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1. I want to capture the mood I have now, post-cancer, in my music.
2. I had never really liked the music by Gabriel Faure, but just by chance, listening to some pieces by him, I got very interested. So I listened to almost everything. All the pieces written by him. I was digging deeper and deeper. I’m not sure I still like his music or not, but it’s interesting.
3. Asian music influenced Debussy, who influenced me — it’s all a huge circle.
4. My interests are moving toward both ‘sound and music,’ not just ‘music.’ I have been doing lots of field recordings and also collecting lots of strange sounds.
5. In the 1980s, Josef Beuys planted the seed that activism could be considered as art. I am influenced by the idea of his idea of social sculpture.
6. To show my everyday life to the world was not my intention.
7. Hopefully, we will become a stronger democratic society and avoid falling into xenophobia. Hopefully, we build good relationships with our neighboring countries and, rather than acting for profit for the current generation, acting in a way that will ensure we leave natural resources for future generations.
8. I used to know things intellectually, but now I feel them. Now I feel that my body is part of nature, so being sick is just a process of nature, and death is a process of nature, and being reborn through the soil is a process of nature.
9. I’m concerned by a deficient technology. In other words, errors or noises. It absorbs me, and I wonder if new cultural currents could emerge from this deficiency.
10. I’m really bad writing the chase scenes or fighting scenes. I’m much better for writing, like, a more melancholic or tragic music.
11. Somehow, I see music as a garden which has a lot of different styles: contemporary, classic, ethnic, Japanese, rock & roll, and so on. I can enjoy them all, and there is space for them all.
12. In the old days, people shared music; they didn’t care who made it. A song would be owned by a village, and anyone could sing it, change the words, whatever. That is how humans treated music until the late 19th century. Now, with the Internet, we are going back to having tribal attitudes towards music.
13. My main interest in synthesizers when I was an older teenager was to escape from the spell of the 12-tone system or, in a more broad sense, the spell of the European modern-music system. That led me to explore towards electronic music and ethnic music.
14. I loved the freedom of improvised music.
15. I have a cultural map in my head, where I find similarities between different cultures. For example, domestic Japanese pop music sounds like Arabic music to me — the vocal intonations and vibrato — and, in my mind, Bali is next to New York. Maybe everyone has these geographies in their head. This is the way I’ve been working.
16. As soon as I choose the timbre of an instrument, that dominates how I compose.
17. When I imagine some music in my mind, almost automatically, I imagine the piano keys.
18. For making music for myself, I just need to be happy. I’m the producer, the director, and the listener.
19. I’m trying to relax, but it’s hard.
20. Japan used to be an animistic society before Shinto imperialism was established. But most of us still have an animistic sense.