Born in Miyazaki Prefecture, Hara graduated from the Department of Political Science and
Economics, the School of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University. In 2000 he
joined Nikkei Business Publications, Inc. where he worked as a Nikkei PC journalist specializing
in telecommunications, where he reported on local governments’ transition to IT. In 2006 he
launched the Nikkei PC website “PC Online”, and in 2007 founded Nikkei NETMarketing
(currently Nikkei Digital Marketing). Since 2010, Hara has been covering, in his role as a Nikkei
Business journalist, the IT and distribution industries. In January 2016 he was appointed the
Founding Editor-in-Chief of “Nikkei Fintech”, the only specialist FinTech magazine in Japan.