[2] At the time disturbances by radical groups on university campuses were intensifying and the president of the Bungeishunju corporation Shinpei Ikejima was coming to the conclusion that perhaps the media also were too solidly left-wing.
At their own request Ikejima said that he had plans to publish Shokun as the bulletin of the Japanese Cultural Conference, a conservative group formed the year before centering on Yukio Mishima and Tsuneari Fukuda who shared Ikejima's sense of crisis about Japan's future, However, he settled on the magazine's current form due to strong opposition within his company, though the Japanese Cultural Conference continued to operate until the spring of 1994.
In 1980 Ikutarō Shimizu, who was left-wing until the start of the 1960s, cemented Shokun's status as a core monthly magazine of conservative literati through articles on his widely talked about ideological conversion and his advocating that Japan acquire nuclear weapons.
Starting at the magazine's inception with the article Jidai to Watashi ("The Times and I") by Michitaro Tanaka, Shokun serialized the memoirs of famous scholars including Tsuneichi Miyamoto and Mitsusada Inoue.
In addition, throughout the 1980s the writer Jun Henmi serialized her face-to-face interviews with then-active scholars and men of letters born in the Meiji Period including Kinji Imanishi, Tetsuzo Tanikawa, and Bunmei Tsuchiya.
Shokun criticized heavily the Shinpoteki Bunkajin, the mostly left-wing so-called "progressive intellectuals" who published many books with Iwanami Shoten and wrote essays for the magazine Sekai.
Particularly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union there was the widely discussed serial column Akumabarai no Sengoshi ("A post-war history of demon exorcism") written by Takeshi Inagaki.
Each column was introduced with the name of the intellectual and appropriate citations followed by a wide variety of his past statements unconditionally praising the personality cult of Kim Il Sung or the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the dictatorship of the Soviet Union, which were exhumed by Inagaki from old magazines and newspaper articles.
Shokun's editorial line had adamantly advocated worship at Yasukuni Shrine but after the 2006 discovery of the memo of Tomohiko Tomita they put together a special issue softening their hardline stance.
Into the 21st century, Shokun made sweeping criticism of Asahi Shimbun's 2005 attack on NHK for allegedly censoring parts of the proceedings of the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery and like Shinzo Abe accused the newspaper of fabrication.
Also, Shokun sometimes made special issues where they listened to the opinions of intellectuals in all walks of life in the form of a questionnaire and on these occasions the honour of appearing was broad from the left-wing to those with little in the way of political affiliation.
In the August 2006 issue of Shokun social philosopher and former Unification Church member Masaki Nakamasa hit back at Saito in the article Sayoku no Saigo no Toride: Kakusa Shakai Aikokushin Kyobozai Hantai ("The Last Bastions of the Left-Wing: Opposition to the Rich-Poor Divide, Patriotism, and the Proposed Anti-Conspiracy Bill"), but Saito said that he was dismayed at the response by Shokun's editors limiting him to the readers' section when he requested that they let him rebut Nakamasa in at least two pages.