LIFE AFTER CANCER
By Sakura Minamida Harris, Director of Marketing at Monomi Park
Note: What I share today is about my journey and my journey alone. There is no one size fits all to a breast cancer journey and each person must ultimately forge their own path.
I
n the movies, you see cancer patients go through chemotherapy and it’s portrayed as the worst thing that can be done to your body to survive. While I
can attest that chemo was not fun, what the movies fail to depict is life after cancer. I too assumed that surgery, chemo, and radiation would just be a “moment in time” and if I survive, I can slip right back seamlessly into my
beloved role as the Brand Director for Ryu Ga Gotoku at SEGA. What I discovered was that my body, as I knew it, would never be the same. My life as a video game marketer would never be the same. This is my story. For twenty years, I have been a global marketer in the
gaming industry and specialized in Japanese IPs like Final Fnatasy and Kingdom Hearts. At the time of diagnosis, I was deeply invested in the growth of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio. I poured everything I had into the Yakuza series for five years because I genuinely loved the game, but above all, I loved the people at the studio and my team. We were really getting into a rhythm and celebrating the exponential growth we drove since releasing Yakuza 0. The future was bright. We were ramping up for one of our biggest releases to date, Yakuza: Like a Dragon. However, on October 6th, 2020, just one month from launch, I was diagnosed with invasive lobular carcinoma at age 37. Everything came to a screeching halt. The initial prognosis was positive. I was told that I
caught the cancer early enough that, with surgery, I’d go back to being a badass game marketer by day, and a badass mom at night in no time. On November 10th,
22 | MCV/DEVELOP December/January 2023
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