Read about our Nagareyama LEAD’s own Sasha Lee Seals and Blanka Kobayashi’s experiences as female entreprenuers in Japan. They discuss:

Beyond the Programs: The Realities of Building a Business

Navigating Institutional Bias and Bureaucracy

Financial Literacy and Startup Survival

Beyond the Programs: The Realities of Building a Business

Sasha Lee Seals grew up in St. Mary, Jamaica, and has spent more than twenty years in Japan building Nagareyama L.E.A.D, a bilingual entrepreneurship curriculum for children. Seals has also navigated three major accelerator programs:

• UBS Project Female Founders
• AWS Impact Bootcamp in Tokyo
• Techstars

Her assessment is direct and precise: the programs that worked treated participants as serious founders building real businesses. The ones that fell short were often just designed to fill a reporting requirement about female founder support.

Having watched the conversation around women in Japanese business shift over two decades, Seals acknowledges the progress is moving but highlights a critical discrepancy:

“The rhetoric is running ahead of the structure. Visibility for female founders has improved faster than the underlying systems. Women now appear at conferences and in press releases, but getting into the room as the decision-maker rather than the attendee is still a different experience for women than for men,” she said.

Navigating Institutional Bias and Bureaucracy

Blanka Kobayashi was similarly direct. Over her five years running a construction company—an industry where female leadership is rare enough in Japan to be notable—Kobayashi has experienced an excessive range of biases. She described a Japanese employee resigning because he could not work under a woman and a foreigner, and walking into meetings assumed to be a nod to diversity quotas.

Kobayashi is uncompromising in her criticism of the structural side of the ecosystem, citing a stark reality regarding public funding:

“Estimates suggest that only five to 10 percent of grants specifically designated for women are actually being claimed,” she said.

The money is available, but application processes that assume founders have the time, contacts and administrative bandwidth to navigate bureaucracy are filtering out the people most likely to need the funding. Kobayashi’s consistent advice to founders lost in this maze is to find someone who specializes in grants and retain them. The time saved is worth more than the fee.

Financial Literacy and Startup Survival

Financial literacy sits at the center of Kobayashi’s approach. With her extensive experience in the field, she notes that people often start businesses without a clear model for what they cost or how long the unprofitable period will last. Her standard is six to twelve months of financial runway before opening—a straightforward discipline many first-time founders skip.

For Seals, survival comes back to relationships. Japan’s business culture is built on trust that takes years to develop, and trying to shortcut it is a strategic error. Connection is what sustains a business, and it is the first thing she advises any new female entrepreneur in Japan to start building.

Read the full article by Shyam Bhardwa Editor, GoConnect June 17, 2026 GoConnect and visit www.NagareyamaLEAD.com to learn more about the program.