Rina Sawayama – XS (Official Video). Rina Sawayama is a Japanese-British singer, songwriter and model. Born in Niigata, she was raised from a young age in London, where she currently resides. Her debut extended play, Rina, was released in 2017, before her debut studio album, Sawayama, was released on 17 April 2020.

Takehiko Yagi is a rising star in Japanese photography, and his vibrant pictures of the Hindu spring festival of Holi won the Grand Prize at the fourth annual Nikkei National Geographic Photo Prize. Diving into the Colors of Holi is his first exhibition in the US, on show at Foto Care Gallery in New York until 28 September, 2016. Here: Jaipur, India, 2013, (Photo by Takehiko Yagi/The Guardian)

Japanese embroidery artist Hiroko Kubota was in the process of making custom sized clothes for her smaller-framed son when he made a small request: could some of the shirts have cats on them? Kubota explains her son was somewhat obsessed with cats and had collected a small library of adorable images found around the web.

Masakatsu Sashie is a Japanese painter, born in 1974 in Kanazawa. His paintings of spherical structures floating above rubble on the streets, envision a future where environmental disasters have made the cities depicted uninhabitable. While he has been painting since 1999, his work caught more national intention in 2005 at the Geisai art show.

Jack Tia Kee Woon is an artist from Singapore. He is famous through his technique of watercolor painting in acrylic environment. His painting style is very light and radiant, where the watercolors add the transparence to the picture, while acrylic make the colors look very deep. One can see the influence of Chinese and Japanese culture on his art.

Minimiam is a project of the Japanese photographer Akiko Ida and French photographer Pierre Javelle. They met studying photography at the Paris “Arts Décoratifs” art school. The project has been ongoing since 2002 and was inspired by the married couple’s profession as commercial food photographers.

These cat hand bags are painstakingly crafted by Pico, a Japanese housewife who loves cats. The difficulty in making these bags means that they often aren’t available, and when they are, they’re only sold on Yahoo! Auction Japan. How much do bags like these go for? The three-color cat below ended up selling for about 700 USD!

A visitor poses for a photo with a Crayon Shin-chan model during an exhibition at Joy City in Beijing May 5, 2015. The exhibition, which showcased fifty models of the Japanese cartoon character in different poses and expressions, will run from April 18 to June 22. (Photo by Jason Lee/Reuters)