マイフォースガールフレンド吉田ルイ子 My Fourth Girlfriend YOSHIDA Ruiko

I’m getting old. Now that I have turned 65, Suginami-ku sends me 杉並区介護保険料納入通知書 ‘Suginami Ward Nursing Care Insurance Premium Payment Notice’. Actually I MUST pay even more money to Suginami-ku, Tokyo-City and the Japan state, for the Japanese people who want to / will live until the age of 100.
Personally, I don’t want to die in Japan, so I’m not paying this for myself, but rather it has to be understood as a “kind of FORCED donation” for the Japanese people.
It’s really tough to be a Japanese artist in Tokyo, with no Japanese passport. Japan does NOT allow dual-citizenship!

Before I die, it would be appropriate to publish some personal, Japan-relevant experiences for posterity.
Photo-journalist Yoshida Ruiko 吉田ルイ子 died 4 months ago at the age of 85. I was rather surprised that NHK didn’t carry any news about it.
Writing a pleasant posthumous memoir about someone who was very close to you presents many difficulties because of its complexity.
Ruiko was perhaps the idiot in her bourgeois family because she moved away, traveled alone to New York and fought, also as an activist, against discrimination. If the world is hell, we are damned from birth, she said. Damned, ergo condemned and lost to happiness.
For Ruiko, it was about asserting freedom in the face of objective lack of freedom.
Fighting, educating, documenting the movements for total emancipation, instead of retreating into insincerity/sarcastic attitudes towards the own people.
Ainu, Okinawa, Black People, Women’s Lib, Jane Fonda.
Ruiko maintained her socially committed, humanistic loyalty until the end of her life; her motto was always an expression of emancipated freedom and sincerity.
I stayed for a short time in her wonderful, spacious house in Setagaya. It was nice and cozy, naturally smoking a joint and having sex.
Her very special, intelligent way of communicating was an educational experience for me. She exuded an immensely attractive personality aura that I greatly admired about her.

Tokyo, sunny, fresh, blue sky. After a morning walk.
13th of October 2024
Mario A 亜真里男

マイスィクスティーンスガールフレンド春美バルテュス
My Sixteenth Girlfriend Harumi Balthus
https://art-culture.world/articles/my-sixteenth-girlfriend-2003/

マイファーストガールフレンド My First Girlfriend
https://art-culture.world/articles/my-first-girlfriend-1986/