The woman who lost it all yet built the largest recruitment company in Asia

This is a story about grit and resilience.  

It's about a woman who started when everything in the world was wrong. She kept showing up even when it was embarrassing, illegal, heartbreaking, and sometimes involved hiding her real designation so men in authority wouldn’t feel challeged.

Picture this.  

Tokyo, 1979.  

Five telephones (not mobiles, but landlines) ringing all at once.  

Young women in her forties is sprinting through Roppongi in sports shoes, holding payment slips to get the temporary workers paid because they loved their founder Shinohara and believed in her vision.

She has no business degree, no investor support, not even a husband to support her dreams and vision.

She even removed her title from her business cards so clients assumed a man was in charge, and she let them think that because the alternative meant losing the sale.  

Kanagawa, 1941.  

It’s the year 1941. The world is a mess after the world war. Yoshiko lives in Kanagawa, Japan and is only seven when her father dies.

Her mother takes on the entire load. People ask her to give up her kids for adoption. But her mother, a midwife and one of the first registered midwives in Japan, doesn't give up. Everyday she tightens her apron and goes to work.  

Every night, someone knocks on their door. A mother in labor, a husband worried about early contractions, a young mother with a young child looking for a place to give birth.  

Her mother might be in the middle of a meal, asleep, or doing anything else, but she stands up straight, grabs her bag, and leaves.  

No complaints, no yelling, no signs of stress shown to her children. Just a mother showing up every day when even getting out of bed feels hard.  

Young Yoshiko watches this and thinks something that will quietly guide her life:

Fast forward to junior high.  

Yoshiko's commute involves a group of classmates who hang out but doesn’t want to do anything else.

She goes home and tells her mother, "I'm not going to school anymore."  

Her mother looks at her and enrolls her in a private school.  

(No scolding. Just a simple change of school.)

Personal Thought: I often think and want to embody this calmness as a mom. Honestly we have more than ever and yet we’re stresses than ever.

At the new school, Yoshiko becomes student government president, joins the language club, and exchanges letters in English with a pen pal in Malaysia.  

She is twelve and doesn’t know yet but she is already working towards something she can't yet name.  

She is 26 when the pressure becomes unbearable. In 1960, society has a clear path for Japanese women: graduate, work briefly, marry, quit, and become a housewife. 

Most of her friends follow this path. The world is built around it. She doesn’t want to get married but she still marries. She quits her job, as expected, and becomes a housewife. 

The marriage lasts less than a year.  It wasn’t a triumphant exit with dramatic music. It felt shameful. Her brother condemned her. Her family felt embarrassed in front of the community. But she still took that step anyway. 

She moved into a 50-square-foot studio and went back to work. She sat alone with this thought: "Almost all the women I knew were married. I ended my marriage by my own choice. Unlike my mother, I have no special skills. I don’t know what I need. I don’t know what I should do." 

Personal thoughts: That feeling of being alone is scary. Everyone else is on their path while you've stepped off, with no map for where you are. I have been in this place more times than I can count.

She decides to learn English. Her colleagues wonder why a woman would choose English over flower arrangement, tea ceremony, or cooking. She’s not going to become a diplomat.

She’s already an outcast, but she ignores them and studies hard. The more she learns, the more she dreams of going abroad. But how?

She’s just a 30-year-old woman with no special skills, no family to support her dreams and no money.

She finds a friend living in Switzerland. She uses the inheritance money left by her eldest brother, who died young, to buy a one-way ticket.

Switzerland is cold and German-speaking. She finds it hard to gel in. She cries regularly and questions everything. After months of trying and failing, she decided it was time to move on.

She moved to England in 1966. That year, London was on the cover of Time Magazine as the cultural capital of the world. Miniskirts and The Beatles were taking over the minds of young people.

Everyone was excited about new possibilities.

She moves to the port town of Bournemouth. She joins a language school and West London College for business and typing. She is so broke that she cannot even afford phone calls home.

Instead, she studies. This goes on for three years. There is no contact with home. She feels lonely and broke but remains determined and occasionally desperate.

Then she finds a job in Australia and moves again.

Sydney changes everything. 

One day, on an ordinary afternoon, she walks into the office to find a woman she has never seen sitting at her colleague's desk. Her co-worker is out of town. The stranger works efficiently, confidently, as if she belongs.

What is this?

She learns the word: temp.

She sits in the staffing agency for three hours, just watching. And looks at how it works, how women move between companies. And how skills can be portable and how work doesn’t have to be one company and one single track.

One day she had lunch with the woman president of the agency. After collecting enough data she is sure this is what she wants to do in Japan.

That brochure becomes the founding document of Tempstaff.

It’s 1973. She’s 38, living in She lives in Roppongi in a small apartment. A curtain divides her bed and desk.

She puts every yen of her savings around $30K US  into launching a company. 

Temporary staffing is considered illegal in Japan during that time. The government considers it akin to human trafficking. The Ministry of Labour calls her again and again and warn her that she is basically operating illegally.

She visits foreign companies without appointments. She introduces herself without her title because her clients assume there is a male president back at the office, and she decides that this assumption is useful.

Companies are slow to say “yes.”

Cash is always a problem and she has to pay the temporary staff before the clients pay her. So, at night, she converts her office into an English school. Students pay upfront and that money goes to salaries.

She lives on four hours sleep a night, for the first five years. She makes close to nothing and every few months she is haunted by one question. Should I quit?

And every few months she doesn’t.

Why?" Because -" I have temporary staff people working for me on my word. What would happen to this promise if I just shut down?”

It was a promise that kept her going.

By the late 1975, Tempstaff grew to 75 employees and over Yuan 10B. But the managemnst process is still very basic. Shinohara wanted to fix it but her all female staff said tehre’s nothing that can be improvement.

A big warm communal company run on trust and loyalty and the energy of women who built something together..

Branch managers became comfortable. The informal network that built the company was now protecting it from growing.

Then one of her subsidiaries hires a male employee for sales and the sales went up for that branch. Seeing this, she hired men from outside.

The men were outnumbered and often silenced. The veteran women had fifteen years of history together.

Then seven male employees wrote a letter asking to:

“Introduce financial targets, create performance evaluations. Reform the company or we leave.”

Yoshiko read the letter and did what she was planning to do for a long time.

The reform was harsh. People were relocated within the company. Some veteran women were even demoted and salaries were reduced.

There were phones ringing every night at Yoshiko's home with complaints. Not a single call was refused by her. 

She lost sleep and she lost people. But she gained a company that was capable of growth. 

It appeared that she no longer cared about the women but still watched out. 

One woman called Chikayo was demoted and almost quit her job. Yoshiko kept finding her new roles and new possibilities. 

Later Chikayo said “She was trying harder than I was to figure out what would suit me. She did the same for all of us. She was finding competencies in us that we ourselves did not know existed”. 

It is January of 1998. Suddenly phones started ringing with questions from media companies and magazines.

One of the tempstaff who had access to their data sold it online.The names, addresses and contact details of 90,000 registered temp workers had been stolen and sold on the internet.

Yoshiko calls a meeting at midnight.

Her first words: “Our primary goal is to eliminate the anxiety of our temps and clients. That's all."

She holds a press conference before the story is published. She reaches out to every affected worker directly, and negotiates to buy back the data. She gets the website taken down.

But the media onslaught was ferocious. 

At the all-staff meeting, she tells her employees: even if the company closes, she will pay one year of their salaries from retained earnings. She asked them to use this time and find some new work.

Then for the first time ever she breaks down. She cries in front of everyone as her heart shattered in a million pieces for her staff.

But again she rose and saved the company.

In 2006 at 72 years old, she took Tempstaff public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and became the first self-made woman billionaire in Japan.

She had no children to leave the company to. But she wanted it to survive without her.

Her shareholding dropped from 72% to 50%.

She said: "Tempstaff is certainly a company I founded  but it is not mine. It exists only thanks to employees, temps, and clients."

Below all the milestones, this is what Yoshiko Shinohara really teaches us:

She was not remarkable at first. All she was, was a person who wouldn’t quit.”

No diploma. No money. No legal support.  No husband. No title on her business card for years. 

What she had was a mother who never bore a tired face. A flyer from a Sydney temp agency and a promise she wouldn't break.

She has run a company for 33 years and when asked about her leadership philosophy she said:

"I had no academic or business experience when I started. I always feel that this person can be better than me. I don’t get angry often. Don’t matter whether you are in a better position or you are older. You should just start anyway."

Not knowing everything was the whole advantage.

She built a ¥237 billion company.

She appeared on Fortune's 50 Most Powerful Women in Business International for nine consecutive years. The only Japanese woman to do so.

She had all odds against her. Yet She Started Anyway.

The question she leaves with every woman reading this:

What promise are you not breaking? Because that is what actually keeps you going.

Next week: Another woman. Another story. Same stubborn fire.

My mission is to get women seen. Build circles where these conversations can happen. So that the next generation women can build fearlessly.

If you’re a female founder who would like to get inspired weekly or you know someone who needs this, subscribe and share.

Until next week xoxo

Chakshu Vats