Being in Tokyo, why did you decide to go to Sidney to start a magazine?

I wasn't in Tokyo.. Before Sydney i spent many years in Perth, Western Australia.. (before that Romania, Germany, London, Osaka, Melbourne, again Sydney etc).
Perth is a great place to get things done if you have your own agenda but it is the world's most isolated city and ultimately any projects will come to some loose/dead end there. So it was rather natural to go to Sydney (where I had lived before).

I went to Sydney with a strong concept for a different magazine. called "The Illustrated Atlas".
It was meant basically follow the pattern of a regular magazine but focus on places and things that are outside the 'cool' circuit and present them in a different kind of cool way - vernacular, deadpan, flat.
Although i had recieved enthusiasm and some support, it proved un-doable. Most people in Australia were , and probably still are basically too busy keeping up to an international level of trendiness to be able to let go of it all and go in the direction i had in mind. Plus in Sydney everyone seemed too busy making money , everything else was second priority.

Meanwhile I found myself involved more and more with japanese people ; having/organizing exhibitions etc. (i had lived in Japan before that). The idea of doing a bilingual magazine came. We wanted neither one of those information-packed japanese language magazines you find in every major city in the world, nor something that capitalized on the
shibuya-kei, superflat, fruits magazine etc inflated idea of japanese cool popular at the time.
Anyway, it was difficult.
Jun Fujioka, my main collaborator at the time, probably ended up meeting every single japanese person in Sydney. Misunderstandings. I was basically (typically) getting frustrated saying that "they" keep shifting responsibility, while "they" were getting
frustrated with me for stuff like taking my brainstorming as concrete ideas that i wasn't carrying through. It was an amazing learning experience that ended up rather messy.
It was after this that Chieko Kawaguchi and I , the only ones left on board, decided to put something together regardless.

Chieko Kawaguchi

TA-KE-HA-RA / A .- cover

from TA-KE-HA-RA / I

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from TA-KE-HA-RA / I

from TA-KE-HA-RA / A

from TA-KE-HA-RA / I

What did you want exactly to accomplish or offer with this magazine?

We didn't know exactly what we wanted, but we knew what we didn't want to do.

We realized that what we tried to do was practically impossible and somehow the figure of Junichi Takehara, one of the collaborators in the
original project, became the epytomy of this impossible ideal...
Having turned the idea of Takehara and the 'impossible magazine' into something
somewhat akin to Dada, and with only two people on board things suddenly became 'doable'.

Here's a spiel about takehara from ta ke ha ra A which was kind of our manifesto:

" Junichi Takehara, graduated with a Masters in sculpture from Tama Arts
University. born in Kobe Japan, currently residing in Sydney, Australia.
Solid training and practice in sculpture, he has achieved a certain mastery of form. An
avid fan of alternative american rock, he has also allowed a large degree of spontaneity and 'grunge' into his esthetic as evident in his more recent work.
In spite of all this his work, is often mispercieved both in Japan and overseas.
He has somewhat come to epitomize a particular concept of cultural confusion and displacement. He has been the main inspiration behind this publication.
Although Junichi Takehara's work is sometimes featured in the magazine, by no means should the magazine's voice and opinions be taken as his own."

Losing is a richer experience than winning. Sketches are more interesting than final products... transcendent, iconic cool that you find in most magazines is boring ... amateur stuff is often more interesting than professional ...

We didn't want submissions or anything that screams 'look at me'. Also no point trying to cover other stuff. There are other people doing it much better so we pretty much got stuck in our own, unbearable at times, microcosm.

Then, by a series of events including deaths and births the whole thing halt for over 2 years.

This year we realized how alive the Ta ke ha ra spirit still was and decided to get back to it. The idea of putting out a magazine retroactively is rather interesting and quite Ta ke ha ra-like.
The next issue will also be retroactive based on material from about 2 years ago and from then we'll move a bit closer to real-time.

We're rather determined to stick to it and follow A, I & E (almost
finished) with O (started) then KA KI KU KE KO SA SI SU SE SO TA CHI TSU
TE TO NA NI NU NE NO HA HI FU HE HO MA MI MU ME MO YA YU YO RA RI RU RE
RO WA WO AND N.

If we're feeling energetic we have minor issues for ZA ZI
ZU ... Life is long, the format and feel will change as we change. At some point we'll get it on paper again.

Chieko Kawaguchi & Alin Huma

TA-KE-HA-RA / I .- cover

from TA-KE-HA-RA / A

from TA-KE-HA-RA / A

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from TA-KE-HA-RA / A