YOKO ONO: HER LIFE, ART AND MUSIC, THE BEATLES' BREAK UP AND JOHN LENNON'S DEATH

YOKO ONO

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Yoko Ono with the Japanese
group Love Psychedelico
Yoko Ono is arguably the most famous Japanese person in the world, past or present, and has been so for a long time. Certainly more people outside Japan know her than the current leader of Japan. Her closest rivals for fame, in the United States anyway, the Japanese baseball players Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui.

Ono also has always regarded herself an artist and certainly sees herself as more than the widow of John Lennon although she has taken it upon herself met to maintain his legacy and image. Lennon met Ono at a London exhibition of her art and later called her "the world's most famous unknown artist. Everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does."

To many Ono is a villain. Summing up the way she is perceived the feminist writer Germaine Greer said in the mid 2000s that Ono “is still hated and reviled....Her enormous wealth can be no consolation for the knee jerk assumption she encounters a hundred times a day that she destroyed Lennon’s gift and broke up the best band there ever was.”

Ono turned 87 in 2020. For a long time she returned to Japan at least once a year. Many years she did charity shows with Japanese artists.

Good Websites and Sources: Official website imaginepeace.com ; 100 Acorns, Yoko One’s Blog 100acorns.blogspot.com ; Lengthy Wikipedia article on Yoko Ono Wikipedia ; Yes and Other Yoko Ono art pieces arttowermito.or.jp ; Yoko Ono’s Art on Artnet.com artnet.com/ ; yoko-ono.com ; Yoko Ono Discography rollingstone.com ; Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band yopob.com ; John Lennon Museum near Tokyo taisei.co.jp

Links in this Website: J-POP AND POP MUSIC IN JAPAN Factsanddetails.com/Japan ; J-POP AND POP ARTISTS IN JAPAN Factsanddetails.com/Japan ; ROCK IN JAPAN Factsanddetails.com/Japan ; PUNK, FOREIGN MUSIC, HIP-HOP IN JAPAN Factsanddetails.com/Japan ; YOKO ONO Factsanddetails.com/Japan ; MODERN JAPANESE ART Factsanddetails.com/Japan ;

Good Websites and Sources on Japanese Music: “The Rough Guide to the Music of Japan” is a CD assembled by Paul Fisher, Short Introduction to Japanese Music asnic.utexas.edu ; Bibliography on Music in Japan aboutjapan.japansociety.org ;Traditional Japanese Music and Dance sfusd.k12.ca.us/schwww ; Wikipedia article on Music of Japan Wikipedia ; Performing Arts Network of Japan performingarts.jp ; Traditional Performing Arts in Japan kanzaki.com ; Hear Music, a World Music Store with a hearjapan.com ; Japanese, Chinese and Korean CDs and DVDs at Yes Asia yesasia.com ; Japanese, Chinese and Korean CDs and DVDs at Zoom Movie zoommovie.com

Yoko Ono’s Life

Ono was born in 1933 into a wealthy, prominent, aristocratic Japanese family. Her father was a Christian who ran the Bank of Tokyo in New York. Her mother was a Buddhist. Her maternal grandfather was the founder of Yasuda Bank. Ono’s father was usually away on business and she didn’t even see him until she was 2½.

As a child, Ono lived in the United States long enough to make her feel like an outsider in Japan. She spent World War II in the countryside Japan while her father was in French Indochina in a concentration camp. Ono’s experience with World War II deeply traumatized her. She suffered from depressions that caused such severe earaches she lay awake for hours in a dark room with sanitary napkins over her ears.

Ono wen t the Peer school Tokyo with the Japanese Emperor Akihito and was trained in classical piano and voice. In the 1950s she was living full time with her family in Scaresdale, New York

Ono went to Sarah Lawrence University in New York. After she enrolled she met and married Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi (now one of Japan's leading electronic composers) and began hanging out in New York. She later went to a sanitarium, got divorced, married again, this time to film director Tony Cox, and had a daughter, Kyoko.

Yoko Ono's Early Art Career

Ono became serious about art in the 1950s after she moved into a $50-a -month loft in New York and furnished it with orange crates. She was involved in the Fluxus, a conceptual art movement organized around chance that was known for its short, prankish performance art pieces and artists such as John Cage, Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys and Japanese artists such as Ay-O, Mieko Shiomi. Takako Saito and Kuniharu Akiyama.

Ono was active in art at a time when the Beat scene was happening. She was among to the first to do performance art and stage concerts in lofts. In one of her first pieces she burned her art. Later she had herself wheeled around in a baby carriage to the accompaniment of sounds of a flushing toilet. Among the people who showed to see here work were Marcel Duchamp, Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst.

In one of Ono’s more memorable pieces, “Cut Piece”, people in the audience were instructed to come up to a stage and cut off pieces of her clothes. Ono also wrote poetry. A verse from one went "BLOOD PIECE/ Use you blood to paint./ Keep painting until you faint. (a)/ Keep painting until you die." Another went: "PAINTING FOR THE WIND/ Make a hole,/ Leave it in the wind."

Ono also hosted “bag events” in which participants covered themselves from head to toe in order make themselves blind to visual perceptions of one another. Ono’s experiments with “musique concrete” were featured at Carnegie Hall’s recital space five years before she met Lennon.

Yoko Ono and the Beatles

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Ono and Lennon
during their Bed In
Lennon met Ono in 1966 at a London art gallery, where she had a one woman show. One of Ono's most famous work, “Ceiling Painting”, caught Lennon's attention. It consists of a white ladder beneath a metal-framed piece of opaque glass, from which a magnifying glass hangs. Lennon climbed the ladder and peered through the magnifying glass at the word "Yes" in the framed glass. Later he told Rolling Stone, "it's a great relief when...it doesn't say, 'No.'"

Ono was seven years older than John. After the two met they were virtually inseparable. John and Yoko were married in 1969. To protest the Vietnam war, they held a "bed in" during their honeymoon in which they stayed in bed for seven days at the Hilton hotel in Amsterdam. Press conferences were held that featured the couple making speeches about peace while they sat propped up on their pillows. The whole episode was glorified song “ Ballad of John and Yoko” .

The couple appeared nude together on an called album "Two Virgins," which came out around the same time as the White Album. The front cover of the album had a frontal shot of the couple. The back cover was a rear shot. A few record stores carried the album and those that did concealed the nude photo behind a brown paper bag. Most of the material on the album was inaccessible Yoko shriek music. On her scream, Ono told Newsweek, “It is a scream of the human race, in a way.” “Unfinished Music No. 2" is another record she made with Lennon.

While Beatles were still together John and Ono formed the Plastic Ono Band that initially produced protest songs like Give Peace a Chance, Cold Turkey, and Instant Karma." In 1969, John and Ono paid for a billboard to be hung at Time Square that read: "WAR IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT. Happy Christmas from John & Yoko. In November 2009, Ono announced money made from the single “Give Peace a Chance” would be donated to the United Nations Peacekeeping Fund, and iTunes announced a special reissue of the song on its 40th anniversary.

In 1998, Ono said that Lennon "was in the level of a spiritual leader" and McCartney was a jealous rival whose main duty was to see that the other Beatles arrived at the studio in time.

Breaking Up of the Beatles

As The Beatles were moving towards breaking up, . McCartney said he tried to convince them to go on the road one more time. In January 1969, George told John that he was thinking of doing a solo album, John supported the idea and said it was possible for all the Beatles to work on solo projects and as George put it "preserve this, the Beatles bit."

Tapes of the Get Back recording sessions in January 1969 offers insight into depth of the problems between the members of the Beatles. By then Lennon was more interested in Ono than the Beatles and Harrison was upset over his second class status and McCartney’s bossiness and McCartney was upset by the lack of enthusiasm and cooperation by the other members.

At one point Harrison walked out and the remaining members recorded with Ono doing vocals. On Harrison, Lennon said, “If he’s not back by Tuesday we’ll call Eric Clapton.” Lennon was also largely absent from the sessions. His greatest contribution were his amusing monologues. Among them was one on how masturbation “doesn’t cause you go blind, only shortsighted.”

Break-Up of the Beatles

In September 1969, Lennon played in Toronto with the Plastic Ono Band. Afterwards, the Beatles had a meeting at Saville Road. Ringo said in the Beatles Anthology, “John finally brought it to its head. he said, “Well, that’s it, lads. Let’s end it. And we all said “yes.”...It wasn’t sulky and we weren’t really fighting. It was like a thought came into the room and everyone said what they said...It was not “I’m leaving, you’re leaving.” It was “Well, that’s it! I’ve had enough. I want to do this”...It was just “Let’s get the divorce over with.” really. And John was always the most forward when it came to nailing anything.”

Paul said he said, “I think we should back to little gigs.” He said “John looked at me in the eye and said, “Well, I think you’re daft...I’m leaving the group. We paled visibly and our jaws slackened a bit...I must admit I had known it was coming at some point because of his intense involvement with Yoko...Good old John — he had to blurt it out. And that was it. There not a lot you can say to, “I’m leaving the group,” from a key member.”

George said, “I don’t remember about John saying he wanted to break up the Beatles. I don’t remember where I heard it. Everybody has tried to leave, so it was nothing new...There was too much restriction. It had to self-destruct and I wasn’t feeling bad about anybody wanted to leave because I wanted out myself. I could see a much better time ahead being by myself.”

The Abbey Road sessions were held after the Saville Road meeting. The public became aware that it was the end when McCartney released his first solo album and announced that he had left the band in April 1970.

Why Did The Beatles Break Up?

The break up of the Beatles is often portrayed as acrimonious and full spite. But it appears now that most of serious falling out between the members of the Beatles took place after they had decided to go their separate ways.

A more accurate assessment of why the Beatles broke up is that they expended a lot of creative energy in a very short period of time and they could no longer maintain the pace which the public had grown accustomed. They were all drifting apart musically and personally (as friends often do). This was made clear by the different directions the Beatles went with their solo careers. It was not a matter of the Beatles hating each other or hating Yoko because she and John were inseparable.

Yoko Ono and the Break-Up of the Beatles

Ono is often blamed for the break-up of the Beatles. She and John were inseparable from the time they met, which coincided with the last couple of years of the Beatles were together. It is widely believed her constant presence made the other Beatles a little edgy.

McCartney said that Lennon became gravely addicted to heroin after meeting Ono, partly as an effort to escape from his pain-filled existence. On Ono, McCartney, said her behavior was strange and interfering and, Harrison and Ringo all resented it.

When asked if her presence in the studio had anything to thing the Beatles demise she told Newsweek, "I was just trying to sit there very quietly without disturbing them. You know, John always wanted me there and if I was not there, John might not have gone to those sessions, maybe “ Abbey Road” and the “ White Album” “maybe all those albums wouldn't have been made...I did not break up the Beatles."

John and Yoko After the Beatles Break-up

After the Beatles broke John and Ono settled in New York. They partied occasionally with people like Phil Spector, Jack Nicholson, Andy Warhol and Miles Davis. But mostly they stayed to themselves. John did a rare interview with Howard Cossell of all people in 1974. He wrote the disco song "Fame" with David Bowie. Among the people who claimed to be his close friend was Uri Keller, the spoon bending psychic who said Lennon gave him a stone that the former Beatle said was from an alien.

In 1971, John released two albums: “ John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band” and “ Imagine” . Both albums contained some well written songs, some weird heavy political ones and songs that bitterly attacked God and Paul McCartney (with “ How Do You Sleep” with the lyric "A pretty face last a year or two/But pretty soon they'll see what you can do”). He used the word "f*ck" in several songs including “ Working Class Hero” .

Ono later said Imagine was "a summation of what we believed." In 1999, it was voted as the best song for the new millennium in a BBC poll. The albums that followed were weird and more political. They included “ Mind Games” (1973), “ Shaved Fish” and (picturing Nixon dancing naked with Mao on the cover). Rock n' Roll (a collection of rock classic produced by Phil Spector) was fun. When John took up music again after a stint as a house husband his music was trite and sentimental. The result was “ Double Fantasy” (1980)

Lennon and Ono spent several summers at the Mampei Hotel in Karuizawamachi, Nagano Prefecture. Lennon's last concert appearance was with Elton John at Madison Square Gardens on November 28, 1974.

The British press called Ono the Dragon Lady. After Lennon and Ono were married, a bigoted article in Esquire called her "John Lennon's Excrusise Gloupie" A book described her as an adulterous heroin addict.

John and Yoko's Life After the Beatles

After Lennon and Ono were married, Ono and Cox were given joint custody of Kyoko. Cox later kidnaped her and the newspaper publicized Ono's search for her. She didn’t find her for quite some time. John and Ono were separated for about two year after he had a brief fling with his secretary.

While Ono managed John’s money, John becomes a house husband, devoting his time to baking bread and raising his son Sean. John and Ono became worth hundreds of million of dollars, partly because of shrewd investments made Ono, who made a fortune in New York real estate and with dairy cows.

Through most of the late 1970s, Lennon played little or no music even though he had a piano in every room so he could jumps and play it if he felt inspired, He recorded Double Fantasy after a seven year hiatus from the studio. At the time of his death he was reportedly working a musical based on “ The Ballad of John and Yoko” . The song “ Starting Over” was recorded two months before Lennon's death.

Paul Helps Yoko Ono and John Lennon Get Back Together

In an episode that became known as “the Lost Weekend,” John and Yoko had separated in the summer of 1973 after a period of marital strife, and subsequently Lennon began a relationship with his personal assistant May Pang — a collusion Pang says was entirely orchestrated by Yoko — with the couple running off together to California, where John was relatively busy musically and socially, often partying away the night with buddies like Harry Niilson, Ringo and Keth Moon, drink of Brandy Alexanders. Yoko continued to stay in touch with John until they met backstage at an Elton John concert in November1974 that they became reconciled. [Source: Daily Mail, Catherine Eade, October 10, 2010]

According to the Daily Mail and the the Times of London “The surprise element of the story, Yoko said, was that Paul McCartney stepped in and brought the couple back together. That Paul and John were not on good terms and a feud developed after Lennon left the Beatles is well known. Yoko told The Times: “I want the world to know that it was a very touching thing that he did for John. 'He was genuinely concerned about his old partner. Even though John was not even asking for help — John, Paul, all of them were too proud to ask anything — he helped. John often said he didn't understand why Paul did this for us, but he did.”

As Yoko recounts, Paul and Linda McCartney visited her in New York early in 1974, and they talked long into the night. Paul asked Yoko what would make her take John back and she told him that if John courted her she would perhaps consider it. Paul then visited John in Los Angeles where he was living with May Pang, and according to Yoko advised him on how to get Yoko back.

The fact that John immediately tried to court Yoko, and came back to New York, was hugely important she says. He made several attempts to woo her, including taking her to a Man Ray exhibition and to see a film, after she watched him perform at the Elton John concert and realized it could all begin again. Less than a year after they were reunited their son Sean was born, on John’s birthday.

Murder of John Lennon

John was murdered outside the Dakota apartment building where he lived in New York City on December 8, 1980 by a fan who one friend of John called The Man Whose Name We Must Never Mention. This man — 25-year-old Mark David Chapman — was mentally-deranged and obsessed with Lennon to a point that he believed he was Lennon and thus felt obligated to kill the "imposter." Chapman stalked Lennon and waited outside Lennon apartment and shot him at point blank range when he returned home.

In a 2007 BBC interview Ono said that on the night Lennon was shot they were headed to dinner after a recording session but decided to return home. Ono said Lennon didn’t say anything after he was shot. His last words were, “Let’s go home, because I want to see Sean before he goes to sleep.”

In 1999, Ono wrote in Newsweek, "The day John died, we were in the studio working on Walking on Thin Ice. We were waiting for the engineers to change the tape or whatever they do, and John said something very nice me that I've always remembered...I was touched. Here I am over 40 and my husband is still saying nice things. Later, when we were getting into the car, I said, “Shall we got a restaurant or something” Shall we get a bite to eat before we go home?" John said, “No, I want to see Sean before he goes to sleep.” And he never saw Sean."

Ono said, "The first thing I did when I got back from the hospital was ask my assistant to call Paul and Julian and John's Aunt Mimi. I thought they should know. I'm sure that remark is not going to make George and Ringo happy." The copy of Double Fantasy that Lennon autographed for Mark David Chapman days before his murder was put up for auction in 1998 for $2 million. To mark what would have been John's 70th birthday Yoko went to Iceland to light the Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavik Bay’s Videy Island. She lights the Tower every year on the same day, sending a vast beam of light shooting upwards into space, and it remains lit until December 8, the day he was murdered by Mark Chapman outside the Dakota building in New York where they lived.

In 2010 a concert was held in Japan on December 8, the day of Lennon’s death. The Dream Power Concert featured Japanese artists singing Lennon songs with all the money going towards schools in Africa, Asia and South America.

Yoko, John and Sean Lennon

John and Ono had difficulty conceiving a child. Sean, their only child, was born in 1976. Ono once said, the only reason she had Sean was because "I had been such a bitch to John." Ono said that she got pregnant with Sean shortly after she and Lennon got back together in 1975 after a two-year separation and she let Lennon decide whether to have the baby or not. “We’d just got back together,” she told the BBC, “and I became pregnant very soon, and I didn’t know if it was the right moment to have a child. I just didn’t want to burden him with something he didn’t want.”

On his father Sean said later, "We used to watch The Muppet Show together, and he rode me to school on his bike. Right before he died he arranged to give me a dog." The dog arrived the Christmas after Lennon's death and Sean named her "Merry Christmas."

Ono told Newsweek in 1995, "John and I had such a hard life. We wished, at least for our son, a very happy life. But because Sean has our genes, I don't think he's going to be happy with just being happy."

Sean studied anthropology for a year at Columbia and then left to devote his life to music. He and Ono worked together on an album called "Rising" with a band they put together in New York. His own album “ Into the Sun” got good receives. He also plays bass in the his Cibo Matto, the band of his girlfriend Yuka Honda (who is 16 years older than him). In the late 2000s he showed up in Japan doing Honda car commercials.

Yoko told Times of London that John preferred to celebrate her and their son’s birthdays rather than his own, explaining that they would usually have a quiet, private party. He was not happy about reaching 40, she added, but believed had he reached 70 he would have been “energetic and very wise and enjoying life”.

Yoko insists that Sean Lennon and Julian Lennon have good relations and the brothers received the same amount from John's estate. Yoko and Sean were photographed with Lennon’s first wife, Cynthia and their son Julian in 2010 at the premiere of “ Nowhere Boy “, the film about John’s early days. Today, May Pang lives just outside New York City, and has two children.

Yoko Ono After John’s Death

Ono continued to live in New York in the same Dakota apartment she moved to with Lenon in 1973. After Lennon’s death she hung out with a local group of artists and spent much of her time with her companion antiques dealer Sam Havadtoy, who acted as Sean's stepfather, until they broke up in 2001. She was worth $775 million in 2006.

Ono’s apartment contains Lennon's portrait, “Mona Yoko”, over a fireplace and Andy Warhol's portrait of Lennon in the dinning room. She also displays a painting by Magritte and 3,000-year-old Egyptian sculpture of the god Sekhmet. The room she receives guests in is painted and decorated entirely in pale cream. Shoes are removed before entering the house. Her wardrobe fills a room a the size an apartment She is driven around in Jaguar.

Ono was reportedly paid £350,000 for allowing Absolute Vodka to use the naked image of her and John Lennon from the “Two Virgins” album cover. She also pocketed the money at auction where Lennon's birth certificate was auction for £1,500 pounds and an erotic drawings Lennon gave Ono for a wedding present was sold for £3,500 each. Ono is always on the lookout for copyright infringements. She sued a Tokyo subway operator for putting a likeness of Lennon on it tickets.

In December 2006, Ono’s driver, Turkish citizen Koral Karsan, was arrested on grand larceny charges for trying to blackmail Ono for $2 million with threats of releasing embarassing recordings and photographs that he secretly took from her and was said by prosecutors to have has placed “people on stand by waiting to kill” her. Karsan was deported to Turkey after pleading guilty to trying extort $2 million.

Ono and members The Beatles sued Capital records for “knowingly under reporting royalties” from Beatles and Lennon albums She was seeking $10 million in damages from the Lennon albums.

In November 2011, USA Today reported, Queen Elizabeth II met with Yoko Ono, who curtsied nicely. The meeting took place in Liverpool, when the queen, dressed in a rich cranberry-colored coat, dress and hat, paid a visit to the Museum of Liverpool, the city in northwest England where The Beatles formed. Ono wore black glasses, white gloves, a black jacket and scarf, and a black straw hat with black-and-white feathery fascinators attached. She clasped the queen's black-gloved hand and bent a knee, then chatted briefly with the smiling monarch. Ono said later she was impressed by the queen's outfit and hat, saying it "made her look so young, so elegant. She is always elegant. It's always nice to meet her," the Associated Press reported. [Source: Maria Puente, USA TODAY, December 1, 2011]

Yoko Ono's Art

Ono has been described as a avant-guard Dadaesque performance artist. Her artworks include: “Bottoms” (a film of people's backsides), “Ex-it “(88 small coffins with tiny trees growing from the lids), “Painting to Hammer a Nail” (a board with a bunch of nails in it and hammer), “Odyssey of a Cockroach” (photographs of Ono standing next to oversized objects such as a giant chair turned on its side).

Collaborations with John Lennon include the “War is Over!” series which including by space on billboards in New York City and other places and displaying the statement: “WAR IS OVER ! IF YOU WANT IT.”

In 2004, for the Liverpool’s Biennial, Ono filled the city with images of a woman’s breast and her own vagina. The work was dedicated to Lennon’s mother Julia. In 2006, she displayed a piece called “Morning Beams” in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. It used ropes to create an illusion of beams of light, which she told the Times of London was “a game with words. Just like a “beam” can be a wooden beam, the stuff in our lives we’re illuminated by, so it’s also light, a morning beam.”

In October 2007, Ono unveiled the Imagine Peace Tower, composed of skyward-shooting beams of lights, on Vidlet island in Iceland to honor Lennon on his 67the birthday. Among those on hand for event were Sean Lennon, Ringo Star and George Harrison’s widow Olivia. In 2010, Yoko Ono was given the eighth Hiroshima Art Prize for her contribution to world peace, through her art.

Yoko Ono's Music

As musical artist Ono known for her screaming vocals, growls and heavy breathing and shouting things like "Listen to your heartbeat". Ono wrote her first screaming piece in 1961. It was called “Voice Piece for Soprano” and presented during an avant garde event at her New York City loft.

In 1996, at the age of 62, Ono performed some dates with her son Sean and a band called IMA. Asked about her reaction to the positive press she received, she told Reuter, "There are not many negative things they haven't already said about me so maybe they had enough of that. But I really don't know. I didn't know why they attacked me when they were doing that. I'm always surprised. Only this times it's nice surprise.”

In 2001, Ono made her first album in six years. Entitled “Blueprint for a Sunrise”, it contained the usual assemblage of unlistenable songs. On the cover her image is superimposed on a portrait of China's Dowager Empress Tz'u-his, who was known as the "Dragon Lady." This a reference to allegations that the Ono was the "Dragon Lady" who broke up The Beatles.

Twenty-two years after it was released theOno song “Walking on Thin Ice” was remixed by a series of New York Djs and the Pet Shop Boys, and became a dance club hit. It was recorded shortly before Lennon was shot and remixed over the years by a variety of Djs. An album with 10 versions of the song become No. 1 on the Billboard dance club chart in 2003 when Ono was 70.

Some now see Ono as a leader of the art rock and techno scene. Among this who have sing Ono’s praises are Sonic Youth and Spiritualized. “Yes I’m a Witch” is a collection of Ono songs done by alternative rock artists, including The Flaming Lips covering “Cambridge 1969" from “Unfinished Music No.2". “Open Your Box” is a dance-oriented release by Ono.

In 2009, at the age 76 Ono released a remix album called “I’m Not Getting Enough” that made it the top 20 on Billboard’s Dance/Club Play chart, and an album called “Between My Head and the Sky” credited to the Plastic Ono Band, a name last used in 1973, with her son Sean and a group of musicians from the United States and Japan, including Japan’s Cornelius and Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda.

Yoko Ono in Hot Pants at 79

Lesley Thomas wrote in The Times: “How many people over the age of 30 look good in hotpants? What about 40? 60? How about nearly 80? Yoko Ono, the artist and widow of John Lennon, appears in the forthcoming issue of Vogue in tiny shorts, breaking all kinds of style rules (chiefly, never show legs and cleavage simultaneously) and looking quite fabulous — and not just for a 79-year-old. With her pixie haircut and sunshades perched on the end of her nose, Yoko shows taut thighs and a high bosom that couldn’t possibly be the work of digital retouching. “Style is by no means all about clothes,” says Alexandra Shulman, the Editor of Vogue. “Nobody demonstrates more clearly independence and exuberance than Yoko Ono.” [Source: Lesley Thomas, The Times, June 4, 2012]

Interviewed in the magazine, Yoko, a grandmother of two, is asked how she has maintained such a physique. Her explanation is: “Because I’m a performer. I do the performance.” Though Ono’s performance is, in this instance, for Nick Knight, the fashion photographer, she is not the first woman of pensionable age to put on such an impressive display.

Image Sources: Japan Zone, Lennon Museum

Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Daily Yomiuri, Times of London, Japan National Tourist Organization (JNTO), National Geographic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated August 2020


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