Sanae Takaichi was despondent. It was the late 1980s, and Takaichi, now Japan＊s prime minister, had just moved to Washington to intern for U.S. Rep. Patricia Schroeder, a trailblazing Democrat from Colorado.
Takaichi, then 26, had broken up with her boyfriend and fought with her parents to pursue her dream of working for Schroeder, a feminist force in the U.S.?Congress, whom she had seen on television. But she had a rocky start in Washington, sleeping on flattened cardboard boxes in her apartment and feeling ostracized because she hailed from Japan, then America＊s chief economic rival.
※Even though I had done nothing shameful to anyone, I was shunned by both Japanese society and my American colleagues,§ she later wrote. ※I was truly alone in a faraway foreign country.§
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