A dare and a $5 bet led to Cydonie Brown joining the U.S. Navy. When a recruiter called in September 1989 to talk with her now-deceased brother Darwell, she said she joked with the individual and said, “You don’t need someone like him. You need someone like me.”

Darwell accepted Brown’s bet, because he didn’t believe they would let a woman join the Navy. After she took the test, she said they wanted her right away and they placed her in radio intelligence and sent her to Misawa Air Base in Japan.

“When I first walked into a Japanese bar, the food presentation was mesmerizing,” said Brown, 52, now a resident of Taftville. “The colors, textures, and the presentations were out of this world.”

She added that Japanese food is presented with reds, yellows, greens, browns and hints of orange and is served in colorful ceramic ware, “which gives them the feeling/illusion that a lot of food is presented.”

While living in Japan for 11 years — three years in the U.S. Navy, two years as a civilian relocation program specialist at Atsugi Navy Base and later as a wife and mother — Brown became immersed in the culture.

Some years in between were spent in California in the Navy Reserve and attaining a bachelor’s degree in international relations and a master’s degree in public administration.

After taking a class on how to wear a kimono, Brown, who is a biracial black/Native American woman, said she was interviewed on a Japanese television show, because she didn’t fit the traditional stereotypical Asian woman.

She also got involved in the television, movie and music video industries. Hoping her young daughters would be “discovered” by local television station representatives who came to the base looking for Americans to work as fashion models and actors in commercials, she said they chose her instead.

“They were like, ‘What? This big woman with a huge afro can speak Japanese fluently. Oh we want her,’” she said.

Brown also co-hosted a weekly radio show “What’s Common Sense in My Country is Not Common Sense in Japan” for two years with South Korean native Kyonkei Kim, in which they talked about their cultures. Their stories were eventually turned into a book by the same name, which they co-authored.

Putting all these experiences behind her, she decided it was time she brought her family to the United States, because she said young children face too much pressure in Japanese schools.

Brown got a job working as a bartender in Las Vegas and met a blind, elderly woman who told her she “had a way with words and should be a national park ranger,” she said. Brown took her advice and landed such a post at the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona in 2009. Later, she was transferred to the Hoover Dam in Nevada, Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State, Lewis and Clark Trail in Oregon, and finally, Weir Farm National State Park in Wilton, Conn., five years ago.

“I was not particularly eager to move every 18 months, but I loved my job,” Brown said.

Later, she worked in the marketing department and call center at Foxwoods Resort Casino and for the Small Business Administration. She is now employed by the Norwich Post Office in a new warehouse, which was established to deal with all the extra mail since the pandemic began.

Brown is also performing again. It began when she was contacted last year by Program Producer Kenichi Iwabuchi of Japan who wanted to know if she would like to be part of an international cooking show “Crazy For Food” on YouTube’s Foodots Channel. After agreeing to it, she, along with two others — college professor Teresa Williams and a Japanese mother Akiko Cruz in Los Angeles — launched their show in October 2019 and are creating two 20- to 25-minute episodes monthly.

Working remotely from their various locations, they share the sights, sounds and intricate recipes of Japan and other cultures, while speaking English and Japanese, Brown said.

Their “fun and unfussy” approach offers a unique format, which utilizes animal avatars (characters usually associated with video games) which mimic the women’s reactions: raccoon is also voiced by Brown, fox (voiced by Cruz), owl (voiced by Williams) and dog (voiced by show’s host, Hideyasu Shimazu). They “cover all the tools and tips needed for the average cook to enjoy the best of Japanese cuisine,” Brown said.

At last count, they had 60,000 views from the four videos they have produced so far.

Viewers are made up of people from 50 different countries with 80 percent of them being women between 18 and 24 years old.

Brown said it makes her happy that she can film these cooking shows in Taftville and make people smile by interjecting Japanese/English languages and “silly comedy” into it.

These humorous shows are especially important in Japan, Brown said, because there is a high suicide rate among young, single women since the pandemic began, because they feel isolated and many have lost their jobs.

“You’ve never seen a program like this before on YouTube. ‘Crazy For Food’ is a talk show by three housewives who speak Japanese, produced by ‘Foodots,’” Iwabuchi said in an email. “Each of them becomes animal avatar and talk about food through internet. Cydonie Brown, one of housewives, will bring enjoyable time to you.”

Since a study showed the audience gravitated toward Brown more than the other two contributors, Foodots is planning a spinoff show with just her and fans on YouTube live, which will highlight Connecticut and Japanese cultures offering education and humor.

She said she plans to continue working on “Crazy for Food.”

Additionally, “NBC Universal saw our show and they loved it. The representative said we should start looking for a production company to help bring the show to television,” Brown said.

She stressed there is much to learn about Japanese culture. First of all, people in this island country prepare meals with mostly fresh ingredients and they shop every day or have it delivered.

Supermarket stores only have a few aisles with canned goods. Also, she said they rarely eat “junk food” such as fried potato chips and soda.

As a tea-drinking society, she said they enjoy wheat, green and oolong cha tea. Additionally, their portions are much smaller portions.

“It starts in school. You can’t get seconds,” she said, adding that their “lunch boxes” are half the size of most people’s in this country.

Another example of their self-control: Japanese people will eat one chicken wing to enjoy the flavor, while people in this country will eat many in one sitting, Brown said.

She remembered while shooting scenes for shows and movies, “everyone must eat a bento (lunch plate with different compartments) together.” If one doesn’t, he or she “would not get cast again or you will not be in the next scene or they’d limit you in the scenes,” said Brown, explaining that the food culture is very important in Japan.

She added that Japanese people are very funny; they love food and are fascinated with American culture. Additionally, their vending machines offer many more choices than in America and they are technically advanced in robotics. Dancing robots are scheduled for the Tokyo Summer Olympics, said Brown, who speaks Japanese fluently, as well as Cree from her mother, a native of the Piapot First Nation situated on the outskirts of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Influenced by a kind and gentle Japanese doctor who taught Brown how to cut bonsai trees while a child living in Fresno, California, she said she knew she wanted to marry a Japanese man. This meant she would need to learn to prepare Japanese food, her girlfriends informed her.

She took cooking lessons from the local Japanese electric/gas company while single in Japan, watched television cooking shows and then attended ABC Cooking School. And yes, she eventually married her Japanese husband, Takashi Fukami, now a retired software engineer and professional photographer.

Brown, who enjoys being a social-media influencer, said her future goals include promoting her 10 million views of 4,000 Google maps Connecticut restaurant photos, and hopefully being “a conduit between the Tokyo Summer Olympics and American audiences regarding Japanese culture, technology, and of course, food.”

Her “Crazy For Food” Show is available on YouTube.