With his perfectly suntanned bald head and carefully trimmed white mustache, Shunpei Kanbe may remind some people of a lion tamer, or maybe an explorer from the Belle Epoque.
Actually both of these guesses are not that far from the truth, as the 66-year-old Japanese veterinarian has spent the last 40 years in Africa. He is chairman of the Africa and Shunpei Kanbe Fellowship (ASKF), a nongovernmental organization he founded in 1994 in order to better pursue his environmental conservation activity.
Kanbe's love affair with African wildlife began in Tokyo. "My parents took me to Ueno Zoo when I was a child," he says. "I was so fascinated that I decided then and there that one day I would visit the savanna and see the animals in their natural habitat."