LaShawn Toyoda learned how to code during the pandemic. Japan's international community is glad she did.

COMMUNITY / Our Lives

LaShawn Toyoda learned how to code during the pandemic. Japan’s international community is glad she did.

The work pays off: LaShawn Toyoda quit her job as an English teacher during the pandemic and enrolled in a coding bootcamp. She says it was a lot of work, but the end result saw her get a new job and the creation of a health database that helps non-Japanese find clinics with leftover COVID-19 vaccines.

By Rochelle Kopp
Contributing writer

Jun 28, 2021

The mood on her Twitter feed was dark and full of anxiety, so LaShawn Toyoda, 36, decided to do something about it.

“People were really upset, scared and stressed out,” she says. “With the Olympics coming up, worries about the pandemic were exacerbated by the slow rollout of the vaccine and the lack of (English-language) information about the voucher system. They had no idea when they would get one, and resources in languages other than Japanese were scarce.”

Toyoda had a new set of skills that she could apply to the problem, as she had recently learned to code.