FIJ Board & Advisors

Shiro Segawa

Chairman

Shiro Segawa is a professor at Waseda University Journalism School and a representative director of the Institute for the Next Generation of Journalism and Media at Waseda University.

His book Truth of Scientific Journalism was awarded the Japanese Association of Science & Technology Journalist prize in 2017. He previously worked at national newspaper Mainichi Shimbun as a correspondent in Washington, D.C., a head of the division of science and environment news, a deputy managing editor, and an editorial board member. He graduated from the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the University of Tokyo, majoring in history of science and philosophy of science. His research profile is here.

Atsuo Fujimura

Vice-Chairman

Atsuo Fujimura has been a director of the Japan Internet Media Association (JIMA) since 2019. He served as executive officer of the media development division of SmartNews, Inc. He is currently a fellow there.

He previously worked at ASCII Corporation as an editor of books and magazines, worked at IBM, founded Atmark IT Inc., and served as the CEO at ITmedia Inc.

Hitofumi Yanai

Executive Director

Hitofumi Yanai is an attorney at law and the chief editor at Infact’s fact-checking department.

In 2012, he founded a non-profit organization, Watchdog for Accuracy in News-reporting, Japan (WANJ) and launched the website GoHoo (which was the only Japanese fact-checking website registered on the Duke Reporters’ Lab Fact-checking Database until it ceased operations in August 2019). He has fact-checked hundreds of news reports published by mainstream media. He is associated with Verybest Law offices and the Institute for the Next Generation of Journalism and Media at Waseda University. He previously worked at national newspaper Sankei Shimbun as a reporter after graduating from the Faculty of Policy Management, Keio University. He published What is Fact-Checking (co-written with Tateiwa Yoichiro) in 2018.

Kentaro Inui

Director

Kentaro Inui is a professor at the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University and a leader of the Natural Language Understanding Team RIKEN Center for advanced intelligence project.

His research fields are artificial intelligence and inference and natural language processing. He engages in automatic editing of linguistic information and knowledge, and research about basic technology of language processing. He is a general project manager of the information processing society of Japan Natural Language Processing and a deputy editor in chief of the Journal of Natural Language Processing. His research profile is here.

Nobuyuki Okumura

Director

Nobuyuki Okumura has been a professor of Faculty of Sociology at Musashi University (Journalism) since 2014.

He was also a Fulbright visiting scholar at the George Washington University from 2018 to 2019. He was previously a professor at Ritsumeikan University and a visiting scholar at SAIS, the Johns Hopkins University. He also worked at TV Asahi as a news producer for a program “News Station”. He has a Master’s Degree (International Relations) from Sophia University. He translated the book : Blur – How to know what’s true in the age of information overload, written by prominent journalists, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel.

Keiko Kanai

Director

Keiko Kanai is a professor at the Faculty of Applied Sociology at Kindai University. She has been teaching journalism at Kindai University since 2008.

She had worked at Reuters in Tokyo, Osaka, and London as a reporter, editor, and translator for 18 years. She graduated from Regis College and Tokyo Woman’s Christian University. She published Learning about Journalism through Columns: Media Literacy in the Global Era. Her research profile is here.

Daisuke Furuta

Director

Daisuke Furuta is a journalist and a founder of Media-Collabo. He is also an organizer of Online News Association Japan and a part-time lecturer at Waseda University Graduate School of Political Science. He was previously the founding editor of BuzzFeed Japan and worked at national newspaper Asahi Shimbun as a digital media editor, Singapore branch manager, Asia head office member, and a local news section member. He graduated from the School of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University.

Kenjiro Murakami

Director

Kenjiro Murakami is CEO at Spectee Inc.. He previously worked at AII Inc., Charles River Laboratories, Inc, and Cisco Systems, Inc. He has an MBA from Waseda University and studied at the Department of Physics, Faculty of Science at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Takeshi Yamasaki

Director

Takeshi Yamasaki is chairman of Science of Food Safety and Security (SFSS), which he founded in 2011. He is also a veterinarian and a Doctor of Veterinary Science at The  University of Tokyo. He previously worked at a pharmaceutical company. His areas of specialization are food safety and security, risk communication, and foods with functional claims. His fact-checking reports are here.

Yo Makino

Advisor

Yo Makino is a co-founder and first-term director of FIJ. He is also a part-time lecturer at Waseda University Journalism School. He previously worked at Nikkei (formerly Nihon Keizai Shimbun) as a senior staff writer for nearly 25 years. He has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Keio University and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. He has published many books e.g. Media-Government Complex, The Huffington Post’s Shock in Japanese. He has also translated several books into Japanese: Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America’s Eyeballs (Written by Gina Keating), Great By Choice (written by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen), and more. His website is here.

John Middleton

Advisor

John Middleton is Professor of Anglo-American law at the Graduate School of Law, Hitotsubashi University. He co-founded and served as a first-term director of FIJ. He is registered as an Australian Lawyer (Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria) and Attorney-at-Law in New York. He holds a Doctorate of Law from Hitotsubashi University. His area of specialization is comparative media law. He wrote Legal and Extra-legal Remedies for Harm Caused by Media Reporting, Focusing on the British and Australian Approaches to the Problem of False Reporting in Japanese.