My First Time Leaving the Country · 🎬 Memoir Skool 📸

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My First Time Leaving the Country

The First Time I Left Love for Tokyo

I was fifteen and deeply in love the first time I left for Japan.

He drove me to the airport in Los Angeles, my suitcases packed for a three-month contract that felt like forever. I remember staring out the window so I wouldn’t have to look at him. I cried the entire way there. I cried walking through the terminal. I cried on the plane. I cried somewhere over the Pacific, wondering what I had just done.

I thought I was brave.

I didn’t know I was terrified.

When I landed in Tokyo, the world felt louder, brighter, faster than anything I had ever known. The signs were unreadable. The air smelled different. Even the silence between people felt foreign. I didn’t realize how overwhelmed I was until two weeks later when I demanded to be sent back to Los Angeles. I told my agency I couldn’t handle it. I was fifteen, thousands of miles from home, and drowning in culture shock I didn’t have language for.

And yet — my very first job?

I helped open Tokyo Disneyland.

I shot the cover and fourteen pages of Olive magazine.

On my first night in my model apartment, there were clothes laid out on my bed. Not wardrobe for a shoot — wardrobe for me. Outfits I was expected to wear to castings. Plaid patterns. Oversized blazers. Men’s shoes. Hats. Structured pieces that swallowed my California softness whole.

I loved it.

It felt like stepping into another identity — one that was sharper, stranger, braver.

Back home I had a convertible Alfa Romeo. In Tokyo, they gave me a bicycle. They chauffeured me to auditions, but the bike was for riding around the neighborhood, weaving through narrow streets that smelled like soy sauce and rain. I pedaled through a life that didn’t resemble mine at all.

I had left love at the airport.

And somehow, in the middle of my tears and terror, I was opening Disneyland in Tokyo.

I didn’t understand what overwhelmed me at the time. I only knew my chest felt tight and everything felt unfamiliar. The language. The silence in elevators. The way people didn’t hug. The way I stood out without trying.

Years later, when a CBS special came to Japan to film American Models in Japan, they interviewed me. I was older then — or at least I thought I was. They asked me what I loved about Tokyo.

I smiled into the camera and said,

“I’m rich. I’m rich. Tokyo made me rich.”

What I meant was I was earning more money than I had ever seen in my young life. I had independence. Cash in envelopes. My own apartment. My own contracts. At fifteen, that felt like wealth.

Then they asked me what it was like living there.

And I said something I still cringe at.

I said, “If everyone has brown hair and brown eyes…”

I didn’t finish the sentence in a way I’m proud of. I was trying to explain what it felt like to physically stand out in a country where I looked different from almost everyone around me. I was describing visibility — but it came out naïve, clumsy, and small.

I wasn’t superior.

I was isolated.

There’s a difference.

What overwhelmed me wasn’t Japan. It was being fifteen, alone, and suddenly hyper-visible. Every train ride felt like a spotlight. Every audition felt like a test I wasn’t sure I understood.

I had left Los Angeles crying over a boy.

And now I was on television saying I was rich.

Both things were true.

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My First Time Leaving the Country