Soy sauce and exhaust. Dried squid and cigarette butts. Tea leaves and neon lights. It's all in a day's work for Laure Drogoul, a self-proclaimed ``marm'' who has spent the past six months collecting the smells of Tokyo.

For Drogoul, a sculptor, 3D artist and olfactory aficionado, the task is both sociological and scientific. ``It's a huge endeavor. I always call it my crock-pot piece-one I'll work on for years and years,'' she says.

Drogoul, who came to Japan in July on the U.S.-Japan Creative Arts Fellowship, has spent the past few months learning about incense ceremonies, making homemade paper and going wherever her nose takes her.

Drogoul's attraction to smell is simple: you are what you smell, she says. ``They (smells) are part of your personality-you're a composite of everything you experience.''

The olfactory project was partially inspired by a nightmare Drogoul had several years ago, in which vivid smells played a central role. Drogoul awoke from the dream with a newfound fascination for smell, and the epiphany that she was going to ``map'' the smells of the world.

In Japan, Drogoul's research has consisted of canvassing the streets of Tokyo wearing an impressively long, oddly elegant snout and an efficient looking lab coat or white kimono. Another necessary prop is Drogoul's makeshift laboratory-or ``smell theater,'' as she calls it-a small wagon dressed up with a seat cushion and assorted canisters of smells.

The get-up makes the act of research a piece of performance art, as well. Both Drogoul and her smellcart are met with bemusement, curiosity and-of course-those eager to capture the spectacle on their cellphone cameras. On one rare occasion, a skeptical police officer in Ueno Park asked Drogoul to cease her smell research; while she wasn't forced to leave the premises, the smellcart was temporarily closed for business.

Drogoul's forays around the parks and streets of Tokyo have yielded interesting results, she says, and her interviews with people have affirmed what she suspected all along-that Tokyoites are in sync with their sniffers.

``There's a sense about personal space here that includes smell,'' she says. ``It's a quieter culture and more sensitive about space because it's so crowded.''

Additional feedback comes from postcard surveys with questions concerning the best, worst and most iconic smells of Tokyo. So far, people's responses have indicated that they consider Shibuya and Shinjuku the most putrid smelling parts of town, and the city's bakeries and gardens the most pleasing pockets of scent.

The fact that Tokyo is such a relatively clean city makes it an exciting place to hunt down smells, Drogoul says. ``Because it's a clean canvas ... you can really focus on a smell; you can kind of experience them as whiffs.''

One respondent said that Tokyo smells electric, and Drogoul tends to agree. ``There's a zingy feel to Tokyo as opposed to New York, which has a heavier, denser feeling.'' Drogoul, who has studied the smells of New York, Baltimore and St. Petersburg, plans to take on Washington, D.C. next.

How did Tokyo's ``industrial soy sauce smell'' figure into the mix? Drogoul picked Japan for many reasons, and not just those related to her nose. ``I chose Japan not necessarily for this (olfactory) project,'' she says. ``I chose Japan because I loved Japanese art-mostly contemporary, but I'm now into traditional, as well.''

During her sojourn in Japan, Drogoul has been experimenting with traditional methods of making paper and lanterns, and hopes to incorporate these art forms in both light-based and thermodynamic-based projects.

Drogoul's Dec. 22 show at the International House of Japan, ``An Olfactory Happening: An Evening Dedicated to Your Nose,'' was more of a ``coming out party'' for the project than an exhibition. In addition to dance and music-in the form of voice, cello, percussion and even dry ice-audience members were asked to participate in blindfolded smell inquisitions.

A masked Mami Takahashi, Drogoul's collaborator on the Tokyo smell project, wafted vials of various scents in front of participants while Drogoul asked for their instinctive reactions and associated memories.

Responses have provided insight into cultural and sociological aspects of Tokyo, Drogoul says. Even the fact that people associate Shibuya and Shinjuku with bad smells is indicative of a certain regard for those areas, she says.

``I think there have been a lot of good, thoughtful responses, which shows me that in Japan and in Tokyo people are really sensitive to smell.''

Drogoul, who makes her homebase in Maryland, first brought her hometown smells overseas when she went to Russia in the summer of 2003, laden with artemisia weed, globs of dough (donated by the local bakery), and her own pheromones.

To Drogoul, Baltimore is typified by the smell of spices, verdant marsh growth and the shellfish hauled in from the coast each day. ``It's a small city punctuated by really big smells,'' she says.

A spice factory on the outskirts of town and a large industrial bakery in the warehouse district kept Drogoul's studio in Baltimore filled with gastronomic scents. Drogoul describes becoming intimate with the quotidian smells from the bakery, so much so that she could detect days when someone left the loaves in the oven just a few minutes too long.

Another quintessential smell of Baltimore, ``Old Bay Seasoning,'' a popular spice blend used in crab boils, didn't garner such a favorable response when Drogoul took it to Russia. People thought the trademark concoction of celery salt and spices smelled terrible, and that was just the point.

Part of what makes smell so sexy is its complexity, Drogoul says; it is at once metaphoric and practical, personal and public, subjective and objective.

At Drogoul's gallery exhibit in St. Petersburg, the smell of baking bread wafted across one room from a small toaster oven; collected weeds, embedded in paper, lined the walls; and a stoic Drogoul offered herself as a smell object. She was surprised-and pleased-to find that people, although tentative at first, were eventually emboldened enough to take whiffs of her, and some even offered themselves in a smell exchange.

If this is sounding a bit like a wildlife documentary or a trip to the neighborhood zoo, you're not far off. Smell is a primordial need, Drogoul says, and a crucial-though often underestimated-element of human communication.

``I'm a strong believer in natural smell,'' Drogoul says, whose marm tendencies are evident not only in the joy she takes in collecting things-colors, textures, and smells-but also in her lamentations of what technology has done to snuff out smell.

Communication used to inevitably incorporate the olfactory nerve, but this changed with the advent of telephones and e-mail, Drogoul says. Nowadays people are more likely to smell plastic than a hint of rose cologne dabbed delicately behind the ears or the garlic and anchovies someone had for lunch.

``All these primal experiences of smelling a person and being smelled by a person are changing through technology,'' she says. ``You do lose things through devices, and language, too; you gain but you lose.''

While Drogoul isn't opposed to trying to produce good smells-she herself occasionally wears perfume and is a devotee of oils that work thermodynamically with one's skin-she does think that the homogenization, even obliteration, of scent can be alienating.

``It (smell) is so connected to memory, and memory can alter your mood. Smells are directly related to your sense of well-being, or your sense of not well-being,'' Drogoul says. ``Some smells will save your life, like the smell of gas.''

Whether it's the acrid smell of your own body odor on a first date or a whiff of the bouquet you brought along as an offering, scent does something to reconnect people with themselves and their surroundings, Drogoul says.

The Tokyo olfactory project won't end when Drogoul goes back to the United States at the end of this month. It is, after all, her crock-pot-a project that will continue to simmer for years to come. For starters, Drogoul plans on creating an installation of Tokyo smells. The installation will include a map of the city, which Drogoul will create based on people's postcard responses and the samples-everything from dried fish to litter-she collected during her time in Japan. Although the necessary technology for sharing smells via the internet has yet to be invented, Drogoul hopes to put what she can of her research and installation online sometime this spring.

Drogoul intends the ongoing project to be a corporeal reminder in an antibacterial age, she says, as it highlights the immense power of this elusive, invisible thing called smell.

``As a sculptor, this project is about space-how space is divided invisibly, or how it exists invisibly,'' she says.

``Imagine what it would be like if we saw smell,'' she says somewhat wistfully. ``What a fog.''(IHT/Asahi: January 22,2005)