An archival interview with Yen Records’ engineer Yasuhiko Terada along with some words from Hosono himself on SFX. The following interviews were originally featured in the book Haruomi […]
Tadanori Yokoo: Mysticism, Psychedelia, and Post-Modern Visions of East Meets West

For our next Art & Design: In Focus feature, we look into the mystical pop art of Tadanori Yokoo.
A contemporary and close friend of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono, Tadanori Yokoo is one of Japan’s most recognized graphic artists. Like Hosono, Yokoo grew up in a post-war Japan where the newly demilitarized country was heavily occupied by US military and forced to rapidly Westernize. While Hosono would channel these influences into his pioneering work in Japanese folk rock, his own version of Western exotica, and later Yellow Magic Orchestra, Yokoo addressed these surrounding tensions with multi-layered, often chaotic posters and paintings that remixed the traditional and futuristic, Eastern with the Western, often incorporating iconic pre and post modern Japanese symbols like the rising sun, the peach, bullet train, kabuki, and yakuza.
From Letterform Archive: “A poster by Yokoo generates its own magnetic field that will either repel or attract depending on the viewer’s tastes. The feelings his posters elicit are seldom of pleasure or the sublime, but rather of shock or confusion leading to deeper contemplation.” He once said in a Friedman Benda exhibition, “What I love most is the absurd image which defies all explanations.” Below, one of his early works from 1965 titled Having Reached A Climax At 29, I Was Dead.

Yokoo has sometimes been referred to as the “Japanese Andy Warhol,” though the two pop artists don’t have all that much in common in their style and approach. One touchpoint they do share though is music. Yokoo has worked with musicians throughout his career starting from the ’60s during the Group Sounds era when the popularity of Western rock bands like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Ventures spread to Japan. Yokoo’s first music credit is with a popular Group Sounds band called The Happenings Four on a 7″ single for Capitol Records. While not as shocking as his posters, the artwork retains that colorful pop art aesthetic and use of Western typography alongside Japanese symbols.

While Warhol will forever be tied to The Velvet Underground & Nico, Yokoo’s most iconic and recognizable album artwork is without a doubt Haruomi Hosono’s 1978 electronic exotica album Cochin Moon. The album is actually credited as a collaboration between Yokoo and Hosono and it’s likely that Yokoo influenced the idea for the album to be conceived as the soundtrack to an imaginary Bollywood film. By that time, Yokoo had already been traveling to India and incorporating mysticism and psychedelia into his work, which can most directly be seen on his record sleeve for Lotus, a live album by Santana that was recorded in Japan.
Hosono and Yokoo would actually travel to India together for inspiration, but apparently both fell ill during the trip. Hosono had it the worst and faced a near-death experience feeling like a shadow of a person for nearly three weeks. The experience would influence the sound of the album and possibly even the track titles (see B1 “Hepatitis”). Yokoo’s iconic artwork is a gorgeous collage of Indian paintings, symbols and advertisements, including the lotus flower, which was a recurring image in his work during this period.

Below, we’ve included a selection of our favorite albums featuring Yokoo’s mystical artwork including albums by Kayōkyoku singer Ruriko Asaoka, Yukihiro Takahashi, Miles Davis, Pharoah Sanders, Tangerine Dream, and more! On a few of these albums, Yokoo actually worked on the limited posters that were included with the vinyl release. As usual, we’ve embedded the music directly in this post to listen while enjoying the designs.






