The first Japanese citizen to launch into space, Toyohiro Akiyama was also the first commercially sponsored cosmonaut and the world’s first journalist to file reports while on a spaceflight. Akiyama, 84, died last Wednesday, August 26, of lower gastrointestinal bleeding, news agencies in Japan reported. A funeral was held with his close relatives in attendance.
As a correspondent for the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), Akiyama was chosen out of his 162 fellow employees who applied to fly to space in celebration of the network’s 40th anniversary. He trained at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, located outside of Moscow, and was assigned to the Soyuz TM-11 crew. On December 2, 1990, Akiyama lifted off with Soviet-era cosmonauts Viktor Afanasyev and Musa Manarov atop a Soyuz U2 rocket that had been adorned with the Japanese flag and ads from various Japanese companies, including Sony.
After a nine-minute ascent—which was filmed on board for TBS to broadcast—and a two-day rendezvous, the three crew members arrived at the Mir space station. Afanasyev and Manarov began a 175-day stay as part of the outpost’s 11th expedition. Akiyama’s time aboard Mir was only a week long.
Every day he recorded a 10-minute video and two 20-minute audio spots. These “To the Universe” broadcasts were aired on TBS. Unfortunately, Akiyama initially became very nauseous, suffering from both space adaptation syndrome (also known as “space sickness”) and nicotine withdrawal (he was a chain cigarette smoker) leading to his early accounts of spaceflight being less than enthusiastic.
He described the water surrounding Japan as “look[ing] very muddy” and suggested that only the “fat” tree frogs that were sent from his country enjoyed weightlessness. Not all of Akiyama’s reports were negative. As time went on, he apologized for his poor attitude and shared footage of Mount Fuji, to his viewers’ delight.
He commented on how most of Japan “looks like it has moss all over,” except for the northern island of Hokkaido, which “looks like delicious kelp.”
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