Derrel Grisham is an American, but it was a sense of nostalgia that drew him to the island of Yakushima off the southern coast of Kagoshima Prefecture.
"I actually grew up near Tokyo," the 57-year-old Grisham says. "My father was in the U.S. Air Force, and I spent my kindergarten and elementary school years in Takahata, near what was then the Tachikawa air force base."
When, in 1991, he first saw the rice paddies, narrow roads and little farmhouses that still dominated the inhabited areas of Yakushima, it reminded him of what Takahata looked like almost 50 years earlier.