Yokoo's parents were merchants, and did not study beyond elementary school. Their daily activities educated the young Tadanori in what he now knows is called animism, but at the time, was just the way it is. "My parents prayed every day, and they had a certain respect for objects. If a newspaper was laying on the floor, for instance, you weren't to step over it. My parents taught me very early on that I wasn't going to accomplish much through egoism alone. They borrowed strength from the gods they sensed around them, and taught me to, too."

This animistic approach to life is based in the beliefs of Japan's only native religion, Shintoism, in which there is no single god, but a sense of the greatness of the natural universe and man's small but essential place in it. Yokoo was introduced to western rationality as a schoolboy, and became much more familiar with it as he experienced the western nations.

In a memorable competition for a MOMA poster, he beat out three of his role models, Peter Max , Tommy Angula, and Milton Glaser, by forcing himself to make a rational explanation, in English, of a design for a poster for an exhibition entitled, "Word and Image". His first try had been rejected, because he couldn't explain it. Tongue in cheek, he produced a second design with a group of mouths and eyes, streaming light: word and image symbolized. Whereas the judges hadn't trusted their sensibilities on his first try, Yokoo says, they trusted his words, and their intellects on the second. Yokoo was dismayed. But he does recognize the limits of animism in the modern world. "You have to have a mix of the old Japanese way of thinking and modern, rational thought, if you're going to live in the world as it is."

Like many great Japanese designers, Yokoo has been successful internationally because he has been able to make rational explanations of his work. And yet he would prefer that European modernism, with its insistence on the rational and the functional, give in a little to the Asian sense of intuition. "It would be better if designers clarified the themes and problems of their own lives..... It's fine for a designer to recognize that design and economy can't be separated, but then he should reject it. When the designer is working, there shouldn't be any consideration whatsoever of the commercial aspects.

"The designer should, within that small frame in which he or she works, explore his own themes, his own life, his own thoughts."

In Yokoo's view, the triumph of the rational and the functional over the intuitive, is aided, technologically, by the computer. A frigidity of expression, which is first provided by designers, and then desired by consumers, to him represents a crisis. "Something generous and essential in human beings could be lost. If one understands the crisis while using the computer, the danger is past. But there are those who mistake a new technology for a new consciousness. They have no doubts."ent that is short, fair, and typically incensorious: "the borderlines separating art, life, and crime were tenuous."