Since the 1995's discovery of a planet orbiting around a Sun-like star

outside of our solar system, nearly 2000 planets have already been

discovered. These are called "exoplanets or extrasolar planets" and

their research is one of the hottest topics in the modern astronomy and

planetary science or even in astrobiology. With the increasing number of

the discovered exoplanets, more and more diverse "new worlds" are emerging.

  However, the direct detection of exoplanets is not easy; we need high

sensitivity, high resolution, and high-contrast at the same time.

Therefore, so far the planet hunting has been led by indirect method

such as radial-velocity and transit methods till recently. The former

detects small periodic velocity shifts of the central star due to planet

orbital motion, while the latter detects small brightness changes when

planets revolve around the central star in the nearly line-of-sight

orbital plane. However, these methods are not directly detecting photons

from the planets (i.e., indirect methods) and biased to the planets

close to the star or the short-period planets.

  Recent advances of high contrast imaging techniques such as 8-m class

telescopes, adaptive optics, coronagraphs, and various imaging

techniques have finally enabled direct detection of exoplanets with the

solar system scale orbit. These techniques eventually enable not only

detection but also characterization of planets including the planet

temperatures and atmospheres. Recently our team has successfully imaged

a "second Jupiter" around a nearby Sun-like star on the Subaru

Telescope. Together with a handful detection of similar planets around

more massive stars, this is the real start of the direct imaging and

characterization of exoplanets. Furthermore, the planet formation sites

or circumstellar disks are also revealed with a very high resolution for

the first time, and gaps and rings in the disks are discovered to be

common even before the ALMA data. Future space-based coronagraphs will

greatly advance these fields.

  Another milestone in exoplanet studies is toward the detection of "

second Earths". NASA's Kepler mission has detected thousands of small

planets including Earth-sized planets and super-Earth at relatively

close to the central star. Some of them are believed within the

habitable zone, where liquid water could exist on the planet surface. If

we can characterize the atmosphere of such planets, we can discuss life

on the habitable planets. However, most of them are too far to be

followed-up; therefore various searches for nearby small planets are

ongoing. The current effort on these searches and future steps toward

the direct imaging and characterization of earth-like planets both from

space and ground are also summarized.