American David Leibowitz admits to having been virtually clueless about Japan before coming here for the first time 21 years ago.
"I thought all the men were samurai and the women were geisha. I knew that the girls were beautiful — and that was enough, really, for a 25-year-old guy," he says with a chuckle.
But soon enough, he was hooked, charmed by "how everything was structured, how people were kind to each other, how everything was new."