Yoko’s father, Eisuke Ono, came from a family that had produced many notable painters, musicians, and academics—and also, in his mother, Tsuruko, one of Japan’s pioneering feminists. Tall, handsome Eisuko was himself a gifted classical pianist, but chose a career in banking rather than the one he might well have had on the international concert stage. After his marriage into the Yasudas, his social status demanded that he should be taken to work each morning in a chauffeur-driven limousine. Embarrassed by such ostentation, he would stop the car a couple of blocks from his office and walk the rest of the way.
Isoko, Yoko’s mother, was a stunning beauty, a much-praised painter, and a famous hostess whose photograph appeared constantly in Japanese society magazines. Both her family and Eisuke’s were widely traveled, multilingual, and highly westernized, the men playing golf in plus fours and Argyll socks, the women chic in the latest Parisian gowns, hats, and furs. It was an era of seemingly unstoppable amity between Japan and America, with emigrants by the hundred thousand crossing the Pacific from the former to the latter, and ever-strengthening business and financial links. Just before Yoko’s birth, Eisuke accepted a position in his bank’s San Francisco branch, leaving Isoko behind in Tokyo. Yoko did not meet him until she was two, and for many years afterward only at long intervals. The transpacific journey in that era was most commonly made by ship. On the first voyage to see her father, she took part in a fancy-dress parade costumed as the moppet film star Shirley Temple, and won first prize.
As part of the Yasuda clan, she enjoyed a life of extraordinary privilege and luxury. Voluminous home movies still in her possession show a cute little girl with bobbed hair, immaculately turned out in sailor suits or Scottish kilts with matching tam o’shanters beside her fashion-plate mother. Because of the Yasudas’ close relationships with successive emperors, she was allowed to attend the Gakashuin, or Peers’ School, an establishment normally reserved for children of the imperial family or senior members of the House of Peers. The family kept thirty servants, including a governess to instruct her in all the labyrinthine points of social and feminine etiquette. Servants had to come into her presence on their knees, and depart from it on their knees backward. On excursions into the outside world, she was not allowed to sit on any public seat until a servant had cleansed it with disinfectant-soaked cotton wool.
Despite this cossetting, her childhood was solitary and insecure. Thanks to her family’s wealth and eminence, few children her age were deemed suitable to play with her. Every summer, Isoko would pack her off to the family’s big country house in the charge of her governess while her brother Keisuke, three years her junior, stayed in Tokyo with their mother. Like some medieval infanta, Yoko would eat her meals alone, with her governess seated nearby murmuring precepts about manners or deportment. Desperate for company, she would sometimes creep to the servants’ quarters and eavesdrop on their conversations. Once she overheard a young housemaid describe the process of childbirth to workmates, complete with harrowing sound effects. The melodramatic shrieks and groans lodged in Yoko’s mind, to surface many years later as her own special brand of singing.
Imagination became her only refuge in the big, lonely house. To stave off her terror of the dark, she would stage a play with chess pieces for characters or arrange objects on her coverlet in the same meaningless but reassuring patterns. But whereas most solitary children keep their fantasies secret, Yoko always felt a powerful urge to communicate hers. “When I was in this summer place by myself, the only playmate I had was the caretaker’s daughter, who was about two years older than me,” she remembers. “We would go to the fruit orchard and I’d take an apple seed and a pear seed and plant them together, to see if the fruit that came up was half apple, half pear. Then I would tell the girl to write it down. I was always thinking ‘I have to tell the world of my discoveries.’”
The outbreak of war with America, and consequently Britain, in 1941 was a traumatic event for cultured, Western-leaning Japanese like the Onos. Although her father was still far from home, now working in French Indochina, Yoko’s life at first remained largely untouched by danger or hardship. She remembers parties given by her mother, where beautifully dressed men and women danced to gramophones with the same hectic, damn-tomorrow gaiety as others far across the seas in London, Berlin, and Liverpool.
By 1945, Japan had been defeated on every overseas front and the Americans were bombing Tokyo in preparation for their finale over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a single night, the waves of B-29 Super-fortresses set sixteen square miles ablaze, killing a hundred thousand people. Eisuke Ono was now in an internment camp in Hanoi. Reluctant to leave Tokyo herself, Isoko sent her children to safety in the countryside with a handicapped servant who had escaped call-up to essential war work. The country people exploited the city refugees without mercy, forcing them to trade their expensive clothes and possessions for meager portions of rice or vegetables, often taking the possessions, then refusing to hand over the food. The servant, as a fellow peasant, received kindlier treatment, the more so if she distanced herself from her charges. Twelve-year-old Yoko thus found herself effectively the guardian of her brother and her toddler sister, Setsuko. Their mother tried to keep them supplied with basics, like miso paste to make soup, but they often went hungry. To distract her two siblings, Yoko would conjure sumptuous feasts from her imagination.
Despite having been hit with two atomic bombs, postwar Japan under American occupation recovered with a speed that made Europe—especially threadbare, food-rationed Britain—gape in resentful disbelief. And despite losing overall grip on industry and finance, the zaibatsu still retained much of their old power. When Yoko entered Gakashuin University, the combined prestige of the Yasudas and intellectualism of the Onos seemed to guarantee her choice of brilliant careers. She was the university’s first-ever philosophy student, was gifted in languages and literature as well as the visual arts, and, like her father, was an accomplished pianist. With a view to the performing career Eisuke had been denied, she also studied music, specializing in German lieder and Italian opera.
Unfortunately, this talented student also possessed a rebellious spirit still extremely uncommon among young Japanese women of her class. Although hugely self-confident on the surface, she remained haunted by childhood insecurities, in particular the guilt she had always felt about her privileged station in life. “My father wanted me to be a concert pianist, but I wasn’t good enough. As a painter in the conventional style, I used to feel overshadowed by my mother. I knew I couldn’t be a linguist like my uncles; I didn’t like the way they put foreign phrases into everything they said. So all the doors were closed on me. I had to find my own way.”
When she was eighteen, the family moved to America to join Eisuke, who had been appointed president of the Bank of Tokyo in New York. They settled in Scarsdale, and Yoko entered Sarah Lawrence College, near Bronxville, to continue her studies in philosophy, music composition, and literature. Sarah Lawrence, in those days an all-female college, had a reputation for fostering individualism and radicalism, positively relishing the idea that its alumnae might go out into the world as “troublemakers.” But Yoko’s developing theories about music, writing, and the visual arts soon had even this most liberal of young ladies’ seminaries scratching its collective head. She dropped out after three years, having been advised by a friendly professor that she might find more sympathetic eyes and ears in the art world of downtown New York.
Her parents had hoped that art and music would be no more than graceful pastimes, and that in due course she would make a suitable marriage and turn into a conventional, dutiful Japanese American wife. One of Japan’s wealthiest men wrote formally to her father, in the traditional manner, proposing his son as a husband for her. But Yoko would have none of it and, aged twenty-three, eloped with a Japanese-born composer-pianist named Toshi Ichiyanagi, who had been studying at the Juilliard School of Music. Without a backward glance, she exchanged her family’s palatial homes for a cold-w
ater artist’s loft in Greenwich Village, and her extensive childhood wardrobe for allover bohemian black.
Here, as her college teacher had prophesied, she quickly found empathetic spirits. By the early Sixties, she had become associated with the Fluxus group, a multiethnic circle of artists unusual for that time in not confining themselves to a single medium but amalgamating the disciplines of painting, sculpture, photography, music, poetry, film, and theatre. Taking Marcel Duchamp as their god, Fluxus members abhorred so-called high art, choosing as their subject matter the most familiar, even banal, components of everyday life. Their moving spirit, Lithuanian-born George Maciunas, proclaimed their mission to “purge the world of bourgeois sickness, intellectual, professional, and commercialized culture…Purge the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, mathematical art…Promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art. Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY.”
Under this doctrine, the personality and political agenda of the artist became as important as the work, or more so, and the audience response a crucial part of its realization. Fluxus events combined shock with deadpan humor: spectators would find they had bought tickets simply to sit and watch an alarm clock tick on an empty stage or a group of artists make a salad together. The emblematic event was John Cage’s 4',33", in which a pianist sat at a keyboard without touching it for exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The “music” was the puzzled fidgeting and whispering of the customers as they waited in vain for something to happen.
Yoko became the epitome of Fluxus multimedia antiart. Her works tended to be sculpture, or rather three-dimensional collage, assembled from quotidian objects and usually inviting physical contact with the observer. Sometimes the creation would be a piece of theatre, with the role of the artwork played by the artist and the audience’s reactions serving to illuminate some truth about the nature of art or the human condition in general. George Maciunas called her technique “neo Haiku theatre”; the art historian Ken Friedman defined it as “Zen vaudeville.”
She began to acquire a reputation for audacity rivaling Cage’s, and additionally spiced with a certain sexual frisson. In her Cut Piece event—first staged in Japan in 1964, and later at other important venues, including New York’s Carnegie Hall—she sat alone onstage, motionless and silent, with a large pair of scissors in front of her. Audience members were invited to come up and each cut off a piece of her clothing until she was down to her underwear. The way in which each individual approached this mute sacrificial victim spoke volumes about human aggression and respect, crudity and delicacy, voyeurism and embarrassment. Also in 1964, she published Grapefruit, a book of haiku-length “instructional poems,” which aimed to make words like the commands of musical notation: “Steal a moon on the water with a bucket. Keep stealing until no moon is seen on the water.” “Draw a map to get lost.” “Make all the clocks in the world fast by two seconds without letting anyone know about it.”
Her marriage to Toshi Ichiyanagi did not last, although the two remained mutually admiring and supportive. Ichiyanagi returned to Japan, where he ultimately became one of the country’s best-known composers. With his encouragement, Yoko, too, returned to her homeland to stage a series of shows and exhibitions. Her American press coverage had been generally friendly, but Japanese critics proved harder to impress, one in particular writing a review of devastating personal viciousness. Not accustomed in those days, as she puts it, to “being slashed,” she suffered a breakdown and checked into a clinic for a complete rest. Instead, she was subjected to ceaseless harassment by journalists and commentators intrigued to see someone of her exalted connections in distress. The time was still far off when she would not mind the whole world peering at her in bed.
Among her visitors was a young American filmmaker named Tony Cox, a devotee of her work who had come from New York on the off chance of meeting her. Yoko refused to see him at first, but relented after he left a little pot of flowers every day with her nurse. Cox was extremely handsome, somewhat like the film star Anthony Perkins, and endowed with great charm and persuasiveness. He quickly convinced Yoko that life was worth living, encouraging her to cut down the heavy doses of Valium the clinic was administering and, eventually, to discharge herself. In 1962, she divorced Ichiyanagi and, later that same year, married Cox. Because of a legal technicality, the marriage was annulled in March 1963; they remarried the following June, and two months later Yoko gave birth to a daughter, Kyoko.
Cox put his own artistic ambitions largely on hold and became a tireless proponent of Yoko’s work, seeking out sponsors to finance her, negotiating with galleries, and also looking after Kyoko, while she gave her whole attention to creating. But he was a volatile character, she was obsessed with her work above all else, and within three years this marriage, too, was breaking down. In September 1966, Yoko’s friend Mario Amaya, editor of Art and Artists magazine, invited her to come to London to attend a symposium on “The Destruction of Art.” Mainly to escape the growing pressures of her marriage, she accepted. “I thought, ‘This [New York] is the Mecca of art,’” she remembers. “‘Now I’m going to be going to nowhere.’” She meant it to be a clean break from Cox, but he insisted on accompanying her, so Kyoko had to be brought along, too.
The symposium over, Yoko decided to stay in London and persevere with marriage and motherhood. She and Cox took a flat in Hanover Gate Mansions, an Edwardian block just down the road from Lord’s Cricket Ground (and not far from Abbey Road Studios), where their neighbors included the art critic Robert Hughes and the widow of the conductor Sir Henry Wood. Though impressively spacious, the flats rented for as little as £14 per week and backed on to a railway switchyard.
For the majority of Londoners in 1966, encountering a Japanese person was exceedingly rare. With the war only twenty-one years distant, attitudes remained colored by the ill-treatment that the “Japs” had inflicted on their British and Commonwealth prisoners in southeast Asia. However, the diminutive figure to be seen around Hanover Gate Mansions did not at first arouse hostility so much as bafflement. Her long, unstyled hair crowded in on her face so closely that her eyes and mouth seemed to merge seamlessly with it. In contrast with the vivid, skimpy female fashions of the hour, her clothes were always concealingly shapeless and funereal black. Two teenage sisters from the same block who occasionally babysat three-year-old Kyoko told their parents incredulously of a flat painted blinding white throughout, without carpets or furniture beyond a few brocaded cushions on the floor.
Her name might still be unknown to most of Britain, but in her own recondite world she was a star. Certainly, when John Dunbar heard she was in London he lost no time in offering her an exhibition at the Indica Gallery, which duly took shape as Unfinished Paintings and Objects, aka Yoko at Indica. There, just two months after she had arrived in London, and three after he stopped touring with the Beatles, John Lennon walked into her life.
At the time, she was still putting the last touches to her show before its opening the next day, so was not best pleased to see Dunbar bring in an early visitor. “I thought, ‘What’s he doing? Didn’t I tell him I didn’t want anyone to come until the opening?’ I felt a bit angry about it, but I was too busy to complain or make a fuss. And, no matter what anyone said later, I didn’t realise then who John was. He was an attractive guy…that’s all that passed through my mind. Up to then, English men had all looked kind of weedy to me. This was the first sexy one I met.”
She has no recollection whatsoever of the unshaven, bleary-eyed, half-stoned scruff that John himself always claimed to have been that evening. “He was shaved—and he was wearing a suit. He just came back from Spain, so he had a tan. I thought he was rather a dandy kind of person. I called it clean-cut; that’s what we used to say at Sarah Lawrence. John hated that expression when I told him later how he looked to me that evening. ‘Clean-cut!’ he said. ‘I was never clean-cut!’ But he was going to a gallery in London, and he’d taken trouble to look good. He could d
o that dandy thing very well when he wanted to.”
The exhibition combined works that Yoko had already shown in New York and Japan with others created specially for the occasion. Here was her Eternal Time Clock, showing only seconds and sealed inside a Plexiglas bubble attached to a stethoscope. Here was her Ladder Piece, a white stepladder up to a card on the ceiling, with the single word Yes written in script so tiny, it had to be read through a magnifying glass. Here was a large, empty black bag labeled WITH A MEMBER OF THE PUBLIC INSIDE, and a plain green apple bearing a price tag of £200. It was John’s first serious exposure to antiart, and at first—without Dunbar at his elbow to prompt him—he assumed he was merely being had. “There’s a couple of nails on a plastic box. Then I look over and see an apple on a stand with a note saying ‘apple’…I was beginning to see the humour of it. I said ‘How much is the apple?’ ‘£200.’ ‘Really? Oh, I see. So how much are the bent nails?’
“Then Dunbar brings [Yoko] over, because The Millionaire is here, right? And I’m waiting for the bag. Where’s the people in the bag? So he introduced me, and of course there was supposed to be this event happening, so I asked, ‘Well, what’s the event?’ She gives me a little card. It just says ‘Breathe’ on it. And I said, ‘You mean [exhaling]?’ She says, ‘That’s it. You’ve got it.’…I got the humour—maybe I didn’t get the depth of it but I got a warm feeling from it. I thought, ‘Fuck, I can make that. I can put an apple on a stand. I want more.’”