Last August, with summer sweltering the city, I met Yuriko Kajiya and Jared Matthews, two soloists from the New York-based American Ballet Theatre, one of the word's top-four classical companies along with the Royal Ballet in London, Paris Opera Ballet and the Bolshoi in Moscow.

Both in their late 20s, Nagoya-native Kajiya and Houston, Texas-born Matthews were in Tokyo to dance a piece from "Giselle" together in a "Lausanne Gala" at the Aoyama Theatre — and also as PR ambassadors for ABT's tour of Japan which finally curtains-up tonight with "The Nutcracker" at Bunkamura Orchard Hall in Shibuya.

As he explained then, Matthews took his first steps into the world of dance at age 8, when he he started to do tap like his hero, Gene Kelly. "He made dancing really cool even though it had a largely feminine image in the United States — especially in places like Texas, where I came from," Matthews said. "Afterward that progressed to ballet, and in 2002 I was invited to join ABT."