Growing up in a karate family and from my experience as a kata athlete myself, I can speak to Sakura’s achievements as being in the realm of what many of us in the karate world considered an impossible dream. Karate in the Olympics has been a long, long road and it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that women were even allowed to compete in the sport on the international level. Sakura was among the few to actualize something so many karate-ka had endeavored towards and never were able to touch. She was not only the first American to qualify for the Olympics, but is the only female athlete to represent Karate from the United States at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. 

Karate-do is so much more than a martial art. It is a worldview and living culture. Sakura is an embodied example of such a way of life and at Little Well Studio, we feel it is important to support such athletes in whatever way we can. Her dream is our dream; shared by girls around the world, the global karate-do community and athletes of the Nikkei / Asian diaspora.