In historical chronicles, you can occasionally find a mention of a Japanese citizen, Toehiro Akiyama, who happened to go into outer space.
He was a little-known, non-smoking journalist who visited the Soviet Mir space station. Like Forrest Gump, you can hardly find any information about the Japanese in textbooks, but his story can be called strange, funny, unusual and almost completely unknown.
How did the idea to send a civilian into space come about?
This nebulous space odyssey began in 1989. The Cold War was on the wane, and Japan was enjoying a bubble of economic excess and decadence. As the Soviet Union suffered an economic collapse, Japan's prosperity grew. The Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) has come up with a crazy ploy to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Soviet Mir station. The plan included a publicity stunt of epic proportions that could only happen during the transition period of the 90s.
By 1989, Gorbachev was on his way to disarming the USSR. The Soviet Union was losing its ballistic missiles, money and power. But while the United States tried to overtake the Soviets in space exploration for 30 years, it suddenly realized that it could draw on the rich experience of specialists working in the Soviet space program. Fearing that the collapse of the Soviet aerospace and military industry would cause a massive outflow of talented scientists to all corners of the world, the West wanted to keep the industry afloat and encouraged cooperation with the Soviet space program.
With the blessing of the United States, TBS paid 1.5 billion Japanese yen ($ 10 million) to send a journalist to the Mir space station for a TV show titled Nihongjin Hatsu! (literally translated as "The first Japanese in space!"). It was a truly crazy idea.
Toehiro Akiyama became not only the first Japanese citizen in space, but also the first journalist in space. To fulfill this historic mission, TBS and the Soviets decided to send a 47-year-old Japanese TV reporter who could not even put two words together in Russian.
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Akiyama's journalistic activities
Toyohiro Akiyama worked as a reporter during the Vietnam War and also worked for the BBC in London. But until then, his experience in space had been limited to reporting on the crash of the American spacecraft Challenger in 1986.
Stay in space
Toehiro Akiyama spent over a year at the Star City Cosmonaut Training Center, where he underwent medical examinations, listened to lectures and improved his physical fitness.
On the morning of December 2, 1990, he went into space aboard the Soyuz TM-11 spacecraft, accompanied by Soviet cosmonauts Viktor Afanasyev and Musa Manarov, six cameras and a Japanese toy mascot.
After two days of travel, the final stop was reached: the Soviet station "Mir". The Soviet cosmonauts reported that they "had never seen a person who was so sick on board the ship." The astronaut journalist also constantly complained about the feeling that his head was about to burst from the pressure.
Very few details remain of how Akiyama spent his week in space, which was accompanied by constant nausea. Thanks to a 1991 New Scientist report, we do know that the living frogs that were taken by the journalist aboard the spacecraft were most likely part of an experiment to analyze how “weightlessness in space has any effect on neuropeptide secretion. in the glands, heart and brain. The experiment was based on protein molecules that are used by cells to communicate.
After seven days 21 hours and 54 minutes of space flight, Akiyama landed on Earth. According to the memoirs, the journalist announced his desire to get regular food and cigarettes.
What was the fate of the journalist?
Akiyama subsequently retired as a journalist in 1995 and used his pension contribution to buy a farm near Fukushima. He left his career, family and friends in Tokyo.
Akiyama's life story was changed by the Japanese earthquakes and the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident. As a result of the disaster, he had to give up a simple life. He is now lecturing in agriculture at Kyoto University of Arts and Design, with a deeply philosophical outlook on the environment and skepticism about modern agricultural production.
Assessment of Soviet space by Western media
Western media, in order to deliver the final blow to the "sinking Soviet ship", reported that the Japanese can be compared with a pretty whiskey-pumped wanderer, nervously wandering in space. Nevertheless, the journalist's memories of his space travel indicate that he never took it as a joke.
Philosophical Reflections
In an interview with the Japan Times in 2013, journalist Akiyama described his experience of contemplating our planet and what prompted him to leave Tokyo: “When I observed the Earth from a distance of 400 kilometers, I looked back at the history of mankind and reflected on the essence of his activities. Currently, the Earth has up to 7 billion people. What is the main human activity? In eating. I wondered how seriously I thought about the act of eating or the foods we eat? How do farmers feel about the products they grow?.. I felt that I could not die without basic knowledge of these things."
He concluded: “What struck me was our shining blue Earth, which looked like one of the life forms floating in the universe. At the same time, I was impressed by the thinness of the blue layer, which is called the atmosphere … Surprisingly, such a thin atmosphere is able to protect all life on our planet - forests, trees, fish, birds, insects, people and everything else."