It's fall and Shihoko Ura, speaking from her home in Brisbane, Australia, says she recently returned from the United States where she had taken a holiday with her daughter Elizabeth.
One reason Ura and her daughter Elizabeth went to Austin, Texas was to attend a professional blogging summit, so that she could glean tips from the assembled blogging gurus to help her with Chopstick Chronicles, her Japanese recipe and food blog. Back in 2015, when she began blogging, Ura says she had no inkling that the weekend hobby project of posting food photos would later grow into a book and gain a global audience.
Ura grew up in Shirahama in Wakayama Prefecture and moved to nearby Mie Prefecture at 18 to attend a nursing college. At the college and afterwards at Yamada Red Cross Hospital (now the Japanese Red Cross Ise Hospital) in Ise, where she later worked as a registered nurse, she learned about the international aid element that is fundamental to the Red Cross organization.