Tragedy crushes some people, twists and mangles them in ways from which they never recover. Others emerge stronger, as if all the pressure had fused to produce a diamond. Violin prodigy Diana Yukawa shows such sparkle.
The 15-year-old teenager was born a month after her Japanese father died in the worst airplane disaster in history -- the Japan Airlines crash that killed 520 people on a mountain in Ueno, Gunma Prefecture, on Aug. 12, 1985.
The story of how she has come to shine so brightly and at such a young age has captured the imagination of the Japanese public since the release this September of her debut CD. "La Campanella" shot to the top of the HMV classical music charts in Japan, and the young Londoner soon found herself a magazine cover girl in the country of her birth.