On the eve of the Spring Summer 2012 mens shows in Paris, we present an interview with one of the greats on the calendar, the legendary Yohji Yamamoto. In discussion with A BLOG contributor Filep Motwary, Yohji muses on his new book ‘My Dear Bomb’, his exhibitions in London, and the qualities of a ‘Yohji’ man.
* * *
Filep Motwary: What made you decide to share the most intimate parts of your life and career with the world?
Yohji Yamamoto: It is not literally a biography. It is a mix of novel, documentary, essay, confession and lying. It’s more about direct emotion than historical information. A Belgian publisher, Ludion, contacted us to make a book. But it was also a coincidence. I was looking for something. After the terrible events last year, which also touched my company, I became stronger and I thought that I could do much more than fashion. To create clothes, I need emotion.
FM: You don’t see this book as an epilogue, I’m sure.
YY: It is the beginning of a new chapter. I hate the retrospective attitude. I am always standing here and now. It all came together very spontaneously. We had casual conversations, four or five times, sometimes a short one over a cup of coffee, sometime a long one for over eight hours. I spoke and she wrote.I decided to write with a co-author because I don’t have the time to write myself. Writing requires a great deal of time and concentration. Also, I cannot often find the words that express my true feelings;I only find it in someone else’s words that are inspiring or that share the same vocabulary. The Japanese writer Ango Sakaguchi, and his essays A Discourse on Decadence (Zoku darakuron) and A Personal View of Japanese Culture (Nihon bunka shikan), is one.
FM: You called your book ‘My Dear Bomb’. Why?
YY: My feelings are always ambivalent – towards life, time and women. Fundamentally, it is my way of being. I have had a constant magma inside me for a long time. I was the only son of a war widow. The fundamental inequality… the bomb can signify many things, depending on the moment. Sometimes anger, sometimes resignation, sometimes resentment… One day, I found an essay in a newspaper about the work of Sakaguchi. This inspired me and I started to read his complete works. The passage that struck me the most is in his essay A Discourse on Decadence, from 1946. I felt a huge resonance between Ango’s words and my own feelings.The anger, the resignation, the resentment… I had been keeping them deep in my heart since I was three or four. It tells the story of an encounter of two souls, a soul of solitude and a soul of decadence, who are always close to the fundamental sadness, the inequalities and the injustices of human existence, and to the doubt of existence itself, which accompanies one all one’s life.
I felt as if all of a sudden, Sakaguchi’s words pulled up a bomb from deep within my heart – My Dear Bomb – and put it right in front of my eyes. Here is the passage, from Part III, A Discourse on Decadence:
“Though I call for Japan’s fall into decadence, I mean precisely the opposite. Today Japan and its modes of thought have sunk deep into a great decadence, and we must twist free of the so-called “wholesome morals”, sharped as they are by the idiosyncratic cerebral machinations left over from the feudal era. We must then stand naked on the cast plains of truth. It is by falling away from the “wholesome morals” that we must recover our true humanity.
We must peel off the many kimonos that disguise our true nature – the emperor system, the bushido code of the samurai, the spirit of austerity, the naked, we must set off once again – this time as true human beings. Otherwise, will we not simply revert to a nation like that of old, a nation based on deceptions? Let us first strip ourselves naked, discard the taboos that bind us, and seek our true voice. May widows find love again – and plunge into hell because of it! May repatriated soldiers set up shop in the black market! Decadence itself is a bad thing, of course, but how are we to grasp the truth about ourselves if we do not put something on the line? To offer only superficial niceties and expect to be rewarded with truth is unreasonable. We must risk our very own flesh and blood; we must be willing to wail for truth. When a fall into decadence is called for, let us fall straight and let us fall hard. Let all morals dissipate, let confusion reign. Let the blood flow, let the poison course through our veins.
* * *
Filep Motwary: What made you decide to share the most intimate parts of your life and career with the world?
Yohji Yamamoto: It is not literally a biography. It is a mix of novel, documentary, essay, confession and lying. It’s more about direct emotion than historical information. A Belgian publisher, Ludion, contacted us to make a book. But it was also a coincidence. I was looking for something. After the terrible events last year, which also touched my company, I became stronger and I thought that I could do much more than fashion. To create clothes, I need emotion.
FM: You don’t see this book as an epilogue, I’m sure.
YY: It is the beginning of a new chapter. I hate the retrospective attitude. I am always standing here and now. It all came together very spontaneously. We had casual conversations, four or five times, sometimes a short one over a cup of coffee, sometime a long one for over eight hours. I spoke and she wrote.I decided to write with a co-author because I don’t have the time to write myself. Writing requires a great deal of time and concentration. Also, I cannot often find the words that express my true feelings;I only find it in someone else’s words that are inspiring or that share the same vocabulary. The Japanese writer Ango Sakaguchi, and his essays A Discourse on Decadence (Zoku darakuron) and A Personal View of Japanese Culture (Nihon bunka shikan), is one.
FM: You called your book ‘My Dear Bomb’. Why?
YY: My feelings are always ambivalent – towards life, time and women. Fundamentally, it is my way of being. I have had a constant magma inside me for a long time. I was the only son of a war widow. The fundamental inequality… the bomb can signify many things, depending on the moment. Sometimes anger, sometimes resignation, sometimes resentment… One day, I found an essay in a newspaper about the work of Sakaguchi. This inspired me and I started to read his complete works. The passage that struck me the most is in his essay A Discourse on Decadence, from 1946. I felt a huge resonance between Ango’s words and my own feelings.The anger, the resignation, the resentment… I had been keeping them deep in my heart since I was three or four. It tells the story of an encounter of two souls, a soul of solitude and a soul of decadence, who are always close to the fundamental sadness, the inequalities and the injustices of human existence, and to the doubt of existence itself, which accompanies one all one’s life.
I felt as if all of a sudden, Sakaguchi’s words pulled up a bomb from deep within my heart – My Dear Bomb – and put it right in front of my eyes. Here is the passage, from Part III, A Discourse on Decadence:
“Though I call for Japan’s fall into decadence, I mean precisely the opposite. Today Japan and its modes of thought have sunk deep into a great decadence, and we must twist free of the so-called “wholesome morals”, sharped as they are by the idiosyncratic cerebral machinations left over from the feudal era. We must then stand naked on the cast plains of truth. It is by falling away from the “wholesome morals” that we must recover our true humanity.
We must peel off the many kimonos that disguise our true nature – the emperor system, the bushido code of the samurai, the spirit of austerity, the naked, we must set off once again – this time as true human beings. Otherwise, will we not simply revert to a nation like that of old, a nation based on deceptions? Let us first strip ourselves naked, discard the taboos that bind us, and seek our true voice. May widows find love again – and plunge into hell because of it! May repatriated soldiers set up shop in the black market! Decadence itself is a bad thing, of course, but how are we to grasp the truth about ourselves if we do not put something on the line? To offer only superficial niceties and expect to be rewarded with truth is unreasonable. We must risk our very own flesh and blood; we must be willing to wail for truth. When a fall into decadence is called for, let us fall straight and let us fall hard. Let all morals dissipate, let confusion reign. Let the blood flow, let the poison course through our veins.
Comment