From Business News Anchor to Graduate School
As a business news anchor, I appear on “Nikkei Morning Plus FT,” a business program on BS TV Tokyo. We cover a wide range of topics related to the economy, from the Bank of Japan’s Monetary Policy Meetings and the latest on the FOMC, to industry analysis and interviews with executives, to how the prices of familiar everyday items are determined. We also sometimes welcome to the studio people from startups that are drawing attention. In those conversations, I repeatedly heard them voice the worry that when a startup tries to launch a new form of business, it runs up against regulatory walls and cannot operate as it would like, and that while it is tied up coordinating with the relevant ministries and agencies, it falls behind its overseas counterparts. That led me to wonder whether there was something I could do, from a standpoint different from that of the government, to promote innovation, and I enrolled in the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Tokyo as a working adult. It was my first time back at the University of Tokyo in nearly ten years, since graduating from the Faculty of Letters.
Student Life as a New Mother
Around the time the summer break of my first year began, I gave birth to my first child, a boy. We were still in the COVID-19 pandemic and classes had gone fully remote, so in a way I was lucky not to have to commute to campus carrying a full-term belly. Since the summer break continued for a while after the birth, I was able to recover my health and settle into a rhythm of life with a newborn while preparing for the classes starting in the fall. In my first year, I made a clean decision to focus on taking the required courses of the Economic Policy course, and from my second year, after my child entered nursery school, I branched out into case studies and practical courses. From my second year, in-person classes were back, which made group work easier, and I was happy that the number of classmates whose names I could match to their faces kept growing.
Learning About ESG from Many Angles
In 2022, through important events such as the GX Implementation Council and COP27, I feel that our awareness of climate change issues rose even further. Reflecting this, many classes at GraSPP took up ESG. I was able to learn about ESG comprehensively, covering carbon credits, resource security, sustainable finance, and more. At my internship as well, I engaged in research in the environment and energy fields, deepening my understanding of the connections between environmental policy and business. It was a fascinating year in which I could see for myself how individual pieces of knowledge linked up—from points into lines, and from lines into planes.
Looking Ahead
Graduate school, work, and motherhood. Wearing those three hats, there were times I thought, “Twenty-four hours in a day just isn’t enough!” But looking back, I believe each of them had a positive influence on the others. Especially after my child was born, I found myself thinking more and more about questions like “What kind of society do I want to build?” and “How do I want to change the world for our children?”—which became an excellent motivation for studying policy. The knowledge of policy and the analytical methods I gained in my two years at GraSPP are things I intend to keep cherishing and developing after graduation, just as I will my child. I cannot yet say clearly what I will do after graduating, but I hope to draw on my career as a business news anchor and my experience at GraSPP to contribute to promoting innovation across the public and private sectors, which has interested me since I first enrolled.
