Born in Nagasaki, Fukuda originally attended Hiroshima Shudo University to study psychology, but left after a year to travel Europe.

[1] Fukuda discovered that she was given a blood-clotting agent while still a baby in 1980, which had infected her with the virus along with many others from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

[2] In 2004, she became a party to litigation against the government, and became a face of the lawsuit as one of the few people to announce her real name.

By then, Fukuda had "become a poster child for the battle against all things wrong with the government and bureaucracy.

After losing her seat in the election, she retired from politics to start a family with her husband, whom she married six months prior.