[10] It is published by regional bureaus, all of them subsidiaries of The Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings, Japan's largest media conglomerate by revenue and the second largest media conglomerate by size behind Sony,[11][12] which is privately held by law and wholly owned by present and former employees and members of the Matsutarō Shōriki family.

His innovations included improved news coverage, a full-page radio program guide, and the establishment of Japan's first professional baseball team, now known as the Yomiuri Giants.

In October 1945, a post-war "democratization group" called for Shōriki's removal, as he supported Imperial Japan's policies during World War II.

When Shōriki responded by firing five of the leading members of this group, the writers and editors launched the first "production control" strike on 27 October 1945.

According to research by Professor Tetsuo Arima of Waseda University on declassified documents stored at NARA, he agreed to work with the CIA as an informant.

[17][18] Under the leadership of Tsuneo Watanabe, who served as editor-in-chief from 1991 until his death in 2024, Yomiuri would gain considerable international prominence.

[23] In May 2011, when Naoto Kan, then Prime Minister of Japan, asked the Chubu Electric Power Company to shut down several of its Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plants due to safety concerns, the Yomiuri called the request "abrupt" and a difficult situation for Chubu Electric's shareholders.

Tsutsui sued the Yomiuri Shimbun for libel and was awarded 3.3 million yen in damages in 2015, on the basis that the truth of the allegations could not be confirmed.

[28][29][30][clarification needed] The Yomiuri newspaper said in an editorial in 2011 "No written material supporting the claim that government and military authorities were involved in the forcible and systematic recruitment of comfort women has been discovered", and that it regarded the Asian Women's Fund, set up to compensate for wartime abuses, as a failure based on a misunderstanding of history.

[31] The New York Times reported on similar statements previously, writing that "The nation's (Japan's) largest newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, applauded the revisions" regarding removing the word "forcibly" from referring to laborers brought to Japan in the pre-war period and revising the comfort women controversy.

Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings owns the Chuokoron-Shinsha publishing company, which it acquired in 1999, and the Nippon Television network.

The system of indexing each newspaper article and image makes the archives easier to search, and the CD-ROMs have been well received by users as a result.