As the editor of a string of successful fashion titles, Hiromi Sogo has spent three decades telling Japanese women what to wear. Her new task is to try to interest them in a drier topic: fiscal policy.
Sogo, the editor-in-chief of luxury magazines Vingt-Cinq Ans and Richesse, said she wondered whether there had been a mistake when she was contacted to take part in a Finance Ministry panel on how to rein in Japan's ballooning national debt. She's also one of six female speakers set to lecture on the topic at a seminar for women in April. Finance Minister Taro Aso will be the only male speaker at the event.
"To be honest, I was clueless about fiscal policy," Sogo, 52, said in an interview at the publisher's offices in Tokyo's fashionable Omotesando district. "But it's important to offer people a chance to find out about it. Women make up half the population and they need to think not only about the small unit of the household, but about what is happening in the country as a whole."