I was born in 1962.
It was the middle of the high-growth period when Japan’s real economic growth rate averaged more than 10% per year and everyone was looking forward to the future.

I grew up with parents who believed in women’s participation in society, and after graduating from college I went to work for a radio station. However, before the Equal Employment Opportunity Law came into effect, it was common for women to leave the workforce and go home. After marrying into an old family, I spent my days raising my three children while teaching toddler classes at home.

However, my desire to work utilizing my abilities after marriage and motherhood grew over the years. At the age of 45, I started my own business, Abilities Corporation, and launched a sales promotion service business in 2008 with a group of women with strong IT skills. Despite twists and turns, the company has steadily expanded and celebrated its 10th anniversary.

The last ten years have been both the most fulfilling and the most difficult of my life.

Two months after establishing Abilities, my mother died suddenly at home, and I was busy commuting home to take care of my father, sick sister and newly established company. I regretted that I was too late in noticing
changes in my children’s health. In order to have more time for my children, I decided to live in the apartment I had rented as an office for a while. But this time my mother-in-law became hospitalized and I spent many years when no amount of time was enough to balance work and home life caring for my children.

Even I, who always took care of my family members when they had the flu and was confident of my health, became exhausted both physically and mentally during this period. I was more than happy to hear my clients say, “We are glad we entrusted our work to your company, and we are grateful for this encounter,” and I wanted to provide work that exceeded their expectations, but my family’s illnesses kept coming and going, and I was in a state of anguish with nowhere to turn.

No matter how much I paid attention to diet, sleep, and exercise, no matter how much I tried to learn about modern medicine and comprehensive medical care, my health condition never recovered, and on the contrary, I saw it getting worse and worse every day. I strongly felt the limitations of modern medicine.

At that time, we were asked to renew the website of a clinic specializing in intestinal flora transplantation. At the time, I had little knowledge about gut microbiota. There had already been cases of improvement in
inflammatory bowel disease, which is difficult to treat, and although it was a field I had no experience in, the more I learned about it, the more I saw its potential. This miracle, which could never have been obtained through insurance treatment alone, shocked me to the core, and I was instantly drawn into the world of microorganisms. Six months after my first encounter with gut microbiota, a group of clinicians who sympathized with its potential led the way to establish Japan’s first organized organization for fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), the General Incorporated Foundation for Clinical Research on Intestinal Microflora Transplantation.