There is a misleading blonde blue-eyed softness about Sascha Hewitt. Actually she is as strong as on ox, which she ably demonstrates by lugging three heavy bags from her home in Tokyo's Shimo-Meguro to where we meet in Shibuya.

So here we are, with an Apple iBook and an assortment of therapeutic oils on the table competing with iced coffees, two Vietnamese-style cold platters of food and my usual scramble of stuff.

Sascha is from Perth in Western Australia, where she co-owned a fashion business, designing and selling in her home country but manufacturing in Indonesia and China. "In 1991 I sold my half to my partner and came to Japan with my then boyfriend, Ian. We had no idea what we were doing. We just knew we wanted to travel. Perth is large but isolated, nearer Jakarta than any Australian city."