Keiko Satoh

These days, Satoh spends most of her time promoting the ideas of two information doctors. One is Richard Saul Wurman, the American architect and writer known for his Access travel guides and his Smart Yellow Pages for Pacific Bell. Satoh produced the Japanese translation of Wurman's influential book Information Anxiety and organized Wurman's Japan-based TED extravaganza.

The other information doctor under Satoh's wing is Seigo Matsuoka, a Japanese philosopher whose book History Informs has made him a sort of Eastern media guru. Satoh is promoting Matsuoka's ideas abroad by helping to create a new book aimed at US audiences. Much of Matsuoka's writings are arcane musings on language, but his bottom-line message - the need to inject humanism back into the narrative of interpersonal communications - parallels Satoh's worldview.

One sign of Satoh's commitment to these ideas is a black ink painting on her office wall. It's a kind of modernist cave drawing filled with primitive language symbols. Admiring comments prompt her to call on an aide, who drops what she's doing to lug in several more paintings by the same artist. His name is simply Panwei, and promoting his work is Satoh's most recent passion.

"He's 29 years old and born in Shanghai,'' she says. "He left after Tiananmen Square to come here. He doesn't speak any Japanese. We communicate by kanji. I began to learn Chinese history through him, through his art. The things that are not in a book, the Chinese way of understanding.''

Satoh brought Panwei to TED to demonstrate the art of calligraphy. She also choreographed a dialogue between her philosopher-client Matsuoka and a Zen priest. Both sessions (surprisingly well-received, it turns out) were motivated by the same idea: to give the Americans in the audience a glimpse into the Eastern mind.

This is what Satoh means when she talks about stepping back before moving forward, nourishing cross-cultural understanding through art and history and even philosophy. It's a painstaking process, and her words can sound jarringly off-key in a world full of high-bandwidth technospeak. Listen long enough, though, and it becomes clear how her insights apply to practical situations. "We've come to view communication just as a form of transaction," she says wistfully, "not as a form of meaning.''

Keiko Satoh is well-placed to serve as a mediator between Establishment Japan and the new international order. She is a member of a prominent Tokyo family and a graduate of Tokyo's respected Aoyama Gakuin University. She also has an English certificate from Oxford and spent two years at Radcliffe earning a certificate of advanced studies in management. Phyllis Strimling, coordinator of the Radcliffe program, recalled Satoh as a "brilliant student who, when she was here, was struggling with how a freewheeling woman can find a way to maintain a level of creativity and intelligence'' in her business life.

Seven years later, Satoh appears to be finding that niche. In addition to consulting for Japanese clients like Nippon Telegraph & Telephone, she spends much of her time in Italy, where she represents jewelry designer Maurizio Beolichi and advises a food company with international ambitions. Indeed, with her freestyle hair, understated fashion, and thirst for philosophical talk, Satoh seems better suited to Milan than to either Tokyo or Manhattan.

She started her career as a forecaster for the Tokyo garment manufacturer Renown, where she tracked everything from pop music to social change in order to second-guess fashion trends. One of her greatest successes was convincing a reluctant management to carry the Norma Kamali line, which she correctly predicted would be a hit with price-conscious working women.

She struck out on her own in the mid-1980s, a young woman in a man's world, an offbeat consultant in a country that still has trouble grasping the value of intangible advice. (Even mainstream consulting companies have a rough time in Japan.) It hasn't always been easy for Satoh to get her message across.

When the old-line Tokyo department store Takashimaya hired her to help decide how best to use designated art space in a future New York outlet, Satoh dragged a delegation of Japanese executives to Boston to meet with a range of art experts. Her aim was to convince the executives to drop their plans to exhibit traditional Japanese art. Instead, she wanted them to promote new American artists - and to understand the intense connection between true art patrons and the local community.

She made headway, but only temporarily. Satoh's consulting engagement ended before the store opened, and the decision was overturned. Last spring, when Takashimaya opened its store on Fifth Avenue, the gallery offered a revolving selection of art from both sides of the Pacific - pleasant, proper, but also thoroughly predictable.