese in space, dies at 84

Toyohiro Akiyama, the Tokyo Broadcasting System reporter who became the first Japanese person and the first journalist to fly in space, died on 26 August at his home in Odai, about 85 miles southeast of Kyoto. He was 84. His wife, Reiko, said the cause was lower gastrointestinal bleeding. Japanese agencies reported the death at the start of September. A New York Times obituary on 10 September carried it into the wider English papers.

Akiyama launched on 2 December 1990 on Soyuz TM-11 with Soviet cosmonauts Viktor Afanasyev and Musa Manarov. The rocket wore a Japanese flag and company marks, including Sony. Tokyo Broadcasting System had paid the Soviet Union about half of a $35 million package to put one of its own staff on Mir for the network's 40th anniversary. One hundred and sixty-two TBS employees applied. Akiyama, then 48 and a former Washington bureau chief, was chosen. He trained at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City.

He spent eight days in orbit, nine days in the mission count that includes the trip, and filed live reports. His first words on the link were "Am I on air?" He talked about cigarettes he could not smoke, about Japanese tree frogs sent up as an experiment (he said only the fat ones seemed to enjoy weightlessness), and about the ordinary discomforts of a commercial passenger on a military station. The Japanese press later called him a space antihero, a label he did not fight.

The flight beat Japan's official astronaut programme into orbit. Mamoru Mohri, selected by the National Space Development Agency for a shuttle flight, had been delayed after the Challenger disaster. Akiyama came home on 10 December 1990 and waved from the Soyuz capsule in a field near Arkalyk, in what was then the Kazakh Soviet republic.

He left TBS in 1995 and moved to Takine in Fukushima Prefecture to grow mushrooms, saying he wanted to work on environmental questions with his hands. He later taught at what is now Kyoto University of the Arts and from 2017 lived in Mie Prefecture. A funeral was held with close relatives.

The 1990 mission sits in a short list: first Japanese in space, first journalist to file from orbit, first commercially bought seat on a Soviet crew. It also sits at the end of the Cold War, when a Japanese television company could write a cheque to Glavkosmos and put a smoker with a microphone on Mir. Today's seats are sold by different offices at different prices. The reports Akiyama filed remain the first Japanese voice from a station that no longer exists.