Photographer Tomoki Imai has been a blur of activity since we reached the lookout point halfway up 601-meter Mount Higakure in the Futaba district of Fukushima Prefecture.

Tomoki Imai remembers well the turning point in his life when he decided to become a professional photographer. Already an aspiring film director at the Tokyo University of the Arts, the Hiroshima-native was turned onto the raw and trigger-happy cityscape and portrait snapshots of ...

Moses Pendleton remembers well his first taste of live performance. He was an elementary school kid when his father -- a dairy farmer in northern Vermont -- hired his young son to show off his prized Holstein cows at the county fair. "My job ...

As a child, Akira Yamaguchi spent countless hours hunched over his desk, doodling the many space-age rocket ships and humanoids he encountered in his bedroom anime collection. The young artist, however, also remembers feeling a sense of guilt whenever he attempted to mimic more ...

Take a stroll down Royal Street in the Adventureland area of Tokyo Disneyland any weekend and you'll likely hear the heart-tugging sounds of Dixieland jazz. What's most surprising, perhaps, is the sheer authenticity of the New Orleanian music re-created by 62-year-old trumpet player Yoshio ...

Manga took a giant leap into its future on New Year's Day 1963, when space-age cartoon images from Osamu Tezuka's famed comic book "Tetsuwa Atomu (Astro Boy)" came to life in Japan's first original animated TV series. This was the birth of anime, which ...

A cacophony of electronic bleeps and disjointed drum rolls kick off the second and latest CD "Sensation" by Ryo Kato, aka DJ Klock. What follows is a series of drill-like drum riffs that start, stop then start again several times before settling into a ...

In matters of war, history is most often recounted from the perspective of the conqueror and rarely, if ever, passed down from the point of view of the defeated. So it's not surprising that the historical significance of the remnants of 16th-century Hachioji Castle ...

With its oddly ear-shaped black-and-white striped body, the hammer-size mimigata tennannsho, a grass that grows in the depths of Mount Takao's forests, has long been an object of fascination and loathing to hikers in the western Tokyo quasi-national park, where it's not just its ...