Hiroshi Fujiwara: Hello! How are you?

Yoon Ahn: I am fine. You?

Hiroshi: I am OK. Not completely fine, but alive…

Yoon: Have you been staying at home?

Hiroshi: I have. Are you in the office?

Yoon: Yes. My studio and my house are just a few minutes apart, but it’s better to work in the office.

Hiroshi: I don’t see many people there.

Yoon: We divide ourselves into two groups. The basic rule is that we work from home, of course, but as soon as people need to ‘create’ something, it’s impossible for them to work from home, so one half comes one day, then the other half comes the next. We split the week up to try to have as few people as possible in at the same time. How long have you been staying at home?

Hiroshi: It’s been about two weeks, I think. Most of the time.I carry on working at home, doing things that can still be done from home. How about you?

Yoon: I do have things that can continue, but for some plans, involving work with other countries, such as photoshoots, we are stuck. And if I have to make the video travel series, what am I supposed to do? We can carry on planning, but we don’t know when we’ll be able to realize anything from those plans. We can’t see our next move. I check the news from other countries, and this situation could continue for over a year…

Hiroshi: Things might calm down, but even then I am pretty sure it will be a bit difficult to travel.

Yoon: I feel scared, of course, of this situation with Covid-19, but I am even more scared about how the world’s economy might change. I am making things to sell, so if the world changes and people get a new perspective on their lifestyles, the way we’ve been selling and doing business just won’t work any more. I’ll have to plan brand new, totally different things from scratch. That is a concern at the moment. I’m worried, to be honest, because I can’t see what comes next, although at the same time, half of my mind is excited about a new start.

Hiroshi: I understand how you feel. Speaking for myself, I usually don’t work on a particularly big scale, so there isn’t a major change to my way of working. Most of my job is producing or designing products for brands and companies, and it’s not my job to think about how to sell them. That’s a job for my clients. So my work style isn’t affected that much by this situation.

Yoon: If people’s lifestyles change, then their habits will change. If their values are going to change, their outlooks are going to change. Even if we go back to
something we could call ‘normal’, it is not going to be the same as it was before Covid-19. I just wonder whether people are really going to change for the better, or if it’s going to get more chaotic.

Hiroshi: Maybe it’ll be a return to… not six months ago or a year ago, but maybe 20 or 30 years ago. Things might become smaller.

Yoon: Yes. More local, more intimate. To be honest, I quite enjoy the limitation. Things have been getting so rushed. Everything’s always about new, new, new. You have to pump things out all the time. In a way, Covid-19 has forced everybody to slow down. Not just in Japan, or the US; everybody has to stop, almost. We can kind of breathe now.

Hiroshi: You sort of had to follow the leader and fit into a system – in the fashion industry, too. But now you can do whatever you want.

Yoon: Yes, definitely. To be honest, people in Japan are all talking about Covid now, but because I often work overseas, I’ve followed the whole situation pretty closely from the end of January. I remember that after Paris Fashion Week, in February, I was heading to Milan and I got a call just as I was about to get on the plane saying that it was about to be locked down, so don’t come, because if I did, I wouldn’t be able to leave. That’s when I realized that something really serious was happening. It had just been in China, but now it was also going to be in Europe, the UK, Germany. In a way, I have been mentally prepared since February, because
that was a wake-up call for me. It was a scary phone call to get.

Hiroshi: Yes. It was a strange moment. I was hearing news from China and we were worried about the Olympic Games, and in February London’s mayor even said: ‘Oh, we can do the Olympics for you.’ And then, all of a sudden, Europe was kind of closed, but Japan stayed the same.

Yoon: I found it quite strange that Italy was seeing so much infection, and that the numbers were growing there. Wasn’t Japan like the second country to get corona, right up there with China?

Hiroshi: I think so. We were kind of scared and worried. We didn’t know what was going to happen.

Yoon: Who knows, maybe they hid it because they wanted to do the Olympics! The thing with Covid-19, I think, is that it’s shed a light on all these underlying issues. It’s definitely has a big impact, but those issues were already there. All this recession talk, these messed-up banking systems… Healthy people get the virus, but a lot of the people who get it have underlying health issues. Maybe that’s part of it. Who knows, but if the numbers are right, then I’m thankful that the spread is not as bad as in some other countries. My work is mostly in America, France and Italy; America is the worst right now, Italy got hit really bad, and France is
really bad, too. Even if you have to go, you get quarantined for 14 days.

Hiroshi: I hope it’s going to stay like this here. That there won’t be an explosion.

Yoon: I know. Hopefully, they can get the number down, but if people don’t follow the rules… There’s talk of a second wave after people go back to a normal way of working. It’s something that we have to face. I think, like the flu, it’s going to become a part of our lives. Maybe it’s just going to be one of those things that happens and then goes down. Maybe we’ll have a ‘corona season’; maybe we’ll get a vaccine. Who knows. It’s definitely not going to go away. We just have to deal with it.

Hiroshi: We have to learn for the future.

Yoon: You’ve been staying home for two weeks. Have you done anything fun?

Hiroshi: Not really. I’m getting together keyboards and guitars, so that I can make music without going the studio.

Yoon: That’s fun.

Hiroshi: It’s good. You can do a lot in the house. I’m good at being at home, at being alone, but I know that if somebody says, ‘Don’t go out’, it makes me want to go out.

Yoon: Do you go for walks?

Hiroshi: I go for lunch sometimes, but not for a walk. Maybe I should! I’ve just been sitting or lying down for almost two weeks… [Laughs]

Yoon: I’ve started walking a lot, actually. I’m exactly like you: if somebody says ‘stay’, it makes me want to go. And because a lot of people are staying home, it’s nice to go for a walk in the morning, with nobody on the street. I’ve lived in Shibuya for almost 15 years without ever really going for a walk, and last week I noticed all these things that I’d never noticed before. It kind of made me sad. Even after living here for so long I still don’t know everything because I always go to the same places, take the same routes. When I went for a walk last week, I went to areas I would never visit when I’m busy. I just walked for eight kilometres and discovered the backstreets and all of these little things. I liked it. It was nice not to be chased by time, either. I didn’t even look at my watch. I just walked and walked and walked. It was the most fun I’ve had in a long time, just walking.

Hiroshi: And I’ve been talking. Mostly this way…

Yoon: Yeah – Zoom, all the time! Are you catching up on movies or TV shows? Because I saw that you saw Tiger King. I watched that, too. It was funny! There’s a lot of weird people, but it’s funny, isn’t it? It’s crazy.

Hiroshi: I can kind of understand… When I was a kid, I wanted to have tigers. It was huge in the 1980s or 1990s, with the white tigers in Las Vegas.

Yoon: I didn’t know it was such a big industry to breed tigers and sell them in the US. I was quite surprised by that. Isn’t it hard to have tigers? Maybe they can in the US because there’s so much land.

Hiroshi: I think they just call them ‘big cats’. [Laughs] How about your store? It’s closed, right? Do you do online?

Yoon: Yes, online only, because of the government guidelines.

Hiroshi: I hear that stores are already opening up in China, Shanghai and Beijing. And maybe next month, Italy will open again. It’s kind of scary.

Yoon: We have to open up. You have to get the economy going. That’s where it’s kind of tricky, because if people don’t go to work and spend, then there isn’t
any money going around. We have to get back into a rhythm, socially and economically. Europe and America have been in lockdown for almost two months now… Even if they have to go back to work, it’s going to take a while for them to go back to the way they were.

Hiroshi: It’s a change of tempo. Maybe we were at 150bpm, and we’re going back to 80bpm.

Yoon: A worldwide recession is everybody’s issue. I wonder, when people actually return to work, are they going to spend their money on clothes? Most likely not for a long time. It might be two years until things pick up again. I’ve been very aware of what might happen for months now. Japan got Covid-19 right after China, and when Japan closed its borders to Chinese tourists back in January we noticed a sudden drop in sales, and we had to make new plans for everything. We’ve prepared a little bit, but it’s going to be interesting in the next few months to see how it’s going to go.

Hiroshi: I don’t think we really need to go back to normal. People think that they want to go back to normal, but it’s going to be a different world.

Yoon: To be honest, I kind of like this pace. I can actually read now; I can walk; I’m not always in a rush. It’s cool. Before, I had so much work that I had to work on weekends as well. Now, I can take weekends off, so on Saturdays and Sundays I’ve been doing online courses on different topics. It’s fun. There’s this thing called MasterClass.com, and you can sign up and take different courses. I’ve been taking classes in economics and photography. And I’ve been cooking a lot. That’s fun, too.

Hiroshi: I find that I’m always thinking about the future, about what will happen after all this, and I don’t really feel negative at all. I just have to do what I have to do.

Yoon: How do you think Japan is going to change? Japan has always had its own system and its own flow, but what’s happening right now is going to impact the whole world. Future labour – that’s something that I think about. There aren’t enough young people here to work in the workforce, and that’s going to become a real issue very soon that the government has to deal with. Governments are actually calling industries to back out of China to make them more local, but even if they do that, who is going to do the work? There isn’t enough labour, unless they open up immigration. But are they going to do that with Covid-19 around?

Hiroshi: Maybe things will shrink a little bit, and not be as big as before. Maybe it’ll be more fun, like a new beginning.

Yoon: We’ll see. Are you making new songs right now?

Hiroshi: Yes, I just finished my new album. It was going to come out in June, but I don’t know if it’s still happening.

Yoon: Did you work on that in the past two weeks, during the quarantine?

Hiroshi: Yes. I know many musicians or artists who do a lot of their work at home.

Yoon: I actually started to do iPad painting. It’s quite fun. You should try it!

Hiroshi: iPad what?

Yoon: iPad painting! Have you seen David Hockney’s book? There was a recent one with all of the paintings he’d done on an iPad over the past few years, and they actually look amazing. It inspired me to start doing iPad painting; you paint with a pen on your iPad.

Hiroshi: So next I’ll see them on your T-shirts.

Yoon: Umm, no… [Laughs] Some things are best kept private!