WEEKENDER VOICE｜25.07.06

“The room where America lived.”

If someone asks, “What first sparked your fascination with America?”

I always have to think about it for a moment.

Not in movies, music, or magazines.

It was right there, in a “room” much closer to home.

Itabashi, Tokyo.

I’d sneak into a room in my grandparents’ house, specifically, my uncle’s room, where he was a college student.

I’d just started elementary school, and whenever my uncle was out,

I used to spend all my time in that room.

A PLAYBOY pin-up girl on the ceiling.

A Led Zeppelin poster on the wall.

next to them was Pink Lady.

As your gaze moved further,

blonde women with curly hair covering every inch of the walls.

High-cut, or almost completely nude,

all sorts of posters that lifted your spirits.

In the corner of the room,

Jimmy Page’s Gibson, a Z-FLEX skateboard.

And the sweet, tropical

Surfboards coated with fragrant wax.

Knowing nothing yet, I learned about “America” in that room.

magazines, records, movies.

In every clipping scrapbook, there was a woman in a swimsuit or underwear

sitting in the passenger seat of an American car.

The scenes I’d seen in movies and the pictures in the room

connected to something somewhere.

I didn’t understand English, but I could feel the texture of the atmosphere there,

I could definitely sense it.

Smells, light, colors, arrangements, music.

As a “feeling” where everything blended together, inside me

seeped into me.

the ’70s, which I hadn’t experienced in real time.

But everything in that room,

still vividly playing back in my memory.

the way posters were put up and colors overlapped,

The feel of records, skateboards, and guitars,

A dusty scent mixed with a sweet, almost melting aroma.

I didn’t realize it then, but now I understand.

That was culture.

Culture is never about “meaning,”

seeping into me as a “feeling.”

What I want to create is connected to the things that were in that room,

They’re definitely connected.

“What was it I admired?”

It’s something you realize later.

What filled that room wasn’t magazines or guitars.

 Maybe it was “freedom.”

Several decades have passed since then.

That atmosphere is still very much alive in the clothes I create.

 “An impulse where the pure and impure in the American landscape became one”

It still flows within me, unchanged.