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Purveyor, Fine Asian Porn
Industry Role:
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Posts: 38,323
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A bump for the late night gang, and more bio info who are somehow unaware of who Mimi is:
Mimi Miyagi's journey from bright young child prodigy to porn star is an interesting one. She was born second of four children to immigrant parents in 1973. She spent most of her childhood moving from place to place while her parents' looked for jobs to feed and house their family. During harder times, she slept on a bunk bed in the kitchen and often went to school without lunch.
These hard times were, not without their life's lessons. As Mimi points out, "Living the way we did, it's given me enormous ambition and determination to never be in that position again". Mimi's mother prized education above others, and would make sure her children did well in school regardless of the situation they were in. "That's why I graduated high school in a year and a half," says Mimi, "she was always on my case. I figured, the sooner I got it over with, the sooner I'd have her off my back. If I came home with an A-, I would get punished, imagine living that way."
Touring most of her childhood in a gymnastics team, being a concert pianist playing big venues most of her youth. Her family constantly pushing her to be an extreme perfectionist was what made her to be strong today. Then at 14, her dreams of an Olympic gymnast was torn away due to her parents decision to move to Guam because they simply couldn't afford to live in California anymore.
Therefore, Mimi decided to take control and hope to fulfill her dreams as a performance artist still not knowing in what field. However, Mimi knew someday she would be in an environment to be free to express her emotionally. "One day I will be able to be a free bird, no more confinements".
At 15, she graduated high school in a year and a half hoping to get a head start on life. For 3 years, she worked three jobs to save enough money to go to college. She returned to LA just before her 18th birthday with little over $1000 to her name. At that time, she naively thought that the money would be sufficient to tide her over for a few months. Within a month, she'd run out of money and was sleeping on friends' couches and getting desperate. She looked for jobs with little success.
Finally, she came across an ad for nude modeling and answered it. She was barely 2 weeks past her 18th birthday the day of her first nude shoot. It was the beginning of her rise in the adult industry. Her journey was not without its challenges. When Mimi first started out in the industry, people told her repeatedly that there just wasn't a market for Asian adult stars, but she refused to give up. She struggled and continued looking for someone who would believe in her enough to give her a break.
That man finally appeared, Mark Carrier from Leisure Time Entertainment. He took her into his company, paid for her breast implants, improved her looks to compete in the American dominated porn star business, and set her up to play key roles in numerous movie contracts. In the next two years, she would do over 200 XXX movies and be the most recognized Asian adult star around. With television stations chasing her down to document her story. Including E! Online, Fox Files, HBO, The Learning Channel the list goes on.
Despite her fame, the money wasn't rolling in as she thought it would. This was because as an actress, model, and dancer, she wasn't receiving any residuals for her work (a common practice in the industry). She realized that if she wanted to make money in this business, she had to take control of her career.
Her first step was to climb the ladder from writer to become the publisher of "Oriental Dolls", the #1 nude Asian magazine. Her next step was to diversify and hire a Webmaster to set up a website for her. To get the pictures online. This proved to be a mistake as she ended up being cheated of $5000, and her domain name registered to this man. It took 3 months of legal battles before her former Webmaster turned the domain name over to her.
With that behind her, Mimi swore to never let someone else handle her website. Taking things into her own hands once more, she went to Barnes & Noble, picked up 2 books on HTML and web publishing, and 4 days and countless pots of coffee later, her very own self coded website was born. Membership for her website started low at around 500 hundred members. Within the first year of operation, her subscription base grew 2,000%.
She has diversified into, licensing software for pay per view streaming videos, movie production, talent scouting, and magazine publishing, as well as still finding the time to devote her days as a mother. Unlike most porn stars whose fame last 15 minutes before they're consumed by drugs and the trappings of "stardom," Mimi has kept focus on becoming the career oriented pornstar by proving to all "The Mimi Network": miminet.com" and producing her highly successful all-Asian "Fantasiany Series" for Metro Video, working as Publisher for "Oriental Dolls Magazine".
She still manages to wear her many hats as porn star, webmistress, mother, movie producer, director, publisher, CEO of her web entertainment & software company, entrepreneur and mentor to the various girls who look to her for guidance today.
ADG Webmaster
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