JFK ON THE GINZA

"JOHN F. KENNEDY" 

ON THE GINZA  

AN AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ICON ... IN JAPAN 

IN HONOR OF JFK, BORN ON THIS DATE 

IN 1917, IN BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS

PRESIDENT, JANUARY 20, 1961-NOVEMBER 22, 1963

In 1981, en route to China for my first visit, I had a chance to dash downtown to Tokyo for an hour-and-a-half, and grabbed it. 

I was back in the country where I lived for a year as a child, in the town of Sasebo, and where, at age eight, I had taken my first photographs.

And what did I see but an image of our slain president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in a store front window on the Ginza – being used to sell glasses.

Such is the power of icons and the mystery of iconography, and of cross-cultural exchanges.