Judith Carr was born and grew up in Burbank, California, the daughter of a jazz trumpet player and an aspiring nurse. She was afflicted with both childhood arthritis and Crohn's disease and spent a sizable portion of her youth in the hospital or on bedrest. Graduating from Burbank High School in 1956 (where she was a straight-A student), she briefly attended Long Beach State College as an art major before relocating to Hayama, Japan, in 1961, with her then lover, a Navy Sailor. A brief marriage to him did not work out, ending in 1964, and she spent the next thirteen years in various occupations, including clerical worker, teaching assistant in kindergarten and high school, and English as a Second Language Teacher, and working as a radio Journalist in Finland.