From the origins of S.T,N.E, there was one particular landscape that served as a major source of inspiration – a mountain range captured on monochrome film.
All of the photographs used in the posters and tabloids were taken by Kise himself. He wrote about this mountain, which holds deep personal meaning for him.
My Favorite Place
by Tokuhiko Kise
Ever since I was in middle school, I’ve been carrying my bike up and riding down the mountains around Osaka, the peaks of Mt. Shigi and Mt. Kongo among them.
Whenever I’d find a nice-looking spot, I’d stop to boil water for coffee and eat some cookies.
Too young to really care for or even enjoy the flavor of the coffee, I simply loved the idea of it.
Around this time, I was redoing the walls of my childhood bedroom. I got the materials from the local lumberyard, but naturally as I couldn’t drive a car just yet, I borrowed a bike to take them home. The bike was a kind of utility bike with a big and heavy sidecar, the likes of which you would never see around today. It’s no easy task to ride straight on a bike with a sidecar attached! But still, it was fun to try.
I put up the planks (which were, now that I think of it, printed laminated plywood) along the walls of my bedroom all by myself. When I finished, my room suddenly felt like a little mountain cabin. Under the glow of a tiny bulb light, I would read a book and relish in the atmosphere.
When I got my driver’s license at 16, all I ever did was ride up the mountain roads with my off-road motorbike.
No matter when, even in the evenings during the week, my friends and I would get up, toss a frypan in our rucksack, and ride to the mountains of the nearby suburbs to cook up something to eat.
Or we’d strap a tent and our sleeping bags to the back seats and just head out somewhere. We didn’t decide things like where we were going to sleep in advance. We simply went. When it got dark, we would get something light to eat, go into the mountain to sleep, and ride out again in the morning.
And during the summer holidays when I was 17, I took the ferry to Hokkaido, a place I had longed to visit, and stayed for a few weeks.
In the pre-iPhone era, you used your intuition to find your way around. And when you got lost, you asked a passerby. It was fun to talk to people you didn’t know.
In high school, I found the place that I’ve loved ever since. This mountain, which sits on the northern edge of Osaka, is covered in silver grass and offers a completely clear, 360-degree view from the summit. Looking out, mountain peaks appear to overlap in layers across a seemingly endless distance.
“Wanna head out now? Think we’ll make it before sundown?” My friends and I would dash to the mountaintop in a little over an hour. Barely making it in time, we would struggle to catch our breath as we gazed out at the beautiful sky before us.
One day, we arrived late in the evening and put up our tent. In the middle of the night, the weather suddenly turned tempestuous. Me and my two friends, barely protected inside our little tent, struggled to hold it down as the wind jostled it and threatened to blow it away. It was then that I learned that wind clashing with itself makes a sound like a thud. We could hear the roar and crack of thunder and lightning all around us. I thought I’d get struck by lightning and die right then and there. But eventually it became quiet, and we woke to a serene morning.
As I loved this kind of “outdoor life”, I would devour outdoor magazines.
It was precisely around the time that I was thinking about what I was going to do with my life and my future that I saw an article in one such magazine for Matsumoto Technical College in Nagano. “Making furniture in the fresh air of Nagano with all those mountains around? This is it, right?” I immediately went for a tour of the campus and knew what I was going to do.
The making of furniture that came out of that serendipitous glance in a magazine has continued for almost 40 years and is still going strong.
To this day I go back to enjoy the view from the mountaintop. Almost nothing has changed; it is still the same.
I could say the same for myself. I just keep on doing what I like.