A native of Osaka, Japan, Noriko came to the United States to pursue her academic credentials. She received a bachelor of science degree in Applied Design and Visual Communications, minor with graphic design and commercial arts from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis/St. Paul.After Noriko worked as an associate producer/director on various projects in Japanese Public Broadcasters office in New York City, she studied film production and editing at New York University, where she produced and directed her first 16mm film, THE BRIDGE MAN. It is a short, poetic documentary film expressing with minimum method one man's loneliness and isolation after the death of his wife. There is another meaning behind the title of THE BRIDGE MAN. In her first debut film she wanted to create her wish to overlap as a bridging filmmaker between two worlds and their differing cultures.

A documentary film about an elderly man dealing with the loss of his wife.The film uses a classic piano selection titled "Clair de Lune" to express the man's emotions as he moves through life suffering from a burden of grief. In this short film, the man's life and feelings are expressed poetically through movement and music.

The film depicts the universal theme of losing a precious loved one and dealing with the inevitable feelings of fear, depression and purposelessness inherent in the realization that one will spend the rest of one's life alone or without that loved one. The film is broad in theme and specifics to allow the audience mental participation by identifying with the feelings more than the specifics of the situation.

Noriko has spent a significant amount of time in front of stemback. Originally she prepared interview tapes and other sound tracks to synchronize sounds to create a short documentary. But she decided not to use any other sound except one strong music. It was much stronger to express his feeling than explain with words. Inspired by the classical piano piece titled Clair de Lune composed by Claude Debussy and the contrast between the atmosphere of the outdoors and indoors. Noriko brought the music into her work using it to set the tone for many of the images in the film, such as sunlight streaming through a window curtain, mirror images and a scenery of rough but beautiful backyard as well as expressing the old man B!G (Js external attitude and internal emotional feeling.

The decision to use nothing but this music throughout the film required a great deal of experimentation. The final result emphasizes the subject's emotional feeling more strongly than any other medium. Since she has wonderful interview comments on this elderly man $B!G (Js interesting story, she is hoping to develop this documentary in the near future as well as other projects on both documentaries and narratives. A short documentary, THE BRIDGE MAN has been selected to the film festivals and received several awards after completed in 2000. Those are: Flying Broom Women $B!G (Js Film Festival (Ankara, Turkey) May, 2002 Festival Inernacional de Filmets de Badalona (Barcelona, Spain) November, 2002