Relaxing in a conference room crowded with shelves of CDs and a couple dozen bottles of Belgian beer, Shohachiro Haga recently explained how he chose the four acts for the Light My Fire world music festival. A middle-aged man wearing an enviably broken-in polo shirt, Haga says, "We can find the roots of the artists we bring here, and they have a strong identity, but at the same time [there is] some mixture with contemporary music and arts."
In other words, he is more interested in living culture than museum pieces.
Haga is the general director of Conversation, a promotional company he founded 21 years ago after enduring four years as a salaryman. "It was miserable for me," he says of his years of bondage.