As the fall exhibition season moves into high gear, there are a number of good shows going up at Tokyo's leading contemporary art galleries, and what is notable is that a fair number of them are based on well-defined themes.

A brief selection: One of my favorite locals, feminist Yoshiko Shimada, opens "Women in the Self-Defense Forces," this Friday at Ota Fine Arts in Ebisu; Kaoru Motomiya has "Metabolism," a well-received show of works inspired by the plight of the Tasmanian Tiger (now believed to be extinct), at the Mizuma Art Gallery in Daikanyama. Meanwhile, in Shinjuku, Gregor Schneider's haunting series of urban minimalist black-and-white photographs is showing at Wako Works of Art. And next door to Wako is the show I'm going to focus on this week -- Tetsu Imamura at the Kenji Taki Gallery.

Born in Boston, Imamura moved to Japan as a child and now lives and works down in Mie Prefecture. The 41-year-old artist first caught my eye when he was featured earlier this year in "Fiction?: Painting in the Virtual Age," a solid group show at the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art. The 14 new mixed-media pictures and objet now showing at the Kenji Taki further develop the artist's work on the theme of dreams and dream imagery.