Fred Harris looks around the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Yurakucho, central Tokyo, and observes with his usual keen but fond eye, "This was the first club I joined when I came here in 1964." (He was also in Japan while serving as a U.S. soldier during the Korean War.)
Described as one of the top 50 foreigners making a difference in Japan, Harris says that first and foremost he's a painter -- "oil and watercolor." But he has so many other strings to his bow that sometimes it's hard to know where art stops and business and entrepreneurialism begin.
Being as much a pragmatist as the romantic he claims to be, he switched from teaching in an art school in his hometown of New York ("I'm a Brooklyn boy.") to working for an architect who wanted to open an office in Japan. Today he is chairman of TDS K.K., which is still going strong after 40 years, offering architectural and interior design, and strategic facilities consulting, mostly for major corporations.