Reuters hires Toyoda as its Japan bureau chief

Kevin Krolicki, Asia news editor, and Soyoung Kim, incoming North and Southeast Asia editor, sent the following message to Reuters staff:

We are delighted to announce that Yukiko Toyoda has been appointed Japan Bureau Chief.

Yukiko is a dynamic editor and newsroom manager who brings a deep record of experience in reporting on Japan and its role in the world to this crucial position, which oversees Reuters coverage in English and Japanese of the world’s third-largest economy.

Over the course of her 25-year career at Kyodo, Yukiko has covered defense and foreign policy and the Bank of Japan in addition to postings in Kyodo’s bureaus in Osaka and Niigata. She was Kyodo’s Singapore bureau chief from 2009 to 2013 and worked as a correspondent in Washington from 2015 to 2018. Most recently, she has been the deputy editor for Kyodo’s investigations team where, among other stories, she worked with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists on reporting on the money flow French prosecutors had examined as part of a corruption investigation related to Tokyo’s successful bid to host the Olympics.

Yukiko has reported extensively on the evolving defense and diplomatic ties between Japan and the United States at a time of rising tensions with China. She was one of a team of Kyodo journalists recognized with a special prize from the Japan Congress of Journalists for a series about US-Japan defense cooperation in 2007. Outside her work in journalism, Yukiko has been a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and has a doctorate from Waseda University with a focus on public policy.  She’s the author of three books on US-Japan relations in Japanese.

Yukiko will begin work on February 15 and report to Soyoung Kim, who starts as North and Southeast Asia editor on March 1.