Roua
(@roua12tnt)

Born in 1990 in Kobe, Japan. She graduated from the University of Tokyo, Faculty of Economics, in 2014. After graduation, she worked as an intern and freelancer in various countries and cities, such as New York, Manila, Wuhan, Tokyo, etc., mainly in a project management role in the IT sector. She visited Estonia for the first time in 2015 and stayed for a year to join the project. Then she returned to Tokyo to work for a think tank. After a year, she left the think tank and returned to Estonia again around the end of 2018 as a founding member of a start-up. In January of the following year, she founded ROUA to run her own freelance business alongside the start-up job. Later, when existing projects were postponed or abandoned due to COVID, she started publishing the JPEE anthology annually as an activity to link Japan and Estonia while aiming to win new projects. At the same time, she enrolled in a correspondence course at Kyoto University of Arts for two years to improve her skills, and she graduated from the illustration course in 2023. As remote working became more prevalent from 2022 onwards, she worked on a project basis on management and consultancy in international teams. Currently, she takes on a full-time job as a product manager in SaaS product development in the EdTech field. Her hobby of drawing illustrations and manga has led her to work in character creation, webtooning, and banner production. Most of her work is online, but she participates in Japanese pop culture events and cultural exchange events in Estonia and abroad as a lecturer and exhibitor, interacting with artists and children.