Alley and I met at Faro Cafe in Shibuya at 2 p.m. on a drizzly mid-July afternoon. She had texted en route that she had a hard stop in an hour as she’s got another meeting to attend. When I arrived, she was already waiting, leaning back against the cafe’s street-side glass window. Despite the time constraints, she moved through the conversation unhurried, tracing her upbringing, identity, career, and future. Slow-spoken throughout, she embodied a sort of internal equilibrium—telling, given how little I saw her lean forward the entire time.
Alley has been living and working in Tokyo for the last six years, yet it's only been recently that she has arrived at that sense of calm. Reaching it meant proving her own worth without, as she put it, losing the core of who she is. She went on to talk about times living in Japan where she's experienced difficulties being a foreigner, a female, and looking younger than she is. "At the end of the day, we're never going to be Japanese," she said, "but we can respect their culture, follow their rules, and obviously get along with locals, as well as have a local community behind you." Whereas some foreigners undergo a complete transformation, Alley feels differently: "I still want to make sure there's a part of me that was like the person that I grew up as. But I'm still quite 'Japanified,' I think. With all that said, Japan has been an amazing place to live and develop myself, and I'm grateful for all the people in the different pockets of my life for their kindness and love."
When I asked what gives away her 'Japanified' side, she pointed to her personal boundaries. "I see myself maintaining a courteous distance with strangers more," she said. To illustrate, she brought up how living in Southern California stands in stark contrast to Tokyo—where a casual greeting at the checkout counter can easily prompt a stranger to overshare personal details about their life. Growing up in California myself, I could understand exactly where she was coming from.
Alley was born in San Gabriel, a city northeast of LA. Her family moved to San Jose in Northern California around the time she started kindergarten. That said, her time in the U.S. didn't resume until over a decade and a half later, when she returned to California to attend University of California San Diego (UCSD), eventually graduating with a degree in research psychology and a minor in business. She spent most of her adolescence navigating life as a foreigner on the other side of the world attending school in Taiwan from first to eighth grade. "To me, Taiwan is really home," she said. "Even though locals might still see me as more of an American, Taiwan is really where my cultural root is. The warmth of the people and the amazing food—I savor and reminisce on my time back home constantly." However, in contrast, when her family went to Shanghai she shared how that experience is what really opened her mind up to the world. Being part of the international school system in Shanghai allowed her to truly grow up surrounded by an environment made up of an array of various nationalities. At least in her experience, this was different from her childhood in Taiwan, where she recalled it being more Taiwanese and American-centered. Nevertheless, her time in Shanghai was when she reached an important point of understanding. As she framed it, "There is just never going to be an absolute, and everything exists on a spectrum. Whatever you look at, it's all going to be relative to what you're familiar with. I think it helps you build a lot of emotional intelligence, compassion, and understanding towards other people."
While it is easy to focus on financial privilege—which she acknowledges came from her parents' sacrifices to afford international schooling—the core privilege Alley values most is exposure. In Shanghai, that exposure meant celebrating everything from Diwali to Christmas, playing rugby and softball, and co-founding a student initiative that built mobile libraries for migrant communities across China. "I also tried to join the Manga club," she added. "I think they thought I was taking the piss and wouldn't let me in. I’d say it’s their loss for missing out on a potentially amazing club member." Having lived abroad myself, I can concur that you can’t help but be curious when you're surrounded by people who are all different from you. Those circumstances make you feel proud of your differences, but also make you realize the comfort in understanding that nobody's worldview is absolute. That's not to say someone's road to self-awareness comes without constant questioning and feelings of uncertainty. For Alley, it was no different.
"It's quite funny because growing up, people are always asking me, and I'm sure it's the same for a lot of people with a similar background to mine, 'Do you ever feel confused or feel like you don't belong anywhere?' And you're like, ‘okay, if I'm all of these things, what am I exactly?’" She answered her own question in the same breath she posed it, yet still appeared relaxed, still leaned backward. "Why can't our identity really be like a multitude? You could encompass all of these things. For example, just because you're Taiwanese doesn't make you less American. Everyone is an amalgamation of their experiences and the different people they've crossed paths with, so why box yourself in?”
She kept expanding on this topic. "For an identity crisis, the same can be said for anything to do with self-perception, because it's such an internal thing [...] At the end of the day, how you feel about yourself and how you perceive yourself has to come from within [...] but if you embrace it as, 'I am a part of what you are, but I am so much more than that'—how could you not be proud of that? I know it's always a growing pain. I think everyone has to go through these identity crises to get to where they are." That multifaceted nature isn't just something Alley has learned to make peace with, she uses it to her advantage. "I think the biggest gift coming out of that is how much I get to apply this in not just daily life but within my career as well," she said, "where I am constantly collaborating with amazing talents from all over the world."
After Shanghai, Alley returned to the U.S. to study at UCSD where she experienced another keystone moment transitioning into young adulthood. "So much of my personality and openness probably stemmed from my time there," she said. "I loved the city and I loved the beach and brew culture there. It felt like the more relaxed sibling of LA." Near the end of her studies and right on the cusp of COVID breaking out, Alley went on a trip to Tokyo that changed everything. She ended up falling in love with the allure of the neon-lit metropolis, instantly making friends with local Japanese and other foreigners. Most notably, Japan had a "work-hard-play-hard" mentality that she immediately felt an affinity and understanding towards.
During that first stay in Tokyo, she became part of Bae Tokyo, a female-centric creative collective—one that opened up new communities to be part of. After a brief return to Shanghai, she made her way back to Tokyo once more—this time for work, signing on as Head of Content at the creative agency UltraSuperNew, overseeing a department of roughly ten to fifteen people. While she loved the people there, as well as appreciated the chance to work in a vibrant city and a fast-paced industry, after two years she craved a change of pace. That said, she's still quick to give credit where it's due to anyone who works in social media. “It's one of those jobs that people don't necessarily always look at with as much reverence as a properly produced film [...] It takes so much—being detail-oriented, being disciplined, plus having strong output in a short amount of time."
"Output cannot stop," I added.
"Yeah!” she agreed. “It's perpetual. Sometimes you wonder, will there ever be an end to this?"
Wondering about her next steps, Alley connected with an old friend, Mike Sunda, the founder of creative production agency PUSH Japan. Alley had known about PUSH ever since her high school days in Shanghai, where the first PUSH office was born. PUSH was originally founded in 2014 by a trio of friends who met through the local skateboarding scene: Jonathon Lim, Kristian Kvam Hansen, and Charles Lanceplaine. PUSH later expanded its footprint and now operates across global hubs including Shanghai, Tokyo, Oslo, Sydney, and London.
In retrospect, joining PUSH was serendipitous. She was simply catching up with Mike when he offered her a chance to join the company. She explained that initially the plan wasn't necessarily for her to become a producer. Given that she only had a little experience in creative direction and production in her eyes, she jumped into the deep end of the job. That said, she came to learn an important fact about the role in fairly quick order: "Being a producer is really about figuring things out. I like to call it a 'Glorified Project Manager'. You look at a project and you're like, 'alright, based on this set of criteria [time, budget, and other constraints], what do we need to do and how can we figure it out?'"
Along the way she's also learned that the more experience you build up through work and the more amazing talents you meet, the work becomes easier and smoother. From there, you can start to anticipate what's coming. As she explained, what she really loves about production is the people and communities she gets to help build and be a part of. “That’s always been the aspect I’ve felt the highest reward from.”She also reflected on her current work in relation to her previous job, "It's nice because with every project, there's an end to it," she commented. "You feel a sense of accomplishment and gratitude towards all these people who were able to come together to create something amazing." Given Tokyo’s relentless work culture, I asked if she ever found time to decompress.
Alley laughed at the thought. "I'm very sadly known in certain areas for being a workaholic. It's crazy because I actually am not that kind of person. I think I just like doing things to keep myself busy as well. So even on off times when I'm not working, if I'm not doing my 20,000 ADHD activities and hobbies, or seeing people, I'm probably just doing more projects on the side for fun, anyway." It seems to me that the idea of "work hard, play hard" is really just non-stop work. Yet sometimes work feels purely like work, other times it feels like play. An example of side projects for fun includes her collaboration with Yukari Tsukahara's magazine Musubi for a Saigon editorial, or her most recent editorial work for Polyester Magazine. In regards to projects within PUSH, Alley said production work is what she loves most. A few recent projects worth highlighting include: Creative direction for Korea fashion brand Open YY, pop up event production with London-based brand Corteiz, and music video production for Tokyo's very own Gliiico in collaboration with director Jackson Forsythe. As for future projects ahead, I asked if she planned to stay in production. "I think it's hard to say right now, but in the foreseeable future, yeah. It's definitely a very mentally and physically strenuous occupation and field to be in, but it’s also a lot of fun."
If there's a throughline to Alley's six years in Tokyo—the hurdles, the hybrid team she's a part of at PUSH, the identity she's spent a lifetime refusing to narrow down to one thing—it's the same idea she circled back to more than once: that you don't have to choose. You can move around, live in different cultures, adapt, evolve, but still remain true to who you are at your core. It's something she's constantly reminded of, too, given how worldly the team she's part of at PUSH is—people from Japan, Germany, France, Russia, and beyond, each bringing their own instincts to a shared project. And yet, still to this day, even in the midst of juggling multiple projects, she appears to remain open and curious about learning from others, as a means of developing a deeper compassion for others—and for herself. As she said, "At this point, I've been here for six years. I think it's a lot easier now, and I think that you also find a way. It takes time to get to that point of reaching an internal equilibrium of how you see yourself integrating within the community without losing the core of who you are as well." With that, she finally leaned forward off the street-side glass panel of the cafe, said goodbye, and made her way back to the office for her next meeting.
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Header Photo Source: Elena Kasnatschejew @elenakasnatschejew
