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Yuri Shibahara
Team Leader
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Yuri is our CEO-to-be who has the rational mind of a legal professional and the creative heart of an artist. She moved to Estonia to live the life she would have enjoyed had she not pursued legal studies. Meal Plan has evolved from the restaurant subscription scheme her Japanese restaurant Yurina introduced as the first ever in Estonia. |
Legal and Business Consultancy
After gaining some business insights in luxury brand business as an associate at LVMH, Yuri worked intensively in her 20s at a boutique international law firm in Tokyo then her own consultancy enterprise. The high demand for a bilingual person with understanding of both Japanese and Common law concepts kept her a sleepless consultant, serving her Japanese and Asian clients during the daytime, work closely with Estonians at Lingvist from late afternoon, catch up with clients in France and UK in the evening, and finally go to bed around 4am if lucky. She is well-trained in coping through tight schedules and intensive work without sleeping for up to 72 hours: a huge plus for a bustling startup business. Culinary Business
Yuri entered a totally different field of business now that she moved to Estonia to finally live the life she would have enjoyed if she had not pursued legal studies. In the 9th month of learning Estonian language, she enrolled in a course to personally challenge her language understanding through studying about catering for special dietary requirements. The knowledge acquired from this certificate course directed her to deploy the search criteria by dietary preferences on Meal Plan. She is currently operating her own Japanese restaurant which introduced the restaurant meal subscription scheme as the first ever in Estonia and offer a monthly cooking class at Tallinna Rahva-Ülikool. Journalism and Community Service
Although she interned at ITV and the British Bureau of Investigative Journalism. it never occurred to her to think that her English writing would be appreciated in publication field. A short story about the heart-warming effort of a Tallinn city bus driver that Yuri shared on Tallinn City Council’s Facebook group suddenly led her to start writing for the monthly community newspaper, Kesklinna Sõnumid, and the online news portal, the Estonian World. She is now a monthly columnist for this newspaper and also serve for the community as a working member of Tallinn City Centre New Arrival Council. Yuri’s heart for a social cause evolved the idea of turning the office of Meal Plan into a food bank plus showering and laundry facility. |
Teaching
At the age of 18, Yuri had to make a difficult choice between pursuing her calligraphy endowment at an art college or follow her passion for English language teaching along with her acting ambition with no guaranteed future prospects, or studying at a prestige university for a foreseeable business success. She took the realistic path, but still managed to gain the CELTA certificate at the end of her 9 months of undergraduate Law and Politics study in London, and started working as a high school English teacher while finishing her BA in Law and Joint Honour in Regional Studies on British Culture back in Tokyo. This English teaching background charmed a connection with Estonia. The language education app startup, Lingvist, spotted her while they were searching for a consultant for their business launch in Japan. Green Tech
To secure her visa extension in Estonia while the immigration policy tightened amid Covid-19 crisis, Yuri came up with the idea of exploiting the residency requirement for an EU Community design of industrial products. Inspired by the non-electric paper humidifiers that are popular in Japan, she chose to design and manufacture non-electric, eco-friendly humidifiers from compressed fibres and streamlined no-plastic production and distribution. And now she is expanding her green tech business idea with the food pick-up and delivery platform, Meal Plan, where we can all save time, money, lives and the earth. Media
Having been championed twice at inter-school English speech contests in Japan, Yuri is not shy about speaking in front of public. She spoke on Estonian TV programmes in Estonian language and featured in an Estonian online TV and a local magazine as a commentator/interviewee. Her growing connection to the local media would help promoting Meal Plan without spending much advertisement costs, hopefully in Estonia. |