Me, Myself, & I

Grew up in Southern California (SoCal). Not really Los Angeles. Inland Empire, if anyone knows about it. Pretty boring. Dairy farms to the south, sewage treatment plant to the west. Yup. It was as stinky as it could get. But that’s all I knew.

’90s kid and proud of it. Old enough to remember what it was like to not have a phone in my hand all the time. Editing videos on Windows Movie Maker. Rolling around in the grass and playing in the street until the street lights came on.

That all changed when I had to pick an identity and start focusing on who I was going to be and what I was going to do for a career. I never thought I’d have to jump into a different career and have a quarter-life crisis.

I’m mixed Japanese American. The son of a 4th-generation Japanese father and a 4th-generation German-Swiss mother. For 25 years I thought I was just a white American. Just a SoCal kid with progressive views born in a conservative family. The odd one out. The creative filmmaker photographer who went against the grain on just about every career choice from the rest of my family and extended family. But that didn’t matter, I knew I had to scratch this creative itch.

After college at UC Riverside, I immediately moved to New York City. I went for spring break just before and I fell in love. Had to go. Best decision of my life. I started out as an assistant video editor. Became a photographer for Alicia Keys. Went into photographing for up-and-coming bands and musicians. Started a nonprofit for photographers working with other nonprofits. Got written up by a few big-title outlets. I was making good money just doing photography. I enjoyed myself. I enjoyed my life. Living a good creative lifestyle. No 9-5. Just a few gigs per month and my bills were paid.

It wasn’t until 2017, when I was photographing during a protest, and I had disqualified myself from the conversation of color. (Again, I thought I was white.) But a Black woman corrected me and said, “You’re a person of color. You’re Asian.” That basically broke open a whole new perspective on life. I thought I was pretty smart, but there was so much I didn’t know.

My life changed after that to learning about my Japanese American history and how much I didn’t know and how different it was from Japanese history. That made me pursue my career harder into filmmaking. I had found a purpose. I knew what story I was going to tell. Long story short, America did bad things to my family and my people. I want the world to know. So I moved back to SoCal to pursue that dream and go the Hollywood way.

But life had other plans. Covid immediately shut down Hollywood. I had to do something else. I created a nonprofit for Asian Americans in Hollywood. I got my writing manager. Then, when Hollywood just started to get back on its feet, the double strikes hit. We were all out of jobs. Three years later, it’s 2026. Moving to Los Angeles had officially become the worst life decision I had ever made.

BUT! There is a but. (Butt… haha.) When I saw that no one was getting work after the strikes had ended, and the people who were already more successful than I was (way more successful) were scrambling and stressing about getting their next job, I made a quick and swift life choice to stop all of my Hollywood career and dreams that I had worked so hard on. I needed to do something else. Just at that same time, artificial intelligence (AI) had started to pick up and AI coding tools had been percolating onto the scene. I had been hearing about this Cursor platform. I was already pretty decent at ChatGPT. I was already working on this database idea with other developers that I was getting frustrated with.

How hard could it be?

Well, easier than it used to be, harder than I thought, but WAAAY more rewarding to do it myself than to wait on others to do it for me. Teaching myself computer programming and computer engineering was so much more satisfying than waiting around for Hollywood to let me make my screenwriting projects. I had been screenwriting for years and the projects I want to do would take high budgets. This computer programming was under my own control, and for $20 a month, I was basically taking a full college course on engineering, while coming out with a product at the end of it.

Yes, it takes more than just AI to get a product actually successful. I’m not like the others who could just make an app that blows up overnight. I have a vision for a problem I want to solve and I’m going to learn how to solve a hard problem. It’s still going to take me some time, but it’ll be worth it in the end.

All that goes to say, that’s who I am. That’s my life in a few paragraphs.

I was once a photographer. Then I wanted to become a filmmaker. I lead a community of people and organized events. I stopped filmmaking to teach myself computer programming. Now I have a nonprofit and work for a startup company.

I’m still trying to figure things out as I go. Aren’t we all?

Also, I have a cat named Kitaro.