Publishers: Bigger & Better than Anyone

Along the banks of Tokyo's Tama River, battalions of leathery Japanese laborers are busy transforming a 1,000-acre site into the greatest fun-farm since Disneyland. When it is completed in 1964 at a cost of $20 million, it will feature two 18-hole golf courses, a chain of fish-stocked ponds, an artificial 50-ft. waterfall, a 725-ft. ski run sprinkled with synthetic "ever-snow," a marine theater for bubbly underwater revues, an open-air music bowl seating 5000, a 120-ft. parachute jump, even an orchard where customers will be able to pluck fresh fruit right off the trees. It is an almost absurdly grandiose undertaking, but egg-bald Publisher Matsutaro Shoriki, 78, who dreamed it up, is not used to doing anything on a scale smaller than cosmic. "The people of Japan," says Shoriki, "expect Shoriki to do things bigger and better than anyone else."

Pray Boru! Immodest as his words may sound, Shoriki is right. His optometrists consider him terribly myopic, but time after time he has proved himself dazzlingly farsighted. In the 1930s he introduced besuboru to Japan by bringing Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmy Foxx and Lefty O'Doul to the Orient for a barnstorming tour. An ultranationalist fanatic later hefted a broadsword and hacked a 16-in. scar into the left side of his head for permitting foreigners like the Bambino to desecrate sacred Meiji Stadium, but Shoriki went on to form Japan's first professional baseball league. In the early '50s he popularized television by planting 220 receivers in key public areas, soon had so many sponsors clamoring for broadcast time that he turned a profit the very first year. Despite gales of protest from Hiroshima-haunted citizens, he pioneered a drive to supplement Japan's insufficient coal and hydroelectric resources by harnessing the power of the dread atom.

On top of all that, Shoriki is also Japan's biggest newspaper publisher. The Yomiuri, a dying daily with a circulation of 40,000 when he bought it with borrowed money in 1924, is now tops in Tokyo, with 2,440,000.* His Hochi Shimbun (circ. 600,000) is the country's biggest sports daily. With two other dailies and three magazines, Shoriki's empire grossed $74.5 million last year, and though post-tax profits were a rice-paper-thin $550,000, he had no complaint. Shoriki's television ventures in Tokyo and Osaka netted $2,300,000, while his horse-racing and golf-course enterprises and his Yomiuri Giants batted in another $1,000,000.

No Hara-Kiri. After graduating from Tokyo University in 1911 with a degree in German law, Shoriki flunked the civil service exam that would have opened the way to a government career; he joined the Tokyo police force instead. By 1924 he was a deputy police chief, but that year he was sacked in disgrace after having inadequately guarded the prince regent (now Emperor Hirohito) during a botched assassination attempt.