It is Saturday afternoon in Kamioka, Kanagawa Prefecture, and Yuri Morita is bringing the first of a two-day seminar on empowerment issues to a close. The room is full -- some 60 women aged between late 20s and 60s, and a scattering of men.
"There are usually more (men)," Yuri notes after the last student has left. "Who are they? Mainly professionals in education and social welfare -- teachers, nurses, midwives, many kinds of helpers and carers. They come from Hokkaido, Tohoku, Kyushu, even Okinawa."
Originally from Yokohama, she is now director of the Empowerment Center she established in 1997 in Kansai's Nishinomiya, where she lives. Through the center she conducts more than 20 seminars a year in the Kanto and Kansai areas. "This morning we worked through the workbook I translated into Japanese from the textbook I authored in the States in the early 1990s while working as an affirmative action trainer of the University of California."