Yoko Miyoshi holds a photobook of “Yohko (Yoko)” in front of Masahisa Fukase’s photographs at Akio Nagasawa gallery in Ginza, 2023.
Yoko Miyoshi met a Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase in 1963 and got married to him in 1964. She became a model for his photography book “Yoko,” which was published in 1978.
They divorced in 1976, but Yoko and Fukase stayed in an intimate relationship afterward. She was devoted to looking after him as he became ill in 1992, and remained close to him until his death in 2012.
60 mouths talking
But making no sense
Of life and of liberty
And the pursuit of happiness
Waiting for something
To smash a few holes
In the wall of good fortune
And the windows to a outer world
The weird 1980s phenomenon of Nameneko/Namennayo: real unhappy-looking kittens dressed up as juvenile delinquents. These were so huge in Japan, they even made a stab at the US market under the bizarre name “(Don’t) Perlorian.” There were postcards, trading cards and some storybooks but mostly it fizzled stateside.
For the 25th anniversary some slightly less-tortured looking Nameneko (I’m guessing puppet bodies with digitally added heads) appeared in mobile phone ads in Japan.