In case you were curious.

I was born in Japan, and raised in the big hair states of Texas and New Jersey. I learned to be a good chameleon growing up, made a tight group of friends (or became adept at playing the free electron flitting from one group to another), wherever my family moved with my dad’s job. I always felt a bit odd though, neither Japanese or American enough. It was heightened in adolescence. I wasn’t attractive or desirable enough on either side of the fence. Too quiet on one, too loud on the other. The set of adjectives go on.

After schooling, without the necessary documentation to stay in the US despite a lifetime there, I left for Japan, a country I didn’t really know aside from summers with cousins and grandparents. I cut my teeth as a young art director. I learned to run a successful business, my work and my life straddled between Tokyo, New York, and Paris. I found my stride, learned to leverage my neither-here-nor-thereness, met my partner in crime and married him. I worked like a Japanese man, holidayed like a French woman, and laughed like an American kid. Soon after I became a mother, I got my bearings as a reluctant single mother in Kyoto. I moved back to Tokyo, worked like a crazy person, and tested thresholds of workplace toxicity in exchange for a sense of security. I learned to date online in San Francisco, where I matched with the CMO of Tinder while testing a dating hypothesis online. My second run in Tokyo confirmed two things: it was time to launch my business, and I was a resplendent late-bloomer when it came to dating.  

When my daughter went to get to know and live with her father for a year in Singapore, I took a year-long sabbatical from parenthood in Bali. I’d been running on empty. I wanted a break from the pace. I needed to rest my nervous system. 

Reunited with my daughter at the height of the pandemic, we moved to the northern island of Hokkaido. I’m based in Sapporo, where I work with clients internationally and continue to navigate all kinds of long-distance relationships with learnings from work, life, and love in the time of Covid.