[1] Her father, Tsuneo Ikeda, was a sports journalist and businessman who started Baseball Magazine (BBM)[2] and his mother’s family founded Kudō Shashin-kan in Ryōgoku.
Her older sister Akiko was the wife of Chiharu Igaya and her younger brother Tetsuo Ikeda is president of Baseball Magazine (BBM)[1].
At first she mainly wrote about women who moved overseas, but after writing about topics related to sumo and Czechoslovakia she moved on to critical biographies of men of letters from her father’s home prefecture of Niigata including Nishiwaki Junzaburō, Yaichi Aizu, and Kumaichi Horiguchi and his son Daigaku Horiguchi, and then to biographies of Lafcadio Hearn and imperial family members.
She is a conservative who for a time served as vice-president of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform and has recently written a biography of Isoroku Yamamoto and engaged in debates about Tokyo Governor Shintarō Ishihara.
She contributed to a volume opposing changes to Japan’s imperial succession laws and she supports the controversial film The Truth about Nanjing.