Yoko Ono lived a charmed life. It did not last. Born and raised in Tokyo, she spent time as a young girl in both San Francisco and New York -- her father was a successful international banker. But a gruesome war in the Pacific -- albeit one started by her country -- upended everything. Her father was trapped in Hanoi on that fateful weekend when Japan launched attacks on Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Hawaii. Three-and-a-half years of total war, along with the wrath of the U.S. military, left much of Tokyo a smoldering ruin. It wrecked traditional Japanese society, too, and left Yoko Ono's mother bartering furniture for food.
In 1953, at age 20, Yoko would return to the United States to study and would eventually emerge as a performer and producer in New York City's experimental music scene and cutting-edge art world. But when she and John Lennon sang, "All We Are Saying Is Give Peace a Chance," a line Lennon credited to Yoko, she was speaking from the heart.
The two had met in the autumn of 1966, in an exhibition at a London art gallery. It wasn't necessarily John Lennon's scene, but he'd been enticed by a friend, the gallery's co-owner, and went to check it out. John was introduced to Yoko, puckishly, as "the millionaire Beatle." In response, she handed him a business card that merely said, "Breathe." Next, John noticed one of her avante-garde pieces of art, a ladder leading up toward the ceiling with a magnifying glass hanging from a chain. As intrepid as the next man, the millionaire Beatle climbed the ladder where he used the spyglass to read the tiny words on a small piece of paper. One word, actually, and the word was "YES."
It's an appealing word in its own right, but Lennon was additionally intrigued because it was very nearly the opposite of the downer message of so many of her contemporaries. "Well," as Lennon told interviewer David Sheff in 1980, "all the so-called avant-garde art at the time, and everything that was supposedly interesting, was all negative; this smash-the-piano-with-a-hammer, break-the-sculpture, boring, negative crap. It was all anti-, anti-, anti-. Anti-art, anti-establishment. And just that ‘YES' made me stay in a gallery full of apples and nails…"
It did more than that, of course. It led to a torrid, world-famous love affair and to marriage, new music, and the birth of a second son. It changed John Lennon's life, in other words, a life cut short in 1980 by an unspeakably sad act.
"After John passed away, my grief showed in my face," Yoko Ono told freelance writer Stephanie Palumbo 10 years ago. "I knew that was not good for our son, Sean, so one day I looked in the mirror and tried to make myself smile. At first it looked made up, and I thought, Ugh, will this be good enough? But with practice, it felt more natural, and eventually my whole body started to smile -- I think that's how I saved myself."
And that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.