Q-1. Your childhood was, as I understand, quite isolated and music was a big release for you. Now your work reaches a huge audience. Is connecting with other people something th at drives you as an artist?
A. When I was a child, all I could see from the window was apple orchards on the hills. Although my hometown was in the countryside, I was able to tune in to the radio broadcasting service, FEN (the Far East Network), thanks to the existence of the Misawa US military base. And I used to listen to music programmes on it. This was in the 1960s. I liked to listen to music in a foreign language coming from a faraway country. While listening to music, I would be tapping away the rhythms and gazing at clouds passing outside of my window and daydream about all sorts of things. I am more of a "receiver" and not exactly a "transmitter". I'm a lot more interested in sharing rather than delivering to people.
Q-2. Even though the motifs you use are constant, you’ve said that the starting point is always different, a feeling generated by a movie or a song, etc. Could you tell me about the starting points for some of the works in the show? I was interested in ‘Or Glory’, the painting with a figure in orange against blue and pink, and ‘stop the bombs’.
A.
「On the Pink Cloud」
I tried to depict a consciousness like an angel on the clouds. I thought about making the figure’s hand hold a pair of seed leaves as an accent colour, but I decided against it because the meaning would be too obvious. I wanted the painting to be rather mellow and non-realistic.
「Or Glory」
I had The Clash’s “Death or Glory” in mind. A strong statement of anti-establishment is expressed by using the motto of brave warriors who are not afraid of death.
「STOP THE BOMBS」
The inspiration did not come from the film, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb（1964）”. Rather, it came from the performance by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in which they planted two acorns in the east and west gardens of the Coventry Cathedral. It was in 1968, the same year as the adoption of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. It is based on the 2016 drawing, “STOP THE BOMBS !! PEACE IN '68” and painted on a wooden panel.
Q-3. What feelings do you want to create for your audience with the structure some of the work is shown within? Or is it about creating a habitat for the works? What is the resonance of the space for you, its mood, DIY style of building, like a treehouse, or other hang-out or retreat, or a stage?
A. I've always felt quite uncomfortable with architecturally solid spaces such as museums. To me, places that have a temporary feel such as huts feel more familiar. I feel the same towards circus marquees that travel from town to town. That said, the architectural space of the hut in this exhibition features many windows and the different floor levels to walk on. So, the viewers with a playful mind should be able to find the space itself interesting to some extent even without the "works of art".
Q-4. What are the challenges of working with the same motifs over many years? How do you maintain creative evolution?
A. I haven't given much thought to it, but I can say that the older I get the more often I find it difficult although not strongly. That said, I think it is this "difficulty" that connects my works to "art" with a sliver of skin. Recently, I was told that a number of young artists whose works resemble my own have been emerging. When I look at their works, however, the resemblances are only skin deep. Those young artists grew up in different places to me, have different views of history and life. When I probe into my own works, I can trace the roots back to my childhood. I don’t mean pop culture. They are more personal and the things that happened within a few hundred metres around me. Apple orchards, sheep, horses, the books I read in my room, foreign music on the radio. (I didn't watch much TV. I read mostly picture books and fairy tales rather than comic books.)
Q-5. Your work manages to be both intimate and personal and universal, speaking to timeless human concerns. Have the seismic events of the past couple of years and their anxieties, the pandemic, the climate crisis and so on, impacted your work and if so how? A number of the new works feature peace signs and protestors, for instance…
A. My older brothers belong to the student movement generation, so I was interested in and alert to the peace movement and environmental issues. Also, the Vietnam War didn’t feel like something that happened in a faraway land, as American troops were dispatched from the military bases in Japan. I believe that I was nurtured by the protest songs of the civil rights movement and the rock music of the anti-war movement. I was influenced a lot more by the hippie culture than by punk rock. Punk rock is about destroying everything, but hippy culture puts emphasis on community and nature as in, “Back to nature” and “Living is not breathing but doing” (both are words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau). But I can also say that punk rock taught the 17-year-old me not to think with my top-heavy head, but to feel with my body! What really changed the way I work was the tsunami disaster that hit the north-eastern part of Japan in 2011 rather than the environmental issues of the last few years, such as climate change. It was a coastal disaster that killed 15,000 people within the stretch of 650 km from where I live now (200 km north of Tokyo) to my hometown. It also led me to understand more deeply about the historical, as well as geographical, position of the place where I grew up, the Tohoku region of Japan. In a way, what Tohoku region is to Japan is a little like what Scotland is to the UK. That aside, I think I was able to cope with the pandemic in a mentally very calm manner because I had already felt an enormous sense of loss before the pandemic.
Q-6. Finally, what music is inspiring you right now?
A. I don’t know if it's inspiring me but I've been listening to a lot of music from the 60s since the earthquake in 2011. Right now, my speakers are playing These Days by NICO, a song written by Jackson Browne on her 1967 album Chelsea Girl. As for newer musicians, I also like their songs if they are influenced by the music their parents used to listen to in the 60s and 70s.