"Serendipity" is the word Yumiko Oho uses more than once to explain events in her life as she breezily chats from her adopted home of Tuscany. But, given the way the 41-year-old entrepreneur went against the grain in her native Japan and seized opportunities in Italy, it doesn't do justice to her story.

From her student days, when she traveled extensively in Europe using money earned through part-time jobs, to her trail-blazing career in banking, to her current role as the creator and manager of two successful websites, Oho has pushed herself beyond what Japanese society expected of her.

Since her teens in the late 1990s, Oho was aware that Japan didn't offer the same employment opportunities for women as it did men. She loved mathematics and dreamed of becoming a doctor, but she also knew that it would be hard to work as one as "people thought that only men could be doctors."