Eleven years ago, Toshihito Takahashi was a high-flying advertising copywriter with a leading Tokyo agency, one of the select few whose work regularly appeared on the nation's TV screens.
Big money, creative expression, success and still greater prospects in a notoriously high-pressure business, even a certain glamour; to an outside observer, the 32-year-old Takahashi seemed to have it all.
Now, age 43, he's an egg farmer living self-sufficiently in a remote mountain village in Shikoku.