Character Profile: Juni Okuda (Patreon)

  Juni Okuda was born in 1981 in Honolulu, Hawai’i. She grew up there until her sixteenth year, leaving the islands only to visit relatives in Korea. When her father got a job at Micron Technologies in Boise, Idaho, the family move was a shock to her. Everything in Boise was wrong—there were four wild, extreme seasons, there seemed to be only one ethnic group, there was no beach, and the land supposedly went on forever. 

Juni disliked her new home and joined the Army Reserves as a way to eventually leverage her way out. She didn’t join the Active Duty Army because she wasn’t sure she’d like it and she’d had more than enough rude shocks in her life. There was no military tradition in her family aside from male cousins conscripted into the Korean Army and a Japanese grandfather no one talks about. 

Her father is Japanese and her mother is Korean, and they met as immigrant children in Hawaii decades ago when their families left their home countries and came to Hawaii at about the same time. Bonding over the immigrant experience, they eventually married and produced Juni. Juni was mostly raised by her mother (a schoolteacher) and identifies with her Korean side and speaks some Korean, seeing her father as a distant workaholic that spent most of his time at the office.