Nobushi spent his formative years in a village in the mountains of Nagano, Japan before moving to US.
He studied photography with William A. Garnett at U.C. Berkeley while pursuing a degree in architecture, and during summer breaks he joined forces with the owner/ publisher and the executive editor of then-fledgling Tokyo-based publication, Global Architecture (GA) as the editorial/photography assistant and the travel coordinator/translator. What was meant to be a job for a few summers became a career of photojournalism in architecture that lasted for 30 years. Acting both as an editor and a photographer for GA, he traveled globally and produced numerous publications.
Amongst his peers, Nobushi has been known for his adept use of “available light” in creating architectural images. Lately he has taken the notion further in his Vermont images collectively titled Exquisite Vermont. In it he captures and reveals the hue, luminosity and translucency inherent in rural Vermont landscape that are nuanced by the ever so changing seasonal light.
Sources of inspiration for Nobushi include the works of ancient Japanese artists like Hokusai, Hiroshige and Koetsu to which he had been exposed since early child- hood. The most influential though was the work of 17th C. haiku master Basho, known for The Narrow Road to the Interior, a travelogue peppered with haiku, that he had kept as he journeyed on foot inland and across central Japan. Young Nobushi appreciated the brevity of haiku with which Basho masterly and often wittily illustrated
the journal. It exhibited Basho’s keen astuteness of the places he visited and experiences he encountered, and it taught Nobushi the way to see attributes in situations and to capture essences that are often hidden below the surfaces.
The road Basho traveled on in 1691 passed by the area where the village Nobushi spent his childhood lay. Today Nobushi is settled in the hills (not unlike that of Nagano) of Southern Vermont since 1981, and devotes himself to making Exquisite Vermont images which he regards as visual haiku (haiga). The first collection of images is titled Exquiste Vermont: Back Roads To A Hidden Valley in homage to Basho.