In January of 1964, Tadanori Yokoo was invited to the Shelter Plan Conference, organized by the conceptual art group High Red Center. The invitation was personalized and formal, stating that Yokoo had been chosen specially, and that he was to wear gloves and a necktie, and enter through the main doors of the Old Imperial Hotel. He was allowed to bring a guest. Yokoo was intrigued, and apprehensive. He took a designer friend, Akira Uno, who had no compunctions about underground art. After loitering about the lobby, they were met by a nervous-looking man in a dark suit and sunglasses, and ushered discreetly to a room that had been occupied, it seemed, without the management's permission. At their knock, the door was opened a crack. They were assessed and received quickly.

Upon entering the room, Yokoo found himself face to buttocks with three rear-shot nude photos of the High Red Center members, Jiro Takamatsu, Gempei Akasegawa, and Natsuyuki Nakanishi. This view was new to Yokoo, and he felt a little sick. He was motioned to observe a rule of silence. He was measured; then he was photographed, fully clothed, from six angles; his mouth was filled with water to the bursting point, and the dispelled water measured; he was disrobed and put in a bath. The volume of displaced water was measured. For the construction of his own personal "shelter", or coffin, he was unburdened of what amounts today to about $300.00, in thousand yen notes. As he signed the guest list, he noticed some familiar names: Ushio Shinohara, Nam Jun Paik, Taro Okamoto, and Yoko Ono. The following morning, Gempei Akasegawa made the top story on the national news page; he was being charged with counterfeiting thousand yen notes. In his autobiography, Yokoo makes a commental theater group, Tenjo Sajiki.

Yokoo went on to work with these greats regularly, and through his collaborations with them, to begin considering the unification of life and art, and on the other hand, a separation between design and art. He reveled in his culture shock.

By giving in, Tadanori Yokoo finds the inspiration to give out. His gifts are visual representations of his voyage to an inner world, a successive crumbling of his own set ideas. Eventually, he says, through this inner trip, he hopes to gain an understanding of the cosmos. "I feel best when abandoning the things I was most particular about. In the process, I gain freedom."

In 1965, Yokoo became obsessed with death. "To confront the fear, I realized I had to become the fear itself," he writes in his autobiography. And so he designed a poster that shocked his friends, and brought him face to face with the terror. It reads, "Having reached a climax at the age of 29, I was dead." A young man in Western clothes, clutching a rose, hangs by a noose against the background of the rising sun's rays. An erupting Mount Fuji and a bullet train decorate the top corners.

Tadanori Yokoo grew up surrounded by pre-war design: labels on boldly colored matchboxes and other daily articles. Because his home town was in a major textile region, he was also surrounded by Western-lettered textile labels that at first glance were exotic and lovely, but in the end, made him feel queasy. As a young man, he fled the countryside and sought whatever urban thrills Tokyo could give him. Later, in the U.S. and Europe, movements like dada and social trends like psychadelic American hippie culture. Yet he couldn't seem to rid himself of the Japanese-ness he associated with that cloying pre-war image.

In a 1966 critique, Yokoo was accused of dragging down modern design to the level of the masses. Far from being affronted, Yokoo thus found his goal: to express, rather than try to escape, the passion, and the earthy and animistic culture, of his native Japan.

From that point on, Yokoo's work began to take on its distinctive tone and voice of friendly irony.