Yoshiko Sakurai


Yoshiko Sakurai is a Japanese journalist, TV presenter, and writer. She is also president of the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals, established in 2007.

Life

Sakurai was born to Japanese parents in Vietnam. After returning with her family to Japan, she graduated from Nagaoka High School. Later she graduated from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, majoring in history.
Sakurai started her career as a journalist for the Christian Science Monitor in Tokyo. She served as a news presenter on Nippon Television's late night news programme Kyo-no-dekigoto from 1980 to 1996. She worked on the HIV-tainted blood scandal in Japan during the 1990s.
Affiliated with the openly revisionist lobby Nippon Kaigi, Sakurai denies the Nanking Massacre and sexual slavery by the Japanese imperial military during World War II. (This claim of denial seems to be contradicted by Yoshiko Sakurai herself during her appearance in the John Pilger documentary 'Japan Behind The Mask' 1987. In the documentary film she acknowledges, and criticizes, Japanese denial of war crimes and suggests students in Japan should be told the hard truth of Japan's imperial past. She promoted Taniyama Yūjirō's 2015 Scottsboro Girls film in Japan and the United States, a revisionist film aimed at denying the sexual enslavement of comfort women.
She is the originator of the term "Tokutei Asia".