Mimi Miyagi

Melody Damayo (born July 3, 1973), known professionally as Mimi Miyagi, is a Filipino-American model, film director, and former pornographic actress.

In 2011, Complex magazine ranked her at #12 in their list of "The Top 50 Hottest Asian Porn Stars of All Time".

Melody Damayo was born in Davao City, the second of four children, to conservative Seventh-day Adventist parents. When she was six, she moved to the United States with her parents, and she grew up in California.

Damayo went back to Mindanao for high school, and her family enrolled her in a Seventh-day Adventist academy (Mindanao Mission Academy) in Misamis Oriental, hoping she would absorb Filipino values. After finishing high school, she enrolled in an Adventist college in Bukidnon, studying finance and economics at Mountain View College, but she dropped out in her second year. She says she had been a disc jockey on the college radio station and had decided on a career in show business.

Damayo returned to Los Angeles and obtained a scholarship to the American College for Fashion Merchandising, but, once again, she dropped out without graduating when she had run out of money and began looking for jobs. By age 18, she had intended to be a makeup artist.

She took some part-time gigs as a go-go dancer at an Asian nightclub in Beverly Hills, before transitioning into adult films and nude modeling.

Damayo says she saw an advertisement for nude models and answered it. She took the name "Mimi", the childhood nickname given by her grandmother. "Miyagi" was derived from the character Mr. Miyagi in the film The Karate Kid, although she has nothing to do with him. She says she cloaked her actual ethnicity in Asian mysticism.

In 1996, she retired from adult film acting and moved to Henderson, Nevada. She married a former professional football player^{[not specific enough to verify]}. She hired a consultant to set up a website (MimiMiyagi.com), then got embroiled in a legal battle over control of the domain name.^{[citation needed]}