TOKYO -- Teppei Kojima was a clothing buyer 10 years ago when he noticed a hot new trend in the West: bonsai. The expressive trees were being used as decorations in the fashionable boutiques he visited on business trips. Store managers would brag about them. "They are cool, aren't they?" Kojima remembers them saying.
A bonsai tree, left, in a pot made by ceramic artist Masanobu Ando, was part of an exhibition in Gifu Prefecture that came together out of a sense of crisis Ando feels as the rest of the world takes the Japanese art in fresh directions. (Photo by Akira Takemura)
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