Business-minded transsexuals a cut above your average salaryman
Salarymen have been around for decades. Even salarywomen are not such a strange sight on Japan's streets. Now, according to Friday (3/3), there are also salary-in-betweens.
As the IT sector has proved in recent weeks, there's more to Japan's high tech biz than meets the eye and nowhere is that more evident than at New Gauge, one of Japan's fastest growing companies staffed, it seems at first glance, by women.
But take a closer look at the employees and things like Adam's apples, relatively large hands and five o'clock shadows become evident.
New Gauge is a company of "nyuu haafu," or New Half, the Japanese term used to describe post-cut transsexuals.
"All our company's executives and half its 15 employees are nyuu haafu. Our company handles all sorts of information for mobile phones, like beauty needs, fashion, as well as information useful for the gay and lesbian communities and anything you need to know about cosmetic surgery," New Gauge's CEO Neru Kisaragi tells Friday. "We're using the fact that we're nyuu haafu to the hilt."
Kisaragi is running a business she says can only be run by nyuu haafu and aims to become a 100 million yen a year operation -- a goal that has got off to a good start by reaping in 20 million yen in its first two months in business.
Kisaragi's rise to IT magnate, however, would have seemed unlikely even to her not so long ago.
"Until three years ago, I was a Western-style cook in a posh hotel. Of course, I was still a man at that time," she says. "I've always wanted to do work that had a creative bent, though, so I gave up being a cook after a year."
Following her, or his as it was at the time, unsuccessful stint as a hotel cook, Kisaragi went to work at the family noodle restaurant for a while, but began an e-mail magazine service for mobile phone users, which he operated in his part time. Before he knew it, Kisaragi had a subscriber list of over 300,000 and was racking in 4 million yen a month in advertising revenue. Using the money he was making, Kisaragi left his hometown in sleepy Hokkaido and headed for the bright lights of Tokyo, setting up New Gauge in the capital's posh Nishi Azabu district late last year and becoming a woman at around the same time.
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