Do we like Yuriko Koike?
Our score: 6 out of 10. A decent record on childcare and LGBTQ+ recognition, offset by a yearly refusal on the Korean massacre memorial and a contested degree story.
Yuriko Koike is a career politician who has run Tokyo for a decade. She won a third term in July 2024 as an independent with backing from the ruling LDP and its partner Komeito, beating Renho and Shinji Ishimaru by wide margins in exit polls. That election was framed as a referendum on her eight years in charge and her response to Japan's falling birthrate.
On women, she has said things that fit her record. Back in 2016 she said appointing women to decision-making positions is “necessary for diversity in Japan”. She also said long working hours just aren't viable anymore. It's one of the more consistent threads in her career.
Her best moment for this page came in December 2021, when she told the Tokyo assembly the city would draw up basic principles for a same-sex partnership system. Advocates called it a significant milestone, while noting it carries little legal weight and doesn't settle things like inheritance. It's a real step from someone with the power to make it happen, even if it isn't marriage.
Now the stain. Koike sent a condolence message to the memorial for Korean victims of the 1923 Kanto massacre in her first year, then stopped. She says she mourns all earthquake victims at a Buddhist service run by the Tokyo Metropolitan Memorial Association, and won't send messages to separately held events. Critics say the killings were no natural disaster, and in August 2025 Tokyo assembly members again asked her to send one. A communist assembly member criticised her for going along with a right-wing assembly member's denial that it happened.
The other cloud is her Cairo University degree. In April 2024 a former aide, Toshiro Kojima, alleged to Bungei Shunju that Koike and another official helped draft the university document that confirmed her graduation. He said he has emails proving it. Koike denied it at a press conference on 12 April 2024, and Cairo University certified her graduation back in 2020. Nothing here is proven, so we're leaving it at alleged and denied.
On policy for ordinary families, she's been busy. In December 2024 she announced free daycare for all preschool-age children in Tokyo from September 2025, saying “There is no time to spare.” Fortune reported it as a first at prefecture level. Whether you like her politics or not, that's a real benefit for real parents.