First published in 1892
Recovery from the A-Bomb ruins
The Chugoku Shimbun was established as a local newspaper named The Daily Chugoku on May 5, 1892 in Ote-machi, Hiroshima and was founded by its editor, Saburo Yamamoto. Early editions included editorials, political news, the Hiroshima rice market prices, serial novels, and occasionally carried overseas news. In 1908, the newspaper changed its name to The Chugoku Shimbun for its 5,000th edition. On its 35th anniversary, in 1926, the headquarters was moved into a new building in Kami-nagarekawa. Then it made remarkable progress, excelling other local papers in circulation.

On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima experienced the first Atomic Bomb ever dropped on a city in human history. There were hundreds of thousands of deaths and casualties. The Chugoku Shimbun lost 113 employees and the building and equipment were completely destroyed in the A-Bomb blast. However, their mission and eagerness to report the news encouraged the surviving staff and they started to rebuild The Chugoku Shimbun immediately after the destruction. They were able to start publishing as early as August 9 by asking other newspapers to print the paper.

After the war, The Chugoku Shimbun worked for Hiroshima's revival and development from the ruins of the bombs. They moved into a new building in present Dohashi-cho, next to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, in 1969. It constructed a printing factory, "Inokuchi Factory" in Shoko Center in Nishi-ku in 1983, which boasted the finest equipment in the country. The Chugoku Shimbun started the newspaper publishing system, "Phoenix," using a computer and editing the papers without type beginning in August 1987. Based on files, documents, articles, and pictures stored in this system,it recently formed the paper's past articles into databases, such as "the A-Bomb database," to make them accessible to Internet and other multimedia formats.
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