Nissan Seminar: How to swim in a thousand waves: female employment experiences from the front line

Convener: Professors Hugh Whittaker and Takehiko Kariya

Speaker: Ms Sumiko Ito, President of Arcadia Capital, Inc., USA and Board Member of FUTI (Friends of UTokyo, Inc.)

Sumiko Ito’s extraordinary early career – as one of the first female officials at the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare and subsequently in consulting and investment banking in the United States – was written up as a well-known Harvard Business School case study in 1993 because of what it said about the opportunities for women in Japan and Japanese women outside Japan between the mid-1970s and early-1990s. In this talk, Ito-san extends her account until the present day and discusses employment opportunities for Japanese women today.