I very much doubt that Tolkien was looking for inspiration in Japanese newspaper articles. According to your own link, the event wasn't widely known even in Jap

I very much doubt that Tolkien was looking for inspiration in Japanese newspaper articles. According to your own link, the event wasn't widely known even in Japan until the 1960s, after the Lord of the Rings was written. It seems more likely that Tolkien was drawing on much older (thousands of years) stories about the same thing.