When the Rev. Kenjitsu Nakagaki was honoring the Buddha's birthday with a sacred flower ceremony at a Seattle shrine in 1986, the Buddhist monk was met with sharp criticism for the chrysanthemums he arranged in the shape of a counterclockwise swastika. Nakagaki, then 25 and ...

An American survivor of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack in New York who reached out to the Tohoku region following the triple disaster in 2011 has for years fostered a unique bond with its people, finding the connection mutually beneficial in coping with ...

Although Alexis Sanborn was a self-professed Japanese-culture geek as a teenager, she never had much of an appetite for washoku (Japanese cuisine). As she grew up reading anime in a California suburb in the early 1990s, before the Japanese restaurant boom in U.S. urban cities, ...