Ginza is a fascinating town, frequently linked with special moments and fond memories. Visits to department stores while holding tightly to a parent’s hand, afternoons in old-fashioned cafés run by one-of-a-kind characters, first dates in special restaurants . . . Ginza is a place like no other.

Hanatsubaki’s “Ginza Memoir” series, hosted by Yoshiyuki Morioka of the iconic Morioka Shoten bookstore, explores the multifaceted nature and universal appeal of Ginza through interviews with guests from a wide variety of fields. With Morioka as guide to Ginza’s hidden charms and diverse narratives, new discoveries await around every corner.

Our guest for the fifth instalment of “Ginza Memoir” is contemporary poet Gozo Yoshimasu. For more than seventy years, Yoshimasu has pushed creative boundaries not just in poetry but also in fields such as photography, video art, and recital performance, but his career began with an editorial position at arts publisher Sansaisha. Half a century has passed since Yoshimasu commuted daily to Sansaisha’s offices in the Ginza Daiei Kaikan building, and he still visits Ginza almost daily to write in his favourite cafes. In this interview, he discusses the alley-like characteristics of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture, unexpected encounters at the ceremony where he received the Hanatsubaki Contemporary Poetry Award, and professional and private associations with photographers. Yoshimasu writes his poetry with his whole body, and his memories of Ginza, too, reflect the corporeal experience of a true artist-about-town.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel and Antonin Raymond’s Kyobunkwan Building

Morioka: Were you a frequent visitor to Ginza in your student days?

Yoshimasu: First-year students at Keio’s Faculty of Letters had classes on the Hiyoshi campus. I failed German, so I was at Hiyoshi for two years, and Shibuya remained my stomping ground throughout the latter half of my teens. That said, when Keio beat Waseda at baseball, we were swept out to Ginza too.

Morioka: I’ve heard stories about Keio students drinking in the Kojunsha Club’s beer hall after a Keio–Waseda game. Did you go as a college student, too?

Yoshimasu: Students weren’t allowed inside, but I was in the general area. I started visiting the Kojunsha properly when I was chair of [literary magazine] Mita Bungaku. You need two sponsoring members to get in. The club has changed a great deal since then, though. It’s the omphalos of Ginza. That said, I visited the Daiei Kaikan earlier, and the Ginza streets around it are completely unchanged. The buildings, too. The Kyobunkwan building is by Antonin Raymond, I believe—I knew him back when I was a devoted fan of his teacher Frank Lloyd Wright.

Morioka: You were a devoted fan of Frank Lloyd Wright?!

Yoshimasu: Yes. A friend of mine held their wedding ceremony at the Imperial Hotel, you see. I felt as if I were in direct contact with the architecture, which was a startling experience—as if we were all gathered together in a cave. The sensation of entering a Frank Lloyd Wright building was astonishing.
Later, when, I held a recitation at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, I noticed how incredibly close the people listening felt. This is Wright’s genius, I thought. The Guggenheim has these little restrooms that are at the end of a sort of path through the fields—a narrow path like one a mouse or rabbit might take. The sensibility is just wonderful. Raymond’s approach to restrooms was similar, and the restrooms at the Kyobunkwan building are superbly located as well—quietly hidden at the end of a sort of alley. I think the core of the affection we feel for Ginza has to do with the “alley-ness” of the place—very different from the “alleyways” that Kenji Nakagami¹ wrote about, of course.

Morioka: Shiseido’s former honorary chairman Yoshiharu Fukuhara also went to Keio. Did you know him at all?

Yoshimasu: When I received the second Hanatsubaki Contemporary Poetry Award, Fukuhara greeted me at the ceremony. He was still Executive Director then. I remember there was some great wine served, and the prize money was a million yen.

Morioka: You won that award for Osiris, the God of Stone, I believe. One million yen was a lot of money at the time. How did you spend it?

Yoshimasu: I bought a Honda Civic for [my wife] Marilia in Los Angeles. It cost exactly a million yen. People made fun of me when I mentioned that in my acceptance speech!

Editing in the Daiei Kaikan Building

Morioka: You worked for the publisher Sansaisha in the Daiei Kaikan building. What did that position involve?

Yoshimasu: Well, I was an editor for the art magazine Sansai. After I graduated from Keio University, I was hired as an editor for The International Graphic, which was published by Kokusai Johosha in Shibuya, but I got into a fight there and quit almost immediately, then answered a “Help wanted” ad from Sansaisha that I found in the newspaper. That was 1963 or 1964, I think. I spent the next six years working on the fifth floor of the Daiei Kaikan. When we went there earlier for the photography shoot, the empty room was just as I left it. Even the Iwate Nippo was still there as a tenant. A lot of newspapers originally had branches in that area—maybe there’s still something of that in the air?

Morioka: 1963 or 1964 would have been the lead-up to the Tokyo Olympic Games. I imagine designers and creators were gathering in Ginza at the Nippon Design Center, Light Publicity, and so on. Did you meet any people like that?

Yoshimasu: Now that you mention it, I do remember visiting Noriaki Yokosuka² at the Shiseido editorial office. I suppose he was in charge of photography for Hanatsubaki. Naoki Yanagimoto, who was chief editor of Foto Critica, the photography criticism magazine that preceded Provoke, told me to write about him.

Morioka: I’d like to read that.

Yoshimasu: When I went to interview Yokosuka, he started walking around me in circles. That was a surprise. I wondered if it was because he was a photographer. Being circled was a rare kind of shock to experience when meeting someone!

Morioka: It does sound like an unusual first encounter.

Yoshimasu: I gave out all kinds of assignments myself when I was at Sansaisha. I assigned work to Kiyoteru Hanada,³ Atsushi Miyakawa,⁴ Makoto Ooka⁵ . . . As I recall, I had Kiyoteru Hanada write an important essay for a special on the Mainichi Contemporary Art Exhibition or something like that. Shomei Tomatsu⁶ was another contributor. He was a great guy—by which I mean, visiting him was a lot of fun! Why are photographers so much fun to be around? I didn’t start hanging around with Yutaka Takanashi⁷ or Nobuyoshi Araki⁸ until later. I’ve always spent a lot of time with photographers. I like photography, and I wanted to be a photographer myself.

Morioka: That would have been about the time of Takanashi’s collections Towards the City (1975, Izara Shobo) and Town (1977, Asahi Shinbunsha). Was Araki still working at Dentsu then?

Yoshimasu: Right, he was still at Dentsu. There was a diner called Kitchen Ramen where he often held exhibitions.

Morioka: And you assigned Shomei Tomatsu as a writer rather than a photographer?

Yoshimasu: That’s right. I think it was for the Tinguely exhibition at the Minami Gallery. He turned in an amazing piece. Ginza was full of galleries, and there were exhibitions practically every day.

Morioka: Was Tomatsu already shooting Okinawa then?

Yoshimasu: He was working on The Pencil of the Sun (1975, Mainichi Shinbunsha). Before that he published Salaam Alaikum (1968, Shaken), a collection of photographs of Afghanistan. That was fine work. There was also “Asphalt,” one of his earlier photographs, showing old nails and things stuck in the ground. It looked like a nebula. According to Tomatsu, he said that when he was starving and at the end of his rope, he was walking in Shinagawa or somewhere when he saw the asphalt and nails in a tunnel under a train station. I really liked Tomatsu’s metaphysical approach to capturing the hidden wounds of the city like that. My memories of Tomatsu seem to jostle against my own Ginza experiences, in a way. I was fond of him—before he died, I even went to visit him in Okinawa. I had a lot of contacts like that. That’s another major memory from my time at Sansaisha.

Gozo Yoshimasu
Born 1939, Tokyo. Graduate of Keio University’s Faculty of Literature. Began writing poetry while still in school, publishing his first collection Departure in 1964. His other collections include Anthology of Golden Age Poetry (Jun Takami Prize), Osiris, the God of Stone (Second Hanatsubaki Contemporary Poetry Award), and “The Island of Snow,” or “The Ghost of Emily.” In 2024, he published Domus X (Kotonisha). He has been the subject of exhibitions like the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo’s The Voice Between: The Art and Poetry of Yoshimasu Gozo and the Shoto Museum of Art’s The Echoes from the Abyss: The Poems of Gozo Yoshimasu, as well as director Kei Shichiri’s film ‘Se’-Back.

Yoshiyuki Morioka
Born 1974 in Yamagata. Head of the Morioka Shoten bookstore. Writer. Published books include Around Ginza in 800 Days (Bunshun Bunko) and Forgiving the Shortcake (Raichosha). Also active as an art curator, with recent shows including Children and Radiation, the second stage of an exhibition held jointly with the University of the Sacred Heart (October 30, 2003–April 22, 2024).
https://www.instagram.com/moriokashoten/?hl=ja

Sogo Hiraiwa
Editor/writer
Born 1990 in Takayama, Gifu. Freelance editor and writer contributing regularly to literary, cultural, and fashion magazines. Also involved in planning and editing books, including the Japanese edition of Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild and Other Stories (trans. Hikaru Fujii). Translator of Virgil Abloh’s Dialogues (Adachi Press).
https://www.instagram.com/sogohiraiwa/

Nathalie Cantacuzino
Photographer
Born in Stockholm, Sweden. Studied Japanese culture and photographic technique in Tokyo. Shoots in genres ranging from fashion to documentary and lifestyle.
https://www.instagram.com/nanorie/