"JOHN F. KENNEDY"
ON THE GINZA
AN AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ICON ...
IN JAPAN
IN HONOR OF JFK, BORN ON THIS DATE
IN 1917, IN BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS
PRESIDENT,
JANUARY 20, 1961-NOVEMBER 22, 1963
In 1981, en route to China for my first visit, I had a chance to dash downtown to Tokyo for an hour-and-a-half, and grabbed it.
I was back in the country where I lived for a year as a child, in the town of Sasebo, and where, at age eight, I had taken my first photographs.
And what did I see but an image of our slain president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in a store front window on the Ginza – being used to sell glasses.
Such is the power of icons and the mystery of iconography, and of cross-cultural exchanges.
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