Toyohiro Akiyama, a television reporter who became the first Japanese person to enter space, earning the nickname “space antihero” for his lack of bravura and insatiable cigarette cravings, died on Aug. 26 at his home in Odai, Japan, about 85 miles southeast of Kyoto. He was 84.
The cause was lower gastrointestinal bleeding, his wife, Reiko, said.
In 1990, at the end of the Cold War, Mr. Akiyama became the star of an improbable reality show, broadcast live before millions, when he was sent by his network, the Tokyo Broadcasting System, on a commercial voyage to the Mir space station alongside two Soviet cosmonauts. It was a spectacular $35 million ratings stunt, with TBS paying about half that amount directly to the Soviet Union to include Mr. Akiyama, then 48, in the launch. And it would make him the first journalist to go to space.
It seemed plausible that Mr. Akiyama would return a national hero. Instead, he was wracked by nausea and discomfort on the eight-day mission; his Soviet colleagues later said they had never seen a man vomit so much.
Mr. Akiyama devoted his broadcasts from the cosmos to stories about headaches, bland food and complicated bathroom protocols, and they contained no grand revelations or meditations on the meaning of life. A chain smoker, he frequently pined for cigarettes — and for natto, the fermented beans of his home country.
The voyage did not turn out to be the ratings hit that his network expected. But Mr. Akiyama earned his place in history as an unlikely journeyman, inspiring some of Japan’s first professional astronauts.
He became known for his plain-spoken narration from the heavens, including his first words from space — “Is this live?” — broadcast as he was strapped to a wall to keep stable.
While Mr. Akiyama vowed never to return to space — “I don’t particularly want to see it again, it’s not a very fun place,” he later said — he emerged changed by the experience and eventually devoted himself to organic farming.
“The Earth looked so beautiful from space,” he said in a 2021 interview with the public broadcaster NHK. “I felt a message from nature. The starry sky and the darkness of space — it made me think about how I should live after returning to Earth.”
Mr. Akiyama was born on July 22, 1942, in Tokyo, the youngest of three children. His father, Kanichi Akiyama, was a pharmacist who was dispatched to Malaysia during World War II, and his mother, Kiyo, managed the home.
His upbringing was difficult; his parents often fought, he recalled in a 1992 biography by the journalist Takashi Tachibana, especially after his father lost his job. Young Mr. Akiyama was shy and sometimes feigned illness to skip class.
Still, he had an aptitude for Japanese and English, and in 1966 he graduated from International Christian University in Tokyo and joined TBS, one of Japan’s most prominent broadcasters.
He rose through the ranks, despite gaining a reputation as an aggressive and sometimes hotheaded reporter, prone to slamming down the phone. He spent several years working for the BBC World Service in London before returning to TBS in 1971.
In 1984, he was named the network’s Washington bureau chief. A breakthrough came the next year, when he outmaneuvered other foreign journalists to land an interview with President Ronald Reagan.
“I was captivated by the thrill of live television broadcasting,” he later said, “encountering raw reality and conveying the scene directly to viewers just as it was.”
In 1988, to celebrate its 40th anniversary, TBS came up with the far-fetched idea of sending an employee to space. At the time, Japan was an emerging superpower, and its economy was at its peak before entering three decades of stagnation. It was also the heyday of broadcasting, and TBS, flush with cash, was eager to make a name on the global stage.
The network received more than 100 applications. Mr. Akiyama was initially disqualified because of stomach ulcers, but he protested. “Is there anyone who worked at a television station until the age of 46 and didn’t have ulcers in their stomach?” he told network executives, according to a 2018 interview.
Ultimately, TBS settled on Mr. Akiyama, and he was sent to Star City, an astronaut training ground near Moscow, where he learned to fly on Russian Soyuz spacecraft for about a year. He was joined by the runner-up in the contest, a videographer named Ryoko Kikuchi, who would serve as an alternate. (A week before the launch, Ms. Kikuchi was sidelined because of emergency surgery to treat acute appendicitis.)
Ms. Kikuchi recalled in an interview the exhaustion that she and Mr. Akiyama felt undergoing rigorous training sessions conducted entirely in Russian. The instructors initially forbade students from taking home textbooks, saying they were classified. Then Mr. Akiyama intervened, sparring loudly with the staff until they reversed course.
“It was incredibly grueling — studying subjects outside our expertise,” Ms. Kikuchi said, “and doing it all in Russian.”
On Dec. 2, 1990, Mr. Akiyama and two cosmonauts boarded the Soyuz TM-11 spacecraft, which was covered in advertisements for TBS and other Japanese companies. From space, he described Earth as “really blue,” and said the seas around Japan were “very muddy,” suggesting they were polluted. He said his home country looked like it had “moss all over,” except for the northern island of Hokkaido, which he said looked like “delicious kelp.”
He was sometimes so absorbed by the beauty of the rising sun and passing clouds, he later said, that he forgot to capture key shots — angering some viewers back home.
Aboard the Mir, he reported on the movements in zero gravity of six green Japanese tree frogs that he had brought on board, part of an experiment for Japanese schoolchildren. (Fat frogs, he contended, loved the feeling of weightlessness.)
His brain, he complained, felt as if it were “floating around in my head.” Told to pack light, he did not bring enough underwear, he confessed in his reports.
Ratings at TBS initially surged, but viewership soon leveled off, with most people tuning out after about 10 minutes, according to data at the time. At one point, eager to cheer up his audience, Mr. Akiyama shared footage of Mount Fuji, a white speck.
There was also resentment at home that Mr. Akiyama was the first Japanese national in space — rather than a professional astronaut like Mamoru Mohri, who had trained at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. (Mr. Mohri had been set to make history as the first Japanese citizen in space, but his mission was delayed after the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger over the Atlantic Ocean in 1986.)
A few years after the space mission, Mr. Akiyama left journalism and started working as a shiitake mushroom farmer, and taught agriculture and ethics at the Kyoto University of the Arts.
In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1999, Mr. Akiyama is survived by three children and a granddaughter.
Mr. Akiyama defended his reporting on the mission in the 1992 biography, saying that he saw himself as a medium for information about life in space and did not see the point of dwelling on his personal experience.
“Fundamentally, this project wasn’t about me personally achieving something extraordinary,” he said. “It was just a matter of chance.”
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