As those who have seen Kore-eda’s wrenching 2004 near-masterpiece “Nobody Knows” are already aware, he has a remarkable ability to work with children, and also to capture the geographical and psychological landscape of childhood, where objectively minor events can have enormous significance. (Other titles from Kore-eda’s exceptionally varied oeuvre to check out: “Still Walking,” “After Life” and his 1995 feature debut, “Maborosi.”) In “I Wish” he captures the different worlds of two separated brothers, who both yearn (at least officially) to get their parents back together and reunite as a family. Koichi (Koki Maeda), aged around 12, is an introspective kid with a permanently stunned expression who’s on the edge of teenage alienation. He lives with his mom and grandparents on the southern tip of the island of Kyushu, in the shadow of the ash-spewing volcano Sakurajima. (A major eruption, he imagines, might be just the catastrophe required to undo the divorce.) His younger brother, Ryu (played by Koki’s real-life brother, Ohshiro Maeda), is an ultra-cute, gregarious kid who hangs with a posse of platonic girlfriends and lives with his kind but irresponsible indie-rock dad in the city of Fukuoka, about 175 miles to the north.

Kore-eda is often celebrated in international film circles as a throwback to the Japanese Golden Age of big-name directors like Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa — he has said his favorite is the lesser-known Mikio Naruse, director of “Late Chrysanthemums” and “Floating Clouds” — but there’s nothing forbidding or ascetic about the precise, bittersweet childhood world of “I Wish.” Indeed, according to Kore-eda, the initial inspiration came from the new bullet-train line (or “shinkansen,” in Japanese) that opened last year on Kyushu — and the first image that came into his head was that of the kids walking along the railroad track in “Stand by Me.” Indeed, “I Wish” possesses the tender intimacy, mixed with the slightest tinge of grown-up irony, of some of the very best tales of childhood adventure, from Stephen King to E. Nesbit to Truffaut’s “Small Change.”

Koichi and Ryu, you see, have heard about a piece of shinkansen folklore: When a new train line opens, if you can observe the precise moment when two trains pass each other at high speed for the very first time, wishes can come true and miracles become possible. They’d like to believe this, and maybe partly do, but Kore-eda clearly sees that the imagination of children (and adults too) is not constrained by questions of logic or plausibility. The two boys’ convoluted (and surprisingly expensive) scheme to run away overnight, along with several friends and all their wishes, becomes its own kind of miracle, and the magic it yields — including a fairy godmother! — is even more precious because it requires no suspension of disbelief.

Arguably, the quest for a bullet-train miracle is something of a MacGuffin in “I Wish.” It’s a good one, because it pays off in the end, but the real point of the movie is watching the way Kore-eda and the Maeda brothers (who also work as a kid-comedy act in Japan) capture the competing worlds of Ryu and Koichi with heartbreaking specificity. Koichi, the older of the two, is in many ways less worldly; he can’t quite see that his desire to reunite the family is about as likely to happen as one friend’s desire to become the next Ichiro Suzuki, or another’s to grow up and marry the leggy middle-school librarian. (Like a true romantic, he doesn’t notice or care that she’ll be pushing 50 by the time he’s legal.) As we regard Koichi through Kore-eda’s sympathetic but slightly detached camera — the cinematographer is Yutaka Yamazaki — we both cling to his last moments of innocence and root for him to grow up and reach a more mature understanding of the world. On that knife edge of yearning and longing is this whole film balanced.

Koichi’s only sustaining adult relationship is with his garrulous, chain-smoking grandpa (Isao Hashizume), who was once famous for his traditional sponge cake but now can’t get the recipe right. His mother Nozomi (wonderfully played by Nene Ohtsuka) is lost in booze and self-pity after her breakup with indulgent wastrel Kenji (Joe Odagiri), who’s raising Ryu in a household of benign rock ‘n’ roll neglect. Perhaps the most devastating scene in the entire movie is a wordless interlude when we watch Nozomi coming home from an evening out drinking with friends. Momentarily giddy, she buys an electronic flashing duck from a street vendor, but by the time she reaches her bus stop she doesn’t think it’s so funny anymore and gazes at it in puzzlement and anguish: Why did I buy this, and how did I get here?

Children, of course, will forgive the grown-ups in their lives almost any degree of lameness and irresponsibility if they feel loved, and Kore-eda takes somewhat the same attitude with his adult characters. Even in a slightly darker subplot involving Ryu’s aspiring actress friend Megumi (Kyara Uchida) and her embittered bartending mother (Yui Natsukawa), what we see is a parent doing the best she can, who has lost the ability to see the bigger picture. (If you have kids too, you’ve been there and done that.) When the kids make their pilgrimage to the mystical bullet-train spot, it may not bring Ryu and Koichi back together permanently, or launch a baseball superstar’s career, or bring a beloved family dog back to life. But those aren’t the only forms of magic, and this marvelous work of all-ages movie craftsmanship has magic aplenty.

“I Wish” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles. It opens May 25 in Boston, Philadelphia and Washington; June 1 in Chicago, Honolulu, Palm Springs, Calif., San Diego, San Francisco and San Jose, Calif.; June 8 in Atlanta, Denver and Phoenix; June 14 in Bloomington, Ind.; June 15 in Minneapolis and New Orleans; and June 22 in St. Louis and Seattle, with other cities and home video to follow.

Over the phone, curator Kendall Brown spoke to me about the themes and influences most evident in the works on show (and the complicated meaning of “art deco”). Click through the following slide show for a tantalizing peek at flapper-era Japan.

Am I right in thinking that most or all of this material hasn’t been shown in the U.S. before?

Yes. There was a big world art deco show organized by the Victoria & Albert Museum [in 2003], and I think a couple of the pieces were shown in that. But of the 190 [pieces in our exhibition], I’d say all but a handful are being shown for the first time in North America. (And in most cases, for the first time anywhere in the world, maybe since the 1930s.)

For the purposes of this show, what does “art deco” mean and not mean?

As you know — or I think your question indicates — “art deco” is a retrospectively art historical term. It was created in the 1960s to refer to a broad movement in the 1920s and ’30s. We’re talking about art deco first as a style, … both an outgrowth of and a reaction to art nouveau — geometric, clipped, short, rectilinear use of lines; streamlined shape; modernist, but with ornament … And we’re also talking about it in terms of things with color, a bright palette: Nile green, chromium yellow — a love of natural, organic form treated in abstract ways. That’s one thing that “deco” means.

Another thing that “deco” [represents] is an era. Sometimes we refer in the exhibition and catalog to the “deco era,” by which we really mean ’20s and ’30s Japan. There are some things in the show that might be considered constructivist; [with those,] we’re showing the impact on deco — deco and, let’s say, the shoulder of deco. …

In terms of what “art deco” doesn’t mean, we’re really looking at deco objects; we don’t look at architecture. We don’t have architectural elements [in the show]. If you were writing a book on Japanese deco, you could certainly expand to talk about architecture.

Would you say many of these pieces reflect a Western influence?

Indeed, they do. One of the things that’s appealing for what we’re calling Japanese deco style in the ’20s and ’30s is that it simultaneously fulfills two different functions. One is that it shows [Japanese artists] being up to date and international — European-American — so it’s very cosmopolitan … But [when the deco and art nouveau styles] are being developed in Europe, in Paris, there’s already a sort of Japan-esque element. The Japonisme is part of so much of European (especially French) modern art, from the impressionists to art nouveau to art deco. So for the Japanese, even as deco is a European, cosmopolitan, up-to-date, forward-looking style, it’s also a style that connects with, and in a sense utilizes, the Japanese past.

It’s familiar and unfamiliar, forward-looking and backward-looking simultaneously for the Japanese. But certainly there’s a strong European element. And in fact, the very first part of the exhibition, and the first part of the catalog, look at the cultural appropriation — how Japanese deco adapts Euro-American urban culture and adapts Egyptomania, the so-called “Nile Style.”

Can you talk about the theme of the “moga,” or the “modern girl,” in these pieces?

Thematically, the aspect of Japanese deco of the ’20s and ’30s that epitomizes this cosmopolitan urban culture is the subject of the “modern girl,” who is in some ways sort of the “flapper.” This kind of middle- to upper-middle-class urban woman wears Western clothes — and even if she wears a kimono, she might have a Western hairstyle and accessories. She goes window-shopping. She goes to cafes. She smokes. She drinks. She ostentatiously does her makeup, in a pocket mirror. The modern girl is perhaps the crucible of the deco culture.

Where would these works have appeared? Were they meant for the home?

The exhibition looks at art from four worlds or realms. [First, we have works] made for national exhibition. The Japanese had the equivalent of the French Salon — an annual, government-sponsored art exhibition — and there are a number of pieces made for that. We can call that “high art” or “museum art.”

There’s also the opposite, which is the art of the streets: commercial art, mass culture, posters, matchbook labels. So we have the high and the low, the fine art and the commercial art.

In between those [lies a middle category]. If we have highbrow and lowbrow, then there’s also “middlebrow,” which is art for the body, personal adornment: kimonos, haoris (the jackets you wear over kimonos in cold weather), obis [kimono sashes], and hair pins. This is art made to decorate the body.

The fourth area this art was made for is the home: the modern bourgeois home, which Japanese at this time, in the ’20s and ’30s, called a “culture home” (which is to say at least a partially Western-style home). You might have a piano; you would sit on chairs and a couch. You’d have an end-table with tchotchkes on it. You’d have a mantle with a clock, and Western-style books would be standing up there on their bookshelf …

We’re looking at art for these four distinct realms. But what’s interesting about the deco style is that it crosses between them. It’s highbrow; it’s middlebrow; it’s lowbrow.

I was a little surprised at the overt eroticism of some works from the show [e.g. slides 3 and 4]. Was this unusual or remarkable for the time?

In the late ’20s/early ’30s, there is a brief florescence — a little cultural moment in Japanese cities that Japanese at the time called “erotic grotesque nonsense.” It’s erotic; it’s a little edgy; it’s strange; and it’s kind of comical. Even with this cosmopolitan international jazz age, there’s growing political repression. Assassinations, laws, Communist Party outlaws, a move towards ultra-nationalism … And sort of as a backlash against that, there’s an erotic, edgy, subversive quality to a lot of art.

But at the other end — also appropriate for deco, and showing the style — is this growing ultra-nationalism and even militarism. This real tension of ’30s culture comes through in deco, and this exhibition, we hope.

When and why did the Japanese “deco era” end?

The very last [part] of my essay in the catalog says that really, the last gasp of deco would be [sometime in the] early ’50s. A few artists who never got around to it in the ’30s come to it after the war, and a few artists who did it in the ’30s and early ’40s do it a little bit after the war. But for the most part, this collection really stops [around the end of World War II]. I think our last dated piece is from 1943.

Deco isn’t just frivolity and lightness — it also has this heavy potential for [the] militaristic. But by the end of the war, not much of anything is made, and even the deco-ish nationalistic pieces are seen as a little suspect. I don’t have a perfect answer to your question, but for the most part, the deco era is really the ’20s to the early ’40s.

“Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920–1945″ is on display at the Japan Society in New York city through June 10. All works on display are from the collection of Robert and Mary Levenson.

View the slide show

I still remember it. The first shock of it. It was just one big hammer.

I turned to my two American friends Danny and Jeff and said, “Earthquake.” They didn’t feel it. They looked at me, and cocked their heads a little bit. And then she hit. We were in a turbine building that is built, for lack of a better term, like Fort Knox. The entire building was shaking.

None of us fell. But everyone got up against a wall, or got up on something. I heard that this earthquake lasted six minutes. But for me, it felt like a lifetime. I’m still living it, 10 months later.

I was working in a contaminated zone. I’ve been working in the nuclear field since 1984, and I’ve always followed good radiological practices. You step in properly. You step out properly. But when the earthquake ramped up, for the first time in my career, I lifted my one leg up and over that boundary and landed my dirty foot on the clean floor. We don’t even hand things across this boundary. Here I am putting my leg over it. And I put my other leg over and I told the guys, “Let’s get out.”

You could feel it under your feet. It was this entire enormous building moving at once. A lot of things were falling. We lost almost every light in the room. The structural steel was moving overhead. The lights were crashing everywhere. There was one young Japanese boy in front of me, still dressed out, and I was coaxing him out and this light came down like a guillotine right next to him. I didn’t know how to say “Look up!” or “Heads up” in Japanese. I wish I did. I was doing my best through charades to tell him, keep your eyes up. Everything was coming down. Thank God this boy didn’t get struck by this light fixture. Because even a light fixture will clean your clock. Or worse.

The crane operator was the toughest one to watch. But I had to keep an eye on him because this crane was just crabbing and jumping. He kept getting up off his chair — putting one leg out of the chair and putting it back in, and I’m thinking, please, please don’t even attempt to get out of there. But I was more in fear of the crane coming down. He had to be a good 30-40 feet up in that cab. It’s a crane that travels the entire length of the turbine deck. He would have put a champion bull rider to shame.

The sounds coming out of this turbine were pretty terrifying. Besides the earthquake and the lights dropping, this turbine was spinning. I had Danny over to the left screaming, “It’s going to blow! It’s going to blow!”

In one nanosecond, the entire floor went black. Every light went out. You would expect some emergency lighting would come on, but there wasn’t a one. And there was this most welcome beam of white light coming from the gap under the door. I made my way over to the door, and the one and only light in the room, it was swinging violently and then at the same time I opened the door it busted free and shattered on the floor. It was pitch black again. I remember thinking, “None of you are getting out of here.”

One of the Japanese guys had grabbed me around the waist. I put my arm up on his shoulder. With every jolt I squeezed his shoulder. I remember praying aloud for him, for all of us. I thought, we’re going to perish in this turbine building. I can still hear the turbine making its most unwelcome sound. I had many thoughts. But one of them was: Good God. I got up this morning just to go to work. And this is how it’s written for me? Dying is a fact of life. We all have to do it sooner or later. But this is how it’s written for me? March 11? On a Friday? On a turbine deck? In Fukushima? At work?  Of course my thoughts went immediately to my family. My two young children.

But then the lights did come back on. The lights were not emergency lights, they were what remained of the lights that didn’t fall. They were peppered about. There were maybe 60 lights on that deck and maybe four came on. It was enough light to see again. I took a look around the deck there. I’ve passed this thing 100 times and never noticed it. But it was an aluminum extension ladder. The most welcome sight I’d ever seen. Because the power was out, the crane isn’t working. This guy can’t drive the crane over to its docking station and get out. Thank God. We got him out of the crane.

—–

After we all got out, I was headed toward my rental car. Then I saw the tsunami coming. I stood there and as it came in I thought, you gotta be kidding me. This thing was huge.

When I first saw it, I saw it as far north and as far south as you could look. It didn’t resemble a wave. It resembled this huge swell of the ocean. This huge hump in the ocean coming your way. It rolled up over everything. It rolled uphill. It did come up over parking lots and took cars away in front of me. The first one receded back and took enough water to expose the sea bed.

It was a beautiful day. Clear, sunny, gorgeous. That’s one of the reasons I parked my rental car so far away, so I would walk in. A meteorologist would have to explain this — I think as a result of so much sea bed being exposed, it must be linked with the atmosphere — it sucked this front down from behind us. This big, black ominous front came rolling down on us, so much so that it began to snow. I’ve never heard anyone mention the snow. I mean, it didn’t snow and accumulate. But it snowed.

And the wind was — it was like a vacuum going by. There’s a harbor in front of Fukushima. And it was totally drained.

When the first wave came in, it just buried the walls to the plant. They were gone. They were all gone. The water just came in, wrapped around the walls and came back out. Units 1, 2, 3, 4 — as everyone knows. It was just an ungodly amount of water.

I was on top of the hill and — you gotta wonder. You gotta wonder about a lot of people. And as it turned out, a lot of people lost their lives in those minutes.

—–

We had a substantial amount of rental cars. We had no choice when they showed up. I think it was the police and maybe National Guard types that showed up, and said, you have to move south or west, and we were on our way. The freeway system was down. We had to take the secondary roads. It was a slow trip. We weren’t the only ones headed south. There were a lot of people headed south. But there were a lot of people headed north, too. I saw a lot of people sobbing, in tears in those vehicles. Maybe they had family north. Who knows what they were driving into? I know I would have done it for my brother, for my sister, or my parents. I would have driven in the opposite direction to help them. It seemed like there were more cars driving in to the zone than there were driving out. But there was a lot of road damage, a lot of cracks in the road. A lot of landslides, a lot of fissures in the ground. We got there after midnight to the train station. Our company had a train chartered from Tokyo. We didn’t get into until 4:30 a.m.

When I heard about the explosion on the turbine deck of unit 1, where I was working — that came as a shock. We heard about that on the bus. Nobody said nothing. We just put our heads down. I remember thinking: Oh, not there. Not this place I was so connected to. You hear about these things happening in the world somewhere, but it really hurt. It hurt to hear that.

I had been in the turbine deck for unit 1 less than 24 hours before. I’ve read that unit 1 was the most badly damaged unit. I don’t doubt that. I felt within the first two to three minutes of the earthquake that this was going to be significant.

—–

This is the first time I’m telling the story in some kind of chronological order. It’s not an easy story to tell. I’m struggling through it. I’m hoping that this helps me and my wife and my two school-age children. The holidays were difficult for me. I didn’t put up decorations. I hardly bought any gifts. Maybe March 11 will help me get past it. I need a year.

The most important thing to me now is people. Like this morning I had a cup of coffee. I watched this exchange outside between two people who didn’t know each other. They both had dogs. It was rather unfriendly and it seemed most unnecessary. That’s just one tiny example in the world. I wish I could take you all by the hand and re-set you with me. That’s what I feel like — I feel like I’ve been re-set. Not that I was all that much trouble before. I’ve always been a decent man. But humbling — that’s the word I’m looking for. This has been a humbling experience. What’s really important, you know?

As told to Alex Chadwick.

But at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the cleanup looks like it has barely begun. Instead, the real work is being done, unseen, deep inside the crippled reactors, where melted fuel remains cool, but whose precise state and location remains a mystery.

The destructive force of three reactor meltdowns is evident as soon as the bus carrying a small group of journalists invited by the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), enters the 20-kilometer (13-mile) exclusion zone imposed after the first reactor building exploded on March 12.

In the town of Naraha, most of the buildings emerged unscathed from the quake, but the streets are deserted. We pass a convenience store with its stock sitting untouched on shelves, and a parking lot dotted with cars that were abandoned in the panic.

During the short journey to the plant from J.Village — a soccer training complex that is now the logistical base for the Fukushima Daiichi cleanup operation — radiation monitors alert us to the invisible enemy that has driven 80,000 people from their homes.

Radiation levels rise and fall, soaring to 35 microsieverts per hour in Okuma, a farming village two kilometers from the plant that could remain uninhabitable for decades.

The abandonment of entire communities is troubling enough, but little can prepare you for a close-up view of Fukushima Daiichi’s damaged reactors.

One is shrouded in a vinyl cover while another appears largely intact, its mottled turquoise and white pattern clearly visible on a cold, but brilliantly sunny winter afternoon. The Nos. 3 and 4 reactors, however, are a tangled mess of steel and debris.

This low-lying area near the coast is by far the most hazardous part of the site. High radiation levels have hampered work to clear the wreckage and inspect the state of the melted fuel. The day before our visit, a robot sent inside reactor No. 2 reactor found 200 millisieverts per hour at one spot.

The reactors proximity to the ocean made them easy targets for the 14-meter (42-foot) tsunami, which effortlessly breached the plant’s protective wall. Along one side of the coastal road, mesh sacks filled with rocks provide makeshift reinforcement; on the other are the exposed innards of the reactors’ turbine buildings, crammed with twisted metal, warped shutters and trucks swept up and deposited by the waves.

But the clutter tells only half the story. From the outside, the appearance is one of utter chaos, but inside, damaged nuclear fuel is being kept cool by vast quantities of water, which is then stored in tanks covering almost every spare patch of ground on the site, before being decontaminated and fed back into the reactors.

Water management is critical to preventing the fuel from heating up again and setting off a potentially catastrophic nuclear chain reaction, says Katsuhiko Iwaki, deputy manager of the Fukushima Daiichi stabilization center.

The current capacity of 165,000 tons of water will reach its limit by April, he says, adding that Tepco is adding space for tens of thousands of tons of additional water.

Work near the damaged reactors is still fraught with danger. “Most of the workers here perform a two-hour shift in the morning and again in the afternoon,” Iwaki said.

“But there are other areas where the dosages are so high they can stay there for only two or three minutes. That’s just enough time to connect a hose before their alarms signal it’s time for them to leave.”

Satoshi Tarumi, whose job is to monitor the health of those workers, arrived at the plant three days after the tsunami. Conditions have significantly improved since then, he says, and despite his relatively young age, 33, he does not fear for his health.

“As part of the Fukushima Daiichi staff I feel partly responsible for what happened, that’s why I want to be involved,” Tarumi said. “My exposure levels are still below the legal limit, and I don’t see any problem working here.”

He is similarly matter of fact when asked about the future of the industry that provides his livelihood: “It’s up to the government to make a decision on nuclear energy. I’m just here to do as much as I can to help stabilize the plant.”

At the apex of the Fukushima Daiichi operation is Takeshi Takahashi, a serious-looking, quietly spoken man who became the plant’s manager last year after his predecessor, Masao Yoshida, took early retirement after being diagnosed with cancer (Tepco says the illness is not related to his work at the plant).

Takahashi concedes that the situation on the ground is still fragile. “We need to avoid major releases of radioactive materials of the kind we saw after the accident,” he said.

“We achieved cold shutdown [a stable state in which reactor temperatures remain below boiling point] in December, but we must ensure we keep making improvements because we still can’t say for sure that the facilities on site are totally trouble-free.”

Those facilities are monitored around the clock by up to 700 Tepco staff ensconced in the emergency control room. Divided into pods depending on their expertise, they are linked to workers in the field and the utility’s headquarters in Tokyo via two enormous screens. Along one wall are messages of support, including a giant Japanese flag bearing the Japanese character for “hope.”

Takahashi made no attempt to deflect criticism of Tepco’s conduct in the early days of the crisis, when information was scarce, and sometimes contradictory. His priority, he says, was to pave the way for a return home for at least some nuclear evacuees.

“We often hear that we didn’t communicate properly, and I am sorry about that,” he said. “It was never our intention to suppress information, but there was a chaotic time after the accident when we tended to neglect efficient communication.

“I’d like to apologize for the troubles and concerns we caused for local people. We need to secure safety in order to bring comfort and relief to the local residents. We are trying our best now to bring those who evacuated from the evacuation zone back to their homes as soon as possible,” he said.

Reports suggest that radiation levels in some areas near the outer edge of the evacuation zone are low enough for a small number of residents to return in the coming months.

They will not include Saori Kanesaki, a resident of Tomioka, a town in the evacuation zone, who until last year guided groups of visitors around Fukushima Daiichi.

“Before the accident it was my job to tell people that nuclear power was safe,” said Kanesaki, who now works at the plant for a Tepco affiliate. “But given the situation, if I were to tell them that now … I would be lying.”

There is a lot riding on their success: if they make the grade they will not only have fulfilled a personal ambition to enter the “flower and willow world” of Japan’s traditional entertainers. They are also part of an ambitious project launched by the town of Shimoda to use public money to prevent the local geisha tradition from disappearing.

Shimoda, a hot spring resort on Japan’s Pacific coast, was home to about 200 geisha in the 1950s. Now just five are left in the town which, like other seaside towns along this picturesque stretch of coast, has fallen victim to the era of cheap foreign travel and declining interest in geisha life among young Japanese women.

In March, they will make their official debut at a festival attended by thousands of visitors. “They’re not really ‘out’ as geisha yet,” said Takashi Takahashi, an official in the local government’s tourism division. “But once they are ready we will be arranging events and opportunities for visitors to experience geisha life, listen to live shamisen.”

“Having said that, this is not simply about nurturing three young geisha,” Takahashi said. “We want to preserve Shimoda’s traditional song and dance, and the geisha are the only people here who can do that. Without them they will be lost forever.”

Preserving that cultural heritage involves dedication, as the trainees discovered when they began learning the ways of the geisha four months ago. For the first month they did not have a single day off as they learned the basic skills: putting on a kimono, playing the shamisen and the taiko drums, and singing and dancing.

“The position of the back and all the other physical details have to be absolutely perfect when we dance,” said Awagiku.

Iroha, another member of the trio, said: “I like the dancing most of all. It looks very serene but it’s hard work. I sweat a lot. My family thought I might be too stiff to master the dance routines to a high enough standard to perform in public.”

Shimoda, located about 60 miles southwest of Tokyo on the tip of the Izu peninsula, is best known as one of the first ports of call for Commodore Perry’s “black ships,” which arrived in 1854 to demand that Japan open up to international trade after more than 200 years of isolation.

It is also the location of the first U.S. consulate general, although it was only three years before the consulate was moved to Edo [now Tokyo] following the opening of Yokohama to foreign trade. Well before U.S. troops marched ashore, Shimoda was a major port of call for vessels traveling between Osaka and Edo.

Shimoda’s modern-day geisha were hired via an advertisement placed with the local Hello Work employment office.

The third of the 20-something apprentices (in keeping with geisha tradition they declined to give their ages) is Rinka, a Chinese woman who moved to Japan 10 years ago and found herself living next-door to their teacher, Nami whose powerful voice became a kind of calling to geisha-hood.

“I used to listen to her practicing in the morning and thought her voice sounded beautiful,” Rinka said. “I consider Shimoda my hometown now and I want to begin my geisha career here.”

Awagiku, who quit her job as a designer, said last year’s tsunami disaster had prompted her to rethink her career. “Until then I wasn’t really aware of my Japanese-ness,” she said. “I have always been interested in calligraphy and was desperate to learn about kimono, so back in August I decided to apply.”

Iroha first came to Shimoda five years ago as a tourist and fell in love with its coastline. “I saw my first geisha here and thought that this must be the perfect place for them to live and work,” she said. “I regard them as the epitome of Japanese womanhood and beauty.”

Nami, a senior geisha, and Chikako, an accomplished performer who runs the only remaining geisha office, dispense their expertise with a mixture of benevolence and discipline.

“The training is extremely tough,” said Nami. “Unless you have a deep-seated desire to learn the skills, there is no way you are ever going to succeed, even with something as simple as tying an obi belt for your kimono. When they arrived they barely knew what tabi were,” she added, referring to the split-toe white socks worn with kimono. “After their first few sessions they were all sweating.”

The daily task of memorizing lyrics to old ballads such as Shimoda Bushi, a Japanese sea shanty, is historical preservation in action. The trainees re-create its undulating rhythm — haltingly at times — with a dance specially choreographed to suit a song that has been part of the town’s cultural fabric for 400 years.

If all goes to plan, the 5.2 million yen ($70,000) project, made possible through central government grants, will culminate in the women’s public debut on March 27 at Shimoda’s Okichi festival, held to honor a tragic local geisha who committed suicide, reportedly after a much frowned-upon relationship with the town’s first US consul general, Townsend Harris, in the mid-1800s.

“We’ll be performing in front of people who have seen the dances countless times before and know every move,” said Iroha. “I’m sure they’ll be watching me very closely to see if I make a mistake.”

But their teacher is optimistic: “Only a tiny percentage of Japanese woman can put on a kimono properly these days,” said Nami. “These three can already do it by themselves. They’re young and they’re learning very quickly. That’s because they love what they’re doing.”