The Asahi Shimbun says its president, Tadakazu Kimura, will resign on Dec 5 to take responsibility for a number of inaccurate articles about the comfort women issue and the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

The newspaper, which made the announcement on Friday, has been under intense pressure for the past two months since it made retractions.

Kimura said he was resigning because the paper had lost the trust of its readers, NTV reported. Four other executives will resign or be demoted, the paper said.

The Asahi articles on comfort women were published in the 1980s and 1990s and based on a Japanese man's account - later found to be false. They described women on the Korean island of Jeju being forcibly recruited to work in Japanese wartime military brothels.

Those retractions, decades after scholars first raised doubts about the man's account and years after Asahi itself said it could not be confirmed, set off a firestorm of criticism.

Last month, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in the Diet that the fictitious articles had damaged Japan's image abroad. He said the stories slandered Japan and he called for issue to be studied based on documented facts.

Regarding the Fukushima nuclear crisis, the Asahi published a story saying that in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami, many plant workers fled the plant, disobeying the orders of Masao Yoshida, who led the emergency response, to stay at their posts.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), which operates the plant, said some workers were evacuated and that they did not panic and flee. The newspaper subsequently admitted that the story was not accurate.

© Japan Today/Reuters