Yuko Murase

Yuko Murase joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as a visiting scholar for fall and winter quarters of the 2025-2026 academic year. She is a journalist with more than 15 years of experience at The Mainichi Shimbun, a major national daily newspaper in Japan that also operates an English-language news site. Yuko has received a Fulbright Scholar Award in Journalism in 2025, becoming the only Japanese journalist selected for that year.

Under the Fulbright program, Yuko is conducting comparative research at APARC on educational systems and practices in the United States and Japan. Drawing on her reporting on education in Japan, including her article: “Preference for 'free schools' over compulsory education stirs controversy in Japan,” she is examining alternative educational models in the United States—such as charter schools and online education in Silicon Valley—to consider their relevance for education policy discussions in Japan.

Yuko has written extensively in both English and Japanese, with a focus on education and social issues. She reported on the tragic suicide of a 13-year-old student in Shiga Prefecture, a case that garnered national attention which led to the enactment of the Act for the Promotion of Measures to Prevent Bullying (2013). Her investigative reporting of harassment within a fire department during and after the COVID-19 pandemic earned the 19th Hikita Keiichiro Award in 2025, bestowed by the Japan Federation of Newspaper Workers' Unions for news coverage that protects human rights and promotes confidence in the press.

After graduating from high school in Australia, Yuko earned a BA in International Relations from Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. She pursued studies in journalism at Rutgers University in the United States and sociology at the University of the Philippines while at Ritumeikan. In 2004, she was selected for the Japanese University Student Delegation to Korea by the Japan–Korea Cultural Foundation.