Women in the Workplace - Mitsu Kimata

As a young girl, Ms Kimata’s father used to tell her: “You should grow up to take care of other people’s problems, not to have other people take care of you.” Taking the advice to heart, Ms Kimata graduated from the Faculty of Medicine (Public Health) at Tokyo University before becoming one of Japan’s first elite bureaucrats for the Ministry of Labor.

“I was the first woman bureaucrat to be assigned to the Vocational Training Bureau. For good or bad, the time had come for Japan to be categorized as a developed nation and was, therefore, required to do something good for developing countries in Asia, to begin with, then Africa and South and Middle America,” she explains.

Read article.