In 1974, Hideko Kariya represented Japan in the Miss Internationals finals, a beauty pageant that started in California in 1960 and moved to Japan in 1968. She placed fifth. Then, in 1981, she married into a family than ran an ever-expanding empire of more than 100 kimono stores across Japan. But as the economy boomed, and with it the family business, Kariya humbly remained at home, Cinderella-like, raising two sons.
In the early 1990s, though, Japan's economic bubble burst and consumers across the nation suddenly tightened their collective obi. The Kansai area - based family kimono corporation Kariya had married into was hit hard from the start of that drastic downturn and began to crumble before eventually collapsing.
After that, Kariya and her husband opened a new kimono shop, in the Jimbocho district of central Tokyo, in 2005, and she suddenly found herself in the position of being an okami (female shop owner), with a steep learning curve ahead of her.