Kori & Mame-Typhoo

Last night there was a tornado watch. The sirens started and in the gray dank basement, I found myself thinking about Haruo Koriyama.

He introduced himself the way only certain people can get away with: "I am Kori, Vice President of Special Projects. That means I do whatever I want."

I met him my first year at Dentsu, entry level, didn't know enough yet to be afraid of anyone. The accounting VP needed someone to deliver bad news to Kori — a billing error on the Tyson-Tubbs project, a significant one. A decimal point. He chose me. I didn't know he thought I was a lamb being sent to slaughter.

Kori's office was a corner office with a view of the Chrysler Building. Corbusier chairs. Like no one else in the beige corporate America of the 80s. I knocked, walked in, showed him the document, and pointed at the mistake. He looked at it. He saw it immediately.

Then I pointed straight at him and said: "You owe me." He laughed.

After that, he kept requesting me for his special projects.

The first one was FaxFashion. 1988. Bloomingdale's was the cultural capital of New York and fax machines were futuristic, unknown to the gen pop. Kori brought it to John C. Jay, another creative titan, and together they sold Canon on an idea that almost no one else would have thought to pitch: introduce the fax machine to Bloomingdale's as a fashion accessory for the successful businesswoman.

My job was to make the faxes. John gave me the photos he created with photographer Torkil Gudnason to put through the fax machine. The degraded, dithered, grain-heavy output became the original art. We were living at the edge of technology and culture, and I was the one standing at the machine, feeding photographs through it and watching what came out the other side.

Kori called me Mame-typhoo. Little Typhoon. Together, I suppose we became a force of nature.

He died in 1989. He was 58. 

He called what we were doing "new media" — he meant Bloomingdale's windows, theatrical stages, live events. The world today — he would have said, “Unbelievable じゃないの” (it’s unbelievable isn’t it)

I owe him more than he ever owed me.I owe him more than he ever owed me.

April 15, 2026

photos by Torgil Gudnason, creative direction by John C Jay