Akemi is a Nikkei storyteller, writer, teacher and visual/experiential creative. She grew up on a consistent diet of family stories, Cricket Magazine, her grandmother’s rum cake and Disney’s Fantasia (1940) on VHS. She is sansei-han with familial roots in Taiji-cho, Wakayama-ken, the neighborhood of Asakusa in Tōkyō-to and Terminal Island. Her paternal lineage is descended from survivors of the Tule Lake, Amache and Jerome 9066 incarceration camps.

Akemi grew up immersed in the world of karate-do and began her Shotokan karate training at age 3 under the instruction of her father, Isao Gary Tsutsui, at Colorado Budokan . She has also been fortunate to train with masters of other karate styles in California, Hawaii and Japan. Her upbringing within a Japanese cultural art and experience as a kata athlete has informed her perspectives on the intersectionality of tradition, ancestral wisdom and modern identity which is foundational to the work of Little Well Studio. Akemi describes karate-do as her ethnic and spiritual identity in motion.