An 'outsider' finds insight into Japan's bad-loan crisis

Just 33 years old when she headed the Tokyo Bureau of the Financial Times, Gillian Tett took an unusual route to the heart of Japan's business world.

The Cambridge-educated anthropologist began freelancing for the British Broadcasting Corp. and the FT from the villages of Soviet Tajikistan, where she was researching a Ph.D. on Islam and nationalism. Recruited for FT's graduate-trainee program, she joined the paper full time in 1993 and was transferred to Tokyo in 1997. In 2002 she took a sabbatical to work on "Saving the Sun," a study of the bad-loan crisis that overwhelmed Japan's Long Term Credit Bank, which was then sold to foreign investors and relaunched as Shinsei.

Now the mother of 6-month-old Helen Marie, Tett returns to work next month as deputy head of Lex at the FT in London. She was recently in Tokyo to promote the newly published Japanese translation of "Saving the Sun." She spoke with The Japan Times in an interview and by e-mail.