VICKI BEYER
With stops in Afghanistan, Australia, Japan, Italy and more than 40 other countries, it’s hard to imagine Vicki Beyer getting any more mileage out of the international studies degree she earned from UNO in 1980. But her career — rather, her careers — have gone even further. Beyer has simultaneously built two outstanding careers 6,000 miles from home in Japan. One career is in law, which has included stints on the faculty of various Japanese universities and a 14-year run with Morgan Stanley as executive director of its legal and compliance division. Today she is a professor of law at Tokyo’s Hitotsubashi University, one of Japan’s oldest and most prestigious universities. But Beyer also has parlayed her nearly three decades in Japan into a high-profile freelance writing career, penning numerous travel articles, reviews, a book and now a blog (jigsaw-japan.com) on her adoptive homeland. Her book, “10 Temples on 2 Wheels, a guidebook of day tours of Kamakura, Japan,” is based on bicycle tours she had developed. Even on a bicycle, Beyer goes far.