Born in Numazu, Shizuoka Prefecture in November 1965. He traveled to Brazil for the first time in 1992 and worked as a trainee journalist for the Japanese language newspaper Paulista Shimbun. He returned to Japan in 1995 and worked in a factory with Brazilians in Oizumi Town, Gunma Prefecture, where he wrote a book about his experience, which won the Ushio Non-Fiction Award in 1999 and was published as Parallel World (Ushio Publishing). He returned to Brazil in 1999. He started working at the Nikkei Shimbun in 2001 and became its editor-in-chief in 2004. His books include If a Grain of Rice Dies (Mumeisha, 2014) and The Untold Tale of the Winners (Mumeisha, 2017).