Miwa Hitsumoto, PsyD, LMFT

With more than 25 years of clinical experience, Dr. Hitsumoto offers counseling grounded in a deep and current understanding of Japanese culture, values, family expectations, and communication styles. Her cultural roots and perspective remain strongly Japanese, while her extensive experience living and working in both Japan and the United States allows her to understand the expectations, pressures, and differences that can arise between the two cultures. This perspective is especially valuable for Japanese individuals, intercultural couples, and families navigating adjustment, relationships, and life across cultures.

Since entering private practice in 2004, Dr. Hitsumoto has worked extensively with Japanese-speaking individuals, intercultural couples, and families, as well as clients facing adjustment difficulties, trauma, depression, anxiety, relationship problems, domestic violence, and other emotional and interpersonal concerns. Her approach is tailored to each client’s circumstances, cultural background, relationships, and goals.

Before embarking on her career in clinical psychology, Dr. Hitsumoto developed a broad perspective through living, studying, and working in both Japan and the United States. As a high school exchange student in Ohio and later a college student in the United States, she experienced firsthand the challenges of adapting to a different culture and way of life. She later returned to Japan, where she built a successful early career as a software engineer and marketing manager for large international corporations. Those experiences ultimately led her back to the United States to pursue graduate training in clinical psychology and professional licensure. Having experienced the challenges of adapting to life in the U.S. herself, she wanted to help Japanese people facing similar difficulties, with particular concern for students and young adults adjusting to life away from Japan.

Dr. Hitsumoto’s connection to Japan is not simply part of her past. She returns several times throughout the year, spending significant time in both Shimonoseki and Tokyo while remaining actively engaged in professional consultation, collaboration with counseling professionals and organizations, and other projects in Japan. This continuing involvement keeps her closely connected to contemporary Japanese society and gives her a current, lived understanding of Japanese culture, values, family dynamics, communication styles, emotional expression, and generational differences, alongside her extensive experience living and working in the United States.

Dr. Hitsumoto remains actively involved in professional dialogue and collaboration in both Japan and the United States. In 2026, she participated in a professional symposium addressing Japan’s new joint-custody framework and its implications for parents and families, and served as a judge and commentator at the 18th Academic Conference of the International Brief Therapy Association in Yamagata. These activities help keep her closely engaged with evolving family, relationship, and mental-health concerns in contemporary Japan.

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In addition to running LA Counseling, Dr. Hitsumoto serves as Executive and Clinical Director of the Center for Japanese Mental Health, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to improving access to mental-health information, education, and support for Japanese individuals and communities. Through this work, she remains engaged with broader mental-health needs affecting Japanese people in the United States and internationally.

Dr. Hitsumoto holds a Master of Arts and a PsyD in Clinical Psychology and has completed extensive professional education and clinical training in the field.

Counseling can begin with whatever is troubling you right now. You do not need to explain everything from the beginning before you can start receiving support. Whether your concerns involve yourself, your marriage, your family, or living and working across cultures, Dr. Hitsumoto can help you explore what is happening, understand the patterns and circumstances behind it, and consider a way forward.