If I had moved to Tokyo, I might even have become a completely different person... although, ever since the start, I've never wanted to move to Tokyo. I just can't handle there being so many people.
I grew up in the countryside and wanted to go to Tokyo. I had Tokyo complex.
I think that one of the visions that is closest to reality is the cardboard city in the subway station in Tokyo, which is based very closely on a series of documentary photographs of people living like that and of the contents of the boxes. Those are quite haunting because Tokyo homeless people reiterate the whole nature of living in Tokyo in these cardboard boxes, they're only slightly smaller than Tokyo apartments, and they have almost as many consumer goods. It's a nightmare of boxes within boxes.
I grew up in Paris and in Japan. My parents didn't have any kind of glamorous jobs or anything - it just happened. We moved a lot and wanted to go to Tokyo, so we did it. They were never afraid to give up on the present and move on.
All the participating countires in Tokyo 2020 were good, but this time we worked really hard and had the confidence that we can achieve it in Tokyo.
"Naming Tokyo" kicked off at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in June, and it's going to travel to various art institutions for years to come. Every time it is shown, I'm developing the research and involving more and more people in it. The final conclusion of the work would eventually be to put up street signs in Tokyo with my names on them.
I've always known that Rio and Tokyo are my two Olympics. Now that Rio hasn't gone to plan, Tokyo has to work, and I'm more motivated than ever.
I didn't realize how much the paint was going to affect how I moved and how I walked. And it wasn't something that consciously happened. It was because the first time I'd done it was a Tokyo Dome show, I want to say in 2013-14, and I walked out there, and I was a completely different person.
He wanted head and hands and arms on a pillow - in many different positions. I was asked to move my hands in many different ways - also my head - and I had to turn this way and that. There were nudes that might have been of several different people - sitting - standing - even standing upon the radiator against the window - that was difficult - radiators don't intend you to stand on top of them. (On being photographed by Alfred Stieglitz)
Maybe vagueness has been good for me. The word means two different things in Tokyo and Osaka, you know. In Tokyo it means stupidity, but in Osaka they talk about vagueness in a painting and in a game of Go.
I always used to reach for the cigarette when the phone rang, and I figured nobody would ever call me in Tokyo. The time difference is so profound it's, like, already September in Tokyo, and I figured nobody would be able to work it out.
Tokyo would probably be the foreign city if I had to eat one city's food for the rest of my life, every day. It would have to be Tokyo, and I think the majority of chefs you ask that question would answer the same way.
I've never seen America as being one place, but I think the record industry people I've spoken to - although they will acknowledge that the cities are completely different from each other - I think they still handle it as being one territory.
I had thought that Tokyo would be like New York City, but it wasn't. I'd imagined that they'd be similar in their bustle and noise level, but, in fact, Tokyo is a very calm metropolis. The bright lights and hectic night-life images so often found in advertisements and Western media do not reflect every day Japan.
I am from the countryside, very rural countryside, and I moved to Tokyo when I was 18 and have been living first-ever since. So yes, I am a city guy, but sometimes I sort of feel there's another me in a parallel world, still in the countryside.
I grew up in a low-income area of Tokyo. Like most homes in Tokyo, ours was small. It was a free-standing, two-family rental duplex built 30 years earlier.
One of my favorite cities is Tokyo because of sushi, and Asian food in general, but then also the way Tokyo operates, because it's so clean, and there's space for a lot of variety of stores.