She and a group of friends are headed to Kyoto for a seminar on women entrepreneurs. At night she'll have dinner with a fast-rising salesman at a major insurance company, who she thinks can bring her new business. As the train zips to Kyoto, Ms. Kasamatsu studies her business plan while her friends chat. Hitomi Tachiiri is a one-woman consultancy to small businesses. To set up her company, Ms. Tachiiri turned to a friend for money after three banks rejected her loan application.
Japan is still a male-dominated society.
Ms. Kasamatsu breaks from her reading to open her calendar book and show off a picture she snapped last year of Chouno, a professional wrestler sporting leather pants and raising his hands in victory. She carries it with her everywhere. At the entrepreneur seminar, Ms. Kasamatsu enthralls the crowd with the tale of her firm's birth, near death and resurrection. Now that she has survived, she says, her mission is to build a new business that can equip home workers, students and others with PCs, Internet connections and the training on how to use them. She orders a four-topping pizza and gives her home address, where her two sons, now ages 12 and 13, are spending the night without her.