Yoichi Masuzoe is a Japanese politician who was elected to the position of governor of Tokyo in 2014 and resigned in June 2016 due to the misuse of public funds. He was previously a member of the Japanese House of Councillors and the Japanese Minister of Health, Labor, and Welfare. Before entering politics, he became well known in Japan as a television commentator on political issues. Masuzoe was born in Kitakyushu in Fukuoka Prefecture on 29 November 1948. He graduated from Yahata High School in 1967 and entered the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo, where he majored in law, politics, and history. He is conversationally fluent in English and French. Masuzoe was an academic assistant at the University of Tokyo from 1971, and later spent several years in Europe as a research fellow at the University of Paris (1973–75) and the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva (1976–78). He was an assistant professor at the University of Tokyo from 1979 to 1989. After leaving the university in 1989, he established the Masuzoe Institute of Political Economy. He became known as a frequent guest on political talk shows in Japan, particularly the popular TV Tackle program hosted by Takeshi Kitano.
While continuing his writing and consulting on foreign affairs, Masuzoe relocated from Tokyo to Kitakyushu in the 1990s to take care of his aging mother, who began to show signs of deteriorating mental health. In 1998, he published a book entitled When I Put a Diaper on My Mother, which details his experience caring for his mother and the obstacles imposed by the Japanese welfare system. The book sold 100,000 copies, more than any of his previous political works, and propelled Masuzoe into the national spotlight as an authority on the aging society in Japan.