Sixteen-year old ballerina Miko Fogarty may be an American teen prodigy, but despite hailing from that land steeped in stardom culture, she seems to have none of the usual celebrity trappings — or to be particularly interested in them.

When we met recently on a steaming August afternoon in Tokyo, she had on a well-laundered T-shirt she'd bought in Bulgaria while she was there competing in a ballet competition, a pair of cut-off jeans and hemp sandals. She was wearing little or no makeup and refrained from flouncing around or showing off, even a little bit.

Beside this beaming ballet prodigy sat her mother Satoko, a former concert pianist from Osaka. Miko had just spent a few weeks at her grandmother's house in the city of Nishinomiya in Hyogo Prefecture, between Kobe and Osaka.