Makiko Itoh was born in Tokyo and raised and educated in Japan, England and the U.S. After years of living in New York City, she moved to Switzerland, where it was difficult to find authentic Japanese cooking. This inspired her to go back to her roots and learn how to cook the food her mother and grandmother used to make, using the limited range of Japanese ingredients available to her. In 2003 she started a blog about Japanese cooking called Just Hungry, and in 2007, a companion blog about bento box lunches called Just Bento. Just Hungry is the most popular blog about Japanese cooking in English, and Just Bento boasts more than 220,000 subscribers and millions of page views a month.