About Me
I grew up in Japan and the U.S. during a trade war between the two countries. From a 10-year old’s perspective, the root of the problems seemed to come from misunderstandings and cultural disconnects, and I saw myself as a bridge. I decided then that I wanted to be an interpreter, a diplomat or maybe a journalist.
I didn’t go to journalism school because an editor I met advised me not to. He thought that I should spend my college years learning “stuff” because I could learn the craft on the job. And so, I went to Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and studied international politics.
My first job out of school was as a fact checker for U.S. News & World Report. It taught me the importance of accuracy and the danger of hubris. I eventually landed my first job as a reporter in Chicago for Reuters. I started covering the mobile phone industry because the business was so small at the time that very few senior reporters were interested in the job. I knew they were wrong, but I couldn’t have guessed how it would come to define my career.
I worked in Tokyo for five years covering the tech industry first for Reuters and then for the Wall Street Journal. My first front page story was about Nintendo’s game-changing Wii console. One of my favorite stories was about the year I spent learning how to wear a kimono properly.
I moved to San Francisco in 2008 to cover Apple, which was entering one of its strongest periods of growth. The iPhone had just come out, the iPad was in development, and Steve Jobs had appeared at the developers’ conference emaciated. These three topics dominated my beat. My claim to fame is that I broke the news about Steve’s liver transplant. I was also named as a Gerald Loeb Award finalist as part of a WSJ team for a series on Internet privacy. But one of my most memorable stories was about iPad couture. Stephen Colbert did a segment on it in which he gave me two middle fingers.
I joined the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto to work on my book Haunted Empire (Harpers Business), an analysis of what happens to a company like Apple when it loses an iconic visionary like Steve Jobs. The book was so controversial at the time that Apple fans flooded Amazon with one-star reviews in the first hours after publication, and Apple CEO Tim Cook called it “nonsense.” Behind the scenes, insiders sent me private emails validating my point of view, and most of what I predicted has come to pass.
My book launch was life changing. That week, my nephrologist called to tell me that I was in stage four kidney failure, and I needed a transplant. I was feeling well in spite of it, so my husband and I decided to take a six-month trip around the world in case wouldn’t be able to travel for a while. A month after I received a kidney from one of my sisters, a friend called to invite me to teach at University of California Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Soon after, I also started teaching at the San Quentin News, the only prisoner-run newspaper in the country.
In 2020, I co-founded the Prison Journalism Project with the aim of fostering journalism inside the walls. I’ve also written stories, essays and columns.
In my free time, I like to cook, eat and drink delicious things. I also like to knit, and I read a lot. I love to travel. I became a pilot a couple years ago, and I fly a Cessna 172.
