One day, while I was driving on a suburban road at night, a couple on a motorcycle passed me. At that moment, I had an idea for a piece of work in which a couple on a motorcycle was riding on a farm road, but the idea was shelved for years.

Last year, on a business trip, I stopped by a community center in a district famous for its rice, which is selected for the Imperial family's offering of rice. The community center is a building that stands alone in the middle of a rural area, with a large tatami room with a stage, and is used for local meetings and banquets. On the wall, there was a faded group photo that must have been taken at a festival, and it showed about 20 young people wearing white happi coats, some of whom had slicked hair on the sides and were sitting in a Yankee style.

When you pass through rice-growing areas during the rice planting and harvesting seasons, you can see couples working in light trucks and combine harvesters. I imagined a story of some of these people who used to be delinquents, but now inherited rice fields. At that moment, the dots of the image connected, and I decided to make it into a work this time.

I asked a person I met while staking out a roadside station on a weekend night to be my model.
The rear seat of the modified bike is lined with thick sponge and has a backrest, making it comfortable to sit on. The woman riding on the back is sitting with her arms folded, looking a little arrogant, but there is something about her that makes her seem cherished, and I feel a romanticism in her. The bike and clothes are both their own, and his helmet has a design that says "Long live the Emperor" and hers has the Rising Sun flag. I like that, too, as it seems to be a remnant of the regrets of the era of nationalism. The sight of the two of them riding a modified bike on a farm road in the slightly humid evening air during the rice paddy season gave me a sense of exhilaration and transience, and I thought it was beautiful.