The Asahi Shimbun has been apologetic of late after it confessed to journalistic wrongdoing in several articles.
The newspaper has admitted an interview with the president of Nintendo was fabricated and that a story in May on the Fukushima accident erred in asserting that plant workers defied orders not to leave the plant site, and, most notably, apologized for a series of stories it ran in the 1990s on the South Korean comfort women long after the source was debunked.
The Asahi also stumbled during its damage control efforts when it censored a story by one of its regular columnists, Akira Ikegami, who criticized the comfort women coverage. What started as an exercise in taking ethical responsibility and trying to regain credibility descended into a theater of the absurd. More bluntly, the Asahi's editors showed an incredible capacity for stupidity.