“I love working with my husband, but lately we’ve been struggling diversifying our conversations,” she said laughing. “A lot of our conversations at home revolve around our business, and we’re realising that it’s not necessarily healthy for us or our family. Even Sutan [our daughter] has started to notice it.”

Moe is an optimistic person: facing this challenge seems anecdotal compared to the ones she faced in the past. Learning how to “balance the personal and the professional” with her partner in life and business is “the best kind of trouble” she could ever face, she says, as it means that she has been able to turn her life in the right direction.

From struggling through divorce, and starting her YouTube channel while fighting postpartum depression, Moe’s journey hasn’t been the easiest one, but through it all, she has embodied the spirit of female empowerment.

“Most women in my family—my mom, my grandma—believed that women should stay at home. I held different beliefs from a young age and that’s why I decided at 16 to start working and to become a geisha. Now, by becoming a business owner, I continue to challenge these beliefs.”

With her daughter starting daycare, Moe has more time to explore the opportunities the Kimono Mom brand has to offer. She has made connections with fellow content creators from around the world, developed meaningful partnerships such as the one with Japanese Airlines All Nippon Airways to “share the real Japan” with tourists, travelled abroad for collaborations, and worked with Japanese artisans to find the right flavours for her sauce.

Through all this, Moe has realised how much her personal growth is inherently linked to her professional choices. “My public personas have always helped me throughout this journey,” she says. “‘Mameharu’ [her Geisha name] helped me grow as a young adult. Now Kimono Mom helps me figure out what I want to bring to the world.”

The path to entrepreneurship has had its own challenges. “Being a female entrepreneur can be difficult in Japan. In business meetings, people tend to overlook me, and prefer talking to my husband,” she says. “But I’m Kimono Mom, I’m the one who built this, and I shouldn’t have to fight for them to recognise it.”

To put this in context, Business Insider reported in 2021 that 4.2 per cent of corporate executives in Japan were women, and in 2022, that only 0.8 per cent of Japanese businesses had a female CEO. These numbers gives us an idea about the uphill battles Moe must have faced as a female entrepreneur.

Moe also says she’s having a hard time being recognised as more than a YouTuber by the media. “I think they love that I am a mother cooking Japanese meals with my daughter, which is true, but looking beyond that has proved to be challenging.”

As many people confuse traditional with conservative, Moe’s philosophy and legacy can easily be misunderstood. 

“Under my content, I regularly get comments praising me for being an Asian woman who is a good mother, cooking and teaching my daughter how to be a traditional housewife,” she says. “These comments don’t mean any harm, but it’s irritating because this is really not aligned with my mission.”

“It’s one of the inconveniences of short-format content like reels,” she says. Her following has doubled since last year—now 2.8 million followers on Instagram and YouTube each— which means that while her content is reaching more people, they might not necessarily be aligned with her core values. To counteract this, Moe has been diversifying the format of her content, and has tried to often address this issue in her videos.

For example, in her vlog-style video A Week in Kimono - Don’t Call Me TradWife [aka “traditional wife”], she gives viewers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of her life. The description of the video doesn’t leave room for ambiguity about her values: “Is dressing in traditional clothes a conservative way of life? No, not at all. Even if I wear a kimono or not, I always want to make my own life decisions.”

Kimono Mom still feels that YouTube is her global safe space. She feels lucky to have managed to grow a community of like-minded people, the Kimonoko, with whom she can share her values and lead by example. 

“Women deserve to be uplifted for many different reasons, and it’s important for me to correct these comments, [not only] for other women, but also to show Sutan that she can grow up however she wants to be,” she says. 

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