Word: owada
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...Tokyo to study for the Foreign Ministry entrance exam. The stocky teenager was becoming sleek and turning heads in a division that is only about 5% female. She passed the stiff exam after just one year -- most people require two years of study, and only 5.3% succeeded in 1986, Owada's year. Even now, Tokyo professionals can be heard to say, "She did what a man can't do," and then hurriedly correct themselves...
...this" on the test sheets. Not everyone wanted to attempt this particular hurdle, and her pals turned to Masako, a good choice since she already had superior penmanship. "I saw this," she wrote confidently on their papers, until someone in the class squealed. In the dustup that followed, Owada spoke out, saying each student should choose whether to reveal her scores. Recalls a classmate: "At a time when everyone took the teacher's word as absolute, she already sensed some right and wrong...
Masako could be cheeky. In high school English class, the students would try to disrupt a lesson by asking the teacher endless questions. Before the start of the session, Owada and her best friend to this day, Sumiyo Tsuchikawa, the two most fluent English speakers in the group, would go to the blackboard and write down teasers like "Did you go out with anyone during college?" The rest of the class shouted out questions in Japanese for the pair to translate in chalk...
...Lillian Katz, says Masako "never needed moral support. She knew her own worth, and she knew that she was her parents' pride and joy." Belmont has reason to remember its former high-schooler. Since the engagement, Japanese tourists arrive by the busload to ogle her alma mater and the Owada house...
When the elder Owada's two-year teaching stint was over, his daughter remained in the U.S. and went to Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in economics. Her thesis adviser was Jeffrey Sachs, who went on to advise countries around the world on how to switch from controlled to free-market economies. "She had a certain extra dimension, a real analytical mind," he observes. "Her thesis concerned Japan's trade performance after each shock in oil prices during the '70s and '80s, and how the country paid for fuel by increasing exports. She devised computer work that was sophisticated, especially...