Mitsuko Shimomura (下村満子) - President & CEO, Genki Plaza Medical Center for Healthcare

Shimomura graduated from Keio University in Economics, and received her master's degree in the same subject at New York University. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1987- 88.
In 1965, Shimomura started to work for Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading newspaper (daily circulation: 8 million), and went all over the world. Her two decades with Asahi Shimbun is a record of many "first woman"s in Japan: the first female foreign correspondent (Asahi Shimbun, New York, 1980), the first woman journalist to achieve Senior Staff Writer status, and the first woman Editor-in-Chief of a major national-circulation weekly magazine (Asahi Journal, 1990-92). She was the first woman to receive the Vaughn-Ueda International Journalist prize for outstanding international reporting (1982). Shimomura left Asahi at the end of 1994, and continues her active career as an independent writer and journalist, TV commentator and public speaker.
In addition to her work as a journalist, Shimomura has written more than twenty books including, Harvard Memories: Reflections on Japan and the U.S.; The Truth behind Japan Bashing; American Views of Japan, and Made in Japan - Akio Morita and Sony, which was written in1986 in collaboration and subsequently published in 20 languages. Her latest book is Thank you to you: Meaning of Life.
Mitsuko Shimomura’s homepage: http://www.m-shimomura.com/english/