Toyohiro Akiyama, First Japanese Astronaut, Dies at 84

Toyohiro Akiyama, the first Japanese citizen to leave Earth’s atmosphere and the first journalist ever to fly in space, has died at 84 from bleeding in the lower digestive tract. The news broke on September 1, 2026, though sources differ on the exact date of death. Japan’s Nikkei and Mainichi newspapers report that Akiyama died on August 26, while the Bernama news agency, citing Kyodo, gives Tuesday, September 1, as the date.

Akiyama was born in Tokyo in 1942. He graduated from International Christian University and joined the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) in 1966. Over his years there he covered politics and foreign affairs, served as the network’s Washington bureau chief, and later became an editor on the foreign news desk. It was from that post that he applied for TBS’s internal selection for a spaceflight, a program the network had arranged as part of a deal with the Soviet space program.

He launched aboard the Soviet Soyuz spacecraft and stayed in orbit from December 2 to December 10, 1990, nine days in all, spending that time aboard the Mir space station. He was 48. From orbit he filed live reports on weightlessness and the experiments he ran, and the first words he spoke from space became his trademark line: “Is this live?”

The honor of being the first Japanese person in space was originally meant to go to astronaut Mamoru Mori, chosen by Japan’s National Space Development Agency, the predecessor of today’s JAXA, to fly aboard the American space shuttle Endeavour. Mori’s flight was delayed after the 1986 Challenger disaster, which opened the way for Akiyama, a journalist with no formal astronaut training, to reach orbit first.

Akiyama left television in 1995, five years after returning to Earth, and moved to the town of Takine in Fukushima Prefecture. There he took up organic farming and grew shiitake mushrooms on logs. Speaking to the Japan Times about that shift in 2013, he said: “What is the most basic human activity? Eating.” He also explained why he had turned to farming instead of journalism: “I felt I couldn’t die without gaining some basic knowledge about these things.”

After the earthquake of March 11, 2011, and the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Akiyama was forced to leave his farm and home in Takine. Starting that November, he taught agriculture at the university now known as Kyoto University of the Arts, then called Kyoto Art and Design University. He stopped teaching in March 2023. From 2017 onward he lived in Mie Prefecture.

In his later years, Akiyama grew critical of the mainstream media in which he had spent three decades of his career. In the same 2013 Japan Times interview, he said: “It may sound like I’m spitting in my own face, since I lived off the media for 30 years.” It was the same conviction that had once pulled him from television to the farm: that direct experience, whether in space or on the land, carries knowledge a newsroom can’t show you.

There is no record of any Serbian or regional connection to this story, and we had not previously written about Akiyama. His December 1990 flight remains a rare case of a journalist, rather than a professional astronaut, becoming the first to carry his country’s flag into orbit, made possible by one broadcaster’s deal with the Soviet space program at a time when the Western route to orbit had been closed by the Challenger disaster.