A Yoko-centric slice of Lennon

I had good reason to master the Tokyo subway system during my recent visit there: I wanted to check out the John Lennon Museum in Saitama, which is about an hour north of downtown Tokyo. Why so far? And why place such a museum in Japan to begin with? Well, it turns out Saitama is Yoko Ono’s birthplace, she being the sole executrix of the Lennon estate, including all of his music, art and personal belongings – even the use of his name.

Yoko still gets a bum rap in many quarters, but I give her respect for turning over some 170 personal items, and not just the kind of trinkets that end up decorating a Hard Rock Café somewhere. Painstaking care was given to choosing the Lennon-alia and deploying the artifacts along two floors, covering nine spaces that sum up the iconic musician’s life.

Well, summation is a funny, subjective kind of thing. The museum tour begins with a seven-minute film that divides Lennon’s life into two phases: before and after Yoko. It’s implied that John was both hugely talented, and hugely unhappy… until he met Yoko. The Japanese avant-garde artist is perhaps still ahead of her time. I tried listening to "Two Virgins" the other day, and, what with her atonal yowling and John’s co-dependent acid ramblings, I figure it might take another 50 years or so before we ever completely "get" Yoko.

So, leaving the theater, I was expecting a rather Yoko-centric experience. But the truth is, Lennon’s personal items lift this museum well above many other tributes in terms of conveying what the ex-Beatle meant to so many people. It’s a chunk of history, in fact.

Where else in the world would you get to see John’s original yellow "Sgt. Pepper" costume – the very one he wore for the famous cover shot of the 1967 album? Or who else can claim to have such an extensive collection of his guitars – the battered Rickenbackers, the Epiphone Casino he played on the rooftop of Apple Studios during the Beatles’ last "live" appearance in 1969, and even the banjo given by his mother, Julia, on which she taught the young Lennon basic chords and songs?

This stuff is magic to Beatle fans. And the John Lennon Museum, which opened on Oct. 9, 2000, is the kind of place a fan can linger and dawdle over for hours. Unfortunately, I had to take an express, one-hour tour because I had a plane to catch back to Manila. As I approached the museum – inexplicably located at the base of the Saitama Super Sports Arena –I noticed there were no other visitors inside. It was a weekday morning, of course, and the Japanese were no doubt at work or school. But I also felt the location was a bit out of the way. Maybe downtown Tokyo would draw larger crowds, but of course the real estate is a bit pricey there, even for Yoko.

You set eyes upon a huge mural in the lobby– a cluster of hundreds of photos taking in Lennon’s life –before heading upstairs to the main gallery space. No photography is allowed, so you’re all but forced to buy a museum program as a souvenir. It’s worth it, though, if only for the detailed listing and color photos.

With Lennon’s birthday coming up this Monday, it seems only fitting to look back and consider what was so unique about the guy. Starting with his childhood – a merchant seaman dad who was never around, a mother who left him in the care of an auntie – Lennon had to tap into his precocious talent, perhaps to express himself, maybe just to be noticed. On display under glass are his first glue-together books, comics like The Daily Howl with cartoons and stories (a precursor – in tone and even layout – to Lennon’s later published book, In His Own Write) and a sports scrapbook called Spotlight on Sport, Speed and Illustration with quizzes, fake ads, even editorials. Like a lot of talented lads, Lennon sought an outlet through art. His mom taught him banjo, but Elvis Presley taught him to rock: the next room features a convincingly grotty mock-up of The Cavern, the Liverpool club where John and the early Beatles were "discovered" by Brian Epstein.

Beatlemania fills up the next room, with real eye-popping trinkets: original lyric books with Lennon’s scrawled words to If I Fell, In My Life and other classic songs; a Hohner blues harp used by John to record such songs as Love Me Do; the original "Mr. Kite" circus poster that inspired John’s psychedelic ditty on "Sgt. Pepper"; the lotus-pattern jacket he wore during the worldwide TV broadcast of All You Need Is Love in 1967. Really, Yoko must have dug deep into her walk-in closet to come up with such benchmark items. Fans will have a field day spotting famous concert jackets (the one with 10 buttons worn during the Beatles’ Japanese tour in 1965), or the trademark round spectacles John wore in How I Won the War – the specs that launched a thousand hippie Lennon-likes. Set in one glassed case is an original tape recorder from Abbey Road (formerly EMI) Studios – a rickety relic that makes you do a double-take: They actually recorded "Revolver" on this?

We next enter the "John and Yoko" years, after the Beatles went up in smoke amid lawsuits and acrimony, and the art duo adopted New York as their new home. The so-called "Lost Weekend" is given a brief gloss, but the room has a decidedly political bent, with documents showing how Lennon was targeted for deportation by J. Edgar Hoover and Nixon. The sleeveless "NEW YORK CITY" T-shirt is there and, yup, the army jacket he wore in the Live in New York City film, too. It’s really kind of eerie, and perhaps akin to what Elvis fans feel when visiting Graceland, to come face to face with memorabilia that has been a part of our consciousness for decades.

The next room delves deeper into the Yoko influence, in case you missed it. A recreation of London’s Indica Gallery, it features a staircase you walk up toward the ceiling, where the word "Yes" is carefully written. Thus you get to recreate the moment when Lennon (as legend has it) first gazed upon Yoko’s conceptual art, and found it to be good ("It was positive!" Lennon would enthuse years later). A motion-sensitive wall installation flashes Yoko koans ("Listen to the sound of the earth turning," "Make a way for the wind," "Imagine 1,000 suns in the sky at the same time") as you descend the stairs and enter a very large, white environment. You can’t help feeling, in a way, that this building is a womb –Yoko’s womb, in fact, giving birth to the Lennon legend. The walls are lined with wondrous trinkets – like Lennon’s personal copy of Arthur Janov’s The Primal Scream that inspired the singers most fetal yelps on record, and a funny little Indian notebook that he kept at the Maharishi’s retreat, in which he wrote lyrics for "The White Album" and later solo work – but all in all, the room feels given over to Yoko. A larger-than-life chessboard occupies one area; all the pieces are white, with the words "PLAY IT BY TRUST" decorating each facing side.

Ascending an escalator, we enter a space that seems a reasonable facsimile of John and Yoko’s Dakota apartment in New York. A white Steinway piano takes center stage, while the walls contain numerous nooks and concave spaces filled with Lennon’s doo-dads and personal belongings, as though you’re perusing the top of his dresser: you find a few colorful neckties, a cigarette case filled with Gitanes, an ACLU card, an Elvis pin, Fender guitar picks, a Mickey Mouse watch with a red, white and blue cloth strap. It’s oddly personal, this random gathering of the things he carried and kept around. Also shown in the Dakota space are personal artworks – things like a single piano key carved and engraved by John to Yoko, and a custom-designed Yamaha acoustic guitar with a dragon design signed by Lennon. Personal photos of the couple taken with son Sean in Karuizawa, where they vacationed between 1977 and ’79, are displayed. Demos of songs – apparently recorded in the comfort of the Dakota and later to appear on the "Double Fantasy" album in 1980 – play on in the background.

In truth, I didn’t want to leave this space, though I knew I had a train and a plane to catch. I could have lingered in this gallery for another hour at least. For Lennon fans, it feels like a genuine tribute, not some ad hoc gathering of multimedia inputs.

The final space seems like another Yoko inspiration: a large, sunlight-filled room with a massive glass wall occupying the center. Clear plastic chairs are positioned around the wall, inviting you to sit and contemplate the dozens of Lennon phrases and lyrics etched across the glass. One caught my eye: "Don’t be hard on yourself/Give yourself a break/Life wasn’t meant to be run." Lennon always had a tendency to write in slogans, but for some reason this phrase struck me, perhaps in the way Yoko’s "Yes" had affected John back in 1966. It seems that Lennon, at some point, did learn to live a Zen-like life, and actually did find love, or completeness, despite what the cynics say. A quote from Yoko near the exit completes the cycle: "As I said a long time ago, there is a wind that never dies. I didn’t know that was you."

This would have been a fitting enough epitaph, but I had one further question to ask the two girls on duty in the near-empty museum on the way out: Why here? Why in Saitama? (At the time, I didn’t know Saitama was Yoko’s home turf.) The two girls shyly conferred, then, smiling politely, pulled out a single sheet of paper and pushed it my way. On it were written two Japanese sentences, translated a bit shakily into English: "This museum was approved by Yoko Ono. Yoko doesn’t care about the place that expresses John’s spirit correctly and honestly."

Must get that question quite often, I thought, as I headed for the Saitama subway and sped off to catch my plane.