Yes to reform, but no newspapers please

Japan's Meiji Emperor presided over the most rapid modernisation a country has ever seen. This included the press.

The Asahi Shimbun was founded in 1879, the same year that Reuters began news distribution in Yokohama. It grew fast and by the early 1900s it was producing several editions a day. 

The Emperor was not amused. In the old imperial tradition, he penned his own haikus, one of which reads:

In newspapers, all see

The doings of the world,

which lead nowhere:

Better never written. ■