NEW YORK -- Saori Kawano was working five and a half days a week as a waitress at a Japanese restaurant in Manhattan when she realized something had to change.
The work was physically demanding, but not unpleasant. She liked the customers, her coworkers and her boss. But, at 28, having left her job as a junior high school teacher in Yokohama to come to the U.S. three years earlier, she felt her life lacked meaning.
"It was too simple; it was routine work. I couldn't contribute anything," Kawano says. "As a young person, I thought, 'What is my purpose here?' I couldn't see my future. I couldn't stand just to keep on doing this for years and years without seeing my future."