Mimi Miyagi

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Melody Damayo, known as Mimi Miyagi, is a Filipino-American model, film director, and former porn actress. She was born on July 3, 1973, in Davao City, Philippines. Complex ranked her #12 in The Top 50 Hottest Asian Porn Stars of All Time in 2011. She is about 5 ft 3 in tall.

She grew up as the second of four children in a conservative Seventh-day Adventist family. When she was six, she moved with her parents to the United States and grew up in California. She later returned to Mindanao for high school, attending Mindanao Mission Academy in Misamis Oriental. After high school she studied finance and economics at Mountain View College in Bukidnon but dropped out. She wanted to work in show business.

Back in Los Angeles, she pursued fashion merchandising but dropped out again due to money. She hoped to become a makeup artist and also worked as a go-go dancer in Beverly Hills. She entered adult films and nude modeling after seeing an ad. She chose the name "Mimi" from her grandmother’s nickname, and "Miyagi" from The Karate Kid character, though she has no connection to him. She has said she used Asian mysticism to obscure her ethnicity.

In 1996 she retired from adult films and moved to Henderson, Nevada. She married a former professional football player. She started MimiMiyagi.com but later fought over the domain name in court. In 1998 she appeared in the documentary Strippers: The Naked Stages and published Oriental Dolls magazine (later called Asian Hotties). After divorcing in 2001, she focused on humanitarian and animal volunteer work. She returned to adult films briefly in 2003 with Happy Ending, then left the industry again in 2007 and acted in mainstream movies such as Little Bruno, with a cameo in Speed Dragon in 2013.

In 2012 she became a fashion reporter for Eyestrane, an online magazine about Asian talent. On May 12, 2006, she ran as a Republican candidate for Nevada governor under her birth name, Melody Damayo, advocating anti-stalking laws. Her slogan was "I'm bare and honest at all times." She lost the primary to Jim Gibbons and later joined the Libertarian Party.