Kosaku Narioka is a reporter at the Asia real-time hub in Singapore. Kosaku covers corporate news from Japan, India and China. His areas of expertise include mergers and acquisitions, cars, semiconductors, real estate and currencies.
Prior to his relocation to Singapore in July 2019, Kosaku spent nine years at the Journal’s Tokyo bureau and covered everything in finance and investing. He wrote about Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s economic initiatives, including the Bank of Japan’s asset purchases and the sharp depreciation of the yen, rule changes for corporate boards to include more independent directors and Government Pension Investment Fund’s shifts to stocks from domestic bonds. He also covered Toshiba’s restructuring and management shakeups following the bankruptcy of its U.S. unit, Westinghouse Electric.
In March 2011, Kosaku reported from northern Japan with his colleagues when the region was hit by a magnitude 9.0-earthquake and one of the worst tsunamis in modern history. He joined the Journal in 2010 as an intern for the Japan Real Time blog. He started his journalism career at a small-town newspaper in a suburb of Houston.
He majored in journalism at Texas State University and studied political science at Seikei University in Tokyo. He also studied Arabic at Damascus University’s language institute in Syria.