Enigmatic friend Makoto was a fellow designer and a significant influence on Yokota during his early years after art school. Makoto was an art director for the legendary Kyoto-based underground psychedelic band Les Rallizes Dénudés. He was renowned for his wild dance freakouts that often accompanied Yokota’s early onstage performances. An avid fan of French decadent literature, his room was lined with books by Baudelaire and Villiers de L'Isle-Adam.
The two friends shared the same taste in music, and Makoto played an important part in Yokota’s early productions, collaborating on the first Tenshin project and early Ebi releases. Long after, when Yokota supported Underground Resistance at their first Tokyo show in 2006, Makoto was again to join him on stage.
Ken Ishii’s Garden On The Palm on R&S Recordings (Belgium) followed hot on the heels of Yokota’s Harthouse debut. Ishii’s management company Music Mine approached Yokota offering to represent him alongside Ishii. Though their styles were different, as fellow pioneers of Japanese techno they were often viewed as a pair, being interviewed and photographed together and touring as Sublime label mates.
Yokota had met local Paris-born DJ Alex Prat (aka Alex From Tokyo) at the Sublime office in Shibuya in 1995. Yokota was preparing to release his sprawling new album Metronome Melody, the first under alias Prism, and Alex was enthralled by the pensive and refined garage house sounds he was hearing. Yokota was also interested in the burgeoning house scene in France and the two would share music recommendations and impassioned late-night conversations, amassing an arsenal of material they would play out on the weekends when they landed on the same bill.