She attended Bunka Fashion College, Japan's primary fashion school then went on to study pattern-making technology at FIT. She continued her education in the field of sociology to get formal training in fashion writing. She has a PhD from Columbia University and wrote her dissertation on Japanese designers in the French fashion industry. In 2004, she published the book The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion from which her article "Japanese Street Fashion: The Urge To Be Seen and To Be Heard" comes. The article takes a sociological and theoretical approach in discussing the relationship between the production and consumption of fashion.