Through all this, Moe has realised how much her personal growth is inherently linked to her professional choices. “My public personas have always helped me throughout this journey,” she says. “‘Mameharu’ [her Geisha name] helped me grow as a young adult. Now Kimono Mom helps me figure out what I want to bring to the world.”
The path to entrepreneurship has had its own challenges. “Being a female entrepreneur can be difficult in Japan. In business meetings, people tend to overlook me, and prefer talking to my husband,” she says. “But I’m Kimono Mom, I’m the one who built this, and I shouldn’t have to fight for them to recognise it.”
To put this in context, Business Insider reported in 2021 that 4.2 per cent of corporate executives in Japan were women, and in 2022, that only 0.8 per cent of Japanese businesses had a female CEO. These numbers gives us an idea…
