Hungarian-American photographer Tom Haar, 71, who spent several years of his childhood in wartime Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, says he wants to help promote the resort area once again "as an international cultural community."

Haar returned to Karuizawa this summer and is holding an exhibition featuring his own photographic impression of the town and pictures taken by his late father of life there before and during World War II.

Karuizawa was a hub for cultural exchanges between Japanese and foreigners — mostly Americans and Europeans — before the war, said Haar, who was born in Tokyo and lived in Japan for nearly two decades before his family moved to Hawaii in 1959.