Amateur ethnographer smitten by China: Japanese salaryman plans to document lives of ethnic minorities.

ASHIYA, Hyogo -- Despite holding down a busy job at a chemical company, Koichi Haga dedicates what little free time he has to visiting minority groups in China to document their lives. So far he has visited about 50 ethnic groups and taken some 20,000 photographs.

Haga, 59, first visited China as a member of the Kobe Junior Chamber Inc. in 1978, just after the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Japan and China had been enacted. The tour familiarized Haga with what was for Japanese at the time a "distant country."

Five years later, Haga set out alone to travel along the Silk Road. On this trip he passed through areas inhabited by the Uigur, one of China's …