My previous profile page started to look really cheesy so I thought I would do a quick n dirty copy/paste from the What Is Smart Doll page for now. I wiill spruce this page up a bit in the future.
Born and raised in London England (Hackney to be precise), I discovered Japanese culture through gaming machines such as the Sega Megadrive and anime such as Super Dimension Fortress Macross.
I wanted to learn more about Japan but in order to do so, I needed to learn Japanese because my only gateway to Japan back then was a couple of Japanese bookshops in London - no internets back in the late 80's ;-)
I started to self-study Japanese by reading manga (Japanese comics) and decided to get a job at a Japanese restaurant called Benihana so that I could practice my Japanese while earning a few quid at the same time. At Benihana I was washing, serving, and occasionally breaking dishes. I got to improve my Japanese during work and also met my wife there.
I decided to finish off my Japanese language learning at London University which lead to a job at Japan Airlines in London. I eventually made it to the land of the rising sun where I worked in IT for several years doing marketing for the scientific journal Nature, Website Manager at Amazon and a Product Manager at Microsoft.
ABOUT MIRAI INC
After saying sayonara to a steady paycheque in 2007, I left corporate life to startup a company with wifey called Mirai Inc. We started off web consulting for the likes of Disney Japan and Columbia Music and before we knew it, we had created a brand called Culture Japan which consisted of a blog, TV show and character goods of our mascot character Mirai Suenaga.
The Japanese government recognized our work in sharing Japanese culture and appointed me as an advisor of various "Cool Japan" committees.
By 2012, I started development on a fashion doll which was to be modeled after our mascot Mirai and by June 2014 she was ready for launch. On 2013 April Fools Day, I announced that Mirai was going to be a terminator robot running on Android that could do your homework - this is the reason why I called the product "Smart Doll." News on the project went viral which was great but also meant that it became difficult to change the name without causing confusion - and so the name stuck.
Because of my April Fool lies, I always get asked "what's so smart about Smart Doll?"
My response is the video below ;-)