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Koshi, a lawyer,
connects women
with leadership
positions at pre-
IPO startups and
large companies
in JapanSchool, she worked as an attorney in New York,
where she began noticing the different ways
women in business were treated. She was shocked
when a male colleague told her he was planning
to take paternity leave, and it made her wonder
why women in Japan often had to decide between
having children or careers. (Environment Minister
Shinjiro Koizumi’s decision to take a 12-day pater-
nity leave in 2020 made headlines in Japan.)
Men in Japan do fewer hours of domestic work
than those in any other wealthy nation, and a cul-
ture of long workdays means Japanese women are
often forced to leave their careers when they have
children. The cultural sentiment was under scored
last year when the head of the Tokyo Olympics or-
ganizing committee said women talk too much in
meetings. (“If we increase the number of female
board members, we have to make sure their speak-
ing time is restricted somewhat; they have diffi-
culty finishing, which is annoying,” Yoshiro Mori
reportedly said.) In 2018, top ruling-party politi-
cian Koichi Hagiuda said raising infants and tod-
dlers is a job for mothers. He’s now the Minister
of Economy, Trade, and Industry.
Although Koshi did not marry or have children,
and did not have to make this choice herself—
“I could work the same as a man, so I didn’t feel any
discrimination,” she says—she decided to run for
mayor of her hometown to try to enact change for
others. In 2012, the then 36-year-old was elected
mayor of Otsu City, at a time when barely any may-
ors in the country were women. In her two terms,
she built dozens of nurseries to give Otsu women
more childcare options.Koshi has always stood out. She recalls
speaking up a lot in class as a child—something
that is uncommon in the country. “There’s a pop-
ular saying in Japan: ‘The nail that sticks out gets
hammered down.’ In Japan, doing things differ-
ently than others is a bad thing,” she says. “I just
did what I really wanted to do, and I didn’t com-
pare myself to other people.”
It wasn’t always easy, and she was bullied in
school. Perhaps it prepared her for the difficulties
to come. Once, while she was trying to persuade
her subordinates—mostly men in their late 50s—
to adopt her childcare policies, one colleague got
so mad that he shouted, punched the desk, and left
the room. “At the time, I thought they were mad
because I was a young woman and the previous
mayors were old men,” she says. “But now I real-
ize that it was because I had a different viewpoint.”
For the more than 340,000 residents of Otsu
City, though, that viewpoint was invaluable.
Ayako Toshinaga, a lawyer, moved there from the
neighboring city of Kusatsu in 2015 because she
couldn’t find a nursery for her baby in Kusatsu.
“I love my job, so I wanted to go back to work,”
Toshinaga says.
OnBoard launched at an inflection point for
corporate gender equality. In 2020, feeling that
she’d accomplished her goals as mayor, Koshi de-
clined to run for a third term and took a position
practicing corporate law at Miura & Partners. A
year later, the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) up-
dated its corporate- governance code to encourage
companies to improve diversity and bring Japan
more in line with global standards, with the hope
that it would make Japanese companies more at-
tractive to foreign investors. (Since March 2022,
Goldman Sachs Asset Management has opposed
Japanese companies’ proposals to elect directors
if at least 10% of their directors aren’t alreadyPHOTOGRAPH BY KENTO MORI FOR TIME