Kenichiro Matsuoka

By the time NET parent company Asahi Shimbun would rebrand the network as Asahi Broadcasting Corporation in 1977, Matsuoka would be promoted to Executive Vice President (Fuku-shacho) at Asahi Broadcasting Co, serve as a founder of Japan Cable Television, and act as its first president, a position he held until his retirement in 1986.

Returning to Japan in 1940, there was talk of Kenichiro attending school in America to defuse any suspicion of Japan's war ambitions, and he would join the state run news agency Dōmei Tsushin that would be broken up by Allied forces during the Occupation of Japan. Matsuoka followed Yōnosuke Natori to the Sun News Photo agency following Dōmei's breakup, then go on to join the fledgling Nippon Educational Television Board (NET) television network upon its founding in 1957.

Kenichiro Matsuoka (松岡 謙一郎, Matsuoka Kenichiro, June 13, 1914 – December 23, 1994) was a Japanese media executive. He founded and served as the first President of Japan Cable Television, and as a Vice President of Asahi Broadcasting Company (now TV Asahi).

Kenichiro's father Yōsuke, was a prominent diplomat in pre-war Japan. Kenichiro's mother Ryuko, was the daughter of an influential kuge judge Shin Soroku, a former retainer of the Chōshū clan, and a beneficiary of their outsized influence in the Meiji Restoration that helped shaped the modern Japanese Government. Yōsuke's sister Fujie was widowed in 1911 with two young girls, whom Yosuke supported as if his own. One of those nieces, Hiroko, married future Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Satō, and ties Kenichiro to the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the Abe political dynasty through Abe's maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, Eisaku's older brother.