Shoko Yamaguchi is a Japanese international-affairs journalist and translator whose reporting has focused on French politics, society, and culture. After graduating in French literature from Keio University, she studied journalism at CFJ in Paris on a French government scholarship in 1969–1970. At Sankei Shimbun she worked in cultural reporting, Yukan Fuji, foreign news, and feature editing before serving as Paris bureau chief from May 1990 to September 2011. She continued reporting from France after retiring from the newspaper. She received the Vaughn-Ueda International Journalist Award in 1994 and was appointed a Chevalier of France’s National Order of Merit in 2001 and of the Legion of Honour in 2013, becoming an Officier of the latter order in 2023. Her five-volume “Paris Nikki: Tokuhain ga Mita Gendaishi Kiroku 1990–2021,” published between 2021 and 2023, brought together decades of reporting under presidents Mitterrand, Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande, and Macron. It documented French responses to diplomacy, wars, terrorism, and social movements. Alongside contemporary reporting, she investigated the history of Franco-Japanese encounters. In “Paris no Fukuzawa Yukichi: Nazo no Shozo Shashin o Tazunete,” she used a portrait taken during Yukichi Fukuzawa’s 1862 visit as an interpreter with a Japanese diplomatic mission to trace his movements through Paris. She visited bookshops, hotels, and museums associated with the mission and investigated the photographer Potteau. Her 2026 book “Nihonjin no Shiranai France: Paris de Deatta Wasuregataki Hitobito” drew on interviews and encounters with presidential spouses, intellectuals, diplomats, doctors, and artists, recounting political and social events through individual experiences.
