The first sentence of the second paragraph of the article titled モンテ、ナビスコ初戦快勝 in Yomiuri Shinbun is written in the present tense (or possibly the future tense I guess):

But, the article is describing a past event. And, all the rest of the article is written in the past tense.

What is going on?

  • keep in mind it's a newspaper -- even English is radically different in front-page print.
    – sova
    Mar 19 '15 at 16:30
  • In japanese sense, if just only last sentence is past tense, we don't care. To all sentence is past tense is rather rare. Oct 4 '16 at 1:03

I would say : instead of presenting it as a simple given event, he summarizes the beginning of the match, kind of headlining what happened during this opening, making it last longer in the readers mind. So you could say it is a historic present.


I've found an explanation on how tense switching works here:


Just in case, I've scanned the relevant bits that work through an example.


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