[4][5][6] Graham was born in Melbourne, Australia,[7] and first travelled to Japan aged 15 for a student exchange programme,[8] where she attended high school and lived with her host family.

[14] The reviewer for the journal Organization of Inside the Japanese Company was troubled by the uninformativeness about Graham's interviewees and by serious problems with the book's quantitative survey.

[15] "C-Life" eventually went under in October 2000,[16][a] and A Japanese Company in Crisis concentrated on the ways in which individual employees thought and acted in expectation of the hard times ahead.

The carping comments from those on the sidelines, who view the candidates as slimy self-degraders desperate for status, provide an amusing counterpoint to the seriousness of the contestants.

[19]The reviewer for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute found the book a "witty examination of British political processes" and "[recommended it] to all would-be politicians and their tutors".

[20][21] Graham debuted in the Asakusa geisha district of Tokyo, and her training before this lasted for a year; this included lessons on dance, tea ceremony and the shamisen.

[4] Graham travelled internationally to demonstrate the traditional arts employed by geisha, visiting the United Kingdom to perform at the Hyper Japan festival in 2013,[27] Dubai in the same year,[23] and Brazil in 2015.