Bio
I was born into a rice farming family in a small town in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. When I was seven, our family quit farming and moved to Sapporo, Hokkaido’s capital and largest city.
After living in Tokyo for seven years, I moved to the United States in the early 1980s, and studied book illustration and graphic art at a private art school in Franklin, Tennessee. The school also taught me human anatomy and perspective drawing, and how to create illustrations in the tradition of Howard Pyle, N. C. Wyeth, and Norman Rockwell.
In 1994, I moved back to Sapporo, Japan, and started a career as a translator/interpreter, temporarily putting a stop to art. Around 2015, then living in San Marcos, California, I resumed oil painting. Since then, I have created a more than 50 animal portraits in oil or mixed media drawing.
