I should have known that Disney characters would one day take over my home. When my husband Yoshi and I married eight years ago, one of our wedding presents was a framed, stained-glass picture of Donald and Daisy Duck, our names and date of ...

TOKUSHIMA — Californian furniture maker Cynthia Kingsbury works in a 100-year-old timber storage building at the foot of a lushly forested mountain in Tokushima Prefecture. Dried sticks are piled like kindling beneath her worktable. Her dog Tingi, a black Labrador-Doberman mix, is sprawled across ...

NIIHAMA, Ehime Pref. — For most writers, the road to publication is paved with rejection slips. Not so for British expatriate Marisa Ishikawa, 35, who lives in Niihama-shi, Ehime Prefecture, with her Japanese carpenter husband and their two small children. Ishikawa dashed off her ...

Japanese-Jamaican-Korean fusion? Korean-flavored Japanese rock with a bit of Memphis blues thrown in? It’s hard to put a label on the multiethnic multigenre sounds of the Pak Poe Band. “I’m greedy,” founder and frontman Pak says with a laugh, when explaining the abundance of ...

MATSUSHIGE, Tokushima Pref. — “It began with a cold,” Lance Kita, 24, replied when asked how he came to teach hula in Japan. Kita, raised in Hawaii, had never taught or even performed the dance native to his home state before coming to Shikoku, ...