SDF

After beginning my career as a reporter for a weekly periodical, I set out on my own as a freelance journalist in 2002.

In 2012, I was awarded the Japan Congress of Journalists Prize and Kodansha Nonfiction Prize for my reporting on the online activities of right-wing organizations. In 2015, I received the Oya Soichi Nonfiction Award for my reporting on foreign migrant laborers.
I believe that discrimination and prejudice are the most pressing issues facing Japanese society today.

In the course of my reporting, I have covered Japanese neo-Nazi organizations that espouse cultural chauvinism. I have talked to members of countless right-wing organizations. But what has alarmed the most are the attitudes of the “ordinary”—those who object to neo-Nazism and the views of the extreme right yet are themselves complicit in perpetuating discrimination.

That’s the truth. The ideology of exclusion pervades Japanese society like the dull, subterranean throbbing of a never-ending bassline, and it fills me with terror. It is because I feel this fear that I cannot look away, or pretend not to see. Discrimination and prejudice destroy our societies and our fellow humans. This destruction must be stopped. We do not have a lot of time.

As a journalist, and as a member of Japanese society, I want to continue to raise the alarm.