She now decided that she needed to get away from her family. It was “like an establishment I had to argue with and I couldn’t cope with it,” she complained. She wasn’t relaxed, ever.”Īs non-prescriptive as it was, Sarah Lawrence triggered her allergy. A teacher remembered her as “tightly put together and intent on doing well. Ono took classes in music and the arts, but she seems not to have fitted in. Sarah Lawrence was an all-women’s college at that time and highly progressive, with no requirements and no grades. Ono soon joined them, and, in 1953, entered Sarah Lawrence, in Bronxville, less than half an hour away. Ono may also have dropped out because her parents had moved to Scarsdale when her father’s bank posted him to the New York City branch. When Tokyo was firebombed in 1945, he was in Hanoi. He was in San Francisco when Yoko was born she did not lay eyes on him until she was three. Ono’s father worked at the Yokohama Specie Bank, which became the Bank of Tokyo after the war, and was frequently posted to foreign branches. Her mother was a Yasuda, a member of the family that founded the Yasuda Bank, later Fuji Bank, and that owned one of the four largest financial conglomerates in Japan. Ono has talked about her parents as being emotionally distant. ![]() Still, he is an enthusiastic writer, sympathetic to his subject (not so much to Lennon), and alive to the attractions of an unusual person and an unusual life. He dates the great Tokyo air raid to 1944, for example, and he gives the impression that Ono spent the night in the bunker with her family. The result feels somewhat under-researched. He didn’t talk to Ono, and there’s not much in the way of new reporting in his book. The most recent Ono biography is “ Yoko Ono: An Artful Life,” by Donald Brackett, a Canadian art and music critic. No matter what you think of the strength of the art, you can admire the strength of the person who made it. Yet the much smaller group of people who know about her as an artist, a musician, and an activist appreciate her integrity. The public perception of her as a woman devoted to the memory of her dead husband has made her an icon among the kind of people who once regarded her as a Beatles-busting succubus. Ono may have leveraged her celebrity-but so what? She never compromised her art. None of the artists and composers Ono was associated with in the years before she married Lennon enjoys that kind of exposure today. On a weekday not long ago, I saw the Vancouver show, which occupied the whole ground floor of the museum, and there was a steady stream of visitors. ![]() There is no question that museums and galleries mount these shows and people go to see them because Ono was once married to a Beatle. She began managing the family finances after she and her husband John Lennon moved to New York, in 1971, and she is said to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars today. Her art is exhibited around the world: last year at the Serpentine, in London (“ Yoko Ono: I Love You Earth”) this year at the Vancouver Art Gallery (“ Growing Freedom”) and the Kunsthaus in Zurich (“ Yoko Ono: This Room Moves at the Same Speed as the Clouds”). Whether she sought them or not, though, she has both. Like any artist, Ono wanted recognition, but she was never driven by a desire for wealth and fame. She later called it “maybe my first piece of art.” She would ask him what kind of dinner he wanted, and then tell him to imagine it in his mind. Ono later said that she and Keisuke would lie on their backs looking at the sky through an opening in the roof of the house where they lived. The children traded their possessions to get something to eat, and sometimes they went hungry. ![]() In the countryside, the family found itself in a situation faced by many Japanese: they were desperate for food. ![]() But Ono’s mother, worried that there would be more attacks (there were), decided to evacuate to a farming village well outside the city. They had some thirty servants, and they lived in the Azabu district, near the Imperial Palace, away from the bombing. She had just turned twelve and had led a protected and privileged life. She could see the city burning from her window. While her mother and her little brother, Keisuke, spent the night in a bomb shelter under the garden of their house, she stayed in her room. That night, Yoko Ono was in bed with a fever.
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