Ayako was born as an illegal settler on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Kwantlen, Tsawwassen, and other Coast Salish nations in Richmond, BC, Canada. Being of “mixed race”—Japanese mother and Irish-Scottish father—she never felt fully accepted by her ancestral cultures or even as a Canadian, facing daily racist micro-aggressions as a visible minority. Despite her imperialist and colonial heritage, she was raised with a strong moral compass, respecting Indigenous people through her mother’s love and admiration for Indigenous art and hearing bedtime stories of her father's activism in the British labour union movement and being a world traveler.

A sense of global responsibility was evident in Ayako from an early age.

In elementary school, she started a paper route to fund a sponsorship program for a family in Nepal. In high school, she volunteered on Vancouver’s East Side, supporting sex workers. She traveled with students to Kingston, Jamaica, to learn from the inner-city community of Riverton, built along the edges of the city landfill.

While studying Sociology and Political Science at UBC, she mentored an Indigenous teen through an UNYA program for four years and organized impactful direct actions as a Canadian Board Member for Students for a Free Tibet. She spent her 20s backpacking and immersing herself in different cultures across Asia, Central and South America, spending a total of almost four years on the road. In her 30s, she founded a non-profit, Fundamentals for Change, which supported community projects in Riverton, Kingston, Jamaica, where which she traveled down to all through her teens to 30’s, staying with the principal and his family, meeting the Prime Minister’s wife, having a documentary made on FFC and being interviewed on the national talk show, Smile Jamaica.

Her early stillbirth of her second child, Emiko, in 2020, shook her whole world. Without having learned any coping skills for grief from her parents or ancestral background, she was left depressed, isolated and alone.

For the past five years, Ayako has been researching and finding ways to reclaim the sanctity of her grief and create new rituals and meanings in mourning; rooted in an anti-colonial mindset. 

To address the lack of post-loss support, Ayako created the Loss to Love app, the world’s first app providing emotional support for bereaved parents through all seasons of their grief.

Ayako currently still lives in, “Richmond”, with her two living children and her husband, minutes away from her parents, her father of which, is suffering from advanced dementia and terminal cancer.