“Before I went out to videotape her live performance, I got the l.p. record Approximately Infinite Universe, and it's so powerful. She had been already married to John Lennon. Most of the songs were written and sung by Yoko, but some were written jointly. And what impressed me most is the handwritten text she wrote inside, her essay called The Feminization of Society. She was talking about the same things that Gloria Steinem and the rest of the activists in the second wave of the feminist movement had been saying all these years. Feminization is the opposite of patriarchy: feminized society would be more democratic. Patriarchy is the root of all the vices: domestic violence, or child abuse, or rape, and ultimately war.

“So that is that is the background for my great admiration for Yoko Ono, and in 1974, Yoko Ono is coming to Japan. She will have a traveling live concert, so I quickly purchased a ticket to go to her concert in Tokyo. I was overwhelmed, and I thought, ‘Oh, I have to videotape her at her next live concert in Japan. I checked who is responsible for her record company, and talked to the representative, explaining how much I want to record the concert. He said, ‘I will talk to Yoko, I will get back to you soon.’ He said, 'Yoko’s response is fine, with one condition, that is give me a copy of the tape you have made' – that was the only condition. And they even provided a space in a large theatre in Osaka for the next live concert. I had never met her in person, that was the only time we came very close.”

“But this tape had been lost for a long time because at that time the final copy was done in big open-reel, and from there we made a three-quarter-inch cassette, and and that's the format we used to participate in various festivals. And I was so stupid,when I got a call, you know, ‘send us a tape,’ I never made sure that they were returned safely. I was busy for the next project, because I had to get to American Center. I don't know how they could generously allow me to stay working there for twnety-seven-and-a-half years. I'm so grateful to my colleagues and to the U.S. government.

“So that's how the Yoko Ono tape happened.”

– Kyoko Michishita, edited from an interview by Lisa Steele and Jesse Cumming, March 31, 2022