Animal mimicry artist Edoya Nekohachi, 63, is a third-generation Japanese performer whose precise renditions of hundreds of bird species' songs, as well as frog croaks, dog barks and dolphin whistles have been amusing audiences of all ages for more than 40 years.

Japanese kite artist Tetsuya Kishida, 89, has been creating and flying kites since the age of 6. He used to be a salesman for the steel industry and he later sold bonsai. In his late 40s, he finally turned his hobby of painting kites ...

Eiichiro Amakasu, 70, is a carpenter who designs and builds traditional Japanese homes and their surrounding gardens. He is an expert of sukiya, a residential architectural style that is typically associated with Japanese tea houses.

Kei Ochiai is a rag-and-bone man for the Kanto region. He drives his small truck through neighborhoods in Tokyo and Yokohama, circling the areas while sounding his pitch with a loudspeaker: "Furniture, bikes, fridges, anything big and heavy, I'll take it." His jovial demeanor ...

Midori Sawato is a benshi, a unique kind of performer who provides live narration to silent films at the movie theater. The benshi brings the characters in films alive using different voices and vocal expressions. They sit to the side of the screen, watching ...

Reiko Yoshimura is the owner of Aoyagi, a tiny bar in the basement of Tokyo's Shimbashi station. Built in 1966, the retro Shimbashi Ekimae Biru Ichigokan (Shimbashi Station Building No.1) is home to dozens of inexpensive drinking establishments that cater to salarymen and the ...

Chizuru, 58, and Fumio Nishioka, 59, are samurai-armor restorers. Among the handful of such specialists in Japan, they are the only ones who use the same techniques as artisans historically did in the past. Whether 900 or 150 years old, a samurai's armor reveals ...

Shoji Kuramochi, 73, is one of Japan's few surviving hunters, and he may be the only one with 100 trained hunting dogs. Besides being a hunter of wild boars and deer, he's also an expert at the traditional Japanese art forms of bonsai cultivation ...

Noriko Hama, is a Japanese economist, the Dean of Doshisha Business School in Kyoto and a contributor to The Japan Times. Well known for her candid television commentaries, popular columns, she is completely absorbed in the world of economics, and utterly unfazed by its ...

Lin Qing Xiang, 33, is the social-media manager of the "The Ruby Alan Show" (also known as "The RA Show"), a video blog that explores both Singaporean and Japanese culture. Lin creates travelogues of his journeys around Japan and also films Japanese-culture events in ...