Seven Stitches and the Pacific Ocean: Why I Chose LA to Break the Cycle of Abuse

Survival Strategy by Natsu

Raising a Child While My Own Inner Child Still Bleeds: Escaping a "Toxic Mother" in Japan for LA

My life was a landscape of hell before I even knew who I was. I was abused from before I could form memories. How do I know? Because my mother told me. She bragged about it. She said when I wouldn't stop crying, she pinched me until I bruised. When I cried harder from the pain, she pinched me again.

I have no "happy" childhood memories. None. All I remember is crying. Being screamed at. Being kicked. Being beaten.

If this were America, my mother would have been in handcuffs instantly. But in Japan, even today, if the blood isn’t visible enough, the system looks the other way. They call it a "family spat."

The moment I truly felt despair was when I was around eight or ten. My mother threw a kitchen knife at me. It sliced deep into my left arm, and blood began to gush out. For a split second, I saw a flicker of panic on her face. I remember thinking, “Maybe if I’m hurt badly enough, she’ll finally be kind to me.”

I was wrong.

She threw a towel at me and barked, “Cover the wound and walk to the ambulance yourself. And don't you dare tell them I threw it!”

I walked to that ambulance alone. I don’t remember the walk, but I remember the void—a total, chilling despair toward humanity. When the paramedics asked, I told the lie she commanded: “A knife fell off the dresser and cut me.”

I will never forget the paramedic's eyes. He didn't believe a word. He looked at my mother with a piercing suspicion I can still see when I close my eyes today. That was the day I learned what "distrust" looked like. I ended up with seven stitches. Yet, in Japan, I was sent right back to that house to keep living with my monster.

Sometimes I think, I should never have been born in Japan. In America, someone would have seen the bruises hidden under my clothes long before that knife flew. I might have been saved.

So, why did I decide to have children? People say victims of abuse repeat the cycle. I wasn't 100% sure I wouldn't, but I had this fragile, stubborn confidence that I could control myself.

Life in LA wasn't a fairy tale. My ex-husband was a gambler, I was poor, I didn't speak the language, and the stress of a crying baby made me want to scream. I broke things—I threw objects against the wall (away from the kids)—but I never laid a hand on them.

The cycle tried to return through my husband. When our second daughter wouldn't stop crying, he swung his fist. It missed her, but it left a literal hole in the wall. The force was enough to kill. In that moment, I knew: Divorce. Looking back, maybe I was trying to save my children from him to save the little girl I used to be. Maybe that was my way of finding justice for my own 7-stitch scar.

The Flashback: When the Monster Within Me Woke Up

Raising children isn’t just about the cute moments. There were times when I was at my breaking point, exhausted and broken, yet my children were just being children—screaming, throwing tantrums, their high-pitched voices piercing my eardrums. When your mind isn't stable, those sounds are a trigger. They are a fuse for abuse.

I’ll be honest: there were moments when I wanted to strike them. The urge to lash out was terrifyingly real. I lived in constant fear that I would lose control and become the very monster I ran away from.

But every time my hand almost moved, the "little me"—the 8-year-old girl bleeding in the hallway—would appear. Her terror, her memory, her silent screams acted as a shield for my own children. My past trauma, ironically, was the only thing that kept me from repeating it.

Both of my children are adults now. I consider myself lucky. I wasn’t a perfect mother; I lost my temper, I screamed until my throat was raw, and maybe those moments left scars I don’t know about. But they were never hunted. They never had to walk to an ambulance alone.

Why I Refused to Raise a Child in Japan

I knew instinctively that I could never raise a child in Japan. If I had stayed, the pressure to be a "Good Mother" would have driven me insane. Japan is a culture of unspoken rules and "silent peer pressure" (Dōchō atsuryoku). You must conform. You must be perfect. For someone like me, who grew up broken, that pressure would have been the final shove into the abyss of abuse.

Japan’s system doesn't protect the vulnerable. I remember being bullied in a Japanese school. When I begged the teachers for help, they looked me in the eye and said, "It’s your fault for giving them a reason to bully you." Even today, when children commit suicide due to bullying, schools simply shrug and say, "We didn't know."

As a child, I actually believed them. I thought, “Oh, I see. I’m the one who is wrong.”

I didn't want my children to ever breathe that suffocating air. People worried about my Asian children facing discrimination in America, but here in Los Angeles, in this melting pot of cultures, they found a freedom I never had. We’ve struggled with money and school rankings, but my priority was always their happiness. Looking back, choosing LA was the first right decision I ever made for them.

The Land of the Free: Why "Not Being Perfect" Saved My Life

From preschool to university, the freedom in America is a different world compared to Japan. Here, you don’t have to be "proper."

Unless you are Japanese, you might not understand the weight of that word: Proper. Take school lunches, for example. In Japan, field trips mean parents waking up at 5:00 AM to craft elaborate, nutritionally balanced "Bento" boxes. If a Japanese mother sent her child with McDonald's, she would be branded as "cold" or "lacking love."

I’ll never forget the shock of seeing American parents hand their kids a bag of McDonald's, a bag of chips, and a peanut butter sandwich for a field trip. In that moment, I felt a massive weight lift off my shoulders.

In LA, makeup, piercings, and nail polish are just forms of expression, not "delinquency" like in Japanese schools. I always felt the Japanese rules were suffocating and strange. Being in a place where I didn't have to fit into a tiny, rigid mold was the first time I felt like I could actually breathe.

I’ve had many struggles—divorce, poverty, and the shadow of panic disorder that still follows me. But raising my children in the chaos and freedom of Los Angeles was the right choice. My $3.80 AdSense balance is a humble start, but it’s a symbol of my new independence. I am no longer that 8-year-old girl bleeding in a Japanese hallway. I am a survivor, a mother, and finally, a woman who is "free enough" to not be perfect.

Of course, Japan has its own beauty, and my experience is just one person’s story. But for me, the "freedom" of America wasn't just a lifestyle—it was my survival.