Yamamoto Mona, a freelance announcer who drew attention when she passed the bar exam in November 2025, has described playing up her femininity to survive in a male-dominated television industry in her 20s. Yamamoto, 50, spoke about her years as an announcer and a career turning point at 29 in an interview with AERA DIGITAL.
She joined Asahi Broadcasting Corporation (ABC, now Asahi Broadcasting Television) in Osaka straight out of university. "I thought using femininity as a weapon was what made you a professional," she said of the character she performed on air.
A childhood spent not standing out
Yamamoto was born in Onomichi, Hiroshima Prefecture, to a Norwegian father and a Japanese mother, and took Japanese nationality at age 6. She said she felt out of place as a child. Foreigners were a rare sight in Onomichi then, and the family drew stares when she walked through the shopping arcade with her father.
She said she could not take being treated as special in a positive light, and tried to behave like everyone else and keep out of sight. Her grandfather was a newspaper reporter and her mother had worked at the Yomiuri Shimbun in Osaka before marriage.
“She told me that from now on women would work too, and that I should just get out into society and work.”Yamamoto Mona, in an interview with AERA DIGITAL
She first set her sights on journalism, thinking of a newspaper in Osaka near her family home. People around her suggested she also try a TV station, and she sat the early announcer exams. ABC was the first company she applied to and the only one she joined.
The turn at 29
Yamamoto said she kept up the performed character through her 20s, and that a career turning point arrived at 29. The interview was published as the first of two parts. In the second, she discusses becoming a judicial apprentice at 50 and what she has learned from people in their 20s.