People

Tadashi Yanai

Tadashi Yanai

Founder & President, Fast Retailing

Biography

Tadashi Yanai, is the Chairman, President, and CEO of FAST RETAILING CO., LTD., of which UNIQLO is a subsidiary. Since opening the first UNIQLO store in Hiroshima, Japan in 1984, the brand has become a global retailer with flagship stores from New York to Hong Kong. As the leader of UNIQLO Yanai‐san, oversees the business operations from designs, production to sales of his products. Tadashi Yanai’s philosophy of “changing conventional wisdom to change the world” and Japanese traditions has become UNIQLO’s central image.

Tadashi Yanai received his Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Politics from Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. In 1984, he had taken over his father’s suite shop and transformed it into UNIQLO. Yanai‐san has since turned UNIQLO into a household name throughout Japan and Asia. Currently UNIQLO operates 1,020 retail outlets all over Asia, Europe, and North America. At 62 years old, Yanai‐san is ranked one of the wealthiest men in Japan and manages to maintain an altruistic side. He donated $12.2 million out of his personal fortune towards relief efforts for Japan after the 2011 tsunami. Yanai‐san also established a strong sense of corporate responsibility within his company; creating programs such has the Grameen Project, and All‐Product Recycling.

Over the years with him as president of Fast Retailing, the company has successfully acquired smaller foreign brands including France’s Comptoir des Cotonniers for women’s wear and Princesse Tam‐Tam lingerie, as well as America’s Theory. Yanai‐san’s has strong control over UNIQLO, with power to finalize all decisions, down to approving samples and colors, while keeping the consumers’ needs in mind.

Yanai was previously a member of the 21st Century Council.

composed by Arswain
machine learning consultation by Anna Tskhovrebov
commissioned by the Berggruen Institute
premiered at the Bradbury Building
downtown Los Angeles
april 22, 2022

Human perception of what sounds “beautiful” is necessarily biased and exclusive. If we are to truly expand our hearing apparatus, and thus our notion of beauty, we must not only shed preconceived sonic associations but also invite creative participation from beings non-human and non-living. We must also begin to cede creative control away from ourselves and toward such beings by encouraging them to exercise their own standards of beauty and collaborate with each other.

Movement I: Alarm Call
‘Alarm Call’ is a long-form composition and sound collage that juxtaposes, combines, and manipulates alarm calls from various human, non-human, and non-living beings. Evolutionary biologists understand the alarm call to be an altruistic behavior between species, who, by warning others of danger, place themselves by instinct in a broader system of belonging. The piece poses the question: how might we hear better to broaden and enhance our sense of belonging in the universe? Might we behave more altruistically if we better heed the calls of – and call out to – non-human beings?

Using granular synthesis, biofeedback, and algorithmic modulation, I fold the human alarm call – the siren – into non-human alarm calls, generating novel “inter-being” sonic collaborations with increasing sophistication and complexity. 

Movement II: A.I.-Truism
A synthesizer piece co-written with an AI in the style of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, to pay homage to the space of the Bradbury Building.

Movement III: Alarmism
A machine learning model “learns” A.I.Truism and recreates Alarm Call, generating an original fusion of the two.

Movement IV: A.I. Call
A machine learning model “learns” Alarm Call and recreates A.I.Truism, generating an original fusion of the two.

RAVE (IRCAM 2021) https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE