Famous in Japan

Masako Shirasu in 1952 Of the many people who have had an enormous impact on Japanese arts and culture, author and fine art collector Masako Shirasu stands out as a distinguished figure. Born Masako Kabayama in Tokyo in 1910, she hailed from a prosperous family: her grandfathers were admirals in the Imperial Japanese Navy and her father was a lawyer. As her family was well-off, she started taking lessons in Noh theatre at the age of 4. It is often claimed she was the first fe

Nintendo's first headquarters in Kyoto, Japan in 1889 As the creator of major franchises like Donkey Kong, Mario, Legend of Zelda, and Pokémon, to name a few, one may think Nintendo is a company founded in the 1980s, when it was actually started by Fusajiro Yamauchi in the 1880s. The eldest son of Sosuke Fukui, Yamauchi was born in November 1859 in Kyoto, Japan, but was adopted at the age of 5 by Yushichi Yamauchi. In Japan, these types of adoptions were used as a way to cont

Manjiro Nakahama, image from "The Presentation of a Samurai Sword" at Millicent Library (1918) A fateful shipwreck is what drastically...

Junko Tabei in 1985 at Communism Peak (now known as Ismoil Somoni Peak) in Tajikistan, Jaan Künnap ,  CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia...

Portrait of Shigeru Kayano A prominent figure in the Ainu movement, Shigeru Kayano was the first Ainu representative in Japan's...