Anarchy of the Body: Undercurrents of Performance Art in 1960s Japan [1 ed.] 9789461665027

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KuroDalaiJee

Anarchy of the Body Undercurrents of Performance Art in 1960s Japan

25/01/2023 09:0

Anarchy of the Body Undercurrents of Performance Art in 1960s Japan

 1. Kyūshū-ha, Group Q & Shika (Poetry Section) in Informel Outdoor Exhibition parade • November 2, 1957 • Hakata Ōhashi (between Nakasu and Kawabata), Fukuoka

 2. Yoshimura Masunobu (right), Masuzawa Kinpei (bottom left) in 3rd Neo Dada exhibition • c. September 1, 1960 • Ginza-dōri, Tokyo

 3. Shinohara Ushio • 1963 • Tanaka Shintarō’s Atelier, Soshigaya, Tokyo

 4. Performance by Kazakura Shō (foreground), Kosugi Takehisa (background) during 15th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition • March 1963 • Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum

 5.Balloon performance by Kazakura Shō during A Night of Waiting for Chanpon Mee • August 26, 1967 • Sennichidani Temple Hall, Tokyo

 6. Unbeat, performance by Nakajima Yoshio (rear left) and Tashiro Minoru (right) • December 4, 1962 • Nakanoshima, Osaka

 7. Nakajima Yoshio • c. 1963 • Near Chūō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo

 8. Asai Masuo in Last Supper • December 5, 1965 • Miyamae Bridge, Seto, Aichi Prefecture

 9. Asai Masuo in Last Supper • December 5, 1965 • Miyamae Bridge, Seto, Aichi Prefecture

 10. Jack Society performing a “jacking” on Doyō Shō (NET TV) • May 20, 1965 • Sidewalk in front of Iwashima Gallery, Ogikubo, Tokyo

 11. Koyama Tetsuo (left), Chida Ui (right), First Dating Show • November 23, 1966 • In front of the Shinjuku Koma Theatre, Tokyo

 12. Koyama Tetsuo in Vitamin Show • January 1, 1968 • Sukiyabashi, Tokyo  13. Koyama Tetsuo (center), performance of Vitamin Art • 1968 • Olympic, Yokohama

 14. Kurohata in National Memorial Ritual for Yui Chūnoshin, with Makirō of Baramanji Kessha in the foreground • December 1, 1967 • In front of Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo

 15. Kurohata in National Memorial Ritual for Yui Chūnoshin • December 1, 1967 • Shinjuku Station West Exit Plaza, Tokyo

 16. The Play, Sheep • August 25, 1970 • near Ōyamazaki, Kyoto

 17. The Play in April Fool Happenings: Hospital, (from left) Fukunaga Toyoko, Miki Tetsuo, Suzukida Asako, Suzuki Yoshinobu, Mizuno Tatsuo, Nakata Kazunari, Ikemizu Keiichi, Nakajima Miho • April 1, 1969 • Former Morinomiya Hospital, Osaka

 18. Zero Jigen, Metropolitan Chinchin Streetcar Funeral with Hanging Nooses and Futon • March 21, 1967 • Metropolitan streetcar between Meguro and Eitaibashi Bridge, Tokyo

 19. Zero Jigen, Buck-naked Ass World Ritual • c. 1965 • Kashima Shrine, Tokyo

 20. Zero Jigen, Ritual Carrying a Futon on Shoulders in Ginza • July 7, 1968 • Ginza, Tokyo

 21. Zero Jigen, Buck-naked Gas-masked Walking Ritual • December 9, 1967 • Kinokuniya Building, Shinjuku, Tokyo

 22. Kokuin • c. 1968 • In front of Hankyu Department Store, Sukiyabashi, Tokyo  23. Kokuin, performing Cyberne-sex Song at Insanity Trade Fair • March 13, 1968 • Honmoku-tei, Ueno, Tokyo

 24. Expo Destruction Group at Smash the Expo Black Festival • June 8, 1969 • Ikebukuro Art Theater, Tokyo

 25. Expo Destruction Group at Smash the Expo Black Festival • June 10, 1969 • Kyoto University Liberal Arts Department A Building, Kyoto

 26. Collective Kumo, performance at Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally, with Moriyama Yasuhide (left) and Katō Isao (right) • May 3, 1969 • Tobata Culture Hall, Kitakyūshū

 27. Collective Kumo, protest Happening in response to the Kyūshū Renaissance • February 26, 1970 • Tenjin Intersection, Fukuoka

 28. Itoi Kanji, performance at MAD/MAP • October 11, 1970 • Higashi Ichibanchō, Sendai

 29. Itoi Kanji • September 20, 1970 • Taishidō, Sendai

ANARCHY OF THE BODY Undercurrents of Performance Art in 1960s Japan

KuroDalaiJee

Leuven University Press

The publication of this book was supported by Bunka-cho Art Platform Japan / The Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan.

Awarded the 2010 Art Encouragement Prize (criticism category) by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, Ministry of Education.

Original title: 肉体のアナーキズム：1960年代・日本美術におけるパフォーマンスの地下水脈 Authorized translation from the Japanese language edition published by grambooks (Tokyo) © 2010 Japanese language edition by grambooks (Tokyo). © 2023 English language edition by Leuven University Press / Universitaire Pers Leuven / Presses Universitaires de Louvain. Minderbroedersstraat 4, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium) All rights reserved. Except in those cases expressly determined by law, no part of this publication may be multiplied, saved in an automated datafile or made public in any way whatsoever without the express prior written consent of the publishers. ISBN 978 90 6270 353 7 (Hardcover) e-ISBN 978 94 6166 502 7 (ePDF) D/ 2023 / 1869 / 1 NUR: 654 DOI: https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461665027 Cover: Daniel Benneworth-Gray Illustration cover: Performance by Expo Destruction Group at Antiwar Expo. Osaka Castle Park. August 10, 1969; Photograph by Hirata Minoru, © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP Lay-out: Crius Group Every effort has been made to contact all holders of the copyright to the visual material contained in this publication. Any copyright-holders who believe that illustrations have been reproduced without their knowledge are asked to contact the publisher

Kazakura Shō, performance at the 15th Yomiuri Independent • March 1963 • Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum • (see p. 152)

———

21

Contents

Translation Credits Notes on the Translation

29

PROLOGUE

UNDERGROUND CONSTELLATION 

31

PART I

TOWARD A HISTORY OF ANTI -ART IN PERFORMANCE

35

CHAPTER 1

THE NETHER REGIONS OF ART, ART HISTORY’S PRIVATE PARTS

37

28

IS A HISTORY OF PERFORMANCE ART POSSIBLE?

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. CHAPTER 2

The Aim and Structure of This Book Reviewing the History of Postwar Japanese Art  The Exclusion of Politicality Is a History of Japanese Performance Art Possible?  What Makes an Artist? Deviating from The Arts Upper-Echelon Courtiers, Bottom-Rung Samurai  From Historical Uncertainties to Real, Shared Feelings

THE SPECTRUM OF BODILY EXPRESSION

37 38 41 43 44 47 50 59

ACTIONS NOT YET NAMEABLE

CHAPTER 3

1. “Artists in Action”—Through the Eyes of Yoshida Yoshie 2. Bodily Expression in the 1960s

59

BEYOND ANTI-ART

73

62

THE DESCENT INTO THE EVERYDAY AND ITS DIFFUSION

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Performance Art and the Anti-Art Debates in Four Acts Act One: Tōno Yoshiaki in the Spotlight, 1960 Act Two: Starring Miyakawa Atsushi, 1964 Act Three: Ishiko Junzō, after 1967 Act Four: Tone Yasunao, circa 1970 Anti-Art Performance

73 73 76 78 81 84

PART II

THE EVOLUTION OF ANTI -ART PERFORMANCE

91

CHAPTER 4

A PRE-HISTORY OF ANTI-ART PERFORMANCE

93

FROM THE 1950S TO GUTAI

1. 1957 as a Starting Point 2. 1970 as an End Point 3. The Age of Kyūshū-ha and Zero Jigen

93 95 96

Contents

23

4. Pre-history 1: MAVO 5. Pre-history 2: Jikken Kōbō 6. Pre-history 3: Gutai CHAPTER 5

WAVES OF DEMONSTRATION (1957–1959)

97 99 99 109

ACTION INFORMEL

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. CHAPTER 6

Shinohara Ushio: Action in the Mass Media Kudō Tetsumi: From Action to Body Kazakura Shō: Objet-ification of the Body Itoi Kanji and Unbeat: Organically Generated Action Kyūshū-ha: Farmers’ Festivities in the City

DIRECT ACTION AND ANTI-ART (1960–1963)

109 112 114 116 118 123

FROM PUBLICITY TO PROVOCATION

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

A Youthful Spring of Happenings The Neo Dada Artists Unbeat’s Coming-of-Age Group Ongaku Meets the Artists Returning from the U.S. Intervention as Expression League of Criminals: Violating the Border of the Politics and Popular Culture 7. VAN and Jikan-ha: Provoking the Audience 8. The Launch of Hi-Red Center 9. The Fieldwork of Mizukami Jun 10. The Early Experiments of Zero Jigen 11. The Middle Period of Kyūshū-ha: An Attempt at Audience Participation 12. The Last Yomiuri Independent Exhibition 13. The Beginnings of Joint Performance Events 14. Interventions and Provocations CHAPTER 7

ONTO THE STREETS! AWAY FROM THE CAPITAL! (1964–1965)

123 125 130 133 136 138 141 144 146 147 149 151 155 162 171

THE SPREAD OF ACTION-EXPRESSION

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

The Outskirts of Art Performance at Regional Independent Exhibitions A Watershed Moment: The Gifu Independent Into the Space of the City Joint Performance Events Artists at Crossroads Activities of Individual Artists

171 173 175 179 182 190 191

24Contents

CHAPTER 8

ANGURA CULTURE AND HAPPENINGS (1966–1968)

197

THE RITUALISTS AT HIGH TIDE

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Pre-Expo ’70: the Crossover between Angura and Intermedia The Spread of Intermedia Events A Stage Named Shinjuku Happenings Hit the Media Jack Society and the Public at Large The Mass Media Strategies of Chida Ui, Koyama Tetsuo, and Chiba Eisuke  7. Ritualists, Assemble! 1: May Day and Other Outdoor Spaces 8. Ritualists, Assemble! 2: The Stage of Low Culture  9. The Ritualists’ Climax 1: Insanity Trade Fair (Honmoku-tei Theater) 10. The Ritualists’ Climax 2: Grand Insanity Trade Fair (Iino Hall) 11. Movements in Kansai: From Remandaran to The Play 12. Quest for the Commune 13. The Recognition and Spread of Happenings CHAPTER 9

THE VARIOUS ANTI-EXPOS (1969–1970)

197 199 201 204 207 210 212 217 219 222 227 233 234 247

FROM REVOLT TO A REVOLUTION IN CONSCIOUSNESS

1. The Beginning of the End 2. From Intermedia to Ibento (Event) 3. The Rise and Fall of Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group  4. The Aims of Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group  5. The Rituals of Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group 6. The “Suicide” of Collective Kumo 7. Ibento Spread to Provincial Cities 8. Challenging the Arts/Systems 9. The Transformation of The Play 10. A New Generation of Collective Action: From “Underground” into the Light of Day  11. From the City into Nature: Toward Open, Fluid Spaces 12. Anti-Art Artists after 1970 CHAPTER 10

THE RISE AND FALL OF ANTI-ART PERFORMANCE

247 250 251 255 258 261 262 265 268 270 275 278 289

FROM ACTION TO ACTIVISM

1. From “Public Demonstration” to “Publicity” to “Autonomous Performance” 289 2. From “Intervention” to “Independence” to “Diffusion” 290 3. From “Individual” to “Collective” to “Collective of Collectives” to “Network”  291 4. From “Event” to Ibento 292 5. New Social Spaces: The Street and the Mass Media 293 6. Beyond the Political: Toward Cultural Reformation 294 7. Anti-Art and Performance 295 8. On the Development of Individual Artists and Groups 296

Contents

25

PART III TRAJECTORIES OF ANTI -ART PERFORMERS

299

CHAPTER 11

301

KYŪSHŪ-HA THE FOLK IN THE CITY

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. CHAPTER 12

Kyūshū-ha and Anti-Art Early Period: Painting (1957–59) Middle Period 1: Objets (1960–61) Middle Period 2: Happenings and Installations (1962–64) Late Period (1965–68) The Avant-Garde in Transition: Farm Folk and Urban Masses

ASAI MASUO

301 302 305 306 307 308 315

DREAMING OF REVOLUTION FROM THE BOTTOM

1. Pioneering the Commune 2. Children as Subjects 3. “Rise Up, Organizers of the Bottom Zenith!”: Revolution from the Far Margins 4. Jōmon Festival 5. After the Jōmon Festival 6. Dreaming of Revolution from the Bottom Zenith CHAPTER 13

ZERO JIGEN

315 317 319 321 323 325 331

BODIES REVOLTING AGAINST MODERNITY

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. CHAPTER 14

A Zero Jigen Revival? Proto Zero Jigen (1960–62) Early Period (1963–64) Middle Period (1965–68) Anti-Expo (1969) Late Period (1970–72) Key Features of Zero Jigen’s Rituals

KUROHATA

331 332 333 335 342 343 345 355

POLITICAL THEATER ON THE STREET

CHAPTER 15

1. From Leftists to the Ritualists 2. Religious Rituals and Political Theater 3. Ascent and Demise

360

KOYAMA TETSUO

365

355 357

A VISCERAL REBELLION

1. Jack Society 2. “Dating” with Chida Ui 3. Solo Career

365 366 368

26

CHAPTER 16

Contents

KOKUIN

373

THE SEARCH FOR A REVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

CHAPTER 17

1. Secession from “Art” 2. The Rituals of Kokuin 3. Ever-Expanding Mind Revolution

373

WOMEN PERFORMERS

383

374 376

CHALLENGE AND ISOLATION

CHAPTER 18

1. Absent Entirely? Few in Number? Or Just Underestimated? 2. The Erasure of the Body: Tanaka Atsuko, Ono Yōko, Shiomi Mieko 3. Challenge to Femininity: Kishimoto Sayako, Chida Ui, Tabe Mitsuko 4. Gender, Underground

383

ITOI KANJI

391

384 386 388

DADAIST DEVOTEE

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. CHAPTER 19

The Legend of Itoi Spiritual Life of the Wartime Generation Body of Steel The Plastic Arts as Shumi (1951–62) From Objet to Action (1962–64) The Evolution and End of Action (1966–70) The Performance of Itoi Kanji The Voices of Rage Now Quiet

COLLECTIVE KUMO

391 392 393 394 402 405 410 413 419

THE TOTAL NEGATION OF EXPRESSION

1. The Logic of Negation 2. First Period: From Zelle to the Spider Uprising 3. Second Period: From the Kokura Happening to Crazy Grand Rally of the Three Deformed Sects 4. Third Period: From Anti-Competition Actions to the Denshūkan High School Struggle 5. Fourth Period: The Obscenity Trial 6. From Body to Concept 7. Ecstasy

419 421 424 429 430 432 435

Contents

27

PART IV THE SPIRIT OF ANTI -ART PERFORMANCE

441

CHAPTER 20

443

THE NETHER REGIONS OF THE BODY RITUALS IN SECULAR SPACE

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. CHAPTER 21

The Nether Regions of the Body Secular Space: The City and The Media Performance as Ritual Why Ritual? Memories of Traditional Body Culture

THE NETHER REGIONS OF THE CITY

443 445 448 449 452 457

FROM SUKIMA TO ANGURA

CHAPTER 22

1. Lost Rituals, Ritual Losses 2. Shinjuku: Big Niche in the Big City 3. The Nether Regions of the City: Earth, Garbage, and Body

459

THE NETHER REGIONS OF CULTURE

467

457 462

MARGINAL ART AND THE QUEST FOR POPULARITY

1. 2. 3. 4. CHAPTER 23

Marginal Art The Masses in the Post-Anpo Period Kitsch as a Popular Aesthetic From Popularity to Anti-Art

467

THE NETHER REGIONS OF THE POLITICS

479

470 473 475

UNDERCURRENTS OF REVOLT

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

The Generation of Anti-Art Performers and Their Political Action The Political Experience of the Artists The Ethics of Apolitical Revolt “Direct Action” in the Media From “Art and Politics” to “The Politics of Art” Anarchy of the Body The City and Asphalt

Afterword for Myself Another Afterword, Twelve Years On  Groups mentioned throughout the book Chronology  Bibliography Illustration credits Index of Subjects Index of Names

479 482 484 489 490 494 498

505 509 513 519 709 727 734 745

Translation Credits

Part I Prologue and Chapters 1–3 translated by Andrew Maerkle Part II Chapters 4–6 translated by Shima Yumiko, Jason M. Beckman, editorial assistance: ­A lice Kiwako Ashiwa Chapters 7–10 translated by Shima Yumiko, Jenny Preston, editorial assistance: Alice Kiwako Ashiwa Part III Chapters 11–13 translated by Daniel González Chapter 14 translated by Jenny Preston Chapter 15 translated by Giles Murray Chapters 16–17 translated by Claire Tanaka Chapters 18–19 translated by Daniel González Part IV Chapter 20–23 and Afterwords translated by Claire Tanaka Chronology Translated by Sarah Allen, William Andrews, Grant Hargus, and KuroDalaiJee English translation edited by Jason M. Beckman

Notes on the Translation

Names are rendered in the original Japanese order, with surnames first. The names of artist groups have been either transliterated or translated according to what seemed most appropriate to the author and translators. They will be capitalized but not be italicized or enclosed in quotations marks. Refer to pp. 513–7 for a list of group names in the original Japanese, along with their pronunciations. For the sake of privacy, some of the individuals appearing in this book have asked to remain anonymous. Those persons will be identified by their initials. The names of events and exhibitions have generally been translated into English for accessibility, but we have included romaji titles where necessary, as well as the original titles in Japanese for the major events, for cross-referencing and research purposes. Major and recurring exhibitions will not be italicized, whereas events and other exhibitions will be. The names of artworks, books, articles, essays, films and performances will commonly appear in Romanized Japanese with an English translation following in parentheses in the first instance. The bibliography contains the original titles for all reference materials in romaji. Taking into account the value of the source material, care has been taken to preserve original citations and references. This translation was made possible through an extensive collaboration between the author, editor, translators and support staff. The utmost effort was made to remain true to the original text, ensure a consistency across all of the translations (though of course allowing for natural variations in translation styles), and to allow the voice and insights of the author to shine through and reach new audiences.

PROLOGUE

Underground Constellation

It is intermission at the theater. A small man gets on stage with a piano stool, sits down, and then falls over backward, his body and the stool slamming against the ground together. He gets up, sits down, falls over again. He keeps repeating this act of harming his own body. (Kazakura Shō, c. 1957) A young man in a cap walks around with clusters of lightbulbs strung by metal wires from his tattered shirt, then crawls down the main avenue in Ginza. (Masuzawa Kinpei, 1960, see also p. 129) At the beach in the dead of night, a man single-mindedly digs a hole in the sand with a spade. When the tide rushes in and he can no longer dig, the man starts a new hole right beside the old one and digs, and digs, and digs. (Miyazaki Junnosuke, 1962) In the darkness stands a row of crosses with people bound to them. A cow’s head is strung up from the ceiling, and swarms of geckos scuttle across the floor. Snakes and chickens are killed, their innards pulled out for offering on an altar while a stripper dances. (Okishima Isao, 1962) A man in a loincloth with cloth wrapped around his head runs through Ginza while raising a bundle of red fabric wrapped in newspaper, evoking the Olympic torch. The man’s loincloth slides down as he runs. (Itoi Kanji, 1964) In the heart of Shinjuku’s entertainment district, a woman cloaked in a red cape and a man with mannequin heads dangling all over his body take turns applying makeup to each other’s faces as hundreds of passersby look on. (Chida Ui and Koyama Tetsuo, 1966, see p. 211 and plate 11, p. 8) Men dressed in suits with rising sun-emblem hachimaki tied around their heads and ceremonial red-and-white ropes coiled around their bodies skip rhythmically while carrying Japanese futon bedding through the streets of Shinjuku. (Zero Jigen, 1967, see plate 20, p. 13)

32

PROLOGU E———UNDERGROUND CONSTELL ATION

Clad in nothing but gas masks and military leg wraps, a group of naked men march briskly through a Shinjuku shopping arcade while each holding one arm aloft in a salute-like gesture. (Zero Jigen, 1968, see plate 21, p. 13) At the plaza outside Shinjuku Station’s west exit, two men dressed as monks set fire to effigies of themselves in homage to Yui Chūnoshin, the Japanese peace activist who had recently immolated himself in protest of the Vietnam War. (Kurohata, 1967, see plate 15, p. 10) A man shits on a plate, then dips apples in it and throws them at the audience. (Koyama Tetsuo, 1968, see p. 221) Bearing a mannequin on their shoulders, three men in loincloths and jackets turn up at a Shinjuku disco popular with hippies. Two women pull sausages out from the mannequin’s loincloth and eat them with forks. (Kokuin, 1968, see pp. 375–6) A group of naked men and women in helmets stand on the balcony of a barricaded university building while holding one arm aloft. (Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group, 1969, see plate 25, p. 15) A man in a yukata robe and woman in a formal kimono attempt to have sex in the middle of traffic in central Fukuoka. (Collective Kumo, 1970, see plate 27, p. 16)

* * * From the early 1960s and on into the 1970s, a series of inexplicable acts were carried out continuously, if fragmentarily and spasmodically, across Japan. Far from an organized movement, these prank-like acts, which left viewers so disgusted that the very act of viewing was shameful to them, seemed to be devoid of political or artistic necessity. Yet when one looks closely into the phenomenon—a complete view of which escaped even those most sympathetic to it at the time—it becomes apparent that the actions of the “Anti-Art performers,” as they are referred to in this book, did in fact share certain commonalities in style and spirit. What drove these people, who were graced with a fair degree of intelligence and artistic sensibility, to enact such foolery? With their cool intellect and canny eye for staging, what was the point of their taking these actions so

Prologue— PROLOGU E———U NDERGROU nderground ND CONSTELL Constellation ATION

33

seriously—actions that appeared to be neither political demonstration nor artistic expression, and yet were not driven by madness or a desire for celebrity either? When, upon his death in 1894, Gustave Caillebotte bequeathed his collection of Impressionist paintings to the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, the painter and then-president of the Académie des Beaux-Arts Jean-Léon Gérôme objected vociferously to the donation, saying that it was all the work of “anarchists” (anarchistes) and “crazies” ( fous).1 Gérôme argued that the state’s acceptance of such “garbage” (ordures) would warrant “a great deal of moral chastening” (une bien grande flétrissure morale).2 More so than criticism as such, these words presaged the aversion society and common sense would feel toward a European avant-garde art that grew increasingly radical entering the twentieth century. That the Anti-Art performers of 1960s Japan addressed in this book were also subject to similar abuse, then, should come as no surprise. But there is no chance of their ever sharing the same destiny as that of the early twentieth-century avant-garde who emerged after the Impressionists, whose works are now presented as masterpieces, sold for tens of millions of dollars, and institutionally valued and preserved. Nor can they even hope to follow the same path as those few avant-garde artists from the 1960s who are now acknowledged by and enjoy a high status in Japanese society. This is not (just) because their works no longer exist, nor is it (just) because they were dismissed as a mere vulgar phenomenon; it is because they were never anointed as “avant-garde art” in the first place, let alone written into history. But their embrace of anarchy, whether naïve or strategic, was always a political choice, and it reflected a highly human and ethical stance in which the political was inseparable from their way of life. Was Anti-Art performance really so insignificant, or was it in fact an essential and even creative act rooted in the political and cultural conditions of the time? How could this expression go so historically neglected and unappreciated? Even if a history of Anti-Art performance were to be written, it would be akin to a constellation in the darkness, appearing to form a meaningful shape one moment and then returning to a random scattering of light the next, depending on the perception of the viewer. The past is not there to be beautified by nostalgia—or exoticism for that matter—which is to say, as a comfort that legitimates our living in the here and now. Enabling us to question our current standing and vision as well as the limits of our consciousness, it is rather like a massive, underground convulsion, sending out fault lines that, without our even knowing, have the power to overturn our entire world. So what was Anti-Art performance, anyway? NOTES 1.

“Enquete: A propos de la donation Caillebotte,” Journal des Artistes, April 8, 1894. For discussion of Gérôme’s response in Japanese see Okaya Kōji, Kaiga no naka no nettai: Dorakurowa kara Gōgyan e [The tropics in painting: From Delacroix to Gauguin] (Tokyo:

Heibonsha, 2005), 48–49; and Inaga Shigemi, Kaiga no tasogare: Eduāru Mane botsugo no tōsō [The twilight of painting: The posthumous struggle over Édouard Manet] (Nagoya: Nagoya University Press, 1997), 55. 2. “Enquete,” 48–49.

Koyama Tetsuo in Vitamin Show • January 1, 1968 • Sukiyabashi, Tokyo • (see p. 368)

PART I

TOWARD A HISTORY OF ANTI-ART IN PERFORMANCE

CHAPTER 1

The Nether Regions of Art, Art History’s Private Parts Is a History of Performance Art Possible?

要するにこのように混沌とした状況内で、情報化がイコール管理化であるような社会体 制の整備が進みつつあるとすれば、われわれは表現ないし文化の問題を、普遍的・世 界的な〈美〉の問題以前に、いわば個別的・私人的な日常生活の地平から、根本的に問 い直してみなければなるまい。そしてそこには、芸術と呼ぶ必要も呼ばれる必要もない 表現が、生活者の身体性ともいうべき、 〈歴史〉の一様式として、さまざまに開花してい るはずなのである。 石子順造

Essentially, if we assume that the implementation of a social system in which informatization equals control continues to advance under these chaotic conditions, then prior to the universal/global problem of beauty, we must try to fundamentally reevaluate the problem of expression or culture from the, say, particular/private horizon of everyday life. And that’s when all manner of expressions that we need not refer to as art and which themselves have no need of being referred to as art will flourish as the mode of history we might call the embodiedness of the living person.1 —Ishiko Junzō

1.

THE AIM AND STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK

Anarchy of the Body examines the still-unrecognized practices of a cohort of avant-garde artists active in Japan during the years 1957–70. In particular, this book focuses on the forms of bodily expression that emerged out of the specific contexts of the place, society, and history of Japan at that time—especially experiments in performance art that emerged out of Anti-Art in the early 1960s—and gives thought to their cultural, social, and political significance. In part I, I identify the omission of performance from the criticism and historical narratives of Japanese postwar art to date, and point out issues underlying that omission, before addressing the potential for performances by artists to reveal important aspects of not just postwar art but also the culture, society, and politics of the time. I then analyze two recurring concepts in the book, performance and Anti-Art, before proceeding to specific historical accounts in parts II and III. Part II is divided into five periods covering the years 1957–59, 1960–63, 1964–65, 1966–68, and 1969–70. In these chapters I sketch out the characteristics of performance art in relation to the social conditions of each period and provide an overview of relevant artists as I trace the interactions and collaborations between Anti-Art performers. Part III covers individual artists and groups who innovated singular ideas and forms of expression but have been obscured among the general tendencies and multiple lineages of artists and groups introduced in part II.

38

PART I———TOWARD A HISTORY OF ANTI-ART IN PERFORMANCE

In part IV, I discuss the corporeal, ritualistic, and popular characteristics of Anti-Art performance in relation to the historical developments of the preceding two parts. After examining the political, cultural, and social conditions that produced those characteristics, I conclude the book by elucidating the latent potential of Anti-Art performance and the issues it raises for the present. 2.

REVIEWING THE HISTORY OF POSTWAR JAPANESE ART

In the course of researching this book, I gained an acute awareness of the sheer diversity of art practices that (as of 2010) existed a half-century ago in the not-so-distant past, as well as the magnitude of their complex intersections. I was struck by the realization that only a small fraction of that material has been addressed by critics, curators, and art historians to date. This oversight is related to a number of factors. Within the realm of avant-garde art, which goes largely unrecognized at a societal level (and all the more so in the absence of Western-style patronage), a substantial number of artists in postwar Japan emerged not just in the Tokyo metropolitan area but also in regional cities. Moreover, the 1960s saw a rapid proliferation of both alternative means of artistic expression and also sites of artistic practice. To be sure, not everything that happens becomes part of “history.” Since history is always a product of conscious and unconscious selection/exclusion, artistic evaluations inevitably stand on some sort of political or social power structure. Such selections and exclusions themselves seem to be inevitable, since structures of dominant/dominated— including the fundamental relationship between “the narrator” and “the narrated”—are reflected in the act of writing (and of publishing) to varying degrees according to the prestige of the author (or publisher). And this is as much the case for the historical practices that include art history as it is for other academic disciplines such as cultural anthropology or ethnography. Yet to disregard those existing power structures or to remain silent about their influence is to in effect offer tacit approval; alternatively, these structures can be opposed by presenting as many voices from other positions as possible, along with histories constituted by verified facts, that together establish a degree of consistency and narrative unity. This approach is already well established, not only in the realm of historiography, but also in other academic fields and political practices, almost to the point of becoming an orthodoxy itself. Still, it is only by means of constant questioning, and the piling of yet more questions upon those initial questions—as though playing both tsukkomi (straight man) and boke (funny man) at the same time—that we can at least partially reclaim the richness of the world we live in. My attempt here at writing a history of performance in Japanese postwar avant-garde art is intended as just such an intervention.2 So far, the only comprehensive overviews of Japanese postwar art history that include early 1960s Anti-Art are Hariu Ichirō’s Sengo bijutsu seisuishi (The rise and fall of postwar art, 1979) and Chiba Shigeo’s Gendai bijutsu itsudatsushi, 1945–1985 (History of deviations in contemporary art, 1945–1985, 1986).3 Although it is not comprehensive in a strict sense, Sawaragi Noi’s Nihon, gendai, bijutsu (Japan/contemporary/art, 1998) surveys important developments in postwar art, while more divergent contributions

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range from Yoshida Yoshie’s memoir-style account of the period, Kaitaigeki no maku orite: Rokujū nendai zen’ei bijutsushi (The curtain falls on deconstruction theater: A history of 1960s avant-garde art, 1982) to Thomas R. H. Havens’s Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts: The Avant-Garde Rejection of Modernism (2006), which extends its scope to butoh and music. 4 Studies on 1960s Japanese art that have appeared since the publication of the Japanese edition of this book include William Marotti’s Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (2013), which focuses on the politics of artist Akasegawa Genpei and the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, and Tomii Reiko’s Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (2016), on the practices of Matsuzawa Yutaka, The Play, and GUN.5 Meanwhile, Japanese institutions have organized a number of important exhibitions focusing on the art of the 1960s. These include The 1960’s: A Decade of Change in Contemporary Japanese Art, held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, in 1981–82; Trends of Japanese Art in the 1960s, held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in 1983; and Japanese Art 1960s: Japanese Summer 1960–64, held at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito, in 1997. Exhibitions specifically addressing the genealogy of Anti-Art include Japanese Anti-Art: Now and Then, held at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, in 1991, and a survey of broader cultural production from the year 1968, 1968: Art in the Turbulent Age, held at the Chiba City Museum of Art and other venues in 2018. Also of note is Japanese Women Artists in Avant-Garde Movements, 1950–1975, an exhibition dedicated to female avant-garde artists that was held at the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts in 2005. Overseas, important scholarly exhibitions have also been held at institutions ranging from Museum of Modern Art Oxford (now known as Modern Art Oxford) and Centre Pompidou in Europe to the Guggenheim Museum Soho (in tandem with the Yokohama Museum of Art) and New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the United States.6 Additionally, pioneering exhibitions of archival materials have been held at Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf (the current Museum Kunstpalast) and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.7 These survey-style studies and exhibitions have been supplemented by monographic essays and exhibitions,8 and the dedicated research of curators at Japanese museums, and of academics in Japan, the United States, and Europe, continues to build on these precedents. It is true that these major Japanese and international exhibitions have tended to make the 1960s avant-garde a point of focus, and that they have established the significance of performative experiments, especially those by the early Gutai Art Association and Hi-Red Center, in that movement. Organizing such exhibitions has been a race against time, as not just works but also witnesses and records of performances have disappeared as the years have passed. Documents that exhibition organizers have discovered and the new perspectives/issues they have put forward are of tremendous value (which may indeed be one justification for having such a huge number of more or less superfluous art museums all across Japan). In tandem with advances in this period/­artist/ theme-based research, the expansion of art-historical approaches in recent years has provided an impetus for us to gradually free ourselves from the prevailing vision of art in Japan: one that emphasizes form over social context, that seeks legitimation in correspondences with the Western canon and which is appraised according to the established academic or social recognition of those works, such that it is ultimately constituted by

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“masterpieces” and “important works” selected exclusively from among extant works (genzon sakuhin). Or so one would like to think, when in fact each discrete monograph is still far removed from being integrated into a comprehensive master narrative, and it will still be some time before the “mainstream” narrative of the period—namely, the progression from Gutai to Mono-ha (School of Things) from the late 1950s to the late 1960s—can be changed by theories informed by the accumulation of evidence that sheds light on new truths. The artist performances featured in this book have been marginalized in histories of art that are based on the idea of “the artwork” (i.e., a work of art that can endure as an object). While it may be due in part to the breadth of his narrative scope, Hariu barely covers performance in Sengo bijutsu seisuishi, the sole comprehensive history of the postwar avant-garde that predates the exhibitions listed above. And while Chiba touches on performances by early Gutai, Hi-Red Center, Group I, and artists involved in Bijutsuka Kyōtō Kaigi (Artists Joint-Struggle Council, hereinafter “Bikyōtō”), he does not address (or simply ignores) the multitude of other performance practices that did not apply to his theoretical framework. Informed by a subcultural perspective that Hariu and Chiba lacked, Sawaragi’s Nihon, gendai, bijutsu was ground-breaking in the attention it paid to artists and groups such as Itoi Kanji and Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension), as well as others in their circles who had been largely ignored by critics and curators. But because Sawaragi, unlike Hariu and Chiba, never intended to write a comprehensive history, he goes no further than to raise those artists and groups as material for a future examination of concepts of the avant-garde (zen’ei) in Japanese art since the interwar period of the Taishō (1912–1926) and early Shōwa (1926–1989) eras. Though not a comprehensive history, Yoshida’s Kaitaigeki no maku orite is a precious resource. This vividly composed work provides contemporaneous testimony on the activities of groups such as Neo Dadaism Organizers (hereinafter “Neo Dada”), Kyūshū-ha, and Jikan-ha (School of Time), events such as the Yomiuri Independent and Akasegawa Genpei’s Model 1,000-Yen Note Trial, and phenomena such as the films of the VAN Film Science Research Institute (hereinafter “VAN”), the rise of butoh, and the anti-­ Expo movement, and situates these artistic zōhan (rebellions) in the political context of the time. As I detail later, Yoshida ran his own kind of alternative space as an organizer (what would now be called a curator) of performances and events, and is effectively the sole critic who expressed strong sympathies with performers in both his practice and critical writing, which spanned a wide range of genres. Yet as much as it identifies with contemporary artists who come from a consistently antiestablishment position, ­Yoshida’s book does not necessarily pose a challenge to conventional art history beyond its value as a historic document. On the other hand, the institutional and spatial restrictions of the exhibition format loom large over most of the exhibitions mentioned above. Art without an extant work (as a material object) tends to be automatically excluded from the scope of exhibition (and therefore research), and even when that is not the case, it is the extant works (which as objects remain) that take center stage (to the survivor go the spoils), while lost works or performances and events that are represented through photographic or moving-image documentation are relegated to a supporting role. Indeed, it is technically almost impossible to present works conceived as actions or events (for which such

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documentation that exists is generally treated as secondary reference material) on equal terms in an exhibition with works-as-objects. And there are further limitations to the medium of the exhibition: the reliance on canonization and mythmaking in order to justify the expense of public funding (mainly taxpayer money), and the restrictions on discourse and display that come with state-run institutions. These factors make it extremely difficult to exhibit anything that the general public might have trouble perceiving as something with value or meaning, let alone anything that addresses politically taboo or sexual/violent content deemed “inappropriate” for an educational institution.9 3.

THE EXCLUSION OF POLITICALITY

It is no surprise that Gutai and Mono-ha have both been widely exhibited and praised internationally (namely, in the United States and Europe). Aside from the important role they both play in Chiba’s analysis, another thing that connects them is their combination of an experimentality that is readily apparent to “outsiders”—their formal methods are clear and innovative even to Westerners—with a sensibility that is easy to link to East Asian aesthetics, which rejects the artificial processing/manipulation of natural materials. But assessments of Gutai and Mono-ha tend to omit the complexity of the society that produced those works and practices, the reasoned defiance hidden within brutality, and the politics that lies on the other side of aesthetics. There is no denying the impression that something is missing from the narrative of Japanese postwar art that is summed up as a progression from Gutai to Mono-ha. This is a narrative that is all too contained within the realm of aesthetics. It conveys almost nothing of the realities that artists (not all of whom came from privileged backgrounds or could sustain their practices without concern for their livelihoods) were experiencing at a turbulent time, nor does it convey those artists’ audacity in confronting political/ social issues, or, at the other extreme, their abjection. In particular, the same omissions occur even in discussions of 1960s art—precisely where one would expect to find a sense of the real world and politics, produced as it was during a time of citizen- and student-led political uprising and counterculture. This problem relates back to the lack of extant works. If the reason that works were not (or could not be) preserved has less to do with the artists than the general society constituted by audiences and cultural authorities, then the implication is that either such works never existed in the first place for the society, or that they have been erased from history by the society. And this appears to be a result of not just physical issues (disparities between the constrained living spaces of major cities and spectacle-oriented exhibition spaces) but also the perceptual/intellectual frameworks of the critics, journalists, curators, and researchers who shape the discourse of art history. There is a vision of art still at large in contemporary society which assumes practices that took place outside elite circles, outside the Western world, or outside major urban centers “never happened,” or labels them mere “epigones” or “derivatives” and further dismisses them as “not art”—even at a time when cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and feminist theory have greatly expanded the possibilities for art history. The problem this absence or exclusion of social connections and politics in art history poses for criticism in Japan is underscored by the controversy that unfolded in

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1996–97 over the exhibition Shedding Light on Art in Japan, 1953, organized by Minemura Toshiaki and his colleagues at Tama Art University in cooperation with Tokyo’s Meguro Museum of Art. Focusing not on an artist, group, genre, or region, but rather on a single year was indeed a bold choice, and there were interesting attempts to show the role avant-garde art played in bringing about urban consumer culture through the inclusion of interdisciplinary projects incorporating design or photography, or window displays by Okamoto Tarō. But the organizers completely left out the first Nippon Exhibition, which was launched in 1953 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, as well as the works of reportage painting that made their appearance there, such as Yamashita Kikuji’s The Tale of Akebono Village (1953), which “put a very heavy emphasis on social themes.”10 Writing in the exhibition catalogue, Minemura argues that few of these works could be said to have “a format [formal autonomy] with the unique strength required to fully support their weighty themes.”11 Others, including Ikeda Tatsuo and Hariu Ichirō, took issue with this in their critiques of the show, to which Minemura responded with rebuttals in turn, leading to a debate that unfolded over more than half a year in the pages of the Japanese art press.12 Examining the finer details of the debate, one can see that Minemura was attempting to present an original viewpoint on the art of the era. But, more importantly, the debate exposed two incompatible “stances.” As Hariu puts it: One stance thinks of [artistic autonomy] as something to be obtained on its own through the expression of all kinds of issues of censorship, economics, society, and culture by the intrinsic function of art, and the other seeks to preemptively fence off the intrinsic territory of art to perfect its thought within that domain—and in this arena I have drawn up, Minemura’s rebuttals all retreat to the latter stance.13

This confrontation exposed the presence at the time of a tenacious conservatism and exclusivism, spanning from academia to the contemporary art world, that would subsequently resurface in debates over feminism and art involving art historians, critics and journalists.14 Indeed, in the case of those who sought to dismiss feminism as imported ideology or claimed that it was becoming dogmatic, it became clear that protecting the “intrinsic territory of art” was cover for a desire to defend nationalism and male privilege. What can we do to attend to not just the “territory” (ryōiki) of art but also its “function” (kinō), to preserve and transmit the realities of art practices that reflect a social aspect, whether the political ideologies of the time or the conditions that constrain the lives and creativity of women? And what do we then stand to gain? One possibility here is to orient ourselves through the living human body, and to reevaluate artworks-as-objects as well as all other art practices according to their relation to the body. For no matter how art becomes conceptualized or commodified, and no matter how our living environments may be urbanized, electrified, networked, or overloaded with information, the material medium of the body is the one thing that can never be divorced from the reality of human life. For the body is where the realities of living, as well as any histories and societal or personal memories that resist abstraction, become embedded. Even when correspondences between art and the sociopolitical conditions of the time have been addressed in texts and exhibitions like those mentioned above, the presence of

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nikutai (the body) in art has been suppressed and excluded. Yet there is nothing else that responded so profoundly to the specific reality of the time and place of 1960s Japan as the corporeal expression (nikutai hyōgen) that was so often abhorred by the highbrow and “tasteful” critics, historians, and curators of the era. Might it be possible to critically reassess the “orthodoxies” of postwar Japanese art by shedding light on the bodily expression that took place outside the art historical mainstream? 4.

IS A HISTORY OF JAPANESE PERFORMANCE ART POSSIBLE?

Taking up the above proposition, I have attempted to write a history of performance by artists in Japan in the 1960s. To put it more precisely, this book focuses on: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Bodily expression in Japan by artists emerging out of Anti-Art practices from 1957 to 1970

“Bodily expression” (shintai hyōgen) refers to forms of performance that use the body as their primary means of expression and which cannot be subsumed into existing genres such as dance, theater, or music. “Emerging out of anti-Art practices” is a highly complex issue in both artistic and social terms, with ramifications for the ultimate aim of this book. And “from 1957 to 1970” designates the period when Anti-Art made its appearance in Japanese art before gradually evolving into the anti-Expo ’70 movement (Hanpaku). As these three conditions are addressed in detail in the ensuing chapters—“Bodily expression” in chapter 2, “Anti-Art” in chapter 3, and “1957–1970” in chapter 4—the space here will suffice to elaborate on the relatively straightforward “in Japan” and “by artists.” I will start by addressing the condition “in Japan.” Even with the abovementioned developments in research on Japanese avant-garde art at both Japanese and international institutions in recent years, it is near impossible to find studies undertaken with a view toward a history of performance by artists, in distinction to the disciplines of theater, dance, or music.15 On the other hand, many of the contemporaneous writings by artists and critics were concerned with introducing and explicating the latest trends in the United States and Europe. The few examples that concentrate on practices in Japan each have their limitations—Yoshida’s Kaitaigeki no maku orite included.16 Even where museum exhibitions have featured Gutai or Hi-Red Center, they still tend to privilege extant artworks, and there has yet to be a single exhibition devoted to Japanese performance art.17 Generally, Japanese critics and curators have also avoided extensive analysis of performance art in Japan. This holds true even for the period up to 1967, when a substantial number and breadth of practices emerged in Japan, and hapuningu (happening) became a buzzword in the mass media.18 Although it is possible that critics simply had not seen those performances in person, this situation recalls the 1964 debate over Anti-Art in which, as will be expanded upon in chapter 3, the focus was more on American Pop Art than works actually being made in Japan at the time. Both Happenings and Anti-Art

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were considered to be foreign culture, and their Japanese manifestations got by on being associated with the trends in the United States and Europe. The modern art of the non-West (including that of Japan) often ends up being read through what might be called a history of one-way “importation,” or a narrative of the influence of Western art and its assimilation, modification and establishment in local contexts. Yet the problem is not that the art history of the non-West is treated as a type of history of external exchange in itself. Rather, the problem is the widely held belief that modern art was transmitted unilaterally from the center to the margins (as a result of which, all modern art from the margins is relegated to being imitative or derivative). Overcoming that belief is a precondition for the “import narrative” approach to have any validity today.19 And so Anarchy of the Body does not present performance art in Japan as a narrative of the reception of Western performance. After its birth in the late 1950s and early 1960s, performance art in Japan began to chart diverse trajectories from the late 1960s onward. Minimal at best, the influence of the United States and Europe was not a major factor contributing to the proliferation of performance practices in Japan at this time.20 Instead, this book concentrates on performance art that was produced spontaneously and endogenously by Japanese artists, in response to the realities of Japanese society. This is not intended as a denial of Western influence, and rather comes from a desire to theorize performance art that was necessarily born of motivating factors in Japanese society at the time—inexplicable impulses, or perhaps folk performance and rituals ingrained in the artists’ very bodies. 5.

WHAT MAKES AN ARTIST? DEVIATING FROM THE ARTS

Even restricting the place to Japan and the period to the years 1957–70, the scope of expression that uses the body as its primary medium is still too vast and diverse. This necessitates another condition, “by artists,” to the exclusion of all other forms of expression: the traditional kabuki and noh theaters, modern dance, butoh, drama and experimental music (or any combination thereof), as well as pantomime, street performance, live or broadcast entertainment, sports with a high degree of performativity, such as pro wrestling, and even what is now generally known in contemporary Japanese parlance as “political performance.” That is, on top of its restriction to the specific space-time of 1960s Japan, this book purposely confines itself to bodily expression by bijutsuka (visual artists). This is a condition that cannot be effective without answering fundamental— which is to say, irresolvable—questions about the definition of the word artist, as well as that of art itself. Nevertheless, I will entrust that to the philosophers of art and aesthetics, and merely ask readers to subscribe here to a quasi-sociological definition of an artist as a creator whose mode of expression is initially premised on showing work in exhibitions. In other words, I am talking about performances by anyone who has received systematic instruction in art at a university or other institution offering specialized art courses, or anyone who, for whatever reason, began their practice as an artist (and, more often than not, painter) by making works for exhibition, which I define as a form for presenting works-as-objects to an indefinite number of viewers within a fixed space and

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time. As a rule, I will not be dealing with theater, dance, butoh, experimental music, or other kinds of performance by those who set out with the stage or concert hall as their site of presentation—with the exception of a few cases of sustained collaboration between visual artists and other performers. This stance may not be the most appropriate for assessing the period from the 1960s onward, when divisions between (visual) art, theater, music and other fields of expression were reevaluated and, outwardly at least, multiple genres progressed toward convergence and coexistence. Indeed, this was a time when the boundaries between “art” and “non-art” were being interrogated from within the realm of art itself. Art was expanding and diffusing into everyday real space, the city, and the environment, at the same time as it was becoming polarized between the artwork as material or as concept—and both these poles far removed from conventional understandings of artwork. Why, then, do I return to the framework of art to study forms of expression that deviated from the modern institutional definition of art at that very moment? I might answer that question in two ways: (1) Because, ultimately, forms of bodily expression that could not be categorized as dance, butoh, theater, music, or entertainment tended to be created by people who had visual art backgrounds. (2) And also because the system that validates the pedigree of such forms of expression as art, regardless of the mindset/practice of the individuals who produced them, was established in the 1960s, and has been maintained more or less continuously since then.

To elaborate on the first answer, while most of the performers addressed in this book studied art at a university or private art school, or began their art activities by presenting works at exhibitions, they were amateurs at performance, as barely any of them had training in theater, modern dance, ballet, or pantomime. At best, there may have been some who exhibited remarkable talent in sports or politics or comedy (fodder for the popular weeklies and sports newspapers!), though never on a professional level.21 And even in their performances, painterly and sculptural elements were frequently deployed as stage art, costume, or prop—not only during the initial stages of experimentation but even as the field continued developing. Likewise, many practitioners resumed their careers as visual artists—most of them having started out as painters—after their performance periods (e.g., Nakanishi Natsuyuki); a few even maintained their visual art practice in parallel with their performance (e.g., Iwata Shin’ichi). For all their efforts to escape their dependency on scripts and language by, say, encouraging spontaneous corporeal expression in their actors or intervening into real space, experimental dramaturgs like Kara Jūrō and Terayama Shūji always returned to the use of dialogue. Conversely, hardly any of the performances by artists relied on language, nor were they even carried out at venues equipped with “stages.”22 Notably, there were only a few collaborations between artist performers and those who had pedigrees in theater, dance or music. As exemplified by the productions of Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop) or Hijikata Tatsumi, there are of course countless instances of artists contributing set design or props to performances— but that is not the same as performing. Some co-performances and collaborations took place through the Neo Dada artists, which included Akasegawa Genpei and Kazakura

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Shō, and Group Ongaku (Group Music), formed by graduates of the music department at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (currently Tokyo University of the Arts), as well as Ono Yōko (Yoko Ono23) and other artists who came to be associated with Fluxus and held at Tokyo’s Sogetsu Art Center. But even if we were to add Hijikata’s butoh and Uryū Ryōsuke’s Hakken no Kai (Discovery Society) to these collaborations, or count all of the instances of visual artists participating in music or butoh performances—as in Kazakura’s performance of a “music” piece by Kosugi Takehisa—there are simply not many cases of artists crossing over into other genres as equal contributors. The artists who did the most to bridge art and music were those such as Tone Yasunao, the one member of Group Ongaku who had not majored in music (he had a literature degree), or Mizukami Jun, who had studied law and was also active as a poet and musician. They were both amateurs in the fields of art and music but ended up collaborating on numerous works with visual artists. Following a period of convergence, musicians and visual artists would diverge again at the end of the 1960s. As a result, the majority of transdisciplinary performances would be carried out by people with visual art backgrounds. Returning to the question of “why artists?”—the second answer articulated above is based on the fact that the institution of “contemporary art,” as it exists in Japan today, was gradually established and consolidated during the 1960s. In contrast to the 1950s, when the only options for artists were to either participate in juried exhibitions (including prefectural exhibitions) or independent exhibitions, the 1960s were marked by the rise of the rental gallery. Leasing out exhibition space on a daily or weekly basis, these venues enabled artists to organize their own solo exhibitions and group shows, which would then be reviewed by critics. Over this decade, artists also started to be invited to participate in newspaper-sponsored contemporary art competitions, open-call outdoor sculpture exhibitions, and thematic surveys at public museums, and a new route to stardom emerged, which began with winning prizes and receiving invitations to participate in (European or American) international exhibitions.24 Even as photography, film, and design were being reinvented by a new generation of creators, however, the boundaries between art and other genres remained. An increasingly radical contemporary art found a place for itself at international exhibitions, outdoor sculpture exhibitions, thematic surveys at museums, and in the pages of art publications, but at the same time it appears to have become all the more cut off from other venues and the mainstream media. While it is true that artists were participating in projects alongside musicians, designers, and architects amid the progression from Intermedia and Environment art to Expo art in the late 1960s, they had far fewer opportunities to profit from commissioned works or sales of work, and they still by and large continued to rely on the exhibition as their main mode of presentation. There were a number of music and theater stars in the counterculture, but within the art scene, Yokoo Tadanori was the one standout, though he was still known as a designer at that point—followed, perhaps, by Katō Yoshihiro of Zero Jigen, though his work was not yet even recognized as “art.” The fact that the avant-garde theater and butoh of the late 1960s contributed far more than art to the merging of genres and the dissolution of boundaries between high and low culture tells us something about the relative autonomy (or hermeticism, perhaps) of the field of art. The above explanation is not immediately conducive to affirmative appraisals of artist performances. After all, since artists were amateurs at performance, they could

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manage no better than crude bodily expression; the more disciplined and perfected staging of theater and butoh was beyond them. At best, their actions were viewed as infantile amusements or a passing vulgar phenomenon—mere garnish to theater, music, butoh, or big-budget events—so that, ultimately, the art world was their only refuge. And yet, a perspective that takes this as a positive is not out of the question. It may be that artists chose performance in order to secure critical distance from both the institution of art itself and the forms of expression beyond art that had become codified as genres. What if it was the artists who had escaped to the nonplace of u-topia—to a place/territory that belonged neither to the avant-garde nor the arts nor society, a place where they had no need to feed off of other artistic genres for survival or assimilate with politics or entertainment, let alone depend on the evaluation and circulation systems circumscribed by the field of contemporary art? Such a terrain would no longer be defined simply by genre. 6.

UPPER-ECHELON COURTIERS, BOTTOM-RUNG SAMURAI

As touched on above, histories that were produced (fabricated) from the perspectives of those who enjoyed political/economic/class/race/gender privilege are now under critique in the field of not just art history but history as a whole, and new historical perspectives are being proposed in their place. Advanced by those who have been dominated, oppressed, and marginalized in the relations between white and nonwhite, male and female, European and Asian/African/Latin American, colonizer and colonized/indigenous, or heteronormative and marginalized sexualities, these counter-histories are put to use in myriad ways by artists, critics, and historians alike. And yet, even now, such counter-histories are exposed to harsh treatment, akin to attacks on multiculturalism. As demonstrated by the controversies over the 1953 exhibition and feminism in art, the dominant position still distinguishes between “pure” and “impure” art, viewing the latter as lacking quality or formal autonomy, and even further, asserting that it is unsophisticated and not art at all. On the other hand, the field of cultural studies has contributed to the spread of approaches that do away with the boundaries between high and popular art altogether. Cultural studies researchers instead work with a broadly defined “visual culture” and incorporate sociopolitical critique (often emerging out of postcolonial or feminist theory) into their purview. Most Japanese might assume that cultural studies is yet another Euro-American import, as it is frequently rendered as a katakana loanword, but there is a distinct lineage of this kind of criticism in Japan, from Yanagi Muneyoshi’s writing on mingei and Kon Wajirō’s concept of Modernology (kōgengaku, literally, the scientific study of the modern) in the early twentieth century through to Tsurumi Shunsuke’s theory of marginal art (genkai geijutsu) following World War II, the latter of which will be elaborated on in part IV. Given those precedents, Japanese society and history have much to offer in addressing contemporary issues in creative practice as well. For instance, it is possible to evaluate contemporary Japanese subculture (including socalled otaku culture) from a cultural studies angle. Given that manga, anime, and computer games have become massive industries that benefit from state support, however,

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cultural studies does not seem appropriate for evaluating contemporary subculture as a whole—let alone that of the past—because cultural studies started out as a critique of the British class system, which is to say, as a project for Marxist research into working-class culture,25 and as such it already contains a critique of mainstream culture. In other words, the distinction between high art and popular art is not (just) a flat difference in genres, as it is also already enmeshed in social hierarchies. Social stratifications among those engaged in the production, circulation, and evaluation of art—from artists to critics, journalists, curators, and collectors—also had an effect on art in Japan. As I discuss in part IV, the late 1950s saw the maturation of the mass media, the expansion of transportation networks, rapid economic growth and the stagnation of agriculture, and these social transformations drove a massive population influx into urban centers. During this period, Tokyo became the most populous city in the world, producing a “middle culture” (chūkan bunka, see also the discussion of Katō Hidetoshi on p. 472) for those who were neither “elite” nor “of the people.” The dramatic turn toward homogenization that Japanese society first took at this time was, essentially, a microcosm of the current effects of globalization across the world, with the cultures of diverse regions and classes that were formerly intrinsic to specific localities suddenly all mixed together. Just like the uncanny coexistence of urban/rural and Japanese/Western presaged by Kyūshū-ha (Kyūshū School) and then fully expressed by Zero Jigen, the art scene mixed together people from different classes and local cultures (artists along with both specialist and nonspecialist audiences). This blend of cultures was the context for how the shimin (citizenry) came together as a collective of diverse classes and vocations in the struggle against the renewal of the Japan–U.S. Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security (commonly referred to as the “Anpo” in Japanese), as well as for the rise in interest in popular culture and marginal art. This mixture would become more homogenized and obscured over time, but given that economic/social/community/gender disparities still exist in Japan today, they must have been all the more prevalent around 1960, when the government sought to control rapid urbanization and yet found itself hard-pressed to keep up with it. The artist Shinohara Ushio, who turned to performance as both an intuitive and strategic response to his era, makes an apt comparison in a commemorative text he published in 2006 upon the passing of critic Tōno Yoshiaki. Shinohara describes the musicians, critics, architects, printmakers, and other high-born who flocked around the senior critic Takiguchi Shūzō as “upper-echelon courtiers” (tenjō-bito) who never lacked money for food or drink. By contrast, he refers to himself and the other young and penniless artists in the orbit of Neo Dada as “bottom-rung samurai” ( jige-zamurai), low-ranking members of the samurai caste who worked their own land.26 According to Shinohara, “the two groups never mixed,” and Tōno was the only one who connected them. Shinohara singles out Tokyo’s Minami Gallery as the base of the upper-echelon courtiers, although one could easily throw in the Sogetsu Art Center as well. Sogetsu was the most important venue in Tokyo for performing arts, film and music throughout the 1960s, and while it did host some events where upper-echelon courtiers and bottom-rung samurai shared the stage,27 it was essentially the domain of the musicians, dancers, filmmakers and critics of the former group. This milieu was what motivated the radical filmmaker Adachi Masao to recollect that Sogetsu “had a kind of status check–like threshold to it,”28 the exclusivity of which would lead to the organization’s loss of relevance in the late 1960s.

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The relationship between upper-echelon courtiers and bottom-rung samurai was not merely a matter of class origin. In fact, Shinohara, who had studied at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, was born and lived in the Kōjimachi district of central Tokyo (and his mother was herself an artist of nihonga Japanese-style painting). He was in an advantaged position compared to aspiring artists who had to work fulltime outside of art in order to make a living and who had no opportunity to study art, and also compared to regional artists who were forced to spend considerable time and money in order to reach audiences in Tokyo, where the contemporary art cognoscenti congregated. The remarkable thing about Anti-Art performance is that, although some Anti-Art performers had a degree of economic capital, many practitioners either came from or resided in regions outside the urban centers of Tokyo in the east and Kansai in the west, and many were laborers with minimal education or who otherwise had never received specialized instruction at an art university or other institution. It would seem that in the artistic avant-garde around 1960, upper-echelon courtiers and bottom-rung samurai, along with even lower ranks of artist, all led parallel lives. The diversification of artistic media and exhibition venues meant they could pursue their practices without crossing paths. Even acknowledging that differences in cultural and educational capital do not necessarily equate to class difference as such, it is safe to say that there was stratification between artists. On the one hand were groups like Jikken Kōbō or Gutai. The members of the former were born and raised in Tokyo,29 where young talents from across all fields congregated, and they enjoyed the backing of the aforementioned critic Takiguchi Shūzō, as well as occasional technical support from corporations; the latter was led by the economically and culturally privileged Yoshihara Jirō, scion of a cooking oil company. On the other hand were artists who sought to imbue their works with an Anti-Art-style aura of real life and politicality, and rejected groups like Gutai as being the “experimentation of spoiled rich kids” whose works conveyed no sense of “dynamism in relation to society.”30 Established in 1948 by critic Hanada Kiyoteru and artist Okamoto Tarō, the Avant-garde Art Study Group included a mix of leftist artists and intellectuals (some of whom were members of the Japanese Communist Party). After the group split up, one faction went on to form the nucleus of Jikken Kōbō, while the other turned to Socialist Realism and the reportage painting movement. But the Anti-Art artists of the next cohort, such as Kyūshū-ha, and of an even younger generation, such as Neo Dada and Zero Jigen, subscribed neither to the optimistic formal experiments of Jikken Kōbō and Gutai, nor to prescribed leftist methodologies. The corporeal expression they developed in this context was crude, eschewing both technical and aesthetic (high) artistic sophistication, which was likely one reason for its neglect by elite critics. An uncredited article on Happenings in the May 1967 issue of Bijutsu techō captures an important distinction between the earlier and later generations: whereas Gutai “deployed the results of their Happenings by compressing them into painterly expression,” the events of Neo Dada and Kyūshū-ha were “incidents amid the political climate of the Anpo Struggle.”31 The article likewise establishes a contrast between the “white-collar, edifying sophistication” of an event at the Sogetsu Art Center32 and the “kamikaze [tokkōtai] eroticism” of Zero Jigen. As has been noted by culture critic Hirai Gen, the experimental film of the 1960s was also marked by a disconnect between the “high avant-garde of those like Hanada Kiyoteru who had read the film theories of Balázs and Benjamin

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before anyone else,” and the “rough, low-level avant-garde” of the “massive underclass who had converged on the cities in the 1960s.” Hirai asserts that cinema’s high avant-garde despised the “humidity, the Japanese closedness or, say, enwombment [tainaisei]” of the underground scene.33 A similar antagonism could be found in the art world as well. We might follow Sawaragi Noi in borrowing the terminology of Tsutsui Kiyotada to trace the development of this structure back to the break between the modern art of the Meiji era (1868–1912), which was underpinned by “ex-samurai/wealthy farmer-style nationalism embodied in caste consciousness,” and the avant-garde movements from the Taishō era (1912–1926) onward, which were driven by “lower-middle-class nationalism.” Although the Taishō avant-garde gave rise to right-wing ideology and terrorism during the transition to the early Shōwa era (1926–1989), Sawaragi states that they were also in agreement with popular movements that represented resistance from below, and moreover anticipated Zero Jigen-style “disturbance [sōdō] art” Happenings.34 As I discuss in chapter 4, the anarchist tendencies of 1960s Anti-Art performance have their origins in the Taishō era, when the pioneers of avant-garde performance, such as MAVO and Gekijō no Sanka (Sanka in the Theater), were also born. 7.

FROM HISTORICAL UNCERTAINTIES TO REAL, SHARED FEELINGS

Thus far, I have used this chapter to comment on the inadequacy of the existing historical research on art in Japan in the 1960s, including problems such as the exclusion of politicality from that research, as well as its disregard for cultural stratification and class disparities. Before proceeding to a concrete, chronological narrative and my discussion of individual artists, I should note some of the inevitable challenges in the objective analysis of performance art, explain how those challenges present a fundamental obstacle to performance art studies, and offer ideas about how to overcome them. One of the primary reasons performance art studies is considered to be more challenging than art history is that there is no “work” that remains as objective “evidence.”35 In other words, all one can do is to reconstruct/speculate what happened based on “documentation” and “testimony.” Some of the art events addressed in this book do not even have photographic documentation, let alone film, and in many cases when documentation does exist it is either damaged, dispersed, or missing. Photographs cannot convey movement, duration, or rhythm—or even color, since black-and-white film was still common at the time. And while film can provide a sense of space and movement, it does not really capture the audience reaction or what it was like to be there live, because the recording technology then did not allow for synchronized sound recording. With both photography and film also comes the danger that the event has been reconstructed, or fabricated, or distorted during the filming and editing processes (whether intentionally or due to unconscious errors or lack of technical proficiency) into something markedly different from the actuality. It is only with this caveat that photography and film can be considered the most important sources for researching performance art. Testimonies are the next most important source, whether by the artists themselves or the spectators who saw performances in person. But even when these witnesses are still alive and available for interview, the passage of several decades between event

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and interview inevitably leads to misremembering and the unconscious editing of memories (selection and elimination, along with occasional falsification or mythologization, as also seen with photographic and film documentation). Moreover, as there is no way to gather testimony from the general audience, witnesses tend to have some kind of familiarity with experimental art or film or theater, and so can hardly be called objective observers, as they harbor certain feelings toward the performers. I became keenly aware in conducting my research that many important witnesses were already dead or had recently passed away;36 a year later, or five or ten, the available testimony may have resulted in a completely different picture of the facts. The best one can do is to pursue a relative objectivity by rigorously cross-referencing each testimony against other testimonies, photographs, and textual records. And yet the rewarding part of oral history is that the interview allows the expression of such sentiments as pride, anger, regret, praise, invective, and misapprehension—even tears—to become statements in themselves. Newspaper and journal articles are also key references, but since only a fraction of Anti-Art performance events were covered by the art journals of the time, the popular weekly magazines (and some monthlies) that came into their own in the 1960s are incredibly valuable sources. Oriented toward a popular readership, weekly magazines often focused on the scandalous aspects of Anti-Art performance—but considering that mainstream coverage of contemporary art is almost nonexistent today, they were perhaps the best medium for performers who utilized the sukima (niches, gaps, openings) produced by urban expansion and the dramatic development of information technology. And since, for some performers, being covered by mass media was one of the objectives of expression, the very sensationalism of the popular media is itself a source of information for speculating about the reality of performance practices at the time. As with weekly magazines, television was another mass medium within which sukima were opening at the time, as the spread of household televisions took a tremendous leap in the 1950s. Nevertheless, despite the frequent appearance of performance art on TV, most of that footage is no longer available for viewing, save for a few events that were captured on film.37 Since videotape was so expensive, most broadcasters would record over the same tape multiple times. Some footage may still exist because it was filmed to submit for a contest, or because a member of the film crew happened to keep it for their personal records; everything else, regrettably, is gone. Despite my efforts to conduct interviews and collect documentation, it is possible that some may not recognize the value of such work, as there is no guarantee of its ultimate “objectivity” or “verifiability.” Still, these efforts will not be in vain if all the accumulation and cross-referencing of fragmentary information sourced from diverse media can establish, with a degree of certainty, the existence of a massive movement. Once one is able to use documentation and commentary to validate a work that no longer exists (as an object), and fill in its factual details, yet another major challenge comes along—which is that there was no theory of Japanese performance art as such during this period, nor was there anyone capable of expounding such a theory at the time. There was essentially no artist on the level of an Antonin Artaud or Allan Kaprow as both practitioner and theorist. Akasegawa Genpei and Tone Yasunao perhaps came closest. Not only are Akasegawa’s essays indispensable for understanding the performances that happened among his circle and within their sociopolitical context, but

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his outstanding writing (his talent for combining criticality with sensory detail) is also packed with hints for thinking about the ties between Anti-Art and performance, even if it is not theory per se. Tone’s criticism will be further examined in chapter 3, but as a practitioner he was understandably inclined toward theorizing his own works, notwithstanding the breadth of his friends and collaborators—spanning from Group Ongaku to Bikyōtō!—over the course of the 1960s. Also, fragmentary though it may be, Mizukami Jun’s manifesto (see chap.  8.13, pp. 235–6) is among the most important articulations of the significance of Happenings by an artist of this period. Katō Yoshihiro of Zero Jigen also made numerous statements in articles and penned many essays as well, but decoding his megalomaniac pronouncements and gnarled syntax, which is unrivalled in the art writing of the 1960s, is a tremendous challenge. Meanwhile, Katō’s Zero Jigen colleague Iwata Shin’ichi was fiercely anti-theory. Considering the above, there were in other words almost no artists who could objectively talk about the significance and potential of their own performances, in clear language and with a precise grasp of the broader art historical and social contexts. Looking beyond visual artists, the writings of dramaturg Kara Jūrō and dancer/choreographer Hijikata Tatsumi do not exactly lend themselves to theorization. Of course, since performance art studies has a stronger track record in the U.S. and Europe, it might be possible to apply some of its methodology to information collected through the processes described above, but rather than relying on hasty theorization to elevate certain facts over others, uncovering and sorting through the sheer diversity of performance practices should probably take priority for the moment—as I hold onto my own hope that doing so might still lead to new theories. The challenge of performance history is also the difficulty of tracking the transmission and succession of influence from one artist to another, one practice to another. As critic Nakahara Yūsuke states, performance differs from painting and sculpture in that it firstly has no clear form, so it’s not the kind of thing where one might see a prior performance and think, “if this is performance, then I’ll pick up from where the previous generation left off in making my own performances.” Performance always starts over each time with the ABCs.38

This is due as much to performance’s “form” as a medium that is done in a fixed spacetime with few reenactments (especially in an era when cheap video recording was still not available), as it is to the fact that, in contrast to collectively produced, stage-based performing arts, most artists’ performances were carried out without advance notice or publicity and were set up in such a way that only a limited group of peers could understand them. Yet the irony of the case of postwar Japan is that, since even a good deal of the most ambitious works in painting and sculpture of the time are lost—to say nothing of the installations of early Gutai or the last years of the Yomiuri Independent—the difference between a distinctly “formal” work and a seemingly “formless” one is relative. Ultimately, the comprehension of not just performance history but also art history in general requires literacy (reading ability combined with criticality) within existing historiography and media discourse, the patience to cross-reference the disparate traces of practices that transcend material or spatial limitations, and, most importantly, an open

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imagination on the part of those who were not able to see what actually happened in person—so that we might inherit and continue those practices through the networks of shared feeling born in this process. NOTES 1.

Ishiko Junzō, “Kicchuron nōto” [Notes toward a theory of kitsch] in Kicchu: Magaimono no jidai [Kitsch: The age of knockoffs], ed. Ishiko Junzō, Uesugi Yoshitaka, and Matsuoka Seigō (Tokyo: Diamond Inc., 1971), 302. Reprinted in Ishiko Junzō chosakushū dai ikkan: Kicchu ron [Selected writings of Ishiko Junzō, vol. 1: Essays on kitsch] (Tokyo: Lamasha, 1986), 8. The emphasis added is my own. 2. I use this term, which frequently appears in the work of activist artists, with full knowledge of its political implications. 3. See Hariu Ichirō, Sengo bijutsu seisuishi [The rise and fall of postwar art] (Tokyo: Tokyo Shoseki, 1979); and Chiba Shigeo, Gendai biju­ tsu itsudatsushi, 1945–1985 [A history of deviations in contemporary art, 1945–1985] (Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 1986). 4. See Sawaragi Noi, Nihon, gendai, bijutsu [Japan/contemporary/art] (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1998); Yoshida Yoshie, Kaitaigeki no maku orite: Rokujū nendai zen’ei bijutsushi [The curtain falls on deconstruction theater: A history of 1960s avant-garde art] (Tokyo: Zōkeisha, 1982); and Thomas R. H. Havens, Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts: The Avant-Garde Rejection of Modernism (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006). 5. See William Marotti, Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); and Reiko Tomii, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 6. In chronological order, they are Reconstructions: Avant-Garde Art in Japan 1945–1965, curated by David Elliot and Kazu Kaido for Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1985; Japon des avant-gardes, 1910–1970, organized in cooperation with the Japan Foundation and held at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1986; Scream against the Sky: Japanese Art after 1945, curated by Alexandra Munroe for the Guggenheim Museum Soho, 1994 (first presented at Yokohama Museum of Art under the title “Sengo Nihon no Zen’ei Bijutsu,” 1994); and Tokyo 1955–1970:

A New Avant-Garde, curated by Doryun Chong for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012. 7. Dada in Japan: Japanische Avantgarde 1920– 1970, curated by Shirakawa Yoshio in 1983; and Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experiments in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950–1970, curated by Charles Merewether and Rika Iezumi Hiro for the Getty Research Institute in 2007. 8. Some of the major retrospectives that have been organized for important artists who engaged in performance practices in the 1960s are Sayako Kishimoto, 1939–1988 at Denkibunka Hall, Nagoya, 1990; Ushio Shinohara at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992 (traveled to the Tokushima Modern Art Museum; Tsukashin Hall, Amagasaki; and the Hara Museum Arc, Shibukawa); Tetsumi Kudo: Contestation/Création, at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, and Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, 1994; The Adventures of Akasegawa Genpei, at the Nagoya City Art Museum, 1995; To Spiritualism: Yutaka Matsuzawa, 1954–1997, at Saito Memorial Kawaguchi Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997; Yoshimura Masunobu in Experiments: Response and Metamorphose, at Oita Art Museum, 2000; Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis, at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2008; and Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver: Ex-Sign, at the Museum of Modern Art, Shiga, 2010. Exhibitions for groups include Group Kyūshū-ha: Anti-Art Project at the Fukuoka Art Museum, 1988; Art in Flux III: Neo-Dada Witnessed at the Fukuoka Art Museum, 1993; Konna avangyarudo geijutsu ga atta! Kōchi no 1960 nendai [Who knew this avant-garde art existed! Kōchi in the 1960s] at the Museum of Art, Kōchi, 1997; Document: Group “Kumo” 1968–1973 at the Fukuoka Art Museum, 1997; Neo-Dada Japan, 1958–1998: Arata Isozaki and the Artists of “White House” at Art Plaza, Oita, 1998; Group I at Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, 2004; Genshoku at Kamakura Gallery, 2005; and Shūdan N39 [Group N39] at the Yorozu Tetsugorō Museum, Hanamaki, 2009.

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Exhibitions that were held since the publication of the Japanese edition of this book include The World of Ishiko Junzo: From Art via Manga to Kitsch at Fuchū Art Museum, 2011; GUN: Niigata Contemporary Artist Group and Its Era at Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, 2012; Hi-Red Center: The Documents of “Direct Action” at Nagoya City Art Museum and the Shoto Museum of Art, Tokyo, 2013–14; Your Portrait: A Tetsumi Kudo Retrospective at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and Aomori Museum of Art, 2013–14; Group “Genshoku” and Ishiko Junzo, 1966–1971 at Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, 2014; “The Principles of Art” by Akasegawa Genpei: From the 1960s to the Present at Chiba City Museum of Art, Oita Art Museum, and Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in 2014–15; Ashita no Jō, no jidai [The age of Ashita no Joe] at the Nerima Art Museum, 2015; Revisiting Group Kyushu-ha at Fukuoka Art Museum, 2015–16; Gunma NOMO gurūpu no zenbō [The Gunma NOMO group in total] at the Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, 2016; Japanese Expanded Cinema Revisited at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2017; Kosugi Takehisa: Ongaku no pikunikku [Kosugi Takehisa: Music picnic] at the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History, 2017; Moriyama Yasuhide: Decomposition and Recomposition at Kitakyūshū Municipal Museum of Art, 2018; and Sasaki Kosei Archive: 1928–2018 at Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art, 2018; Matsuzawa Yutaka: A Centennial Anniversary Retrospective at Nagano Prefectural Art Museum, 2022. See also the catalogues for two exhibitions held outside of Japan after 2010, The Emergence of the Contemporary: Avant-Garde Art in Japan, 1950–1970, held at the Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro in 2016, and Between Collectivism and Individualism: Japanese Avant-Garde in the 1950s and 1960s, held at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, in 2021. So what about private institutions, which, theoretically, should be free from bureaucratic restrictions? In Japan there is still no venue with the requisite clout and funding to be able to organize exhibitions that include works of extreme expression. In fact, the country’s many corporate-sponsored institutions, where image branding and customer service are major concerns, may be even more restricted than its public institutions.

10. Minemura Toshiaki, “Shokkaku no riarizumu: Funshutsushita mō hitotsu no Nihon” [Tactile realism: The eruption of another Japan], in 1953-nen Raito appu: Atarashii sengo bijutsuzō ga miete kita / Shedding Light on Art in Japan, 1953 (Tokyo: Meguro Museum of Art and Tama Art University, 1996), 112. Exhibition catalogue. 11. Minemura, 112. 12. See Ikeda Tatsuo, “1953-nen raito appu ten o mite: Kikakusha no ito e no gimon” [A look at Light Up, 1953: Doubts about the organizers’ aims], Shinbijutsu Shimbun, July 1, 1996; Kitazawa Noriaki, “Hihyō no seijisei to riarizumu no ten’i” [The politics of criticism and the dislocation of realism], Shinbijutsu Shimbun, August 12/21, 1996; Minemura Toshiaki, “Hitei no tame no shokutaku wa yōishinai mono da: Ikeda, Kitazawa ryōshi no hihan ni kotaete” [The table is not set for dismissal: Replying to the critiques of Messrs. Ikeda and Kitazawa], Shinbijutsu Shimbun, December 1, 1996; Minemura Toshiaki, “Saido 1953-nen Raito appu ten kikakusha kara: Tenrankai no mikata o manande hoshii” [From the Light Up, 1953 organizers, again: Learn how to view the exhibition], Shinbijutsu Shimbun, February 1, 1997; Hariu Ichirō, “1953-nen ten ronsō ni yosete: Ruporutāju kaiga no zenmen hitei wa seitō ka” [On the 1953 exhibition controversy: How can a complete dismissal of reportage painting be legitimate?], Shinbijutsu Shimbun, March 11, 1997; Ikeda Tatsuo, “1953-nen ten saisairon: Tenrankai wa kankyaku no tame ni aru” [Re-revisiting the 1953 exhibition: Exhibitions are for the viewers], Shinbijutsu Shimbun, March 21, 1997; Minemura Toshiaki, “Hariu Ichirō-shi ni kotaeru: Anatagata wa hontō ni mita no ka, ‘ruporutāju kaiga’ o?” [Responding to Hariu Ichirō: Reportage painting—how many of you really looked at it?], Shinbijutsu Shimbun, June 11, 1997; Hariu Ichirō, “Sukuigatai henken to keishiki ronri o uchiyabure: Minemura Toshiaki e no saihanron” [Down with irredeemable biases and formal logic: A re-rebuttal to Minemura Toshiaki], Shinbiju­ tsu Shimbun, July 21, 1997; Washio Toshihiko, Katsuragawa Hiroshi, Takashima Heigo, Yoshida Yoshie, Segi Shin’ichi, and Ozaki Masato, “‘1953-nen ten ronsō’ o dō miru ka: Sono hyōka to mondaiten o saguru 1: ‘Atarashii sengo bijutsu’ zō no mosaku, kōchiku no tame ni saranaru ronsen o” [How to view the “1953 exhibition controversy”? Working through criticism

Chapter 1———The Nether Regions of Art, Art History’s Private Parts

and problematics 1: More dispute needed for seeking out and constructing a “new image of postwar art”], Shinbijutsu ­Shimbun, October 11, 1997. Shortly thereafter, Yamada Satoshi organized Realism in Postwar Japan, 1945–1960 at the Nagoya City Art Museum. As though passing judgment on the 1953 controversy, the exhibition reconsidered postwar art through an expanded concept of “realism.” It was able to raise important issues in combination with its installation plan, which challenged the physical limits of the “exhibition” format and established conventions of display. But since the focus of the exhibition was on works that were made prior to 1960, it left off the question of how realism developed during the period of rapid economic growth that followed (although it did include works by Kyūshū-ha, one of the groups addressed in this volume). See Nagoya City Art Museum, ed., Sengo Nihon no riarizumu, 1945–1960 / Realism in Postwar Japan, 1945–1960 (Nagoya: Sengo Nihon no Riarizumu Ten Jikkō Iinkai, 1998). Exhibition catalogue. 13. Hariu, “Sukuigatai henken to keishiki ronri.” 14. For an overview of these debates by one of the participants, see Chino Kaori, “Bijutsukan, Bijutsushigaku no ryōiki ni miru jendā ronsō” [Gender debates in the field of art museums/ art history], in Onna? Nihon? Bi? Aratana jendā hihyō ni mukete [Women? Japan? Beauty? Toward a new gender criticism], Kumakura Takaaki and Chino Kaori, eds. (Tokyo: Keio University Press, 1997), 117–54. 15. Among the more comprehensive offerings is Takashima Naoyuki’s “Kōi no kiseki ‘Nihon’” [Traces of action: Japan], published in a special feature on performance in the October 1985 issue of Bijutsu techō. Takashima introduces important groups and events, spanning from Japanese Futurism in the 1920s to Zero Jigen in the postwar period, but he does not broach a historical progression that could connect them all. A year later, Okabe Aomi published an even more thorough analysis in the catalogue of Japon des avant-gardes, 1910–1970. Okabe covers a broad range of eras and tendencies, starting from Murayama Tomoyoshi in the interwar period and extending to Unbeat and The Play in the postwar period. This important essay is essentially the only contribution so far that merits being called performance history. See Okabe Aomi,

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“Action et avant-garde” [in French], in Japon des avant-gardes, 1910–1970, ed. Centre Georges Pompidou and Japan Foundation, (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1986), 348–65. Exhibition Catalogue. 16. Kaitaigeki no maku orite is a revised and expanded collection of essays Yoshida first published in Bijutsu techō from 1971 onward under the title “Sengo zen’ei yukari no aragoto jūhachiban” [The ruffian’s repertory of the postwar avant-garde]. Yoshida makes frequent reference to performance artists in these essays, and has also discussed Happenings, butoh, theater, and other forms of bodily expression beyond art in his other writings. For more general overviews of performance at the time, see “Hapuningu no henbō” [The transfiguration of Happenings], Tenbō (August 1969): 92–99, and the special feature in the December 1970 issue of Bijutsu techō, “Kōisuru geiju­ tsukatachi” [Artists in action], which will be addressed in greater detail in Chapter 2. 17. Exhibitions focusing on performance that have featured practices from Japan include the internationally touring Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, which was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, in 1999, and Traces: Body and Idea in Contemporary Art, which traveled between the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, in 2004–05. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the former introduced only Gutai, Neo Dada, and Hi-Red Center from Japan. The latter looked into the relations between bodily acts and material works in Japan, Europe, and the United States, with an emphasis on aesthetic approaches over historicity. On top of intentionally disregarding the particular context of 1960s Japan, the exhibition was concerned with the traces of actions that are retained by matter, and did not address performance as such. Drawing a distinction between “documentation” and “works,” it was also devoid of any display of documentation, with the exception of some videos and photographs that had been repackaged as works. Yet since the distinction between “documentation” and “work” is not solely based on the artist’s intent and is also driven by the market system of dealers and collectors who support avant-garde art, one might question whether treating all works equivalently while ignoring differences

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between social conditions in Japan and Europe and the United States is really appropriate for Japanese art. 18. The first proper introduction of Happenings to appear in Bijutsu techō, “Tokubetsu kōza: Hapuningu to wa nani ka” [Special lecture: What is “Happenings”?] (May 1967), focuses on Happenings in the United States and Europe, from Allan Kaprow to Intermedia events, while Japanese Happenings after Gutai only receive a passing reference, with no further elaboration. Likewise, a roundtable discussion featuring Ishizaki Kōichirō, Kanesaka Kenji, Satō Shigechika, and Tone Yasunao, which ran in the March 1967 issue of Eiga hyōron, just prior to the Bijutsu techō article, concentrates entirely on Euro-American artists, despite Tone himself being a practitioner and Kanesaka and Satō strong supporters of Japanese underground culture. Moreover, although Nakahara Yūsuke and Akiyama Kuniharu address the progression from Kaprow’s Happenings to more environmental projects in their respective contributions to a special feature on Happenings in the August 1968 issue of Bijitsu techō, they hardly make any reference to practices in Japan—something that is particularly remarkable in the case of Akiyama, who covers an extremely broad range of artists and was himself involved in Intermedia projects. Nakahara touches upon an event by the American Geoffrey Hendricks at Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, while Akiyama mentions a group of Paris-based artists that includes the Japanese Kudō Tetsumi. The sole event led by a Japanese artist in Japan to be mentioned is Ay-O’s Happening for Sightseeing Bus Trip in Tokyo (1966), which Akiyama cites merely as an example of Fluxus. 19. The reception of European art methodologies (say, Cubism) in the history of modern art in Asia is often accompanied by a process of adaptation, translation, and selection in response to diverse political, social, and cultural necessities, such as the pursuit of decolonization or cultural autonomy. See the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the Japan Foundation, eds., Cubism in Asia: Unbounded Dialogues (Tokyo: National Museum of Modern Art, 2005). Exhibition Catalogue. 20. To be sure, performances were held in Japan by artists who had just returned from the United States—namely Ichiyanagi Toshi and Ono Yōko, followed shortly by Ay-O—as well

21.

22.

23.

24.

as by visitors from the United States, such as John Cage, David Tudor, and Merce Cunningham, or those from Europe, such as Nam June Paik (who moved from Japan to West Germany in 1956 before settling in New York in 1964). Although the influence of these performances was not entirely negligible, Japanese artists such as Group Ongaku were already pursuing their own brand of experimentation by then, as shall be subsequently detailed. And the “foreign” performances tended to be music or Fluxus events, so whatever influence they may have exerted on Japanese artists was also quite contained. Regarding performance in Europe and the United States in the 1960s, the violence of Jean-Jacques Lebel or the overt corporeality/rituality of the likes of Carolee Schneemann or Viennese Actionism are seemingly far removed from the cultural traditions of Japan. Barely discussed by critics, such practices were hardly in a position to influence Japanese practitioners. While in high school Yoshimura Masunobu once won a prize at a costume competition and got laughs by reading a speech from an absurdly long scroll of paper during student president elections. Yoshimura Masunobu, in interviews with the author, July 1993 and August 21, 1993; corroborated by Akasegawa Genpei in an interview with the author, August 26, 1993. The ties between artist-performers and sports would make a fascinating topic for further research. Alongside Yoshimura, who played rugby and soccer in high school, notable cases include Itoi Kanji, who competed in gymnastics at the National Sports Festival, and Shiraga Kazuo, who went on to paint with his feet after having done sumo and judo. One exception is a series of performances by Kurohata that incorporated scripted drama and politically satirical narration. Notably, the performances were organized with the participation of stage director Suzuki Shirō (see chap. 14). Translator’s note: While known throughout the world as Yoko Ono, we have made the decision to preserve the original Japanese name order for all of the individuals appearing in this book. Sekine Nobuo had the following to say about Takamatsu Jirō, who was confirmed as a star of 1960s art in the latter half of the decade: “He was extraordinarily sensitive to the latest art news, and constantly aware of the eyes of the

Chapter 1———The Nether Regions of Art, Art History’s Private Parts

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

critics and the views of other artists. It was actually painful to have to see him like that. Now that I can think about it coolly, I guess he must have been in a bad state of mind, always trying to be the darling of contemporary art.” Sekine Nobuo, Fūkei no yubiwa [The ring of landscape] (Tokyo: Tosho Shimbun, 2006), 51–52. Ueno Toshiya and Mōri Yoshitaka, Karuchyuraru sutadīzu nyūmon [An introduction to cultural studies] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shinsho, 2000), 19–22. Shinohara Ushio, “Tsuitō: Tsukurugawa kara mita Tōno Yoshiaki-san” [Remembrance: A creator’s view of Tōno Yoshiaki], Aida, no. 121 (January 20, 2006): 19–20. Akasegawa Genpei and Kazakura Shō, who were both members of Neo Dada, appeared in performances at Sogetsu Art Center by Ono Yōko, Kosugi Takehisa, Nam June Paik, and others, and Sogetsu was also an important base for the members of Group Ongaku, who had close interactions with Neo Dada. Adachi Masao interviewed by Hirasawa Gō, Eiga/Kakumei [Film/Revolution] (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2003), 131. The lone exception, Yuasa Jōji, was born in Fukushima but lived and worked in Tokyo after studying medicine at Keio University. For biographies of all the members, see Fukuzumi Haruo, ed., The 11th Exhibition Homage to Shuzo Takiguchi: Experimental Workshop (Tokyo: Satani Gallery, 1991), 87–95. Exhibition catalogue. Akasegawa Genpei, Anzaï Shigeo, and Tōno Yoshiaki, “Tōgi: Toshi kūkan no naka no shintai, pafōmansu ga hyōgen suru mono” [Discussion: The body in urban space, what is expressed by the performance], Yuriika [Eureka], no. 9 (September 1984): 159–60. “Tokubetsu kōza: Hapuningu to wa nani ka?” [Special lecture: What is “Happenings”?], Bijutsu techō, no. 282 (May 1967): 132. Likely, Biogode Process (The Expression of a Multibody System by Electronic Computer Composition), held December 14–15, 1966. Matsuda Masao and Hirai Gen, “Eigashi no dansō, toshi e no shiryoku” [A rift in film

34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

57

history, insight into the city], in Andāguraundo firumu ākaibusu [Underground film archives], ed. Hirasawa Gō (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2001), 89. Sawaragi Noi, Nihon, gendai, bijutsu, 190–92. I was born in 1961, too late to see the performances described in this book firsthand. Fortunately, some artists kept their performance practices going, and I was able to see a few of their more recent performances in person or on video. Beyond the limited opportunities to actually see them, it is of course impossible to get a true sense of the historical space-time or the original physicality of the performers from those performances, in contrast to score-based performances or the repeatable performances of Gutai. Nevertheless, performances by the 1960s-era artists in their later years are certainly another potential source of information. Among those I was unable to interview: photographer, critic, and filmmaker Kanesaka Kenji (died 1999); critics Satō Shigechika (1988) and Hiraoka Masaaki (2009); photographer Yoshioka Yasuhiro (2002); Koiwa Takayoshi of Zero Jigen (year of death unknown); Makirō of Baramanji Kessha (2006); Kurohata’s Matsue Kaku (1984), Takahara Yūji (2001), and Suzuki Shirō (1997); and Matsuzawa Yutaka (2006). And although I had previously conducted interviews with them, Ōyama Uichi (2000), Hataraki Tadashi (1996), and Miyazaki ­Junnosuke (1989) of Kyūshū-ha, as well as the photographers Hanaga Mitsutoshi (1999) and Hara Eizaburō (2004), all died before I started the research for this book. See for instance Nagano Chiaki’s Aru wakamono-tachi [Some Young People] (1964). There may also be some documentation to be found in the newsreel footage of the time, which contains wealth of material for future research. Nakahara Yūsuke, “Nihon gendai bijutsu e no hatsugen” [A statement for Japanese contemporary art], interview with Shirakawa Yoshio, in Shirakawa Yoshio, Nihon no Dada, 1920–1970 [Dada in Japan, 1920–1970] (Tokyo: Shoshi Kaze no Bara, 1988), 27.

CHAPTER 2

The Spectrum of Bodily Expression Actions not yet Nameable

1.

“ARTISTS IN ACTION”—THROUGH THE EYES OF YOSHIDA YOSHIE

As will be detailed in part II of this book, from the end of the 1950s, a mode of corporeal expression (nikutai hyōgen) that stood apart from public artmaking demonstration and publicity stunt came into being. At this time, specialized art discourse—especially that of Europe and the United States—had a marked influence on diverse artists in Japan, visible across different regions and periods. However, the flourishing of performance art at this time cannot be explained solely in terms of outside influence or internal developments in existing art practice. The flourishing was also due in part to the diversity of the pedigrees from which forms of bodily expression were emerging, covering everything from theater and traditional popular entertainment to dance and music. Moreover, it reflected a zeitgeist that was broadly shared among creators working in all kinds of genres beyond the field of art. Although at first it may appear that each individual artist worked independently in a fragmentary, transitory manner, the aggregate of those agitated and polyphonic practices spontaneously gave rise to contemporaneous synchronization, resonance, and shared feeling. So what was this zeitgeist with which these artists were so captivated? What kind of concept could possibly encompass so many different generations, varied genres, and styles of action (kōi)? In preparation for an in-depth examination of these questions, we might first revisit the views of Yoshida Yoshie. From 1965 to 1966, Yoshida directed what would now be called an alternative space, the Modern Art Center of Japan (MAC-J), located in Tokyo’s Mejiro district. Featuring performances by Akasegawa Genpei, Ikeda Tatsuo, Kazakura Shō, Kuni Chiya, Jikan-ha (School of Time), Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension), and Yoshida himself, as well as screenings of films by Adachi Masao and Jōnouchi Motoharu, the Myūzu shūkan (A Week for Muse, hereinafter Muse Week) event he organized at the center in December 1965 stands out as an interdisciplinary showcase of Yoshida’s broad circle of acquaintances and his critical sensibility. As the direction of the event suggests, Yoshida was that rare art critic who was also an active supporter of performance practices. Yoshida’s unique critical stance can also be glimpsed in his critical work, Kaitaigeki no maku orite. Idiosyncratic in terms of both perspective and subject matter, the book addresses numerous performance artists who had rarely featured in other surveys or exhibitions—from Neo Dada to Kyūshū-ha, Jikan-ha, and the Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group, as well as butoh dancer Hijikata Tatsumi. Yoshida was thus more than qualified to contribute to Bijutsu techō’s special feature on “artists in action” (kōisuru geijutsuka-tachi), published in December 1970 when most of major performance artists of 1960s had appeared on the scene. Conscious of the breadth and diversity of the performance that appeals to him, Yoshida explains in his lead essay that in compiling his source materials on the topic, he has “avoided anything that would further expand the parameters of the existing concept of ‘art’ by means of negation,” instead focusing on “things that exceed ‘art’ in the

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intensity of their concern for people and their acts of expression.”1 According to Yoshida, that more than half of those he selected could be called “visual artists” is simply a function of this criteria.2 The artists featured in the accompanying pictorial survey can broadly be grouped into the following categories: Conceptual/language artists: Matsuzawa Yutaka, Sunohara Toshiyuki, Kawatsu Hiroshi, Tanaka Kōdō, Seishin Seirigaku Kenkyūjo (Psychophysiology Research Institute), Tsubouchi Naoki Collective/commune artists: Asai Masuo, The Play Solo Happeners: Kazakura Shō, Chiba Eisuke, Itoi Kanji, Nakajima Yoshio Earthworks artists: GUN, Kyūmin Other: Gulliver, et al. Dancers: Kuni Chiya Theater: Akuta Masahiko, Ikeda Shōichi (Ikeda Ichi) Musicians: Kosugi Takehisa, Taj Mahal Travellers

Yoshida’s essay further touches upon the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, Akasegawa Genpei’s closing testimony in his Model 1,000-Yen Note Trial, Ono Yōko’s book of instruction pieces Grapefruit (1964), Negishi Kazuhiro, Hi-Red Center, Shiomi Mieko, Mizukami Jun, Toshima Shigeyuki, Iwata Shin’ichi, and Akiba Toshio, among others. One of Kyūshūha’s major events, the Grand Assembly of Heroes (in which Yoshida was the sole critic to participate, see chap. 6.13, pp. 157–60) also receives a mention. Yoshida states that he “did not distinguish the highest reaches of conceptual thought from bodies writhing about in the mud,”3 but as the above breakdown shows, his selection is nevertheless weighted toward “conceptual/language artists.” In contrast, his directive to “avoid further expanding the parameters of art through the denial of conventional artwork” led to the exclusion of Gutai and Neo Dada. And since he also excludes artists who targeted the mass media, Chida Ui’s “dating” (see chap. 15.2, pp. 366–7), which had precisely that objective, was also left out. Yet such criteria are not the only explanation for why these examples slipped through what at first seems to be a comprehensive and rational selection, as the very exclusion of Gutai, Neo Dada, or Chida Ui reflects the challenges of performance art studies as much as it does Yoshida’s views. Indeed, many other artists and groups who had significant track records and had developed their own styles by 1970 are also excluded from Yoshida’s analysis—Zero Jigen (aside from individual recognition for Iwata Shin’ichi), Kokuin (Heralding the Shadow), Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, and Kurohata (Black Flag) among them. Given the ephemerality and “live” nature of performance, as well as the proliferation of regionally based practices at the time, one might assume the grounds for this exclusion is simply that Yoshida had not been able to see everything in person, but that is not the case; Yoshida includes Asai Masuo, who was active in the regional cities of Seto, Nagoya, and Suwa, despite having never met the artist or seen any of his performances. And although Zero Jigen does not meet Yoshida’s criteria, since targeting the mass media was one of the group’s primary objectives, Yoshida nevertheless cannot disregard the group entirely. He slides Zero Jigen into a passage on artists he is unable to cover, along with the likes of Kudō Te­ tsumi and the butoh dancers Hijikata Tatsumi and Ishii Mitsutaka. Furthermore, while

Chapter 2———The Spectrum of Bodily Expression61

Yoshida expresses a sympathetic stance toward Kudō, he does not base his assessment on having seen Kudō’s performances live (which only began in earnest after the artist moved to Europe in 1962). Likewise, in a different article, also copiously illustrated, Yoshida provides an overview of Nakajima Yoshio’s activities in Europe without having seen them in person. 4 Conversely, for all the times he had seen Zero Jigen up close at MAC-J and other venues, Yoshida displays minimal interest in the group. In sum, his selection for the Bijutsu techō special feature was determined by his unique viewpoint as a critic and not whether he had seen something in person. So, what is important about an “art of action” (kōisuru geijutsu) to Yoshida? In his words, it is its “‘communal’ aspiration, which reverberates across strata that at first seem to be completely fragmented and at odds with each other,” as well as its “ethos of love” (ai no shisō).5 These are by no means objective standards. Granted, we might find a communal aspiration in the practices of artists who sought to present their lifestyles as a form of expression, such as Asai and The Play or the Taj Mahal Travellers. But as can be surmised from Festival of Human and the Earth, a major event that Yoshida pulled off with Ozaki Masanori in August 1971 (see chap. 9.12, p. 278), what Yoshida had in mind was not so much a practice of communal living per se (like Buzoku, which included members from both visual art and film backgrounds), as it was a commune of the imagination, opened up by direct action. Yoshida was writing around the close of the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, a time when the cultural rebellion that had culminated in the events of 1968 was beginning to calm down and the collapse of the practice of communes was in view. Far more committed to politics than other art critics and also interested in the vulgar and the erotic, Yoshida paradoxically looked toward ascetic Conceptual/language practices for a glimpse of the “light” of a “‘human existence’ that would be revived once more.”6 Though it went on to become the exclusive domain of the intellectual elite within the institution of contemporary art after it flourished in Japan as it did elsewhere in the 1970s, Yoshida saw in conceptual art the potential for an alternative kind of commune. Interestingly, Yoshida, having seen the “scatology films” of the Viennese Actionist Otto Muehl,7 asserts that “a different tradition or way of life is required to dramatically externalize of this sort of internal combustion of the body,” whereas a “cool” attitude like that of self-described “salaryman” performer Gulliver would inevitably predominate in Japan.8 Yoshida follows with an extensive passage taken from Akasegawa Genpei’s essay “Obuje o motta musansha” (The proletarian who possessed objets), in which Akasegawa, aware of the danger that “little theater” (shōgekijō) can end up getting institutionalized as “big theater” (daigekijō), expresses his hopes for the emergence of a “hypertheater” (chōgekijō) at the opposite end of the spectrum—a hypertheater of seemingly futile acts that barely register as visual art or art in general.9 But even if it were true that Japan lacked the cultural traditions that made Viennese Actionism possible in Europe (in particular, conflicted feelings about corporeality), was there really no “different tradition or custom” available for a Japanese “art of action” (kōisuru geijutsu)? Was futility so inevitable—even if the practices Yoshida was writing about were already on the brink of extinction as he was writing? What about someone like Matsuzawa Yutaka—a favorite of Yoshida’s—who referenced Buddhism and other Japanese traditions in his works, rather than things that were indistinguishable from the conceptual art of the West (such as Takamatsu Jirō’s work from the late 1960s)?

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So where Yoshida looked toward conceptual art for alternative possibilities, I will take an opposite tack in this book by considering how a cohort of visual artists attempted to resist various institutions and forms of authority in everyday life not by means of Conceptual acts (such as Horikawa Michio’s sending stones through the mail) but through manifestations of corporeality. This also entails a reevaluation of whether Japan’s corporeal expression truly lacked, as Yoshida claimed, the “different tradition or way of life” necessary to “dramatically externalize this sort of internal combustion of the body.” 2.

BODILY EXPRESSION IN THE 1960S

Yoshida’s reason for titling the Bijutsu techō special feature “Kōisuru geijutsuka-tachi” (Artists in action) may have been that the terms hapuningu (happening), akushon (action), ibento (event), and pafōmansu (performance) simply could not encompass the breadth from “the highest reaches of conceptual thought [to] bodies writhing about in the mud.” If the intent of this book is to intervene into the existing systems of art and history, an examination of this terminology is warranted. That said, these are loan words with complex backgrounds, informed by historical shifts in meaning, first in English and second in Japanese, both in everyday speech and also in an art context—and further as common nouns that have evolved new everyday usages in light of their art-specific meanings. Although it will consequently be a somewhat intricate undertaking, I hope to elucidate the characteristics of Anti-Art performance in relation to these terms. 2.1

HAPUNINGU/HAPPENING

I should perhaps begin by examining the word hapuningu (happening). Tracing back to Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, the event held by John Cage disciple Allan Kaprow in New York in 1959, the English happening has become an established art-historical concept that is grounded in the globally emergent avant-garde developments of the time. Once the word pafōmansu (performance) started gaining traction in 1980s Japan, hapuningu/ happening came to be used to refer, contrastively, to the unique bodily expression of the 1960s, which suggests it is an appropriate historical term for the artists addressed here.10 As detailed later in this book (see chap.  6.4, pp.  133–5), hapuningu entered Japanese usage in 1961, and was formally recognized as a genre by the time of the Sakai Independent of 1966.11 In 1967 it became a frequent topic of debate in art and film magazines, and then went mainstream in 1968 with popular television anchor Kijima Norio Hapuningu shō (Happening show).12 Bijutsu techō, as a specialist publication, was thus surprisingly behind the curve in organizing its August 1968 special feature on Happenings. Despite its origins in art, the diffusion of the term hapuningu in popular culture and the mass media—namely, film—is significant. Consequently, in contemporary Japanese the word has taken on the meaning of “an unexpected occurrence” (as defined by the authoritative Kōjien dictionary), that is, an occurrence that is either unnatural or surprising (i.e., one that is not especially welcome). In that sense, insofar as they all qualify as strange/unusual incidents that occur unexpectedly, hapuningu would seem to

Chapter 2———The Spectrum of Bodily Expression63

cover everything from Kazakura Shō getting on stage during intermission at the theater and repeatedly falling from his stool to the intrusion of Zero Jigen’s alternate reality into urban space, to Itoi Kanji running through the streets in nothing but a loincloth. Critics have also discussed the unexpected, strange/unusual character of Happenings. Susan Sontag asserts that Happenings do not merely break down the fixed relationship between performer and audience, but also frequently involve teasing and abusing the audience.13 A Happening is not so much an unnatural event as it is one that is predicated on the denial of semantic resolution or mutual understanding. In fact, they were often conceived with the intent of making audiences confused or angry, as is evident in many of the performances of the 1960s. The word’s capacity for pardoning the strange/unusual incident through magnanimous humor is also apt for the period. As noted by translator Kishi Tetsuo, the usage of hapuningu in contemporary Japanese accords with the original character of Happenings identified by Sontag, as the word tends to be accompanied by a degree of levity or comicality and is never used in reference to serious accidents.14 Nor should we overlook the humor of the protagonists of this book—Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, who was in fact also a hit comic entertainer, Zero Jigen and Itoi Kanji included—even when their humor was not met with laughs and only prompted confusion through its incomprehensibility. The Geba–an goten, a lexicon of Japanese keywords from the 1960s student radical and underground culture scenes,15 channels a Sontagian aesthetic that privileges the senses16 in stating that the spirit (seishin) of hapuningu “prizes the lively individualistic, fully embodied sense of presence in a singular, irreplicable now.”17 That Anti-Art-style performance artists themselves used hapuningu, and even invented idioms such as hapunā (Happener)18 and hapunisuto (“Happenist,” coined by Akiyama Yūtokutaishi), is further proof that the term was readily accepted among artists. Still, there are a number of arguments against using hapuningu as a general term for bodily expression in 1960s Japan. First, if we follow Kaprow, who is credited as the originator of Happenings, the term still covers far too many types of expression, even when its scope is limited to art discourse. Although it includes forms of expression that are centered on the live body, it does not restrict its focus to that. By the mid-1960s Kaprow’s Happening had come to encompass diverse practices from all over the world and was being used comparably to the contemporary performance (more so as a catch-all for anything that did not conform to existing genres). Kaprow suggests this in his own writing, through his alignment of Happenings with Assemblage and Environments, as well as his citation of the work of Japan’s Gutai group to support his assertion that Happenings evolved out of action painting.19 But as will be expanded upon later, the early performances of Gutai must be explicitly distinguished from what I refer to in this book as “bodily expression that stands apart from artmaking demonstration.” Second, and not unrelatedly, there is a concern that hapuningu could be subsumed under engeki (theater)—in spite of Kaprow’s own efforts to distance Happenings from museums, galleries, and other stages for high art. Michael Kirby repudiates the common understanding of Happenings as spontaneous, improvised and frequently provocative; he instead positions Happenings as an extension of multiple lineages of art and theater by defining it as “a form of theatre in which diverse elements, including nonmatrixed

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performing, are organized in a compartmented structure.”20 While this may serve as an objective definition of Happenings as an expressive medium, at the very least the artistic category implied by engeki, the word for “theater” in Japanese, is too rigid to contain the activities of artists in 1960s Japan. Third, as Kaprow lamented in a 1967 essay, there was a “vast and giddy nonsense about what Happenings are” in the United States, where the term was applied to everything from advertising to political incidents.21 Similarly, in 1960s Japan the usage of hapuningu was already so indiscriminate that it no longer referred to experimental bodily expression. As I discuss later, Tone Yasunao was among the artists who sought to distance themselves from this understanding of hapuningu. Fourth is the danger that the designation hapuningu could end up serving an agenda that would subsume such expression into the social order. In Japanese today, hapuningu is used in the sense of “surprising incident,” mocking or denouncing an incident as incomprehensible or negative—that is, an undesirable occurrence or something that should never have happened in the first place. In other words, unless an artist or performer strategically uses the term in the sense of “making something happen” (as did Ikemizu Keiichi), it is no longer the artist, who by some act or incident disrupts the social order to draw attention to an issue, who gets to define an incident as a happening (as was originally the case); rather, that power is reserved for those who allow proper things to unfold within their proper order—those on the side of the establishment order who would dismiss what happened as a “strange/unusual incident” (or, alternatively, call the event a happening to maintain the superiority of the existing order, implying that it is prankish or insignificant). Fifth and finally, hapuningu tends to carry the unfortunate, restrictive connotation that it necessarily incorporates “chance.” Kaprow asserts that Happenings actively welcome and incorporate chance,22 but even if such a Cageian stance informed certain performances in 1960s Japan, it does not apply to the ambitious setups and meticulous preparation of Zero Jigen. There were also those who rejected chance outright, as Mizu­ kami Jun did in his manifesto (see chap. 8.13, pp. 235–6). Thus does hapuningu fall short as a comprehensive term. 2.2 AKUSHON/ACTION

The term akushon (action) immediately recalls the original title of Akasegawa Genpei’s memoir on the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, Imaya akushon aru nomi! (Now we have no choice but action!).23 Given that this word was used by one of the standard bearers of Anti-Art, Kudō Tetsumi, at a 1960 assembly of intellectuals and artists who opposed the revision of the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty, and that the performative practices of the artists taken up in this book originate from the same Anti-Art era, it would seem to be a good candidate for use here. Moreover, much Anti-Art performance reflects an anarchistic idealization of direct action. The links between Anti-Art performance and activism—understood as the political intervention into the dominant institutions and discourses of the majority by laborers, ethnic minorities, women, and others—further suggest that, in both artistic and political senses, akushon/action is at minimum a better fit for this book than hapuningu/happening.

Chapter 2———The Spectrum of Bodily Expression65

Historically, the term akushon appears in the names of at least two international art groups. One of the two is the Taishō era avant-garde group Akushon (Action), formed in Tokyo in 1923 by Kanbara Tai. But Action was hardly dedicated to the kind of anarchistic Dadaism that characterized its peers such as MAVO (see chap. 4, pp. 97–8). Rather, the group was a manifestation of the possibilities for action (kōdō) fostered by the buoyant atmosphere that existed in Japan until the collapse of the Taishō democracy following the Great Kantō earthquake of September 1, 1923. The second group is Viennese Actionism, which was deeply rooted in European culture and active more or less at the same time as Zero Jigen. Attacking the closed conditions of Austrian politics and culture at the time by leveraging everything from Freudian analysis to pagan ritual, their lurid track record, running the gamut from criminal acts to suicide, indeed seems worthy of the word action (or Aktion in German). And yet, the curators of the first exhibition to provide a comprehensive introduction of Viennese Actionism in Japan, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949– 1979 (organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, see also chap. 1, n. 17, pp. 55–6), make no distinction between action and performance, as is evident in their inclusion of everything from action painting to Happenings, feminism, and participatory projects in the exhibition, as well as by their emphasis on Gutai. In other words, there is a risk that action could effectively be divorced from its political implications and end up taking on an art-historically circumscribed connotation of “expression related to action painting.” But this book is concerned with acts that go beyond demonstrations of artmaking or painting process. These are acts that emerged out of the context of the activism (kōdō shugi) that could be found in all facets of Japanese society in the 1960s, acts that must be understood as a commitment of the self to transgressing the boundaries between life and art and politics. We must not forget the countless examples of artist performances from the 1960s at odds with the immediacy, improvisation, ephemerality, and in situ–ness connoted by the word akushon. Certainly, the “actions” that Kudō Tetsumi and others in the orbit of Neo Dada began in the late 1950s were driven by intuition or improvisation, and there are many later examples of artists and groups that kept their use of props or staging to a minimum, such as Unbeat, Itoi Kanji, Mizukami Jun, and Akiyama Yūtokutaishi. The performances of Zero Jigen, however, were clearly based on deliberate preparation and scripted scenarios, while the collective, stage-based performances of groups such as early-period The Play, Kurohata, and Kokuin involved elaborate direction, and so hardly qualify as intuitive or improvisatory “actions.” In essence, although akushon hits on some of the attributes of what I refer to as “Anti-Art performance” in this book, it is by no means a perfect match. 2.3 IBENTO/EVENT

Alongside hapuningu, yet another art term that emerged out of the 1960s avant-garde is ibento (event). Tone Yasunao writes the following about the relationship between the two terms (further confirming that hapuningu was seen as a concept that extended to the Intermedia art of the late 1960s). Although intermedia or mixed-media corresponds to what is generally referred to as hapuningu, a schematic explication might distinguish each practice based on the genre from

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which it derives, with hapuningu emerging out of developments in action painting, ibento emerging out of performances of scores for aleatory music, and Intermedia emerging out of underground cinema. (Yet while it’s true that the historical conditions at the moment of their emergence have marked the characteristics of each practice, it would be nonsense to differentiate all that is currently referred to as hapuningu on that basis.)24

The English term event was first used by the Fluxus artists.25 It covers everything from an artist’s execution of a performance they have conceived of or planned themselves to instruction pieces meant to be carried out by other artists or audience members, as well as pieces that involve almost no bodily acts, whether by the artist or anyone else. But however removed they may have been from normal music recitals, the Fluxus artists also referred to their performances as “concerts,”26 which, as Tone’s analysis also suggests, supports that the term event clearly has roots in experimental music. And while Tone asserts it would be “nonsense” to distinguish between “visual art (i.e., painting) Happenings,” “music events” and “cinema-derived intermedia,” there are only a few instances of people with visual art backgrounds applying the word event to their artistic actions. For instance, in December  1966 Ay-O, who had started out as a painter, organized a series of performative pieces for which spectators and artists traveled by bus to different sites and carried out actions at each stop. While each of the actions is referred to as an event, the overarching title, Happening for Sightseeing Bus Trip in Tokyo, suggests that even someone as steeped in Fluxus as Ay-O made no great distinction between the two terms.27 Examples of artists who disliked having their works referred to as Happenings may help us tease out the contrast between ibento and hapuningu. Ono Yōko wrote the following passage in English in “To the Wesleyan People, January 23, 1966”: Event, to me, is not an assimilation of all the other arts as Happening seems to be, but an extrication from the various sensory perceptions. It is not “a get togetherness” as most happenings are, but a dealing with oneself. Also, it has no script as happenings do, though it has something that starts it moving—the closest word for it may be a “wish” or “hope.”28

In response, Midori Yoshimoto observes that whereas happening has a theatrical aspect for Ono, Fluxus is more introspective, with Ono’s use of the words “wish” and “hope” underscoring her search for “spiritual values.”29 Like Ono, Shiomi Mieko has consistently contended that her works are “events” and not “happenings.”30 Ay-O asserts that in contrast to “happenings,” which take place only once (as Kaprow also declares31), Fluxus events are characterized by their repeatability.32 Even Tone came to use the Japanese ibento in contradistinction to the popularized hapuningu of the late 1960s.33 Meanwhile, in his deposition in Akase­ gawa Genpei’s Model 1,000-Yen Note Trial, where the definitions of art and art terminology were hotly contested in a legal setting, Nakanishi Natsuyuki distinguishes the two by saying that if hapuningu are “highly theatrical,” ibento are “utterly lacking in such theatricality,” citing Banquet to Commemorate the Defeat in the War (August 1962) as an example of the former and Yamanote Line Festival (October 1962) as an example of the latter.34 To review, ibento was frequently used by musicians and refers more to a replicable, individuated, introspective act than to a collective spectacle. As such, what I refer to

Chapter 2———The Spectrum of Bodily Expression67

in this book as “Anti-Art performance” is positioned at the opposite extreme of ibento, insofar as it privileges the materiality and visual effect of the body, and in light of its singularity in intervening into a specific place and time. At a stretch, ibento might overlap with Anti-Art performance in the repeated, meditative, individuated rituals of artists like Matsuzawa Yutaka and Mizukami Jun, or it might suit the physical expression of 1970s Mono-ha or conceptualist approaches, which were more concerned with the relations with space, matter, and information produced by the body than the body as such. These themes, however, are beyond the scope of this book. 2.4 PAFŌMANSU/PERFORMANCE

Simply put, pafōmansu (performance) is the most comprehensive word denoting artistic bodily expression. And yet, it is almost meaningless to use the term in a restrictive sense, in part because the word did not exist in Japanese in the 1960s,35 but more so because the term simply has far too broad a scope. If we adopt Richard Schechner’s definition of performance as “restored behavior,” the term applies to everything from premodern rites and rituals to all manner of theater and dance, as well as touristic services such as reenactments in which people wear traditional clothes and demonstrate the lifestyles of particular times and places.36 According to Marvin Carlson, the English word performance (inclusive of the adjective performative) is used not just in the arts but across diverse fields of study, from linguistics and sociology to cultural anthropology, and any context-specific or interpersonal human act is tantamount to a performance.37 Another reason for my reluctance to define the material in this book as pafōmansu is that the word still retains a special historical significance in its contemporary Japanese usage. In the lexicon of art, pafōmansu is defined as a mode of expression that was established in the course of twentieth-century Western art history, while in Japan, by the mid-1980s the word came into use not just by contemporary art professionals but also general society, and is now as common a term as hapuningu or ibento. It appears, for instance, in phrases such as kosuto pafōmansu (cost performance) or seijika no pafōmansu (a politician’s performance, i.e., political performance) while also being used to designate an acknowledged genre of artistic expression that defies classification as theater, dance, or music. Thus, where the English word performance is considerably broad, pafōmansu in Japanese is overly broad in its own way—and, even more unpromisingly, it also incorporates a Japanese-specific restriction. Performative acts in contemporary Japan either immediately get labeled as “pafōmansu” and recuperated into the field of “art,” or are otherwise received—and at times consumed—as “incomprehensible but entertaining acts” or “oddly disturbing gestures.” In other words, pafōmansu has become a word for designating acts that are devoid of any provocativeness or criticality. This evolution of the term is not unrelated to the fact that the entrance of pafōmansu into the Japanese lexicon occurred in the early 1980s, when postmodernism was at its height of popularity and consumer culture was on the rise.38 The popularization of pafōmansu was clearly driven by developments in the United States and Europe, as the word was used in reference to the works of international artists who combined both

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avant-garde and entertainment elements in their art practice, such as Laurie Anderson, who toured Japan in June 1984, around the same time as the stars of the 1960s Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys. With her use of interdisciplinary, cutting-edge technology, Anderson’s performances are especially emblematic of the atmosphere of that era, coming on the heels of Akasegawa Genpei’s memoir of his activities with Hi-Red Center, Tōkyō mikusā keikaku (Tokyo Mixer Plan), published March 1984. Although the book’s publication marked an important turning point in shifting the spotlight toward performance art in Japan from the 1960s onwards, I suspect that this “new expression in the age of art”39 that was imported along with the Western new wave of performance art was easy to consume as a complement to the economic conditions and intellectual atmosphere of Japan at the time. It neither fostered the next generation of Japanese performers nor brought about a historical reexamination of the bodily expression of artists who had continued their practices from the 1960s and ’70s onward. And so, even in its contemporary Japanese usage, which was established after having been cycled through the performances welcomed in the consumer culture of the 1980s, pafōmansu is haunted by the nuance that it permits any kind of abnormality or provocation to be commodified as “difference.” By that logic, pafōmansu is ultimately indistinguishable from attractions held at baseball games, soccer stadiums, pro wrestling matches and theme parks, or on television and the stage. Nevertheless, prior to its acknowledgment as an art genre, performance has always had a subversive power, or at least one capable of interrogating the existing order, as a means of expression. This is a power that can merge art with life (or transcend or disrupt the boundary between the two). In other words, performance has the power of art to critique life, the power of life to critique art, the power of provocation toward the systems that regulate the two and keep them separate. This was reason enough for artists who had awakened to its potential to disrupt both art and life—or better yet, those (such as women and ethnic minorities) who could not help but to awaken to that potential—to choose performance as a medium. 2.5

ANTI-ART PERFORMANCE

In light of these issues, in this book I employ the term performance (as bodily expression) to mean an artistic medium that meets the following criteria: – It (1) cannot be subsumed within existing artistic genres and (2) challenges existing orders in art and society (i.e., it is not visual art, theater, music or dance; nor is it a political demonstration, religious rite, entertainment or sport). – The live human body either plays a main role or is the central medium, especially when that includes bodily movement and not merely bodily presence. (We might call a presentation of the creative process of a work-object an “artmaking demonstration,” whereas anything geared more toward the production of sound or an environment would be a “concert” or “event.” And a presentation that incorporates a live body with minimal movement might be called a “live installation.”)

Chapter 2———The Spectrum of Bodily Expression69

– The intent is to show the audience (i.e., have them experience) something in a temporally and spatially limited setting, whether a gallery, stage or urban space (as opposed to acts done without spectators or only for one’s inner circle). This criterion would extend to include photographic or film documentation of performances where an audience was not present, so long as the documentation was made to be exhibited publicly.

Used in this sense, performance is able to encompass all the aforementioned modes of expression from the 1960s that incorporated the body, from Happenings and Actions to “events” based on bodily movement. Even as I maintain this baseline definition, there may be occasions where, in order to point out or compare historic conditions, I cite examples that are open to debate as to whether they satisfy the above criteria—but the focus of my argument will always be on works that fulfill all of the criteria. In the previous chapter I introduced “bodily expression” as one of five limiting conditions for the scope of this book. On top of defining such bodily expression as “performance,” I am also restricting it to performances (2) by artists, (3) in Japan, (4) from 1957 to 1970, and then further narrowing the scope to (5) practices that emerged out of Anti-Art. Accordingly, “Anti-Art performance” is my name for vulgar action expression in urban space—part of the trend Yoshida deems “bodies writhing about in the mud,” which kicked off with Kyūshū-ha and peaked twice, with Zero Jigen and again with Itoi Kanji. Which now raises the question: What did Anti-Art entail in the realm of visual art? NOTES 1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

Yoshida Yoshie, “Tandoku kōisha no chōgekijō” [The solitary actor’s supertheater], Bijutsu techō, no. 335 (December 1970): 58. Yoshida, 58. Yoshida, 58. Yoshida Yoshie, “Kokkyō o tokashi toshi o name: Mōhitori no rokujū nendaiji, Nakajima Yoshio” [Melting national borders, licking cities: Another child of the 1960s, Nakajima Yoshio], Bijutsu techō, no. 358 (August–September 1972): 8–9, 192, 219. Yoshida Yoshie, “Tandoku kōisha no chōgekijō,” 59. Yoshida, 59. The films were screened along with works by Christian Boltanski in October–November 1970 by the underground theater troupe Tenjō S­ ajiki. For more on Viennese Actionism (­Wiener ­A ktionismus), see chap. 20.4, p. 452. Yoshida Yoshie, “Tandoku kōisha no chōgekijō,” 62. Yoshida, 62. Consider the following series of statements made by critic Tōno Yoshiaki in a roundtable discussion. Tōno first says that “During the time of Happenings, instead of an approved

site, like some display in a department store, it was like [the artists were] infringing on the site each time, right? Whereas with performance, it’s not just a word, as it also has its own bill of rights.” He then asserts, “A Happening was really a singular thing, never meant to be repeated. […] But what we now refer to as ‘performance’ is pretty repeatable. […] And then because of that repetition, it kind of mixes the art up with, like, amusement or entertainment.” Tōno Yoshiaki, Anzaï Shigeo, and Akasegawa Genpei, “Tōgi: Toshi kūkan no naka no shintai: Pafōmansu ga hyōgensuru mono” (Discussion: The body in urban space: The expression in performance), Yuriika, vol. 16, no. 9 (September 1984): 148, 151. 11. The event was officially known as Festival of Contemporary Art [Gendai bijutsu no saiten]. For more, see the Chronology. 12. The program aired on the Nippon Television Network from May 18 to October 12, 1968. See also chap. 8.4, pp. 204–5. 13. Susan Sontag, “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador, 1966), 263–74. My commentary follows Kishi Tetsuo’s

70

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

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observations in the notes to his translation of the essay in the Japanese edition. See Susan Sontag, Hankaishaku, trans. Kishi Tetsuo [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō: 1996), 415–16. Sontag, 430. Translator’s note: The title references the loanwords gebaruto, derived from the German Gewalt, meaning “power” or “violence,” and often used in the Japanese context to refer to violent clashes between student radicals and police forces or other radical factions, and angura, derived from the English “underground.” “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 14. Akatsuka Yukio, Geba–an goten [A gewa[lt]– un[derground] lexicon] (Tokyo: Jiyū Kokuminsha, 1969), 160. Translator’s note: Although this derivation seems to have evolved naturally in the Japanese context, it’s worth noting that Allan Kaprow himself used the word Happener in his own writing. See for instance Kaprow’s essay “Pinpointing Happenings (1967).” Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments & Happenings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966). Michael Kirby, Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1966), 21. Allan Kaprow, “Pinpointing Happenings (1967),” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 88. Allan Kaprow, “Happenings in the New York Scene (1961),” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, 19. The full title was Imaya akushon aru nomi: “Yomiuri Andepandan” to iu genshō [Now we have no choice but action! The “Yomiuri Independent” Phenomena]. The book was retitled Hangeijutsu Anpan [Anti-Art Anpan [short for Independent]] upon its release by Chikuma Bunko in 1994. Tone Yasunao, “Geijutsu no chikaku hendō: EXPO kara hippī made” [Art’s tectonic shifts: From the Osaka Expo to the hippies], Bijutsu techō, no. 289 (November 1967): 103. As stated by Ay-O in “Fluxus Universe: A Conversation between Akiyama Kuniharu, Ay-O, and Shiomi Mieko,” trans. Mami Yoshimoto and Hajime Morita, in Fluxus: Art into Life,

26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

ed. Urawa Art Museum, (Saitama: Urawa Art Museum, 2004), 159. Exhibition catalogue. Originally printed in Fluxus, special issue, Art Vivant, no. 11 (December 1983). Ay-O, “Fluxus Universe,” 159. Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 31. Ono Yōko, “To the Wesleyan People, January 23, 1966” in Alexandra Munroe with Jon Hendricks, Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society, 2000), 289. Exhibition catalogue. Yoshimoto, Into Performance, 31. Ay-O, “Fluxus Universe,” 160. Allan Kaprow, “The Happenings Are Dead: Long Live the Happenings! (1966),” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, 63. Ay-O, “Fluxus Universe,” 159. Tone Yasunao, “Seido toshite no geijutsu to ‘shigusa’ toshite no geijutsu: Hyōgen o haiki­shiuru ka” [Art as institution and art as “gesture”: Can expression be abolished?], in Gendai geijutsu no isō: Geijutsu wa shisō tariuru ka [The phases of contemporary art: Can art be ideology?] (Tokyo: Tabata Shoten, 1970), 37. Originally published as “Shintai, chikaku, hyōgen: Seido toshite no geijutsu to ‘shigusa’ toshite no geijutsu” [Body, perception, expression: Art as institution and art as “gesture”], Kikan firumu, no. 5 (March 1970). “‘Sen’en satsu saiban’ ni okeru Nakanishi Natsuyuki shōgenroku (ichi)” [Nakanishi Natsuyuki’s deposition at the Model 1,000-Yen Note Trial (1)], Bijutsu techō, no. 347 (October 1971): 94. Nakanishi spoke in court on September 14, 1966. One of the earliest uses of the term pafōmansu in 1960s Japanese art is an action by NOMO member Miyoshi Hidetoshi that was carried out in July 1969, Purakādo pafōmansu (Placard performance). Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2006), 34–36. Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1996), 6–7. Starting with the publication of Nakahara Yūsuke’s Japanese translation of Roselee Goldberg’s Performance: Live Art, 1909 to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979 / Tokyo: Libroport, 1982), some of the exhibitions, performances, and publications that appeared during this period include the following: Laurie Anderson, Mister Heartbreak (Laforet Museum

Chapter 2———The Spectrum of Bodily Expression

Akasaka, Tokyo, and other venues, June 1984); Akasegawa Genpei, Tōkyō mikusā keikaku [Tokyo Mixer Plan] (Tokyo: Parco Shuppan, 1984); Nam June Paik: Mostly Video (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, June–July 1984); Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik, “Concert Performance with Two Pianos” (Sogetsu Art Center, June 1984); performance special feature in Yuriika (September 1984); performance special feature in Bijutsu techō (October 1985); the “Performance Now!” symposium (Yūrakuchō

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Asahi Hall, December 1984; a transcript was published in the January 18 and 25, 1985, issues of Asahi Jānaru [Asahi Journal]; Pafōmansu nau: Āto jidai no shinhyōgen [Performance now: New expression in the age of art], ed. Nanjō Fumio with Tsurumuto Shōzō (Tokyo: Tōkyū Agency, 1986). 39. This wording comes from the subtitle of the book (see n. 38 above), Pafōmansu nau: Āto jidai no shinhyōgen.

CHAPTER 3

Beyond Anti-Art The Descent into the Everyday and its Diffusion

1.

PERFORMANCE ART AND THE ANTI-ART DEBATES IN FOUR ACTS

The Japanese term at the crux of this book’s argument, hangeijutsu (Anti-Art), comes from an article Tōno Yoshiaki wrote for the daily Yomiuri Shimbun highlighting Kudō Tetsumi’s work at the 12th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition of March 1960.1 Held almost four years after that, in January 1964, the Bridgestone Museum of Art’s “‘Anti-Art’: Yes, or No?” symposium attracted so many spectators that they spilled out of the lecture hall,2 and the debate continued to unfold across the pages of various art journals thereafter. Countering the sharp-witted provocation of Tōno, who was at the forefront of a new generation of critics, was emerging talent Miyakawa Atsushi, who would ultimately settle the discussion. Miyaka­wa’s rhetoric possessed such virtuosity that even peers who initially took a skeptical stance toward Anti-Art, such as Hariu Ichirō, came away impressed with his brilliance.3 A close examination of these events through the lens of the present, however, raises questions. Bodily expression at the time developed amid the radicalization of the Yomiuri Independent, the establishment of regional Independent exhibitions, and the emergence of diverse kinds of popular approaches to art. Taking this context into account, the debates over Anti-Art encompass a number of issues that are highly relevant to the argument of this book. As outlined in chapter 1, for all the diversity of performance practice in 1960s Japan, there is a significant lack of both contemporary criticism and theorization of those practices by the practitioners of the time, and nary an attempt at a historical overview. The critical writing on Anti-Art, however, compensates for that lack. As will be established in part IV of this book, the attraction to the nether regions—of the body, the city, culture, and politics—that defines Anti-Art performance is itself a manifestation of the “descent into the vulgar everyday” (hizokuna nichijōsei e no kakō)4 that characterized the Japanese Anti-Art movement in general, which was in turn deeply implicated in the conditions for not just art but also culture and society during the 1960s. Retracing the development of Anti-Art is thus also an effective means of retracing the development of Anti-Art performance.5 2.

ACT ONE: TŌNO YOSHIAKI IN THE SPOTLIGHT, 1960

In his article on the 1960 Yomiuri Independent, Tōno Yoshiaki introduces the following works as examples of what he terms garakuta no hangeijutsu, or “junk Anti-Art”: – Itoi Kanji’s Ajikan (fig. 191, p. 401), an installation in which “nude photographs stuck to clumps of straw are enshrined in a small hut made of wood planks.” – Shinohara Ushio’s Thunder Sculpture (Kaminari chōkoku), comprising “hundreds upon hundreds of cheap bamboo sticks that have been forcefully bent, with a toilet and sandals and cans and balloons strewn among them.”

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– Kudō Tetsumi’s Proliferating Chain Reaction B, a structure made of “red and white and yellow vinyl strings all tied together and knotted into scrubbing brushes” (The work is illustrated in the article, in which Tōno anoints Kudō the “hope” of this new trend.)6

Tōno writes the following about these works: If you’re questioning whether this is really Art or not, just relax. This is definitely not Art, and rather what I’d call Anti-Art [emphasis mine]. And yet it probably strikes you far more powerfully than any “artwork” sealed tight in its glass case at the museum that has no relation to your life today. It’s fascinating how, over the past year or so, the trend toward anti-painting or anti-sculpture has clearly taken root among the new generation in such an entirely natural way [emphasis in the original]. A poet who was in elementary school during the war years once said that his only playthings were burned-out corrugated metal sheets and the empty cages at the zoo, and now a generation of artists who can boldly yet naturally make use of new materials has at long last grown out of that junk-filled postwar devastation. […] What a lucid world of metaphysics it is that these most vulgar of objects are now being converted into! A vivid world of ideas that has taken root in the junk of devastation—this is the first true postwar school.7

This article is said to have introduced the term hangeijutsu to broader Japanese art discourse, but 1960 was hardly the beginning of the Anti-Art tendency at the Yomiuri Independent—it was merely the year the tendency became more pronounced. In a commentary published in the Yomiuri Shimbun just two days after Tōno’s article, Takiguchi Shūzō asserts that he had already noted the emergence of a “Dadaistic or Anti-Art trend under the influence of Art Informel” a year prior.8 The fact that other critics were already using the term suggests that it was rather Tōno’s characteristically provocative use of language that put him in position to light the fuse of the Anti-Art debate. That Tōno chose to single out the works of Itoi, Shinohara, and Kudō in such a short article is highly significant, as all three artists would go on to continue engaging in performance practices, even if there were marked differences among them in disposition and expression. Yet the developments of their later careers prompt doubt as to whether the works they exhibited at the 1960 Yomiuri Independent really can be lumped together as “junk Anti-Art.” For his part, Kudō stated that the designation “Anti-Art” was “way off” and expressed his disappointment in viewers who could not see the unique “response” (taiō) informing his use of such materials as “scrub brushes and sexy pink vinyl tubes.”9 It would seem that bringing an element of the everyday into his works was a means and not an end for Kudō. In Shinohara’s case, the works he made in 1958–59 using scores of cheap bamboo kindling underpin Tōno’s assessment. But these works of what the artist termed “action sculpture” (akushon chōkoku) were not solely about the use of everyday items, as the elements of overtly improvised messiness and abnormal size also appear to be central to their expression. As for Itoi, his installation Ajikan was a collection of sordid images displayed inside a shabby, Japanese-style living space, which may have incorporated similar traditional objects as his other entries to the 1960 Yomiuri Independent, Branches, Shōji Screen, and Time for Action, as well as his contributions to the 1961 and

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1962 exhibitions (fig. 188–193, pp. 400–402). In the end, the only thing linking these three artists was their use of junk, or non-art objects taken from everyday life. Whether the cheap mass-produced products in the works of Kudō and Shinohara or Itoi’s seemingly lived-in materials and spaces, it was the fact that this junk hardly seemed capable of becoming art that must have given others the impression of its being Anti-Art.10 Numerous critics aside from Tōno responded to the “Anti-Art” at the 1960 Yomiuri Independent, including Ebara Jun, Hariu Ichirō, Nakahara Yūsuke, Segi Shin’ichi and Takiguchi Shūzō. Tōno was of course among the supporters while, as shall be subsequently detailed, Nakahara expressed conditional approval through a more detached analysis. Takiguchi acknowledged the energy of Anti-Art even as he stated his desire to see more finished paintings and sculptures,11 while Ebara took an outright negative stance, decrying Anti-Art as an “exaltation of the bizarre [getemono]” and “the kind of foolishness that conflates serving up gossip to the newspapers with starting real scandals, in the true sense of the word.”12 Also among detractors were Hariu and Segi; Hariu believed that the Anti-Art artists had “lost their [command of] speech and were spastically crying out,”13 and Segi asserted that “if spewing out your still-unprocessed feelings on canvas constitutes action, then it’s nothing but a waste of energy.”14 As the Asahi Jānaru opined, “a quite decisive clash in assessments [was] taking place among the supposed vanguard critics.”15 And, for the record, this anonymous reviewer was also among the detractors, asserting that the Anti-Art “Beats” of the Yomiuri Independent were missing Dadaism’s revolt against any logic or order that would reinforce conventional aesthetics; that they offered no critique of reality; and that they lacked the self-criticality of Dada. Although few articles provide commentary on individual works, the critics of the 1960 Yomiuri Independent did more to ground their arguments in specific works being made in Japan at the time than those who participated in the Anti-Art debates of 1964, which hardly touched on actual local practices.16 Among them, Nakahara Yūsuke contributed the most rational assessment of the works. On the heels of Tōno, Nakahara contributed his own article to the Yomiuri Shimbun. Commenting on the Informel-style paintings on display at the Independent, Nakahara observes that “what is being performed is for the most part a method that reduces expression to how much paint they can pile onto the canvas,” whereas the works of Kudō Tetsumi (Proliferating Chain Reaction B), Shinohara Ushio (The Largest Self-Portrait in the World), and Kaneko Tsuruzō (Aru kanshō [A certain sentiment]) share the characteristic of “handling the links between material and expression in a highly natural way.”17 This analysis is consistent with a subsequent article for Bijutsu techō in which Nakahara once again mentions works by the same three artists and asserts that these are works that “present, rather than describe.”18 If in his Bijutsu techō article Nakahara makes the insightful observation that “masochism” connects everything from Kyūshū-ha to Miki Tomio’s work, in his Yomiuri Shimbun article he goes further to identify as another commonality in such works marked by a “naïve stance of leaving everything up to the viewer, whereby some combination of unusual materials inevitably corresponds to unusual images.”19 Thus he questions these artists’ facile expectation that fresh, novel work automatically results from simply combining unconventional materials. An even more remarkable statement from the latter half of the Yomiuri article reveals that Nakahara does not restrict his critique to aesthetic analysis. Contrasting the works at the Yomiuri Independent with those at

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the Japan Independent Exhibition, which was founded by the leftist Japan Art Society, Nakahara posits: “Is so-called Anti-Art really the oil to the water of works that attempt to critique reality? I think not.”20 In other words, Nakahara senses something in the works containing social critique at the Japan Independent that was shared by the post-Informel “pile-on-the-paint school,” Tōno’s junk objet crowd, and artists using materials like asphalt, such as Kyūshū-ha or Miki Tomio. Although Nakahara does not provide any basis for his identification of a potential to critique reality in “so-called Anti-Art,” he does propose something that goes beyond mere aesthetic debate. As we shall soon see, in 1964 too, Nakahara would keep his distance from the debate while maintaining a consistent critical awareness. But by then all references to social criticism in Anti-Art were nowhere to be seen. 3.

ACT TWO: STARRING MIYAKAWA ATSUSHI, 1964

While I will not provide a detailed account of the discourse on Anti-Art between 1961 and 1963 here, a 1962 article Tōno published in the Asahi Shimbun includes commentary that cannot be overlooked in a history of performance art, even if it outwardly seems unrelated to the contentions of the 1960 and 1964 debates.21 Despite leading with a description of Ichiyanagi Toshi’s November 1961 Sogetsu Art Center performance IBM: Happening and Music Concrète, Tōno devotes the bulk of his article to kinetic art—namely, Jean Tinguely—and American artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg, and this lack of reference to Japanese artists is close to the tenor of the 1964 debates. Tōno’s discussion of the characteristics of Anti-Art, however, which seems to have been prompted by Ichiyanagi’s Happening, merits examination. Tōno writes: “One feature of ‘Anti-Art’ is that […] the creator no longer arrogantly forces his ego on his viewers, and instead directly involves them in an ‘event’ that is acted out by everyday, vulgar objects.” Although it does not play an obvious role in Tōno’s 1964 debate with Miyakawa, this assertion presages the formulations of Happenings advanced by Ishiko Junzō and Tone Yasunao—who will take the stage in their respective sections of this chapter—both in its awareness of Happenings and Environments and in its recognition of the viewer’s subjective, active involvement in response to the artist’s self-expression. Following the publication of this article, Act Two of the Anti-Art debates was triggered by the symposium Tōno organized at the Bridgestone Museum of Art under the provocative title “‘Anti-Art’: Yes, or No?”22 It was then that Miyakawa, the other central figure in the debate, entered the fray. In a review of the symposium for Bijutsu techō, Miyakawa “provisionally” defines Anti-Art as a “descent to the vulgar everyday, both in its use of objets (readymade objects and junk) and its imagery.”23 And he was just getting started: Miyakawa goes on to argue that Informel and action painting had brought about the “autonomy of the expressive process,” such that it became “an end in itself,” and that “the descent to the everyday is the final annulment of the boundary between art and nonart.” He concludes with the theoretical acrobatics of asking how it could be possible for “an art that doesn’t exist [to] exist.”24 As much as this conclusion reflects Miyakawa’s penchant for breezing over the analysis of works in favor of theorizing,25 it also indicates that the context of the debate had shifted from when Anti-Art made its debut four years prior.

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More significantly, in the 1964 debate, Miyakawa, Tōno, Takashina Shūji and others addressed the works of American Pop artists like Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. Tōno’s and Takashina’s articles focus in particular on the new mode of relation between objet and image. The works of 1960 have been completely forgotten, and no Japanese works from the time of 1964 even merit discussion—neither the works at the 1960 Yomiuri Independent, any developments in Japanese art since then, nor even the works in the exhibition Tōno organized concurrently to the symposium, Young Seven (held at Tokyo’s Minami Gallery in January–February 1964). As Chiba Shigeo notes of Miyakawa and Tōno, “it would have been well enough for them to read [American] Neo Dada- or Pop Art-style tendencies in [Japanese] Anti-Art, but they instead warped what they found in Neo Dada and Pop to fit the model of Anti-Art.”26 The title of Nakahara Yūsuke’s article summarizing the 1964 Anti-Art debates, “A survey of writing on Pop Art,” corroborates this claim.27 In other words, there is a divergence between the works put forward as Anti-Art at the 1960 Yomiuri Independent and those considered Anti-Art in 1964. Where the debate in 1960 was about works that radiated an abnormal energy through their accumulation of cheap, everyday materials, discussions of the latter in 1964 were centered on works by American artists such as Johns, Warhol and Lichtenstein, with a shift in emphasis from the rhetorical dispute over the “autonomy of the expressive process” (i.e., the back and forth between Miyakawa and Tōno) to the semiotics of Pop Art, or the relation between obuje (objet) and imaju (image). To be sure, the works by Kikuhata Mokuma, Tateishi Kōichi (Tiger) and Nakanishi Natsuyuki in the Young Seven exhibition featured signage- or design-style elements that were distinct from the Anti-Art of 1960, and these artists may have been responding to similar concerns to their American peers. Yet, aside from a passing reference by Miyakawa, no Japanese works were directly addressed in the 1964 debates.28 The baffling thing about both Miyakawa’s assertions and Tōno’s rejoinders is that if we took Miyakawa’s claim about the “autonomy of the expressive process” literally, it would seem to invite discussion of artmaking demonstrations (e.g., those by Gutai or Shinohara Ushio) as performance, but no one even broaches this topic. Recalling Nakahara’s observation that the phrase “autonomy of the expressive process” is a contradiction in terms, since true “autonomy of the expressive process” means there would be nothing to see (as in, no work would exist as a result of the expression), the recognition of the creative process itself as artwork—that is, performance—was not on the table in this debate. Even when Tōno critiques Miyakawa for overlooking how so-called Anti-Art “storms the ‘autonomy of the expressive process’ from its rear gate and razes it to the ground,”29 it leaves the impression that Tōno’s critique is in some way argument for argument’s sake. What kept Tōno from bringing up Ichiyanagi’s Happening after having cited it as an example of Anti-Art in 1962?30 Disregard for Japanese performance practices in the Anti-Art debates was not a problem specific to Tōno. Although numerous artists across Japan were already engaging with performance prior to the Anti-Art symposium of January  1964, not one critic makes any mention of them. Even assuming they had no way of knowing about the experiments of Zero Jigen in Nagoya or those of Unbeat, which took place in Tokyo but were not publicized, Tokyo’s leading critics would surely have had access to information, if only indirectly, about events such as Banquet Commemorating the Defeat in the War (see pp. 155–7), which was held at the Kunitachi Community Center in August 1962 and

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featured members of Neo Dada and Group Ongaku, and Kyūshū-ha’s Grand Assembly of Heroes (see pp. 157–60), held in November of the same year in Fukuoka with the participation of artists Kazakura Shō, Kosugi Takehisa, Tone Yasunao and critic Yoshida Yoshie from Tokyo. In Tokyo, multiple artists carried out performances at the final Yomiuri Independent in March 1963, while that May members of Hi-Red Center took to the streets to conduct performances for their event 6th Mixer Plan. Furthermore, one of the biggest performance events of the entire decade, Sweet 16 (see p. 155), was held at Sogetsu Art Center in December 1963, a month prior to the Anti-Art symposium, with the participation of some forty artists, musicians and dancers. The critics’ seeming indifference relates to another major omission in the Anti-Art debates. As Tomii Reiko points out, even as Miyakawa proclaims the “descent into the vulgar everyday,” he is completely oblivious to the expansion of geijutsu (art) into the real, everyday space of the city: If Miyakawa’s stylistic formulation [of Anti-Art] allowed him to examine the metaphysics of geijutsu, the artists took their descent to the everyday further and created a new reality of geijutsu in the actual space of life. Or, to put it differently, they pursued “experiments in the public sphere.”31

Between 1960 (a few years prior to the end of the Yomiuri Independent) and 1964, things were unmistakably moving toward art’s penetration into real space, its transformation into an environment, its incorporation of temporal elements, its transition to performance, and its presentation in urban space rather than at museums or galleries. I will go further in-depth on these topics in chapters 5–7, but it is fair to say that just about any performance or act by almost any artist at the time displayed an Anti-Art inclination toward “descent into the everyday” that would rival any work of Pop Art. Ultimately, the Anti-Art debates concluded as an abstrusely rhetorical dispute among elite critics, completely divorced from art practice in Japan. To that end, we might say that the debate never even got going in the first place. What happened during the intermission, as it were, between the two acts of ’60 and ’64 was a kind of “cleansing of Anti-Art” that sought to recuperate the material into the conceptual, junk into brand-new, street into gallery, and the process of action into its resultant “artwork,” in an effort to neatly resolve it all under the guise of “Art” (geijutsu). It was a move similar in nature to the campaigns of “internationalization” and “beautification” (in preparation for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics) taking place at that very moment. In the end, what precipitated Anti-Art’s recuperation into Art was not Miyakawa’s theory, but the 1964 Anti-Art debate as a whole. 4.

ACT THREE: ISHIKO JUNZŌ, AFTER 1967

Tomii Reiko notes that 1964, the year of Act Two of the Anti-Art debates, is the year that Hi-Red Center, one of the groups that bridged Anti-Art and Non-Art, carried out its final project, Be Clean! Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropolitan Area (hereinafter Cleaning Event).32 Meanwhile, 1967, the year that will be taken up in Act Three of this drama, saw Anti-Art meet its symbolic end with the guilty verdict of

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Akasegawa Genpei, one of Hi-Red Center’s former members, in the first Model 1,000-Yen Note Trial. Although no debate transpired on the level of three years prior, 1967 was also the year Ishiko Junzō emerged as the critic who would theorize the development from Art Informel to objets and Happenings, serving as a bridge between Anti-Art and performance art. Almost as if to compensate for the omission of performance in the 1964 debates, Ishiko tweaked the title of Miyakawa’s ground-breaking 1963 essay “After Informel” (Anforumeru igo)33 for an essay of his own, “After Happenings” (Hapuningu igo). In the essay, Ishiko announces that “Following Miyakawa, who saw in Informel the potential for the contemporary in expression, I see a turning point toward the materialization of that potential in Happenings.”34 Underlying this line of thought is Ishiko’s discontent with how, given that discussions of art to that point had been “overly focused on the mental state and desire fulfillment of the artist,” talk of “annihilation of the self” in fact amounted to no more than an “assertion of the self” as a form of desire fulfillment for the artist.35 In other words, this was a critique leveled at an art world that refused to situate art in broad terms as a “social mode of being,” one lacking “the vision to see expression as a medium for spiritual interchange.”36 For Ishiko, “expression” is “a circulatory mode of interchange with the other,” whereas a designation such as “art” (geijutsu) is “just the name for an institutionalized form of psychological transmission between humans.”37 And what links Ishiko to Tone Yasunao, the protagonist of Act Four of the Anti-Art debates, is this very vision of fine art as a social medium on par with popular art and entertainment.38 Further, if we take the display of the objet, which began with Duchamp, as an epistemological act that asserts “the namelessness of ‘things’ [mono]” and “interrogates the ‘event’ [koto] that bridges the gap between object [buttai] and good [buppin],” this act then links to a theory of performance as an “assertion of the anonymity of action [kōdō].”39 As Ishiko writes about the egg-shaped and rope-like objets employed in Hi-Red Center’s Yamanote Line Festival (see pp. 144–5), “the status of the object [buttai] and that of the human action [kōi] are inseparably connected to each other, such that they are kept suspended in a state of incomplete process. The objet is no longer an objectum [kyakutai] to be observed from a distance by the subject [shutai], and rather an unnameable tool, an accomplice for action that involves creator and spectator equally without distinction.”40 This paves the way for performance as a “circulatory mode of interchange with the other,” mediated through the objet. Notably, Ishiko expands his scope even further beyond the art world–insider content of the 1964 debates in his essay “‘After Happenings,’ revisited,” published in August 1968, a year following “After Happenings.”41 He does so in part because the popularization of Happenings, including events for the sake of self-promotion, was indisputable by 1968. But the shift in the cultural climate is also evident in a special feature Ishiko produced for weekly magazine Shūkan Manga Taimuzu (Weekly Manga Times), in which he presents artists who had deviated from the world of contemporary art—from Akase­ gawa Genpei to Kara Jūrō, Zero Jigen, Koyama Tetsuo, Ishii Mitsutaka, and Matsue Kaku of Kurohata—alongside theater and dance as the standard bearers of underground culture, the headline’s titular “Pornographers in the guise of avant-garde art”(!). 42 In “‘After Happenings,’ revisited,” Ishiko draws on not just Allan Kaprow, the obligatory reference for discussions of Happenings in the art world, but also Susan Sontag, who

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articulates the subcultural sensibility of the late 1960s in her writings on “camp.” Ishiko however maintains an ambiguous distance from the new subculture of the day. For instance, he is critical of Sontag’s take on Happenings,43 which he finds to be overly in thrall to Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, as she “goes too far in superimposing on Happenings a sense of materiality akin to passion, which she extrapolates from bodies engaged in action.” As a result, Sontag loses sight of the potential of Environments as a “recovery of total perception.”44 Ishiko’s emphasis of how Happenings differs, from not only the corporeality of Artaud but also the butoh of Hijikata Tatsumi and the theater of Kara Jūrō, is apparent when he zeroes in on Hi-Red Center’s use of objets in “After Happenings.” He asserts in the essay that a Happening is “the autonomous independence of an expression that could only be phenomenon,” while cautioning that Happenings is “not so much a rejection of the transmission of expression as it is […] a totality that encompasses the transmission process within itself.”45 Ishiko cites the integration of natural and urban environments in a November 1967 performance by Hakken no Kai (Discovery Society)46 and the intermedia experiments carried out in New York in October of the same year by E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) as precedents for the type of Happening to which Miyakawa’s “autonomy of the expressive process” may have referred. To Ishiko, such events “produce an environmental space” in which “all types of objects, and the movements of those objects, and all types of people, and the movements of those people, are equal parts.”47 Yet even as he finds Zero Jigen “refreshing,” he dismisses the group’s performance as “a mere show.”48 Ishiko’s ambivalence can be seen in the gap between his takes on contemporary art and kitsch. For example, in a later essay, he questions whether Nakahara Yūsuke’s understanding of conceptual art does not neglect perception or imagination in its over-distillation of the idea. 49 Arguing that “the faculty of sight has not retained its physiologically natural state; sight itself has been established as a human agency—as human history—with depth and breadth,” Ishiko claims that what matters then is a historicity (rekishisei) or institutionality (seidosei) grounded in “the breadth and depth of our physicality.”50 Although this of course anticipates Ishiko’s writing on kitsch, the key is not the “body” as such, but that the whole of perception carries historicity/institutionality. As with his aforementioned distaste for Artaudian takes on Happenings, we can detect here a subtle rejection of the physical. Moving beyond the elitist contemporary art discourse that emulated the West at the expense of the realities of Japan, “the breadth and depth” of Ishiko’s capacity to bridge Anti-Art and Happenings are commendable, as he actively engages with what Tsurumi Shunsuke calls “marginal art” and “popular art” (see pp. 467–8), as well as the kitsch and vulgar elements that influence even contemporary art, while still diligently keeping abreast of underground culture. Contrast Ishiko’s stance with the August 1968 special feature on Happenings in Bijutsu techō, published around the same time as “‘After Happenings,’ revisited,” in which Nakahara Yūsuke and Akiyama Kuniharu make not even the slightest mention of Japan’s homegrown Happenings, let alone “Ritualists” (gishiki-ya) such as Zero Jigen, who were coming into their prime. By comparison Ishiko’s range is far broader than that of Nakahara and Akiyama, and consequently, he went to great pains to theorize the reality of 1960s Japan in his particular writing style, which was often incredibly abstruse. It was not only in theorizing Happenings that Ishiko took his place in the Anti-Art debates. Although he makes no direct mention of Anti-Art in the 1971 essay on kitsch

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that will be examined in chapter 22, his commentary on the differences between Pop Art and kitsch seems almost intent to sweep aside the 1964 debates that revolved around American Pop Art rather than Japanese Anti-Art. As Ishiko argues, even as Pop Art addresses the rift that had occurred between image and referent while also problematizing the institutionality of painting itself, it nevertheless clearly belongs to “the context of painting or art.”51 In contrast, the kitsch of a bathhouse mural depicting a typically evocative landscape—say, Mount Fuji—is “an ethical expression that pursues a ‘beautiful effect.’”52 Even as it extends the Japanese tradition of painting on sliding panels, screens, and other partitions, such kitsch could also be called “a specter of a community that was barely allowed to survive [by modern society].”53 Thus, “the theater of Kara Jūrō, the dance of Hijikata Tatsumi or Ishii Mitsutaka, the films of Wakamatsu Kōji or Adachi Masao, the art of Akasegawa Genpei, and the design of Yokoo Tadanori or Kimura Tsunehisa” are not kitsch, however kitsch-like they may seem to be.54 Ishiko was in command of a sociohistorical vision with a scope broad enough to relativize not just the world of contemporary art, but the whole of 1960s counterculture. 5.

ACT FOUR: TONE YASUNAO, CIRCA 1970

Tone Yasunao would reexamine developments in Japanese art up to the late 1960s from the viewpoint of Anti-Art in a series of essays he published around 1970. As an artist, Tone had carried out numerous Happenings and concerts, both on his own and as a member of Group Ongaku. At the same time, he maintained a wide circle of acquaintances, spanning from the artists active during the later years of the Yomiuri Independent to those involved in Bikyōtō (Artists Joint-Struggle Council). He was, moreover, a frequent contributor to art journals as both a writer and participant in roundtable discussions, on top of being one of the editors of Bijutsu techō’s 1972 landmark, two-part special feature “Chronicle: Fifty years of contemporary art,” which compiled a massive amount of reference material. As suggested by his comment that he and other Neo Dada artists chose to boycott the independently-organized exhibition of 1964 (commonly referred to as the Hariu Independent, after the influential critic) because to them the recently canceled Yomiuri Independent had been “not just an exhibition venue, but also a chance to have our works seen that extended all the way to the mass media networks of the newspaper companies,”55 Tone was particularly aware of the function of the mass media among the Anti-Art performance artists. To that end, he furthers Ishiko’s concern for a Happenings-style “totality that encompasses the transmission process [of expression].” What Tone recognized in Anti-Art after its early 1960s heyday was that, in “its everydayification [nichijōka] of the creative act and its deployment of everyday [nichijōteki-na] objects,” Anti-Art was capable of turning “any and all our environments into art” and could “restore an art that had lost its reality in the confinement of individual representation to its place as a form of vital work in the world.”56 Tone expresses a regard for the “everydayification of creative action” here that was absent, as already noted, in Miyakawa and others, and mirrors Ishiko’s discovery of the “circulatory mode of interchange with the other” that occurs in Happenings. Tone’s observation that Ichiyanagi Toshi had employed the enka ballads57 of singers like Miyako Harumi and Suizenji

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Kiyoko as audio sources in his contribution to Cross Talk/Intermedia, a massive event held in February 1969 at Yoyogi National Stadium in Tokyo,58 calls to mind the situation at the Yomiuri Independent, where a portrait of then-Crown Princess Michiko59 by a sidewalk portrait artist was shown alongside avant-garde artworks. Tone’s observation of the contemporary reality in which the popular coexists with the artistic is similar to Ishiko’s; however, as I will elaborate, Tone’s refusal to even cast an eye toward the potential of popular, kitsch culture is a striking departure from Ishiko. Tone was no supremacist of optimistic sensitivity. Tone calmly observed that in the Benjaminian transition from the loss of “cult value” to the valorization of “display value,” there would be little to differentiate “artistic” experiments such as intermedia from the show windows at department stores and shops.60 Reminding readers that the From Space to Environment (Kūkan kara kankyō e) exhibition held in November 1966 at Ginza’s Matsuya Department Store—right in the seat of Japan’s consumer culture— had been criticized as an “amusement park for novel attractions” and “the first trend to take the lead in the reconciliation of the avant-garde and the masses,’” he notes that this “displayification of the artwork, or what might be called the autonomization of the artwork’s display aspect, has turned the work into something for consumption with the moniker of art.”61 In a subsequent essay, Tone argues that this art-as-display mentality reflects a situation in which art had found a new mode of being in technocratic society, as a result of the technical amplification of Anti-Art.62 This insight not only applies to Expo ’70, which was happening at the time of the essay’s writing, but also anticipates everything from the government-sponsored art initiatives held across Japan today to the reinvention of large-scale international contemporary art exhibitions as a form of amusement park. Tone shares Ishiko’s open attitude toward mass media visual culture. Attentive to all manner of graphic art in the streets, from municipal and community message boards to the standing signboards of the student radicals, commercial posters indistinguishable from “art” (prints, etc.) and theatrical posters billing underground events, he makes a notable observation that underground theater posters that do not fulfill the purpose of messaging, as they are aimed at temporary communities; “the vestige of the dream that Anti-Art could negate Art by turning an entire environment into art” could be found in these posters’ “ambivalence,” generated by “the conflicted desire behind the individualistic designer’s longing for namelessness.”63 In other words, even as he identifies consumable display art, such as “Expo art,” as an inevitable consequence of Anti-Art, he also contends that the “descent into the vulgar everyday” in Anti-Art would lead to art’s “liberation from individual expression” to be “thought of as one among the many kinds of relations that connect us to other people and things,” and ultimately “at last, open the way to the nullification of modern art.”64 So what meaning did performance have for Tone in a politico-cultural context that was drastically different from that of the early 1960s? While Tone states that some of the “expression that seeks to eradicate all artistic categories and that does not fit within the institution of art”65 had established itself as popular culture ( fūzoku)—of which Happenings was the most prominent example—he is nevertheless dismissive of Happenings, which in its popularization ( fūzokuka) “appears to have become a subspecies of theater.”66 He is also dismissive of Yoshida Yoshie’s “bodies writhing about in the mud”:

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The tactile epistemology that Happenings once relied on fails to transcend the limitations of human individuality. Overlooking that limitation leads to the emergence of a sort of expressionist Happenings that cannot fully dispel its romanticization of acts that embrace elements of ritualism or violence.67

These “expressionist Happenings” were superseded by intermedia-style expression, which responded not just to the visual environment as such but also to environments that included immaterial mediums like light and sound that were produced by new technology. Tone uses the term “event” to distinguish this phenomenon from the popularized version of Happenings. Notably, Tone understands the works of Japan’s “Anti-Form” artists (later known as Mono-ha) to be “events” or “an art of gesture [shigusa]”—even going so far as to refer to Sekine Nobuo’s Phase—Mother Earth (1968), historically renowned as the genesis of Mono-ha, as the “Concave-Convex [ōtotsu] Happening”!68 This interpretation follows Lee Ufan’s treatise on Mono-ha, which asserts that gesture is done “without conscious representation.”69 Tone is nevertheless critical of the Anti-Form artists, for gesture (shigusa) or body language (miburi) in the first place “is meaningless without the perception of the other,” and because for all their assertions about the “encounter” with the worlds of things, the Anti-Form artists are stuck asserting an “encounter with the thing” that does no more than to structure the relationship between a static self and natural things, making no attempt to grasp the cultural world that that self and other construct together.70

Tone’s ideal was an “event” akin to a “sexual caress,” in which “the reciprocity between my intent and the other’s gesture and the reciprocity between the intent discerned from the other’s actions and my own gesture” would be guaranteed—though it is ultimately unclear what form that event would take.71 Tone surpasses the critics of Act One and Two in the breadth of his sociopolitical outlook, in his acute political consciousness, in his openness, and in his detailed eye for observation—which encompasses everything from the lettering on student radical signboards to Akatsuka Fujio’s manga Mōretsu Atarō,72 to the latest design trends, and also printing errors such as misalignments and over-layering. And yet, in spite of his drive to overcome art as individual creation, was he not in fact seeking a reciprocity with the other that could function only within a limited community, that is, a site of expression within the art world? What if, ironically, that site for reciprocal communication was as limited and intimate in scope as a “sexual caress”? Here Tone diverges significantly from Ishiko. While both writers show an interest in marginal art, Ishiko is concerned with everyday expression by the nameless masses, whereas Tone tightens his focus in looking for possibilities in mediums that transmit radical messages and the immaterial communication of such mediums. Although Tone, in terms of his platform and social milieu, was closer to the “upper-­ echelon courtiers” than the “bottom-rung samurai” of chapter 1, he was able to serve as a bridge between the two. It was for this reason that, even among the highbrow Sogetsu artists, he sought to redeem the latent potential of Anti-Art from the reality of the dramatically advancing mass consumer society of the 1960s. Tone’s stance was informed by the shift in circumstances in the years surrounding 1970, when he was writing the essays

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cited here, as a result of which art’s “descent into the vulgar everyday” was no longer even necessary. In other words, once the framework of the “exhibition” was out of the way, the “vulgar everyday” was already elevated to the level of both artistic expression and commercial enterprise, and that reality was itself already far more Anti-Art than the critics of Acts One and Two could have imagined. 6.

ANTI-ART PERFORMANCE

As evident in the preceding overview, the Anti-Art debates went beyond the 1964 symposium and Miyakawa’s response to it, and by no means did Miyakawa have the last word on the issue. The Anti-Art debate of 1964 dealt exclusively with “artworks” that functioned only within the system of Art, and from start to f inish the discussion overlooked the realities of Japan in its preoccupation with the model of American art. And yet, amid the normalization of “the artif ication of environment” in everything from department store consumer culture to youth subculture, Anti-Art transcended both “art” and “art world,” traversing from “upper-echelon courtiers” to “bottom-rung samurai,” until it reached the point where it could connect with the lived culture of the “masses” (or “townspeople”? “commoners”? “the people”?). Astutely responding to these social changes, Ishiko Junzō shifted focus from Happenings to kitsch, while Tone Yasunao discovered design and other modes of social communication that transcend individual expression. This is why the existing conceptualization of Anti-Art based on the 1964 debate, which took place between art critics and was conf ined to an art world context, needs to be resituated in the major social, cultural, and political contexts of the 1960s. That the scope of Miyakawa’s “descent to the vulgar everyday” was far greater than Tōno Yoshiaki’s “living context of history”73 or Chiba Shigeo’s “specif ic context” of Japanese art 74 is obvious in the context of Ishiko’s and Tone’s rereading of Anti-Art and the circumstances behind Anti-Art performance’s turn toward the nether regions of the city, culture, and politics, as will be detailed in part IV of this book. Art did not merely turn toward the “vulgar everyday” in making use of everyday materials and junk; rather, it entered into exchanges with an indef inite number of multifarious miscellaneous others—not limited to artists or intellectuals or activists—by opening itself up to the body, to action, to profane urban space, and to profane mass media, and the diffusion that accompanied that “descent” was what made Art into Anti-Art.75 In the Anti-Art debates introduced in this chapter, Tōno, Ishiko, and Tone each show some form of appreciation for Happenings as a mode of Anti-Art. But another commonality linking the three is that they were all dismissive of performances that relied on the rawness of the body itself or on premodern rituality, as seen in Tōno’s rejection of Ono Yōko (see note 30 of this chapter), Ishiko’s rejection of underground corporeality, and Tone’s rejection of “expressionist Happenings.” However, as I will make clear, considering the sheer volume of such performances that took place during the 1960s, any logic that would isolate those performances from “art” as “popular culture” and treat only “events” composed from sophisticated materials, spaces, sounds, or environments as “art” is too retrograde for a mass society in which Anti-Art was already a reality.

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The artists in this book took the fair with the foul in fulfilling their destiny to establish the underground currents (whether dirty or clean) of Anti-Art performance. Their concerted attempts to reject the cleansing “events” that have continued from the 1960s to the present—for urban development, social control, and consumer culture—may have been a great exercise in futility, a senseless folly. But they are also part of our history. Anti-Art performance took the spirit of Anti-Art, which was sustained from its birth in the early 1960s up until around the year 1970 with gradual shifts in meaning and focal points, developing it through expressive action that centered real, raw bodies. This action implemented the “descent into the vulgar everyday,” in both its figurative and literal senses, via its exposure of both the body as nether region, and also the literal nether regions of the body. They were a form of expression that aimed to overturn the hierarchies of the established culture, as well as social hierarchies, while moving between the fields of art, politics, and popular culture. And they were a definite product of their era in that they shared the anarchistic spirit that had informed the historical context of Anti-Art in the early 1960s only to essentially die out along with the cessation of the student-led political and cultural rebellion of the late 1960s. NOTES 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

Tōno Yoshiaki, “Yomiuri Andepandan-ten kara 1: Zōshokusei rensa hannō (B) Kudō Tetsumi— Garakuta no hangeijutsu” [From the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition 1: Kudō Tetsumi’s Proliferating Chain Reaction B—Junk Anti-Art], Yomiuri Shimbun, March 2, 1960, evening edition. See Hariu Shizuo’s recounting in the roundtable article “Hangeijutsu ni okeru ‘han’ no ishiki” [The “anti” mentality in Anti-Art], Bijutsu Jānaru [Art Journal], April 1964, 17. The Bridgestone Museum Hall had a capacity of 219 people at the time. Hariu Ichirō, in an interview with the author, April 2, 2005. Miyakawa Atsushi, “Hangeijutsu: Sono nichijōsei e no kakō,” Bijutsu techō, no. 234 (April 1964): 48–57. Chiba Shigeo summarizes the 1964 Anti-Art debate in his Gendai bijutsu itsudatsushi, 1945–1985 (see chap. 1, n. 3), and the incident has been a point of emphasis in almost all historical accounts of the art of 1960s Japanese to date. For a more recent take, see Mitsuda Yuri, “Geijutsu, fuzai, nichijō: ‘Hangeijutsu’ o meguru hihyō gensetsu” [Art, absence, everyday: The critical discourse of Anti-Art], in Bijutsu Hyōronka Renmei, ed., Bijutsu hihyō to sengo bijutsu / Art Criticism and Postwar Art in Japan (Tokyo: Brücke, 2007), 145–68. However, discussions of the Anti-Art debates to this point have not paid sufficient attention to the

interaction between criticism and the Japanese art of the time, showing minimal consideration for the agency of artists, let alone offer anything that relates to the social conditions of 1960s Japan from a broader perspective. 6. Tōno, “Garakuta no hangeijutsu.” 7. Tono, “Garakuta no hangeijutsu.” 8. Takiguchi Shūzō, “Yomiuri Andependan-ten no kaijō de: Ugoku wakai chikara” [At the Yomuiri Independent Exhibition: Active, youthful vigor], Yomiuri Shimbun, March 4, 1960, evening edition. It is possible the article from the year prior was “Yaburareru kisei gihō: Dai jūikkai Yomiuri Andepandan-ten” [Conventional techniques defeated: The Eleventh Yomiuri Independent Exhibition], Yomiuri Shimbun, March 5, 1959, evening edition. But while Takiguchi touches on new trends that go beyond the influence of Informel, as seen in the works of Shinohara Ushio and others, he does not use the word hangeijutsu/anti-art. Incidentally, although the first person to use the term hangeijutsu/anti-art in Japanese has yet to be determined, Takiguchi penned the following sentence in his Kindai bijutsu [Modern art] of 1938: “Cubist ‘collage’ was extensively employed by the Dadaists as an anti-artistic act [hangeijutsuteki na kōi]” (see p. 50 of the Bijutsu Shuppansha edition of 1962). As noted by Ikeda Tatsuo in “Hangeijutsu ni okeru ‘han’ no ishiki,” 20.

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9. Akasegawa Genpei, Arakawa Shūsaku, Itō Takayasu, Kudō Tetsumi, and Nakanishi Natsuyuki, moderated by Ebara Jun with commentary by Nakahara Yūsuke, “Roundtable: Wakai bōkenha wa kataru” [Roundtable: The young adventurers speak], Bijutsu techō, no. 192 (August 1961): 14, 17. 10. Aside from the three artists mentioned here, Tōno Yoshiaki also cites Tanaka Shintarō, Kaneko Tsuruzō, and Arakawa Shūsaku as examples of the Anti-Art trend. Expanding the purview to articles by other critics, the following artists were among those whose works were either directly or indirectly referred to as exemplifying Anti-Art, or “the junk school” (Ebara Jun), at the Yomiuri Independent: Uemura Hiroyuki (large Informel-style painting), Miki Tomio (who cut a tire open to turn it into a quasi-sculptural form, which he then covered in asphalt), Ishibashi Yasuyuki (who pasted posters and other printed matter onto panels and then ripped them off in places), and Sakurai Tamaki (who strung a tire up in a wooden frame). 11. See Takiguchi, “Ugoku wakai chikara,” and Takiguchi Shūzō, “Hitotsu no sōwa” [An episode], Geijutsu shinchō (April 1960): 116–18. 12. Ebara Jun, “Tāningu pointo ni tatsu Andepandan-ten” [The Independent at a turning point], Sansai (April 1960): 60. See also Ebara Jun, “Senshusareru haikyo” [Stolen ruins], Geijutsu shinchō (April 1960): 120–22. 13. Hariu Ichirō, “Yomiuri Andepandan-ten kara 5: Sakuhin 9 no 59 Satō Shōzaburō—Kawaita yūmoa” [From the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition 5: Satō Shōzaburō’s Work 9-59— Dry humor], Yomiuri Shimbun, March 7, 1960, evening edition. 14. Segi Shin’ichi, “Hangadan sakka e no chūkoku” [Advice for the antiestablishment artists], Asahi Shimbun, March 14, 1960. 15. “‘Hangeijutsu’ o meguru ronsō” [The debate over “Anti-Art”], Asahi Jānaru, no. 56 (April 3, 1960): 49. 16. But even for a naysayer such as Ebara Jun, for whom the “junk school” was mere scandal rather than a critique of conventional painting and sculpture, Kudō Tetsumi was in a class of his own; Ebara praises Kudō because “in all of the materials he uses, whether metal rebar, gloves, vinyl cords, or hemp string, there is not any pretense of the artist’s emotions or subjectivity.” Ebara, “Tāningu pointo ni tatsu Andepandan-ten,” 60.

17. Nakahara Yūsuke, “Sozai to hyōgen no shinkyōchi: Futatsu no Andepandan-ten” [A new frontier for material and expression: The two Independent exhibitions], Yomiuri Shimbun, March 12, 1960, evening edition. 18. Nakahara Yūsuke, “Tenrankai senpyō: Dai jūnikai Yomiuri Andepandan-ten” [Exhibition review: The 12th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition], Bijutsu techō, no. 173 (May 1960): 56. 19. Nakahara, “Sozai to hyōgen no shinkyōchi.” 20. Nakahara, “Sozai to hyōgen no shinkyōchi.” 21. Tōno Yoshiaki, “Hangeijutsu no dōkō, jō” [The Anti-Art trend, part 1], Asahi Shimbun, January 17, 1962. 22. Although Tōno would confess the month following the symposium that his use of the word hangeijutsu (anti-art) in the 1960 Yomiuri Shimbun article was something of an overreach for what he meant to be “antimaterial” (hansozai), he also clarified that the article title was indeed conceived of as a provocation. “Hangeijutsu ni okeru ‘han’ no ishiki,” 21. 23. Miyakawa Atsushi, “Anti-Art: The Descent to the Everyday (1964),” trans. Justin Jesty, in From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan, 1945–1989, ed. Doryun Chong, Michio Hayashi, Kenji Kajiya, Fumihiko Sumitomo (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 128. For the Japanese, see Miyakawa Atsushi, “Hangeijutsu: Sono nichijōsei e no kakō,” Bijutsu techō, no. 234 (April 1964): 48–57. For Tōno’s response, see “A Dissenting View: Anti-Art—After Miyakawa Atsushi,” trans. Kikuko Ogawa, in Chong et al., From Postwar to Postmodern, 132–36, in English and “Isetsu: ‘Hangeijutsu’—‘Miyakawa Atsushi’ igo,” [An alternate theory: “Anti-Art”—after “Miyakawa Atsushi”] Bijutsu techō, no. 236 (May 1964): 46–49, in Japanese. 24. Miyakawa, 132. 25. Chiba Shigeo remarks in his Gendai bijutsu itsudatsushi that “Miyakawa’s essays barely mention any actual works or artists from Japanese art” (p. 66), while in Tomii Reiko’s characterization Miyakawa was someone who “preferred to theorize on the intrinsic nature of art, as he was mostly indifferent to the reality of artists’ practices.” Reiko Tomii, “Geijutsu on Their Minds: Memorable Words on Anti-Art,” in Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experiments in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950–1970, ed. Charles Merewether with Rika Iezumi Hiro (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), 55. 26. Chiba, Gendai bijutsu itsudatsushi, 66.

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27. Nakahara Yūsuke, “Poppu āto ron no shūhen, jō, ge” [A survey of writing on Pop Art, parts 1 and 2], Nihon Dokusho Shimbun, May 25, 1964, and June 1, 1964. 28. More support for the argument that critics’ interest had shifted from the Anti-Art of Japanese artists to American Pop Art can be found in a subsequent overview of the 1964 debate by Nakahara Yūsuke, “‘Hangeijutsu’ ni tsuite no oboegaki” [Memorandum on “Anti-Art”], in Ningen to busshitsu no aida: Gendai bijutsu no jōkyō [Between man and matter: The conditions for contemporary art] (Tokyo: Tabata Shoten, 1972). First published in 1965 bijutsu nenkan [1965 art annual], supplementary issue, Bijutsu techō, no. 246 (December 1964): 71–75. Nakahara identifies a contradiction in the ahistoricity behind Miyakawa Atsushi’s claim that Anti-Art is a “descent into the vulgar everyday.” That is, he observes that if art is a historical concept, then Anti-Art must be so too, in which case there was no need for Miyakawa to trot out the term hangeijutsu (anti-art), since, pursuing this line of reasoning further, chōkindai geijutsu (postmodern art!?) might have done just as well. Accordingly, Anti-Art is indeed Art, even given the forced separation between “idea” and “substance” that it effects. This can be considered an elaboration of Nakahara’s 1960 comment about works that “present, rather than describe.” Per Nakahara’s logic, the unmistakable distinction that we make in everyday life between “usable readymade products” and “unusable junk” (tsukaimono ni naranai haihin) is untenable in art, as both serve equally as material support for the “substantive” aspects (or, perhaps, material properties) of art. What likely contributed to this opinion is the fact that the “everyday objects” that were then employed in Japanese works, including those on view in the Young Seven exhibition, were already being organically integrated into art without any reservations about their being junk (haibutsu). As though for good measure, Nakahara writes the following while connecting the Anti-Art disputes from 1960 onward with the “objet and image” dispute of 1964. “In general, one of the characteristics of the Anti-Art trend is its incorporation of all kinds of readymade products, but this comes not from an emphasis on materiality and rather the intent of eliminating the proportional increase in painterly materiality that antagonizes the image and ends up altering it.” (Nakahara, “Poppu āto ron no

shūhen,” part 2.) In this way, Nakahara’s argument shifts from “junk” to objets in general, and then positions the materiality of the objet as the antagonization of the image, only to completely nullify Anti-Art within art. This is no doubt informed by the change that occurred in Japanese works once the extraordinary situation that had emerged at the 1960 Yomiuri Independent, which was filled with things that were visibly foreign to art, finally settled down in 1964. But Nakahara’s logic itself goes beyond that to entail a sort of “cleansing,” in that it generalizes the materiality of the objet by eliminating the lived reality of “junk” (as typified in Itoi Kanji’s work). Perhaps this relates to his forgetting about the potential intent to critique reality contained in “so-called Anti-Art” that he had so astutely perceived some four years earlier. 29. Tōno, “Isetsu: ‘Hangeijutsu,” 48. The English follows the above-cited translation in From Postwar to Postmodern, 135. 30. In May 1962, during the interim between Ichiyanagi Toshi’s 1961 performance and the 1964 Anti-Art symposium, Tōno Yoshiaki took part as a performer in an event held by Ono Yōko at the Sogetsu Art Center, which he wrote about in “Chansu operēshon (gūzen sōsa)” [Chance operations], Kamera geijutsu, no. 206 (July 1962): 127–30. Tōno’s impressions are all negative, ranging from complaints of his head feeling weird to his nerves being frayed to his complete sense of discomfiture. As suggested by statements such as “far from liberation, I felt paralyzed, as though hog-tied by that peculiarly clingy female obstinacy” and “[it was a] private work, one that exposed the disposition of the creator, or her romantic sentimentalism,” he unabashedly attributes the unease he felt to Ono’s femininity. In contrast to Ono’s work, which “forcibly distorted numerous actions [kōi]” to produce a “mucous-like space,” he praises Ichiyanagi’s Happening for “freely liberating action” to generate a “cool, mineral-like space.” This may be due not only to Tōno’s perception of Ichiyanagi being free from the “specter of the ego” retained by Ono, and also because he was able to relax and enjoy Ichiyanagi’s event as a spectator rather than performer. Tōno then goes on to expound on John Cage’s practice of chance operations, Hans Namuth’s documentation of Jackson Pollock at work, and Robert Rauschenberg’s combine paintings. What drove Tōno to refute Ono’s positioning in the context of the American avant-garde in this

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31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

PART I———TOWARD A HISTORY OF ANTI-ART IN PERFORMANCE

way? Let me simply note that, beside his misogyny, another remarkable point here is that all the Happenings deemed praiseworthy by Tōno emerged out of American Neo-Dada. Tomii, “Geijutsu on Their Minds,” 49. Tomii, 55. Published in the May 1963 issue of Bijutsu techō. For the English, see Miyakawa Atsushi, “After Informel (1963),” trans. Mika Yoshitake, in Chong et al., From Postwar to Postmodern, 105–13. Ishiko Junzō, “Hapuningu igo” [After Happenings], in Ishiko Junzō chosakushū dai nikan: Imēji ron [Selected writings of Ishiko Junzō, vol. 2: Essays on images] (Tokyo: Lamasha, 1987), 236. First published in Bijutsu Jānaru, no. 61 (July 1967). Ishiko, 238. Ishiko, 238. Ishiko, 237–38. The designer Sugiura Kōhei’s comment at the 1964 Anti-Art symposium about Claes Oldenburg’s hamburger work is an early instance of this perspective: “Why go to the trouble of adding an ‘anti’ to call it art when you could give it a more straightforward name, like advertising or design or something like that?” As quoted in Miyakawa, “Hangeijutsu: Sono nichijōsei e no kakō,” 49, and Nakahara, “‘Hangeijutsu’ ni tsuite no oboegaki,” 36. Ishiko, “Hapuningu igo,” 246. Ishiko, 249. Ishiko Junzō, “Sairon, Hapuningu igo” [“After Happenings,” revisited], in Ishiko Junzō chosakushū dai nikan, 255–65. First published in Eiga hyōron, no. 250 (June 1968). Ishiko Junzō, “Tokubetsu kikaku gurafikku repōto: Zen’ei geijutsu to iu na no erogoto­ shitachi” [Special feature graphic report: Pornographers in the guise of avant-garde art], Shūkan Manga Taimuzu, November 25, 1967. Namely, Sontag’s “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition” (see chap. 2, n. 13). Ishiko, “Sairon, Hapuningu igo,” 260. Ishiko, 262. Kokoka kanataka, hatamata doko ka? [Here or There, or Where?], performed by the Hakken no Kai students in the underground parking lot at Sennichidani Temple Hall, Tokyo, in November 1967. It would be restaged at a Discovery Society performance the following year. See also page 262 of this book. Ishiko, “Sairon, Hapuningu igo,” 262–63. Ishiko, 263–64.

49. Ishiko Junzō, “Hai Reddo Sentā ni miru bijutsu no ‘gendai’” [The “contemporary” in art as seen through Hi-Red Center], in Ishiko Junzō chosakushū dai nikan, 194–96. First published in Bijutsu techō, no. 345 (August 1971). 50. Ishiko, “Hai reddo sentā,” 206, 210. 51. Ishiko Junzō, “Kicchuron nōto” [Notes toward a theory of kitsch], in Ishiko Junzō chosaku­ shū dai ikkan: Kicchuron [Selected writings of ­Ishiko Junzō vol. 1: Essays on kitsch] (Tokyo: Lamasha, 1986), 26. First published in Ishiko Junzō, Kicchu: Magaimono no jidai. (See chap. 1, n. 1). 52. Ishiko, 26. A reference to the Austrian modernist writer Hermann Broch (1886–1951), whose writing on kitsch Ishiko cites extensively in his essay. 53. Ishiko, 30. 54. Ishiko, 36. 55. Tanikawa Kōichi, “Hangeijutsu sono muhō e no ishi to ai” [Anti-Art, its drive toward and love for lawlessness], Yuriika, Special issue, vol.11, no.4 (September 1979), 83. 56. Tone Yasunao, “Higeijutsukasuru geijutsu: Geijutsu ni okeru kindai no hōkai” [Art into Non-Art: The collapse of the modern in art], in Gendai geijutsu no isō: Geijutsu wa shisō tariuru ka [The topology of contemporary art: Can art be ideology?] (Tokyo: Tabata Shoten, 1970), 18–19. Originally published as “Kindai no hōkai: Kindai geijutsu ni okeru hitei no genri no hōkai” [The collapse of the modern: The collapse of the principle of denial in modern art], SD: Space Design, no. 56 (July 1969). 57. Translator’s note: Modern enka is a genre of popular music that combines Western orchestration with traditional Japanese stylization. The song lyrics often explore sentimental, melancholy themes. 58. Tone, 13. Could this be a reference to Ichiyanagi’s Tokyo 1969 (Music Project No. 1), composed in December 1968, which incorporates Hatakeyama Midori’s popular song “Shusse kaidō” [The road to success]? See Kawasaki Kōji, Zōho kaiteiban Nihon no denshi ongaku [Japanese electronic music, expanded and revised edition] (Tokyo: Aiikusha, 2009), 802. Considering that classical music people with a strong sense of cultural hierarchy had already rebuked Ichiyanagi for including a rock group in a classical concert, his incorporation of enka ballads in this performance must have been quite provocative. See Ichiyanagi Toshi and Isozaki Arata, “Kakyō sareru rokujū

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59.

60.

61. 62.

63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70.

nendai ongaku shīn” [Bridging music scenes in the 1960s]. Intercommunication, no. 26 (Fall 1998). Translator’s note: The wife of then-Crown Prince Akihito, who succeeded as emperor in 1989. Tone, “Higeijutsukasuru geijutsu,” 15. We might interpret Tone’s argument that the loss of cult value in art brought about an “art that was liberated from ritual” as stemming from his perception that Anti-Art performance, which had gone against the times in its attempts to revive ritual in the early 1960s, would eventually run its course. Tone, 14–15, 20. Tone Yasunao, “Seido toshite no geijutsu to ‘shigusa’ toshite no geijutsu: Hyōgen o haikishiuru ka” [Art as institution and art as “gesture”: Can expression be abolished?], in Gendai geijutsu no isō, 34. Originally published as “Shintai, chikaku, hyōgen: Seido toshite no geijutsu to ‘shigusa’ toshite no geijutsu” [Body, perception, expression: Art as institution and art as “gesture”], Kikan firumu, no. 5 (March 1970). Tone Yasunao, “Gurafikku komyunikēshon o kanō to suru mono wa nani ka: Posutā ron” [What makes graphic communication possible? On posters], in Gendai geijutsu no isō, 137–38. Originally published as “Gurafikku dezain wa kanō ka” [Is graphic design possible?], Dezain, no. 124 (August 1969). Tone, 137–38 Tone, “Seido toshite no geijutsu to ‘shigusa’ toshite no geijutsu,” 34. Tone, 37. Tone Yasunao, “Kankyō geijutsu e no shikō: Hapuningu kara Intāmedia e” [The aspiration to Environment art: From Happenings to Intermedia], in Gendai geijutsu no isō, 116–17. Originally published in Eiga hyōron, no. 250 (June 1968). Perhaps this includes the performance by Kyūshū-ha that Tone witnessed in Fukuoka. Tone, “Seido toshite no geijutsu to ‘shigusa’ toshite no geijutsu,” 37. Lee Ufan, “Deai o motomete” [In search of encounter], in Deai o motomete: Atarashii geijutsu no hajimari ni [In search of encounter: At the beginning of a new art] (Tokyo: Tabata Shoten, 1971), 55–79. Originally published in Bijutsu techō, no. 324 (Feb. 1970). Tone, “Seido toshite no geijutsu to ‘shigusa’ toshite no geijutsu,” 41.

71. Tone, 43. If they are both extensions of John Cage and Fluxus, what then is the difference between the abovementioned Cross Talk/Intermedia event, which did no more than “emphasize new styles” in the contexts of large-scale technology and industrial society (Tone, 38), and, say, the Intermedia Art Festival (a music, film, and Happening event held November 18–21, 1969, at Nikkei Hall and the Ginza disco Killer Joe’s), which Tone had organized a month prior with Kosugi Takehisa and Shiomi Mieko? Tone states that Intermedia is not a style for him and his peers, as it aspires to “commit to the world” and resituates art in “‘practice’ or ‘the relations that link it to other people and things.’” Tone Yasunao, “Bigakuteki zen’ei to kankyōteki ishiki: Futatsu no Intāmedia fesutibaru” [The aesthetic avant-garde and environmental consciousness: Two Intermedia festivals], in Gendai geijutsu no isō, 241–42. Originally published in Nihon Dokusho Shimbun, February 24, 1969. 72. Serialized in Shūkan Shōnen Sandē, 1967–70. 73. Tōno, “Isetsu: Hangeijutsu,” 49. The English follows Mika Yoshitake’s translation in From Postwar to Postmodern, 135. 74. Chiba, Gendai bijutsu itsudatsushi, 82. 75. However, Tanikawa Kōichi’s assertion of Anti-Art’s eventual popularization not only completely recasts the politicality of Anti-Art, it also exaggerates a single aspect of the historical process. Tanikawa claims that “the descent into the everyday” refers to “a principle, steeped in democratic morals, of liberating art from a privileged artistic mentality and providing the people with a chance to actively comprehend something like the richness of art or aesthetic sense in their daily lives.” Tanikawa, “Hangei­ jutsu sono muhō e no ishi to ai,” 86. In fact, given its incomprehensibility, its occasional atrociousness, its vulgarity, and its crudeness, Anti-Art performance was ultimately neither a “popular art” for the masses / mass-consumption (what Tanikawa might call “Art Pop”?), nor was it a “marginal art” that was broadly practiced by amateurs and which found its audience in a community of amateurs, nor was it even the “kitsch” extolled by Ishiko. As such, Anti-Art performance was a minor avant-garde movement that was acknowledged only among a specific cohort of recipients/creators.

Kokuin, performance • c. 1968 • In front of Hankyu Department Store, Sukiyabashi, Tokyo • (see p. 375)

PART II

THE EVOLUTION OF ANTI-ART PERFORMANCE

CHAPTER 4

A Pre-History of Anti-Art Performance From the 1950s to Gutai

1.

1957 AS A STARTING POINT

Part II chronologically traces the development of performance art in the 1960s, exploring the role of Anti-Art performance, examining how artists cooperated with each other and whether they shared a zeitgeist—details that would remain unnoticed if we were to focus solely on the activities of individual artists and groups. But first, perhaps an explanation is warranted as to why I have set 1957–1970 (see chap. 1.4, pp. 43–4) as the timeframe of this book. 1955. Generally considered to be a turning point in postwar Japanese history, the year marks the beginning of the so-called 1955 system, a political alignment between the newly established conservative Jiyūminshu-tō (Liberal Democratic Party, formed by the merging of Jiyū-tō and Minshu-tō in November) in power and the Shakai-tō (Japan Socialist Party, consolidated after a union of the left and right factions in October) in opposition. It is in July of this year that the Rokuzenkyō (6th National Council) of the Japanese Communist Party was held, in which the JCP self-criticized its commitment to “armed struggle,” ultimately opting to abandon the old party line entirely. In July 1956, Keizai hakusho, the government-issued economic report, declared: “Japan is no longer in the postwar era” (mohaya sengo dewa nai).1 During the few years following 1955, a series of important social and political shifts laid the backdrop for the culture that emerged in the 1960s. In the realm of politics, the Japan Trotskyist League was established in January 1957,2 Kishi Nobusuke’s first administration began in February, and farmers who opposed the U.S. military base in Sunagawa, located in the west of Tokyo, succeeded in halting its expansion in July. The Bund (Communist League) was formed in December 1958. By the end of 1958, the National Council Against the Amendment of the Police Duties Execution Act had secured the rejection of said amendment, forming the basis for the National Council Against the Renewal of the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty. In this manner, the factions and structures of the Anti-Japan–U.S. Security Treaty (Anti-Anpo) movement were created in 1957-8. Shifting focus to the changes in society, Tokyo had become the largest city in the world by population (8,518,622) in 1957. To prevent water shortages in Tokyo due to the increasing population, Ogōchi Dam was completed and began operations in June of that year. The expansion of Tokyo brought developments in infrastructure: a new expressway replaced Sukiyabashi Bridge in Ginza in 1957; bullet train “Kodama” began service between Tokyo and Kobe in November 1958;3 and Tokyo Tower, equipped with television broadcast antennas, was completed in December. As Tokyo grew into a megalopolis, transportation networks developed all over Japan. The election of Japan as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council made clear the country’s newly elevated international status, and this marked the start of a course of events that led to the Tokyo Olympic Games and deregulation of overseas travel in 1964, and ultimately to the Japan World Exposition, Osaka, 1970 (hereinafter “Expo ’70”).

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The rapid development of mass media was an essential factor contributing to the spread of performance art at that time. It is well known that the television became a common household item in Japan after the broadcast of the crown prince’s wedding in April 1959, viewed live by 15 million people, but by May of 1958 the number of subscribers to NHK (the Japan Broadcasting Corporation) had already exceeded a million, doubling in less than a year. This rapid growth marked the advent of the era of mass media and electric appliances, brought on by the “three sacred treasures” (the washing machine, television, and refrigerator), in which visual information connected various parts of Japan ever more closely. The boom in weekly magazines perfectly illustrates the development of mass media during this period; beyond the weekly magazines that had been published by major newspapers up to that point, between 1956 and 1960 publishing companies launched numerous weekly magazines, spearheaded by Shūkan Shinchō (Weekly Shinchō). Shūkan Shinchō was followed by Asahi Geinō (Asahi Entertainment), Manga Taimuzu (Manga Times), Josei (Woman), Taishū (Populace), Myōjō (Rising Star), Jitsuwa (True Story), Jitsuwa Tokuhō (True Story Special Report), Gendai (Modern Times), Bunshun, Heibon, Manga Tengoku (Manga Paradise), and the first TV guide Terebi Jidai (TV Times). 4 In most of these magazines appeared articles related to “Anti-Art performance.”5 Taking into consideration these political, social, and economic contexts, we can demarcate 1957 as the start of our art-historical timeframe. In Japanese postwar art history, 1957 is often recounted as the year of the “Informel whirlwind.” The Art of Today’s World exhibition, which introduced Art Informel to Japan, commenced in Tokyo in November 1956 and then traveled to Osaka and Fukuoka the following year, leaving a strong impression on artists in various parts of the country, some of whom would go on to become members of Kyūshū-ha. When Georges Mathieu came to Japan for a solo exhibition in September 1957, his public painting demonstrations in the Shirokiya Department Store greatly influenced Shinohara Ushio. In October 1957, art critic Michel Tapié curated International Contemporary Art Exhibition—Informel: Genesis of an Other Art, held in Tokyo and Osaka, and International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai, which traveled to Osaka, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Tokyo, and Kyoto from April  1958. The disbanding of art group Demokrato (1951–1957) in June 1957 and the final exhibition of Jikken Kōbō in August of the same year both signified, in part, a generational shift in Japanese postwar art movements. In May and July of 1957, the Gutai Art Association (hereinafter “Gutai”) held Gutai Art on Stage in Osaka and Tokyo; this was its first performance show for the general public, unlike its previous exhibitions, which were directed at the media. In October, the month after Mathieu’s public demonstrations, Kudō Tetsumi held a “public artmaking demonstration and performance” in Tokyo. Kazakura Shō held a performance in Ōita in March (the precise timing is only conjecture at this point) that was completely independent of the artmaking demonstration trend; it was an expression that centered on the action itself, and had no final art object as an end result. Shinohara and Yoshimura Masunobu also met in 1957, and Yoshimura’s atelier (later known as the “White House,” the headquarters of the Neo Dada Organizers) was built in Shinjuku. Kyūshū-ha, which remained active throughout the entire era of Anti-Art, formed this year as well. As is evident in the above, 1957 was the year artists began performing individually, which laid the foundation for the future development of more collective performances.

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2.

1970 AS AN END POINT

1970 was, in many ways, another turning point in postwar Japanese history. The huge success of Expo ’70—its 64,218,770 visitors an incredible record, considering that Japan’s national population was 100 million at the time—was an ultimate result of the rapid economic growth, urbanization, internationalization that occurred throughout the 1960s. Behind the success of the event was the government’s suppression of movements against the extension of the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty in 1970, which could have reignited the large anti-treaty protests of 1960. After the authorities had squashed the culmination of the student movement in 1968, large-scale social or political movements were less visible in 1970. Two weeks into the Expo ’70, remnants from the student revolutionaries hijacked the Yodo-gō (Japan Airlines Flight 351) and left for North Korea. Reportedly, some of the members of this group were later involved in the abduction of Japanese citizens to North Korea, which remains a significant political issue in present-day East Asia.6 1970 was also the year of the most (in)famous performance of the Shōwa era; in November, novelist-turned-media celebrity Mishima Yukio and his cosplay militia Tate no Kai (Shield Society) stormed the headquarters of the Japan Self-Defense Forces, culminating in an impassioned speech and Mishima’s hara-kiri suicide. There are several reasons why I selected 1970 as the terminal point for this period of Japanese art history. First, it marks the final combustion of the Anti-Art performance movement, when the activities of Banpaku Hakai Kyōtō-ha (Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group, shortened hereinafter to “Expo Destruction Group”) ceased in 1969. The end of the group decisively cemented the rift in the avant-garde art community, which had already been split into pro- and anti-Expo groups with the former, many of whom were star artists (architects, designers, composers, and visual artists) of early 1960s Anti-Art, surviving in cultural history as the “winners.” Itoi Kanji’s naked run through the Expo Square in April 1970, an audacious act that not even Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension) could achieve, was the last flash of brilliance by a lone artist, independent of any movement or organization, before the light of Anti-Art went out. Second, in May 1970, the historically renowned Tokyo Biennale: Between Man and Matter, curated by Nakahara Yūsuke, heralded the developments toward a new era of “contemporary art”: conceptual art, installations and Mono-ha (School of Things), which became the mainstream of Japanese art in the 1970s. Mono-ha came onto the scene in 1968, but it was not until the Tokyo Biennale 1970 exhibition that the currents of Euro-­ America art and synchronized methodologies of 1970s art in Japan were all present together. Third, the year 1970 saw the rise of new movements that broke from both mainstream “contemporary art” and moreover from Anti-Art groups like Kyūshū-ha and Zero Jigen in terms of their methods, sensitivities, and organizational strategies. The gathering of artists from various parts of Japan at the Nirvana: For Final Art exhibition in Kyoto (August 1970) set forth a methodology that was distinct from conceptual art as a directly imported phenomenon. The exhibition was a collaboration organized by Matsuzawa Yutaka, known as the founder of gainen geijutsu (concept art) in Japan, and Mizukami Jun, who began performative works in Kansai (the greater Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe region) and participated in the Expo Destruction Group. This collaborative movement indicated not

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only a shift from action to language as a medium of expression, but also a new organizational strategy of open and widespread networking, vastly different from that of prior art groups and their alliances. Further, in a departure from the realm of “art” that underpinned groups such as Kokuin (Heralding the Shadow) and The Play (both established in 1967), groups like Production Ga‘s (Purodakshon Gasu, formed in Nagoya in 1969) and Group Zero (later known as Japan Kobe Zero, formed in Kobe in 1970) forged ahead with new sensitivities and methods. Dispelling the emblematic angura (underground) eeriness of Zero Jigen, their art was lighter, more mundane, favored playfulness over confrontation, positive over negative, dissemination over concentration. Likewise, En Gekijō (Circle Theater), which was undeniably rooted in the counter-culture movement, tried to overcome the common angura modes of artists and the theater. Other incidents that indicated the “end” of avant-garde art in 1970 included the Supreme Court’s rejection of Akasegawa Genpei’s appeal and the guilty verdict against him in the Model 1,000-Yen Note Trial in April, as well as, in the same month, the closure of Gutai Pinacotheca, the home base of Gutai. 3.

THE AGE OF KYŪSHŪ-HA AND ZERO JIGEN

Another reason for the 1957–1970 timeframe is that it was in this period that Kyūshū-ha and Zero Jigen coexisted as the two longest-lived Anti-Art groups of the 1960s. Although Kyūshū-ha’s experiments with performance never fully developed, the group kept tackling the most complex issues in Anti-Art. While it is still debatable as to when the group (formed in 1957) came to an end,7 Kyūshū-ha’s anti-institutional activities in the vein of Anti-Art performance continued until 1970, even though their activities peaked in the early 1960s. Zero Jigen, though its formation came three years after Kyūshū-ha in 1960, took off as a performance collective in 1963 as if taking over for Kyūshū-ha, whose activity peaked in 1962. Zero Jigen challenged social and artistic norms far more persistently than any other performance art collective of that time. Though they were most active in 1967-8, it is fair to say that they continued to lead the nationwide movement of Anti-Art performance through their prolific performance activities until 1972, the same year that Gutai disbanded. The last event in which both Kyūshū-ha and Zero Jigen collaborated was Kyūshū Renaissance: Grand Festival of Heroes in February 1970. At the time, the only active members of Kyūshū-ha were Sakurai Takami and Ochi Osamu, but at the event Zero Jigen filmed a scene of Inaba no Shiro Usagi (The White Hare of Inaba), a film that took inventory of their work, and Shūdan Kumo (Collective Kumo [Spider]) attempted sexual intercourse in the street, which might be interpreted as a protest against the commercialization and spectaclization of avant-garde art. This Kyūshū Renaissance was the last performance event by the alliance of Anti-Art performers from various parts of Japan who were sporadically active between 1962 and 1969. It was also a farewell to the Anti-Art trend of the 1960s, as Collective Kumo’s action confronted the futility of every manner of avant-garde art. In other words, it can be said that the year this event took place, 1970, was the terminal point for not only Kyūshū-ha and Zero Jigen but for Anti-Art performance as a whole.

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4.

PRE-HISTORY 1: MAVO

Before examining the developments in performance by visual artists in the 1960s, it is important to recall that performance by artists in Japan began well before 1957, dating back to the 1920s. Among all of performance in non-Western regions, this emergence was significantly early, and the Dadaism of the shinkō bijustu (new art) movement of the Taishō Period (1912–1926) was the riverhead of the Dadaist trends in performance in the 1960s.8 Based on a detailed study by Omuka Toshiharu, I will focus on some of the more important points of the movement that foreshadowed the performance art of the 1960s. Murayama Tomoyoshi, who mastered Expressionistic Neue Tanz in Germany, began performing dance pieces with Okada Tatsuo. The Taishō New Art Movement, of which they both were a part, reached its apotheosis in Gekijō no Sanka (Sanka in the Theater) at Tsukiji Shōgekijō, Tokyo, in May 1925. Upon a conventional theater base, this performance layered various “intermedia” experiments, akin to the future theater pieces of Jikken Kōbō and Gutai.9 Their mixture of drama, poetry reading, dance, motorbike noise and film within the theater space was a marvel at the time; Takashima Naoyuki claims that it was “the first performance in Japan that attempted to throw corporeality into everyday life.”10 Here I would like to focus on MAVO, a group led by Murayama which also participated in Gekijō no Sanka, and examine three ways, linked to Allan Kaprow’s concept of “Happenings,” that its art encroached on the space of reality through bodily intervention. First, like the work of artists across Japan from the late 1950s onward, the group’s street demonstrations sought to appeal to mass media as they railed against existing art systems. In August 1923, to protest the large volume of MAVO member works rejected by the Nika Art Exhibition, they put their reclaimed works on display at Ueno Park and afterwards packed them into cars, announcing their plans in advance in the newspapers.11 As they were about to begin their procession with a marching band leading the way, their performance was interrupted, halted by police. Prior to this were other anarchic acts: Sumiya Iwane hoisting MAVO’s triangle flag on top of the museum roof; Takamizawa Michinao throwing stones at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, where the Nika Exhibition was held, shattering skylight windows.12 These actions “left a strong impression on the public of MAVO’s provocative tendency” and “sealed its image as a radical group that undoubtedly smashed frames and broke out of conventional frameworks through their series of demonstrations.”13 Second, it should be noted that MAVO members were already experimenting with bodily expression that moved beyond the frameworks of dance and theater, treating the body itself as artwork. As Omuka notes, Murayama’s Bubikopf (bob cut hair) “was, needless to say, closely related to performance, or corporeal expression using the whole body.”14 Thus, it was a part of his outlet as an artist who desired to be “in a mental space terribly far removed from the modern.”15 It foreshadowed later self-as-artwork gestures by Anti-Art performers, such as Kazakura Shō’s dyed blonde hair,16 Shinohara Ushio’s Mohawk hairdo (seen also in Mazura Ryūdan), Nakajima Yoshio’s “Indian” (Native American) hairdo (influenced by Shinohara), and Matsue Kaku and Itoi Kanji’s cross-shaped shaves. The intermingling of the body and the exhibition space can also be seen in a photograph from Okada Tatsuo’s solo exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial University Christian

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 1. Okada Tatsuo, The Gallery and Me • Okada Tatsuo Exhibition • August 1924 • Tokyo Imperial University YMCA Dormitory

Youth Center in Hongō, in August  1924, which captures the artist dancing in his exhibition space [fig. 1].17 Its theatricality, pairing the artist’s body and exhibition space, and its performativity, cognizant of the photographer’s presence, are altogether reminiscent of the portrait photographs taken at the first Neo Dada exhibition in 1960.18 More intriguingly, Kinoshita Shūichirō exhibited (presented) the bodies of three men with painted faces as an artwork titled R.G… in the First Sanka Members Exhibition at Ueno Matsuzakaya Department Store in May 1925 [fig. 2].19 It was reported that viewers initially did not notice that they were live bodies. This “exhibit” of bodies was in fact a demonstration of the stage costumes for the upcoming Gekijō no Sanka performance, so it may not exactly be fair to call it a standalone piece; nevertheless, it was a pioneering intervention into the human body exhibitions that proliferated during the Anti-Art period, such as Kojima Nobuaki standing in a metal barrel at the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition in 1962. Third, as Gennifer Weisenfeld has indicated, MAVO challenged gender and sexuality norms, visible in Murayama’s aforementioned bob hairstyle and the cross-dressing featured in their dance performances, their danjo ryōsei (androgenous) and futanari (intersex) sensuality, the glorification of hedonism in their plastic arts and poetry, inclusive of their overt onanism.20 Of course in their day, unlike the 1960s, naked dance and overt sexual expression in public spaces was not a possibility. Their acceptance of cross-dressing and sexual pleasure, however, sufficiently challenged institutionalized asceticism, transcending the “civilized” morals espoused by the Meiji government—which was established by the former samurai class—and finding something in common with the anarchism of Ōsugi Sakae21 and Dadaism of Tsuji Jun.22 Holding demonstrations in the streets, turning the body itself into art object, challenging sexual and gender norms—pioneered by MAVO, these elements can also be seen in the Anti-Art performance, butoh dance, and theater of the 1960s. During a time when anarchism flourished in the aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake (1923) and assassination of Ōsugi Sakae, MAVO’s  2. Kinoshita Shūichirō, R.G… • 1st Sanka Exhibition • March 1925 • Matsuzakaya, Ueno, Tokyo

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experiments in various means of expression, in the sense that they themselves were social phenomena linked to provocative activism that verged on scandal, were the forerunners of Anti-Art performance. However, due to the ideological disagreements among the artists, with some turning to Proletarian Art and others to anarchism, research into the art of this era did not begin until the end of the 1960s and so had little influence on the artists of the Anti-Art period.23 5.

PRE-HISTORY 2: JIKKEN KŌBŌ

Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop) formed under the leadership of Takiguchi Shūzō in September 1951.24 The group aimed to synthesize the artistic genres of visual art, film, music and design while also venturing into the performing arts, immersed in the intermedia experiments that blossomed in the late 1960s. Their fifth performance, “Intermedia Manifesto by all of the members,”25 performed at Dai-ichi Seimei Hall in September 1953, was Jikken Kōbō’s most collective production, featuring an “auto-slide” slide projection synchronized to a tape recording. As for performance with the body, its members staged the ballet Mirai no Ibu, L'Eve Future (Future Eve) at Haiyū-za Theater in March 1955. However, its pioneering and experimental nature notwithstanding, there are several reasons why it is difficult to connect Jikken Kōbō to the Anti-Art performances of the 1960s. First, for Jikken Kōbō, outside of the context of ballet, an established Western art genre, the body itself was rarely in a leading role. Even L’Eve Future was dominated by a cool, mechanical aesthetic, and Kitadai Shōzō’s stage design seemed to overpower the dancers’ bodies.26 Second, the group’s experiments, in today’s terms, had a strong tendency to media-mix, and had little to do with politics, thus operating squarely within an established modernist aesthetic. Third, its performances remained on the stage as “high art,” and never ventured into the realities of outdoor urban space or mass media. With its supreme artistic and technological ability, it would have been possible to corporatize Jikken Kōbō, but Takiguchi resolutely rejected that notion,27 instead following a path toward artistic autonomy, perhaps because he had always avoided commercialization. For these reasons, it is difficult to detect in Jikken Kōbō any germination of the later Anti-Art performers who, dismantling modernistic autonomy and the hierarchy of high art over popular art, were oriented toward political action, popular entertainment, and ritual. Rather, Jikken Kōbō went increasingly in the direction of the performances at Sogetsu Art Center in the first half of the 1960s and Intermedia events in the latter half of the decade which, presumably against Takiguchi’s intentions, led to large-budget, corporate-funded events like Expo ’70 and so became a force in opposition to Anti-Art performance. 6.

PRE-HISTORY 3: GUTAI

Following Jikken Kōbō, Gutai’s experiments are an integral part of postwar performance history in Japan. As Minemura Toshiaki notes, despite being two groups with almost entirely different qualities, Jikken Kōbō and Gutai had something in common: a tendency

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to depict “things” (mono) rather than “ideas” (koto), in the vein of Tsuruoka Masao’s famous assertion on the aim of art.28 They however lacked the cynicism that tore Tsuruoka between Modernism and Realism and instead shared “an almost sanguine ambition to rise and desire to lead.”29 Whatever “ambition to rise” might mean here, Tsuruoka’s cynicism resurfaced in the contradictions between avant-garde and popular art that emerged within Kyūshū-ha. Absent such contradictions, Jikken Kōbō and Gutai cannot be connected to Anti-Art performance. Yet it is not in spite of these qualities, but in fact because of them, that Gutai’s evaluation was unrivalled in the Western art world—to the extent Tōno Yoshiaki lamented in 1984 that Gutai remained the only Japanese “action art” known in the West.30 Shiraga Kazuo’s Challenging Mud at 1st Gutai Art Exhibition in October 1955, along with Murakami Saburō’s Passing Through at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition in 1956 and Gutai on Stage in 1957, featured in Allan Kaprow’s Assemblage, Environments & Happenings (1966), were among the most progressive and original works, not only for Gutai but in performance history worldwide.31 Similarly, Gutai is also the sole entry from Asia in Michael Kirby’s Happenings, published the same year.32 Nevertheless, it would be unreasonable to suggest that Gutai was a forerunner of Anti-Art performance, for the reason that Gutai’s bodily expressions never transcended the framework of “art” in several regards.33 First, save for Shiraga Kazuo and Tanaka Atsuko, there were surprisingly few instances of Gutai artists baring their bodies themselves as the main medium of artistic expression; their main focus was rather on processes of material transformation—producing composites of material, color, sound and movement—which would come to be known as “environment art.” In fact, as Tatehata Akira observes,34 even though Gutai in its early days may seem to have done a remarkable variety of experimentation, most of their experiments turned the painting process into a form of expression. Flinging glass jars filled with paint and shooting paint from a canon (Shimamoto Shōzō), pouring paint from a watering can while suspended mid-air (Sumi Yasuo), painting with a mechanical car (Kanayama Akira)—these works did not foreground the artists’ bodies and instead aimed to show a process of painting through extremely unconventional means. Even Shiraga’s Ultramodern Sanbasō, which seemed to be of a traditional theater style, was regulated by the structure of painting with red arrows. Second, there is room to consider whether, in fact, Gutai’s bodily expressions were born out of individual artists’ intrinsic desires, in the vein of Shinohara Ushio, whose performances were driven by his naïve craving for media publicity, Kazakura Shō, whose repulsion for theater led him to carry out acts of self-harm, Unbeat, who were similarly influenced by Dadaism, and Zero Jigen, who liberated the memories of vulgar spectacle engrained in the body. Aimed at garnering acclaim, Gutai’s demonstrations were quite different from those of young and powerless artists who, without guidance or financial support from a figure like Yoshihara Jirō, cultivated their own bodily expressions and also the venues for said expression. Gutai’s demonstrations instead functioned within the general tactics of their collective: outdoor exhibitions, stage performance, and marketing to overseas (Western) media. In reality, before Shinohara was able to secure a weekly magazine interview by using all his personal connections (April 1958, see chap. 5.1, pp. 109–10), an article about Gutai had appeared in the New York Times (December 1957), in which the writer was simply impressed by the unique production methods

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 3. Murakami Saburō, Passing Through • 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition • October 1956 • Ohara Hall, Tokyo

more so than the artworks themselves.35 This article clearly displays that Gutai’s publicity reach was far beyond that of unknown young artists like Shinohara. Yet, without their collective, Shiraga and Tanaka would not have conducted performances individually.36 It is well known that by Gutai’s mid-to late period, its early experiments in bodily expression had all but disappeared, giving way to a focus on painting and sculptural artwork. Third, Gutai’s action expressions were only conducted in spaces set up for the media (which could be easily photographed) or on theater stages, venues detached from the everyday world, city space, disordered reality. In other words, they were enclosed in spaces that were designated for “art.” Even if there were pieces within Gutai Art on Stage that attempted to invade the audience’s seating space, they maintained the boundary between stage and audience. No member of Gutai, Shiraga and Tanaka included, ever diverged from the group’s collective program, nor dared to perform in city spaces where their acts of expression would not be guarded as “art.”37 Further, there were no members of Gutai who, like Unbeat and Mizukami Jun, performed on the street for only their own sake, unannounced to spectators or the media. Fourth, the apoliticality that pervaded Gutai’s entire oeuvre significantly differentiates them from Anti-Art performance. The fact that (most) all of Gutai’s experiments were, in their unwaveringly apolitical manifestation, situated within the purified, quarantined modernistic aesthetics of “painting” or “plastic arts”—this is a definitive difference that separates them from the focal point of this book, Anti-Art performance. Just as Michael Kirby mistakenly asserts in Happenings that “Boxing Painting” (Shinohara) was performed by an artist who painted with their feet (in actuality, it was Shiraga),38 Gutai was regarded by overseas scholars as a group influenced by action painting, and, therefore, similar to Neo-Dada. However, Gutai’s expressions were more closely related to Jikken Kōbō’s experiments with purely cultured forms and spaces than to the “Boxing Paintings” of Shinohara, who attempted to plunge into the tawdry world of mass media and sell himself. Needless to say, their expressions lacked the political mission and themes present in the reportage paintings of the same period, and were entirely isolated from alignment with the antiestablishment and antiwar movements that erupted in the mid-1960s, as well as from the cheap, disordered air of lived experience that encompassed later “Anti-Art.” In All Kansai, an economic magazine for business people first published in 1967 that enthusiastically promoted Expo ’70,39 Yoshihara Jirō was featured not as a leader of Gutai but as the head of an oil refining company; other members

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of Gutai made frequent appearances in this magazine as well. 40 Yoshihara was the only avant-garde artist on the Expo Art Exhibition Committee, and Gutai’s final public performance took place at the Festival Square of Expo ’70, sponsored by the government and corporations. It was held at night (7–9 p.m.) when the oddly futuristic architecture surrounding the square could not be seen; it was as though the darkness masked the political and economic forces that supported Gutai. There are any number of reasons for this lack of politicality—among them, Yoshihara Jirō’s konomi (personal tastes), more so than his critical eye. Yoshihara was highly regarded, not only as an artist guiding the next generation of artists but also as a leader blessed with organizational abilities, economic resources and international (i.e., Western, importunate as it may be) knowhow. Though his work was adorned with the traces of intense painterly action, in the end Yoshihara aspired to a more refined formalism and did not approve of the grotesque experiments occasionally attempted by ambitious Gutai members. A similar kind of selectivity was at work in the various pioneering experiments at Sogetsu Art Center; while the experiments of individual members may have appeared to be spontaneous and free, within the wider art context of that period, the latitude of their expression was inevitably constrained by the unwritten law of Gutai. 41 Another difference between Gutai and the practice of Anti-Art performance, emblematized by the Gutai Pinotheca exhibition space established in 1962, was Gutai’s self-contained system of production, presentation, and evaluation. The existence of this system rendered it unnecessary for members to experiment individually, to promote themselves in the streets and for mass media, to collaborate with artists outside the group, or to participate in “independent” exhibitions (non-juried exhibitions, pronounced “andepandan” as in the French indépendant) for personal recognition or to grow the organization. 42 At this point in time, the fact that the Kansai region was the hub of their activities would not suffice as a reason for this arrangement;43 by the mid-1960s, developments in media and transportation networks enabled like-minded artists based in different locations throughout Japan to collaborate and cooperate with each other, and even attempt to build networks for sharing common aims and ambitions through the exchange of information. Indeed, even within the Kansai region, artists were performing independently and the formation of collectives was well underway, as seen in the artists who later formed The Play. Further scrutiny of the diverse personalities across the eighteen long years that Gutai operated would reveal some number of “non-Yoshihara” bodily expressions. For example, Shiraga Kazuo’s Challenging Mud (October 1955, [fig. 4]) and Please Come In (July 1955), both known as early Gutai performances, showed a certain corporeality that could not be reduced to experiments in pure form which revolved around material and space. Challenging Mud showcased the power of muscle resisting mud mixed with cement, while Please Come In drew attention to the artist’s masculine power, his naked torso cutting a red log with a hatchet. Shiraga believed that physical labor was linked to the mind, holding onto “the thought that there is something to be gained from abusing your body until it wavers, on the verge of collapse”44 There is also a charming anecdote about how his experience with judo and sumo helped him paint with his feet. 45 In contrast to Murakami Saburō running fully-clothed through large kraft paper screens in Passing Through (October 1956), it was not Shiraga’s naked upper body, but rather the presence of

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 4. Shiraga Kazuo, Challenging Mud • 1st Gutai Art Exhibition • October 1955 • Ohara Hall, Tokyo

flesh that the artwork aimed to impress upon its audience. As Shiraga himself remarked, “I like it bloody,”46 referring to the raw sensuality of the fleshy red tones he preferred. He was, however, scolded by Yoshihara when he used the fur of a wild boar in a painting, and on other occasions for “submerging strange objects in a tank filled with red liquid,” and “pouring formalin into a tank packed full of cow intestines that surrounded a brick.”47 Concealed beneath this animalistic, or perhaps better put, this visceral sensibility lay a ritualistic quality, perhaps akin to that of Hermann Nitsch, a member of the Vienna Actionists known for his bloody performances using animal carcasses and Koyama Tetsuo, who slaughtered a calf and painted his body with its blood (see chap. 15.3, pp. 369–70). Shiraga also foregrounded the body in Ultramodern Sanbasō performed at Gutai Art on Stage in May and July 1957), expanding the body to fill the space of the stage in a similar manner to the work of Tanaka Atsuko, who will be discussed subsequently. Their foregrounding of the body in performance set them apart from the “public artmaking demonstrations” of other members. 48 Tanaka Atsuko was another artist who exposed the body in a way that completely deviated from “painting,” but did so in a style opposite to Shiraga; her works in Gutai Art on Stage and her demonstration for the media prior to the event centered on her clothing as a focal point. In Stage Clothes (May 1957) [fig. 5], 49 she changed quickly from one piece of clothing to another in front of the audience, evoking at once a modern fashion show and a technique from kabuki called hikinuki (in which an actor dressed in layers of costume removes the outermost layer during a performance to transform instantly), while simultaneously inducing a feminist reading that—like Ono Yōko’s Cut Piece (August 1964) (see chap. 17.2, pp. 384–5)—reclaimed strip shows as women exposing their bodies actively and willingly (to the male gaze). Of course, Tanaka herself flatly denied such interpretations,50 emphasizing that her concern was with the beauty of colors beyond human creation and the Modern aesthetic of instantaneous transformations. That stance alone cannot, however, explain why her fixation with the human form (devoid of physicality and eroticism) differed so markedly from Gutai’s aesthetics in Stage Clothes and also in Electric Dress (October 1956) [fig. 6], another of her noted works. According to Katō Mizuho, unlike other Gutai works (including the aforementioned pieces by Shiraga) which exposed their own materiality, in Tanaka’s Stage Clothes and Electric Dress,

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 5. Tanaka Atsuko, Stage Clothes • Gutai Art on Stage • May 1957 • Sankei Kaikan Hall, Osaka

 6. Tanaka Atsuko, Electric Dress • Gutai Art on Stage • May 1957 • Sankei Kaikan Hall, Osaka

“the characteristics of the material are diminished, if not eliminated through the importance given to process and the work’s relationship to the body.”51 “What instead comes to the foreground,” Katō elaborates, “is an ‘irregularly flashing image of clothes’ and ‘the visuality of a body transforming itself in quick succession,’” clothing for the purpose of the “formation of self.”52 Stage Clothes and Electric Dress can be seen as a manifestation of her strong will to overcome a physique controlled by a ponderous materiality, through the immediate, momentary, ceaseless nature of sensory stimulation. This drive can be seen in her miraculously mutative work, Bell (October 1955), in which bells installed in various parts of a gallery rang one after another when switched on by the audience, and also in the luster of the enamel paint of her paintings; the gigantic human figure in her three-dimensional works (Stage Clothes, 1956 and 1957) can also be understood from this point of view. In this sense, Tanaka’s work was distinct from the 1960s Intermedia events that rejected the body Anti-Art used as its weapon, and instead was an attempt to expand the body with technology, as seen in post-1980s media performances. Though she was an important artist in Gutai’s early period, Tanaka departed the group in 1965, not simply due to interpersonal issues,53 but perhaps more so because her work continued to be essentially different from what Yoshihara demanded of Gutai work. Although the obsessive affect embodied in Tanaka’s works, following her drawings

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of electric clothing, was inherited by her later paintings, it must be said that the fact her overwhelming talents were restricted for decades to painting, without any major further development, was indeed a great loss for Japanese performance art. NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Shōwa sanjū nendo keizai hakusho: Nihon keizai no seichō to kindaika [Economic Survey of Japan (1955–1956): Growth and Modernization of Japanese Economy], ed. Keizai Kikaku Chō [Economy Planning Agency], (Tokyo: Shiseidō, 1956), 42. The Japan Trotskyist League was renamed Kakukyōdō, the Revolutionary Communist League, in December 1957. When the Kodama first began operating, it took six hours and fifty minutes to travel from Tokyo to Osaka, even though the train was advertised as a “business super express.” In October 1964, the new Hikari train model shortened the travel time to three hours and ten minutes. Weekly manga magazines Shōnen Sandē (Boy’s Sunday) and Shōnen Magajin (Boy’s Magazine) were also launched in 1959, becoming major manga media outlets in the 1960s. Some examples of a shift to a new urban lifestyle include the first sale of Coca-Cola in Japan in May 1957 and the first appearance of the word Danchi-zoku (“tribal” living in public high-rise housing) in Shūkan Asahi (Weekly Asahi), July 20, 1958. Takazawa Kōji, Shukumei: ‘Yodo-gō’ bōmeisha tachi no himitsu kōsaku [Destiny: Secret maneuvers by the exiles in “Yodo-go”] (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1990). It is debatable whether the Grand Assembly of Heroes (November 1962), the last Kyūshū-ha exhibition (August 1965), or the Possibilities of Art through Artist Collectives exhibition (the de facto last exhibition of Kyūshū-ha as a group, May 1968) should mark the end of Kyūshū-ha. The first retrospective exhibition of the group, Kyūshū-ha ten: Hangeijutsu ­purojekuto [Group Kyūshū-ha: Anti-Art project] at Fukuoka Art Museum in 1988 stated the end to be 1968. Shirakawa Yoshio, “Enkan no kanata-e” [Beyond the Circle], Nihon no Dada 1920–1970 [Dada in Japan 1920–1970], ed. Shirakawa Yoshio (Tokyo: Shoshi Kaze no bara), 8–9.

9. Omuka Toshiharu, Taishō-ki shinkō-bijutsu undō no kenkyū [The Japanese Modern Art Movement and the Avant-Garde 1920–1927] (Tokyo: Skydoor, 1995), 594–607. 10. Takashima Naoyuki, “Kōi no kiseki (Nihon)” [Trajectory of action (Japan)], Bijutsu techō [Art Notebook], October 1985, 71. 11. Omuka, Taishō-ki, 483. 12. Omuka, 483. 13. Omuka, 485. 14. Omuka, 521. 15. Omuka, 521. 16. Kazakura dyed his hair in 1956. See Akasegwa Genpei, “Kazakura,” Bungei [Literature] (September (1981): 108. 17. Omuka, 521. 18. Neo Dada Witnessed (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1993), 20–26.　 19. Omuka, 573–575. 20. Gennifer Weisenfeld, MAVO: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde 1905–1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 243. 21. Translator’s note: Ōsugi Sakae (1885–1923) was a leading anarchist critic and activist, and established Japan’s first Esperanto school in 1906. 22. Translator’s note: Tsuji Jun (1884–1944) was a Japanese author and one of the first self-identified Dadaists in Japan. His notable works include the play Kyōraku-shugi-sha no Shi [Death of an Epicurean] and Japanese translations of Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own (1844) and Cesare Lombroso’s The Man of Genius (1889). 23. Omuka Toshiharu, “Taishō-ki shinkō bijutsu undō no gaiyō to kenkyū-shi” [Summary and history of study of new art movements of the Taishō period], in Taishō ki shinkō bijutsu undō shiryō shūsei [Collection of New Art Movements of the Taishō Period Materials], ed. Omuka Toshiharu (Tokyo: Kokushokankō-kai, 2006), 15. 24. Fukuzumi Haruo ed., Dai jūikkai omāju Takiguchi Shūzō: Jikken Kōbō to Takiguchi Shūzō [The 11th Homage to Takiguchi Shūzō: Takiguchi Shūzō and Experimental Workshop] (Tokyo: Satani Gallery, 1991), 102–103.

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25. “Experimental Workshop: A Chronological History,” Fukuzumi, 110. 26. Miwako Tezuka, “Jikken Kōbō and Takiguchi Shūzō: The New Deal Collectivism of 1950s Japan.” Positions: Asia Critique, vol. 21, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 351–81. Originally presented at the College Art Association annual conference, Boston, MA, February 22, 2006. 27. Kitadai Shōzō, in an interview by Miwako Tezuka, December 12, 2000. From Tezuka’s conference presentation (see n. 26 above). 28. “Depicting ‘Things,’ not ‘Ideas,’” From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan 1945-1989: Primary Documents, ed. Doryun Chong, et al., (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 58–62. The original article was titled Koto dewa naku ‘mono’ o egaku to iu koto [Depicting “things,” not “ideas”], Bijutsu hihyō [Art Criticism], no. 26 (February 1954): 13–24. 29. Minemura Toshiaki, “Shokkaku no riarizumu: Funshutsu shita mō hitotsu no nihon” [Realism of the tactile: Eruption of another Japan], in 1953-nen raito appu [Light Up 1953: Emerging New Art History of the Post-war Japan] (Tokyo: Meguro Museum of Art and Tama Art University, 1996), 113. Exhibition Catalogue. 30. Tōno Yoshiaki, Anzaï Shigeo, and Akasegawa Genpei, “Tōgi: Toshi kūkan no naka no shintai” [Discussion: the body in the city space], Yuriika, September 1984, 160. 31. Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments & Happenings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966), 212–24. 32. Michael Kirby, Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1966), 28–29. 33. On the question of Gutai’s status as the first performance group in Japan, see: KuroDalaiJee, “Subculture in Revolt: Zero Jigen and Antimodern Performance Art in 1960s Japan,” in Points of Convergence: Alternative Views on Performance, ed. Marta Dziewanska and André Lepecki (Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2017), 114–15. Exhibition catalogue. 34. “The early Gutai was definitely a group of painters, and painting was positioned at the center of its movement. […] The myth of Gutai is strictly about the emergence of tableau. It is a mistake to regard its violent actions as the denial or transgression of painting.” Tatehata Akira, “Seisei suru taburō: Gutai bijutsu kyōkai no 1950 nendai” [Tableau self-generating: Gutai in the 1950s], in Action et Emotion, Peinture des Années 50: Informel, Gutaï, Cobra

35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

(Osaka: National Museum of Art, Osaka, 1988), 14. Exhibition catalogue. Falk, Ray, “Japanese Innovations,” New York Times, December 8, 1957. Murakami Saburō, interview by Ozaki Shin’ichirō and Yamamura Tokutarō. Document Gutai 1954-1972, ed. Ashiya City Museum of Art & History (Ashiya: Ashiya City Culture Foundation, 1993), 376. “As a member of Gutai, there was no plan that required such an event. We agreed on doing something in accordance with the master’s (Yoshihara) proposal, such as the outdoor exhibitions, Gutai on Stage and International Sky Festival. If someone had made a proposal and it was approved, it would have happened—but in actuality, that never happened.” Tanaka Atsuko conducted an action at a beach on Awaji Island, Hyōgo Prefecture, around October 1968, making a huge drawing on sand. This could have been an independent project (after she had left the group), but this action was only performed for the camera, without an audience and far away from the cities. Kirby, Happenings, 28. “Zadankai: Bankokuhaku no rinen to tanoshi­ sa o Kōbe ni, Yume to hikari to ongaku no Kōbe kānibaru” [Discussion: Bring the principles and happiness of Expo to Kobe, Kobe Carnival of dreams, light, and music], Ōru Kansai [All Kansai], May 1970, 134–140. Following the March 1966 special issue of Ōru Kansai, thirty articles on Gutai appeared in the magazine before 1970. We must consider the political stance of each individual Gutai member, but Yoshihara’s social status as a businessman (he became executive of Yoshihara Oil Company in 1955) who was firmly on the side of the establishment, and the fact that Gutai operated under his patronage, inevitably affected the political stances of other members and the group as a whole. There was perhaps a division of art communities between tenjō-bito (upper echelon courtiers) and jige-zamurai (the samurai on the ground), in the words of Shinohara (see chap. 1.6, p. 48). Presumably in December 1962, Nakajima Yoshio from Unbeat was scolded when he performed in front of the Gutai Pinacoteca. Nakajima Yoshio, in an interview with the author, January 14, 2006. Likewise, in November of that same year, Tone Yasunao and others had not been allowed to perform at the Gutai

Chapter 4———A Pre-History of Anti-Art Performance107

43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

Pinacoteca on their way to Grand Assembly of Heroes. Kazakura Shō, “Hapunā no kiseki” (Trajectory of a Happener), interview by Kikuhata Mokuma, Kikan, no. 12 (May 1981): 14. Kikuhata Mokuma visited Shiraga Kazuo as a representative of Kyūshū-ha seeking to form a coalition with Gutai presumably in April 1962, but Shiraga did not allow Kikuhata to meet with Yoshihara. Kikuhata Mokuma, in an interview with the author, April 1, 2008. The Tokyo-based art critics and journalists ignored the importance of Gutai’s experiments even after Gutai’s group shows in Tokyo. Chiba Shigeo, Gendai bijutsu itsudatsu shi [History of Deviation in Contemporary Art, 1945–1985] (Tokyo: Shōbun-sha, 1986), 45. Shiraga Kazuo, interview by Ozaki Shin’ichirō, Document Gutai 1954-1972, 381. Shiraga stated that his experiences in Judo and Sumo clubs “helped me learn how to twist my body, to put my body into it. And ukemi [falling and receiving, a Judo technique of to prevent harm to the body when being thrown] was useful when I was painting with my feet.” Shiraga, 381. Shiraga, 380. Shiraga, 386. Besides these examples, other Gutai performances which foregrounded bodies are: Mukai Shūji’s Face and Signs, Yoshihara M ­ ichio’s Rokku araundo za kurokku (Rock around the Clock), and Morita Masahiro’s Bunretsu kigō B (Schism sign B); these performances all appeared in Daijōbu tsuki wa ochinai (Don’t worry, the moon won’t fall) in collaboration with Morita Modern Dance in 1962. The performances used dancers in white costumes, which concealed their corporeality, as materials for formative art. Also, Morita danced in a red costume in Shiraga’s Gendai sanbasō (Modern Sanbasō) performances. “In the center hung a huge dress of red artificial silk, with small yellow and green legs protruding from its hem. Tanaka appeared from underneath the dress. She was wearing a dress made of green artificial silk, but quickly

50.

51.

52. 53.

removed the sleeves, skirt, and bodice to reveal a yellow dress made of artificial silk underneath. Then she took out a thin red evening dress made of organdy that was folded under the hem of the yellow dress and put it on. She took it off and then pulled the yellow dress, which peeled off spirally, and made a striped pattern in contrast to the black lining. After she took them all off, she took out yellow and pink artificial silk materials prepared under long black gloves. She opened the silk materials, made a gown, and put it on. She then took the gown off and once she was standing there, clad only in black body tights, the lights went out.” Atsuko Tanaka: Search for an Unknown Aesthetic, 1954-2000 (Ashiya City Museum of Art & History, Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, 2001), 74. Exhibition catalogue. When Tanaka was asked if her works had any relation to conventional politics, she replied, “My paintings don’t have much to do with politics. In a broader context, they might have something to do with it, but not in general. They don’t have anything to do with gender, either. It doesn’t matter whether I’m a man or a woman. I’m not conscious of it.” From a symposium talk at UCLA (February 8, 1998). See Tanaka Atsuko: Another Gutai, DVD, directed by Okabe Aomi (Kyoto: Ufer! Art Documentary, 1998). Katō Mizuho, “Kyōkai no tansaku” [Searching for a boundary] in Atsuko Tanaka: Search for an Unknown Aesthetic, 1954-2000, 18. Katō, 18. Tanaka once revealed her feelings about Yoshihara Jirō, saying, “Yoshihara Jirō was a bad man. As we [Tanaka and her husband, Kana­ yama Akira] were much younger, Yoshihara, with Motonaga Sadamasa and others, banded together to ostracize my husband. Kanayama was so oppressed that his character seemed to have changed since then.” Kana­yama Akira and Tanaka Atsuko (interview), Bijutsu to kyōiku/1997 [Art and Education/1997], produced by Nakamura Masato, ed. Sakaguchi Chiaki (Tokyo: Japan Art Foundation, 1997), 293.

CHAPTER 5

Waves of Demonstration (1957–1959) Action Informel

1.

SHINOHARA USHIO: ACTION IN THE MASS MEDIA

As I have already touched on, it is fair to say that new kinds of bodily expression (shintai hyōgen), which differed from public artmaking demonstrations and existing forms of stage-based performance arts (music, theater, dance and combinations thereof), began in 1957. Though it is clear that many of these new bodily expressions, like those of Shinohara Ushio and Kudō Tetsumi, can be traced back to Georges Mathieu’s painting demonstrations at the Shirokiya Department Store [fig.  7], neither of their works remained within the category of Art Informel and there were other artists, such as Kazakura Shō and Nakajima Yoshio, thought to be unrelated to and unmotivated by Mathieu’s demonstrations. In the wake of Mathieu’s exhibition, quite a few artists began holding performances that might best described as public artmaking demonstrations (kōkai seisaku). Among them was Shinohara Ushio, who later became the star artist of the Neo Dada Organizers (Neo Dada). What drew Shinohara so strongly to Mathieu 1 was not that his demonstrations revealed the process of painting like Gutai artists, nor that he derived his “expressive process’s achievement of autonomy” (hyōgen katei no jiritsu) (Miyakawa Atsushi2) from Informel aesthetics; rather, it was his ability to grab the attention of passersby in a small corner of a shopping center, and the way he awakened the potential for artists’ work to become known throughout mass society by using mass media. The crucial element for Shinohara, more so than the artist’s intrinsic desires inevitably giving birth to bodily expression, was that demonstrations were to be aimed at the media. Shinohara’s first media appearance, outside of art journals, was in the April 1958 Shūkan Sankei (Weekly Sankei). [fig. 8] Seeking out journalists, Shinohara’s “hard sell” was turned down by the likes of Asahi, Mainichi, Yomiuri, Shinchō, but after going to borrow train fare from a relative who worked for the Shūkan Sankei editorial department,

 7. Georges Mathieu, Battle of Bun’ei • public painting demonstration • September 3, 1957 • Shirokiya, Tokyo

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 8. An article featuring Shinohara Ushio, “Rockabilly Painter”

he managed to secure his first news coverage, fashioning a piece out of bamboo in front of the camera.3 This moment is significant in the development of performance art in the 1960s for two reasons. First, unlike the work of Gutai, which was undergirded by organizational support, Shinohara (utilizing a considerable amount of energy) marketed himself—an artist with his signature Mohawk hairstyle—as an object worthy of media attention. It was one of the weekly magazines, welcoming the publishing boom of the 1950s, that took him up. His body and his actions, exposed in the pages of magazines and CRT television screens of the rapidly developing mass media of the 1960s, pioneered what Zero Jigen and Jakku no Kai (Jack Society) later engaged in full-scale. Shinohara’s work was not covered by the Yomiuri Shimbun and its ilk, despite the fact that it was being exhibited at the Yomiuri Independent exhibition, and instead taken up—after much struggle—by a magazine with familial connection; consequently, Shinohara was not dependent on the existing systems of the art world. The second significant point is that what Shinohara promoted was not the artwork, but the artist himself. On display in the photographs from the magazine, besides the obvious images of the artist standing before his work at the Independent Exhibition in the act of chatting with his audience or painting in his home, was an interest in the artist’s lifestyle: getting his Mohawk cut at the barber, listening to rock ’n’ roll and modern jazz at the jukebox, working part-time as a tutor, being fawned on by his mother at home. From the article’s title, “Rockabilly Painter,” we can discern that the author, swept up in the “Rockabilly whirlwind” that was spurred by the 1st Western Carnival at Nichigeki Theater just that February, captured Shinohara as a face of the cultural moment for the day’s youth. It is precisely for these qualities that Shinohara had such media appeal, and not the case that any artist could achieve what he had. As documented in a radio talk show from around the time, Shinohara had a gift for accentuating his persona: his quick-witted manner of speaking; his shamelessness, singing popular rockabilly songs while the cameras were capturing him making art; his violent statement that he

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would “take a knife to just the vital point—not the whole thing but a part, the effective one—like really killing somebody. With all my hate, in a single stroke”; and the charming vulgarity with which, when asked, “what is your goal as an artist?” he responded without pause “to have seven Cadillacs, just like Elvis.”4 The Mohawk, which became Shinohara’s trademark, perhaps drew more attention to him as an artist than to his artwork. Shinohara began sporting the hairstyle as a “conspicuousness” strategy even before his public artmaking demonstrations. While Shinohara had studied at Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music (present-day Tokyo University of the Arts), an academic art school, he considered the institution to be significantly behind the times. He instead picked up inspiration from commercial design strategy, a field unfamiliar to most fine artists,5 as a result of his friendship with Tanaami Keiichi, an aspiring designer and student at Musashino Art School (present-day Musashino Art University). Shinohara got the idea for his eye-grabbing Mohawk haircut while chatting Obara Hisao, a fellow member of Alchemist (an art group founded in 1956 to which Shinohara belonged), but felt shy about it when out in public and ordinarily covered it with a cap. For such a trailblazer, the story of Shinohara removing his cap to show off his Mohawk to the reporter for the first time is an amusing one.6 The weekly magazine article was an effective piece of publicity ahead of Shinohara’s solo exhibition at Muramatsu Gallery, held immediately after the article’s publication in June 1958.7 Shinohara states in his book Zen’ei no michi (The path of the avant-garde, 1968) that by noon on June 3, opening day, the gallery was “already packed with male and female office workers on their lunch breaks.” He continues, With the massive reach of the weekly magazine, everyone knew who I was. Photographer Torii Ryōzen came and took all these color photos of my performance. My action was furious, India ink splashing across the ceiling, and Yazaki-san [gallery owner Yazaki Kōhei] got more and more upset with each stroke.8

Though the exhibition may have encompassed four bamboo “sculptures” and a painting, the “action” here described—perhaps given the spatial constraints of the gallery—was a painting demonstration. By the final day of the exhibition on June 8 (with the guestbook at this point extending well into to its third volume), however, it had escalated into a fullfledged show with music, clearly aware of the photographer’s presence. Doing demonstrations day after day, even someone as tough as me starts to feel a bit groggy. But today, I’m planning a big action painting with a jazz band in the background led by Agurī T. Uzawa. Everyone who’s heard about it has gathered here and it’s so packed in Muramatsu Gallery Room C that it’s almost hard to breathe. “The band has arrived!” announced Hijikata Tatsumi, who had gone to pick them up, as he returned with the company, their shiny instruments looking out of place in our gallery. A drum set, tenor sax and trumpet—they set up their instruments stitched between the objet works. The sax and trumpet blared. Shouting out something or other, Yazaki-san tried to shut the doors at the entrance but was powerless against the overflowing crowd. An enigmatic ecstasy permeated the whole space—it was performance [ jitsuen]. Paint splashed against the audience. I beat the canvas with my brush to match the quick rhythm of the

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drum. I finished one painting almost immediately, and so I put up another canvas and kept painting. Instead of using the brush, which I had just broken, this time I picked up a knife and started slashing at the canvas. I flagged the photographer toward the end as I kicked through the canvas, and he snapped a shot of my head peeking through the hole.9

His media exposure continued in this fashion: a weekly magazine on April 27, solo exhibition and events from June 3 to 8, an appearance on a radio program on June 4. Without a premeditated strategy or artistic development intrinsic to his work, in the end Shinohara, this striking character with his trademark Mohawk haircut, came to be a rolling stone in the world of media by this consequential “media mix.”10 Yet, in spite of his largescale three-dimensional works such as the bamboo sculpture from the 10th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition (March 1958) titled Wild Form: This is the Art, his performances appear to have remained within the framework of public painting demonstration. 2.

KUDŌ TETSUMI: FROM ACTION TO BODY

Beginning with public painting demonstrations alongside Shinohara in the late 1950s, Kudō Tetsumi sought an original form of performance that would go beyond such demonstration. Kudō performed a piece called Happening “Anti-Art” (Demonstration of Making and Performance) at his solo exhibition at the Blanche Gallery in Shinjuku, October 1957, preceding Shinohara’s demonstrations. As this title comes from the 1994 catalog published by the National Museum of Art, Osaka,11 it is unclear whether the terms hapuningu (Happening) and han-geijutsu (Anti-Art) were in use at the time, but the word jitsuen (performance) does appear at the time on a signboard in the gallery.12 Judging by other photographs from the event, and given that the performance took place only a month after Mathieu’s public painting demonstration, we can assume Kudō’s performance had stronger ties to the public demonstrations of Informel than to later Anti-Art or Happening. In July 1958, a year after this solo exhibition, Kudō invited Shinohara to join his group Ei in holding a group exhibition he called Joint Great Action at Mimatsu Shobō Gallery.13 This performance by Kudō has also been billed as “Happening Anti-Art.”14 As I [Shinohara], like Mathieu, sprayed India ink about, Kudō began throwing raw eggs and tomatoes against a cloth spread on the floor, yelling kiai with each throw. At one point he slipped on the egg white, still flinging food as he tumbled to the ground. And when he ran out of throwing materials, he tore his own artwork down from the wall and peppered them with karate chops, breaking them to bits.15

According to this account, from the fact that they ultimately destroyed once-finished artworks, which thereafter were “lost someplace,” we can understand that for Kudō, and perhaps Shinohara as well, the idea of leaving work behind was not important. This in stark contrast to Mathieu’s public demonstration works, which are still today preserved in museum collections.16 Nevertheless, the account of Kudō’s action also reveals his stylistic differences from Shinohara. An article17 in the Tokyo Chūnichi Newspaper about

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 9. Kudō Tetsumi, public painting demonstration • 3rd Exhibition by Group Ei • July 6, 1958 • Mimatsu Shobō Gallery, Tokyo

the Joint Great Action exhibition depicts Shinohara dressed in a youthful dress shirt and pants, while Kudō wears a kimono-like “hagoromo [celestial robe] made of tattered rags.” And while Shinohara works on the large canvas on the wall, Kudō spreads out a long cloth on the floor, raises his feet high above it, and “paints with his whole body, using his hands and feet as brushes.”18 Two months later, Kudō held a painting demonstration with drum accompaniment in the second-floor gallery of Tenmaya Department Store in Okayama. A photo of the demonstration shows the figure of Kudō, again with a large cloth unfurled across the floor, painting using his hands and feet. [fig. 10].19 In sum, Shinohara displayed his talent, with action painting as a means to sell his persona as a mohawked artist of a new generation, whereas Kudō was oriented towards a more material and spatial performance through the Japonisme of his dress, his mushy, tactile ingredients, and his use of his hands and feet. Even more intriguing was Kudō’s Demonstration of Registration of Spinal Cord Waves, a one-day solo exhibition at Café Tabiji (Ikebukuro, Tokyo) in December 1957.20 Though we can only speculate, due to the fact that I have not managed to track down any photographic records or eyewitness accounts, it is possible that this performance marked the shift in the substance of his expression from painted work (i.e., a painting) to the body itself. The fact that after the solo exhibition this action was scheduled for every Wednesday at six in the evening until the next year (1958) illustrated that the artist’s body, transcending the temporal and spatial constraints of the exhibition, possessed its own continuity. Kudō’s work, bordering on insane and brimming with an aloof expressive impulse, emerged from his idea that the energy within one’s own body can become one with cosmic, physical energy. He did not aim for a collision of the body with external reality, and even if he aimed to put on a show for an audience, the spectacle probably wasn’t the most important point. It is no coincidence that Kudō’s Anti-Art-type works were in fact materially different from Anti-Art, as they possessed a finished quality, with materials and expression intimately intertwined in the work itself. Indeed, from the origins of Neo Dada to the end of the Yomiuri Independent, even in this period of time oriented toward independent Happenings, Kudō devoted himself to sculptures and installations of excessive materiality that agglomerated everyday objects. The full development of his performance had to wait until his move to France in May 1962. In Europe, Kudō’s performance,

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 10. Kudō Tetsumi, public painting demonstration • Kudō Tetsumi New Works • September 9, 1958 • Tenmaya Gallery 2F, Okayama

similar to Nakajima Yoshio (who moved to Europe in 1964), adopted methods that would appeal to European people’s exoticism through certain oriental archetypes, like the samurai committing hara-kiri or the Buddhist monk. In that sense, it was different than the style of work he created in Japan. However, one cannot deny the possibility that even before his move to Europe, his poses during the 1958 performance with Shinohara—reminiscent of kabuki—and his hagoromo garb were an expression of the latent Japonisme within Kudō. This flavor of Japonisme would frequently appear in the Ritualist performances of Zero Jigen and Kurohata in subsequent years. 3.

KAZAKURA SHŌ: OBJET-IFICATION OF THE BODY

During the rise of Anti-Art in the late 1950s, isolated from the Shinohara and Kudō vein of artmaking demonstration and without one iota of Japonisme, Kazakura Shō originated so-called “pure” performance. Apart from the public demonstrations that revolved around Gutai and Informel, the earliest incidence of performance in postwar Japanese art history may have been that of Kazakura at Ōita Prefecture Education Hall in March 1957.21 During an intermission of the cultural festival in which the East Ōita Youth Club was performing, Kazakura (a member of the Youth Club) went out on stage with a stool, sat on it, and repeatedly fell backwards. One witness, Satō Shirō, wrote: The Education Hall used to be where the new city hall is now located, and a cultural festival was held there. Local youth clubs, independent theater groups, and other cultural organizations jointly performed theater and dance works. Kazakura participated in it as an individual with his own performance. He carried a stool to the center of the stage and sat on it. Then, after a moment, he suddenly fell backwards. The nearly full-house audience was startled. But then Kazakura stood up, sat down on the stool, and fell back again. As he repeated this action ad infinitum, a trepidation, almost akin to dread, fell over the audience. As though the human and the stool could shatter at any moment. He didn’t hold back at all when he fell. […] But still, this act of risking his life, using his own body as a medium, was its own unique thing. It wasn’t acting, or dance.22

Satō felt “paralyzed by this urgent impact, like a person without an exit.”23 Only when one of the audience members rushed onto the stage and tried to stop Kazakura, did Satō

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“feel saved and relieved.”24 Further still, since Kazakura used a swivel piano stool 25— the danger was evident just looking at it—his upper body bore the brunt of the falls and he broke his clavicle as a result. Of this historical performance, which in the sense that it was an unplanned occurrence might be aptly deemed a “happening,” Kazakura later said: You might say that it’s a transformation of meaning through repetition, I suppose. A chair is supposed to be something for you to sit on to rest, but if you keep repeatedly falling from it, it becomes a space, or a dimension maybe, that is entirely different from the ordinary. A change in perception, maybe. It feels like something like that happened, you know?26

There are several ways to interpret this extremely simple performance, which appeared quite suddenly in the artistic landscape of the time, in light of the evolution of Kazakura and other artists in the years following. First, it might be seen as a critical or ironic intervention into institutionalized “theater.”27 From 1953, Kazakura was involved as “a stagehand for the theater productions of the local youth club” and acted as well, but the company tended to perform left-leaning realism. Kazakura, on the other hand, believed that a true theater should be a drama that incorporated chance, like the work of Luigi Pirandello. He felt that “surrounded by overbearing people who were absorbed with leftism […] it was in that setting that I wanted to convey theater in its true form.”28 Within the meaningless repetitions that Kazakura enacted—indifferent to story and in fact deliberately interrupting its flow, inverting the development of drama—is Michael Kirby’s concept of “Happening,” which dismantles the framework (matrix) of time/space/story. Second, the chair, an everyday object, defying its intended use by humans and the bodily needs it serves, instead harms the body; in other words, the object rebels against the body. Among 1960s performers, it is Kazakura’s acts that frequently abused his body, sometimes accompanied by suffering and danger. He once stated, “I had a feeling, deep down, that in order to communicate something to someone, I myself had to suffer as much.”29 In his best-known performance, which began in 1960, he moved around inside a huge balloon; with the total darkness inside the balloon came anxiety and the fear of suffocation. In his 1962 performance at Banquet Commemorating the Defeat in the War, Kazakura branded his chest with a hot anchor. During Muse Week in 1965, he locked himself in a trunk wearing an aqualung, risking his life to perform an escape. Third, Kazakura chose the instrument of the chair because of his feeling of discomfort towards Western lifestyle, which Kazakura once clarified to me in a letter,30 as well as in his final public talk.31 Kazakura recalls his revulsion at watching a Western man step onto a tatami floor with his shoes on: “It felt as if he had stepped on a human body.”32 In the cultural sphere of Asia, where the climate is warm and water is abundant, when entering a home it is customary to take off one’s shoes and wash one’s feet, and only then sit on tatami33 (which must have been an even more standard practice then than it is today). In contrast, chairs and beds were strange objects, born of a different cultural environment. In this way, Kazakura’s attitude may have shared a certain sense with Zero Jigen and Kokuin, whose gestures, attire and props played in the conceptual gaps between Japanese and Western, public and private. Likely, this awkward discomfort

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towards Western culture may be linked to Kazakura’s enduring anti-U.S. sentiment—“I hate America, as it was the enemy in the War. I cannot fawn on it now.”34 Kazakura’s acts of expression were often unpredictable, and so frequently went undocumented; as such, it is difficult to track how his trailblazing ideas developed. One thing, however, is certain: compared to members of Neo Dada and Hi-Red Center, Kazakura was one of the rare artists of his generation who continued to perform into his later years. His concerns were site-specific, in relation to place and temporality, and through his interventions as a minor character, he appears sporadically in the history of performance until the early 1970s. 4.

ITOI KANJI AND UNBEAT: ORGANICALLY GENERATED ACTION

Itoi Kanji was born in 1920, making him about fifteen to twenty years senior to most of the Anti-Art artists who began their careers in the early 1960s. He had already begun exhibiting artwork in 1951.While he first exhibited works influenced by Informel at a solo show at Muramatsu Gallery in December 1957, shortly after Mathieu’s demonstrations, prior to that he had already established quite an extensive oeuvre—an “archetypal Itoi Kanji” world, as it were. However briefly Itoi may have been influenced by Informel, his work bore no relation to public artmaking demonstration. Itoi’s work did not inherently possess the impromptu explosivity of Informel painting, so it was important that he prepared his action-based expressions according to his unique philosophy and sensibility. Without any extant photographic records, we must rely on Itoi’s firsthand accounts for information. According to Itoi, his first performance was a solo exhibition at Kyūryūdō Gallery (Ginza), July 1957, in which he wore a curtain, colored to match the artworks, like a skirt.35 By then, he was already committed to Dadaism, lining up a collection of altogether amateurish, hobbyist pieces, which he listed thus: “collage, origami, bonsai, tanzaku (long cards) inscribed with waka poetry, artificial flowers arranged in worn-out shoes.”36 Itoi also distributed a magazine on Haiseki (see chap. 18, n. 9) titled Asobi (play) published by Iida Gakurō, who influenced these pastimes of Itoi’s. Based on his varied activities, we can gather that Itoi was a practitioner of what Tsurumi Shunsuke termed marginal art (genkai geijutsu). Another performance-like activity from the 1950s was Itoi’s “experimental exhibition” at Ōmori Gallery (Tokyo) in November 1959. Conjuring the tea gathering of Katō Yoshihiro (Zero Jigen) at his solo exhibition in 1963, Itoi’s act of serving tea to guests manifested the basic principles of his artistic expression—homage, and hospitality to others and to the audience. During the period that Itoi was producing work influenced by Informel, Kagami Masayuki visited Itoi’s solo exhibition at Kunugi Gallery (Ginza) in February 1958. In return, Itoi visited Kagami’s exhibition at Hibiya Gallery, marking the beginning of their friendship. Around June 1959, Itoi joined Kagami, Nakajima Yoshio, Tashiro Minoru in the Shōhei High School Group.37 Nevertheless, Itoi was a solo performer with a general disdain for group activities, so it would seem that the group just added him of its own accord. It is worth noting that this group, which later came to be called Unbeat Organizers (hereinafter “Unbeat”), performed actions that were independent expressions— neither public artmaking demonstration nor advertisement—in urban spaces, which

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existed outside of institutional art. In that sense, Unbeat was Japan’s first performance art group. Yet, because Unbeat’s action expressions were spontaneous and unpredictable, and did not cater to critics and the media, Unbeat has thus far hardly made an appearance in the mainstream of art history.38 Unbeat was born of historical coincidence; its Dadaism was shared by the three who were concurrently enrolled for only one year at Shōhei High School39 in Ochanomizu: Nakajima Yoshio the wild child, 40 who yearned for direct interaction with his audience, Kagami Masayuki, whose appetite for destruction was balanced with practical organizational and production skills, and Tashiro Minoru, who was blessed with a rare intelligence and environment that allowed him to read Western art books. We cannot specify, at present, the precise timing of Unbeat’s formation and earliest activities. We can however speculate, based on flyers and ephemera, as well as interviews with Kagami and Nakajima, that the group began sometime between April  1958 and March 1959, when Kagami, Nakajima and Tashiro were in school together. Extrapolating from Nakajima’s testimony—that he was moved by the way Kagami trashed the school’s cultural festival, 41 held annually in November—the group must have formed after the fall of 1958. The name Unbeat, however, did not yet appear in flyers for their events thereafter. According to the group’s flyer for the Yomiuri Independent in March 1963, 42 Unbeat was formed in November 1961 at Meiji Gakuin University, where Nakajima enrolled in April 1961, and Tashiro the following year. But, as the name Unbeat was not listed in the pamphlet for the Shirokane Festival (the Meiji Gakuin University Festival) in 1961, their first performance under the name of Unbeat would have been June of the following year (see chap. 6.3, p. 131) Reminiscent of Neo Dada Organizers, which held its first exhibition in April 1960, the name Unbeat Organizers was first introduced in 1962, but has been applied retroactively to the group’s activities from the fall of 1958 by Nakajima. Kagami had already enacted a Happening using coal tar during the abovementioned solo exhibition at Hibiya Gallery. 43 Participating in Kudō Tetsumi’s group Ei, he became familiar with the avant-garde art crowd and their ideology. It was Kagami who lit a fire under Nakajima and Tashiro, enlisting other members of the Shōhei High School art club to begin conducting performance-like expressions. They are said to have done various actions on the streets between the school and Ochanomizu Station, such as painting their faces with white grease and wrapping themselves with clear plastic and white bandages. 44 Throughout the group’s existence, from the Shōhei High School days until after it became known as Unbeat, its distinctive characteristic was that rather than acting in a unified manner, each member was free to improvise acts of expression at will. On top of the fact that members were performing disparately, they weren’t particularly interested in creating records of their events; as such, no photographs of the performances from this period have been uncovered. Nakajima Yoshio was the most active performing member of the group. He came to Tokyo from a town in north Saitama with the aspiration to become an artist like Van Gogh, prodigiously producing Informel-style paintings and selling them on the streets. His initial motivation to perform was to attract the attention of passerby so that they would look at his paintings, but when he soon realized that he could feel his connection with the audience through his pantomime-like gestures, he began to center performance as its own expressive act. 45 Art critic Yoshida Yoshie, who watched Nakajima’s

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action in 1963, called it a “spastic, crazy gesture,”46 distinct from butoh, which was on the rise at the time. While the context of these developments of Nakajima’s performance within the group’s activities at Shōhei High School is unclear, it is likely that Kagami and Tashiro contributed theory and direction to Nakajima’s spontaneous activities. Sometime around the fall of 1958, 47 Nakajima held a performance titled Moving Object on a train platform at Ochanomizu Station. 48 He wriggled (“danced,”49 in his own words) around like an object, climbing down onto the tracks, which stopped a train. Compared to Kazakura’s chair piece, which no matter how unexpected and nonsensical still occurred on a stage, this incident, in the way it paralyzed the city’s transit function, was all the more Happening-like. Unbeat continued its activities across Japan until 1964, well into the era of Anti-Art, leaving a significant footprint in the history of early performance art. 5.

KYŪSHŪ-HA: FARMERS’ FESTIVITIES IN THE CITY

As previously mentioned, Kyūshū-ha was formed in 1957. Kyūshū-ha was not a performance group like those that followed Unbeat and Zero Jigen, and neither was it packed with outstanding organizers and performers like Neo Dada, whose members later went on to hold performances individually and with other groups such as Hi-Red Center and Group Ongaku (Group Music). Throughout its history, however, Kyūshū-ha maintained a strong interest in corporeality and ventured out into the streets and urban spaces, and for that reason must not be overlooked in the pre-history of the Anti-Art performance. The August 1957 exhibition 18 Artists of Group Q (Group Q was the early name of Kyūshū-ha) is considered to be the group’s inaugural exhibition. At a subsequent street exhibition in November, they rose their banner, which read “Informel Outdoor Exhibition by Group Q and Shika,” and paraded from the exhibition site in Tenjin, where their works were on display, down Meiji-dōri (the main street) through Nakasu, with painted faces and strange outfits made from dungarees (hemp coffee bean sacks that Yamauchi Jūtarō procured from a café) (see plate 1, p. 3). More so than a deliberate, methodological performance, the parade was a demonstration for publicity ahead of their exhibition— similar to that of the Neo Dada in Ginza in 1960 and Zero Jigen’s collective crawling in Sakae, Nagoya in 1963—or perhaps a few of their members who had participated in the Nika Exhibition took a cue from the costumes and festivities of the event on the festival’s eve.50 Regardless, it is interesting that the painters of Kyūshū-ha and the poets of Shika (Poetry Section) chose this style for their demonstration. Though MAVO’s experiments were a Taishō era precedent, at the time such a demonstration by costumed painters, even from an international standpoint, would have been remarkable. Korean art historian Kim Mikyung compares this parade by Kyūshū-ha to a 1967 street demonstration in Seoul that used placards [fig. 11] to announce the Cheongnyeon chakka yeonlipcheon (Joint Exhibition of Young Artist Groups);51 however, the Korean demonstrators were wearing plain clothes and the messages written on the placards contained not only publicity for the exhibition (“Please come see – Free of charge”), but also appeals to reform government art policy (“Korea has no contemporary art museum!” “Promote art for the development of our nation”). Along with the demonstration,

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 11. Demonstration during Joint Exhibition of Young Artist Groups • December 11, 1967 • Seoul

they submitted a petition to the government requesting the reformation of the selection and award system for the National Exhibition, and for the construction of a contemporary art museum.52 Accordingly, even though both groups adapted the same style of raising up a message as a group and walking through the city center, the Korean group bore more resemblance to a political demonstration by urban laborers, while Kyūshū-ha was reminiscent of a rural festival parade. There were several other examples of parades by avant-garde art groups in the 1960s (Tosa-ha predecessor Group Zero, GUN, and others), but Kyūshū-ha’s rustic style was quite unique, even compared to them. Aside from their experiments with Informel painting, early Kyūshū-ha was most recognized as a group that engaged in social “movements,” such as protesting against the Fukuoka Prefecture Art Exhibition’s jury system and organizing the Kyūshū Independent Exhibition. Along with the aforementioned parade in 1957, the group’s experimentation with exhibitions on the streets of urban centers were noteworthy in performance history. There were instances throughout Japan of groups of young artists organizing outdoor exhibitions in parks and other public spaces; this phenomenon was particularly common among groups in provincial cities that lacked museums and galleries, or that otherwise lacked the personal connections or economic capacity to exhibit even if such venues did exist.53 In the case of Kyūshū-ha, they managed to garner attention by holding an exhibition in the city center, on the fence of the prefectural government office, the structure of which was well-suited for hanging paintings. Kuroki Yōji, one of the early members of the group, became friends with poet Itahashi Kenkichi through the poetry magazine Shika. Though it was coincidentally through Itahashi, who worked at the prefectural office, that the group successfully negotiated the use of the fence, it was simply characteristic of Kyūshū-ha to hold actions ranging from exhibitions in urban spaces all the way to street parades.54 After the parade, however, Kyūshū-ha did not turn to focus on bodily action itself as a form of expression until they organized the Grand Assembly of Heroes on a beach in Fukuoka in November 1962—their first conscious, strategic foray into performance as an artistic medium. Because they were so busy with their paintings and other activities in their early rapid acceleration, though they were greatly inspired by the Art of Today’s World exhibition, which traveled to Fukuoka in March 1957, none of the group’s members

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saw Mathieu’s public artmaking demonstration in Tokyo in September. It therefore follows that, unlike the case of Shinohara Ushio, Informel’s influence on Kyūshū-ha was limited to painting. NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

Shinohara Ushio, Zen’ei no michi [The path of the avant-garde] (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppan-sha, 1968; Saitama: Gyuchan Explosion! Project 2006, 2006), 28–30. Miyakawa Atsushi, “Anti-Art: The Descent to the Everyday (1964),” in From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan 1945–1989: Primary Documents, ed. Doryun Chong, et al., (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 131. “Rockabilly Artist,” Shūkan Sankei, no. 325 (April 27, 1958): 39–41; Shinohara, Zen’ei no michi, 30–31. Unpublished tape recording, “Radio sketch: 2000th anniversary program, Announcer for a day 2, Kosan and Rock’a Billy artist,” broadcasted on June 17, 1958, recorded on June 4 at Muramatsu Gallery during his solo exhibition. Shinohara Ushio, in an interview with the author, Shinohara’s studio in New York, February 25, 2006. Shinohara, interview. He distributed signed copies of the magazine to gallery visitors to further publicize the exhibition. Shinohara, Zen’ei no michi, 43. Shinohara, Zen’ei no michi, 46. Shinohara, 47–50. Another interesting episode that illustrates Shinohara’s desire to attract media attention is when he applied to be on “TV Wedding” program (Radio Tokyo [KRT], now TBS) with his then girlfriend and was accepted. But the shooting was cancelled, as neither of their families agreed to be on the show. Shinohara, 47. Tetsumi Kudo: Contestation/Création (Osaka: The National Museum of Art, Osaka, 1994), 138, 160. Exhibition catalogue; See also Your Portrait: A Tetsumi Kudo Retrospective, ed. Shima Atsuhiko et al., (Osaka: The National Museum of Art, Osaka and Daikin Foundation for Contemporary Arts, 2013), 523. Exhibition catalogue. Tetsumi Kudo, 138. Horiuchi Kesao, Noma Denji, and Yoshino Masao also participated. Tetsumi Kudo, 138, 160.

15. Shinohara, Zen’ei no michi, 62. The “Mima­ tsu Gallery in Tamura-chō, Tokyo” from his memory must be Mimatsu Shobō Gallery in Shinbashi. 16. Mathieu’s work, titled Bun’ei no eki (Battle of Bun’ei, the first war between Yuan [the Mongolian Empire] and Japan in 1274), exhibited in the display window at Shirokiya Department Store and originally created during his demonstration (Tokyo, September 3, 1957), is now in the collection of Centre Pompidou in Paris. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, created for the demonstration at the rooftop of Daimaru Department Store (Osaka, September 12, 1957), is in the collection of Kanagawa Prefecture Museum of Modern Art. 17. “Geijutsu wa kokomade kita! Rokabirī gaka natsuno kyōsōkyoku” [Art has come this far! Rockabilly Painter Rhapsody in Summer], Tokyo Chūnichi Shimbun, July 8, 1958. 18. “Geijutsu wa kokomade kita!” 19. Tetsumi Kudo: Contestation/Création, 160. The hand- and footprints can be seen in an existing work Seishin ni okeru ryūdō to sono gyōshūsei No. 5811 [Psychological flow and its cohesiveness No. 5811]. Kudō Tetsumi Retrospective, 35. 20. Tetsumi Kudo: Contestation/Création, 138. 21. According to Kazakura’s and Satō’s recollections, it was likely the Oita City Youth Cultural Festival at the Prefectural Education Center and the Central Civic Hall on March 31, 1957, but this remains unconfirmed. The announcement of this event appeared on Ōita Shihō (Ōita city news) on March 1, 1957. 22. Satō Shirō, “Shinseiki-gun (2),” Kōseki [Wake], no. 3 (May 1986): 38. 23. Satō, 38. 24. Satō, 39. 25. Kazakura Shō, in a personal letter to the author. The letter was not dated but the envelope was postmarked May 16, 2006. 26. Kazakura Shō, Tokei no furiko [Pendulum of a clock] (Tokyo: Shoshi Yamada, 1996), 60. 27. Zero Jigen later intervened in theater performances several times. Katō Yoshihiro writes,

Chapter 5———Waves of Demonstration (1957–1959)121

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

“Seven members of Zero Jigen were watching an Existentialist theater piece with a fullhouse (about 700) audience. But since it was extremely boring, they stood up and went up on the stage.” “Zero Jigen gishiki seiron monogatari 1” [The true story of the rituals of Zero Jigen 1], Eiga hyōron, vol. 25, no. 6 (June 1968): 101. This incident must have happened at the performance of Les Mouches (The Flies) by Jean-Paul Sartre at the Seinen Geijutsuza (Youth Art Theater) in December 1963. Iwata Shin’ichi, another leading member of Zero Jigen, recalls a separate incident: “We went on stage during a theater performance, started a huge quarrel, and ended up getting badly beaten up.” This must have been happened at the 20th performance of Enzensberger seiji to hanzai yori no gensō (An illusion from Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Poesie und Politik) by Hakken no Kai, as part of Engeki sentā 68 (Theater Center 68) at Nagoya CBC Hall in December 1969. We can speculate that Zero Jigen was also critical of conventional theater. Kazakura, Tokei no furiko, 59. Kazakura, 61. Kazakura, in a personal letter to the author (see n. 25 above). Kazakura Shō, interview by Wada Chiaki, Sangō Sōko (Warehouse No. 3), Fukuoka, April 29, 2006. “Soon after the war, we all lived in rooms with tatami floors. We simply disliked sitting on chairs…Our lifestyle was living on tatami, which made it easy to wash our feet with water. Sitting on a chair and taking off your shoes every time you wash your feet is not suitable for Japanese custom. This made me think that a chair should not be used for sitting but to fall from.” “Karada ni ‘sensō’ o kakaete: Kazakura Shō no hapuningu genten” [Holding war inside his body: the origin of Kazakura Shō’s performance], Aida, no. 150 (July 2008): 13. Kazakura, letter. Kazakura,“Karada ni ‘sensō’ o kakaete,” 13. “Karada ni ‘sensō’ o kakaete,” 17. Kazakura also wrote in his personal letter, “I took it as a kind of loyalty test to prove we would not object the government’s policy. Some people thought joining the big corporations that are supported by the government would bring a personal economic gain so they could buy a house. What I thought and feared was, however, that Japan would be economically colonized by the U.S. and the Japanese economy would become completely Americanized.”

35. Itoi Kanji, in a personal letter to the author, June 20, 2004. 36. Itoi, letter. 37. Sekaino hitotachi ni mottomo matareteita Dam­ act ga Nihon (Ueno Kōen) ni sono zenbō o miseru!! [Damact, the most anticipated group by people in the world shows the whole picture in Ueno, Japan!!] Unbeat, flyer for the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, Tokyo, March 1963. 38. One exception is Okabe Aomi’s essay “Action et avant-garde” (see chap. 1, n. 15). 39. Inheriting the history and spirit of Shōhei-kō school (1790–1870), Kaisei Evening School was established in Tokyo Kaisei Junior-High School in 1903. It was renamed Shōhei Junior-High School in 1936, and, again, changed the name to Shōhei High School after the school system reform in 1948. “Shōhei High School was an independent evening school and the only school with a fine art course in Japan. In particular, both of the teachers and the principal were well versed in the arts. The fine art classes were taught by “top-ranking” or “master” artists such as Yokoyama Zenshin (Japanese style painting), Kinoshita Kan’ichi (Western painting), and Tsukioka Eiki (Japanese style painting). Under their guidance, many dilettante students aspired to be artists.” Nakajima Yoshio, Dai gojūhakkai bijutsu-sai [The 58th Fine Art Festival], pamphlet, November 1960. 40. For Nakajima Yoshio’s activities in Unbeat before he moved to Europe, see Nakajima Yoshio Syndrome: Art Is Always the Next Possibility, ed. Nakajima Yoshio Syndrome Committee (Tokyo: Nakajima Yoshio Syndrome Committee, 2015) 41. Nakajima Yoshio, in an interview with the author, Tokyo, January 14, 2006. 42. Unbeat flyer (see n. 37 above). 43. While Happenings were introduced to Japan in 1961, Kagami Masayuki already knew the term through Tashiro Minoru, who had access to foreign books and the ability to read them. According to Chiba Eisuke, a member of Jack Society, Kagami wrote a theory on Happenings in an apology letter to the police for his arrest due to his street action in Ginza (Kagami claims it was at the time of his solo show at Kunugi Gallery, but the date is unconfirmed). Otherwise, his arrest for the action could have been at the Super Avant-Garde Group Exhibition in 1963. Chiba Eisuke, in an interview with the author, August 26, 2006.

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44. Kagami Masayuki, in an interview with the author, Tokyo, September 19, 2008. 45. Nakajima, from the January 14 interview. 46. Yoshida Yoshie, “Kokkyō o tokashi toshi o name: Mō hitori no rokujū nendaiji, Nakajima Yoshio” [Melting national borders, licking cities: Another child of the 1960s, Nakajima Yoshio], Bijutsu techō, no. 358 (August and September 1972): 194. 47. There is material stating that Nakajima performed the “moving object in Happening form” at his solo exhibition from October 30 to November 2 (year and venue unknown). Yoshida, 193. 48. Yoshida, “Kokkyō o tokashi toshi o name,” 193. Yoshida wrote that it was 1957. 49. Nakajima, from the January 14 interview. 50. For its spectators, the Nika Exhibition aimed “to be loved by people, to attract the people’s attention, to be for the people,” and with Tōgō Seiji’s idea of “exhibiting works in festivity, to be enjoyed by people, to convey to them the vitality of Bacchus” as a guide, held Eve festivals beginning in 1950. The artists were to wear specially designed Nika yukata (summer kimono), or dress as a “native” in “Indian-style” (which, looking back, sounds rather racist) and parade with dancers and a band, carrying a mikoshi (portable shrine) with a semi-nude female model on top (Tōgō himself negotiated with the Superintendent General of the police force to get permission) in the streets of Ginza. Nika nanajūnen shi [70-year history of Nika], ed. Nika 70-year history editorial committee (Tokyo: Nihonkeizaishimbunsha, 1985), 120. As suggested by Yamaguchi Yōzō, at the time a curator at the Fukuoka Art Museum, it is possible that this parade influenced the Kyūshū-ha parade, which is well-known in avant-garde art history. Since several Kyūshūha members—Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Kuroki Yōji, Terada Ken’ichirō and Yonekura Toku—participated in Nika after the parade had started,

51.

52.

53.

54.

it is plausible that any of these members knew of the publicity effect it had through its media coverage, even if they did not witness it personally in Tokyo. The exhibition, held at Central Publicity Hall from December 11–16, 1967, was a collaboration between three groups: Mu (Nothing), Origin, and Shincheon (New Exhibition). It marked the emergence of Neo-Dada, Pop Art, and performance-influenced anti-Modernism tendencies that deviated from Informel painting. Korea’s first art performance, titled Meeting of Plastic Umbrella and Candles, took place at this exhibition. Kim Mikyung, Hanguk wi shilhom misul [Experimental art in Korea] (Seoul: Shigong-sa, 2003), 48–49. The inaugural exhibition of Shinseiki-gun (New Century Group), in which future members of Neo Dada participated, was held in Wakakusa Park in Ōita city in 1957. Gunma-ken Nōmin Geijutsu Dan: Gurūpu Doro (Gunma Prefecture Farmers’ Art Troop: Group Mud), founded also in 1957, exhibited their works outdoor but in more unusual venues. They held exhibitions in Maebashi Park and on a farm road in Takasaki city so that farmers could see their works. For information about Group Doro, see Yoshida Fukuichi, “Gunma ni okeru sengo, zen’ei bijutsu undō no kiseki to yukue” [The trajectory and future of the postwar avant-garde art movement in Gunma], Gunma Kenritsu Joshi Daigaku Tokubetsu Kenkyū Chōsa Hōkokusho [Gunma Prefectural Women’s University, Report of Special Research] (Gunma: Gunma Prefectural Women’s University, 2000), 32–33. For information on Kyūshū-ha’s composite activities that involved being a poetry circle, an art society, and a contemporary art group, see Justin Jesty, Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 198–219.

CHAPTER 6

Direct Action and Anti-Art (1960–1963) From Publicity to Provocation

前衛芸術家はバビロンの「架空庭園」にいる。ここはフィクショナルな時間空間であっ て、警察などの介入する権利はもとよりない。しかし、ここで初めて世間様は、孤独な芸 術家のスキャンダラスな強烈なアッパーカットをくらって、鼻血を出したりぶっ倒れたり する幸福を享受するのだから、芸術にとってこれほど現実的な風土はないともいえる。 そしてまた、芸術家がアクチュアリティに関与する最も理想主義的な手段が、この テロリズム、このスキャンダルであろう。ここに実現される現実以外の現実は、すべてふ やけた、生ぬるい、ぐにゃぐにゃした現実で、そんなものは最大限芸術の風土から追放 したほうがよいにきまっているのだ。 芸術に社会性や歴史性を取り入れることが問題なのではなく、芸術にとって永遠 の問題は、テロリズム、すなわち否定の機能によって芸術自体が歴史になることであろ う。芸術的スキャンダルとは、現実的行動とのアナロジーにおいて、あたかも革命の最 中、群集を集めて広場で執行される国王の処刑のようなものだ。 澁澤龍彥

The avant-garde artists are in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Garden is a fictional spacetime where no one, not even the authorities, has ever had any right to intervene. However it is here that, for the very first time, the world took the solitary artist’s scandalous, intense uppercut right to the face. And because the world, nose bloodied and knocked out, accepted the blow happily, it can be said that for art, never was there so realistic a climate as here. This terrorism, this scandal is perhaps the most idealistic means by which the artist takes part in actuality. The reality-other-than-reality realized therein—a slack, tepid, flabby reality—must be banished from the culture of high art. Incorporating sociality and historicity into art is not the problem; rather, the eternal issue for art is that through terrorism, that is, its function of negation, art itself becomes history. Artistic scandal is, if an analogy to realistic behavior can be made, like the execution of a king in a plaza as the crowds gather during the height of the revolution.1 —Shibusawa Tatsuhiko

1.

A YOUTHFUL SPRING OF HAPPENINGS

From 1960 to 1963, many artists began using their bodies for artistic expression. The performance of this period, as expressed by Shibusawa above, was characterized by terrorism, scandalism, provocation of the audience (including the general public), one-way communication—which Katō Yoshihiro from Zero Jigen later called “raping the city,”2— and spontaneously-generated anarchy (shizenhassei-tekina anākizumu). The radicalization of the annual Yomiuri Independent, which held its final exhibition in March 1963, became an event that emblematized this period in the art world. During the three years following the Anpo Struggle (Anpo tōsō), however, there were several important signs of change within the history of performance art, and the demise of the

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 12. Anpo Struggle • June 18, 1960 • In front of the National Diet Building, Tokyo

Yomiuri Independent was but one consequence. It is fair to say that the period between March 1960, when Tōno Yoshiaki popularized the term “Anti-Art” during the 10th Yomiuri Independent, and the public forum “‘Anti-Art’: Yes, or No?” in January 1964 was the golden age of “Anti-Art” in a narrow sense. In the realm of politics, 1960 was the year that the movement against the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan (commonly referred to as the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty in English and Anpo in Japanese) rocked the entire nation by demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke [fig. 12]. It is said to be the largest nationwide civic movement in postwar Japan. 1960 also saw the largest labor dispute in Japanese history, a furious struggle sparked by the mass-firing of workers at Mitsui Miike Coal Mine in Ōmuta, Fukuoka. It was the pinnacle of the labor movement’s “total capital versus total labor” mobilization, with activists participating from all over Japan [fig. 13]. Still, despite the fact that members of Kyūshū-ha joined in the Miike Struggle and Neo Dada participated in the Anti-Anpo demonstration in front of the National Diet Building, hardly any of the artists actively incorporated these political issues into their work. What greatly influenced the artists discussed in this book was not the political issues themselves but rather their awareness of the need for “autonomy” from existing political and cultural institutions, and from hierarchy, an awareness born out of their quest for a new mass movement to follow in the wake of the Anti-Anpo movement’s failure. Through this awareness, a new generation of creators working in a wide range of genres led the way to direct action (chokusetsu kōdō) that disturbed the boundary between politics (seiji) and culture (bunka), or at least changed the way the lines were drawn. As will be discussed in chapter 23, Hi-Red Center is one manifestation of this newly emerging generation of artists in the post-Anpo period. Hi-Red Center and its affiliated artists, who emerged from the network of critics and activists of Jiritsu Gakkō, aspired to anarchistic direct action; and as was seen during the Anpo Struggle, the spread of mass media increased the possibilities for transmitting direct action across all of Japan. Originally bounded by place-specificity and one-time temporality, direct action acquired effectiveness as expression (in this sense, as performance) in mass media. 1962 was the year that performance art began to flourish in earnest, independent of public artmaking demonstrations such as Gutai’s “action painting.” Artists who had already been performing began to do so even more intensely in the ensuing years, setting the backdrop for the final Yomiuri Independent exhibition in 1963. At the same

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 13. Miike Struggle (Picketers in front of the hopper) • May 20, 1960 • Ōmuta, Fukuoka

time, the activities of these artists were the driving force behind the artistic maturation and consolidation of art groups that occurred after 1964, bringing together artists for several culminating events. After 1967, parallel to the beginnings of “intermedia” experiments, the interventions of bodies and objects and violence towards and provocation of the audience yielded more and more unexpected incidents that would bring art to the verge of “Happening.” Given these developments, 1962 becomes the start of performance’s adolescence in the 1960s. With Unbeat as the forerunner, Neo Dada, Group Ongaku, and League of Criminals, as well as groups that played important roles in the next period including Hi-Red Center, Zero Jigen, Kurohata, and 8 Generation, were all established by 1963. While it is fair to consider Ono Yōko’s performances at Sogetsu Art Center the first “Happening” performance in Japan, there were Japanese artists before her who were performing organically, with no link to artistic trends in the U.S.3 Meanwhile, 1962 saw changes in the key players of the art world, with Kudō Tetsumi leaving for Europe in May, Yoshimura Masunobu departing to New York in September, and Kikuhata Mokuma and three other members leaving Kyūshū-ha in March. 2.

THE NEO DADA ARTISTS

As mentioned previously, Shinohara Ushio began his solo performance-esque actions prior to his activities in Neo Dada, debuting in the media in 1958 as the “Rockabilly Painter.” In March 1960 he exhibited the following works in the Yomiuri Independent: The Biggest Self-portrait in the World, Boxing Painting, and Kaminari Chōkoku (Thunder Sculpture), alongside a photograph titled Spectacular Rock’a Billy Artist. Although Shinohara does not remember much about it, we can speculate that in the huge, five-by-five-meter self-portrait persisted his appetite for self-promotion. 4 Shinohara started his Boxing Painting routine during this period, though it would be some time before this “action painting” (or perhaps it should be called a “painting action,” as the action was more important than the painting) took the form of boxing. He created the painting he exhibited in the Yomiuri Independent in 1960 by dropping a ball of paint-soaked cloth onto a canvas spread on the ground,5 but the actual scene of its production was not made public.6 As such, Boxing Painting evolved in its creation

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process from the floor to the wall, and also from private to public. Although no photo documentation remains, it was first presented to the public during an event organized by Bizāru no Kai (Bizarre Society) in September 1960, in which Neo Dada participated as a group.7 Following that event, Shinohara performed Boxing Painting for a magazine article, sometime around March 1961.8 Two months later, he performed Boxing Painting with exaggerated gestures and facial expressions to put on a show for photographer ­William Klein, who was shooting for his photo collection Tokyo.9 We can observe two new developments in Shinohara’s public artmaking demonstrations from this period. First was the addition of television and film to the news media, and second the introduction of color photographs featuring moderu jō (model girls) (plate 3, p. 4). For example, Shinohara’s account of the filming of the documentary Nihon zankoku monogatari (Atrocious Tales of Japan, 1963, directed by Nakagawa Nobuo et al.), records the various schemes he used to liven up the event: The floor and walls of the studio in Yoyogi were covered with Kent paper panels, as I had requested. Some objects were placed on the left and right. Buckets filled with the five primary colors used for filming in color, instead of India ink, were placed here and there. A model girl was brought in thinking that she’d be doing a normal shoot. She threw a tantrum when she found out that she’d in fact be covered in paint and have to wrestle with me naked, but in the end calmed down and gave the OK. She stood naked under the bright lights, wearing only sunglasses, covered in goosebumps. With a yell, red paint traversed her slender neck—but it was splashed on too quick to be effective. Bit by bit! My paintbrush ran over her breasts, hips. Her jiggling, loose fatty flesh shook. And then came the buckets. Paint rained down, blanketing her, dyeing the whole scene in purple. Lifting her up with a heave-ho, I used the model like a brush, pushing her up against the paper on wall. But the weight was too much, and I dropped her with a crash onto the floor, which had become a sea of paint. “Throw more!”—the excited director called out. This time I rubbed yellow over the soles of her feet, stamping them onto the wall. With the whole surface covered in paint, nothing more I could have done would have yielded any effect. I tore the Kent paper panels from the walls and covered her face, squeezing tightly. She screamed and ran off. The whole thing lasted seven minutes.10

The use of a nude or semi-nude female model, likely a response to the demands of the sex-crazed mass media, would later become a staple of Zero Jigen. As is evident in this account, the woman, without independence as a “model” and let alone as “artist,” becomes a mere “tool” (i.e., canvas, brush). In that regard the work is similar to the torsos in Yves Klein’s Anthropometries, as well as the treatment of Kishimoto Sayako in Beach Show by Neo Dada, which we will return to later. Unlike Kyūshū-ha, for which cohesiveness as a group was quintessential, Neo Dada was a collection of lone wolves and did not organize group performances or collaborations. Performance art pioneer Kazakura Shō did not even perform in the thrice-held Neo Dada Exhibition. To promote their first exhibition at the Ginza Gallery in March 1960, the group walked through Ginza and rode the train while dressed in strange costumes [fig.  14]. Each one of them was dressed to draw the attention of cameras: Shinohara half-naked with his trademark Mohawk; Arakawa Shūsaku with his

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 14. Members of Neo Dada walking in Ginza (from right to left, Shinohara Ushio, Yoshimura Masunobu, Toyoshima Sōroku, Arakawa Shūsaku, Kazakura Shō, Ueno Norizō) • March 1960 • Ginza, Tokyo

 15. Ishibashi Betsujin and his work • Neo Dadaism Organizers Exhibition • March 1960 • Ginza Gallery, Tokyo

head bandaged, wearing a kimono while holding out an umbrella; Ueno Norizō barefoot, wearing a child-sized kimono; Kazakura in a beret and a dancer-like outfit; and Yoshimura Masunobu strolling along, drinking water from a kettle.11 Photos of this first exhibition by American journalist Jacqueline Paul,12 capturing each member posing in front of his work, are indicative of Neo Dada’s media-focused mentality. Ishibashi Betsujin, for example, set up an especially small table in front of his work to pose for photographs as if doing zazen meditation. [fig. 15], and when Tōmatsu Shōmei shot Shinohara’s work, in a characteristically purposeful composition he juxtaposed Shinohara’s work with Yoshimura in the act of performing.13 Another element related to Shinohara’s use of female models emerged in media accounts of Neo Dada after the first exhibition, as reports of a sex scandal—orgies held at the group’s headquarters, the White House (Yoshimura’s house in Hyakunin-chō, Shinjuku)—came out not in mainstream weekly magazines but in adult magazines for men, including Sekai hadaka-bi gahō (World Nude Beauty Pictorial)14 and Hyakuman-nin no yoru (Night of a Million People).15 While the accuracy of the stories told during a roundtable discussion for Hyakuman-nin no yoru16 may be questionable, it is clear that the members were expected to praise free-sex in that context. Their activities may have been perceived as mere “sex entertainment” and thus of little value, which is precisely the reason why Zero Jigen was subsequently ignored by art critics, but as Hariu Ichirō points

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 16. Yoshimura Masunobu • Bizarre Society event • September 30, 1960 • Ginza Gas Hall, Tokyo

out, “compared to other artistic youth groups such as Gutai, [Neo Dada] was consciously devoted to becoming a social phenomenon, to enacting scandal—I find that extremely interesting.”17 In this assessment, Hariu strangely hits the mark; being seen as a social phenomenon by the media may in fact have been part of Neo Dada’s Anti-Art strategy. Mass media covered Neo Dada as a performance group as a part of the “Beat Tribe” when it participated in “Bizāru no Kai” (Bizarre Society),18 an event organized by cartoonist Tomita Eizō in September 1960.19 Neo Dada’s show, performed alongside a film screening and poetry reading, featured none of the eroticism of Nihon zankoku monogatari or later angura shows, instead putting on a remarkable, masculine display of violence against material objects. With arrow marks painted all over his body, Yoshimura poured nitric acid on steel sheets, hacking at them with an ax. Shinohara bound his body with string-like cloths and performed Boxing Painting. In these actions, we can observe Neo Dada (Shinohara and Yoshimura 20) angling for recognition as a part of the “Beat Tribe.”21 The violent character captured in Shinohara’s expression that “the only way to escape a massacre is to become a murderer,”22 written in the Neo Dada manifesto, surfaced in two of their other group performances at Beach Show in July 1960. Fortunately, there is a film recording of one of the performances, which took place at An’yō-in Temple in Kamakura.23 The film depicts Kishimoto Sayako, who would go on to become one of the few militant female performance artists in Japan, covering her face for the male members to use as a canvas (i.e., as material), as they threw paint at her. Just a magazine photograph remains of the performance at Zaimokuza Beach,24 when Kazakura was thrown into the sea; consistent with his penchant for actions that put his body at risk, it is likely that Kazakura agreed to this ahead of time. In both acts, however, the body is a target of violence, powerless to resist. Kazakura was perhaps the only one willing to undertake these kinds of self-flagellating acts that embodied the violence inherent in Neo Dada’s aesthetics. He began to perform independent of the group in October  1961, as a part of his solo exhibition at Muramatsu Gallery. Covering the gallery floor where his objects and drawings were displayed with newspaper, he sounds a siren with “a fierce-animal-like machine sound.” Then he switches on a wind machine, inflating a balloon that is concealed beneath the newspapers, which grows so big it fills the entire gallery space, leaving no space for the audience.25 This performance embodied one of Kazakura’s recurring themes—air and

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 17. Street performance, left to right: Shinohara Ushio, Yoshimura Masunobu, Masuzawa Kinpei • 3rd Neo Dada Exhibition • September 1960 • Ginza, Tokyo

 18. Masuzawa Kinpei, street performance • 3rd Neo Dada Exhibition • September 1960 • Ginza, Tokyo

breath—and also can be considered the beginning of his independent performance career, as he started to use Kabbalah to number his performances from that year onwards.26 Was there not, however, meaning in Neo Dada’s performance of the violence it enacted upon itself, inclusive of infighting between members? Masuzawa Kinpei at the third Neo Dada Exhibition demonstrated precisely that dimension of Neo Dada. At the exhibition, Yoshimura dresses up as a mummy just as he had for the first Neo Dada exhibition, probably because it was such an effective performance the first time; Shinohara wraps his entire body in colorful cloths to convey his wild “savagery” [fig. 17], while Masuzawa emphasizes his vulnerability, wearing lightbulbs strung by metal wire over his tattered shirt, affixing dangerous objects to the body in typical Neo-Dadaistic fashion [fig. 18]. Masuzawa’s getup, much like the ratty futon and shattered lightbulbs that appeared in his exhibition pieces, conjures an image of the homeless and the vulnerable. The performance is thus devised as an artistic expression, and not a mere publicity stunt. His figure stands in stark contrast to the sunglass-wearing American military policemen and dolled-up women strolling about on Ginza Street.27 In a narrow sense, Neo Dada’s activities as a group only consisted of three group exhibitions held in April, July, and September of 1960. The group lost the White House as its headquarters after Yoshimura got married in October of that year. Arakawa Shūsaku was expelled from the group for holding a solo exhibition at Muramatsu Gallery without the group’s consent, and moved to the U.S. in December; then, following Yoshimura’s move to the U.S. in the fall of 1962, the group ultimately disbanded. Even as they were headed toward dissolution in that final period, however, the members of Neo Dada

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 19. Yoshimura Masunobu performing in brushing his teeth at Something Happens, on the right: Shinohara Ushio • August 25, 1962 • House of Isozaki Arata, Tokyo

knew they stood on the cusp of a new era, and participated in two events, after their three exhibitions, that foretold the dawn of that era. One of the two events was the Banquet Commemorating the Defeat in the War (Haisen kinen bansan kai) on August 15, 1962 (pp. 155–7). Ten days later, the other event, Something Happens, was organized by Isozaki Arata (Yoshimura’s high school senpai and the designer of the White House) and his colleagues from the Faculty of Engineering at University of Tokyo in conjunction with Neo Dada, as a farewell party for Yoshimura and Isozaki28 before their move to the United States [fig. 19].29 The former was a genuine collective performance planned by several artists and art critic Yoshida Yoshie, while the latter was the first event—albeit not a public one—with a title based on the American idea of “Happening.”30 Following these two events, Neo Dada (Kazakura, Shinohara, Masuzawa, Yoshimura, and others), associated artists (Okamoto Tarō, Miki Tomio), musicians (Ichiyanagi Toshi, Kosugi Takehisa, and Tone Yasunao), a dancer (Hijikata Tatsumi), an art critic (Takiguchi Shūzō), architects (Isozaki, Iyama Takeshi, and others), and media representatives (Kaidō Hideo from Yomiuri Shimbun) formed a unified community, with a shared understanding that action could be an independent form of artistic expression. 3.

UNBEAT’S COMING-OF-AGE

Already active in 1958, the Shōhei High School group continued its activities even after Nakajima Yoshio matriculated at Meiji Gakuin University. The group developed improvisational performances on the city streets from 1962 to 1963, in which Itoi Kanji also took part. Unbeat’s cast of characters was independent from that of its contemporaries Neo Dada and Group Ongaku, and their performance settings differed significantly as well. Unbeat was truly pioneering in the way they braved public spaces as they developed their action-expressions, rather than remaining in the confines of the Sogetsu Art Center, a protected space for artistic experimentation. As previously mentioned, Nakajima Yoshio, Kagami Masayuki and Tashiro Minoru initially began to work together in November  1961, and would soon operate under the name Unbeat Organizers. While the group’s name took influence from Neo Dada

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 20. Nakajima Yoshio, performance on the Shirokane Festival eve • c. October 31, 1962 • Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo

Organizers, formed in 1960, it was also an attempt to surmount that influence, negating the popular “Beat Tribe” (of which Shinohara and Neo Dada were a part) by affixing the prefix un-.31 Tashiro christened Unbeat’s performance a “damact” (damu akuto); it is unclear precisely what he meant, but it conjures the kind of will required to control passion on display in action painting—to consciously “dam” the flow of everyday “acts.” As terminologies, “Unbeat” and “damact” thus take a critical stance, distancing the group from popular culture, and from art itself. The first post-1960 Unbeat action was an event at Meiji Gakuin University, where Nakajima and Tashiro were enrolled. Nakajima entered the university in 1961 and joined the art club. In November of that year he organized Dadaism Festival, where he exhibited a work titled Experimental autopsy in progress. In June 1962, in what is considered to be Unbeat Organizers’ official debut, the members of the art club held an event in which they danced to the sound of a trumpet and drums.32 During university’s annual Shirokane Festival in November of the same year, they presented works titled Modern Ballet by Nakajima, Unbeat Organizers and the Avant-Garde Artists Perform a Scandal, Unbeat Organizers Manifesto, and Topological Cooking Method (a urinal objet), organized together under the title “gathering of artists announcing tomorrow.”33 However, Nakajima’s Cuba 62 and Tashiro’s A Murderer of Elsinore were deemed politically and sexually provocative and were withdrawn at the request of the festival’s executive committee. Nakajima’s large-scale performance piece using a motorbike light and engine noise, captured in a photograph [fig. 20], is emblematic of Unbeat’s confrontational attitude during this period. In an effort to demonstrate that their work was more than mere instinctual rebellion or publicity stunt, they also exhibited a score by John Cage,34 who performed at Sogetsu Art Center the October prior to the Shirokane Festival, and a toilet bowl reminiscent of Duchamp, indicating their desire to situate themselves in a Duchamp/Cage Western avant-garde genealogy. Beyond the performances at Meiji Gakuin University, Unbeat also often performed on the streets, increasing its membership to include Kikukawa Yasuo, who temporarily lived with Tashiro, Fujimura Tadayoshi, and Yamaguchi Katsumi. After the group’s expansion, their verified performances consisted of a series of Happenings held at various locations between December 2–5, 1962: the Kamogawa riverside around Gojō Bridge in Kyoto, the Kyoto Gakugei University campus (present-day Kyoto University of

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 21. Unbeat, performance on the Kamogawa riverbank, left: Kagami Masayuki [presumed]), center: Tashiro Minoru, far right: Nakajima Yoshio • December 2, 1962 • Near Gojō Bridge, Kyoto

Education), in front of the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, inside Osaka Station, and on the bridge (or a weir on the Tosahorikawa River, present-day Nishiki Bridge) in front of Asahi Newspaper building in Nakanoshima in Osaka. This series of Happenings was realized with the help of Iwai Noriko and Hasegwa Yoshiko, students at Kyoto Gakugei University. During these events, Itoi climbed up a fifteen-meter black pine tree at the University and ate young pine leaves while looking around; it is also known that he wrestled with Tashiro at Osaka Station. The recorded performances that included Itoi, however, were those that took place at Gojō Bridge in Kyoto and Nakanoshima in Osaka. A photograph from Kyoto [fig. 21] captures Unbeat’s characteristic style, allowing each member to act individually in the same place, at the same time. As a crowd of onlookers watch from Gojō Bridge, Nakajima crawls, dragging a long white cloth behind him, Tashiro gazes at himself in a mirror, and Kagami squats on the ground, using a ladle to listen to the sound of water. The performance setting of the Kamogawa riverside is reminiscent of kawara kojiki (riverbank beggars), a derogatory term for early kabuki actors. This site, and the next performance site on the bridge in the Osaka city center, are ethnographically interesting because they are marginal spaces, at the border between traditional community and its outsiders. At the bridge in Nakanoshima, Itoi changes into an adolescent black miniskirt that Kagami has brought, puts on a bowler hat, and stands on the concrete bridge rail (without wearing underwear, creating a voyeuristic “chirarism” effect when viewed from below, a strategy that Itoi regularly enjoyed). From the rail, he throws the hat like a boomerang, which Kagami catches; at the same time, Tashiro and Fujimura are playing the trumpet. Fortunately, a newspaper article captures the event, with an accompanying photograph (see plate 6, p. 6): On the 4th in the early afternoon [December  1962], eight oddly dressed young people jumped and flitted and tumbled about on the Nakanoshima bridge in Kita-ku, Osaka… a man wrapped in nylon tape and paper string, writhing as he dragged along an old canteen and empty cans; a woman mindlessly tearing up newspaper; a man with his face painted completely white, playing melancholic tunes on a flute… after a while, they began to scream and shriek terribly.

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These individuals, which included Mr. Tashiro Minoru (22), were members of Unbeat Organizers, an avant-garde research group of artists and poets from Tokyo, showcasing their collaborative work to all of the local businesspeople on lunch break. One of them, Mr. Itoi Kan [Itoi Kanji] (42), who had come from Kyūshū to cheer them on and participate, began to handstand on the railing, stark naked, and was promptly accosted by two officers from the Tenma Police, who angrily told him “We demand you come in for questioning for this act of public indecency!” thereby ruining the special art display. Mr. Tashiro passionately defended his actions: “you should believe the truth that we were doing what we wanted to do in this moment—and not trying to be understood.”35

Tashiro’s words in the article confirm Unbeat’s characteristic style: without prior planning, members individually, improvisationally created expressive actions. One photograph from the article depicts Tashiro and Nakajima with strings and cloth wrapped around their bodies. Another shot (see plate 7, p. 6), which appears to have been taken on the streets of Ginza at around the same time, captures Nakajima wearing a shirt covered in quotes from the “Dada Manifesto,” with trash (or art objects) hanging from him. According to Nakajima, he was playing sounds of wind and trains like concrete music from a tape recorder at the time. Because few sources beyond these remain to document their activities, it is difficult looking back to fully understand Unbeat’s style; we can, however, observe that they were able to achieve a unique evolution through their awareness that they were successors to Dadaism, their simultaneous individual performances, their use of sound.36 However, perhaps because they lacked the network of the Neo Dada artists, or otherwise because they emphasized improvisation to the detriment of developing a coherent media strategy and leaving behind a record of their activities, they did not catch the eye of the public, or art critics, for that matter. Unbeat conducted several performances beyond the ones detailed here, though their precise dates are unknown. But after Super Avant-garde Group Exhibition at Bijutsuka Kaikan (Artists Hall) produced by Kagami in June 1963 (pp. 160–1), Kagami and Nakajima left for Europe in May 1964, and Tashiro soon followed.37 Kikukawa, Fujimura, and the other remaining members continued to perform for a while, but ultimately they disappeared from history. 4.

GROUP ONGAKU MEETS THE ARTISTS RETURNING FROM THE U.S.

The early 1960s, distinct from Neo Dada’s media stunts and Unbeat’s haphazard, improvisational actions, saw the emergence of environmental experiments (integrating various site-specific material, spatial, temporal, and sensory elements), which were designed to engineer certain effects as stage performance. Though in the subsequent years they became obscured in the shadow of developments in performance, which became theatrical and exposed the body, the new environmental art attempted to transcend not only the notion of artwork as object but also the limitations of the idiosyncrasy and ego of the artist, establishing a foundation for performance of even more excessive expressiveness. Musical artists furthered these environmental experiments in a time and space that diminished their historical and political contexts. In 1960, after experimenting

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 22. Ono Yōko, Lighting Piece • May 24, 1962 • Sogetsu Art Center, Tokyo

with jazz, Indian and other ethnic music and improvising with conventional instruments and tape-recorded sounds, Kosugi Takehisa, Mizuno Shūkō, and Shiomi Chieko (later, Mieko), all students in the Department of Musicology at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music began creating sound environments that brought various objects into the space of performance. Interestingly, the involvement of Tone Yasunao, a Chiba University graduate in Japanese Literature and a devoted Surrealist, due to his distance from musical convention and sharp critical perspective, pushed the group toward even more radical experimentation. In September of 1961, with the debut of Concert of Improvisational Music and Acoustic Objects at Sogetsu Art Center, Gurūpu Ongaku (Group Ongaku [Music]) was born. The group participated in a piece by Ichiyanagi Toshi, IBM (Happening and Music Concrète), at Ichiyanagi’s concert in November, three months after his return from the U.S. In this performance, each of the participants made their own “music” using computer punch cards. Although it was a musical composition, it was nevertheless the first work in Japan that was named a “Happening” (hapuningu), introducing this term imported from the United States to Kosugi and Tone.38 “Happenings” had already begun to emerge organically within Group Ongaku’s experiments, but what sped their arrival and spread within intellectual circles was Ono Yōko’s performance at Sogetsu Art Center in May 1962 (after her return from the U.S. in March), widely considered to be the first hapuningu (Happening) in Japan.39 Within this performance, however, the focus was on the “event” of her distinctive instructions: Ono “lit a match and smoked a cigarette in slow motion”;40 [fig. 22] Ono made Mizuno Shūkō sweep the stage with a broom41 while she recited poems in English, “they shined flashlights on each other, wrote on a blackboard, made noise with toy instruments, cast soapy water onto other performers”;42 “multiple people sat on chairs reading the newspaper, and then later sawed the legs off the chairs.”43 Consequently, Ono hated the term “Happening.”44 The final number, Audience Piece, was a prime example of disturbing the relationship between performer and audience; all of the players gathered on stage and selected individual audience members, staring at them until they eventually averted their eyes. 45 [fig. 23] The fact that so many individuals who were attuned to avant-garde expression—“more than forty” prominent artists and critics from various fields (see chronology for details), spanning contemporary music, Early music, graphic design, photography,

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 23. Ono Yōko, Audience Piece • May 24, 1962 • Sogetsu Art Center, Tokyo

contemporary art, butoh, even artists from overseas—participated in Ono’s performance is remarkable, and illustrates the extent to which Sogetsu Art Center attracted artists from diverse genres and contributed to their collaborations. American filmmaker Donald Richie, who saw the performance, concluded that Ono’s work was an imitation of John Cage with “no trace of originality,” ironically noting that the majority of the “Japanese avant-garde elite”46 participated in the performance while lamenting that it was “unnecessarily long.”47 And yet, that Ono’s work demanded considerable patience of not just the performers but the audience over the course of many hours, evinces that the audience was in fact prepared to embrace this style of expression. Upon seeing Ono’s performance, Hiraoka Hiroko, who participated in the 3rd Neo Dada exhibition, reportedly said that “Neo Dada already played through that kind of thing,”48 Her statement suggests that Happening-style expressions were already practiced in the Japanese context before they were conveyed from the United States by Ichiyanagi and Ono, and it is precisely for this reason that Ono’s performance garnered such attention. Waves of Happenings from the United States continued to break on the shores of Japan. Most important were the performances by John Cage, who is considered the ideological source of Happening as well as its original practitioner, and David Tudor, that occurred between October–November 1962, in Kyoto, Osaka, and in Tokyo at Sogetsu Art Center; these performances had such an impact that their effect came to be known as the “John Cage shock” (Akiyama Kuniharu). 49 Mizuno Shūkō of Group Ongaku, however, remarked that what Cage had done was “nothing novel at all. It felt like stuff we were already done with and had moved on from.”50 Beyond its pioneering introduction of Happenings, Sogetsu Art Center’s role as a platform for experimentation in the realms of music, film, animation, and design cannot be understated. Nevertheless, most of these “experiments,” including the performances discussed here, occurred within the frameworks of “stage art” and “experimental art.” They may appear radical at first glance, but excluded politics and corporeality and, save for a few exceptions, did not demolish the boundary between stage and audience. Moreover, the male performers (including Nam June Paik!) who took the stage at Sogetsu Art Center mostly appeared in suit and tie, establishing the Sogetsu Art Center network of artists, in Shinohara Ushio’s words, as “tenjō-bito (upper echelon courtiers).”51 By contrast, with the rise of an underground culture in Shinjuku from the late 1960s, the events

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at Sogetsu Art Center began to seem rather tame and unexciting. According to Dōmoto Masaki, Sogetsu Art Center was “a private room” with extremely clean, polished walls of stainless steel or duralumin. […] There was a certain sense of camaraderie there, but it lacked the sense of limitless solidarity we felt in Shinjuku. […] Even among close comrades, coming into that sort of delimited space, everything is sterilized in the name of the avant-garde. That was the limitation of Sogetsu.52

Yet we must not forget that there were attempts to challenge the “Sogetsu aesthetic.” For example, Nam June Paik, in his May 1964 solo performance, shaved wood from a piano, threw raw eggs against a wall, poured detergent on his head and washed it in a basin, and cut off the tie of Takiguchi Shūzō, who was seated in the audience. These violent actions must have appeared alien in Sogetsu Hall [fig. 24]. Watching the performance, Akasegawa Genpei got “the impression that it was a jumble of electronic music and a sort-of folkish Happening.”53 More so than an allusion to folk tradition, as is often seen in post-1980s Korean performance art, this performance may have been an attempt to intentionally disrupt Sogetsu’s inclination for “high art.” Paik always expressed his timely and unwavering support for Hi-Red Center, the “disruptors” par excellence of this period. Opposition was not limited to just Paik; Hijikata Tatsumi’s Masseur at Sogetsu in November 1963 is another example of a performance that spatially and aesthetically challenged the “Sogetsu aesthetic.” In addition to the performances at Sogetsu and activities by Group Ongaku, there were other attempts at collaborations by visual artists during this period, with genres such as music and poetry. For instance, Kojima Nobuaki, who is known for standing in a steel drum during the 1962 Yomiuri Independent to present himself as an artwork, collaborated with members of Group Ongaku (Kosugi Takehisa, Tone Yasunao, Takeda Akimichi and Tojima Mikio) to perform an action-expression at Muramatsu Gallery in June of that same year. Kojima mixed mortar in the gallery space, and the next day, he broke the dried mortar into small pieces to distribute to the audience and scatter at the base of the willow trees outside the gallery in Ginza. His action possessed a materiality which is not seen in other “musicians.” In another event at Honryū-ji Temple in Ikebukuro titled Knock K=4, held in October 1962, a truly collaborative piece that included poetry (Tanikawa Shuntarō, Kamata Tadayosi, and Allen Ginsberg), jazz, and sadō (a tea gathering), Kojima did not participate in the performance but contributed by constructing a set on stage from mosquito nets, made to look like a small teahouse entryway. This performance is noteworthy as an early example of “collaboration” between poetry, music, and visual art through a network of people distinct from that of Group Ongaku and Sogetsu Art Center. 5.

INTERVENTION AS EXPRESSION

Group Ongaku continued its activities through its diverse network across music, visual art, film, dance, and butoh. According to Kosugi,54 the group’s inaugural performance, Concert of Improvisational Music and Acoustic Objects (September 1961), was actually a turning point in its experiments as a group. After the performance, Kosugi and Tone began to participate in various events as individual artists. While it was natural that

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 24. Nam June Paik performing • May 29, 1964 • Sogetsu Art Center, Tokyo

among Neo Dada members they would band together with Kazakura, who had been holding solo performances, interestingly, Akasegawa, who was not driven by a desire for public appeal like Shinohara and Yoshimura and who was known for sitting quietly in the corner during the wild parties at the White House, also joined in Kosugi and Tone’s activities. Rather than preparing a specific site for their actions or serving as the main performers on stage, Kazakura and pre-Hi-Red Center Akasegawa typically “intervened” in other events, such as music concerts, butoh performances and public discussions. Similar interventions (kainyū) were made by Kosugi and Tone, League of Criminals, and Zero Jigen. These performances were acts of disturbance, distinct from the scheduled and harmonized inter-disciplinary artistic collaborations discussed earlier. Different from Kosugi’s “collaboration” as a musical performer at the butoh performances of Kuni Chiya Dance Institute beginning in August 1962, “interventions” often destroyed the typical relationship between main and supporting roles. While it is not easy to sort through the facts of this intense period of so many performative incidents, I will highlight a few examples. One is the inaugural meeting of the Jiritsu Gakkō (School of Autonomy). Jiritsu Gakkō was a research society comprised of intellectuals, critics and political activists from the post-Anpo period, which will also be touched on in chapter 22 (pp. 470–2). As candidates for guest lecturers were being recruited at this meeting to open the school, Nakanishi Natsuyuki “walked about the full-house audience holding a smoke canister while swinging around an egg-shaped object,”55 as Kosugi “played” his piece, Anima 1, using his body to wind threads of yarn he had strung up across the seats.56 It seems likely that these actions were meant to disturb a space of serious discussion. Akasegawa and Kazakura often showed off their knack for being “intervenors.” On a television program57 in June 1963, Akasegawa “released a bandaged gold fish into a fish bowl, put on sunglasses still wrapped in their packaging, and frying an abacus and eyeglasses to make tempura.”58 In July, he appeared on a discussion program titled Between Adults and Kids (the discussion theme was “how to prosecute murderers”59), broadcasted by Nippon Educational Television (presently TV Asahi), with his face painted in white greasepaint as he burned “a fake 1,000-yen note.” Both acts were early examples of artists disrupting existing TV programs. Meanwhile, in November 1963, Kazakura intervened in a butoh performance, The Masseur, that was produced, directed, choreographed and

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 25. Hijikata Tatsumi, Masseur • November 5, 1963 • Sogetsu Art Center, Tokyo

performed by Hijikata Tatsumi. As captured in Iimura Takahiko’s documentary film, this performance was quite different from the more aesthetically and methodically refined butoh style that Hijikata developed later. The performance space was designed by Akasegawa, who took out the first twenty rows of seats, replacing them with tatami mats, and then installed the audience seating instead on the stage.60 The performance had a popular entertainment style, the dancers’ fast and acrobatic movements accompanied by a group of shamisen (three-stringed Japanese musical instrument) players. It was filled with ideas that disrupted the Sogetsu Art Center, a major stage for high art [fig. 25]. On the same stage, Kazakura pasted wrapping paper onto himself, completely covering his body, and sat still on top of a wall behind the stage.61 Just as the performance ended, he shouted “give me water!” pushing the audience to finally notice that there was a person sitting there.62 Kazakura also staked out a similar presence in Rose-colored Dance, at the House of Mr. Shibusawa in November 1965. He recalls, “as Hijikata and his troupe danced with desperate looks on their faces, I walked on the stage with Jōnouchi Motoharu from VAN. We sat facing each other, on a white cloth. A guy we had brought with us shaved half of our heads into buzzcuts.”63 Adachi Masao, another member of VAN, retrospectively praised Kazakura’s unwavering intention to bring down the Soge­ tsu Art Center.64 6.

LEAGUE OF CRIMINALS: VIOLATING THE BORDER OF THE POLITICS AND POPULAR CULTURE

Hiraoka Masaaki and Miyabara Yasuharu, two members of Jiritsu Gakkō’s steering committee, participated in a group called Hanzaisha Dōmei (League of Criminals). The group, created by the Waseda University students Hiraoka, Miyabara and Morotomi Yōji in late 1961,65 was generationally similar to Unbeat (about five years younger than the core of the Anti-Art generation, born in the mid-1930s). Rather than enacting bodily expressions in their own particular style, their activities spanned the fields of politics, publishing, theater, music and popular culture. For this reason, it would be difficult to describe them as a “performance group.” However, as their name suggests, they were willing to commit crimes and acts of terror, and I would therefore like to introduce them

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here as representative of the characteristic anarchism of this era, and as a practical example of artistic intervention. Imaizumi Yoshihiko, who became aquatinted with the group in Jiritsu Gakkō’s planning stages, wrote that the League of Criminals “aimed to produce a revolutionary condition through their outbursts of crime, like the Satsuma clan on the eve of the Meiji Restoration, committing arson and burglaries throughout the city of Edo, agitating the hearts of the people. Though in reality, what the group actually did amounted to nothing more than petty crime.”66 Although Imaizumi loathed their “childish,” “masturbatory” behaviors, he was nevertheless a supporter. The group’s book, Akai fūsen aruiwa mesu-ōkami no yoru (Red Balloon, or the Night of She-Wolf) published in August 1963, is representative of the diverse sphere of their activities. In addition to Hiraoka’s obscene, energy-filled (albeit abstruse) essay “Like a Tartar,” the book contains instructions for performance works by Kosugi titled EarDrum, Anima 1, Mano-Dharma for Mr. T, and Organic Music, photographs by Yoshioka Yasuhiro, visual arrangements designed by Akasegawa Genpei and Takamatsu Jirō, and a photograph of Itoi Kanji (see chap. 18.4, p. 399). Imaizumi, mentioned above, was a member of the Jiritsu Gakkō steering committee, an editor of art criticism magazine Keishō (later, Kikan), a witness and accomplice to much of the art of this period. It was Imaizumi who introduced Akasegawa, Itoi, Takamatsu and Yoshioka to the group, at Hiraoka’s request.67 The network of people that emerged following the uproar caused by the book is even more intriguing. In December 1963, Morotomi was arrested for shoplifting Juliette or the Prosperity of Vice by Marquis de Sade (translated by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko) and the police coincidentally found Red Balloon in his belongings. As the book contained photographs of a vagina taken by Yoshioka, Morotomi was apprehended and questioned for the crime of distributing obscene books and images. In an article reporting on this incident,68 Ishii Kyōji, director of Gendai Shichōsha, which published the translation Juliette or the Prosperity of Vice, commented as a “philosophical patron” of the League of Criminals. Another article69 mentioned that some members of the League of Criminals believed Kurita Isamu, literary critic, writer, and lecturer at Jiritsu Gakkō, to be one of the “bosses” of the group alongside Ishii. Mori Hideto, editor-in-chief of Shisō no Ka­gaku (Science of Thought) and lecturer at Jiritsu Gakkō, expressed his support for the League of Criminals in his magazine, protesting against the arrest of its members.70 And finally, the book, which brought to light the existence of Akasegawa’s “model 1000-yen note,” triggered the largest incident of 1960s art history, the Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident. It is thus the publication of Red Balloon happened within the context of an extensive cross-disciplinary network of individuals, all associated in some way with Shisō no Kagaku, Jiritsu Gakkō, and Keishō, spanning politics, criticism, publishing, photography, music, visual art, and literature. This multidisciplinarity reflects how the performative activities by the League of Criminals were born out of the ferocious energy of the post-Anpo political and cultural climate. One of the more full-fledged performances by the League of Criminals was the theater piece Wet Sneeze of a Black-rimmed Rose, held in Ōkuma Auditorium at Waseda University, November  1962. Imaizumi was initially given a script by Miyabara for the stage design, but was put off by how boring it was and recruited his artist friends to “intervene.” The result was a series of Happenings that transcended the framework

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of theater. A large plastic womb made by architect Iyama Takeshi occupies the entire stage while a man and a woman, representing a sperm and an egg, engages in dialogue. Smoke billows out from a cannister, setting the scene for an orgy. Takamatsu Jirō’s signature rope appears from center stage, extending into the audience. On the wing of the stage, Kosugi Takehisa makes noise using a tape deck. Kobatake Hiroshi, a sculptor who had previously sent out invitation cards called “Burial Sculptures,” sprinkles water and throws his sculptures from the second-floor balcony, attempting to break them to pieces during the play’s “scene of sabbath.”71 For the actual performance, however, the setup was poor, and the outcome was not as planned. According to Imaizumi, the actions by Takamatsu and Kobatake were not agreed to by the League of Criminals and instead became an obstruction, completely negating the theatrical hierarchy between main(theater on stage) and sub-feature (art and music). Though Nakanishi did not appear on stage in the form of either action or installation, he did paint the inside of the urinals in the men’s bathroom bright red, seeking the defamiliarization of the space outside the theater. The League of Criminals was most active in 1963. In May, its members performed two theater pieces at Waseda University: Hiraoka Masaaki’s Harenchi Kan Kan (Shameless Can-Can) in the first half and Miyabara Yasuharu’s Higi No. 13: Ōtōkatsuuki katsureishiki (Secret ritual No. 13: Circumcision with a Cherry Fruit) following intermission. According to an essay by Hiraoka, written in his characteristically convoluted style,72 the performance was designed to provoke the audience with an ad-libbed “Messiah’s agitation,” loud jazz, mahjong and lighting. In August, the group held Criminals’ Black Mass of Jazz and Adlibbed Poetry during the launch party for the aforementioned Red Balloon at Café Nice in Shinjuku, which consisted of jazz, adlibbed poetry, dance by naked men and women, and acts of sodomy. In October, on the day candidates were announced for the House of Representatives election in Shinjuku, during rush hour the League of Criminals enacted a “strange festival» using hats and eggs and white face powder, flashlights and straw rope inside a Japan Railway train car (reminiscent of the Yamanote Line Festival), and laid down in front of the ticketing gates for the Odakyū Railway Line and the entrance to Mitsukoshi Department Store (reminiscent of Zero Jigen’s signature netai, see chap. 9.3, p. 252). In November at the Kyoto University School Festival, they performed a theater piece titled Agitation of Criminals: Aside from the banana peels spread across the floor, the performance was the same as what we did in the Black Mass at Nice. Candles and music. But this time, to throw the audience into a state of chaos and create uncontrollable excitement, we used explosives, smoke bombs in the shape of grenades, Varsan “bug bombs.” We splattered chicken blood with explosives, forced the audience to drink Coca-Cola infused with eyedrops, used Buddhist songs and gongs and fire.73

Any audience member who tried to escape was beaten. While all of this was happening, Motoshio Kiki (an Ankoku Butoh dancer) performed “sex dance.”74 If we must summarize the League of Criminals as a performance group, its unique characteristics include bisexual orgies within ritualistic atmospheres, furious jazz music (Hiraoka later became a jazz critic), physical and perceptual provocation of the

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audience—the complete disturbance of the space of performance. As indicated by the translated volume of Marquis de Sade stolen during the shoplifting incident, they were influenced as well by the Shibusawa of this period, who glorified the anarchism he saw in Western black magic and secret societies (see chap. 20.4, pp. 450–2). We can speculate that Shibusawa also influenced the filmmakers discussed subsequently. 7.

VAN AND JIKAN-HA: PROVOKING THE AUDIENCE

Beyond art, music and political groups, experimental filmmakers also played an important role in the performative “interventions” that exploded in 1962. Of particular significance was the VAN Film Science Research Institute, established in December 1960 in Kunitachi, Tokyo.75 Its members—Adachi Masao, Kanbara Hiroshi, Asanuma Naoya, Jōnouchi Motoharu, and Kawashima Keiji—were friends of Neo Dada and its related artists. In November of 1960, a month before VAN was established, Arakawa Shūsaku, without so much as a pause after breaking with Neo Dada, joined Asanuma and Jōnouchi in an event called Invitation to JASA (JASA combined the first letters of their names), a screening of the French film Zero for Conduct (1933) directed by Jean Vigo. Hariu Ichirō documents the story of the event, as told by Tōno Yoshiaki, which played out like a bad prank in the screening room in the Faculty of Arts at Nihon University: A man at the entrance goes, this building is flammable, so we’ll collect all of your lighters and matches here. Then a guide escorts them into a pitch-black room. A staircase leads up to the screening room on the mezzanine. Five minutes pass, then ten, and still the film hasn’t started. Out of nowhere Tōno realizes that he still has another box of matches, and quietly lights one. He can see a few familiar faces among the nearby guests. And suddenly he comes to his senses—we’ve been tricked. He lights another match and sets a weekly magazine on fire. When he does, Arakawa is in front of them, lying there like a clump of dirt. They shake and kick him, but Arakawa doesn’t wake up. When they give up and try to leave, they find that the staircase they had just climbed was gone. With no other choice, they were all forced to leave one by one, through a window. In that empty, pitch-black room, Tōno says he felt something extremely nihilistic and yet exhilarating.76

According to Adachi Masao,77 the announcement for this event only mentioned the premiere screening of Zero for Conduct in Japan,78 completely deceiving the audience.79 The mechanics of the event—confiscating anything that could be used to give off light (by Adachi, in the role of the reception desk) and making a normally safe place seem truly dangerous by guiding the audience by flashlight and covering them with dust—were quite well-conceived. The audience response was varied; some people were piping mad, while others were amused (“You got me!” shouted Shibusawa) and laughed out loud. Although Arakawa had used his body to intervene, the main aim of this event was the change it inspired inside the audience, leaving them in utter darkness, and also perhaps the dodging of their expectations of a film screening. Reading even further into the event, given that Zero for Conduct is a story about students uprising against a housemaster and teachers at a Catholic boarding house and a film that was banned from being

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screened for its potential to incite anarchy, the inclination toward anarchism lurking among many of post-Anpo intellectuals can also be seen in the selection of this title. Next, Adachi and friends contrived a plan to plunge the Zengakuren (All-Japan Federation of Students’ Self-Governing Associations) rally into chaos at Kyōritsu Auditorium in June 1961, on the one-year anniversary of Kanba Michiko’s death in front of the Japanese Diet Building during the Anti-Anpo movement. The film that the group produced and screened, Document 6.15, consisted of documentary footage combined with reenacted scenes. It was extremely effective in how it agitated the audience, but particularly of note was its use of sound. Because approximately half the audience could not fit into the venue and remained outside, where a rally against the dissolution of the Zengakuren executive committee was unfolding, they set up one two-channel speaker facing the inside of the hall, and another facing the outside. One of the speakers broadcasted “the Zengakuren executive committee summarizing the Anpo Struggle and students’ angry chants and jeers,”80 while the other played “recordings of voices in the Diet during the steamrolling of May 19 and the government’s statements.”81 This became a “huge Happening”82 because it created an environment in which the audience inside the hall (who were watching the film) grew angry at the executive committee after hearing only, for instance, “the Japanese Communist Party’s assertions that should be denied,”83 while those outside the hall were uplifted by exclusively listening to the “agitations of the Bund Zengakuren.”84 This mayhem prevented the executive committee from proceeding with its plan to announce the disbanding of the Bund (a major faction of Zengakuren, which led the Anti-Anpo movement). The committee criticized Adachi and VAN for being “modernist revisionists who made a strange film,” and stated, “They have nothing to do with us, and we will not forgive them!”85 But this, of course, played right into the hands of Adachi and co. This event is a great example of the effect in which one Happening gives rise to a chain of other Happenings, as it foretold the screening of Sa’in (Closed Vagina) in 1964 by Adachi and the Nihon University New Film Study Group in Kyoto (see chap.  7.5, pp. 182–4). Within the medium of film, the idea that the entire site of the film screening, and not only the images shown on screen, should be comprehended as artwork would be further developed in Iimura Takahiko and Kawanaka Nobuhiro’s fusions of multi-projection and Happening, and Gulliver’s screening events, which coupled video and the physical space in which it was being projected. But in this regard Document 6.15, because of the way it utilized political conflict and the intersection of live event and recording to even further disrupt the relationship between inside (screening venue) and outside (reality space), was an especially radical experiment.86 Although the events of the previous paragraphs did generate Happenings, they were primarily framed as film screenings. By contrast, there were other events at this time, entirely independent from the realm of film, that were precursors of sorts to the later performances of the Ritualists. According to Okishima Isao, second chairman of the Nihon University New Film Study Group and one of the organizers of Grotesque Festival at the University’s Faculty of Arts Festival held in November 1962, the event consisted of four elements: “Museum,” “LSD Laboratory,” “Joint Review Meeting,” and a screening of Jigoku (Hell) and Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan (Tōkaidō Yotsuya Ghost Story), both directed by Nakagawa Nobuo. Of these, the “Museum” section, of which Okishima was in charge, was most noteworthy. As he found the usual Film Department displays

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of film and editing equipment ordinarily exhibited at school festivals boring, Okishima attempted to stage “a kind of ‘ritual,’ like a ‘black mass’ or ‘sabbath.’”87 It was pitch black inside, and we tie each of them, one by one, to about thirty crosses. (At the time, the studio had a mountain hut set for filming practice, which we neatly divided into small rooms and threw a number of audience members into them.) In the rotten stench emitted by cowhide affixed to the crosses… a stripper from the Ikebukuro France-za begins dancing beneath the ceiling light. After a time… down a long ladder hanging from the ceiling, a woman in a red satin dress descends, playing the role of a miko [Shinto shrine maiden] … dancing as she mustered up her nerve … while geckos, snakes, chickens, and other creatures were slaughtered… Well, I don’t really want to remember why, but I guess we wanted to identify “death” in our immediate environment…88

An essay by Terayama Shūji’s supplements this account with additional information:89 a severed cow head hung from the ceiling; innumerable geckos crawled about the floor; the intestines of a goat or dog, slaughtered in that space, were offered to an altar; geckos were pinned on the walls; rat carcasses were burnt, emitting a stench so strong it is said to have caused audience members to vomit. This European-style “ritual” was likely within the sphere of influence of Shibusawa Tatsuhiko’s Kuromajutsu no techō (Notebook of Black Magic) published in October 1961. The elements reminiscent of the rituals of European secret societies—crosses, naked women dancing, the slaughter of animals—were almost never seen in Japan, even in the “rituals” that gained traction in the late 1960s art scene. Terayama, in his typical manner, expressed that he was dissatisfied by the ritual because it lacked “Happenings initiated by the audience.” “Provoking” an intrinsically passive audience to voluntarily participate was an aim shared by not only such eccentric artist as Terayama, but by many of the radical intellectuals and political activists of this era. Jikan-ha (School of Time) was an art group that, in the manner Terayama preferred, conducted radical provocations similar to League of Criminals, VAN and other the filmmakers, pioneering the notion of turning viewers into actors. From May to June 1962, its members, which included Tanaka Fuji, Doi Junen, Nakazawa Ushio, and Nagano Shōzō, held their first exhibition at Satō Gallery. Although it cannot quite be called a performance group,90 Jikan-ha is noteworthy in art history because its members changed the concept of an “artwork” into something that is completed through the physical intervention of the audience,91 pioneering what would later come to be known as “interactive” artwork. However, we must remember to differentiate their work from the “interactive art” of today, within which the audience participation is superficial, or exists in preestablished harmony (more often than not, the audience is in fact under the artist’s control); Jikan-ha’s drive to provoke was at the core of their work. As an example, during a butoh performance titled Gigi (Ritual of sacrifice) by Ohno Kazuo and Kasai Akira at the Asahi Hall in October 1963, Jikan-ha designed to invade the borderline between stage and seating, between the viewers and the viewed, issuing a provocation to each of the audience’s five senses: they set up strobe lights behind the front seats to blind the audience, projecting noisome din and thunderous roars, emitting a horrible stench,

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dropping three 5-meter-wide balloons from above the audience’s seats, and making audience members walk on top of a board that rested on ping-pong balls.92 An excited audience member reportedly went up on the piano that was on the stage. Out of frustration, Doi also went on the stage during Ono Yōko’s aforementioned Audience Piece and pinched the noses of the performers.93 His act can be understood as a manifestation of Jikan-ha’s will to disrupt the relationship between performers and audience. 8.

THE LAUNCH OF HI-RED CENTER

It is precisely the period of provocative performance thus described that launched HiRed Center, a renowned group in 1960s art history.94 The group name was assembled by piecing together English translations of the first kanji of its founders’ names: Takamatsu Jirō, Akasegawa Genpei and Nakanishi Natsuyuki (高taka = high, 赤aka = red, 中naka = center). Akasegawa has extensively written on Hi-Red Center’s activities, and their October 1964 final work, Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropolitan Area (Cleaning Event), is seen as their quintessential performance. I will thus limit the discussion of Hi-Red Center in this book to confirming some basic information about the group up until 1963 and calling into question the group’s well-established evaluation by pointing out a number of heretofore overlooked issues. The following is an outline of the Hi-Red Center’s major projects up through 1963: 1962 October: Yamanote Line Festival (Yamanote Line Incident95) Location: Yamanote Line Trains, Tokyo Station/Ueno Station/others, Ueno Park Note: this event preceded Akasegawa’s involvement with the group 1963 May: The 5th Mixer Plan Location: Shinjuku Daiichi Gallery 1963 May: The 6th Mixer Plan: a presentation ceremony of objects Location: Miyata Naika (Miyata Internal Medicine Clinic), Shinbashi Station Plaza 1963 August: Ropelogy96 Location: Roof of Bijutsushuppan-sha Publishing Co.

Among these pieces, The 5th Mixer Plan is primarily an exhibition of objects without performance, even though it involved various devices to entertain the audience.97 In The 6th Mixer Plan, Nakanishi appears in the plaza in front of Shinbashi Station with numerous clothespins attached to his head and balloons on his body; however, this action is in the lineage of Neo Dada’s displays of strange dress and behavior and their tendency to show this work on the streets, and distinctly different from the street actions of Unbeat and, later, Zero Jigen, which grab people’s attention with the movement of the body. By contrast, Yamanote Line Festival is more performative. At a designated time at each station, Nakanishi, face painted white in grease paint, shines a flashlight on an egg-shaped object, gazing at it inside the train car, licking it while out on the platform.98

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Takamatsu hires a man, who he found working an advertisement job on the street, to move a large rope object, unfurling it on the platform to show to all of the passengers. Kosugi Takehisa and Tone Yasunao also participate in the event by making sounds using a portable recording device (or a radio) inside the Yamanote Line train. They are meant to link up with Nakanishi and the others at Ikebukuro Station, but Nakanishi’s group drops out midway and so Kosugi and Tone go around the Yamanote Line by themselves.99 As Imaizumi complained, despite the brilliant idea to make use of the Japan National Railway loop line, there were far too many photographers (more of whom were requested by the artists than came from media outlets100) on scene at the Yamanote Line Festival, which lessened the strangeness of such actions in everyday spaces. When later asked why he had exited at the ticket gate of Ueno Station without even having completed one loop from Shinagawa in the direction of Ikebukuro, Nakanishi replied “I can’t answer.”101 Is it too harsh to speculate that, not accustomed to using his body for artistic expression in urban space and his action not attracting as much attention as he had hoped, Nakanishi simply made a run for his old artistic haunt of Ueno? Either way, from these events we can infer that Hi-Red Center remained dependent on the framework of museums, galleries, and art audiences. This fact is particularly evident in Shelter Plan (January 1964), which was performed for a limited audience in a place of restricted access (a room in the Imperial Hotel). Even Nakanishi admitted that they attached more importance to “interacting with those who already really knew how to appreciate art” than what their “instructions, or orders” might bring forth.102

 26. Takamatsu Jirō performing in 6th Mixer Plan • May 28, 1963 • near Shimbashi Station, Tokyo

 27. Takamatsu Jirō performing in 6th Mixer Plan • May 28, 1963 • Miyata Internal Medicine Clinic, Tokyo

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 28. Hi-Red Center, Ropelogy, left to right: Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Takamatsu Jirō, Akasegawa Genpei) • August 5, 1963 • Bijutsu Shuppansha roof, Tokyo

Though Cleaning Event was one of the true success stories of 1960s performance, a masterful intervention into urban space, Yamanote Line Festival, spearheaded by Nakanishi, did not achieve the same level of polish. In a similar light, it is necessary to read and understand the other activities of Hi-Red Center not as acts of collective agreement but as the concepts of individual artists. As discussed earlier, Akasegawa conducted a significant number of solo performances independently from Hi-Red Center. Although it has not received much critical attention, Takamatsu also had a solo performance during The 6th Mixer Plan in which he rolled a car tire while walking blindfolded on the street near Shinbashi Station [fig. 26].103 Takamatsu covering himself with ropes at Miyata Naika Clinic [fig. 27]104provided the inspiration for Ropelogy, which featured three members with their eyes, ears, and mouths covered and feet connected by ropes, playing a game in which they try to find each other by touching the rope with the soles of their feet [fig. 28].105 One consistent point across all of these works of Takamatsu’s is his experimentation with performance that cut off communication through seeing, hearing, and speaking, instead relying on the sensations of the hands and feet. 9.

THE FIELDWORK OF MIZUKAMI JUN

Completely isolated from the performance activities happening in Tokyo at the time, Mizukami Jun began his own unique performances in Kyoto. Mizukami’s first performative expression was “a simple ritual in which he and a friend stretched a hemp rope with a small stone at the center across the street where Kanba Michiko had been crushed to death as students stormed the Diet Building during the Anti-Anpo movement, commemorating her sacrifice.”106 This incredibly simple act, which should be called an “event” rather than a performance as it had no audience and contained no bodily movement, nevertheless held two important points of significance linked to Mizukami’s work in later years. First, the act aimed to directly examine the life of each individual who had dropped out of the political struggle. After the event, Mizukami traveled to the countryside where he enjoyed talking to the local people,107 presumably in an attempt to span

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the gap between the elite (whether artists or political activist) and the masses in the post-Anpo political context, just as Tanigawa Gan and his colleagues had tried to learn from the lower classes at Jiritsu Gakkō. Second, the event’s concern with place. This ritual was significant only because it occurred at the site of Kanba Michiko’s death. Mizu­ kami’s action, which required no audience nor bodily movement, was meant to revive the memory of a place which otherwise held no particular significance. Mizukami’s subsequent action, titled Gifts from KICK Agency, was in the same vein as the act of leaving food and gifts received while on a trip on top of roadside posts and stones. These are acts that likely were not designed to be noticed by people, but that hold a particular meaning in the artist’s consciousness. In a certain sense it is a type of conceptual art, like how in traditions around the world stones and signposts are left to mark sacred sites and borders. These actions, which prepared Mizukami to later take off as one of the Ritualists, is a kind of “fieldwork” comparable to that of ethnographers, seeking out special meaning in the lives of ordinary people and places. Mizukami’s uniqueness didn’t stop here; he played the flute in a university orchestra and the saxophone in events later on, sonic experiences which enabled him to master the skill of breath control. He had also begun expressive activities as a poet, familiar with Beat poetry. These experiences guided him from music and literature to action-expression. Perhaps the fact that Mizukami was an intellectual of high academic caliber and not an art specialist, having studied law at Kyoto University, is the reason why he was able to develop performances of a different quality than the expressions of art school graduates.108 The first performance that Mizukami centered on his body itself was Ritual for Spiritual Renovation Plan, held at the chanson café French Can-Can in Kyoto, June 1962.109 During the performance, Mizukami removed his clothes piece by piece, including his underwear (i.e., he was briefly naked) and then changed into a white outfit he had made himself. While the presence of a naked body in a coffee shop was reminiscent of Zero Jigen’s 1964 action at Café Spain in Tokyo, in Mizukami’s case, the nakedness was not the important point; rather, it was the transformation of the act of changing clothes from ke (the ordinary, everyday) to hare (the extraordinary, sacred)—a transformation in the ethnographic sense. In his November 1962 performance Cell + White Mass at Kyoto Shoin Gallery, he painted maggot-like shapes on four panels that were set up to create the four walls of a room,110 and in his October 1963 performance on the street in Nagoya, he wrapped a nude sculpture of a woman with bandages; more so than a dig at the characteristic academism of Japanese art, the purpose of these acts might have been to purify the sites. While difficult at present to ascertain the details of Mizukami’s later work, it is clear that he independently continued to hold numerous performances and street actions, until he discovered collaborators in other musicians and artists. 10. THE EARLY EXPERIMENTS OF ZERO JIGEN Zero Jigen became active in Nagoya in the early 1960s. Their earliest performance to be documented in photographs was a naked tea gathering held in a Japanese-style room belonging to the future wife of Katō Yoshihiro, in August  1962 (see chap.  13.2, p. 333).111 Another work from this early period, Ritual by Sound (Collective Mixed Ritual)

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 29. The Ritual of Red • Katō Yoshihiro solo exhibition • June 16, 1963 • Sakura Gallery, Nagoya

(November 1962)112 was an attempt to “cram as much ‘gay and lesbian sex, the destruction of objects, cult dancing, sadō, poetry reading, eating contest, wedding ceremony, jazz, etc.’ as possible into a juicer,”113 creating a synchronous blend of actions combining the naked body, sound, and voice. Katō began calling these Japanese-style intermedia events gishiki (rituals). Among the rituals held indoors, the group “lie-in” (nekorogari) at the Yomiuri Independent in March 1963 (see pp. 153–4) and Ritual of Red at Sakura Gallery, Nagoya in June 1963 [fig. 29] were open to the public and the materials from these events survive. Ritual of Red was an extension of the tea gathering-style experiment from the previous year. It was significant because its elaborate configuration differentiated it from the simplicity of previous actions, which mainly consisted of crawling and lying down. A photograph of the event depicts a woman serving tea to a group of people, which includes a man wearing a loincloth (Iwata Shin’ichi). The woman is surrounded by other members, both men and women, who appear to be making sounds. Proper utensils for the tea gathering are set up thoughtfully in a space where Katō’s lithographs hang the wall. According to an illustration note by Itō Takao, each of the twelve participants were assigned to one of the following tasks: sound, yoga, incense, sutra, or gong, as well as the yokobue (tranverse flute) and mokugyo (wooden fish gong). Captured in the photograph, these parts of the performance indicate the deployment of elements from traditional rituals, such as sadō (tea) and hōyō (Buddhist memorial service).114 Zero Jigen’s first outdoor ritual took place in January 1963 at the Insane Nonsense Exhibition (Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum), for which dozens of participants formed a long, serpentine line and crawled along on the street. [fig. 30]. A series of other performative actions followed this one, beginning with the lie-down at the Yomiuri Independent in March, Ritual of Red in June, Ritual to Taste a Female Body in August—in which the group ate a meal at a table on the street in Nagoya’s downtown Sakae-machi district as a woman wrapped in bandages lay on top it (see chap. 13.3, pp. 333–4)—and an open-air exhibition at an empty lot in central Nagoya in October, which featured a half-naked Katō wearing only a corset as the group burned artworks. The group’s ferocious energy and rich ideas foreshadowed its later development into the most important Anti-Art performance group; however, the group did not establish its signature ritual style until around 1967. In this period, the group was instead occupied with bringing to

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 30. Zero Jigen performs at Insane Nonsense Exhibition • January 1, 1963 • Sakae, Nagoya

life the ideas of its individual artists—Iwata and Katō, Koiwa Takayoshi, and others— and had not yet sufficiently sorted out, through trial and error, its polyphonic character. This character is, in Katō’s words, “a parallel synchronicity (indefinite time dimension, Zero-ing of time)” that would “blenderize (synchronize)”115 variegated actions and events, at once sacred and profane. It is once Katō moved to Tokyo at the end of 1963 that Zero Jigen progressed to its next phase. 11.

THE MIDDLE PERIOD OF KYŪSHŪ-HA: AN ATTEMPT AT AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION

For Kyūshū-ha, the period covered in this chapter (1960–1963) exposed internal contradictions and found the group stuck in a rut as a result of conflicts in organizational strategy, member turnover, and in reaction to the shifting political climate.116 On the brink of demise, the group sought to revitalize itself by organizing Grand Assembly of Heroes, inviting live performers Kosugi Takehisa, Tone Yasunao, and Kazakura Shō from Tokyo in November 1962. Nevertheless, Kyūshū-ha had in fact performed a number of other Happening-like experiments that foreshadowed the Grand Assembly. The “room-like concept” that begins in Ochi Osamu’s solo exhibition,117 which in today’s terms would be called an installation (kaijō geijutsu [venue art] was a term also used at the time), incorporated audience members into the work itself, making the audience no longer audience, strategically transforming them into active “revolutionaries” alongside the artist.118 In the summer of that year, Obana Shigeharu held a solo exhibition at his home in the southern countryside of Fukuoka. The exhibition, featuring neither bodily expression nor elements of live art, exemplified venue art, transforming the entire space of reality into artwork, a quality unachievable in a gallery or on the street.119 Hataraki Tadashi was known to be a great sympathizer of Hi-Red Center. He was not an artist blessed with the gift for performance. Not a natural painter like Sakurai Takami (or Ochi Osamu or and Kikuhata), Hataraki initially aspired to be a novelist and could never let go of the critical sensibilities he developed through language. He wrote one of the earliest short critical essays on Happenings in Japan,120 which cited the

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 31. Miki Tomio performs at Experiment: Execution of Testament Exhibition • December 28, 1962 • Jolies Chapeau Gallery, Fukuoka

passage from Shibusawa Tatsuhiko’s writings that appeared at the beginning of this chapter. In the essay, Hataraki argues that Kyūshū-ha, regardless of how avant-garde its activities might seem, remains within the bounds of an “art” movement, and seeks action within urban space that verges on crime and scandal. In June 1962, before Grand Assembly of Heroes, Hataraki chained together seventeen boxes on wheels, totaling six meters long, then tied a twenty-meter-long chain onto them and tried to drag the mass of wheeled boxes and chains across a busy intersection in downtown Fukuoka (location unknown), whereupon he was promptly apprehended by the police.121 According to Sakurai, Hataraki himself admitted that this endeavor was a failure, and Sakurai also regarded Hataraki’s speech at the Grand Assembly, intended to be a performance, not with a critical eye but with one of pity. Although Kyūshū-ha had already been discussing the need to transform the audience into active participants, with the exception of Hataraki, the participation of veteran performers Kosugi, Tone, and Kazakura at the Grand Assembly had little impact on its members. After Grand Assembly of Heroes, several Kyūshū-ha members performed for the Kyūshū-ha Exhibition, held at Shinten Kaikan in December 1963. This was Kyūshū-ha’s first important group show in Fukuoka since 1957, featuring performance in a way that their group exhibitions and joint solo exhibitions had never done in Tokyo. These performances marked a change of course for the group, reflecting on its work up to that point to shift its efforts into local communities. For the exhibition, Ōyama Uichi’s work consisted of loaches moving around in a pool of paint on the floor, which Obata Hidesuke then broils on a shichirin (earthen charcoal grill) and eats; Hataraki wraps his entire body with bandages, turning himself into an object; and Miyazaki Junnosuke and Katae Masatoshi (Katae was fully dressed in a morning suit), walked along a rope strung above the street. None of these acts surpassed the earlier works by Neo Dada and Hi-Red Center, nor did they show the creativity or development of Zero Jigen. Even the group’s local literary circle friends were disappointed because the exhibition was that of “a tour of a second-rate theater company unbecoming of the heroes they were.”122 Around the same time, Kikuhata, who had left Kyūshū-ha123 because he was critical of Sakurai, organized a performance event in Fukuoka at a gallery ran by a hat shop in Tenjin, in collaboration with his Tokyo artist friends. Titled Experiment: Execution of Testament

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Exhibition (December 1962), the performance consisted of Shiga Kenzō124 and ballet dancer Shōji Chima dancing while a half-naked Miki Tomio, his face painted white and wearing white pantyhose, beheaded a chicken [fig. 31].125 Though Shōji’s dance left a deep impression on Tabe Mitsuko, a member of Kyūshū-ha, and public performances by Miki were quite rare, it is difficult to say that the performance contained much in the way of originality, as its title reveals the influence of Marquis de Sade and translator Shibusawa Tatsuhiko,126 and Hijikata Tatsumi had already a slaughtered a chicken during his 1959 performance Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors) at Dai-ichi Seimei Hall. In the end, it was not until the emergence of Collective Kumo, when Kyūshū-ha was slowly unraveling, that genuine performance came to Fukuoka. Considering that Hataraki backed Collective Kumo and Kikuhata was the mastermind that incited it, it becomes clear that the core faction of Kyūshū-ha, centered around Sakurai, was ultimately unable to develop their performance practice.127 12. THE LAST YOMIURI INDEPENDENT EXHIBITION From 1960–63, the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition saw a gradual turn toward artworks in three dimensions and installations that protruded into the space of reality, as well as the removal of works deemed dangerous or obscene, developments that escalating an Anti-Art-like situation. At the 14th exhibition (1962), all of Itoi Kanji’s work was deemed obscene and met with rejection (see chap. 18.4, pp. 401–2); Hirokawa Haruji’s sculpture of a life-sized doll holding a knife, Hamaguchi Tomiji’s wood relief collage that included a knife, Yoshioka Yasuhiro’s close-up photographs of a vagina, and Jikan-ha’s audience participation piece that called for the use of colored liquid all met the same fate as Itoi. As a result, the 15th and final exhibition in 1963 introduced a new “List of standards and criteria for exhibited works for the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.” These new regulations classified works inappropriate for exhibition: works that could disrupt facility management, that emitted sound, that involved dangerous or obscene materials, and so forth. But as the organizers’ suppression of the works that follow by Kosugi and Kazakura will evince, the regulations also worked to police art outside of these specifications. Despite the increasing tendency for works to intrude into real space, it should be noted that not many performances actually took place at the Yomiuri Independent. During the 14th exhibition, Kojima Nobuaki stood in a metal barrel for an extended period of time as a part of his work Possibilities in the Undifferentiated, but it is difficult to categorize this motionless work as performance; it would be more appropriate to classify it as “body art,” work that turns the body or part of the body into art. This type of artwork was a stage in the development of Kojima’s work, which later would focus on life-size human sculptures. Many other works of body art followed Kojima: Hataraki Tadashi at the 1963 Kyūshū-ha exhibition; Hayashi Miyori at the 1963 Okayama Young Artists Group Exhibition; Itoi Kanji at the 1964 Sendai Independent; a mummy-like man128 with a work titled Koroshiya (Killer) at the Saitama Avant-Garde Art Exhibition in 1964; and Saotome Yukio, a member of the Saitama Avant-Garde Artists Group, who exhibited a nude woman as artwork.129 The first and the last performances at the Yomiuri Independent that foregrounded moving bodies, independent from exhibited work, happened at the 15th exhibition. Much has been written about the performances from this exhibition.

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Shinohara Ushio describes the performances by Zero Jigen, Nakajima Yoshio, Kazakura Shō, and Nakanishi Natsuyuki: the exhibition hall of the Independent, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in Ueno was overgrown as more events sprung up than bamboo shoots after the rain. Approximately thirty Zero Jigen members130 from Nagoya are lying on futon bedding spread across the floor as Nakajima Yukio [author’s correction: Nakajima Yoshio] appears, his face painted pure white, dragging objects along the floor. Takamatsu Jirō stretches a hemp rope through the rooms of the museum and out the entrance, all the way to Ueno Station. Photographers gather where Kazakura hangs from a rope, stark-naked. The usually genial museum guard ladies are almost in tears, running around with the people from the newspaper company [the exhibition organizers]. People who didn’t know them stared, thinking that it might be one of the events. Meanwhile, Nakanishi Natsuyuki begins his last supper with a miniature dinner set, eating fried quail eggs as though ignorant of everything going on around him.131

To introduce the actions of the artists who appeared at the exhibition in more detail, Kazakura’s action, as it appears in Akasegawa Genpei’s illustration of the performance,132 seems as though it is being co-acted with Kosugi Takehisa, but in fact they are acting independently. The following is Imaizumi Yoshihiko’s account: There was a break room with a sofa next to the last room of the exhibition hall, which Yomiuri Shimbun had rented. In the room, Kosugi is squatting inside a white cloth bag, and Kazakura, the performer I adore, is doing a yoga-style headstand, wearing only a black turtleneck sweater and exposing his lower body. Although it was really nothing at all, the Yomiuri employee in charge of the exhibition desperately taps at the part of the bag where it seems Kosugi’s head might be, telling him to “stop, please stop.”133

We can see the half-naked Kazakura standing on his head in Akasegawa’s illustration, and Kazakura’s action with the rope that was mentioned in Shinohara’s account can also be verified with a rare photograph of the performance (see plate 4, p. 5). Judging by the list of exhibits, the title of Kazakura’s performance was most likely Jibutsu wa dokokara kite doko e iku (Where do things come from and where do they go?), submitted as a sculpture. The list also includes Kosugi’s works, Micro 4 / Instrument and Chironomy / Instrument, but the performance above was titled Anima 2 (Chamber Music). Inside a white bag about two meters long with zippers of varying lengths attached to it, Kosugi makes sounds using an unidentified sound device (an Indian drum?). Then he proceeds to repeatedly open one of the zippers to peek outside, or to stick an arm or other body part out of the hole, before pulling it back in again. The bag was a device that separated spaces inside and outside of it (Kosugi described it as “a substitute for a room”134), and also an artwork that could be hung on the wall (all three of his works were categorized as sculptures in the list of exhibits).135 Chironomy (“chiro” comes from the Greek word for hand), preformed the following year at Sa’in no gi (Ritual of the Closed Vagina) in Kyoto, in which Kosugi sticks only his arm out from backstage, was a similar piece. Kosugi was impressed that, despite not having coordinated their efforts, his work shared qualities with the actions of

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 32. Zero Jigen, Revolutionary Ritual • 15th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition • March 10, 1963 • Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum

Takamatsu and Kazakura, which expanded the exhibition space.136 As the title of Kazakura’s work, Jibutsu 事物—a word consisting of the character 物 (mono), meaning matter or thing and 事 (koto), meaning incident or event—suggests, the works by Kazakura, Kosugi, and Takamatsu are concerned with the potential for mono/things (objects) to bring about koto/events. Since the body is hidden in Kosugi’s Chironomy, the exposure of the body is necessarily not the main focus of the work. Even so, at the very same exhibition that just the previous year rejected Itoi Kanji’s work which incorporated a pornographic image and Yoshioka Yasuhiro’s close-up photographs of a vagina, Kazakura’s exposure of his lower body was a revolutionary act in the history of art exhibitions, throughout which museums have placed a great deal of restrictions on artistic expression. Imaizumi Yoshihiko called this “an issue unearthed by Kosugi and Kazakura, performers of the finest of incidents.”137 Yomiuri requested that artists not move their works from the areas designated by the exhibition committee, which was renting the space from the museum. Kosugi argued that “My playing music inside the bag is the work in its entirety,” emphasizing that “the work is meaningless if I can’t move around, so the request puts me in a tight spot…the place designated for my exhibit is only a space to hang the tools for my musical performance, and that alone is not the artwork.”138 Returning to Shinohara’s account, the Zero Jigen that makes an appearance does not participate as a group; rather, Iwata and Katō participated as individuals, simply laying on the floor wearing ordinary clothes [fig. 32].139 There is no record of them having caused any disturbance like Kosugi and Kazakura had. The titles in the list of exhibits140 indicate that Iwata exhibited humorous paintings in his typical carefree pop style, while Katō’s works were titled An Entering Nirvana Ceremony Mandala (3/10 Revolutionary Ritual 1), Black Eros (3/10 Revolutionary Ritual 2), 3/10 Revolutionary Ritual Divine Instrument 1, and 3/10 Revolutionary Ritual Divine Instrument 2 (all submitted as paintings). These performances were quite important in the history of Japanese performance art because the artist planned his performance—it was neither improvisational nor spontaneous—which he dated and mapped out as his main submission in the exhibition from the start, using the installations in the exhibition as props. Katō’s strange and esoteric titles, and an installation that consisted of a grid-shaped relief with cigarette butts pasted on it and breast-shaped objects arranged on the floor, were typical of his style in this period. The performance element, however, consisting of nine members merely

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 33. Nakajima Yoshio performance • 15th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition • March 10, 1963 • Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum

lying side-by-side on the floor in plain clothes, alternating in opposite directions, did not exhibit the uniformity and style for which Zero Jigen would come to be known. Another action that occurred on the staircase in front of the museum, which appeared in Shinohara’s account as well as Imaizumi’s, who misunderstood it as the work of Jikan-ha,141 was actually by Unbeat—Kagami Masayuki, Nakajima Yoshio, Tashiro Minoru, Fujimura Tadayoshi, and Yamaguchi Ka­ tsumi, with Itoi Kanji also joining the group’s members.142 Nakajima, with his face painted white and wearing clothes coated with paint, wanders around the exhibition space with an expression of agony [fig. 33]. Itoi and Tashiro join him at the front steps, enacting what Unbeat termed a “damact” (or a “dance of insanity,” as Yoshida Yoshie describes it 143). On a tip from a museum attendant, the police were dispatched and they were all dragged away. According to Yoshida, A guy was raging around crazily in front of the main entrance of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. His face was painted white and he was dragging an object along as he raved about. Nearby, Itoi Kanji aka Dada Kan, the King of Destruction, stood frozen in place. He ripped apart the young man’s [Tashiro’s] shirt. And then that guy, shirtless, stumbling closer looking like he might tumble over, starts bounding toward me as I’m standing there with the curious onlookers.144

Imaizumi and Yoshida claim that this was the first time one of their performances was halted by police intervention,145 but for Unbeat, it was actually the second time that they were arrested—the first instance being the incident at Ochanomizu Station. This final Yomiuri Independent also included a number of other unregistered events, such as the Miniature Restaurant that appeared in the testimony of Akasegawa and Nakanishi.146 Hamaguchi Tomiji, who was disgruntled because he was forced to withdraw his knife artwork from the last year’s exhibition, walked around carrying his work in and out of the museum and moved it to various locations for display, inside the galleries and even outside the museum. Takamatsu extended a rope-like object from the museum to Ueno Park 147 and Nakanishi scattered the clothespins from his artwork on the wall by clipping them onto the visitors. Though may be difficult to deem these

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actions “performances,” they all demonstrate the automatic movement of objects. We might think of these works as a type of “interactive” artwork, much like Jikan-ha had even more consciously explored in its work the previous year, which the audience transformed by stepping into the space of the artwork. 13. THE BEGINNINGS OF JOINT PERFORMANCE EVENTS In the latter half of this period (1960–63), a noticeable trend emerged: performances that occurred disparately—by different groups, in different regions, across different genres—converged through the work of organizers (instigators who were a kind of curator or coordinator). Prior this converging, there were cases in which multiple artists would participate in the work of a single artist, as in the Ono Yōko’s performance described earlier, and instances of artists performing during other established events, such as when Kosugi Takehisa put a gas mask on Kazakura Shō and played him like an instrument by giving him CPR during the third New Directions concert (October 1963), which was organized by musicians. By contrast, however, Sweet 16, a three-day event at Sogetsu Art Center in December 1963, was a more mature manifestation of large-scale, collective performance. From what is presently known of its acts, Iimura Takahiko performed Screen Play, in which he projects a film onto Takamatsu Jirō’s back while Akase­ gawa Genpei, using the light of the projection as his guide, cuts a rectangular hole out of the jacket Takamatsu is wearing. Kosugi performed a musical piece titled Mālika 5,148 in which he watches a vase of flowers blowing in the breeze of an electric fan, waiting for the moment the flowers begin to fall; when they do not, he shoves the flowers into the fan. Shiomi Mieko holds up a placard on stage149 that reads “An event dedicated to J. J. Lebel: Be Absent.”150 Kazakura washes a rope in a sink, and later, in Kosugi’s Theater Music, “plays” the musical act of walking backwards following the instruction “Keep Walking Intently.” There were also dance performances by Hijikata Tatsumi and Kuni Chiya.151 We can gather from the above actions that Sweet 16 was an aggregation of events that lacked uniformity as a result of its varying media and methods. Of all the events at Sogetsu Art Center, Sweet 16 was probably the most anarchistic, but it nevertheless remained an experiment of “high art” on stage. In contrast, the events Banquet Commemorating the Defeat in the War (August 1962), Grand Assembly of Heroes (November 1962), and Super Avant-garde Group Exhibition (June 1963), are more interesting examples from this period for their infiltration into the space of everyday life, connecting them to the street performances of later years. 13.1 BANQUET COMMEMORATING THE DEFEAT IN THE WAR

Held at Kunitachi Community Center in Tokyo on August 15, 1962, Banquet Commemorating the Defeat in the War became the popular name of this event, though the numbered tickets given for the Banquet at the time only read “Art minus Art (in commemoration of our defeat in the War),”152 Yoshida Yoshie selected and invited the participating artists, and therefore the event can be understood as his project; according to an account

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 34. Yoshimura Masunobu brushing his teeth at Banquet Commemorating the Defeat in the War • August 15, 1962 • Kunitachi Community Center, Tokyo

by Akasegawa Genpei;153 in fact, however, Yoshida simply realized that he could rent the community center for cheap, and did not have much of a concept for the event beyond that. The event nevertheless turned out to be a success due to its excellent selection of participants and notable performances, as well as for the way it deceived the audience (reminiscent of Invitation to JASA at Nihon University the previous year) and for its balance between individuality and collectivity. It was the first joint performance by Neo Dada and a butoh dancer, who developed a technique, notable for its repetition and violence, that could not be said to belong to either theater or butoh dance. The artists involved—though there were of course others who played the roles of preparing and eating the food—were Yoshida, Akasegawa, Kazakura Shō, and Yoshimura Masunobu from Neo Dada, Kosugi Takehisa and Tone Yasunao from Group Ongaku, Hijikata Tatsumi, and Hirokawa Haruji. Shinohara Ushio, Masuzawa Kinpei, and Yoshino Tatsumi from Neo Dada, Tashiro Minoru and Nakajima Yoshio from Unbeat, and Itoi Kanji attended as spectators, as did art critic Nakahara Yūsuke.154 Sadly, there is only one surviving photograph from the event [fig. 34], but Akasegawa’s illustration in Imaya akushon aru nomi! “Yomiuri andepandan” to iu genshō (Now we have no choice but action! The “Yomiuri Independent” Phenomena)155 serves as a helpful point of reference. All of the community center’s chairs were put outside and a large table was set up in the center, where a whole roast chicken, spaghetti, bananas and more were laid out in “a heaping feast.” Even though the audience was made to purchase “banquet tickets,” only the participating artists were allowed to sit around the table to eat while the audience could only watch. We might view this event as a precedent for other experiments in holding private meals in public spaces, such as Zero Jigen’s Ritual to Taste a Female Body in Nagoya the following year and Tateishi Kōichi and Nakamura Hiroshi’s meal that was a part of the 1964 Off Museum exhibition at Tsubaki Kindai Gallery. Arguably, the Banquet proceeded without any plan or direction of its overarching flow. After finishing his meal in silence, Yoshimura stands up and begins to brush his teeth until his mouth is red with blood [fig. 34]. Kazakura appears in a mannequin mask and performs a Happening, falling from a chair five or six times.156 Hijikata dances naked to the background music of the sound of water dripping from a faucet. Kazakura performs Execution Ceremony of Sade’s Testamnt157 by pressing a hot anchor to his chest, assisted by Hijikata. Tone plays a piece of chance operation music by “overlaying

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a transparent sheet of scores on a map […] finding points of contoured lines on the map that overlapped with the score, and then dropping eraser-like objects onto a piano from a height of some ten-thousandths (of the altitude on the map) above.”158 Kosugi performs Anima 1, in which he winds a string by rotating his body.159 Although this Banquet was undeniably geared toward the in-group of avant-garde artists and their supporters, it still deserves special mention for the developments it represented within the history of performance art. The event took a step outside of spaces for “art” like the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and Sogetsu Art Center, and connected everyday acts (such as eating) with bodily expression. Unlike Grand Assembly of Heroes, which had a weak unifying concept, and the overly anarchistic Super Avant-garde Group Exhibition, the central conceit of the “banquet” coexisted with the spontaneity of the individual artists. And though artists remained at the center of, the Banquet became a space of expression entirely separate from the “exhibition.” 13.2 GRAND ASSEMBLY OF HEROES

As mentioned earlier, Grand Assembly of Heroes, held at Momochi Beach in Fukuoka from November 15–16, 1962, was planned as a way to rescue Kyūshū-ha from its mid-period crisis. In addition to members Ōyama Uichi, Obata Hidesuke, Sakurai Takami, Tabe Mitsuko, Chō Yoriko, Hataraki Tadashi, and Miyazaki Junnosuke, other participants included: Baba Takehisa from Fukuoka; Mieno Ichirō from Ōita; Kosugi Takehisa, Tone Yasunao, Kazakura Shō, and Yoshida Yoshie from Tokyo; Chiba Eisuke (who later became a member of Jack Society) from Fukushima; and Itoi Kanji from Sendai. The audience included Tazoe Masatake from Fukuoka, who came with Moriyama Yasuhide, the future founder of Group Kumo, and Tanaka Yukito, an arts writer for Mainichi Shimbun, who ultimately came up with the name for Moriyama’s group. Neo Dada members Kinoshita Shin and Tanaka Shintarō also came all the way from Tokyo. Although the majority of the participants were locals, the event surprisingly convinced artists far and wide to make the trek out to Fukuoka. The widespread attention garnered by the event certainly may have stemmed from the network Kyūshū-ha cultivated while by exhibiting frequently in Tokyo, but in fact Kyūshū-ha had also placed an advertisement in the October issue of Bijutsu techō magazine, which is how Itoi learned of the event. The advertisement stated: There are so many troubles, so many travails, but from point zero, amidst the exchange of malice and distain, this announcement of tomorrow, by the massacrers themselves and their mobile works, will lead our grand gathering to success! Our authority and survival are the clarification of a revolutionary aim that can only exist tomorrow! Please come on down to Kyūshū with a tremendously joyous feeling in your hearts!!! —Kyūshū-ha Management

While the event was actually held in Fukuoka, it was charming that they invited the entire country to “come to Kyūshū.”

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 35. Ōyama Uichi performs at Grand Assembly of Heroes • November 15, 1962 • Momochi Beach, Fukuoka

The event venue was Momochi-ya, a large, two-story beachside hut for summer swimmers located close to the city center, which Kyūshū-ha had been renting since 1958 to use as a studio during the winters. The Grand Assembly was a result of Kyūshū-ha’s efforts to overcome the naiveté of their early days. A Kyūshū-ha leaflet read: We must do a complete 180-degree rotation from how we are seen today—we must show, prescribe, give notice, induce action. In other words, we must turn to “command,” lest we face the possibility of submitting to the desire for being “commanded” and be strangely split into two factions.”160

Just as the message suggests, Kyūshū-ha sought to move beyond the relationship in which artwork is no more than something that the audience observes and contemplates, toward one in which the artist compels the audience to bodily, real (social?) action. The same leaflet stipulated that “At any rate, we are not issuing tickets for spectators. All of them are tickets for participants.”161 Here we can discern Kyūshū-ha’s expectation that the distinction between artist and audience could be abolished, inspiring everyone to some kind of action. In this sense, the intent was similar to that of Muse Week, planned by Yoshida Yoshie, in which participants switched roles between performer and audience by putting on or taking off a pair of gloves (see chap. 7.5, pp. 188–9). While the only remaining photographs of the event depict Ōyama Uichi burning an alter constructed of objects, such as whiskey bottles, on the beach [fig. 35], Sakurai Takami and Yoshida Yoshie wrote detailed accounts of the performances inside the hut.162 Below, I will attempt to weave together an outline of the entire event by combining the records of Sakurai and Yoshida, with additional testimonies from other participants. At 7 p.m., there is a speech by Sakurai, something between “opening remarks” and “a forewarning,” and the participants hold a meeting to prepare the schedule of events. Just as they have about figured out the event’s progression, however, Yoshida and the others from Tokyo vehemently object, an early indication of the gap between them. In the end, a very rough schedule is decided upon in which Kinoshita, Kazakura, Tone, Kosugi, Obata, and Tabe are to perform until 7 a.m. the next morning, with the trio of Sakurai, Chō, and Baba performing between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m.

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Itoi Kanji is called on to perform first. The lights are turned off and Itoi strips down to the waist by candlelight, with a piece of paper taped to his back that reads “Dada Kan is still in a rebellion at the age of forty-two,” and wearing a white cloth on his head that is crisscrossed by vinyl tape. Then, shaking the cloth he pulls objects out from inside it—“Yukijirushi brand container of baby formula,” “candy box that opens from the middle,” “tube with a 10cm diameter,” “photo album,”—and gives them to the audience to pass around (see chap. 18.5, pp. 403–4). In typical Itoi fashion, inside the candy box is “a beautifully mosaicked egg,” and pornographic pictures (likely, collages of print clippings) are affixed to the objects.163 Next comes an instruction to blow out the candles, after which Hataraki Tadashi reads “an incantation-style text in a thoroughly administrative, robotic tone.”164 Subsequently, the following actions are performed, though the precise order is unknown. On the ground floor, Obata lays down, wrapped in bandages such that he cannot move his body. Two chickens, similarly bound, are rolling around nearby. A bible and a dissection scalpel rest atop a box covered in white cloth. After Chō releases Obata from his bandages, Obata recites passages from the New Testament and then stabs the chickens in the head with the scalpel, killing them. He then performs a “crucifixion,” nailing one to a blank white canvas and the other to a canvas that had been painted black. Tabe installs mannequin legs, wearing hosiery, on the white wall of a two-ken (approx. 3.6 m 2) square dressing room, and then asks participants to repeatedly hammer nails into the mannequins’ heads, which she has left on the floor. But she ultimately gives up, without any of the mannequin heads having been spiked.165 According to Yoshida, it is a “tactile environment” that “used nude photo collage as a backdrop.”166 At 2:30 a.m., as according to plan, the trio of Sakurai, Chō and Baba begin their performance, distributing leaflets (special edition) titled “Declaration of Anti-Exterior” They tear a blue cloth off a tower-like structure167 to reveal what appears to be a tall building with hard-boiled eggs stuffed into the windows. Once the participants eat the eggs, the light is turned on and everyone can see that Chō is standing inside the object. Meanwhile, Kazakura, Kosugi and Tone continue their “musical performance” over the course of many hours. Kazakura, completely naked, jumps from a beam into an inflated balloon, burying himself within it. Kosugi makes sound using a kind of musical instrument. Then Kazakura goes outside carrying a long string and Kosugi winds it using his body (most likely a rendition of Kosugi’s original work, Anima 1). Tone pushes an organ against the wall and plays it using the pedals while holding down the keys. Chiba Eisuke takes a rabbit-shaped wad of cotton that has been soaked in formalin and lights it on fire, and then drips candlewax on the exhibited artworks, leaving traces of himself throughout the venue. And as a result, an oil painting by Mieno Ichirō catches on fire.168 Chiba frequently conducted actions of this sort during this period, earning himself the ire of other artists. Other indoor actions include Kinoshita’s question and answer session with the participants, and Yoshida scrubbing the floor with a cloth. Outdoors, Ōyama Uichi and Miyazaki Junnosuke perform. Ōyama douses an object altar with kerosine and sets it alight, throws a bottle of sake into the fire and then rolls about on the sandy beach. In contrast to the quite ritualistic feel of Ōyama’s action, Miyazaki digs a succession of holes in the sand; each time the depth of the hole reaches

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about his height and sea water begins to well up in the bottom, he moves and starts digging a new hole beside it in what can only be thought of as an exercise in futility. A simple comparison cannot be made between this action and the hole-digging of Group I at the Gifu Independent Exhibition in 1965 because of the difference in context—one was performed individually, on a beach at night, while the other was performed by a group, on a riverbed during the daytime—but compared the Group I piece known historically as “artwork,” Miyazaki stands out for his Sisyphusian selflessness and genuineness (Yoshida compares it to the strange and wonderful giant palace built by the postman Cheval of France over the course of thirty-three years), which leaves a strong impression on the participants. During a debate forum the next morning on the second floor, according to Yoshida, “the fundamental gap between the theatrical festivities of Kyūshū-ha and the Happenings by Tone, Kosugi, and Kazakura”169 becomes apparent. Yoshida’s generalization, however, is overly simplistic; even if it is clear that the actions of Ōyama and Obata are certainly something akin to muddy rituals, Miyazaki’s is neither theatrical nor ritualistic. Perhaps Yoshida, who had organized the Banquet in Kunitachi and knew not only Kosugi and Tone but also Ono Yōko and John Cage (who had both preformed the previous month in Tokyo), had low expectations for Kyūshū-ha and other local artists, who could not keep up with the trends in Tokyo. And although Sakurai himself readily acknowledged the gap between Group Ongaku’s flair for live performance and their relative inexperience with performance,170 Kyūshū-ha did not put this lesson to use in its later work. For Kyūshū-ha, performance would remain no more than a part, or an extension, of their exhibitions (this was the case for the 1963 Kyūshū-ha exhibition in Fukuoka), a testament to their mediocrity. Grand Assembly of Heroes was significant in that it gave Kyūshū-ha members, who lacked natural aptitude as performers, a large-scale opportunity to express their critical awareness of the need to move beyond the conventional “exhibition” as a means of expression, and also because it marked the emergence of the group’s inclination toward muddy rituals. It is clear, however, that the Grand Assembly was a step back for this group that had hoped to build a mass movement, as none of its artists went on to develop the practice of performance beyond this event, which they held within a space-time inaccessible to both the cities and the ordinary people who lived there. 13.3 SUPER AVANT-GARDE GROUP EXHIBITION

According to event organizer Kagami Masayuki, the line from the event brochure that reads “Rocky Mountain coyotes and wolves of Japan howl to each other, relayed by the stars” is meant to signify that Japanese art is responding to trends in American art.171 Held at Artists Hall in Ginza on June 22, 1963, the participants of the Super Avant-garde Group Exhibition were Unbeat members Kagami, Nakajima Yoshio, Tashiro Minoru and Fujimura Tadayoshi; Itoi Kanji, Hamaguchi Tomiji, and Chiba Eisuke. Nakahara Yūsuke and Yoshida Yoshie’s names were printed on the invitation card without their permission, and the names of Kosugi Takehisa and Shinohara Ushio also appeared, though they did not participate. At the event, Yoshida recalls that “a piano was destroyed, ammonia

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 36. Nakajima Yoshi performs at Super Avant-garde Group Exhibition (presumed) • c. June 1963 • Artists Hall, Tokyo

was strewn about, a fire engine arrived blaring its siren, and some people were taken to the Tsukiji Police Station.”172 According to Kagami and Nakajima, there was no overarching plan and the participants performed various actions as they pleased: one wearing nothing but a pair of underpants, one wearing a steel helmet, one singing and playing music, one playing the piano (Chiba claims this was Nakazawa Ushio173), and one eating a head of a cabbage.174 There was a large audience, and the venue had a long, continuous floor that did not separate the artists from the audience. The substance strewn about, according to Kagami, was actually formalin, putting the audience at risk of asphyxiation; Chiba was the perpetrator of this act, whose actions were also frowned upon at the Grand Assembly. The only photo thought to have been taken of this event shows Nakajima, with his face painted white, lying next to something that looked like sound equipment. [fig. 36] At some point either before or after the Super Avant-garde Group Exhibition, Ka­ gami, Nakajima, Tashiro, Chiba, and Yamaguchi perform in the streets of Ginza near Kunugi Gallery wearing black mosquito nets. They carry a tank filled with five liters of colored water, which bursts, spilling its contents and staining the handbag of a passerby. The artists are taken away by the police.175 Though impossible to verify at present due to a paucity of information, we can conjecture that this action on the streets of Ginza, much like the event at Artists Hall, given a large number of artists acting on their own, was a considerable mess—more chaotic, even, than the Banquet Commemorating the Defeat in the War and the Grand Assembly of Heroes. We can presume, based on the fact that none of the star artists of Neo Dada participated in this event in Ginza, at the heart of Tokyo, while many did appear in the latter two events, that Unbeat sat on the periphery of the art world. Nevertheless, it can still be said that this event, enacted in a state of anarchy without any control by its organizers, in Tokyo just after the last Yomiuri Independent, was a consequence of the overall trend of this era.

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14. INTERVENTIONS AND PROVOCATIONS In addition to the events discussed thus far, 1963 saw a spread in bodily expressions by artists across Japan. At the opening of the 2nd Okayama Young Artists Group Exhibition in December, Hayashi Miyori and Terada Takehiro, artists from Okayama, enacted performative expressions with Shiomi Mieko (who was born in Okayama) of Group Ongaku, while Suzuki Akio, who is now an internationally renowned sound artist, held his first sound-event, dropping objects from the staircase of Nagoya Station. What commonalities, however, did these performances from 1960–1963 share? First, as can be seen in the case of Neo Dada and its associates, is the joint organizing that came as a result of the intimate collaboration between artists, creators of music and film, and even political activists. What made these couplings and crossings possible, beyond the existence of venues such as the Yomiuri Independent and Sogetsu Art Center, was the shared orientation toward anarchy in the post-Anpo moment, the drive to overcome existing political and cultural methodologies. This type of inter-generic connection would become sparse around the mid-1960s, when “performance art” was becoming more established, but would reemerge in the late 1960 within a new political and technological context. Second, as seen in the cases of Kazakura and Akasegawa, most often performance occurred not as an independent expression, but as an “intervention” into the main plot or leading role. Performers took on the role of disrupting the pre-established harmony of institutionalized sites of expression from the flanks: political rallies, film screenings, concerts, dance performances, and art exhibitions. Connected to the second, the third shared feature is the inclination not to seek reciprocal communication with the audience, but rather to shock and to provoke— spectators, city dwellers, students, or the media. As Katō Yoshihiro from Zero Jigen’s description of their rituals in urban space as “raping the city” suggests, these performances were one-way, incomplete, uninterested in seeking the comprehension or acceptance of the audience, and to the contrary, willing to intentionally confuse and anger the audience. This attitude is visible in Invitation to JASA, the screening of Document 6.15, the Gigi performance, Ono Yōko’s Audience Piece, Yamanote Line Festival by Hi-Red Center, the actions of Unbeat, and interventions by Akasegawa, Kazakura and the League of Criminals. This notion of “performance as provocation” may have originated from a declaration by Jiritsu Gakkō, with which some of these artists were involved: You should realize that communication established at such times [when internationalists, nationalists, and fascists form a united front in spite of their opposition] will shatter in one fell swoop the mutually-permeating delusion [here: misconception] of the moment, when the administrative organs of the political powers that be surpass all others—that this communication, no matter what, must be one-way, that is, not a question of understanding, but a knife that suddenly pierces the chest.176

While this kind of “one-way” communication was inherited by angura (underground) theater in the latter half of the decade, after the mid-1960s it lost its relevance as people adapted to mass media and mass society, as new networks of artists formed, and with the advent of movements seeking mutual exchange between diverse peoples.

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NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, “Zen’ei to sukyandaru” [Avant-garde and scandal], in Shinsei jutai [Immaculate Conception] (Tokyo: Kawade Shōbo, 1987): 161–162. Katō Yoshihiro, “Kokyō Nagoya no Sakae-machi de geijutsu teroristo zenra shūdan ‘Zero Jigen’ wa tanjō shita” [The naked collective Zero Jigen was born in Sakae-machi, Nagoya, my hometown], Ragan [Naked Eye], no. 3 (December 1987): 7. Yoshida Yoshie, “Hapuningu no henbō” [The transfiguration of Happenings], Tenbō [Prospect], no. 128 (August 1969): 97. Shinohara Ushio, Zen’ei no michi [The road to avant-garde], (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha,1968), 28–30. Lee Mina, “Bokushingu peintingu no rireki o megutte” [An Observation on the Chronology of the Boxing Paintings], Shinohara Ushio: Boxing Paintings and Motorcycle Sculptures, (Kamakura: The Museum of Modern Art, 2005): 101. After the publication of this book, a film capturing the earliest performance of “boxing painting” was discovered. It was aired in NBC News, U.S., July 30, 1960, titled “Japanese Beatnik.” This footage was used in the film, Cutie and the Boxer, directed by Zachary Heizerling, 2013. Reiko Tomii, “Ushio Shinohara’s Action in Three Modes,” Hiroko Ikegami and Reiko Tomii eds., Shinohara Pops! The Avant-Garde Road Tokyo/New York (New York: Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, 2012): 32, 35. “Ohige no bīto ga bakuhatsu suru mangaka shijin Tomita Eizō no mune no uchi” [Bearded Beat explodes: Inner thoughts of a cartoonist and poet Tomita Eizo], Shūkan Josei [Weekly Woman], 4th week, no. 171 (October 1960): 32. “Sōretsu! Akushon gaka (Action Artist at Work),” Asahi Gurafu [Asahi Picture News], March 17, 1961: 44–45; Waseda Akihiro, Ōe Kenzaburō, Shinohara Ushio, “Zadankai mecha kucha bīto gēru” [Roundtable discussion: Super Beat-Guerre], Mainichi Gurafu [­Mainichi Graphic], May 7, 1961: 25. William Klein, Tokyo (Tokyo: Zōkeisha, 1964), 40–41. Shinohara, Zen’ei no michi, 73–74. During this period, an action by Group Zero took place that was similar to Kyūshū-ha’s parade (1957) and Neo Dada’s street publicity. Group Zero’s action was referred to as

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

“Demonstration/Walking in the City without Reason” and took place around Obiya-machi area in Kōchi City in August 1961, a year before the group joined Zen’ei Tosa-ha (Avant-Garde Tosa School). Its members walked around with a large painting of a zero mark that contained holes, through which they thrust out their heads. It was a “moving advertisement,” similar to Yoshimura Masunobu’s mummy wrap using Neo-Dada’s exhibition poster. For Jacqueline Paul, see the following photobook, which includes documents of Neo Dada artists: Japan Quest: An Illustrated Opinion of Modern Japanese Life, eds. Jacqueline Paul and John G. Roberts, (Tokyo: Uchida Rokkakudo Publishing House, 1962). Neo Dada no shashin [Neo Dada Witnessed], ed. Kuroda Raiji (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1993), 22. Exhibition catalogue. “Tokyo no wakaki ekakitachi no shūmatsu pātī” [Weekend party of young artists in Tokyo], Sekai hadaka bi gahō [World nude beauty graphic magazine], August 1960. “Nusumidori, bīto zoku no kurisumasu gēmu” [Sneak shots; Beat tribe’s Christmas Game], Hyakuman nin no yoru [Night of a Million People], January 1961, 143–52. Shinohara Ushio, Takahashi Eisuke, Nishimura Hajime, and Murai Kōshirō (pseudonyms of Toyoshima Sōroku, Yoshimura Masunobu, and Kazakura Shō), “Ishoku zadankai ‘Neo Yajū-ha’ no urayamashii kekkon seikatsu, wakai sakka no gurūpu” [Unusual round table talk; “Neo Fauvists” envious married life of a young artists group], Hyakuman nin no yoru, vol. 6, no. 12 (December 1961): 50–57. Hariu Ichirō, “Kiki no naka no zen’ei gun” [Avant-garde group in crisis], Bijutsu techō, no. 183 (January 1961): 30. The founders of this group, with a group name that represents “eccentrics,” were Tomita Eizō, Akiyama Shōtarō (photographer), Hijikata Tatsumi (butoh dancer), Ishihara Shintarō (novelist), Terayama Shūji (as tanka poet), and other celebrities. They envisioned a cultural movement by young artists and intellectuals similar to Beatniks in New York. “Ohige no bīto,” Shūkan Josei, 32–34. See also “Bīto zoku wa kensetsuteki na senkusha: Ginza ni shinshutsu shita kichigai buraku” [Beat tribe is a constructive forerunner: A crazy tribe advanced to Ginza], Shūkan Sankei

164

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

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[Weekly Sankei], no. 467 (October 17, 1960): 59. “Hanabanashiki ‘zokunai kon’ fankī no kekkonshiki” [Flamboyant “inner-tribal wedding”: Funky’s wedding], Mainichi Grafu [Mainichi Graphic], November 6, 1960, 42–43. In the photos accompanying the above article (“Beat tribe is a constructive…”), Masuzawa Kinpei also seemed to have been on the stage. “Oretachiwa bīto suruze!” [We do Beat!], Jitsuwa Yomimono, December 26, 1960. In this article, Neo Dada group is considered “a group of Beat Tribe,” with photographs of members dancing naked with jazz music at Yoshimura’s atelier. Author unknown, Flyer of the Second Neo Dada Exhibition, September 1960. A TV program “Kita kara Minami kara” [From north and south], broadcast on TBS on July 25, 1960, described summer camps in various parts of Japan under the title of “Under this Flag.” Ashihara Eiryō, “Kokokara naniga umareruka” [What will be born from here?], Geijutsu shinchō, September 1960, 214. Akasegawa Genpei, “Kazakura,” Bungei [Literature], no. 20-9 (September 1981): 117. This was a rare collaboration of Neo Dada members, with the idea originating from Kazakura, adapted by Akasegawa, and directed by Suga Toshinori. Okada Takaaki, ed., “Kazakura Shō ryakunenpu” [Kazakura Shō selected chronology], Kikan, no. 12 (May 1981): 71. Neo Dada no shashin, 42–43. Also, as seen in a photo by Nakajima Masatsugu, Masuzawa urinated on the bedding, conveying that the bedding was something to leave a trace of the living body for him. The combination of the different textures of the soft bedding and glass light bulbs was similar to that of underwear and a vacuum tube in Akasegawa’s sculpture Sheets of Vagina. The promised scholarship from the Ford Foundation was suddenly cancelled, so Isozaki could not go to the U.S. Hiramatsu Tsuyoshi, Isozaki Arata no ‘tochō’: Sengo nihon saidai no konpe [Isozaki Arata’s “Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building”: The biggest competition in the postwar Japan] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 2008), 218. Itō Teiji, “…Something Happens…,” Bijutsu techō, no. 209 (September 1962): 83. Something Happens was held on the same day as the opening of Gutai Pinacoteca, the base for Gutai exhibitions in Osaka. The two unrelated

30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

events on the same day seemed to epitomize the fact that the activities of Gutai were totally separated from those of Neo Dada and other movements in Tokyo. Translator’s note: the event title, Something Happens, is originally in English. Kagami Masayuki, in an interview with the author, Tokyo, January 12, 2006. A letter from Nakajima Yoshio to Itoi Kanji (June 23) states “Unbeat was established at Meiji Gakuin University.” As the performance of Taiyō-shin e no gishiki [A ritual for the sun god] fell on a Saturday, we surmise that the performance occurred in 1962. There was no mention of the name Unbeat in the previous materials of events at Shōhei High School and Meiji Gakuin University. Poster for the 85th Shirokane Festival organized by the Art Club and Unbeat Organizers, October 1962. The score was from Cage’s concert at Sogetsu Art Center on October 23–24, 1962. Kagami took the score with cigarette ash used by one of the performers from audience seat. Kagami Masayuki, in an interview with the author, Tokyo, September 19, 2008. “Mahiru no gaitō-geijutsu? BG ya sararī-man no dogimo o nuku” [Mid-day street art? Astonished office workers], Asahi Shimbun (Osaka), December 4, 1962, evening edition: 7. Unbeat’s use of sound through tape recordings and live performance outside of well-equipped concert halls was pioneering in the history of Japanese performance. As there exists a photograph (owned by Katō Yoshihiro) of Tashiro lecturing at the Japan Super-Art Trade Show in Nagoya at the end of August in 1964, his trip to Europe must have taken place afterwards. The word hapuningu (happening) appeared earlier in print in the introduction of “Happuninguzu gurūpu no ‘kankyō, jokyō, kūkan’ ten” [Environment, Situation, Space exhibition by “Happenings” group], by Uekusa Jin’ichi, Sogetsu Art Center Journal, July 1961. Ishizaki Kōichirō states that Happenings were introduced to Japan by Ono Yōko. “Kantō zadankai: Gun’yūkakkyo shite ikizama ga yakitsuki” [Opening round table talk: Rivaling heroes gathered and their ways to live was scorched], Yoshida Yoshie, Kaitaigeki no make orite: Rokujū nendai zen’ei bijutshu-shi [The curtain falls on deconstruction theater:

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40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

53.

54. 55.

A history of 1960s avant-garde art], (Tokyo: Zōkeisha, 1982), 9. Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks, Yes, Yoko Ono (Tokyo: Japan Society in association with Abrams, 2000), 150. Munroe and Hendricks, 150. Munroe and Hendricks, 150. Munroe and Hendricks, 151. Ono, “To the Wesleyan People” (see chap. 2.2, p. 66). Yes, Yoko Ono (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 2003), 104–6. Donald Richie, “Tsumazuita saizensen: Ono Yōko no zen’ei shō” [Frontline stumbled: Ono Yōko’s avant-garde show], Geijutsu shinchō, vol. 13, no. 7 (August 1962): 60–61. Richie, 60–61. Ichiyanagi Toshi wrote a refutation to this article. Ichiyanagi Toshi, “Saizensen no koe: Donald Richie e no hanron” [Voice of the frontline: Objection to Donald Richie], Geijutsu shinchō, vol. 13, no. 8 (August 1962): 138–39. Yoshida, Happening no henbō, 97. “It must be said that no other concert in Japan shocked the audience as much as Cage’s at Sogetsu Art Center.” Akiyama Kuniharu, “Soko wa rokujū nendai zen’ei geijutsu no shingenchi datta” [It was the epicenter of the 1960s avant-garde art], Kagayake 60 nendai: Sōgetsu Āto Sentā no zenkiroku [Let the 60s shine: Sogetsu Art Center complete documents] (­Tokyo: Film Art, 2002), 49–50. Mizuno Shūkō, “John Cage ga yatteiru koto wa mezurashiku mo nanotomo nai” [What John Cage is doing is nothing unusual], Kagayake 60 nendai, 175 For tenjō-bito, see chap. 1.6, pp. 48–9 and n. 26. Dōmoto Masaki, “Jurarumin sei toranku no naka no dai tōkyō no ruteki-sha” [A great Tokyo castaway in a duralumin trunk], Kagayake 60 nendai, 197. Akasegawa Genpei, “Chōhatsuteki na hapuningu no kowasa” [Scariness of provocative Happenings], Kagayake 60 nendai: 175. Kosugi Takehisa, in an interview with the author in Kosugi’s office, Osaka, July 21, 2006. Imaizumi Yoshihiko, “Ekakidomo no hentekorin na arekore no maesetsu 4: Sōdai deno hanzaishadōmei shusai no engeki shō to pure H.R.C. no kankei ni tsuite” [Painters’ strange this and that prologue 4: About the theater show organized by the League of Criminal at Waseda University and its relation to preH.R.C.], Aida, no. 52 (April 2000): 27.

56. Akasegawa mistakenly wrote that the performances by Nakanishi and Kosugi took place at the theater performance of the League of Criminals. Akasegawa, Tōkyō mikisā keikaku [Tokyo Mixer Plan], (Tokyo: ParcoShuppan, 1984), 31. But Imaizumi pointed out Akasegawa’s misunderstanding. Imaizumi, “Ekakidomo no hentekorin na arekore no maesetsu 4,” 27. 57. According to Akasegawa, the June 1963 program was Yangu sebun tsū ō (Young 720), but as the program started in October 1966, it could have happened later in the program, or it could have been a different program. 58. Akasegawa Genpei, “Akasegawa Genpei jihitsu nenpu” [Akasegawa Genpei autochronology], Akasegawa Genpei tokushū [Special Feature: Akasegawa Genpei], Kikan, no. 14 (January 1987): 81. 59. Nakanishi Natsuyuki was supposed to appear, but it was switched to Akasegawa at the last moment. 60. Motofuji Akiko, “Hijikata no sonzai sonomono ga butō” [Hijikata’s existence itself was Butoh], Kagayake 60 nendai, 189 61. See a stage photograph in Shashinshū Hijikata Tatsumi: Nikutai no butō shi [Photographs Hijikata Tatsumi: Butoh Document of Body], ed. Morishita Takashi (Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan, 2014), 70–71. 62. Okada, “Kazakura Shō ryakunenpu,” 76. 63. Kazakura Shō, Tokei no furiko [Pendulum of a clock] (Tokyo: Shoshi Yamada, 1996), 76.　 64. Adachi Masao, Eiga/Kakumei [Film/Revolution] (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2003), 131. 65. According to Hiraoka Masaaki, the first artistic activity by the League of Criminals was a two-person exhibition of Miyabara Yasuharu and Odate Setsuko at a coffee shop Doga (Degas?) in Ekoda, Tokyo, in November 1961. Hiraoka Masaaki, Hito no hajime [The beginnings of man] (Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 2012), 140. 66. Imaizumi, “Ekakidomo no hentekorin na arekore no maesetsu 4,” 26. 67. Imaizumi Yoshihiko, “Ekakidomo no hentekorin na arekore no maesetsu 12: Hanzaisha dōmei no manbiki ga gen’in de Akasegawa sen’ensatsu saiban no maku ga kitte otosareta” [Painters’ strange this and that prologue 12: Shoplifting by the League of Criminals caused the 1,000-yen note trial], Aida, no. 61 (June 2001): 29. Imaizumi asked Nakanishi to contribute to the magazine, but Nakanishi did not oblige.

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68. “Keikan niwa nankai datta momoiro hon: Waisetsusho hanpu de tsukamatta sōdaisei bungaku gurūpu” [A pink book too difficult for police: Waseda University students literature group arrested for distribution of obscene publication], Shūkan Shinchō (December 30, 1963): 35. 69. “Hanzaisha dōmei no dai ichigō hanzai: Waisetubunsho hanpu zai ni towareta sōdaisei gurūpu no haikei” [The first crime of the League of Criminals: the background of the Waseda University student group accused of distributing an obscene document], Shūkan Bunshun (January 6, 1964): 113. 70. Mori Hideto, “Kenkyo sareta ‘Akai Fūsen’ ni tsuite no shiteki apīru” [A personal appeal about the apprehended Red Balloon], Shisō no Kagaku [Science of Thought], no. 58 (January 1964): 92. 71. Imaizumi Yoshihiko, “Ekakidomo no hentekorin na arekore no maesetsu 5: Hanzaisha Dōmei nanka he no kappa! Ekakidomo wa bōsō shita” [Painters’ strange this and that prologue 8: To hell with the League of Criminals! The painters went wild], Aida, no. 53 (May 2000): 21–22. 72. Hiraoka Masaaki, “Harenchi kan kan” [Shameful Can Can], Dattannjin Sengen [Tartar Manifesto] (Tokyo: Gendai Shichōsha, 1964), 78–157. 73. Hiraoka, 16. 74. Hiraoka, 16. 75. VAN’s office moved to Ogikubo after a year and a half, lasting until 1969. Nishimura Tomohiro, “Nihon jikken eizō shi 17: Nichidai eiken to VAN eiga kagaku kenkyū-jo” [History of experimental films in Japan 17: Nihon University Film Study Group and VAN Film Science Institute], Aida, no. 104 (August 2004): 27. 76. Hariu, “Kiki no naka no zen’ei gun,” 29. 77. Adachi, Eiga/Kakumei, 114. 78. The Japan premier that actually took place was in 1976, with a title Shingakki: Sōkō Zero [New Term: Zero for Conduct]. 79. Perhaps the event organizer knew about Eric Satie and Francis Picabia’s event in which they sold tickets for ballet performance titled Sold Out, and on the performance day, put a notice “Sold Out” in an empty and darkened theater. Donald Richie considered this event as a more successful example of provoking the audience than the performance by Ono Yōko (Richie, “Tsumazuita saizensen,” 61). 80. Adachi Masao, “Subete wa ‘VAN eiga kagaku kenkyū-jo’ kara hajimatta. Eiga=Undō ni

81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86.

87.

88. 89.

90.

91.

92.

93.

kanshite no danshō” [Everything started with VAN film science study institute: A fragment about Film=Movement], Underground Film Archives (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2001): 98. Adachi, 98. Adachi, Eiga/Kakumei, 84. Adachi, 84. Adachi, 84–85. Adachi, “Subete wa ‘VAN eiga kagaku kenkyū-jo’ kara hajimatta,” 99. Matsuda Masao and Hirai Gen, “Eigashi no dansō, Toshi e no shiryoku” [A fault of film history, sight toward city], Underground Film Archives, 86. Adachi, Eiga/Kakumei, 82–85. Yoshida, Kaitaigeki no maku orite, 123. VAN held another Happening at the Kanba Michiko memorial meeting on the second anniversary of “6/15” in June 1962 that consisted of blowing up a balloon borrowed from Kazakura (who did not participate) and commissioned music by Ichiyanagi Toshi and Tone Yasunao. Yoshida, Kaitaigeki no maku orite, 123. Okishima Isao, “Waratte, waratte, mijimede, waratte: ‘Sain’ wa kaku tsukurare, kōkai sareta” [Laugh, laugh, miserable, laugh: Thus Closed Vagina was produced and screened], Underground Film Archives, 103. Okishima, 103–104. Terayama Shūji, “Hakubutsukan de korosareta” [Being killed at a museum], Iede no susume [Encouragement to leave home] (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1972), 113–116. Nakazawa Ushio executed a group performance while wrapped in white cloth. See a photo documenting the performance by Hara Eizaburō. Shirakawa Yoshio, Nihon no Dada 1920-1970 (Tokyo Hakuba Shobō, 1988), 139. “Encounter of artists and audience should happen on the same dimension, and should not be separated and unrelated as in existing art.” Tanaka Osamu, “Jikan-ha,” Bijutsu Jānaru, no. 30 (June 1962): 16. Nakazawa Ushio ed., “Jikan-ha keireki” [History of Jikan-ha], Mebius no tamago ten 1999 [Mobius Egg Exhibition 1999], (Tokyo: Mebius no tamago ten zenkoku jimukyoku [National Office for Mobius Egg Exhibition], 1999), 33; Yoshida Yoshie (photo: Sakai Yoshiyuki), “Gunzō ’642: Group Jikan-ha arui wa kankyaku o ugokasu kokoromi” [Group ’64-2, Group Jikan-ha or an attempt to move the audience], Shin-fujin [New Woman], (February 1964): 96–98. Yoshida, Kaitaigeki no maku orite, 90.

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94. Regarding Hi-Red Center, refer to the following exhibition catalogue: Yamada Satoshi and Mitsuda Yuri eds., Hi-Red Center: Chokusetsu kōdō no kiseki [Hi-Red Center: The Trajectory of Direct Action] (Tokyo: Hi-Red Center ten jikkō iinkai [Executive Committee for Hi-Red Center Exhibition], 2013). 95. Nakanishi called this event “a kind of Happening or event” titled Yamanote Line Festival when he testified at the Model 1,000-Yen Note Trial. “Sen’ensatsu saiban ni okeru Nakanishi Natsuyuki shōgen roku 1” [Nakanishi Natsuyuki testimony record at the Model 1,000-Yen Note Trial, 1], Bijutsu techō, no. 347 (October 1971): 91. 96. Nakanishi translated “ropeology” as the “study of rope” in his testimony. Nakanishi, “Sen’ensatsu saiban,” 101. 97. There were some schemes, such as chaining the beer jugs to the wall. Also, when an audience member gave money to Nakanishi, he used a clothespin-making machine to press clothespins, which then dropped eggs from the ceiling onto Nakanishi’s egg-shaped object, breaking them. Akasegawa, Tokyo mikisā keikaku, 77–78, 85–87. 98. I had hoped to reproduce Murai Tokuji’s photographs The 6th Mixer Plan and Yamanote Line Festival in this book, but Nakanishi did not agree to it. For photos of these performances, see: Akasegawa Genpei, Tokyo mikisā keikaku, 15, 92–96; The Adventure of Akasegawa Genpei (Nagoya: Nagoya City Art Museum, 1995), 67 and 77; Shirakawa Yoshio, ed., Dada in Japan 1920-1970 (Tokyo: Shoshi Kaze no bara, 1988), 124; Doryung Chong, ed., Tokyo 19551970: A New Avant-Garde (New York: Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012). Exhibition catalogue cover. 99. William A. Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music group and Yasunao Tone’s early work,” Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language (New York: Errant Bodies Press, 2007), 32. 100. “Besides, seeing so many cameras and even a film camera at the scene, even innocent passengers were not disturbed. But somebody told me that some passengers were whispering to each other that a SF film or TV show was being shot. When we encounter something unusual, we have an ability to reduce it to something we can understand and return it to the everyday. Also, among those with cameras, far more were summoned by Nakanishi and Takamatsu for documentation than those who

had invitation cards. They tried to agitate the consciousness of the audience, but they hampered it themselves.” Imaizumi Yoshihiko, “Ekakidomo no hentekorin na arekore no maesetsu 3: Yamanote-sen enkan undō wa Ueno Kōen de ikikureteshimatta” [Painters’ strange this and that prologue 3: Yamanote Line Circle Movement came to a dead end at Ueno Park], Aida, no. 51 (March 2000): 20. 101. Nakanishi, “Sen’en satsu saiban ni okeru Nakanishi Natsuyuki Shōgen roku 1,” 96. 102. Nakanishi Natsuyuki, “Sen’ensatsu saiban ni okeru Nakanishi Natsuyuki shōgen roku 2” [Nakanishi Natsuyuki Testimony Record at the Model 1,000-Yen Note Trial, 2], Bijutsu techō, no. 348 (November 1971): 220. 103. Neither Nakanishi nor Akasegawa had any recollection of this. 104. Akasegawa, Tokyo mikisā keikaku, 98. Nakahara Yūsuke, “Haireddo sentā” [Hi-Red Center], Bijutsu techō, no. 227 (October 1964 Special issue): 40. 105. Nakanishi Natsuyuki, “Sen’ensatsu saiban ni okeru Nakanishi Natsuyuki shōgen roku 1,” 111-112. According to Takamatsu, it was called a “blind game.” “Roundtable discussion: Signs of Direct Action 2,” Keishō, no. 8 (June 1963): 17–18. 106. Inoue Shōji, “Mizukami Jun no 60, 70 nendai: ‘Riakushon’ to ‘Kami-ha (Niru-ha)’ no jidai” [Mizukami Jun’s 1960s and 70s: The era of “reaction” and the “Paper School” (Nir School)], Rear, no. 6 (May 2004): 10. 107. Mizukami Jun, in an interview with the author, Nagoya, April 28, 2006. 108. Artists who graduated from non-art related faculties and did performances other than Mizukami were: Matsuzawa Yutaka (Waseda University, Department of Architecture, Faculty of Science and Technology, and later studied at two Universities in the U.S.), Kami­ jō Junjirō of Zero Jigen (Tohoku University, Faculty of Agriculture), Tone Yasunao (Chiba University, Department of Japanese literature, Faculty of Literature), Nakajima Yoshio and Tashiro Minoru (Meiji Gakuin University, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Science), Ikeda Shōichi (Kyoto University, Department of Macromolecular Science, Faculty of Engineering), and Azuchi Shūzō (Ritsumeikan University, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Literature). 109. Ono Yōko performed at this coffee shop in July 1964.

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110. Mizukami Jun, from the April 28 interview. 111. Katō was confident that the year of this photograph was 1962, but as the scene looks almost same as that in Crazy Love, 1968, the photo could be re-enactment of the performance in 1962. 112. Katō Yoshihiro, “Zero Jigen, matano na o ‘kyōki teki nansensu (mushō kōi-in) no monogatari’” [Zero Jigen or a story of “crazy nonsense (gratuitous act institute)”], Kikan, no. 9 (June 1964): 21. 113. Katō, 21. 114. Takahashi Kōko was thought to be singing utai (noh chant). Takahashi Kōko, in an interview with the author, January 21, 2008. 115. Katō, 21. 116. See chap. 11, p. 306 and notes 22 and 33. 117. Sakurai Takami, “‘Eiyū tachi no daishūkai’ no hōkoku oyobi 1964 nendo ‘Eiyū tachi no daishūkai’ teian [A report on The Grand Assembly of Heroes, and a proposal of the 1964 Grand Assembly of Heroes in FY1964]” Kyūshūha, no. 7 (October 1963): 1. As for the explanation of “Room Concept,” see Sakurai Takami, “Kyūshū-ha kaigō tsūchi” [Kyūshū-ha meeting notification], Kyūshū-ha, no. 6 (October 1962). 118. Sakurai, “Kyūshū-ha kaigō tsūchi.”　 119. Obana’s old house in Chikugo-yoshii was formerly a rice granary. The installation was set in an approximately 9-tatami matted room (14,6 m 2), a wooden floor room, and an 8-tata­ mi matted room (13m 2). There were a pair of white gloves on a jet-black bed, a pair of black high-heel shoes on the wall covered with black curtains, a long rod, “something like a sex toy,” (Kyūshū-ha?) journals, and a buoy. The devices in the basement reported by Sakurai (see Sakurai, “Kyūshū-ha kaigō tsūchi”), which were said to include one to look up magnified images of the people dancing upstairs, and another, a box with wheels, in which to lay down be connected to cords similar to an electro-cardiogram, in order to have amplified colors, shapes and smell directly transmitted to the brain. However, these were entirely Sakurai’s fantastical fabrications. Obana Shigeharu, in an interview with the author, Fukuoka, June 24, 2006. 120. Hataraki Tadashi, “Hapuningu=sukyandaru” [Happening=Scandal], Shin genjitsu shūdan kaihō [New Reality Group Newsletter], no. 3 (July 1963): 14–15. 121. Sakurai, “Eiyū tachi no daishūkai’ no hōkōku,” 13.

122. “Kiroku to dōkō” [Records and trends], Kiroku to geijutsu [Records and Art], no. 7 (January 1964): 29. 123. After leaving Kyūshū-ha, Kikuhata Mokuma announced during a roundtable discussion in 1964, “I recently joined Hi-Red Center”—though it may just have been his usual lip service. 124. Shiga Kenzō performed at his solo exhibitions at Fūgetsu-dō (October 1962) and at Lunami Gallery (June 1963). 125. Kikuhata Mokuma, “Kōki” [Postscript], Kikuhata Mokuma chosakushū 3: Kaiga no genkyō [Collected Writings of Kikuhara Mokuma 3: Phantom home of paintings] (Fukuoka: Kaichōsha, 1994), 297–98. Kikuhata Mokuma, in an interview with the author, Fukuoka, January 19, 2007. 126. The title of Miki’s performance came from Execution Ceremony of Sade’s Testament, the performance by a Surrealist introduced by Takiguchi Shūzō (referring to Shibusawa). The performance with the same title was already enacted by Kazakura Shō and Hijikata Tatsu­ mi in August 1962 (see chap. 20, p. 450; see also n. 157 below). 127. Shin Genjitsu Shūdan (New Reality Group) in Ōmuta, including ex-Kyūshū-ha Taniguchi Toshio, jointly organized Zen’ei sakka okugai jikken shō (Avant-garde artists’ outdoor experimental show) with Kyūshū-ha in Ōmuta in May 1963. While it included the carrying of sculptures on cars and a parade with drumming, it basically should be categorized as an outdoor demonstration of making sculptures with cement. (From photographs in Taniguchi Toshio’s collection). 128. The performer is Moriya Naoyuki, according to Matsunaga Ko’s interview with the artist, 2000. 129. It refers to Saotome Yukio’s work Shōhin 1969. 5A. B [Commodity 1969. 5A. B] exhibited at the 9th Gendai Nihon Bijutsu ten [Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan] (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, May 1969). Itō Bungaku, Hadaka no nyōbō [Naked wife] (Tokyo: Sairyū-sha, 2009), 219–27. 130. According to a documentary photograph, there were nine artists. 131. Shinohara, Zen’ei no michi, 98–99. 132. Akasegawa Genpei, Imaya akushon aru nomi! ‘Yomiuri andepandan’ to iu genshō [Now we have no choice but action! The “Yomiuri Independent” Phenomena] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1985), 191.

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133. Imaizumi Yoshihiko, “Ekakidomo no hentekorin na arekore no maesetsu 8: Yomiuri anpan de Takamatsu no himo o Ueno eiki made nobashitano wa watashi da” [Painters’ strange this and that prologue 8: It was me who extended Takamatsu’s string to Ueno Station], Aida, no. 57 (September 2000): 18. 134. “This bag is actually a replacement of a room. The various sized zippers are equivalent to doors and windows of a room. When I stick my hand out for about one hour, only the hand is out while the rest of my body is inside—the sense of outside/inside gets confused. […] I transformed a room to a large bag.” Kagayake 60 nendai, 160. 135. See the following interview: Kosugi Takehisa: Oto no sekai, Atarashii, Natsu [Kosugi Takehisa, World of Sound, New Summer] (Ashiya: Ashiya City Museum of Art, 1996), 12–13. Tabe Mitsuko exhibited her body suits with many zippers (Omote to Ura [Front and Back] in the catalogue list) on the wall, but she did not perform using them. See also “I Can’t Give Up Hope” The Art of Tabe Mitsuko, ed. Shōji Sachiko (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Art Museum, 2022), 33. Exhibition catalogue. The title is translated as The Right and Wrong Side. 136. Kosugi Takehisa, “Paiku ga piano o kowashita!” [Paik destroyed the piano!], Kagayake 60 nendai, 160. 137. Nagara, “Chokusetsu kōdō no Kizashi Ⅱ”, 32. 138. The Yomiuri representatives stated that they had received numerous complaints from artists that their works had been moved and replaced by other works in the space. However, Kosugi insisted that he had not moved the other artists’ works. When the Yomiuri representatives told Kazakura that what he had done could not be accepted as an artwork, Kazakura said “have you read the title? It is Jibutsu [Things]. Jibutsu means koto [another reading of the Chinese character 事 ji,which means incident] and 物butsu [material]. So, the work includes an incident.” Yomiuri responded by shifting focus, saying “What you have done is public display of obscene objects, and it has made the public uncomfortable.” Imaizumi, “Ekakidomo no hentekorin, 8” 18. 139. Kishimoto Sayako, who did not become a member of Zero Jigen, participated. 140. Titles of Iwata’s exhibits were: Damatte daite (Hold me in silence), Shindemo ii (I don’t mind dying), Aitsu bakari ga naze moteru (Why does

only he get all the attention?), and Taiyō wa hitoribocchi (The sun is alone). 141. “Perhaps it was Jikan-ha, or some hot-blooded young people performing a show of resistance on the front steps of the museum on the opening day, which was already reported in Geijutsu shinchō magazine [April 1963, 14]. The museum notified the police, and they were taken custody, thus opening a way for police intervention. Later, they also wandered around inside the museum like ghosts, which was not so impressive.” Imaizumi, “Chokuse­ tsu kōdō no kizashi Ⅱ,” 31. 142. Kagami, in an interview with the author, Tokyo, January 12, 2006. 143. Yoshida, Kaitaigeki no maku orite, 117. 144. Yoshida Yoshie, “Yōkyō kara yōkyō ni byōjō akka shita ha, ha, happunisuto Nakajima Yoshio” [Worsening from feigned m ­ adness to sham madness: Ha ha ha Happenist ­Nakajima Yoshio], Eiga hyōron, vol. 29, no. 8 (­August 1972): 65. 145. Yoshida, Kaitaigeki no maku orite, 117–118. 146. Akasegawa, Tokyo mikisā keikaku, 49–50. Imaya akushon aru nomi!, 196; Nakanishi, “Sen’ensatsu saiban ni okeru Nakanishi Natsuyuki shōgen roku 1,” 100. 147. It was Shinohara Ushio who stretched the string to the entrance of the museum, and Imaizumi suggested extending it further to Ueno Station, with Nakanishi actually executing this. Imaizumi, “Ekakidomo no hentekorin na arekore no maesetsu 8,” 17, 19. 148. Mālika means “wreath” in Sanskrit. 149. Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 148–49. 150. Jean-Jacques Lebel was a painter and performance artist born in Paris in 1936. 151. Yoshimura might have done the same performance of brushing teeth for a long time as at the Banquet Commemorating the Defeat in the War. (Iyama Takashi, in a phone conversation with the author, December 16, 2008) 152. “The Principles of Art” by Akasegawa Genpei: From the 1960s to the Present, ed. Suga Akira, Mizunuma Hirokazu and Matsuoka Takeshi (Chiba: Chiba City Museum of Art), 2014, 95. Exhibition catalogue. 153. Akasegawa, Tokyo mikisā keikaku, 20–21. 154. Akasegawa, 28. 155. Akasegawa, Imaya akushon aru nomi!, 181. 156. Nakanishi’s comment in “Roundtable discussion: Signs of Direct Action 2.”

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157. This title and the performance using a branding iron could have been derived from Jean Benoit’s ritual at the International Surrealism Exhibition in 1959 in Paris (see chap. 20.4, p. 450). 158. Akasegawa, Tokyo mikisā keikaku, 25. 159. Akasegawa, 25–26. 160. Sakurai, “Eiyū tachi no daishūkai’ no hōkoku,” 10. 161. Sakurai, 10. 162. Sakurai, 11–18; Yoshida, Kaitaigeki no maku orite, 148–52. 163. Sakurai, 12–13. 164. Sakurai, 13. 165. Tabe Mistuko, “Tabe Mitsuko, Oral History, November 29, 2010,” interview by Chang Wenjuan, Kitahara Megumi, Kokatsu Reiko, and Nakajima Izumi, Oral History Archives of Japanese Art, www.oralhistory.org/archives/ tabe_mitsuko/interview_02.php. 166. Yoshida, Kaitaigeki no maku orite, 152. 167. In Sakurai’s writing, it is deshin (crêpe de Chine), a French crepe cloth used for lining women’s dresses.

168. Itoi Kanji, in a personal letter to the author, February 25, 1994. Itoi, in an interview with the author, Sendai, August 21, 2004. 169. Yoshida, Kaitaigeki, 152. 170. “At any rate, I really felt the strength of playing music. In contrast, paintings don’t play.” Sakurai, “‘Eiyū tachi no daishūkai’ no hōkoku,” 19. 171. Kagami Masayuki, in an interview with the author, Tokyo, January 12, 2006. 172. Yoshida Yoshie, “Kokkyō o tokashi toshi o name: Mō hitori no rokujū nendaiji Nakajima Yoshio” [Melting national borders, licking cities: Another child of the 1960s, Nakajima Yoshio], Bijutsu techō, no. 358 (August–September 1972): 95. 173. Chiba Eisuke, in an interview with the author, Tokyo, August 26, 2006. 174. Kagami Masayuki, in an interview with the author, Tokyo, January 12, 2006. 175. From the interviews with Kagami and Chiba. 176. Nagara Tō (Imaizumi Yoshihiko), “Jiritsu ­gakkō no kito ni yoseru” [On the plan for Jiri­ tsu gakkō],” Keishō, no. 6 (June 1962): n.p.

CHAPTER 7

Onto the Streets! Away from the Capital! (1964–1965) The Spread of Action-Expression

1.

THE OUTSKIRTS OF ART

The Tokyo Olympics was held in 1964. To coincide with the opening of the games, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen began service on October 1, 1964, dramatically shortening the travel time between Tokyo and Osaka. Other transport networks—such as the Metropolitan Expressway—were expanding nationwide. The face of Tokyo itself was being transformed. In the same year, Japan became an IMF Article VIII country and restrictions on foreign travel were lifted. The Japanese economy was becoming increasingly internationalized, and internationalization brought with it a new focus on urban beautification (see chap. 21, pp. 457–8). The Building Standard Act was amended in 1964,1 abolishing height restrictions and paving the way for the development of new high-rise structures. On April 28, 1964, Japan joined the OECD; the very same day saw the launch of the lifestyle magazine Heibon Punch. The confluence of these events defined the year. Economic growth, concomitant with an increased international presence and the emergence not only of a new urban youth culture but also a media platform to support it, signaled both at home and abroad that Japan was undergoing radical transformation. There were also political changes. In November, Satō Eisaku replaced Ikeda Hayato as Prime Minister. By 1965, after the economic boom of the Olympics, recession kicked in, leading to a series of major bankruptcies. In February 1965, the U.S. started bombing North Vietnam, and in Japan, the Citizen’s League for Peace in Vietnam (Beheiren) formed in protest. 1964 was also a notable year in the art world. The sudden cancellation of the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition led to a need for fresh venues and new ways to accommodate the country’s expanding avant-garde scene. Artists themselves began directly soliciting the engagement of art critics and the popular media. These moves were reflected in a flurry of exhibitions and events: Ritual of Sa’in in Kyoto (May), Off Museum in Tokyo (June), Japan Super-Art Trade Fair in Nagoya (August–September), the Gifu Independent Exhibition in Gifu (August 1965), and Muse Week in Tokyo (December 1965). These were also changing times for the Anti-Art movement. On January 8, 1964, Akasegawa Genpei was summoned to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department (the event was reported by Asahi Shimbun on January 27), marking the beginning of the Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident. This series of events would culminate in the Supreme Court ruling against the artist in 1970. That same month, an open discussion titled “‘Anti-Art’: Yes, or No?” took place, leading to the second phase of the Anti-Art debates. And whilst in Tokyo itself the increasing influence of Pop Art (see chap. 3, p. 77) heralded the decline of Anti-Art with its focus on bodies and junk waste, new Anti-Art movements were surfacing in the Kansai area. Manabe Sōhei and Ōe Masanori, who had formed Jikken Guraundo ∧ (Experimental Ground ∧[ah]) the previous year, staged an intervention at Ritual of Sa’in in Kyoto by depositing garbage collected from the streets in front of the

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venue. In July, Katō Minosuke, another member of the group, participated in an exhibition in Kyoto with Ikemizu Keiichi and Tashiro Masayoshi titled Anti-Art: Three Artists Exhibition, organized by Nakamura Keiji. In 1965, Ikemizu began staging solo actions. Two years later, with artists such as Mizukami Jun who were staging performances in Kyoto around the same time, he formed The Play. 1964 also marked a turning point in the history of performance art. In October, Hi-Red Center staged their seminal Happening Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropolitan Area (Be Clean!)—though this also marked the beginning of the group’s dissolution. Katō Yoshihiro, a core member of Zero Jigen, moved from Nagoya to Tokyo to open an electric company and embarked on a series of street interventions, sometimes in collaboration with Iwata Shin’ichi, who had remained in Nagoya, and other times with the Tokyo members. In July and November, the group staged consecutive performances at the Naiqua Gallery and various outdoor spaces in a concerted attempt to establish their presence in Tokyo. The sheer number of performances staged by the group between 1964 and 1966, together with their bold use of urban space and radically unconventional style, was little short of astonishing. Their momentum increased over the next couple of years, cresting in 1967–8. In September 1965, meanwhile, the exhibition Flux Week was held, marking the first major introduction of Fluxus to Japan. With the participation of ex-Jikken Kōbō members, the Fluxus movement led to the Intermedia events of the late 1960s. Flux Week, and the events it spawned, signaled the fact that Japanese performance art had joined the wider international movement. Indeed, the lifting of overseas travel restrictions in April 1964 prompted the emigration of a number of important Japanese artists to the U.S. and Europe. Kagami Masayuki and Nakajima Yoshio of Unbeat went to France, later followed by Tashiro Minoru (Nakajima subsequently moved to the Netherlands, with Kagami returning to Japan in 1969). Kinoshita Shin of Kyūshū-ha left for Paris in November 1964. In March 1965 Sakurai Takami moved to San Francisco, where he remained until October 1967. In July 1964, Shiomi Mieko and Kubota Shigeko went to New York to join Fluxus, and a month later, Ono Yōko returned to New York after a short period in Japan. Ōe Masanori also left for New York in 1964, returning in 1969, while in August 1965, Kosugi Takehisa launched his first Europe–U.S. tour (which ended December 1967). Within Japan itself, however, the departure of these artists opened the way for a new generation to take over the performance scenes in Tokyo and Kansai. The major shifts in performance art over the period can be summarized as follows. First, bodily expressions expanded into large-scale outdoor spaces; for example, the Independent Art Festival in Gifu (Gifu Independent). Secondly, Gifu and other regional Independent exhibitions—such as the Nagoya Japan Super-Art Trade Fair—facilitated connections between regional artists who otherwise worked alone, including a younger generation that had not exhibited at the Yomiuri Independent. These regional exhibitions contributed to the formation of the artist networks that can be seen emerging from 1967 onwards. Thirdly, the period saw a succession of performances in urban spaces by the likes of Zero Jigen and Hi-Red Center, as groups responded to the need for new venues to replace the Yomiuri Independent, and, particularly in the case of Hi-Red Center and Itoi Kanji, to the urban renovations that took place in the leadup to the Tokyo Olympics. Fourthly, genre-crossing (intermedia) events—such as the Ritual of Sa’in in Kyoto (which

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notoriously ended in chaos)—shifted to more organized joint performance events. Examples of these were the events held by Yoshida Yoshie at the Modern Art Center of Japan (MAC-J), with Muse Week in December 1965 standing out as particularly notable. 2.

PERFORMANCE AT REGIONAL INDEPENDENT EXHIBITIONS

Following the cancellation of the Yomiuri Independent, a number of Independent exhibitions and events sprung up between 1964 and 1966 that took up the term “Independent” in their titles: 1964* February–March The 17th Japan Independent (Tokyo, 1947– ) March The 8th Kyoto Independent (Kyoto, 1955– ) June The 5th Himeji Independent (Himeji 1961–1965) June–July Independent ’64, a.k.a. Hariu Independent (Tokyo, one-off) July The First All-Japan Independent (Yokohama, –1965) September–October The Sendai Independent (Sendai, one-off) December Independent ’64 in the Wilderness (Nagano, one-off)2 Film Independent (Tokyo, one-off) 1965 March June August

The 24th Hokkaidō Independent (Asahikawa, 1946– ) The First Gunma Independent (Maebashi, one-off) Independent Art Festival, a.k.a. Gifu Independent (Gifu, one-off)

1966 August

Festival of Contemporary Art, a.k.a. Sakai Independent (Osaka, one-off)

*Annual events that recurred in subsequent years are not listed more than once

These independent exhibitions took place throughout Japan, and the majority of them originated in response to the demise of the phenomenally successful Yomiuri Independent. Notable exceptions are exhibitions that began prior to 1964 and continued despite changes in the artistic environment (such as the Japan Independent, organized by Nihon Bijutsu Kai [Japan Art Society]), and exhibitions in Hokkaidō and Kyoto. For young and unknown artists, particularly those working in regions beyond the major cities, independent exhibitions presented an important opportunity to gain critical recognition for their innovative and experimental work. These artists were typically excluded from juried exhibitions (even prefectural ones) still controlled by the quintessentially Japanese iemoto system, which was structured around a rigorously hierarchical relationship between master and apprentice (this system still functions today in the ikebana and tea worlds). Meanwhile, affordable commercial galleries or public exhibition spaces were few and far between. There were no media channels to publicize their work more broadly, and the costs and organizational effort required to hold an exhibition in

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Tokyo—where both critics sympathetic to avant-garde art, and the media, were concentrated—were not practicable. But the success of the Yomiuri Independent as a testing ground for avant-garde art and the nationwide publicity it attracted had clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of Independent exhibitions. Independent exhibitions, in sum, offered artists a way to promote their experimental work more widely, provided a crucial channel to connect with one another (especially the large-scale events), and helped artists to achieve wider public recognition for their work (including local and even national media coverage). They also spared them the expense of exhibiting in Tokyo, and the need to go cap in hand to conservative regional art authorities. Yoshida Yoshie called the strategy “an act of protest against the centralized hierarchy of Art.”3 Yet the Yomiuri Independent continued to be an alluring option for regional artists. It had the backing of a media empire, could rely on the publicity power of Yomiuri Shimbun (one of the major newspapers) and offered the possibility of being nominated by influential art critics. None of the regional Independents boasted such favorable conditions, and in this sense, Tokyo retained its privileged position in the art world. Independent ’64, for example, organized by influential art critic Hariu Ichirō and held in Tokyo, was snubbed by ex-Neo-Dada artists, while the All-Japan Independent in nearby Yokohama ended up as a “local” exhibition attended mostly by local resident artists. 4 Given the spotty track record of other Independents, there were doubts about whether artists would even be willing to incur the travel and shipping costs demanded to participate in exhibitions in Gifu and Sakai; yet, the Gifu Independent managed to attract the attention of not only the art world but also that of the media at large (though that coverage was not always favorable). Looking back today, it was the only regional Independent of historical significance. At other Independent exhibitions, not blessed with the organizational capacity of Gifu and lacking appropriate venues to make experimentation possible, it was impossible to avert the mayhem in the wake of the anarchic and disruptive artworks that had emerged towards the end of the Yomiuri Independent. During Independent ’64, for example, Chiba Eisuke informed the reception desk that he was going to “exhibit bacteria”5 and placed a toilet bowl in the venue, which he then urged the public to use. More problematic was the Anti-Art duo Manabe Sōhei and Ōe Masanori from Kyoto6 who sounded a siren inside the gallery, and strew about dried ice on the first day and formalin on the second day, infuriating more conservative artists.7 Tateishi Kōichi, hot-tempered on a good day, was outraged.8 Similar disturbances occurred at the Sendai Independent. The event was organized by the conservative modern artist Miyagi Teruo, who presided over an exhibition space in Sendai that was supported by the Satō Gallery in Tokyo.9 The venue was a downtown department store, and department stores, even to this day, represent a more restrictive exhibition space than the conventional gallery. Itoi Kanji exhibited an object that included pornographic photographs; he also transformed himself into a living sculpture, bandaging his head and wearing a red loincloth.10 In another performance, he paraded naked through the street with Kamijō Junjirō, a member of Tōhoku University Art Club who would later join Zero Jigen. Chiba Eisuke fell afoul of the store management with his Entrance Series. The work consisted of “thin packing strings that crisscrossed from wall to wall like a spider-web, with blue ‘handle with care’ tags and red plastic strings

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dangling at intervals, and ‘rubber bands’ scattered on the floor.”11 The department store manager stated, “It’s not art—it’s trash.”12 On the same grounds, Itoi’s objet was not allowed to be displayed in its entirety 13 because “it would make customers uncomfortable.” Both the Hariu and Sendai Independents thus exposed a number of logistical issues: the risk of restrictive exhibition policies and other forms of censorship imposed by those in charge of exhibition spaces; the difficulty of achieving widespread media publicity; and the impracticality of incorporating fluid and ephemeral expressions—e.g., performance and installation—in the absence of adequate organizational structures. 3.

A WATERSHED MOMENT: THE GIFU INDEPENDENT This is a mass rally of lone wolves from throughout Japan! The roar of resistance to false authority demands that we, artists and outlaws, band together! —Excerpt from submission guidelines, Gifu Independent Exhibition poster

How did the Gifu Independent become the only Independent exhibition to avoid the problems that beset others, and what made it such a watershed in art of the 1960s? Its success, as Takahashi Ayako has suggested,14 was due primarily to its high level of organization which, for a regional Independent exhibition, was exceptional. Vava, the artists’ group in Gifu responsible for the exhibition, was led by Nishio Kazumi, an influential local doctor, together with a group of city officials (one of them, Gotō Akio, later became mayor of Seki City). Government connections were crucial for obtaining sponsorships and negotiating access to public spaces, which for the Gifu Independent included the 50,000m 2 outdoor space of the Nagaragawa Riverbed (on the condition that the organizers could evacuate the artworks in the instance of high water), the 570 m2 Kogane Park, and the over 2,000 m2 Civic Center. The organizers also recognized the need to attract both the art community and the general public. To this end, they scheduled the exhibition to coincide with the 20th National Athletic Festival held in Gifu that year; they also held it during the summer vacation. They utilized a popular tourist spot, Nagaragawa River, famous for cormorant fishing; and they involved Hariu Ichirō, Nakahara Yūsuke, and other famous art critics in the planning stages.15 These strategies, widely employed by the Venice Biennale and other international exhibitions that cater to tourists, are also now regularly used in the regional art festivals held throughout Japan since 2000 to promote regional development and tourism. As its exhibition poster announced, the Gifu Independent was intended as a mass rally of “lone wolves”: artists from throughout Japan—individuals and, at Nakahara Yūsuke’s instigation, groups and collectives—hungry to showcase their work. Admittedly, only a few of the star artists from Tokyo’s Yomiuri Independent participated, but the exhibition succeeded in attracting newly formed groups from Tokyo and its vicinity, as well as groups from the Kansai area. These included Tokyo’s Jack Society and Zero Jigen; Gar Gar Contemporary Art Society and Saitama Avant-Garde Artists Group from Saitama; Group I (Kobe); Okayama Young Artists Group (Okayama); and Vava (from Gifu, the organizers’ base). The only participant from Kyūshū-ha was Ōyama Uichi, known for

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his memorable ritual in the 1962 Grand Assembly of Heroes. Ōyama also took part in the Sakai Independent a year later. The Gifu Independent was also significant in that it offered a wider range of entry categories than previous independent exhibitions. In the final Yomiuri Independent, traditional “painting” and “sculpture” categories had been broadened to “two-dimensional work” and “three-dimensional work.” Gifu took this a step further, adding “theatrical work (including dance),” “film,” “sound,” and “others.” These new categories—foreshadowed by the diverse media showcased at Sogetsu Art Center events and Film Independent—reflected the conviction that “anything that can be perceived by the five senses, from sound and light to time and space, is creative material.”16 The organizers also considered staging dance performances on a dancing boat (odoribune) on the Nagaragawa River,17 but this component was never realized. There were, ultimately, very few dance, film, or sound works, and those that did take place had minimal visual impact. Moreover, the fact that they were held at separate venues (for example, films were screened at the City Library Hall)18 meant that they attracted little attention. Nonetheless, in terms of the structure of the exhibition, the fact that some performances were officially classed in the category “Others”—although not yet in the category of “hapuningu” (Happening), as in the Sakai Independent a year later—was momentous. In this sense, the Gifu Independent can legitimately be considered an “art festival” rather than an “art exhibition.” Of further interest due to their unique logistics, Zero Jigen and Kurohata’s bodily expressions (discussed later) were all performed at the outdoor riverbed. Ironically, by locating these types of on-site art making and performances—which were naturally prone to unexpected accidents—apart from more conventional artworks that were sited indoors, experimental presentations were free from any intervention by the organizers. The challenge posed by transporting large-scale works capable of standing out visually against the spaciousness of the riverbed meant that many artists elected to create installations on-site. Indeed, a significant trend that emerged during the exhibition was works that required no shipping or material costs, which relied simply on the conditions or materials on hand; examples are the conceptual works of Ikeda Tatsuo and Matsuzawa Yutaka,19 as well as works by Mizukami Jun, who was not on the list of exhibitors but took part unofficially. In Semiotics, for example, Mizukami walked around the riverbed making marks on stones he found lying on the ground. He also performed Lip Bubble by suddenly appearing with his lips quivering (the details are unclear, but he may have been blowing saliva bubbles from his mouth). Saitama Avant-Garde Artists Group’s Ishi­ tsu monogatari (Lost and Found Story) demonstrated the same tendency: group members left artworks in various locations throughout the city for the general public to find and bring to the exhibition venue.20 The concept did not work out in practice, but the work was nonetheless a pioneering experiment in soliciting audience participation and utilizing the full extent of the exhibition space. Other examples of ephemeral performative works included those by Kurohata and Zero Jigen, Jack Society, and the hole-digging by Group I, now celebrated in the annals of art history. Kurohata 21 raised a flag containing the words “Black bud [kuroi me]… [illegible] …Kurohata Revolutionary Avant-Garde Artists: Front League.” They also participated in an action with Zero Jigen involving three men launching themselves onto a light pink futon mattress that was spread out on the riverbed [fig. 37]. On the same occasion,

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 37. Kurohata and Zero Jigen performance • Gifu Independent • August 1965

 38. Zero Jigen performance • Gifu Independent • August 1965

Kurohata members set off firecrackers and smoke bombs, simulating a battlefield. This was possibly one of the earliest performances staged in protest of the Vietnam War. Zero Jigen also enacted a two-part ritual at night inside a freakshow-style tent. In the first part, a group of men forms a circle, howling, while inside the circle men and women run around colliding with one another. In the second part, a high-heeled shoe is dangled from a string attached to a pulley, which in turn is attached the waists of two women. Katō lies naked beneath the shoe and as the women twist their waists, lowering the shoe, the heel brushes against his penis, producing an erection. Seven men and women lie writhing, faced upwards beneath Katō.22 The group then performs a ritual entitled ketsu­zōkai (literally “ass world,” punning on the Esoteric Buddhist concept of Taizōkai, or “Womb World”), in which naked men line up on all-fours with lit candles hanging from their buttocks. Ketsu­zōkai subsequently became part of the group’s repertoire. [fig. 38] Group I’s hole-digging became the group’s representative work, foreshadowing that of later groups such as Mono-ha. Performed by nine of its members under the blazing sun [fig. 39], the action was significant in terms of its gratuitousness and its demonstration of the anonymity of collective work. It also made optimal use of the space and structures offered by the exhibition, and its intervention in an open natural space was typical of Earthworks. The strong conceptual focus of Group I’s work made it one of the outstanding collectives of the 1960s. It is debatable whether digging holes qualifies as performance, but since the members placed more importance on the process of digging

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 39. Group I, Hole • Gifu Independent • August 1965

than the actual form of the holes themselves (in contrast to Sekine Nobuo’s Isō—Daichi [Phase—Mother Earth]), the action clearly fits within the bracket of performance art. Meanwhile, both Akiyama Yūtokutaishi’s The Elegant Life of Mr. H at the Civic Center and Ikemizu Keiichi’s The Man (the catalogue lists the title as Homo Sapiens/ Man ♂) at the riverbed involved the artists displaying themselves in cages (the similarities were coincidental, and their contrasting characteristics have been discussed by the critic Akane Kazuo23). Rather than performances, these were closer in concept to Kojima Nobuaki’s “body art” work at the 1962 Yomiuri Independent, in which he exhibited himself as a live sculpture. One of the distinct features of the Gifu Independent was its tendency towards collaborative productions and presentations, such as works by Group I. Saitama Avant-Garde Artists Group, for example, created an event titled Naburi (Tantalization), in which members arrange 200 wooden stupas randomly around a scaffold erected on the riverbed. They then place mannequins on the scaffold, spraying them with foam to create the appearance of flesh, and burn them.24 Like Ishitsu monogatari, this was a collaborative action executed on a scale impossible for an individual working alone. These works by the Saitama group notably developed the possibilities offered by collective artmaking. In particular, Ishitsu monogatari should be recognized as a “project” that broke out of the confines of established art audiences and engaged directly with wider urban spaces. A number of participants at the Gifu Independent—Group I and Jack Society, for instance—displayed billboards emblazoned with their group names, suggesting that the exhibition also served as an opportunity for groups to publicize their manifestos. Judging from its title, Our Struggle by Okayama Young Artists Group is also likely to have been polemical, although no further details are known about it. It is notable that, despite the bucolic atmosphere of the location itself, works by groups from Okayama and Saitama contained references to the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam which had begun six months earlier, though they were less apparent here than in Kurohata’s antiwar works. Saitama Avant-Garde Artists Group, for example, stated that its performance Naburi was an expression of the anger felt by its members at the contemporary situation both at home and abroad. Targets of its frustration included: “Vietnam, common evils, weapons, imperialism, agony, poison gas, napalm shells, the smell of death, people being tortured

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to death, defendants, emptiness, holes, contradiction, true independence, anger, everyday life, liberation, kitchen scenes, sensation tactile, maze, is there a way out?, walls, axis of rotation, slaughter, weapons, the Geneva Convention, etc.”25 A number of artists also appear to have participated unofficially at outdoor sites beyond the scope of the organizers’ control: the performance by Mizukami described above, and Jack Society’s more straightforward publicity stunt in a shopping arcade, discussed below.26 But there were likely also other performances that merit further research, though records of them are sparse. On many fronts, the Gifu Independent was visionary and it left its mark on art history. It was a large-scale event well-supported organizationally that worked closely with the tourist industry, and it managed to bring together independent artists and groups from all over Japan. It trialed outdoor on-site art installations, performance, and conceptual works; interventions in wider urban spaces; and collective art making—and it was these achievements that made it an artistic watershed whose impact is still felt in contemporary Japanese art. 4.

INTO THE SPACE OF THE CITY

Whereas the performances at the Gifu Independent all took place on the Nagaragawa River plain, the years 1964–5 began to see more bodily expressions in urban space, beyond museums and galleries. Jack Society and Zero Jigen are paragons of this trend. Jack Society, as we shall see, explored a number of different publicity strategies, and encouraged avant-garde artists to integrate their activities in the everyday social world. There is, however, no common thread unifying their works. One of their performances at Gifu Independent involved Sasaki Kōsei, Chiba Eisuke and others dressing in summery short sleeve shirts and shorts and walking from the Civic Center through a shopping arcade, noisily kicking along 18-liter tin cans27 and dragging large sheets of paper, including one with the words “Tokyo Jack” written on it [fig. 40]. Like the street parades of Kyūshū-ha, Neo Dada, and the Kōchi-based Group Zero (which goes on to become Zen’ei Tosa-ha, “Avant-Garde Tosa School”), the performance was designed simply to attract attention to the group in a busy shopping area.

 40. Jack Society performance • Gifu Independent • August 1965

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 41. Zero Jigen, Ginza Panty Parade • c. December 1964 • Ginza, Tokyo

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 42. Zero Jigen, Formalwear Bathing Ritual • c. December 1964 • Meguro, Tokyo

Zero Jigen’s bodily expressions up until 1963 were largely confined to galleries and empty lots, but beginning in 1964 the group staged a succession of performances in streets and other less conventional spaces, both in Nagoya and Tokyo. Their urban-space performances over this period include the following works. In Insane Nonsense Exhibition (January 1964), Katō Yoshihiro, Iwata Shin’ichi, and Koiwa Takayoshi walk through the streets in Nagoya with an assortment of objects attached to their bodies (see chap. 13.3, pp. 333–4). Katō is subsequently active in June–July: during consecutive solo exhibitions at Naiqua Gallery, Tokyo, he attaches price tags to his body; at an off-track betting establishment in Shinbashi he masturbates on stage; at Spain, a coffee house in Shinjuku, he “covers himself with sawdust”28 and gradually undresses. July  1964 saw Zero Jigen’s street crawling performance in Shinjuku, which was captured in the important documentary film Aru wakamono-tachi (Some Young People). In December 1965, during Muse Week, Katō and two other members walk around with ridiculous objects attached to their heads and backs [fig.  47] (see also p.  508). Outdoor actions included: six men walking through Ginza wearing women’s underwear over their trousers (c. December 1964) [fig. 41]; artists getting into a public bath fully clothed (c. December  1964) [fig.  42]; and a group of men in formal attire boarding a Yamanote Line train carrying a naked woman wrapped in plastic sheeting (c. October 1965) [fig. 43]. These performances all demonstrated Zero Jigen’s increasingly confident use of urban space.

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 43. Zero Jigen, Ritual of Transporting a Wrapped Woman’s Body • c. October 1965 • Unidentified station in Yamanote Line, Tokyo

 44. Hi-Red Center, Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropolitan Area (Be Clean!) • October 16, 1964 • Ginza, Tokyo

In June–July and November 1964, the group (led by Katō) held consecutive group exhibitions at Naiqua Gallery, a hub of avant-garde art. The group advertised these performances in Bijutsu techō (in the same issue, it also advertised its activities at Japan Super-Art Trade Fair, held in Nagoya from August to September) suggesting its newfound resolve to extend its reputation further afield. But at the 20th Century Exposition of Ass World Ritual Objects by Katō and Iwata, held at Naiqua Gallery in November and again at Kashima Shrine, the group’s focus shifted to ritualistic setups, reflecting Kato’s aim to act out feelings of malaise in urban spaces and, in parallel, to utilize confined areas in order to express condensed, intense emotion. It was during the same period that Hi-Red Center performed their renowned Cleaning Event [fig. 44] in October 1964. As we will see in chapter 21, the performance was a reaction to the city-wide beautification campaign leading up to the Olympics. The initial idea was to fill all the garbage bins in the city with garbage.29 Manabe Sōhei and Ōe Masanori had conducted a similar but more direct action involving urban garbage during the May 1964 Ritual of Sa’in in Kyoto, but rather than a performance intervention, Hi-Red Center used the act of cleaning itself (dressing up as official city cleaners rather than using actual trash as a prop) to comment on government policy.30

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Itoi Kanji’s action in Ginza in October was another significant example of urban space performance in 1964. Itoi arrived in Tokyo having been frustrated by the number of regulations at the Sendai Independent, where he had performed a naked Happening with the Tōhoku University group. His action involved running down Ginza in a loincloth, his face covered with a white cloth, brandishing a piece of red fabric like an Olympic torch. He gradually removes the loincloth until he is completely naked, whereupon he is then taken to a police station and admitted to a mental hospital. All of this plays out as intended. 5.

JOINT PERFORMANCE EVENTS

Major shifts taking place in performative art during this period included the spread of performative expressions, a move towards collective projects, and increased use of urban spaces to avoid the restrictions imposed by conventional venues. These factors also led to better organized events and provided greater opportunities for collective expressions. Significant examples of these are Ritual of Sa’in, Japan Super-Art Trade Fair, Flux Week, and Muse Week. The TV documentary Some Young People can arguably also be included in this list: although the actions were filmed in separate locations (rather than a single venue), the documentary brought together works by pioneering performance artists within a single virtual space. This is far from a comprehensive picture of the times. Despite the move towards collaborative works, a number of artists—members of Zero Jigen and Kurohata, as well as Mizukami Jun—continued to perform independently in different forums, and there were joint performance events by other artists not mentioned here. Nonetheless, a closer look at the five events listed above helps us begin to understand the circumstances and contexts that paved the way for the heyday of performance art from 1966 to 1968. 5.1

RITUAL OF SA’IN May 5–7, 1964, Maruyama Park Amphitheater Concert Hall, Gion Hall, Kyoto

Sa’in no gi (Ritual of the Closed Vagina, hereinafter Ritual of Sa’in) by Adachi Masao (co-produced by Nihon University New Film Research Group) was one of the earliest experimental films, and it successfully bridged avant-garde practices of the early 1960s with the angura culture that emerged later in the decade. It was intended as an expression of “the feeling of blockage—like a closed vagina—after the failed 1960 Anpo Struggle, and, at the same time, as a love story.”31 First screened in November, 1963 at the festival of the Faculty of Arts, Nihon University, the film was screened and performed in Kyoto in May 1964, at Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka in November 1965, and at the Modern Art Center of Japan (under the direction of Yoshida Yoshie) in December. The pre-event at the Kyoto City Maruyama Park Amphitheater on May 5–6 and the screening at Gion Hall32 on May 7, 1964, were designed as “intentionally outrageous publicity stunts aimed at creating a fully-realized ritual (i.e., an “event”), of which the film was merely a symbol.”33 Bringing together people from the visual arts, music, film, and theater, it was also

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noteworthy as a “total event.” Accounts by Adachi, Okishima Isao, and Komatsu Tatsuo, who was involved in the theater presentation in Kyoto, offer a good overview. The event left a deep impression on Komatsu in particular: Ritual of Sa’in was particularly significant because the participants had total freedom to express the full range of their emotions. It was the first time there had been anything like it in Kyoto—all these artists coming together, the scale of the event, its sheer scandalousness, the pre-events, dealing with the aftermath, it was fantastic. And the way it appalled self-proclaimed liberal intellectuals and conservative factions! There have been other attempts to match it but in terms of shock factor, nothing has come close.34

Possibly because Adachi was dissatisfied with Tokyo audiences’ reaction to the film after all the effort that had been invested,35 colleagues involved with its production in Kyoto negotiated with Gion Hall to organize another event, asking Akasegawa Genpei, Kazakura Shō, and other Neo Dada artists to participate. They were joined by Jōnouchi Motoharu from VAN and Koike Ryū (who later becomes part of Taj Mahal Travellers) from Tokyo, and the so-called illegitimate children of the pre-angura Kyoto theater scene: Gendai Gekijō (Contemporary Theater) led by Komatsu, S no Kai (S Society) from Doshisha University, and Kyōraku Shinsengumi of Kyoto University.36 The event began with a pre-event the evening before at the open-air concert hall in Maruyama Park. “[Kazakura] banged on the keys of a grand piano, then he began whipping it; performers dashed around the stage; one danced naked, one sat cross-legged, stern-faced and meditating while one ran around splashing people with a bucket of water. One performer was attacked by Moro (Morotomi Yōji from League of Criminals) and abducted in a waiting car.”37 There were more than ten performers in all, according to Adachi. Kazakura’s destruction of the piano with a hand-made whip,38 was intended not as an individual act of destruction but as “everyone’s sacrifice.”39 Akasegawa “lit pieces of paper and scattered them on the stage.”40 The performances were watched at a safe distance by approximately 500 terrified audience members, through a wire fence that surrounded the outdoor music theater. The pre-event continued for approximately two and a half hours. The screening at Gion Hall the following day was packed, with over 800 in attendance. The audience is made to walk through an “art installation of discarded garbage”41 placed in front of the hall. Adachi mistakenly attributes this to Kyūshū-ha, 42 but it was actually by the duo Manabe Sōhei and Ōe Masanori, who had previously incurred the anger of other artists by spraying formalin at Independent ’64. Inside the hall, a professional striptease dancer walks through the audience, demanding they donate their belongings, binding the wrists of those who refused with long ropes. 43 The stripper is joined by Jōnouchi and F, a monk from Kyoto. 44 When the screening begins, after reaching the end of the second roll of film (there were six in all), the organizers realize that the last two rolls have been stolen. 45 They carry on with the remaining two rolls, then turned on the lights and announce that the screening is over. Akasegawa then “begins a series of Happenings, which he performs with great solemnity, such as hitting colored balls with a bat into the audience.”46 Beside him, Kosugi Takehisa, apparently undisturbed by the chaos, plays a musical instrument (possibly the tabla). Kazakura climbs into a

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wide-open zippered bag, and this object in itself is Kosugi’s “instrument” as artwork. Once the audience realizes that the film has been stolen, they raise an uproar: Out of the darkness come shouts, raised voices, jeers, the sound of someone running out and the footsteps of others following after. The sound of something falling over, the sound of something gushing, all of these sounds clashing, overlapping—and then from somewhere the audience, a woman screams. 47

Adachi begins to make a speech on stage on the theory of Happening, but an audience member snatches the microphone and the two begin to fight. A woman claims that F (the monk) has tricked her, promising to pay back a loan with the profits from the screening, triggering an attack on F from all sides by members of the audience. 48 A yakuza in kimono mounts the stage, and the aforementioned woman splashes water on him. The security guards suggest to the manager, Kumagai, that he should call the armed police, but Adachi tells him there is “no need because this is all part of the festival plan.”49 The stagehands then begin to dismantle the stage set intended for Kazakura’s performance, in preparation for the next day.50 The organizers and audience members, meanwhile, are informed that armed police surround the hall; the event continues nonetheless, finishing with Omatsuri Ondo (Festival Song) and an announcement promising that another screening would take place at Kyoto University’s West Auditorium. On June 19, the screening of the film in its entirety takes place without any disturbance. 5.2 SOME YOUNG PEOPLE July 26, 1964, Shinjuku; August 2, 1964, Tama River

The documentary film Non-fiction Theater: Some Young People, directed by Nagano Chiaki, offers crucial coverage of performances from this period. It was filmed approximately two months after the Ritual of Sa’in and broadcast by Nippon TV on October 4. Artists and groups featured in the film were Shinohara Ushio, Tanaka Shintarō, Miki Tomio (all artists from Off Museum),51 Zero Jigen, Kankō Geijutsu Kenkyūjo (Sightseeing Art Research Institute, the name of artist duo Nakamura Hiroshi and Tateishi Kōichi), and Ono Yōko with her then husband, Tony Cox, shortly before the couple returned to the U.S. Even though these performances happened in front of the camera rather than for an onsite audience, the film remains a valuable document of early works by artists who would go on to have long careers, such as Ono and Zero Jigen. It also captures scenes of Tokyo immediately prior to the Olympics, skillfully edited to the rhythm of a song by Sakamoto Kyū, Shiawase nara te o tatakō (If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands). One of Ono’s actions documented in the film, entitled Selling Morning (Morning Piece), involves the artist casually leaving flowers on a street and selling pieces of broken glasses along the riverside. Shinohara’s action painting for the film, with Kinoshita Shin, Kojima Nobuaki and others, is a holdover from his Neo Dada days; another scene, in which he drinks Coca Cola while chatting with his mother in a traditional Japanese room, is more typical of his performance style. Zero Jigen reenacts its earliest “street crawling,” which subsequently becomes part of the group’s repertoire. The film also

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shows naked Zero Jigen members clambering from the riverbed up a large net cast from a bridge over the Tama River (they are joined by other artists who did not belong to the group). Sightseeing Art Research Institute holds a performance at Komazawa Olympic Park in which they eat five donuts, each thirty centimeters in diameter, placed on a table in the formation of the Olympic rings, with fork and knife. They had also exhibited their work on the Tama Riverbed in March,52 and in April stood outside Tokyo Station holding up their paintings.53 These actions, deliberately appealing to TV audiences, incorporated straightforward references to the topical Olympics theme, and the artists still appear focused on their activities as painters rather than performance per se; even still, it is interesting that Nakamura and Tateishi shared a desire, similar to Ono and Zero Jigen, to perform in urban space. 5.3 JAPAN SUPER-ART TRADE FAIR August 30 – September 5, 1964, Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum, Nagoya Peace Park

Although records are few and far between, Japan Super-Art Trade Fair is one of the most important events in the history of performance art. Considered the biggest event held in Nagoya by Zero Jigen, it also brought the group’s activities in Nagoya to a conclusion. It was attended by a number of performers, including artists who had been involved in Anti-Art performances in Tokyo and Kansai, and many of them performed works at the event’s outdoor venue. The event was divided into two parts: “Stage Venue” (a room in the museum) from August 30–31; and “Space Venue” from September 1–5. The separation into two parts recalled the indoor and outdoor venues of the earlier Gifu Independent, but the aim here was to organize the event into two wholly separate parts: exhibition and performance. The outdoor venue comprised of a 100-meter-wide street (Hisaya Ōdōri, the main avenue in downtown Nagoya), an underground shopping mall, a department store, and a muddy river. Photographic records of the exhibition show ambitious large-scale works such as a sculpture by Katō Yoshihiro and an installation of hanging nooses by Itō Takao. The participants consisted of core members of Zero Jigen (Katō, Iwata, and Koiwa) as well as other members from the group’s earlier period (Kawaguchi Kōtarō, Mizuno Mitsunori, Takahashi Kōko, et al.), and local artists including composer Nakagawa Kōichirō, poet Kanie Masato, tanka poet Kasugai Ken and painter Kanai Kumiko. In addition to these Nagoya-based artists, Itoi Kanji sent a work (possibly a collage) from Ichikawa in Chiba, while Mizukami Jun sent a work (discussed later) that explored the nature of languages and scripts. Tashiro Minoru from Unbeat, Asai Masuo from Seto, and Sakurai Takami of Kyūshū-ha gave lectures at the symposium. Kurohata54 and Kyoto artist Manabe Sōhei also participated in some capacity, Yonekura Toku from Kyūshū-ha55 took part in a performance (the details are not entirely clear) that involved being told by another artist to make a call to the venue from a public phone, divulging his location.56 This seminal event was the first instance of a gathering of artists drawn from all over Japan—from the Kantō area to as far as Fukuoka—who belonged not just to the performance scene of the early 1960s but also the Anti-Art scene. Katō and Iwata delivered

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 45. Performance by Zero Jigen et al. during Japan Super-Art Trade Fair • c. August 1964 • Peace Park, Nagoya, Aichi

a lecture during the symposium, titled “Netai geijutsu ni tsuite” (On the art of the lying body), while lying down on an ironing board and a couch, respectively, and introduced a rule (intended to liven up proceedings) that individuals whose shoulders were massaged by a blindfolded artist had to make an impromptu short speech. Katō and several other male artists also enacted a performance—diverging significantly from the style of other Zero Jigen performances of the time—in which they lay on a table, their bodies covered with plastic strings.57 The most notable performance took place in the Peace Park at night. A group of artists climb a staircase, side by side, gradually removing their clothes [fig. 45]. The men then lie on the ground in a row, and then a woman lies on top of the men at one end; the movements of their bodies carry her along to the other end. This action would become the prototype for Zero Jigen’s later naked rituals, as it demonstrated Katō’s growing talent for directing large groups of performers, as well as his creative use of space. 5.4 FLUX WEEK September 6–14, 1965, Gallery Crystal, Ginza

By the mid-1960s, artists who had spent time in the U.S.—musician Ichiyanagi Toshi, music critic Akiyama Kuniharu, Shiomi Mieko, and Ay-O, who temporarily returned to Japan from New York in 1966—had begun telling their colleagues in Japan about the activities of Fluxus and its central coordinator, George Maciunas, in the U.S. and Europe. At the same time, in the U.S., Nam June Paik and Kubota Shigeko were telling Fluxus members about Hi-Red Center, which belonged, in their view, to the broader Fluxus movement. This was the beginning of the participation of Japan-based Japanese artists in the international Fluxus network and ultimately gave rise to Flux Week, organized by Ichiyanagi together with Akiyama and Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, former members of Jikken Kōbō. Flux Week featured works by Shiomi, who had recently returned to Japan in July, as well as works by absent Fluxus members (such as Paik and other overseas members), who sent their works either by mail or through acquaintances who performed as proxies. It was part of Fluxus philosophy that the performer, whether the original artist or not, holds the power to manifest the spontaneous creative energy of the work.

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 46. Shiomi Mieko performs Water Music during Flux Week • September 8, 1965 • Gallery Crystal, Ginza, Tokyo

The following is a list of events performed in the gallery space over the four days: First night: September 8, Shiomi Mieko Day (“Event”) Water Music (Let the water lose its stillness): in this performance, Shiomi uses a rubber tube to suck water from a tank, which she transfers to a glass using a syringe. She then presses her wet face against a sheet of paper that hangs from the ceiling and cuts out the wet section. Next, she plays a vinyl record, to which she has applied a thin layer of water-soluble glue and let dry, as she drips water onto it with an eyedropper. She submerges an electric soldering iron in the water tank, stretches strings across various points on a world map, drops water on the strings with a syringe, and dries the strings with the flame of a candle [fig. 46].58 Hayashi Miyori from Okayama Young Artists Group also participates in this performance. Piece for Two Performers: involves one performer “moving a part of the body, or an object, either as close or as far as possible. Yamaguchi Katsuhiro is holding a key and Shiomi uses a compass, her own belonging, moving it closer to Yamaguchi’s key, while drawing a circle with it.59

Second Night: September 9, Flux Short Films Day No performances.

Third Night: September 11, Night Concert, featuring performances of pieces by La Monte Young, Tone Yasunao, George Brecht, and Takeda Akimichi, and a reading of poems by Jackson Mac Low. Young’s 400 for Henry Flynt: performed by Tone, Takeda, Akiyama and Ichiyanagi, the piece involves Tone picking up the handset of a public telephone, inserting a coin, and then putting the handset down, which returns the coin; Tone repeats this action countless times. Takeda hits a chair with a tool (possibly a bamboo ruler), and Akiyama carries a signboard made of galvanized iron sheet and hits it with a hammer. Ichiyanagi bangs a gong.60 Prohibition of Ready Made by Tone Yasunao: “Tone applies adhesive bandages to his toes and face and then pours water from a glass into his mouth, gargles, and spits it out. Ichiyanagi

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stands stock-still, peering ahead through a pair of binoculars. Takeda cleans his glasses with a handkerchief. Akiyama puts on a surgical mask and flips through a telephone directory.”61

Fourth Night: September 14, Performances by Yamaguchi Katsuhiro and Nam June Paik. Rainbow Operation by Yamaguchi: the entire space is covered with a transparent plastic mosquito net62 as Yamaguchi spins a fluorescent yo-yo in the dark and Akiyama rubs a loudspeaker with a wire brush. Yamaguchi asks audience members to identify a particular color from the clothes or belongings of the person sitting to the right of them, and then shines a flashlight on them. He has the audience wear paper glasses with small holes.63 Serenade for Alison by Nam June Paik: Onisawa Kiyoko (a member of Kuni Chiya Dance Institute) removes, one by one, six differently colored pieces of underwear that she is wearing on top of each other, performing different actions with each article, such as setting it on the wall, or stuffing it into the pocket or mouth of an audience member. She concludes by cutting the last piece of underwear into pieces and mixing into a bowl of egg mixture, which she then cooks into an omelet.64

In addition to these performances and screenings, there was also an exhibition of objects and swimwear designed by Miyuki Minako. While a rather low-tech affair, Fluxus Week was still a pioneering event for later Intermedia events. 5.5 MUSE WEEK December 16–22, 1965, Modern Art Center of Japan, Tokyo

A Week for Muse (hereinafter Muse Week), was the event from the period that most successfully struck a balance between being structured organizationally and granting freedom to its participants. The Modern Art Center of Japan (MAC-J) had opened in September 1965 under the directorship of Yoshida Yoshie—who had been appointed by the manager of the space, the painter Kategawa Shigeo65—and became the forerunner of alternative art spaces in Japan. Located near Mejiro Station, this innovative facility was owned by the Shizan family, who specialized in the art of miniature “tray” landscapes or bonkei. Features such as “movable wall panels in black or white, and a suspended black panel ceiling that could be raised or lowered”66 allowed the space to be transformed in ways rare even today to accommodate a range of exhibitions, performances, and screenings. Aiming for a space that “disseminated”67 art rather than an exclusive gallery for art world insiders or a commercial gallery for “saleable” art (e.g., painting), Yoshida set up a membership system that boasted more than forty members at its peak.68 He also published newsletters, and set up bookshelves in a corner of the gallery for “little magazines” (ritoru magajin) of poetry, film, dance and music, as well as specialist art magazines.69 The venue soon became well-known for its genre-crossing experiments, showcasing screenings of Iimura Takahiko’s films, Adachi Masao’s Sa’in, solo exhibitions of Gōda Sawako and Matsuzawa Yutaka, and dance performances, among others. Contemporaneous accounts offer insight into Yoshida’s intentions for the events that took place during the week. Yoshida himself declared that he was “not interested

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 47. Zero Jigen performance during Muse Week • December 18, 1965 • Meguro (presumed), Tokyo

in differences between artistic genres”70; it was not his intention to simply cobble together performances like a “hasty match-maker,” nor to divide the space up “like the manager of an apartment house, allocating and confining each tenant to a pre-existing space.”71 Secondly, there were no “protective” measures in place for any of the performances; it was up to the artists themselves to negotiate and cooperate with other artists sharing the same space, and to ensure the safety of the audience.72 Thirdly, performers and audience were not separated; performers were simply required to wear a black glove on their right hand (or paint it black) to differentiate themselves from the audience. Putting on—or taking off—the glove allowed artists and audience members to swap roles at will. Moreover, as the title of the event indicated, performers were asked to do at least five hours of actions over the course of the week.73 Muse Week participants included Akasegawa Genpei, Adachi Masao, Kazakura Shō, Jōnouchi Motoharu, Tsujimura Kazuko, and Yoshida, as well as the groups Kuni Chiya Dance Institute, Jikan-ha, and Zero Jigen. In total, “about forty people participated including three groups of filmmakers, a dance group, a poetry group, a Happening group, two groups of avant-garde artists performing ritualistic expressions, a musician, an artist, and the MAC-J group.”74 Zero Jigen’s performance—which started with an outdoor

 48. Zero Jigen performance during Muse Week • December 18, 1965 • Modern Art Center of Japan, Mejiro, Tokyo

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 49. Kazakura Shō performance during Muse Week • December 1965 • Modern Art Center of Japan, Mejiro, Tokyo

procession led by Katō Yoshihiro wearing a candle on his head [fig. 47]—was recorded in a series of photographs by Hirata Minoru. The group’s burlesque humor was well demonstrated by their costumes. Inside the gallery, Iwata Shin’ichi played a saxophone as male members of the group took off their clothes and hugged each other [fig. 48]. Akasegawa “appeared with a duralumin trunk that contained Kazakura, who was wearing an aqualung. Akasegawa was supposed to open the trunk,”75 but dangerously for Kazakura, miscalculated the timing [fig.  49]. Kuni Chiya’s group danced on a floor covered with tissue paper, wielding lemons tied together with strings. Jikan-ha stretched multiple strings across the space. Yoshida had the audience balance precariously on rubber balls while he tied their hands and feet and polished their shoes.76 6.

ARTISTS AT CROSSROADS

From the joint performance events described above, we can glean a number of key aspects of mid-1960s performance art. While the documentary Some Young People featured a variety of performances, including the action painting on the Tama Riverbed and Zero Jigen’s collective performance, there was no common thread unifying them. Nor was there a connection between actions that were effectively a continuation from the early 1960s: Zero Jigen’s early performances, events referencing topical issues by Sightseeing Art Research Institute, and Ono Yōko’s quiet and poetic street events. What is significant, however, is that performance had become an established means of artistic expression for young avant-garde artists of the time, and that the artists who appeared in the film were regarded as rebels protesting against the “mood of feigned peace” and the “myth of happiness,” as the voiceover in the film notes. As Zero Jigen leader Katō states in the film, “Our society is so peaceful now, people are complacent. In this situation, the animalistic, or what is usually perceived to be an immoral, filthy, or grotesque action, may seem all the more sublime.”77 Ritual of Sa’in represents an interesting case in which three kinds of Happening— the planned (Akasegawa, Kazakura, Kosugi), the unplanned (theft of the film, Manabe and Ōe’s garbage), and the audience’s response—came together in a single screening

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event, a cross-genre coalition of post-1962 Anti-Art performers (ex-Neo Dada artists, VAN, and an anarchic political activist group) that produced a final spark of creativity. However, the event was less effective in terms of creating a network of young or regional artists that would carry through to the next stage. Of these five events, Flux Week was distinguished both by its aesthetic and its network of participants. Tone Yasunao and Shiomi Mieko from Group Ongaku both participated in the event but Kosugi Takehisa was absent, as he was touring Europe. Likewise, no members of Hi-Red Center took part, even though they were considered part of Fluxus. There seems to have been a division between those who developed a direct connection with Fluxus artists, either by studying or working in the U.S. or Europe, and those who worked independently in Japan. The fact that the two groups did not interact with each other except during a few events at Sogetsu Art Center is indicative of the polarization of 1960s avant-garde art. Moreover, Yoshimoto Midori describes Shiomi’s work, with good reason, as “a kind of scientific experiment”78 designed to focus the audience’s mind on a subtle movement within the confinement of a gallery; in that sense, it belongs within the genealogy of “high art” performances by musicians and artists at Sogetsu Art Center from the previous period. Later, Akiyama Kuniharu, Ichiyanagi Toshi and Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, who had participated in Flux Week, joined Intermedia events held in well-equipped large-scale spaces, such as Kūkan kara kankyō e (From Space to Environment, November 1966) and Cross Talk/Intermedia (February 1969), which would soon thereafter be swallowed up by the larger Expo ’70. Only Japan Super-Art Trade Fair and Muse Week inherited the anarchic spirit from the Anti-Art of the early 1960s and carried it over into the late 1960s; and while we still do not have a full picture of Japan Super-Art Trade Fair, its participants included major artists and groups that played key roles in the heyday of Anti-Art performances after 1967, such as Zero Jigen, Kyūshū-ha, Kurohata, Mizukami Jun, and Itoi Kanji.79 Muse Week on the other hand, brought together artists from a wide range of genres and styles. It introduced significant performance innovations, such as the interchangeability of performers and audience, and also gave artists the latitude for free and spontaneous expression while avoiding conflict with the event’s organizers. Unfortunately, MAC-J was “dissolved after only six months”80 as a result of financial issues, and this important space that had facilitated a wide range of free expression and cross-genre events disappeared all too soon. The artists who gathered there thus went their separate ways; some became involved in the Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident, others turned to political activism, and others still returned to their own genres. 7.

ACTIVITIES OF INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS

From 1964 to 1965, several artists and groups, such as Kurohata, Mizukami Jun, Ikemizu Keiichi, Asai Masuo, and Zero Jigen, performed independently outside of the events mentioned above. Kurohata’s action painting at Hanazono Shrine, Shinjuku in November 1963 is supposedly the group’s first performance-type work. Its distinctive style appears to date back to the first performance of “Creative Art Gymnastics” at the 15th Shigun (Avant-Garde Art Group “Visions”) group exhibition at Ginpō-dō Gallery, Ginza in September 1964,

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 50. Ikemizu Keiichi, Homo Sapiens • November 29, 1965 • Tennōji Zoo, Osaka

 51. Ikemizu Keiichi, Homo Sapiens • November 29, 1965 • Shinsaibashi-suji, Osaka

although the details are unclear. There are surviving records of the group’s Happenings from 1965 at Kondō Gallery (Kayabachō), Awa-Katsuura Beach in Chiba, and MAC-J. Ritual Dedicated to the Shooting of Viet Cong Boy at Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku (September 1965) was the first performance with a title that indicated the group’s anti-Vietnam War message, which became more pronounced in the next period. Solo artist Mizukami Jun also presented countless performances during this period. These included, in chronological order: Rojō no fūsōshiki (Wind funeral on the street, July 1964, Nagoya), in which he lies sideways on a street in a downtown area with his head towards the west, wearing a black or white costume; Hoshi no uwasa (Star Rumor) at Japan Super-Art Trade Fair (August–September  1964, Nagoya); Cérémonie pour Larva (November 1964, Kyoto); Missō keikaku (Plan for a Secret Burial, March 1965, Kyoto); Sexophonic (May 1965, Nagoya); Keikō-tai tenji: Tainai ganbō-setsu (Exhibition of fluorescent objects: On the desire for the womb, September 1965); and Teisō-tai ni taisuru fukugō sareta osutorasizumu, fetisizum matawa uragaesareta kaigara rea: Teisōtairei yokoku (Compounded ostracism or fetishism or a chastity belt, or reverse shell rea: the chastity belt’s prophecy; October 1965, Kyoto). Hoshi no uwasa, a “round tape poem,” involves the passing of a length of cloth tape, which has words written on it, round and round a circle of seated people, who together read the words on the tape aloud as it passes before them.81 In Sexophonic, Iwata Shin’ichi from Zero Jigen, who ran a jazz café in Nagoya, plays the saxophone, making “non-lyrical sounds.”82 These performances demonstrated Mizukami’s break from his early interest in poetry as literature and a turn towards language itself in his experiments with voice/sound.

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Ikemizu Keiichi, who along with Mizukami later formed The Play, performed a Happening in Osaka in November 1965—first at Tennōji Zoo [fig. 50] then on Shinsaibashi-suji Street—in which he shuts himself in a cage [fig. 51], similar to the cage he had used on the riverbed at Gifu Independent.83 The choice of location, a zoo and a busy downtown area, focused attention specifically on the theme of the performance. Unlike Kojima Nobuaki’s presentation of his own body as an artwork at the 1962 Yomiuri Independent, Ikemizu’s point was to present himself as the biological species “homo sapiens” rather than as human, the “natural” perspective of animals offering a reflection of, and corrective to, human society. This line of thought led to his works of the 1970s that incorporated zoo animals. Although he used the term hapuningu (Happening) in the performance invitation, for Ikemizu, a “Happening” was not the presentation of bodily movements, but rather the act of “making something happen.” It was a concept he would go on to further develop. In 1967, Mizukami and Ikemizu, both individualist identities who boldly rejected the main thrust of the contemporary art scene, formed The Play, which would leave a major mark in 1960s performance art history.84 Asai Masuo was based in Seto and thereby cut off from metropolitan artistic networks; he did, however, hold a number of events in urban spaces in Seto and Nagoya from 1964 to 1965 that frequently included performances. The Jōmon Festival, a largescale event first organized in 1964 in Seto and held in Suwa the following year, consisted of a manga exhibition, discussion, verse drama, music performance, and street parade (see chap. 12.4, pp. 322–3). But Asai’s importance in performance history lies less in his bodily expressions inspired by primitive festivals, than in his attempt to found a serious socio-cultural movement through the publication of mimeographed magazines, such as Andoromeda (Andromeda), that took up the plight of socially vulnerable people. He died tragically in an accident in July of 1966, and his untimely death prevented him from joining other like-minded groups in the late 1960s that sought to form communes and networks through printed media, such as Suenaga Tamio’s Kokuin. NOTES 1.

Until then, the “absolute height” of a building could be no greater than 31m. Height limits have now been replaced by volume limits. 2. This was an imaginary exhibition at “Nagano Prefecture Nanashima Yashima Tundra Area” organized by Matsuzawa Yutaka. It called for artists to submit concepts—“something formless (a ‘void’ work)”—to the venue instead of sending material artworks. 3. Yoshida Yoshie, Kaitaigeki no maku orite: Rokujū nendai zen’ei bijutsushi [The curtain falls on deconstruction theater: A history of 1960s avant-garde art] (Tokyo: Zōkeisha, 1982), 130. 4. The exhibition organizer changed its title from All-Kanagawa Independent Exhibition to All-Japan Independent Exhibition from the 11th exhibition onwards, aiming to achieve synergy with Hariu Independent. Ultimately, the synergies did not materialize and the exhibitions were

held concurrently but independently. Despite its proximity to Tokyo, most of the participants were local resident artists, so important artists from outside Kanagawa were only Itoi Kanji, Matsuzawa Yutaka, and Hamaguchi Tomiji. Dai-ikkai zen nihon andepandan ten [The First All-Japan Independent Exhibition] pamphlet, Kanagawa Prefecture Art Association and All-Japan Independent Exhibition Committee, July 1964. 5. Ikeda Tatsuo, “Nichi-roku” [Diary], Nihon ­Dokusho Shimbun, (June 29, 1964): 8. “4–5 sheets of flock paper” submitted to the reception by Chiba were used for his installation work Toilet. 6. Manabe and Ōe had been egged on by Chiba Eisuke. Chiba Eisuke, in an interview with the author, Tokyo, August 26, 2006. 7. According to Oyamada Chikae, “as soon as I entered the venue, a strong odor hit my nose and

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8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

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eyes and I could not see anything.” Andepandan ’64: Andepandan no sō-kessan to atarashii undō no shuppatsu [Independent ’64: A summary of Independent and a departure of a new movement], Bijutsu Jānaru, no. 49 (June 1964): 28. Sasaki Kōsei, in a personal letter to the author, April 2006. Ishikawa Shun, in an interview with the author, Sendai, August 20, 2004. “The artist himself lay spread-eagle on the floor, with his head wrapped in a white bandage and wearing a red loincloth.” Miyagi Teruo, “Sendai andepandan shinsatsuki” [Diagnosis of the Sendai Independent], Bijutsu Jānaru, no. 52 (March 1965): 41. Miyagi, 40–41. Miyagi, 41. Miyagi, 41. Takahashi Ayako “1965 Natsu: Zen’ei no hanabi (joron), Andepandan Āto Fesutibaru towa nanika?” [Summer 1965: Fireworks of the avant-garde (introduction), What is the Independent Art Festival?], Nagoya Geijutsu Daigaku Kenkyū Kiyō [Nagoya University of the Arts Bulletin], March 2006: 77–91. Takahashi, “1965 Natsu: Zen’ei no hanabi (sakuhin-ron), Shū dan sanka sakuhin ni okeru anonimasu sei” [Summer 1965: Fireworks of the avant-garde (artwork), Anonymity in collective participants’ works], Nagoya Geijutsu Daigaku K ­ enkyū Kiyō, no. 27 (March 2007): 153–166. Critics invited to the first preparatory meeting in April were Hariu, Nakahara, Akane Kazuo, Nomura Tarō, and Yoshida Yoshie. Artists such as Ikeda Tatsuo, Ikemizu Keiichi, Terada Takehiro, Mizutani Isao also participated. Gifu andepandan ten sanka tebiki [Gifu Independent participants’ manual]. “We decided to rent a boat as well. By holding avant-garde dances outside, accompanied by the sound of shamisen (a three-stringed Japanese banjo-like musical instrument), with drunken viewers, and thousands of lantern lights, we could generate a new kind of communication.” Ishihara Michio, “Andepandan Āto Fesutibaru okugai kaijō no koto” [Outdoor venues at Independent Art Festivals], Gendai Bijutsu [Contemporary Art], no. 5 (June 1965): 7. Ōyama Uichi of Kyūshū-ha presented his tape-recorded sound work. Hishimi Takako’s film work (Wakare, kyonen no natsu [Separation, last summer]) was also screened. (According to Takahashi Ayako’s research of “Sanka mōshikomi shō” [applications certificate]).

19. Ikeda’s work consisted in a written instruction to the audience to look for his artwork—an object that looked exactly like a pebble, which he had inserted somewhere on the riverbed. Matsuzawa’s Anti-civilization School participated with a language-based work that listed imaginary works such as Silence from August 9 to 19 (silent sculpture). Ikeda Tatsuo, Geijutsu avangyarudo no senaka [The back of avant-garde art] (Tokyo: Chūsekisha, 1991), 125–126, 128. 20. “We placed carefully wrapped empty boxes in buses and stores. Each box contained a piece of paper with an instruction to deliver it to the Civic Center, the main venue of the festival, where we set up a lost and found counter, but we learned that none of the boxes had been returned.” Matsunaga Ko, in an email to the author, May 27, 2006. Matsunaga acquired this information from Shigemura Mitsuo and others. 21. The artists “suddenly appeared on stage.” See “Kurohata geijutsu shūdan no ayumi” [Trajectory of Kurohata Art Collective], Bessatsu Kurohata [Kurohata Extra], 1966. 22. Katō Yoshihiro, “Zero Jigen kyōso Ketsuzōkai mandara kyōten go yaku shū (sono 4)” [Zero Jigen founder Ketsuzōkai mandara sutra terminology in translation (part 4)], Kuroaka­ kintama-bukuro [Bag of Black, Red, and ­Golden Balls], no. 1 (March 1967): 16–17. 23. Akane Kazuo, “Geppyō, koten, gurūpu ten kara, Kansai” [Monthly review. Solo and group exhibitions in Kansai area], Bijutsu techō, no. 258 (October 1965): 132. 24. Saitama Avant-Garde Artists Group (Takagi), “Andepandan Āto Festibaru sanka tēma Naburi ni tsuite” [Independent Art Festival: On the theme of “tantalization”], Gendai Bijutsu, no. 258 (November 1965): 29. See also Matsunaga Ko, “Saitama Zen’ei Geijutsu Sakka Shūdan” [Saitama Avant-Garde Artists Group], Zocalo, no. 72 (December 2000): 7. 25. Saitama Avant-Garde Artist Group (Takagi), 30. 26. Asai is reported to have floated a hundred old tires down the Nagaragawa River (Hanaga Mitsutoshi, “Zero Jigen to hapuningu senjutsu” [Zero Jigen and Happening strategies], Eiga hyōron, vol. 25, no. 5 (May 1968): 75. However, this is likely in fact a reference to Asai’s action of rolling down the river on a raft made from the inner tubes of truck tires from Gujō-hachiman. “Tanshin” [short news], Andoromeda [Andromeda], no. 11 (September 1965). 27. Chiba, interview. 28. The original text is “ogakuzu maruke.” Maruke is Tōkai dialect for mamire, meaning “covered

Chapter 7———Onto the Streets! Away from the Capital! (1964–1965)195

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

in.” Katō Yoshihiro, “Gishiki ni wa wareme ga an’noyo” [There’s a crack in the ritual], Nihon chō-geijutsu mihon ichi [Japan Super-Art Trade Fair] (Nagoya: Zero Jigen Shōkai, 1964): 20. The original idea was as follows: “Since everyone is frantic about cleaning up, all over Tokyo, let’s fill up every bin in Tokyo with trash.” However, the plan was abandoned because there were too many bins in Ginza alone, and it would have taken too much effort to transport the garbage from the Yume-no-shima landfill. It was just “too plain” an idea. Akasegawa Genpei, Tokyo mikisā keikaku [Tokyo Mixer Plan] (Tokyo: Parco Shuppan, 1984), 174. Six days earlier, Hi-Red Center had enacted Dropping Event, in which members dropped various objects from the top of a building. They did not drop them onto the street below (with a few exceptions), but rather onto a lower roof. Hirata Minoru, in an email to the author, February 12, 2007. Adachi Masao, Eiga/Kakumei [Film/Revolution] (Tokyo: Kawadeshobō Shinsha, 2003), 511. The Sa’in screening event might have been titled as Sa’in no gi (Ritual of Sa’in) or Sa’in wa eiga de aru (Sa’in is a Film), but an original poster and brochure confirm the title Sa’in no gi. The title also appears in the account written immediately after the event by an anonymous author who seemed to have some involvement in it. “A-raka-ru-to: Jan tachi no nikki 2” [A la carte: diary of Jan and others 2], Gendai Gekijō [Contemporary Theater], no. 2 (October 1964): 30. Komatsu Tatsuo, “Ikō” [posthumous manuscripts], Yume wa kōya o, Komatsu Tatsuo tsuitōshū [Dreams in the Wilderness: Komatsu Tatsuo Memorial Collection] (Kyoto: Sunlead, 1987), 208. Komatsu, 204. Adachi, Eiga/Kakumei, 120. Komatsu, “Shiteki Seibukōdō shōshi” [A personal brief history of the West Auditorium], Yume wa kōya o, 236. Komatsu, Ikō, 206. This performance was reenacted under the title Hitting a Piano at Fukuoka Art Museum on January 30, 1994. See Kaze o takuramu [Plotting the wind], ed. Nagasaki Yukiko (Tokyo: Gallery 58, 2022), 14–15. Adachi, Eiga/Kakumei, 123. Adachi, 121. Adachi, 123. Adachi, 123. Komatsu, Ikō, 208 Okishima Isao, “Waratte, waratte, mijimede, waratte: Sa’in wa kaku tsukurare, kōkai

45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

59.

sareta” [Laugh, laugh, wretchedly laugh: This is how Closed Vagina was made and screened], Hirasawa Gō ed., Andāguraundo firumu ākaibusu [Underground Film Archives] (Tokyo: Kawadeshobō Shinsha, 2001), 106.　 Okishima, 106. According to Adachi, it was the League of Criminals who stole the film reels (Adachi, Eiga/Kakumei, 126), but it could also have been the Kyoto participants. The truth is unknown. Adachi, Eiga/Kakumei, 124. Komatsu, Ikō, 208. Adachi, Eiga/Kakumei, 124–5; Okishima, “Waratte, waratte,” 106. It was common at this time for public security police to attend rallies that were presumed to be related to the New Left. Adachi, Eiga/ Kakumei, 125. Adachi was impressed by the attitude of Kumagai, the Gion Hall manager, who refused to allow the riot police to intervene and calmly dealt with the damages and the cleaning up, even accepting the garbage in silence. Adachi, Eiga/Kakumei, 126–27. Komatsu, Ikō, 209. Off Museum (Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, June) was held to rival Independent ’64 at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, with some overlapping dates. Neo Dada and other important star artists of the late Yomiuri Independent who refused to join Independent ’64 participated in Off Museum. This exhibition was recorded in Nakamura Hiroshi’s 8mm film Das Kapital (1964). Hirata Minoru, Chō geijutsu: Zen’ei bijutsuka-tachi no ashiato 1963–1969 [Art in Action: The 1960s Avant-Garde Works and Profiles of Young Japanese Artists] (Tokyo: Sango-kan, 2005), 46–51. “Kurohata geijutsu shūdan no ayumi.” The article refers to “traveling sales.” There was a possibility that this would lead to a collaborative event between Zero Jigen and Kyūshū-ha; however, due to Sakurai’s departure for the U.S. next year, the two groups missed their opportunity and did not hold a joint performance until Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally in 1969, after Kyūshū-ha almost disbanded. Yonekura Toku, in an interview with the author, Fukuoka, January 23, 2007. Recorded on 8mm film in Katō’s collection; the oldest film recording of Zero Jigen. Furukusasu ten: Geijutsu kara nichijō e [Fluxus: Art into Life] eds. Yoshimoto Asami and Morita Hajime (Saitama: Urawa Art Museum, 2004), 90. Exhibition catalogue. Furukusasu ten, 90.

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60. Furukusasu ten, 92. 61. Furukusasu ten, 92. 62. Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, Sakuhinshū Yamaguchi Katsuhiro 360° [Works of Yamaguchi Katsuhiro 360°] (Tokyo: Rokuyōsha, 1981), 36. 63. Furukusasu ten, 93. 64. Furukusasu ten, 93. 65. Shiitada Atsushi, “Kategawa Shigeo ryakuden” [Brief biography of Kategawa Shigeo], Aishū to chi no zōkei: Kategawa Shigeo no sekai [Art of sorrow and blood: The world of Kategawa Shigeo] (Naha: Okinawa bunka no mori, 2008), 150. 66. Yoshida Yoshie, “Nichijō no naka no buttaishi: Kuni Chiya” [Object Poems in the Everyday: Kuni Chiya], Yoshida, Ryūbō no kaihōku [Wanderer’s liberated zone] (Tokyo: Gendaisōbisha, 1977), 237. 67. Yoshida Yoshie, “MAC-J towa nan de attaka, aruiwa, arōtoshitanoka, kongo no b­ ijutsu undō no ichi shiryō toshite” [What was MAC-J? Or what was it meant to be? As material for the future directions of art], Art 21, no. 4 (December 1967): 68. 68. Yoshida Yoshie, “MAC-J towa nan de attaka, aruiwa, arōtoshitanoka, kongo no bijutsu undō no tameni” [What was MAC-J? Or what was it meant to be? Future directions for art]’ Art 21, no. 3 (January 1967): 59. 69. Yoshida, 57–58. 70. Yoshida Yoshie, “Myūzu Shūkan kaisai” [Muse Week opened], Bijutsu techō, no. 264 (March 1966): 78–79. 71. Yoshida, 78–79. 72. Yoshida, 79. 73. Yoshida, 78. According to Yoshida in “Object Poems in the Everyday: Kuni Chiya,” all participants were assigned to perform a total of twelve hours per week, either six hours over two days or two hours over six days. 74. Yoshida, “MAC-J to wa nan de attaka,” Art 21, no. 3: 58. 75. Akasegwa Genpei, “Jihitsu nenpu” [Autochronology], Akasegawa Genpei tokushū [Special Feature: Akasegawa Genpei], Kikan, no. 14 (January 1987): 83. See also Okada Takaaki, ed. “Kazakura Shō ryakunenpu [Brief chronology of Kazakura Shō], Kazakura Shō tokushū [Special Feature: Kazakura Shō], Kikan, no. 12 (May 1981): 82–83. 76. Yoshida Yoshie, “Aru enerugī: Bi no myūzu ni inotta zen’ei geijutsuka tachi” [A certain energy: Avant-garde artists who prayed to the muses], Hōseki, vol. 2, no. 3 (March 1966). Aside

77.

78.

79.

80. 81.

82.

83.

84.

from these works, Ikeda Tatsuo made a box resembling a large die, put up a sign proclaiming “you will understand the truth of art with just a 30-second glance,” and had the audience peek into the box for a fee of ten yen. Ikeda Ta­ tsuo, Geijutsu avangyarudo no senaka, 146–48. Nagano Chiaki, transcribed, translated, and annotated by Midori Yoshimoto, “Some Young People: From Nonfiction Theater, Transcript of a documentary film directed by Nagano Chiaki,” Josai University’s Review of Japanese Culture and Society, vol. 17 (December 2005): 100. Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2005), 159. Although Japan Super-Art Trade Fair was held in Nagoya, it was the only nationwide event in which Unbeat from Tokyo and Asai Masuo from Seto participated. Unbeat was already in the process of disbanding with Kagami Masayuki and Nakajima Yoshio having departed for Europe. Asai, who also participated in the ritual in the Peace Park, returned to local activities until his accidental death 2 years later. Yoshida, “MAC-J to wa nan de attaka,” Art 21, no. 3: 56. Inoue Shōji, “Mizukami Jun no 60, 70 nendai: ‘Riakushon’ to ‘Kami-ha (Niru-ha)’ no jidai” [Mizukami Jun’s 1960s and 70s: The era of “reaction” and the “Paper School” (Nir School)], Rear, no. 6 (May 2004): 11. Mizukami Jun, in an interview with the author, Nagoya, January 28, 2007. Mizukami learned to play the flute in a university orchestra, and then took up the saxophone, perhaps to produce a more avant-garde sound. The cage in Gifu had bars only at the front with the sides and back covered by boards, while the cage in Osaka had bars on all four sides, thereby exposing him to the gaze of people from all directions. KuroDalaijee, “Zō no mado: 1960 nendai kara miru Ikemizu Keiichi” [An Elephant’s Window: Keiichi Ikemizu as Seen in the Context of 1960s], Keiichi Ikemizu et al., eds. Ikemizu! 1964–2000 (Kyoto: Keiichi Ikemizu, 2005): 9. Azuchi Shūzō (later known as Gulliver), who later formed Remandaran with Mizukami Jun, showed his precocious talent by transforming weeding duty at his high school into an event in 1965. His talent, combined with his outstanding looks, made him famous as a hippie in Tokyo. He came into his own as a unique film/ video artist in the angura culture of the 1960s.

CHAPTER 8

Angura Culture and Happenings (1966–1968) The Ritualists at High Tide

1.

PRE-EXPO ’70: THE CROSSOVER BETWEEN ANGURA AND INTERMEDIA

From 1966, 1960s counterculture had finally entered its heyday. Angura (underground) culture was thriving, fed by increasingly fierce anti-Vietnam War protests and the student movements, and so too was a wide range of performance art. Independent of angura and antiestablishment performance art and driven instead by growing economic prosperity and technological advances, new Intermedia performances integrating music (sound) and film on stage were being pioneered by an array of artists and musicians including Akiyama Kuniharu and Yamaguchi Katsuhiro (ex-Jikken Kōbō members who had participated in Flux Week in 1965), ex-Group Ongaku members Tone Yasunao, Shiomi Mieko, and other Fluxus-related figures. The event Happening for Sightseeing Bus Trip in Tokyo, organized by Ay-O in December 1966, in which Akiyama, Yamaguchi and others participated, performing works by Allan Kaprow, the great doyen of Happenings, as well as other Fluxus artists, were enacted, paving the way for experiments in urban spaces. November  1966 saw the cross-genre event Kūkan kara kankyō e (From Space to Environment), with performances held at Sogetsu Art Center and an exhibition at Ma­ tsuya Department Store in Ginza. Participating artists were Ay-O and Shiomi, who had taken part in Sightseeing Bus Trip; contemporary classical music composers Takemitsu Tōru and Ichiyanagi Toshi, visual artists Takamatsu Jirō, Tanaka Shintarō, Yoshimura Masunobu and Jasper Johns, and graphic designers Yokoo Tadanori, Awazu Kiyoshi and Fukuda Shigeo. Former Anti-Art artists (Takamatsu, Tanaka, and Yoshimura) also took part, but by this time their work had renounced its messy engagement with real life and taken a more clinical turn; largely indistinguishable from design, it was now more likely to fit comfortably in the strictly regulated exhibition space of the department store. This new mixture of artists—artists of the new and old generation of “Intermedia,” “Sogetsu,” and “Anti-Art” artists—also appears in Biogode Process in December, which was subtitled “An expression of computer-generated multi-system spaces.” Consisting of music, art, and film (including animation), this stage event was planned and organized by Team Random (Satō Nobuhiro, Tsukio Yoshio, and Tone Yasunao). Participants comprised a mixed group of early Sogetsu artists (Ōtsuji Kiyoji and Yamaguchi Katsuhiro from Jikken Kōbō), radical Anti-Art practitioners (Akasegawa Genpei, Kawani Hiroshi, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, and Kazakura Shō), ex-Group Ongaku members (Tone Yasunao and Mizuno Shūkō), and younger visual artists (Tada Minami and Yoshida Minoru). Many of the works in the exhibition displayed a new level of technological sophistication such as computer-controlled sound effects. In 1967, however, a new cohort of artists began to participate in “intermedia” events. Information on American underground culture was merged with remaining Anti-Art tendencies as seen in Muse Week (December 1965), which led to new collaborations between

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 52. Cream Happening • Intermedia • May 1967 • Lunami Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo

artists in the experimentation of different types of media that would ultimately change the nature of intermedia events. By the time Sogetsu Art Center held its Underground Cinema: Sogetsu Cinematheque, a screening of American experimental films, in June–July  1966, underground culture was beginning to make its mark. The event featured not just American films, but also Kanesaka Kenji’s experimental films shot in the U.S. Kanesaka had just returned to Japan and would later become a key figure as a coordinator, documentarist, and critic of angura culture, collaborating with Japanese filmmakers such as Iimura Takahiko and Kawanaka Nobuhiro, and film critic Satō Shigechika. In January 1967, Takamatsu Jirō, Tone Yasunao, Miyai Rikurō, Ōbayashi Nobuhiko, Satō Shigechika, Yamashita Yōsuke (the jazz musician), and Aikura Hisato (the jazz critic) participated in the sound recording for Kanesaka’s film Ishikeri (Hopscotch); and it was through Kanesaka that Anti-Art artists associated with the Yomiuri Independent (Takamatsu and Tone) joined the new generation of angura filmmakers and musicians such as Miyai, Satō, and Ōbayashi. The sound recording for Ishikeri was an opportunity for established artists with long careers, who had participated in the final years of Yomiuri Independent, to collaborate with younger artists. Such collaborative interactions between Anti-Art and new angura artists are also evident in “the first intermedia event” in Japan.1 Titled simply Intermedia, this event was held in May  1967 at Lunami Gallery, and involved a similar cross-generational range of artists [fig. 52] including new angura filmmakers (Ōbayashi, Kanesaka, and Miyai), artists from the Anti-Art generation (Akasegawa, Kazakura,2 and Tone), their associates from VAN (Jōnouchi Motoharu, Adachi Masao, and Katō Mamoru), the filmmaker Iimura Takahiko, who belonged to the same generation, and Okabe Michio,3 who had turned to film from visual art. Contributors to the event’s brochure included prominent art critics such as Ishizaki Kōichiro, Ishiko Junzō, Kanesaka Kenji, Akatsuka Yukio, and Satō Shigechika, who also took part in a related symposium together with Tone Yasunao and Nakahara Yūsuke, suggesting that the event attracted significant critical attention. Even for these critics, though, the way forward for intermedia remained unclear (the concept “intermedia” itself, as it appears in their writings, appears to have been uncharted territory). Descriptions included, for example, “Happening, event, expanded cinema, namely an intermediate area which does not belong to any established artistic genre” (Ishizaki), 4 and “deconstruction, expansion, merger of media” (Satō).5 Kanesaka was the only one to engage more enthusiastically; he would later become critical of “Intermedia” events after joining Banpaku Hakai Kyōtō-ha (Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle

Chapter 8———Angura Culture and Happenings (1966 –1968)199

Group) with Kokuin, Zero Jigen and 8 Generation, yet at this moment in 1967, he still seemed convinced that for “twenty-first century men,” new technologically advanced media would become a tool of cultural revolution. In this, he followed the thinking of Marshall McLuhan and Timothy Leary. However, Kanesaka’s expectation of a seismic cultural shift went beyond the narrower concerns of media and communication. In language that was inspired by his experience with drugs and reminiscent of the idiosyncratic writings of Katō Yoshihiro, he wrote evocatively of “those who have grown up underground now crawling up through every crack in the earth’s core, nourished on every putrid smell and trace of decadence.”6 These words offer an insight into his later actions. There was therefore an identifiable trend towards intermedia experiments that combined art, film, music, design, and bodily expression. Broadly made up of Anti-Art/ angura artists on the one hand and Sogetsu/Fluxus artists on the other, the two factions came together in Muse Week and Intermedia before gradually going their separate ways (with the exception of occasional collaborations later on). But the dividing line between the two factions corresponded to a similar split in the use of the term hapuningu (Happenings). Originally denoting an intention to provoke or to raise questions, as it spread to popular usage, hapuningu became little more than an anodyne expression for increasingly prevalent “high-tech intermedia” works, which themselves were now being brought under the umbrella of “fine art.” 2.

THE SPREAD OF INTERMEDIA EVENTS

The year 1968 saw two large-scale events in Tokyo and Kansai that took place over several days, further establishing the Intermedia trend. EX·POSE 1968: Nanika itte kure, ima, sagasu (EX·POSE 1968: Say something, now, I’m searching) was held at Sogetsu Art Center in April over five days. It was organized by the magazine Dezain hihyō (Design Critique) as a follow-up to a symposium held in late 1966 with graphic designer Awazu Kiyoshi, architecture critic Kawazoe Noboru, and art critic Hariu Ichirō. EX·POSE 1968 was initially conceived as a combination of lectures and discussions, but as the planning progressed, it expanded to include performative attractions such as film screenings and Happenings.7 One symposium (April 20) was conducted in total darkness, each panelist confined within a box revealing only their head. A lecture by Tōno Yoshiaki (April 25) was shot in video from behind the stage and screened live on a TV monitor. Performative experiments such as these were a notable feature of the event. The following is a list of performative events that took place at EX·POSE 1968:8 Day One: April 10 Changed? What has? (Contemporary Metamorphosis) Blue Box: a program coordinated and directed by Geoffrey Hendricks, with participation by Hendricks, Takamatsu Jirō, Tone Yasunao, and Shiomi Mieko Psycho-delicious: a psychedelic show coordinated by Ichiyanagi Toshi, Yokoo Tadanori, and Kurokawa Kishō, with participation by The Happenings Four (music), Naitō Mako (go-go

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girl), Hamano Yasuhiro (fashion show), Yokoo (harmonica performance), and Ichiyanagi (electric music, sound)

Day Two: April 15  All of Us Are Pierrot the Fool (What is a clash?) The main events on this day consisted of a multi-projection film screening and a slide show.

Day Three: April 20 Violence and Ecstasy (Possession of Action) Gentō kitan: Ā mujō, yoarashi O-hyaku [Strange Tale: Les Miserables, O-hyaku of the stormy night], a story written by Hariu Ichirō with slide projection arranged by Uryū Ryōsuke, narrated by Makiguchi Motomi Impromptu demonstration of painting by Hendricks on the front of the panelists’ boxes, with Takamatsu Jirō, Kojima Nobuaki, and Inayama Takakazu Happening by Shinohara Ushio Ad-lib performance by Hasegawa Tokio and Nagai Seiji9

Day Four: April 25 In Favor of Disappearance (Virtual and Real Images) Poetry reading by Shiraishi Kazuko Lectures by Tōno Yoshiaki and Takamatsu Jirō Shiruku sukurīn ni yoru kumogakure no jutsu [The art of disappearance by silkscreen], artistic composition by Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, and performance by Kara Jūrō, Ōkubo Taka, and other members of Jōkyō Gekijō

Day Five: April 30 Tomorrow, the Sun of the Day after Tomorrow Will Rise (Future Imagination) Poetry reading by Ōoka Makoto Panel discussion, in which panelists speak standing in front of a black box for a confessional

The participation of art critics in performances was one of the distinguishing features of EX·POSE 1968. Hariu, for example, wrote the scenario for the slide show “On the subject of dark emotions,” a kabuki-style political satire, while Tōno scripted the piece “Performance as an ugly old American woman.”10 Ultimately, however, the event—including its psychedelic show, which had become a popular trend by early 1968—belonged to the realm of “Art.” It was held at Sogetsu Art Center, the stronghold of “high art,” and participants included many of those who later collaborated with Expo ’70 (Kurokawa, Yamaguchi, Ichiyanagi, Yokoo, Takamatsu, Tōno, and Matsumoto Toshio, whose film was screened on the second day). Shinohara Ushio made a rare appearance at Sogetsu Art Center—though he was ill at ease on its lofty stage—stripping naked and lighting a firework that he had attached to his penis.11 This intervention, reminiscent of Zero Jigen, was partly comedic; but for Shinohara, who considered himself a “bottom-rung samurai,” it was also his way of disrupting the event. More disruptive still was Kara Jūrō, a leading figure of angura culture. Kara directed a theater piece after Tōno and Takamatsu’s lectures, in which

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three middle-aged ladies sing and dance, it’s part folkish, part musical; it’s all very of the moment […] followed by a Happening in which a seemingly violent man in a shabby kimono brandishes a cooking knife, rips up a dirty futon mat, scatters cotton wadding onto the audience, pours water over his head, and then runs into the audience carrying the futon.12

Taki Kōji, who would later become critical of Expo ’70, praised Kara for offering a “fresh critique of the avant-garde artists associated with the Expo.”13 Strangely, even though the title (EX·POSE) clearly gestured to the forthcoming “Expo” in Osaka, the Expo itself was never in fact a main focus of the lectures or discussions during the event. The division between pro-Expo and anti-Expo participants, which would gradually become pronounced, had yet to fully emerge.14 Seven months after EX·POSE, another event, Zone: Standing Here—Then?, was held in Kyoto from November 8 to 19; the similar nature of its title suggests this was a deliberate nod to the earlier Tokyo event. The main organizer was the Azuma Gallery in Kyoto, with Komatsu Tatsuo, an eminent theater and music producer, his colleague Yanagisawa Masashi, and Mizukami Jun in charge of the program. Participants included hippie film maker Miyai Rikurō (who also participated in Lunami Gallery’s Intermedia), and visual artists from the Kansai area such as Kawaguchi Tatsuo, Matsumoto Shōji, Imai Norio, and The Play members Mizukami and Gulliver (Azuchi Shūzō). A symposium was held on the first day (November 8) and the exhibition opening on November 14, with an electric music performance and screenings of films by Miyai and Gulliver. A butoh dance performance led by Takemura Rui and Happenings by The Play and Zero Jigen took place on November 19. Unlike EX·POSE, Zone seems to have been a project initiated by the artists themselves, rather than by art critics, although the symposium invitations to Yamazaki Masakazu, a well-known theater critic and playwright, and Nakahara Yūsuke, a famous art critic based in Tokyo (though originally from the Kansai area) suggest a desire for some kind of stamp of authority. Yet the way it incorporated angura-inspired work at the Kansai event, combining art, film, and Happenings, and the fact that it was led by Komatsu Tatsuo and other theater people who had earlier participated in Ritual of Sa’in, set it apart from the earlier Tokyo event. The dichotomy between angura work and the kind of experimental high art (produced by Sogetsu and hi-tech art groups) that could equally well be displayed in corporate pavilions was not clear cut in Kansai. It may have been due to the fact that there was less media exposure within the region, and therefore fewer commercial opportunities. But it is important to note that artists from the late 1960s in the Kansai area had their own unique trajectory; indeed, the first angura folk singers to gain popularity during this period (such as Takaishi Tomoya and Okabayashi Nobuyasu) were from Kansai.15 3.

A STAGE NAMED SHINJUKU

1967 was an important year in terms of the overlap between wider cultural trends and performance art. That summer saw media attention turn toward the crowds of young people—known as the fūten-zoku (“idler tribe”)16—who hung out around Shinjuku Station’s East Exit, which came to be known as the Green House. From all over Japan, young people

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 53. Exterior view of Experimental Small Theater Modern Art • Shinjuku, Tokyo

were heading to Shinjuku, and a unique culture was emerging. In September of that year, Itoi Kanji, hearing about the fūten-zoku on the news, made a trip from Sendai to experience it for himself. By this time, Shinjuku had become a large urban center (see chap. 21, p.  459), luring film, music, and theater practitioners. The area was also attractive to the young—the foot loose and fancy free, both from Tokyo and beyond—as a place where they could enjoy themselves uninhibitedly, unlike the more exclusive areas such as Ginza. The nucleus of this new community of creatives was the internationally known coffee shop Fūgetsu-dō, patronized by an array of artists, intellectuals, fūten and hippies.17 This was the coffee shop, too, where Zero Jigen reportedly scouted its female performers. Fūge­ tsu-dō also made its vast wall space available for exhibitions, and many of the artists who feature in this book held shows there. Jikken Kōbō exhibited at Fūgetsu-do in 1957, Group Ongaku held a concert there in 1962, and Yoshimura Masunobu and Sasaki Kōsei also had solo exhibitions. Meanwhile League of Criminals, Kurohata and Zero Jigen met and held performance events at Café Spain, the poets’ hangout in Shinjuku. Other angura cultural hubs also sprung up, including Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka (Shinjuku Culture, a movie house and theater that opened in April, 1962), Pit-Inn (a jazz club that opened in December  1965, with a theater space that opened in July  1968), Sasori-za (Theater Scorpio, a movie house that opened in August, 1967), Experimental Small Theater Modern Art (theater for popular and avant-garde performances, which opened in October  196718) [fig.  53],  54. Body painting by Makirō • c. 1968 • Experimental Small Theater Modern Art, Shinjuku, Tokyo

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 55. Body painting by Mazura Ryūdan • c. 1968 • Kinokuniya, Shinjuku (presumed), Tokyo

Angura Pop (a disco named by Kanesaka Kenji that opened in 1967), Shinjuku Milano-za (a movie house, opened in December, 1956) and LSD (a disco that opened in the summer of 1967). Countless music, theater, film, and Happening events were held in these venues, ranging from the truly radical to the simply trendy. Donald Richie, Ōbayashi Nobuhiko, and Kawanaka Nobuhiro screened underground films at Theater Scorpio;19 and it was also at these venues that at the height of the angura and psychedelic boom, artists Makirō20 [fig.  54], who later formed Baramanji Kessha (Rosicrucian Society), and Mazura Ryūdan,21 who sported a Mohawk like Shinohara [fig. 55], performed live body painting shows, where they painted onto naked women. Artists also exhibited in vacant spaces belonging to shrines near Shinjuku’s entertainment districts. 8 Generation screened its films at the office space of Kiō Shrine, and Matsue Kaku from Kurohata held an exhibition on the approach to the Hanazono Shrine. The tent performances by Kara Jūrō and his troop Jōkyō Gekijō (Situation Theater) at Hanazono Shrine, from August 1967 to June 1968, were representative of the ways in which angura culture forced its way up through these hidden corners in urban spaces. Shinjuku’s streets were another stage co-opted for performances: Jōkyō Gekijō performed a street theater piece at Shinjuku Station East Exit, taken from the prologue of Ōshima Nagisa’s Shinjuku dorobō nikki (Diary of a Shinjuku Thief), while Zero Jigen and Kurohata also executed their rituals in the streets of Shinjuku. Shinjuku was also a familiar venue throughout the 1960s for visual artists. Yoshimura Masunobu lived in Hyakunin-chō, near Shinjuku Station, from 1959 to 1962, and was one of the first to settle in the area. His house became a meeting place for Neo Dada and the Anti-Art artists. Shinjuku Daiichi Gallery (which opened around 1961) and Tsuba­k i Kindai Gallery (which opened November  1962) frequently hosted exhibitions featuring avant-garde artists, and performances sometimes spilled out onto the streets. Matsue Kaku, who made his living as a sign painter, lived in the eastern outskirts of the town and began performing in Shinjuku as early as 1963, well before most of the other artists. There were also a number of joint performances. Zero Jigen performed rituals at Keio Department Store and the Kinokuniya Building, as well as other venues; In August 1966, Kurohata, Zero Jigen, and others conducted Anti-Vietnam War Action Parade, a joint performance in the streets of Shinjuku.22 These rituals received coverage in

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weekly magazines and newspapers. In December 1966, Suenaga Tamio from Group Shikaku (Sight) and Akiyama Yūtokutaishi participated in Shinjuku Art Festival, organized by Shigun and Kurohata, at Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka, with theater, music, and dance groups. The Black Festival at Angura Pop in October 1968 saw the addition of Vitamin Art, led by Koyama Tetsuo. Some of these groups and artists formed the “Ritualists” and became core members of the Expo Destruction Group. The Black Festival was held immediately before International Anti-War Day (October 21), when clashes between student protesters and riot police brought mayhem to Shinjuku, and Kokuin’s film screenings spilled out onto the street. These art events epitomize the politics and culture of Shinjuku at the time. 4.

HAPPENINGS HIT THE MEDIA

Between 1967 and 1968, the term hapuningu (Happening) suddenly took off. Popularized by the media, it became a household word. The term was first used in 1961 in musical contexts (see chap. 6.4, p. 134), but by 1965–66, it had spread to the visual arts. According to the Asahi Shimbun Sengo Midashi Dētabēsu 1945-1999 (Asahi Newspaper Postwar Headline Database 1945–1999),23 the word hapuningu did not feature in headlines prior to 1967, but by 1968 it had occurred ten times—decreasing to seven times in 1969, and five times in 1970. The usage of the word pafōmansu (performance), on the other hand, became widespread only after 1985, and whilst it has been in constant use ever since, its usage is largely restricted to cultural contexts, particularly in reference to visual art and the theater. The word hapuningu, by contrast, was used to cover a wide range of topics ranging from politics and the economy to weather and traffic. According to Yoshida Yoshie, obuje (objet) was another art term that entered common usage, though it too retained predominantly aesthetic connotations. Hapuningu, meanwhile, became a shorthand term for denoting specific events; for example, the “Yasuda Fort 24 hapuningu, a National Diet hapuningu, a sporting upset hapuningu, a criminal arrest hapuningu, even a hapuningu involving a dump truck crashing into a living room.”25 Its use was “spreading in every direction from politics and the economy to commonplace events and petty crime.”26 The term hapuningu (describing a performance) was first used in 1966 in the context of the shōgekijō (little theater) movement.27 In March 1967, the magazine Eiga hyōron (Film criticism) published an article about a symposium on the theme of hapuningu,28 and in the same month Swinger Party29 [fig. 56], featuring Koyama Tetsuo and others, was held at the Shinjuku Milano-za dance hall. From that moment on, the use of the term would escalate. In its early stages, the term was used only by avant-garde intellectuals and artists. Gradually, however, it began to feature on television. For example, Masukomi Q (Mass Media Q, Tokyo Broadcasting System Television, TBS), broadcast in 1967, was called a “Happening program” on account of its man-on-the-street interviews. In May 1968, Kijima Norio, a popular broadcaster of the Morning Show (Nippon Educational Television, NET, current TV Asahi) began hosting Kijima Norio Hapuningu Shō (The Kijima Norio Happening Show, Nihon TV). The first episode, titled “Is there anything interesting?” was filmed in Shinjuku. Over 500 people flocked to the filming: office workers on their

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 56. Swinger Party • March 23, 1967 • Shinjuku Milano, Tokyo

way home, students, fūten tribe members, hippies, members of Genri Kenkyū Kai,30 and angura groups. Some took off their clothes, others climbed a banner pole and hung the Fūten Sanpa flag (“Fūten three factions,” parodying the three major student sects31); others still started fires and began brawling. Kijima decamped to a coffee shop and continued filming. The riot police were called, the crowds dispersed, and peace eventually restored. Ultimately, the event is indicative of the popularity of live broadcasted Happenings (some TV companies staged fake Happenings by paying those who appeared in the program, a practice that received some amount of criticism).32 In the art world, Ikemizu Keiichi’s Happenings took place in November 1965 and Jack Society carried out Happening Campaign (produced by NET TV) in May 1966. These are the earliest examples of artists naming their own actions “Happenings.” At Sakai Independent in August 1966, the organizer created a category for hapuningu, a first in the history of Independent exhibitions. But the term still required a gloss in an article in Bijutsu techō from March 1966,33 and it was not until May 1967 that the magazine published a comprehensive introduction to Happenings as art.34 A special issue on Happenings would not follow until August 1968, in spite of the fact that Bijutsu techō had led the way in its reporting of the most cutting-edge artistic expressions—and moreover, most of the articles in the issue focused on works by American and European artists. As early as March 1967, however, the film magazine Eiga hyōron reported on a Happening symposium that included advocates of angura culture such as Kanesaka Kenji and Satō Shigechika35 and it also published a serial essay “Zero Jigen gishiki seiron monogatari” (The true story of the rituals of Zero Jigen) by Katō Yoshihiro. Given the dates of these articles, we can surmise that radical filmmakers and critics recognized the emergence of Happenings as a distinctly Japanese cultural phenomenon, earlier and more insistently than art critics themselves. Nevertheless, visual artists had increasing opportunity to air their Happenings on TV. Akasegawa Genpei and others reportedly filmed Happenings for television as early as 1963, while for Jack Society, Happenings were a conscious part of their publicity strategy and so they deliberately increased their performance frequency. Chida Ui, in particular, declared it her goal to become a mass media celebrity. Zero Jigen, Kokuin, GUN, The Play, Baramanji Kessha, and others also presented Happenings on TV.

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 57. Chida Ui performing in Psycho-delicious #1 Intermedia Piece • February 1968 • Angura Pop, Shinjuku, Tokyo

The increased popularity of “psychedelic” culture was another factor behind the rising media profile of Happenings. American drug culture had enabled artists to experience the total liberation of their sensations—visual, audial, and bodily—in ways hitherto unknown, and it exerted a huge influence not only on the music scene, but also on the full span of visual culture, including graphic design, fashion, and architecture. Psycho-delicious #1: Inter­ media Piece36 [fig.  57], co-directed by Kanesaka Kenji and Kazumata Kōichi at Angura Pop in February  1968, was the first event to connect psychedelic culture to Happenings. Participants included Shinohara Ushio, Chida Ui, Azuchi Shūzō (who later changed his name to Gulliver and began experimenting with film), film director Miyai Rikurō, photographer Hanaga Mitsutoshi, and Itō Mika, a dancer who specialized in modern dance. There were hippie posters on the wall and a black light shone onto them, creating a weird, watery shimmer. Something that looked like an embryo, or the walls of an internal organ, glistened in front of my eyes. Everything was painted with fluorescent paint. […] Suddenly a flash, and then—Kaboom! Strobe lights and rock music streamed down from the ceiling like the roar of a jet plane. Rock music flooded over us, pounding our eardrums, the lights flashing continuously. I felt dizzy. From this barrage of sound and light, I could make out three voluptuous women, their bodies wrapped in white tights, writhing as Ukiyo-e images were projected onto them. […] All around, scenes from angura films were being projected from multiple projectors, and the effect was disorienting […] eventually, men and women appeared wearing strange glasses and carrying incense, and they started painting each other’s faces and hands with fluorescent paint […]37

It is worth briefly considering the significance of Shinohara in this event. In 1968, the age difference between Shinohara Ushio and Chida Ui, both participants in this event, was sixteen years. In April 1968, Shinohara also organized an exhibition titled Psychedelic Illustration;38 he had been appearing since 1958 in weekly magazines and on radio. He was a rare example of an artist consistently interacting, over the span of a decade, with new and emerging art trends.

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5.

JACK SOCIETY AND THE PUBLIC AT LARGE

The proliferation of Happenings in the popular media was not simply symptomatic of the vulgar popularization of avant-garde art, or the lure of celebrity. A number of artists, through their work, were seriously questioning pressing social issues: the growth of consumer society in the wake of rapid economic growth; the increasing influence of the media, especially television and weekly magazines; the fast pace of urbanization. Faced with the limited effectiveness of the traditional art world, they began to explore new expressions using new methods and media. From 1960 to 1963, as we saw in chapter 6, Anti-Art artists had been rejecting the concept of a reciprocal relationship between artist and audience in favor of the absolute autonomy of the artist. But from 1966 to 1968 up-and-coming artists began to explore how avant-garde art activities could achieve greater levels of social recognition, and to this end they began to focus on the benefits of wider media exposure, considering how to respond to the needs of their public, and work within the structure (and systems) of the mass media. One example of an avant-garde art action in an urban space that did not seek to antagonize its audience was Shattā ni egaku 15 nin no gaka tachi (15 Painters Painting on Shutters) at Maebashi Building Shopping Street in August 1966 [fig. 58].39 This event was organized by the members of NOMO, a regional art group in Maebashi, Gunma, and involved Jack Society from Tokyo, Rozo-gun from Mito, and Ihara Chizuko and Chida Ui, who both later joined Jack Society. Though the paintings—executed on shop shutters—were stylistically avant-garde for the time, the shopkeepers nonetheless responded favorably40 and the project was widely reported in the media,41 an indication of its unusual success. This was the kind of social recognition aimed at by Jack Society, which formed in 1964. The group began to explore different social contexts through which they could actively “sell avant-garde art,” using performances to build a reciprocal relationship between artist and audience. Jack Society’s first director was Nakao Takashi42 and its deputy director was Ma­ tsuo Kiyoshi; Sasaki Kōsei was in charge of event planning. Both Matsuo and Sasaki were eloquent speakers, and the group was unusual in that it prioritized the documentation of its activities. This documentary evidence helps trace both the group’s evolution and its objectives. In essence, unlike commercial art and the “pure art movement” ( junsui geijutsu undō), the group sought to carve out a path to “socially rationalize the artist’s

 58. 15 Painters Painting on Shutters, second from the right: Sasaki Kōsei • August 1966 • Maebashi Building Shopping Street, Maebashi, Gunma

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lifestyle and establish art as a vocation”43 through their organizing of artists, their development of channels for marketing artworks, their events aimed at the general public, and their media strategies. Unlike Neo Dada, Kyūshū-ha, and other regional art groups, Jack Society was a heterogeneous art group, although a number of its members shared a predilection for exhibitionism and self-promotion. Thus, while Neo Dada members belonged to the same generation and shared an artistic style, and Kyūshū-ha and other regional groups were bound by a sense of geographic affiliation, Jack Society members were disparate in terms of age, aesthetics and social views. One of the oldest members was Sasaki Kōsei, who was born in 1928, the same year as Kyūshū-ha’s Sakurai Takami. After graduating from Musashino Art College (present-day Musashino Art University), Sasaki exhibited at the Dokuritsu Exhibition, one of the major juried group exhibitions. He also had numerous solo exhibitions and won awards in art competitions, gaining recognition through his artwork. The group’s youngest member was Chida Ui, born in 1948. She met Shinohara Ushio while she was in high school and dropped out to try to make a living as a media celebrity. Other members included employees from Tōei Dōga (currently Tōei Animation), where Sasaki worked, such as Kobayashi Shichirō. 44 Exposure to the film business through Tōei may have been a factor behind the importance the group placed on the social position of the artist, similarly to how Shinohara Ushio had become aware of the strategic importance of popular media through his friendship with a design student in the 1950s. Jack Society was made up of two opposing factions (much like the split between the Yoshimura/Shinohara wing and the Arakawa/Akasegawa wing of Neo Dada): Sasaki, Chida, Koyama Tetsuo, and Chiba Eisuke were more interested in performance art, while Matsuo and Kobayashi Shichirō were more focused on artwork. The group’s open-call exhibition of April 1966, titled Oshare na 15 nichikan (Fashionable 15 Days), was the first event led by the performance faction that appealed to the masses. Programs in the event consisted of an “instant” fancy dress contest, a dance party organized by a rock band, a “dressing up show” sponsored by a beauty parlor, and a “sword show.” These events seem to have derived their characteristics from corporate-sponsored events aimed at young females. Yet while they may resemble the public-friendly “art projects” that occur in Japan today, at a time when “avant-garde art” was still a meaningful label, the populist strategy of the exhibition was wholly innovative.45 In May, a month after this event, a street performance took place in front of Iwashima Gallery (which later becomes the Jack Art Museum) in Ogikubo. A performer crawls along with a doll on their back, then rolls over on the sidewalk. Sasaki performs in a bag and Chiba sits on a stepladder in a suit, casting a fishing line onto the road (see plate 10, p. 8). The event—focusing on the everyday behavior performed in a crazy way—was prearranged to be filmed by NET TV using a hidden camera and microphone, and was broadcast on Doyō shō (Saturday show). Following the event, in June, Jack Society conducted a “jacking” on NET’s Katsura Kokinji Afternoon Show, which saw Koyama (a proponent of “Vitamin Art”) gnawing on a cabbage while each of the other members performed some action or presentation with objects. Although the English word “hijack” was not in common use at the time, the term “jacking” certainly carried connotations of appropriation—for example, the occupation of public spaces like TV programs. Jack Society also held street demonstrations at the 1965 Gifu Independent, as well as Painting on Shutters in Maebashi. On both occasions, members typically chose

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 59. Sasaki Kōsei performs during 15 Artists Painting on Shutters • August 7, 1966 • Chūō-dōri Shopping Arcade, Maebashi, Gunma

crowded shopping arcades, and their actions seem to have happened on a whim. At Gifu Independent they wore everyday clothes, kicked about large tin cans to make a noise, and dragged around a piece of paper painted with the group’s name [fig.  40, p.  179]. At Maebashi the following year, the group devised more eye-catching stunts. Sasaki, Chiba, Satō Mitsusuke, and two women (Ihara Chizuko46 and Mori Jun, who was a staff of Iwashima Gallery) painted their faces white and walked about with hoses in their mouths (which they may have been blowing through to create a sound) while carrying umbrellas [fig.  59]. Koyama wore a white cloth with “Avant-Garde Art Tokyo Jack” written on it, spreading his arms wide to display the group’s name [fig. 60]. This particular action predates what would become his signature style, but it is noteworthy that he was the only member to wear a costume, differentiating his performance from everyday actions in a real-life space. Gifu Independent may also have functioned as a platform for art groups from all over Japan to present their manifestos (see chap. 7.3, p. 178). During the May Day rally of 1966, similarly, Sasaki Kōsei appeared with finger cots attached all over his body, accompanied by a man in a costume with protruding eyes (or breasts?), holding a banner that read “Jack causes revolutionary changes in thinking.” This is another example of the group’s use of performance as a mode

 60. Koyama Tetsuo (left) and Chiba Eisuke (right) perform during 15 Artists Painting on Shutters • August 7, 1966 • Maebashi

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 61. Performance by Sasaki Kōsei (left) et al. for May Day • May 1, 1966 • Yoyogi, Tokyo

of publicity. [fig. 61]. Jack Society’s PR activities were further highlighted at Sakai Independent in August  1966, when its members set up a huge panel with texts and photographs setting out the group’s aims and its history. 47 In 1966, the All-Japan Contemporary Artists Council (AJCAC) formed as a nationwide organization for aspiring professional artists. The council was effectively an expansion of Jack Society, which until then had mostly consisted of artists in Tokyo and neighboring cities; it linked together a nationwide network of avant-garde artists (membership was restricted to professional artists seeking to establish their reputation and excluded amateur “hobby” artists) that had come into being through the Independent exhibitions of the mid-1960s. In this sense, the AJCAC was a direct outcome of the Independents. 48 Its bulletin, Art 21, offered a forum for members to exchange information, but there was also the option to purchase space in its pages to publicize artworks. AJCAC and Jack Society were completely separate entities, and nevertheless the two shared a skepticism of the insularity of the art world, belief in the need for media strategy, and the ultimate aim of creating a collective of artists who considered themselves professionals. 49 Ikemizu Keiichi, who had organized Sakai Independent and later formed The Play, and Ritualist members Akiyama Yūtokutaishi and Matsue Kaku, were often involved during the early stage of the AJCAC’s history, an indication that even artists with such different aesthetic and political views were taking an interest in the creation of a professional body of artists. 6.

THE MASS MEDIA STRATEGIES OF CHIDA UI, KOYAMA TETSUO, AND CHIBA EISUKE

Chida Ui (known later as novelist Ui Angel) and Koyama Tetsuo were the younger members of the performance faction of Jack Society, and their Happening style was clearly aimed at popular media coverage. In November 1966, they jointly performed Dating Show (in front of Shinjuku Koma Theater and Sukiyabashi Park), produced by Sasaki Kōsei, and there are numerous photographs documenting their public “date” in a busy shopping area. Chida appears in Shinjuku wearing a long cape while Koyama has mannequin heads attached all over his body; they then apply makeup on each other [fig. 62] and are joined by Sasaki Kōsei looking like a space alien with finger cots all over his body, and Chiba Eisuke, Kobayashi Shichirō, and Ihara Chizuko (see chap. 15.2, p. 366–7). The performance gained widespread audience and media attention. The use of costumes, makeup, and a public “date” scenario suggest a similar inspiration to the fashion show in Fashionable 15 Days. By this time, the commercial possibilities of Zero Jigen’s performances had attracted attention, with frequent media coverage of their street actions,

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 62. First Dating Show, performance by Koyama Tetsuo (center) and Chida Ui (right) • November 23, 1966 • In front of Shinjuku Koma Theater, Tokyo

and in May 1966, the group was invited to participate in a street advertisement for the comedy movie Kurēji da yo, Kisōtengai (It’s a Strange Heaven).50 In December 1967, Chida and Koyama also appeared in Great Ramble Operation, an advertising campaign directed by Zero Jigen for the French film La Grande Vadrouille (The Great Ramble, 1966).51 Chida and Koyama also appeared as a duo in the Bum Academy Second Festival in April 1967, and again on Katsura Kokinji Afternoon Show in July (under the title The Third TV Media Show). But Chida also began to appear alone in TV and weekly magazines, a trend which Koyama—keen to foreground his provincial roots and animalistic sense of vitality—rejected, causing them to eventually go their separate ways. Chida and Koyama were not the only members with contradictory tendencies. There was also a noticeable contrast between Chiba Eisuke, whose darker Dadaist side was sometimes hidden behind a populist façade, and the group leader Sasaki Kōsei, who was a polemicist and “stage director.” But it is precisely the fact that these vastly different artists collaborated with each other that constitutes a defining feature of the period. Chida Ui’s “avant-garde celebrity business” based on “proactive opportunism”52 was, in a way, an extreme example of media performance (she herself talked of “playing with the mass media”53 and used the term “avant-garde celeb business”54). Her approach demonstrated a cool-headed observation of social realities, absent among other artists. She was frustrated, she wrote, that even a major artist such as Takamatsu Jirō had relatively little presence in society, and that Okamoto Tarō was the only “celebrity” painter. Even performances by Zero Jigen were simply expressions of the artists’ mental landscape and risked “becoming ordinary by being acknowledged as extraordinary.”55 She continues: What a delight it is to see my actions broadcast out to society, leaving all kinds of impressions. Even if most of it is misunderstood, I couldn’t care in the slightest. Because misunderstanding is itself a fabulous mode of transmission. […] For me, the difference between Happenings and Dating is this: the immediate objective of artists who do Happenings is the unpredictability and gratuitousness of the action, which arises from a mental image held by the artist and those working with him or her. Dating, by contrast, is an artistic process with the sole aim of generating publicity. For me, appearances on television, articles in weekly magazines and newspapers, making drawings or writing articles like this one—these are all Dating, so long as they become incidents in the public arena.56

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Chiba Eisuke was also a member of the performance faction of Jack Society (the others were Sasaki, Chida, and Koyama). He shared with them a common interest in popular media as a way of bringing the group’s activities to the public’s attention. Nonetheless, his formalin-throwing action, his stretched string installation from 1964 (see chap. 7.2, pp. 174–5), and the street performance in which he pretended to be a bloody and wounded dead body, speak to a strong Dada influence.57 He also experimented with deliberately spreading disturbing news or rumors, a means of using linguistic communication to overcome the spatial constraints of the artwork, thereby enhancing its reach.58 An example is an article published in Art 21. The article took the title “Party of Maki,” calling to mind the name of an apparel company, and listed the names of cities such as Paris, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, Bagdad and Kyoto, followed by comments such as: “For more information, see contact details below”; “The latest PLAY situation”; “There will be a report in Tokyo within a few days—something may happen within the year”; “With regards to the MAKI incident, the extensive relationship between Party of Maki and Chiba Eisuke has led to the occurrence of unexplained phenomena in the places named below.”59 Through its insinuations that a political society with worldwide influence was planning some kind of disruption, the article was deliberately designed to unsettle. Chiba’s most radical action (though the date is unknown) took place at a film screening around 1968 (possibly at Suginami Ward Civic Hall), during which he raised a banner that stated “Kidnapping Prime Minister Satō.” He also held a solo performance at Sankei Hall (c. December 1967) and a Happening (date unknown) in which he drove a car wrapped in bandages.60 His wheelhouse, however, was the work of disseminating ominous rumors, like those described above. Ultimately, Jack Society’s various attempts to embed contemporary art in a wider social context were short-lived, and their actions never mustered the power to gain momentum and circulate within the media. The group’s activities peaked in 1967, but following Sasaki’s sudden break from the Japanese art world and his subsequent departure to the U.S., it soon disbanded. Its last documented action was the aforementioned Third TV Media Show in July of 1967, and the fourth and final issue of Art 21 was published in December. Chida and Koyama participated in Gishiki-ya Kaomise Taikai (Ritualists Debut Assembly) in July 1967 and then joined the Ritualists’ events as individuals, rather than as members of Jack Society. 7.

RITUALISTS, ASSEMBLE! 1: MAY DAY AND OTHER OUTDOOR SPACES

During the latter part of the decade, early pioneers of performance art—Zero Jigen and Kurohata from Tokyo, and Mizukami Jun from Kansai—began to develop their wellknown Ritualist styles. They were joined by Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, who participated in the Gifu Independent, Kokuin, formed by Suenaga Tamio in spring of 1967, and Koyama Tetsuo, who left Jack Society and started Vitamin Art. Kawanaka Nobuhiro’s 8 Generation (which included new members after its restructuring), and angura film makers and critics such as Kanesaka Kenji and Satō Shigechika, would also join Ritualist artists, ultimately forming the Expo Destruction Group in early 1969. The period thus saw a realignment of artistic affiliations along artistic and political lines, and a move away from the

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more heterogeneous and cross-genre events of the earlier period. Ritualists severed their connections with Sogetsu-associated artists, butoh dancers, and Fluxus artists—with whom they had previously presented performances at Lunami Gallery and MAC-J—and rejected the use of venues such as Sogetsu Art Center, where performances could easily be perceived as “avant-garde art.” Instead, they focused on performance designed to shock through its vulgarity, and readily accepted the label kawara kojiki.61 It was during this period that Zero Jigen’s produced some of its landmark performances: Metropolitan Chinchin Streetcar Funeral with Hanging Nooses and Futon (March 1967), Ultrasonic Wave Operation (August 1967), Buck-naked Gas-masked Walking Ritual (December 1967), and a ritual in Donald Richie’s film Cybele. In terms of media coverage, the novelty of its ideas and maturity of its style, not to mention the large-scale set-ups it devised to meet the challenges of urban space, the group was highly successful. Throughout this peak period of activity from 1966 to 1968, Zero Jigen also collaborated with Ritualist artists. The following is a chronological list of their collaborations: May 1966 All-Japan Insanity Trade Fair (’66 Yoyo Independent Avant-Garde Artists’ Action62 Assembly), May Day rally, Yoyogi Kurohata, Zero Jigen, 8 Generation, Zantō Kaigi63 (Remnant Council), Jack Society, Itoi Kanji, and others64 Aug 1966 Anti-Vietnam War Action Parade, Shinjuku Kurohata, Zero Jigen, 8 Generation, Group Shikaku (Suenaga Tamio, et al.), and others (Group Mizunoki, Gaga Remnants, Stage Construction Company, et al.) Oct 1966 Midnight Variety Happening: Brahman, Chiyoda Salon Small Theater Kurohata, 8 Generation, Suenaga Tamio, Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, and others (Maro Akaji, Watanabe Chihiro, Stage Construction Company, et al.) Dec 1966 Shinjuku Art Festival, Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka Kurohata, 8 Generation, Group Shikaku (Suenaga Tamio and Watanabe Chihiro), Akiyama Yūtokutaishi and others (Shigun, Sawahata Faction of Gaga, Violence Committee of Deep Night Alliance, modern dance and flamenco groups, et al.) May 1967 Ki-no-shita Circus Hut Freak Show,65 May Day rally, Yoyogi Kurohata, Zero Jigen, 8 Generation, Kokuin July 1967 Ritualists Debut Assembly (The First Jacks Show) Hitachi Hall, Shinjuku Kurohata, Zero Jigen, Baramanji Kessha, Kawanaka Nobuhiro, Chida Ui, et al. Oct 1967 Ultrasonic Wave Operation (Flower Train Gas Mask Operation No.  1) Club Hana-­densha, Asakusa Zero Jigen, Matsue Kaku, Chida Ui, Gulliver, Sakurai Takami, et al. Mar 1968 Insanity Trade Fair, Honmoku-tei Theater, Asakusa Zero Jigen, Kokuin, Vitamin Art (Koyama Tetsuo et al.), Kurohata (no appearance but backstage support) Oct 1968 Black Festival, Angura Pop, Shinjuku Zero Jigen, Kokuin, Vitamin Art, Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, et al. (Poster Demonstration Group [Watanabe Chihiro], Aome Umi and Blue Eyes, Hana­ ga Mitsutoshi, Yoshihara Norio, et al.)

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Grand Insanity Trade Fair: Year-end Angura Festival, Iino Hall, Toranomon Zero Jigen, Kokuin, Vitamin Art, Baramanji Kessha, Akiyama Yūtokutaishi (in a special appearance as Shinjuku Shōnen-dan [Shinjuku Boy Troop]), Kurohata

Most of the collaborations, except for the event at Hitachi Hall (which was initially billed as a concert by The Jacks66), took place outdoors, or in venues around Shinjuku and Yoyo­ gi that were not typically associated with “high art.” The Yoyogi venue for the May Day rally was often used for performances during this period67 and it seems to have offered ample space for artists to present their work, though by this point in time May Day had lost the political tension of the postwar period and had become a festive event. Shigun, a left-leaning art group close to Kurohata, had engaged in group public painting demonstrations at May Day rallies since 1964.68 Outside of the radically left-wing artists, the only other artists to participate in the May Day rally were Ritualists, and Sogetsu or Intermedia artists were entirely absent, which indicates that those participating in May Day shared particular political (and anti-political) orientations. Zero Jigen, however, with experience asserting its presence in busy urban spaces, must still have stood out. On May Day 1966, its eight members paraded in morning dress carrying life-size dolls, while two women in black suits carried pillows on their backs [fig. 63]. They also performed their well-known Ketsuzō-kai action, in which they squatted on all fours with lit candles and incense sticks attached to their butts.69 Itoi Kanji participated in the performance wearing a kantōi, the simple penis-shaped tunic that he often used [fig. 64]. Matsue Kaku from Kurohata attracted the crowd’s attention by swinging metal chains (a dangerous publicity stunt), then played the biwa (Japanese lute) and sung saimon-gatari,70 all the while wearing a colorful dotera (padded kimono gown) [fig. 65]. For the May Day 1967 event, titled Ki-no-shita Circus Hut Freak Show, a massive hut was built five meters tall and fifteen meters wide, decorated by Matsue with his hallmark painting and calligraphy, which he derived from traditional popular theater styles. This event marks Kokuin’s debut performance; members handed out the Kokuin Sengen (Kokuin Manifesto), “painted their bodies bright red and lay down on the green lawn holding each other.”71 In contrast to the large-scale performances of the previous year, Zero Jigen’s action was limited to a ritual by a small number of performers, because other members scheduled to perform, including those from Kokuin, had been detained by the event’s organizing  63. Zero Jigen performance for May Day • May 1, 1966 • Yoyogi, Tokyo

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 64. Itoi Kanji performance for May Day • May 1, 1966 • Yoyogi, Tokyo

committee and the undercover police,72 leaving Katō, wearing a kimono, to enact the Ketsuzō-kai ritual by himself [fig. 66]. Kamijō Junjirō, who joined Zero Jigen while at Tōhoku University and became a principal performer during the group’s middle period, lay down with a pregnant nude female doll “with a candle affixed to her belly.”73 This ritual was titled Ritual of Giving Birth. Despite the anti-Vietnam War message of Matsue’s storytelling, Zero Jigen’s bizarre and vulgar performances must have struck viewers as ero guro nansensu (erotic, grotesque, nonsense), totally out of tune with the original purpose of May Day. The May Day organization committee in fact made a formal complaint, and Akahata (Red Flag, the Japanese Communist Party newspaper) condemned the group and its work as the “reckless action of Trotskyists” (which greatly amused Suenaga and others).74 Certainly, the artists who participated in the two May Day rallies had varying attitudes towards politics, a fact observed later in the Expo Destruction Group. Mizukami Jun and Koyama Tetsuo, for example, were not explicitly political, while Katō Yoshihiro’s aim at Expo was to attract greater audience and media attention; Kurohata however was consistent in its popular anarchist and anti-­ Vietnam War stance, and Suenaga Tamio’s Kokuin filmed the 2nd Haneda Struggle and other important political incidents in support of the student league Zengakuren. These

 65. Matsue Kaku (left) and Zero Jigen performance for May Day • May 1, 1966 • Yoyogi, Tokyo

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 66. Matsue Kaku (left) and Katō Yoshihiro (center) performance for May Day • May 1, 1967 • Yoyogi, Tokyo

two groups, at least, demonstrated the latent presence of political convictions in their work during the May Day rallies. Performances by Zero Jigen, Kokuin, and Koyama Tetsuo during this period shared a number of similar characteristics: their focus on anonymity, on Japanese cultural references, on sex and bodily sensations. The work of Kurohata and Matsue Kaku, however, was more impactful in terms of its explicit antiwar message. Kurohata was founded in 1961 and began to enact bodily expressions around the same time as Zero Jigen. Members included Suzuki Shirō (who joined as a theater director); Matsue Kaku, who performed a saimon storytelling, was a kabuki-style painter, calligrapher specializing in kanteiryū (exaggerated kabuki-style handwriting) and signboard maker, besides being generally adept at stage design; and Takahara Yūji, who had a background in visual art like Matsue and had also published a novel. To an even greater degree than other Ritualist groups, members brought with them a range of skill sets. The theatricality of its performances, which it owed to Suzuki, also set it apart from other groups dominated by visual artists. It incorporated religious elements, such as a Brahman monk’s robe, Buddhist altars and sutras, and it consistently opposed the war in Vietnam. Its actions were serious, and sometimes violent, and humor was totally absent, unlike in Zero Jigen’s work. Matsue himself actively curated the visual image of the Ritualists by creating signboards and setting up a hut for the May Day event in 1967, designing the stage at Club Hana-densha in October of the same year and posters written in kanteiryū-style calligraphy for the event at Iino Hall in November 1968. Another group that participated in the 1966 and 1967 May Day events with Kurohata and Zero Jigen was 8 Generation. Formed in 1963, 8 Generation was a group of filmmakers led by Kawanaka Nobuhiro. The name derived from the 8mm film used in movies and referenced the so-called “8th art” of film media.75 The group documented other artists’ rituals and they also conducted performative screenings of their documentaries with multiple projectors and off-screen projections. On May Day 1966, they performed an action that involved them walking around in clothes that are covered in train tickets, matches, and cigarette butts [fig. 67], with one member walking on stilt cans wearing a Mod-style wig,76 as “the Happening of communication refusal by smoke screen.”77 Though it is hard to imagine given the lyrical nature of his later films, Kawanaka even performed in an individual capacity at events. In July 1967, he left his seat in the audience and went up on the stage to participate in The Jacks’ musical performance, and joined

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 67. 8 Generation performance for May Day • May 1, 1966 • Yoyogi, Tokyo

Baramanji Kessha’s performance for Katsura Kokinji Afternoon Show (date unknown) with his face painted white.78 8 Generation went on to participate in Expo Destruction Group. Between the two May Day events, the three groups—Kurohata, Zero Jigen, and 8 Generation—also participated in Anti-Vietnam War Action Parade in August  1966. The title was similar to that of the preceding year’s event, but this time the event was dominated by the anti-Vietnam War theme that informed much of Kurohata’s work. The performance, titled Zero Jigen’s Insane Opera, was a large demonstration leading from Kōshū Highway to Shinjuku Koma Theater through the Odakyū department store. Dozens of people wearing white religious robes perform obscene gestures around a man dressed as a lecherous nanban [European] priest, and as they march through the streets they sing vulgar and obscene lyrics to the 9th movement79 in deliberately loud, non-artistic, beautiful voices. The parade is led by a hearse carrying two female bodies laid flat80

Funerals and religious references were particularly evident in this ritual, showing the typical hand of Matsue Kaku. 8.

RITUALISTS, ASSEMBLE! 2: THE STAGE OF LOW CULTURE

While most of the events of 1968 discussed in the following section were staged solely by Ritualists with a visual art background, there were also angura-inspired cross-genre performances typical of 1966 Shinjuku taking place. The December Shinjuku Art Festival, in particular, was described as a “pivotal attempt to stage multiple performances simultaneously in a single space.” Kawanaka Nobuhiro describes the event as follows: The Yamashita Yōsuke Quartet and the Ichikawa Hideo Quintet played jazz, while Takemura Rui and Wakabayashi Mihiro danced, Shiraishi Kazuko recited her own poetry, and Maya Etsuko and her group performed a pantomime. Yotsuya Simon [doll maker and actor] and Yamaya Hatsuo [actor] also made an appearance. There was a man making strange noises, women and men stripped naked. One man was enacting a ritual topknot cutting ceremony; and an artist was absorbed in creating objects that proliferated on the screen behind the stage. It was a spectacle in which anything went, bringing the obscenely chaotic energy of Shinjuku straight onto the stage.81 Kurohata’s ritual Tsuina [a Shinto ritual for driving out evil spirits], opposing the Vietnam War, occupied the whole stage and audience

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area and was filmed by 8 Generation. The sound of the camera shutter was deliberately incorporated into the performance.82

Ritualists Debut Assembly in July 1967 and Ultrasonic Wave Operation at Club Hana-densha83 (Asakusa) in October 1967 both featured a mixture of artists representing both the Shinjuku cultural scene (including media-focused female artists Miyata Harumi and Chida Ui) and more folk-inspired Ritualists. The Ritualists Debut Assembly was staged at a concert by The Jacks at Hitachi Hall and not originally advertised as a performance—much to the surprise of families who came to listen to the music.84 The Jacks and the Ritualists had met through Ōe Chōjiro, who was a member of Makirō’s Baramanji Kessha and also the president of The Jacks Fan Club.85 Katō Yoshihiro describes one of the performances— probably Ritual of Memorial Service for Embryo, which took up the issue of the illegality of abortions for minors, a contentious topic at that time [fig. 68]—as “an old fashioned unari [growling] ritual by Makirō (Baramanji Kessha) and Matsue Kaku.”86 The ritual involves a man dragging a large Shinto shrine bell while intoning “Kimyō chōrai Kimyō chōrai [Listen to the holy words!], Barmanji, a memorial service for children crying on the riverbank of hell, the riverbank where dead children pile stones for their parents—Listen to the holy words!” Makirō, dressed as a priest, “ties a human body, which is covered by a sheet, to a chair and scrapes out heaps of ripe tomatoes from between the legs of the torso, discarding them on the ground. The ripe tomatoes represent a fetus.”87 Next, Hayakawa Yoshio from The Jacks sings melancholy lyrics from their hit album Vacant World and Makirō scatters paper dolls, each in the shape of a fetus, while reciting the Heart Sutra.88 Some of the elements recall works by other Ritualists: the Buddhist references in Matsue Kaku’s work, Zero Jigen’s childbirth motifs, Koyama Tetsuo’s explorations of blood and food. In particular, the scene of the memorial service for an unborn child distinctly represents the ritualistic element. The use of blood, intestines and bodily fluids in this performance, a familiar device from Wiener Aktionismus (Viennese Actionism), is quite unusual within Japanese Anti-Art performance. Baramanji Kessha’s ritual performance is interrupted by Matsue Kaku lighting firecrackers and performing saimon storytelling; Matsue then “swings around a biwa [Japanese lute] as if in a drunken frenzy, running around wildly, almost breaking his takageta [high wooden clogs].”89 At this moment, naked Zero Jigen members come onto the stage, followed by a chindon-ya (street marching band, traditionally employed to advertise store openings), which sets a breezy tone that veers into absurdity as they begin to shave their body hair with razors. Kawanaka  68. Baramanji Kessha, Ritual of Memorial Service for Embryo at Ritualists Debut Assembly • July 30, 1967 • Hitachi Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo

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Nobuhiro makes an unscripted entrance with a shoe tied to his head and crawls around the stage on all fours. At the end, four masked men with black umbrellas rush onto the stage together with Miyata Harumi and Chida Ui, and the group runs around. Harumi and the masked men take off all of their clothes and stand still. Chida Ui, who is standing next to the crowd, lifts her skirt and puts on seven pairs of colored panties—which she has shoplifted—one after the other […] Miyata Harumi […] massages the penises of the masked men standing beside her in succession, using both hands to rub two penises at a time.90

Confronted by these scenes, the audience (which has presumably come to listen to folk music), begins to complain loudly. Miyata, in a state of arousal, storms around the stage in a rage, at which point the curtain drops. Another event at the giant cabaret club Club Hana-densha in October  1967 was advertised with “300,000 fliers folded into the morning newspaper, bearing the words ‘Eroticism or Art? The first cabaret appearance of Zero Jigen!’” The event was staged with the help of professional lighting technicians and a band that played “navy songs in a chindon-ya style.” Katō thought it was one of the most successful events by Zero Jigen.91 “A huge shunga painting (an Edo-era pornographic image) in gaudy colors hangs in front of the band. Three circus pictures hang from the ceiling supported by poles (Gulliver holds one of these poles). Chida Ui, Aome Umi and Nobuko (unidentified) are tied upside-down half-naked on three of the poles while Matsue Kaku, wearing a red loincloth and showing off his tattoos, recites the Brahman mantra. The event features six guests, which includes a rare appearance by Sakurai Takami, hippie painter and leader of Kyūshū-ha. After just returning from living in San Francisco for four years, Sakurai arrives with his Caucasian wife and blue-eyed child in tow, as well as his Japanese wife. He sits in a beat-up wooden cart that is pulled around in on stage by Nagata Satoshi of Zero Jigen.” The climax of the show comes when “six men, naked except for the gas masks over their faces, begin dancing with their arms in the air,”92 provoking shrieks of joy from the club hostesses. 9.

THE RITUALISTS’ CLIMAX 1: INSANITY TRADE FAIR (HONMOKU-TEI THEATER)

Hallmark features of Ritualist performances at these events included Matsue Kaku’s EdoEra-style grotesque designs and violent actions, Baramanji Kessha’s monkish costumes and use of blood and bodily fluids, Zero Jigen’s nudity and Japanese cultural references, Koyama Tetsuo’s fascination with folk entertainment found in traditional agricultural communities, and Kokuin’s theatricality and parodic imitation of Western occult rituals. Their absurdist aesthetic reached its peak in Insanity Trade Fair at Honmoku-tei Theater (Asakusa) in March 1968, and Grand Insanity Trade Fair at Iino Hall, Tokyo in November, events which represent the pinnacle of Ritualist works. We have a reasonably comprehensive picture of these events thanks to extant documentation and witness accounts. The flier for Insanity Trade Fair listed its participants as Zero Jigen, Vitamin Art (Koyama Tetsuo and others), and Kokuin, although according to some accounts, Baramanji Kessha

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 69. Kokuin performs at Insanity Trade Fair • March 13, 1968 • Honmoku-tei, Ueno, Tokyo

also participated. Kurohata directed and coordinated the event but did not perform.93 This was not the first time that the term “Trade Fair” had been used for a Ritualists’ event; prior examples are Japan Super-Art Trade Fair (August–September  1964), Zero Jigen’s final major event from its Nagoya period, and the All-Japan Insanity Trade Fair on May Day, 1966. Katō Yoshihiro stated that the Honmoku-tei Theater event was the second event to use the term (the first having likely been the 1966 May Day event, since the Nagoya event was mainly restricted to regional participants), making the Iino Hall event the third.94 We may surmise, therefore, that Katō was a major presence behind Ritualist events of the period. Honmoku-tei Theater95 was mainly used for kōdan (historical storytelling) and rakugo (comic storytelling), and it was an unusual choice of venue for a performance event by visual artists; this in itself indicates that the events staged here had a different significance from those presented at strongholds of angura culture in Shinjuku at that time. Hanaga Mitsutoshi, who photographed the event, writes, “In Tokyo during the early Meiji period, street performers began to appear in vaudeville halls, and variety shows were added to rakugo programs—performances such as Heraherahe96 and Oppekepe.97 So a hundred years later, Zero Jigen and other Ritualists seemed to fit perfectly at Honmoku-tei.”98 Compared with the spaciousness of modern theaters such as Iino Hall (the venue for the next Insanity Trade Fair), Honmoku-tei was smaller and closer in style to a traditional Japanese vaudeville hall, resulting in a more intimate atmosphere between audience and performer.99 Accounts by Hanaga and others offer us the following overview of the Honmoku-tei event. “30 minutes after the curtain is raised, [the event] starts with Kurohata’s ritual of doing nothing, using nothing,”100 followed by Kokuin’s performance in which “a suspended [sic.] man is placed on a table. A half-naked woman dressed as a nun uses a knife and a fork to eat a frankfurter in the shape of a penis”101 [fig. 69). Men hug and caress each other; there are masked women in white robes; a man (Muta Kunihiro) wears a kimono with writing on it that reveals his legs through a slit in the front; and a woman rides a bicycle. Suenaga Tamio wears a loincloth coupled with white navy cap, jacket, and boots, and salutes a naked woman who has the words “cyberne-sex song” written on her body 102 (see plate 23, p. 14). Suenaga and several others then crawl on the floor with mannequins

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 70. Koyama Tetsuo performs at Insanity Trade Fair • March 13, 1968 • Honmoku-tei, Ueno, Tokyo

on their backs, the word “Kokuin” painted onto the mannequins.103 A television rests on the floor, and the performance is timed to coincide with news scenes being broadcast of students clashing with riot police at Haneda Airport, making the performance all the more impactful.104 Koyama Tetsuo and the other members of Vitamin Art, meanwhile, perform actions using their hallmark mannequin heads and apples (a source of vitamins), and white-painted faces. After various actions, such as licking the mannequin heads, Koyama executes what takes the prize for the most repugnant action in the history of Japanese performance art: he defecates in front of the audience [fig. 70], fans his feces to waft the smell toward them, sticks a small flag on top as if it were a children’s meal, and then smears it onto apples he picks out of a bucket, which he promptly throws into the audience.105 The performance concludes with the appearance of a chindon-ya band, which emerges from behind a squatting man wearing a karakusa (arabesque) patterned cloth on his back resembling a tattoo. Zero Jigen members then take to the stage wearing hats, business suits and carrying briefcases but with furoshiki (wrapping cloths) around their necks bearing the same karakusa-patterns. They then strip naked except for their hats and white tabi socks, march jauntily around the stage, two of them carrying a small boy and a woman on their backs [fig. 71]. After the dark and unsettling performances of Kokuin and Koyama, Zero Jigen’s performance and the band’s music must have struck an upbeat note.106

 71. Zero Jigen performs at Insanity Trade Fair • March 13, 1968 • Honmoku-tei, Ueno, Tokyo

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10. THE RITUALISTS’ CLIMAX 2: GRAND INSANITY TRADE FAIR (IINO HALL) Most of the artists who appeared at the Honmoku-tei Theater event also participated in Grand Insanity Trade Fair: Year-end Angura Festival at Iino Hall (Toranomon, Tokyo) in November 1968 [fig. 72]. The event, originally planned for the magazine Eiga hyōron under the name “Angura Festival,” was organized by the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Satō Shigechika, and co-hosted by Japan Underground Center—with which Satō was involved—and Katō Yoshihiro’s Insanity Trade Fair Association. It was conceived as an angura film event, with five participating groups each given a 30-minute stage slot. This may have been the reason for Katō’s negative review of the event, for this manner of scheduling precluded the synchronous performance of multiple events that he had always favored. Nonetheless, the event sold out 107 with 600 people each paying 800 yen for a ticket (double the price of a regular movie ticket at the time). It clearly held appeal to the wider public, as well as performers and angura cultural circles. Grand Insanity Trade Fair was also well covered in the media, and many photographs of the event remain. Although the stage was large enough to accommodate more than one group at a time, the actions were performed sequentially. The following is a full account of the group performances, pieced together from accounts by the artists and witnesses of the event: Baramanji Kessha Two men who “resemble mountain ascetics in white kimonos run onto the stage and recite a prologue.”108 As they ring bells, Makirō, who is playing the role of a priest, emerges from the audience singing Goeika (a Buddhist hymn). One of the men pretends to urinate109 while another holds out a bowl to receive it. The priest then sprinkles the liquid on the stage and over the audience with a sakaki tree branch, typically used in Shinto purification ceremonies.110 Temporarily leaving the stage, the priest reappears amidst a crowd of strangely dressed people. The priest and a woman climb up to an altar at the center of the stage and crawl into a large white cloth bag. Another performer carries the bag on his shoulder. Inside the bag, the man and woman are taking off their clothes and smearing themselves with tomatoes and red paint. The lights go out. A film showing a man vomiting is projected, playing in reverse. At the climax, the priest and the woman are meant to emerge from the bag, which is slashed open with a sickle, and stand  72. Poster designed by Matsue Kaku for triumphantly as fierce Buddhism deities Grand Insanity Trade Fair

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 73. Baramanji Kessha performs at Grand Insanity Trade Fair • November 30, 1968 • Iino Hall, Toranomon, Tokyo

covered in tomatoes and paint, their hands in the air in the banzai pose [fig. 73]. At this moment, however, somebody—claiming to be a stage director—has the curtain come down before the scene plays out.111 Photos show performers dressed in costumes that resemble mountain ascetics, Indian Yogis, or the strange Basara112 style, in which bodies are wrapped with bandage-like cloth. Kokuin A woman in underwear, bound with red and white ropes, is carried through the audience on a mikoshi-like palanquin by a group of men wearing loincloths singing “Ge ge ge no ge” [fig. 74]. A woman wearing only panties with the sailor-collared top of a schoolgirl uniform stands on a sewing machine table, whipping two men in long loincloths [fig. 75]. A classical music conductor in formal dress stands before women wearing costume masks (Kokuin’s standard prop), pretending to conduct Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto as it plays on a record. A man and a woman stab at each other, mimicking the sword fights of provincial traveling theaters [fig.  76] and at the same moment, blood (paint, actually) begins to seep through the chest areas of the performers lined up behind them, who are all dressed in white.113 According to Makirō, “the audience was initially unsettled by the sado-masochism of the first scene, but [the sword fight] took them by surprise and ultimately they burst into laughter.”114

 74. Kokuin performs at Grand Insanity Trade Fair • November 30, 1968 • Iino Hall, Toranomon, Tokyo

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Akiyama Yūtokutaishi Akiyama’s action might have been performed during the interlude after Kokuin’s performance. He appears “wearing a U.S. military jacket and a helmet with a flashing miniature light bulb.”115 He performs his routine noh-pon, in which he sticks his finger in his mouth to make a sound like a noh tsuzumi drum, then begins “running around to the music of the Gunkan March116 wearing a pair of running shorts and a running top with ‘Glico, 300m a piece’”117 written on the chest and angel wings attached to his back [fig. 77].

 75. Kokuin performs at Grand Insanity Trade Fair • November 30, 1968 • Iino Hall, Toranomon, Tokyo

 76. Kokuin performs at Grand Insanity Trade Fair • November 30, 1968 • Iino Hall, Toranomon, Tokyo

 77. Akiyama Yūtokutaishi performs at Grand Insanity Trade Fair • November 30, 1968 • Iino Hall, Toranomon, Tokyo

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He gets members of the audience to put pieces of Glico caramel in his mouth.”118 This parody of a Mikawa Manzai119 dance performance sends the audience into gales of laughter. Kurohata A man with his face painted white, wearing a pair of yellow panties and red shoes, rides a children’s tricycle around the stage. Another man then suddenly appears with a black umbrella, unzips his fly, exposes his penis, and starts to walk about in silence.120 Katō’s opinion of Kurohata’s performance is very negative, dismissing it as nothing more than “amateurish provincial theater,” possibly a result of Matsue Kaku’s absence.121 Vitamin Art More than ten mannequin legs are displayed on stage. Four men enter slowly, one wearing a red loincloth, one a blue loincloth, one in transparent panties, and one in a negligée with his face painted white (perhaps playing a female role). They groan with pleasure as they caress the mannequin legs; the man wearing panties removes them, embraces the man in the negligée, moaning in ecstasy.”122 At the same time, Koyama Tetsuo, wearing a tragic expression, makes butoh-like movements [fig. 78]. “The two men embracing each other begin to wrestle with the mannequins on the stage, hitting each other. With their bodies still entangled, they weep loudly, shedding real tears, and scream at the top of their lungs.”123 The documentary film shows them lining up the upper torsos of the mannequins on the stage while some of the performers move the bottom parts. A man (Koyama?) with a mannequin head between his legs moves around the stage together with other performers, some of whom are stark naked. Vitamin Art and Kurohata also plan to strangle a chicken, but this plan does not pan out, as one of the managers of the theater takes away the chicken—a repeat of what happened at Bum Academy Second Festival. “You might say this unexpected incident made a mess of both groups’ plans and performances.”124

 78. Koyama Tetsuo performs at Grand Insanity Trade Fair • November 30, 1968 • Iino Hall, Toranomon, Tokyo

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Zero Jigen A group of men wearing panties and leggings run onto the stage in front of a curtain bearing the figure of a “running man,” painted by Iwata Shin’ichi. Some of them carry rolled-up futon mats and crawl around the floor. A chindon-ya band appears. On the lower part of a bunk bed, a man crouches on all fours with incense hanging from his rear: this was the Ketsuzō-kai pose. On the top bunk, a woman stands in a shrine maiden’s costume holding a pair of fans painted with a rising sun. She begins to dance, kicking off the men as they try to climb up onto the top bunk with her. They roll over in exaggerated poses as they fall. — Satō Shigechika, one of the producers, was pleased with the success of the event (it had sold out), but the audience’s reactions were more negative; some called it “disgusting,” and others were disappointed at its lack of cohesion: “unruly and with no overarching message such as the anti-Vietnam War messages of Happenings in the U.S.”125 Katō Yoshihiro himself admitted that it was not as successful as the earlier event at Honmoku-tei Theater, with the main reason, in his eyes, being the size of the venue. While Honmoku-tei was a small tatami-matted space perfect for vaudeville, Iino Hall, with its 600-person capacity, was too large, and the space between the stage and audience seating was too great to allow the audience to get involved. Performers, moreover, had not “pushed back on the ‘old-fashioned’ structure of allocating thirty minutes per group.” (Katō would have preferred to hold the five performances simultaneously in five locations within the theater).126 Other factors behind the disappointing result were the absence of Kurohata’s Matsue Kaku, and the theater manager’s interference in the planned killing of the chicken. But the event also lacked the kind of coherent orientation that was evident in Hijikata Tatsumi’s fiercely individual solo dance Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese: Revolt of the Body at the Nihon Seinenkan (Japan Youth Hall) in the previous month. It is also conceivable that after so many consecutive performances, the groups had got stuck in a rut, their actions gradually degenerating into mere entertainment. Katō reflected upon these points: Why don’t they do the usual mouthing, caressing, licking? Why don’t they bond with each other on the level of breath? Why do they confine themselves to their own cliches and refuse to engage in dialogue with the given situation, without any dynamic development or independent reaction, in a space where they cannot confront the contemporary world and thereby dismantle it?127

Indeed, for Katō in particular, the performances lacked the displays of intimate physical contact—for example, exaggerated licking, caressing, the attunement of breath—that he expected. The event, he felt, was a missed opportunity for violent disruption. But there had been no attempt to generate a sense of dialogue, and the artists had simply repeated their standard routines. In fact, The Iino Hall event marked a critical juncture for Zero Jigen. Expo Destruction Group was formed soon after the event, although Kurohata and Baramanji Kessha

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were notably missing from its ranks, and the clarity of the agenda it set out may have been a result of the failings in the proceedings that Katō identified. 11.

MOVEMENTS IN KANSAI: FROM REMANDARAN TO THE PLAY

A totally different kind of performance movement emerged in Kyoto over this period, which had little in common with what was going on in Tokyo at the time. In January 1966, during his first solo exhibition at Toga Gallery, Mizukami Jun executed a series of events mainly consisting of musical performances.128 From this moment on, his work focused on language-based art, and he staged a succession of performances. Little is known today about his work except that it showcased non-material media, such as sound and language. Around March 1967, Remandaran was formed by Mizukami, Iwakura Masahito, and Azuchi Shuzō, who had all performed individually at the 11th Kyoto Independent Exhibition, and Nakata Kazunari, who had exhibited works incorporating condoms at the same exhibition.129 In April, the group performed Mostly in Underground Mall: Kyoto Two Persons’ Remandaran at the Shijō underpass and Maruyama Park in Kyoto. They also performed Ritual on the Emperor’s Birthday: Osaka Castle Remanradan at Osaka Castle Park. Azuchi’s “measuring” action—in which he uses clocks and a measuring tape similarly to his performance at Ritsumeikan University [fig.  79]—was supposedly an expression of the disquiet he felt in his daily environment. In Mizukami’s work, the use of props, such as a coffin, roses and sandalwood, suggest that his rituals were developed with European esoteric occult ceremonies in mind [fig. 80]. In May, a month after the group’s debut performances, Mizukami and Gulliver participated, unsolicited, in an Intermedia event, Biogode Process Kyoto. They initially plan simply to open an umbrella from their seats in the audience, but during the event they walk out onto the stage proper from backstage. This simple intervention, like other interventional performances from 1962 to 1964, may have represented a cynical critique of a gradual trend towards “high art,” observable in the work of Jikken Kōbō, at subsequent exhibitions at Sogetsu Art Center, and in Intermedia events. Ritual on the Emperor’s Birthday: Osaka Castle Remanradan at Osaka Castle Park was deliberately held on the emperor’s birthday on April 29,130 and included sprinkling pink “rain” using a watering hose in front of the Kyoto City Hall. These actions may have been intended as affirmations of the group’s modest resistance to the enormous power of political influence. Finally, in August, the members of Remandaran, Ikemizu Keiichi (who had been staging “cage” Happenings since 1965), and other performers in the Kansai area, formed The Play. The Play launched its landmark large-scale collaborative projects from the late 1960s through the 1970s. These projects required lengthy preparation and negotiations, and were situated in natural environments near major cities, such as Voyage (1968), Current of Contemporary Art (1969, see p. 269), Sheep (see plate 16, p. 11), and Thunder (throughout the 1970s). In the context of postwar Japanese art history, the group is significant for its collective anonymity (members were identified only as “Mr./Ms. Play”), the communal character of its activities—a hallmark of the late 1960s and early 1970s— and its pioneering “projects” in public spaces, a trend which continued on in numerous

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 79. Performance by Azuchi Shūzō (Gulliver), Miki Tetsuo (rear left), Ishida Hiroshi (rear right) et al. • Foot-mark Revolution • June 17, 1967 • Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto

 80. Mizukami Jun (right) and Suzukida Asako perform at Ritual on the Emperor’s Birthday: Osaka Castle Remandaran • April 29, 1967 • Osaka Castle Park

 81. Performance by The Play, right to left: Suzukida Asako, Ikemizu Keiichi, Iwakura Masahito, Horiuchi Akiyo • First Play Exhibition • August 27, 1967 • Higashi Yuenchi Park, Sannomiya, Kobe

art projects in Japan after the 1990s. However, in its early period (1967–1969), the group’s activities mainly consisted of Happenings in which the physical actions of individual bodies were fundamental. The group’s first presentation was in August 1967 at the Higashi Yuenchi Park in Sannomiya, Kobe. In the prologue, members of the group wearing patches over their left eyes begin circling the park [fig. 81]. They then proceed onto the street outside in order to attract an audience. Actions by individual members include Iwakura Masahito operating a miniature steam locomotive with coal (as he had done at the Sakai Independent)

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 82. Iwakura Masahito performs at the First Play Exhibition • August 1967 • Higashi Yuenchi Park, Sannomiya, Kobe

[fig. 82], and Ikemizu Keiichi making a 4-meter-high ladder and jumping off the top down to the ground. He is joined by other members, including Azuchi Shuzō [fig. 83], who measures a section of the ground with a measuring tape and sits inside a small cage [fig. 84]. Nakata Kazunari launches a 4-meter-long condom-shaped balloon onto a pond and floats on top of it [fig. 85]; the following day, wearing a white costume, he runs at full speed with a smoke canister attached to his waist. Yoshioka Shigeo sets out a white table and chairs, sits down on one of the chairs and brushes his teeth [fig. 86]. Fukunaga Toyoko sits on the ground and pulls threads from a plant pot. Abe Kōshi, performing Mai hōmu papa (My home papa), attaches dolls in the shape of children to his limbs, an action expressing the sorrow of a father who has to work for his children on holidays [fig. 87]. Sasaki Kōsei of Jack Society, who had come to Kansai to recruit members for the All-Japan Contemporary Artists Council, also makes a surprise appearance, performing naked while wearing only an apron with his head shaved, blowing into a rubber hose.131

 83. Artwork by Ikemizu Keiichi, the figure in mid-air is Azuchi Shūzō • First Play Exhibition • August 1967 • Higashi Yuenchi Park, Sannomiya, Kobe

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 84. Azuchi Shūzō performs at the First Play Exhibition • August 1967 • Higashi Yuenchi Park, Sannomiya, Kobe

Apart from the prologue, therefore, each member performed individually—a striking difference from The Play’s later focus on collectivism and anonymity. Moreover, because of their visual art backgrounds, members also used sculptural props in their performances. The general mood of the performances was relaxed and playful, and the event was staged at an amusement park, a recreational space without the political and legal restrictions applied on the city’s busy streets. Abe’s Mai hōmu papa seems to have resonated with the audience’s own experience; indeed, many parents would have come with children in tow. Ikemizu’s leap from a colorful red-and-blue ladder, Azuchi’s cage, and Iwakura’s miniature steam locomotive could all have equally featured as amusement park attractions. Mizukami meanwhile, who had a long history of performing rituals, performed a ritual along with his partner Suzukida Asako on the street in front of the Traffic Center Building in Sannomiya. “A couple in black clothes and black capes stand facing each other. The man covers his head with a cloak as he ties and unties a bright red rope around his body.”132 Mizukami, wrapped in cushion-like objects, cut a particularly odd figure [fig. 88]. He said of his work, “It didn’t matter what I did, it was about creating a cohesive sense of time, within a particular concept. Props like clothes and padding are designed simply to trigger reactions,”133 confirming that his idea of performance was based on the concept of “reaction” (hannō-goto). A year later, in August 1968, The Play organized a joint Happening event titled Reaction in Summer at SAB Hall in Osaka. It was subtitled Evening of Art Collectives for Impact and the accompanying manifesto stated “Revolt against all authorities. Revolt in

 85. Nakata Kazunari performs at the First Play Exhibition • August 1967 • Higashi Yuenchi Park, Sannomiya, Kobe

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 86. Yoshioka Shigeo performs at the First Play Exhibition • August 1967 • Higashi Yuenchi Park, Sannomiya, Kobe

the name of the restoration of humanity. In short, revolt in the name of life.” Despite its seemingly innocent projects, even The Play demonstrated a sense of rebellion (zōhan) and violence that resonated with the political climate of 1968. Moreover, compared to most of the Anti-Art performers discussed in this book (who did not attempt to give their artistic expressions theoretical legitimization), The Play made clear the philosophy behind its methodology. It aimed to transform both those who “do” (the actors) and those who “are done to” (the audience), by “opening up all the receptor organs and inducing a reactive response,”134 thereby giving rise to a particular occurrence, in a particular place. The term reaction in the main title of the event was an important concept for Mizukami, and an essay titled Do it without Happening (unsigned but by Mizukami), printed in the same handout, was later edited and reprinted in the first issue of The Play’s newsletter (published April  1969).135 The ludic individual actions performed in Kobe the previous year had now been integrated into conceptually coherent collective actions aimed at “reform.” The event at the SAB Hall was nonetheless still a series of performances by individual artists, despite its elaborate sets and lighting. But at an event in Kyoto in November 1968, titled Zone (see p. 201) that involved film, music, and butoh dance,  87. Abe Kōshi performs at the First Play Exhibition • August 1967 • Higashi Yuenchi Park, Sannomiya, Kobe

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 88. Mizukami Jun and Suzukida Asako perform at the First Play Exhibition • August 1967 • Sannomiya, Kobe

 89. Group I performs Impersonal Men at the First Kobe Carnival • May 14, 1967 • Sannomiya, Kobe

The Play conducted a single, large-scale group action indicative of its desire to enact interventions in large spaces. This involved covering the audience with an enormous sheet dropped from the second floor of the building. As we will see in the next chapter, after 1969, the group further developed its anonymous and collective actions. During its early days, therefore, the Play’s activities consisted of a variety of intermingled elements. As its name suggested, its works had a playful quality, evident even from its debut at the amusement park in Kobe. Similar “playfulness” can also be found in actions by Group I at the first Kobe Carnival in May 1967 and Group Zero (with Enoki Chū) at Kobe Festival in May 1972. It is hard to find Anti-Art themes—anti-modern, anti-urban, the championing of vulgarity and violence, or political issues—in the bodily expressions of these groups, and it may be that this was a generational issue (the Play began performing after the mid-1960s) or even a geographical one (the artists came from Kobe, an area known for its refined taste). Group I,136 active from 1965, was another group representative of the post-Anti-Art generation of artists who were based in the Kansai region. An underlying concept of its work was “the impersonal” (hininshō), and its experiments utilized all available media: painting, installation, film, and printed material. Its focus was therefore not exclusively performance-oriented, although it included bodily expressions as part of its experiments. Hole by Group I at Gifu Independent, cited as an example of “body art” along with Ikemizu Keiichi’s cage137 and also Impersonal Men [fig. 89] from the first Kobe Carnival are such

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examples of the group’s performative works. Group I’s insistence on anonymity, and the importance it attributed to conceptual work, make it the most stylistically consistent of the 1960s art groups. But its conceptual bias also meant that the group’s experiments risked being assimilated into the system of “contemporary art.” Further, the relaxed mood of Impersonal Men, a work in which the group participated—a parade of approximately thirty people in white cloaks with pointed hoods covering their entire body— lacked the intensity of a cutting-edge art collective and rather calls to mind the blandness of Sequin Men by Gutai at Expo ’70 (Impersonal Men received the Humor Award from the Committee of the Kobe Port Hundred Year Anniversary Festival). But performances by these groups could easily degenerate into run-of-the-mill entertainment events more suited to the orchestrated make-believe of supposedly festival spaces such as Kobe Carnival and Pedestrian Paradises (and later, Expo ’70). This was especially true when they lacked the conceptual coherence of Group I’s work, or the element of obscenity that came with the use of real bodies, failed to properly engage with political debate, or fell back on an over-optimistic faith in the power of collective action. The Play, however, managed to maintain its avant-garde direction by actively initiating its own projects (with the exception of those commissioned by art museums), choosing its own venues and dealing with planning negotiations, as well as leaning into and expanding the concept of Happenings. 12. QUEST FOR THE COMMUNE The bodily expressions discussed in this chapter were mostly initiated by visual artists. However, there were other groups without visual art backgrounds also conducting Happenings. Examples include the hippie collective Bum Academy 138 and its spin-off, Buzoku (The Tribe). Of all the hippie groups, these two were particularly influenced by the Beatniks in their embrace of drugs, their vision of going back-to-nature, and creation of self-sufficient communes in the countryside. In the fall of 1966, Bum Academy organized The First Festival in Shinjuku Station East Exit.139 Its Second Festival, Rally and Parade by Free Language that Predicts the End of the World140 (April  1967), was held in the streets of Shinjuku and the Yasuda Seimei Hall. Gary Snyder, a Beat poet and long-time Kyoto resident, together with Bum Academy members Sakaki Nanao, Nagasawa Tetsuo (a.k.a. Naga), and Yamada Kaiya (a.k.a. Pon), did poetry readings. Katō Yoshihiro from Zero Jigen, Matsue Kaku from Kurohata, Sasaki Kōsei, Chiba Eisuke, Chida Ui, and Koyama Tetsuo from Jack Society also participated. On the first day of the festival, Bum conducted “a demonstration march with dozens of people adorned with flowers and beads playing guitars, reciting mantras, and carrying” placards that read “Let’s walk, do not shut away our naked bodies.” Chida and Koyama performed Dating Show, their usual routine, on the street.141 The following day at Yasuda Seimei Hall, Koyama tried to kill a chicken (as a ritual) but Gary Snyder prevented his action (thereby creating a Happening within a planned Happening). Koyama’s intention, to set at ease the souls of a chicken (and later cow) that had been killed for the sake of man’s survival, was a stark contrast to Snyder’s ethical objections to the act. Sasaki (of Jack Society) criticized the American poet for his Western views, informed by the Christian differentiation between human and animal life, as distinct from the Eastern view of nature.142

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It is possible that this was just another one of Sasaki’s typical self-promoting stunts as a member of Jack Society, but as Chiba Eisuke notes, Jack Society was fundamentally opposed to Snyder and the hippies because it “totally accepted economic liberalist systems in which the quantity of information is the measure of evaluation,” whereas the latter “embraced anti-Vietnam War and naturalist ideals and tried to escape capitalism”143 This demonstrates, at the very least, that the event was comprised of groups with utterly opposing ideals. As Katō described his participation in this event as “a naked raid with Matsue Kaku,”144 there were lines of fracture between, on the one hand, Katō, Chida and Matsue—Katō and Chida both chose urban spaces as their stage; Matsue was never able to abandon his life as a city-dwelling family man—and the optimism that underpinned the “return to nature” attitude of members of Bum Academy. The Bum Academy Second Festival is generally said to have been a factor behind the emergence of Buzoku. In May 1967, Kaminari akagarasu zoku (Thunder Red Crow Tribe) began housing construction in the Fujimi Highland district, Nagano Prefecture. Together with other communes—Emerarudo iro no soyokaze (Emerald Colored Breeze) in Kokubunji, a western outskirt of Tokyo, and Gajumaru no yume zoku (Indian Laurel Dream Tribe) in Suwanose Island (one of the Tokara Islands in Kagoshima)—Kaminari akagarasu zoku would become one of the group’s bases. In December 1967, Emerarudo iro no soyokaze published the first issue of the Buzoku newsletter. The Third Bum Academy Festival was held in Miyazaki, southeast Kyushu, in the fall of 1967.145 Thereafter, Buzoku’s contact with the Ritualists in Tokyo was lost. Although some members of the group had a background in visual arts, such as Yamada Kaiya and Gotō Akira, Bum Academy/Buzoku events mainly consisted of music and poetry readings. They were less focused on work that took place within specific space-time constraints—Happenings or performance art or even cross-genre work— not necessarily because they did not attach importance to creating and presenting artworks but rather because they were trying to restructure their entire lives outside of the existing political and economic order. Yet, Buzoku was not completely unrelated to art groups. Katō Mamoru, a former member of Nihon University Film Study Institute, and Miki Tetsuo, an active member of The Play, both participated in Buzoku. The Play’s collaborative projects in the rural commune suggest commonalities between Buzoku’s lifestyle philosophies and artistic production. 13. THE RECOGNITION AND SPREAD OF HAPPENINGS Currently available information indicates that the number of events involving any type of performance began to increase from 1965, reaching forty in 1966 and peaking at over sixty in 1967, before falling again to around fifty in 1968 and 1969. Some examples of performances in December 1967 are as follows: National Memorial Ritual for Yui Chūnoshin, organized by Kurohata with participants consisting of Baramanji Kessha, 8 Generation, Zero Jigen, Kokuin, and Itoi Kanji in Shinjuku (December 1) (see plate 14 and 15, p. 10; chap. 14.3, p. 360); Self-Burial Ritual146 by Tama Art University students, including Hori Kōsai, who later formed Bijutsuka Kyōtō Kaigi (Bikyōtō, Artists’ Joint-Struggle Council) that took place from Tokyo Station to Ginza (December 4)

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 90. Hori Kōsai (far left) et al., Self-Burial Ritual • December 4, 1967 • Near Tokyo Station

[fig.  90]; Buck-naked Gas-masked Walking Ritual, one of Zero Jigen’s best performances, in Shinjuku (December  9) (see plate  21, p.  13); on the same day, a street Happening by GUN in Nagaoka, Niigata; Great Ramble Operation by Zero Jigen, Koyama Tetsuo, and Chida Ui in Yūrakuchō, Hibiya (December  15) (see p. 367). Also this month, a film and music event by Gulliver took place in Kyoto and Tokyo,147 and there may have been a performance by Chiba Eisuke at Sankei Hall.148 Thus, while the period marked the final blossoming of Ritualist performances, it also saw the emergence of a new generation of artists and art groups including Gulliver, GUN, and Bikyōtō, that would soon create conceptual pieces that reflected the revolutionary culture of the late 1960s.149 Exposure to European and American artistic developments was not the major factor influencing the work of visual artists of the Anti-Art generation, including that of the Ritualists; as they built up their own experience in urban settings, they were also witnessing the work of artists from other genres such as theater, music and butoh. Collaborations and encounters with the styles and methods of a new generation opened up new possibilities, sometimes leading to further cooperation, sometimes to antipathy. Their understanding of Happenings (as bodily expressions were called) gradually deepened and would ultimately become the expanded bodily expressions that we now know as “performances” (although the word was not used at the time). One example of the group’s developing bodily expression can be seen in Mizukami Jun’s Nine Fundamental Declarations of Happening,150 published in 1968. Here, Mizukami rejects the conventional idea that Happenings rely on chance and puts forward a theory of Happenings as a method of artistic expression, distancing them from some of their scandalous and populist associations. His writings shed light on various experiments carried out from the early 1960s—including performances by Mizukami in Remandaran and The Play, as well as those by Unbeat, Zero Jigen, Hi-Red Center. They are also often applicable to actions by shōgekijō groups. Mizukami’s declarations are therefore worth quoting in full: 1. We do not reject traditional aesthetics, but we do not place importance on them. 2. It [Happening] is not a new artistic genre, but an almost all-encompassing total form of art. Artistic forms specific to each genre are merely parts of the total form. 3. The result of the action has little artistic significance. The significance is in the movement of consciousness during the process of the action. 4. It is an expansion in the domain of form and consciousness. 5. It is a reciprocal flow between the quotidian and the artistic domain.

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6. Each person must have specific reactions to individual situations issuing from their own deeply held theoretical convictions. 7. It is a way of training the consciousness to analyze the multiple and integrated layers of action, in order to fully accept its response to the action. 8. It is a stimulus that triggers thoughts; successful communication is a start to a new way of thinking, caused by the Happening. 9. It is the pursuit of consciousness and action within a specific segment of everyday time. Since Japan’s home-grown performance scene from the 1960s never developed its own theoretical basis, these nine statements are highly valuable. Nevertheless, Mizukami’s emphasis lies on the pertinence of Happenings for the “individual” and on the level of “consciousness,” whereas for Ikemizu Keiichi, the leading artist of The Play, the significance of Happenings was that they allowed for large-scale interventions in urban spaces, interventions possible only through collective action. Either way, Mizukami’s manifesto suggests that by 1968, Happenings had become recognized as a serious mode of artistic expression, backed by student movements and angura culture that sought to revolutionize both politics and life. But one can also see in the declarations the potential both for the later breakdown, and spread, of Happenings. Happenings risked becoming simply different types of expressive media, and ultimately, if not enacted within a “specific segment of everyday time” (as defined in declaration 9), risked becoming no more than a lifestyle choice. This did in fact come to pass. First, bodily expressions by visual artists were incorporated into theater arts with more elaborate staging. Second, as evident in Ikeda Shōichi’s En Gekijō (Circle Theater, established in 1968), which emerged in the following period (see chap. 9.10, pp. 270–2), there was a shift in Happenings as creations of extraordinary worlds within a specific time and space, to performative expressions located within the everyday reality of people’s lives—a negation of the original concept of Happenings. Third, as with the popularization of psychedelics, Happenings became socially acceptable and shows became popular, paving the way for their transformation into the business of Environment art. We will explore the second and the third points in the following chapter. The first point—the incorporation of bodily expressions into theater arts—is immediately relevant to the present discussion. This period was distinct for incorporating Happenings into butoh and shōgekijō performances. Happenings—distinguished by their earthiness, their premise that body expressions could transcend language, their breaking of boundaries between actors and audience, stage and everyday space—were being performed not just by the visual artists mentioned here, but by a variety of performing artists. One example is Hijikata Tatsumi, who performed his celebrated Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese: Revolt of the Body in October 1968. Visual artists merely did not have the same level of physical training and stage experience, and their own performances likely seemed inferior. Ishiko Junzō (see chap. 3.4, pp. 78–81), a critic who made the connection between Anti-Art and Happenings, recognized elements of Happenings in Hijikata’s butoh and Kara Jūrō’s theater, noting that “[Kara and Hijikata] tried to recreate the entire theater as a place of total and collective experience, modeled on the type of audience/performer

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engagement found in circuses, amusement shows, ceremonies, and rituals.”151 However, Ishiko argues that their attempts were “Happening-like,” but not “actual Happenings.”152 The goal of Happenings, he believes, was the “total liberation of perception” through “all processes of communication” embracing artists, audience, and “environmental spaces.”153 Ishiko is known for his theory on kitsch, but even he seemed to have certain reservations regarding Zero Jigen’s vulgar folk style. An example of a Happening that Ishiko did praise, however, was Here or There, or Where? by the apprentices of Hakken no Kai (Discovery Society), first performed in November 1967 at the underground parking space of Sennichidani Temple Hall.154 From the script for this Happening theater, “nothing more than a collage of pages from random books such as Haniya Yutaka, Rimbaud, and Nakahara Chūya, put together in one night while listening to the latest Beatles album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,”155 it is difficult to see what fascinated Ishiko. His account, however, is illuminating: Stepping onto a gravel road in the underground space full of dust—after a momentary blackout, suddenly the backdrop falls, and you can see the freeway ahead. A car with its headlights on speeds towards the audience from under the freeway bridge. Out of the shadowy distance, a small actress runs through the audience muttering “Saru Saru, Saru, Saru…,” [saru means “monkey,” and also “to leave”] and then stops and yells, “Saru, and at any rate saru [I’ll be leaving]” as she quickly runs off. […] A man jumps headfirst into a rusty oil drum as it is rolled around. The light from the bonfire and the final fireworks set off by everyone on the stage are so bright that the audience’s eyes hurt, and so on.156

The performance, it seems, was an attempt to disrupt the audience’s expectations and preconceptions through a collage-like assembly of playful elements, at the same time unifying theatrical and “real” spaces through the use of spectacular effects. Tenjō Sajiki and other street theater groups developed similar experiments, but more radically unsettled the boundaries between street and theater, actors, audience, and bystanders. Such experiments included Tenjō Sajiki’s Yes in May 1970, which was reported under the headline “Street Happening,”157 as well as other street theater performances by the group, and En Gekijo’s Multi-Play, which will be discussed in the next chapter. As we have already seen from the discussion of Honmoku-tei Theater and Iino Hall (see pp. 219–27), there were more attempts to use popular entertainment (taishū geinō) to intervene in high art (kōkyū geijutsu) theater performances, thereby merging theatrical and real spaces. The butoh performance Anma (The Masseur) in November 1963 at Sogetsu Art Center was one pioneering performance that pushed theater in this direction. The Hakken no Kai event A Night of Waiting for Chanpon Mee was a large-scale performance in the late 1960s in which visual artists as well as those from other genres took part. The script for this Happening, in which the entire Hakken no Kai troupe participated, was originally intended to be written by Satō Shigechika, but when Satō could not finish writing in time, Ishiko Junzō and Tone Yasunao were drafted in a last-ditch attempt to rescue the event.158 They managed to open as scheduled in August 1967 at the Sennichidani Temple Hall. Along with Hakken no Kai members, participants included Ishiko, Tone, Kazakura Shō, Zero Jigen, Satō, film and theater director Takechi Tetsuji, and composer Ishii Maki. Kazakura “projects a film in a loop that depicts him walking

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backwards. He then walks up in front of the screen wearing exactly the same clothes as in the film.”159 [In Tone’s work, Theater Piece] Ishiko calls out the time by looking at a table of random numbers. When the number indicates “on,” Kon’no [Tsutomu] begins shaving my [Uryū Ryōsuke’s] head, and when it indicates “off,” he smears foam on my head, resulting in a beautifully uneven haircut. In the space next to it, Tsuki Machiko phones the homes of Prime Minister Satō and other cabinet members when “on,” and put down the phone when “off.” These phone calls are amplified loudly in the space. Approximately eight groups simultaneously put on similar kinds of “plays” [. . .] The venue has night-market stalls for catching goldfish and fetching loach, shops for cotton candy, balloons, and fortune telling. There are also drug dealers hanging around with 2,000 doses of Hyminal (sleeping pills) procured from a particular major hospital and stimulant drugs imported from the U.S.160

The event was a confluence of Fluxus-like instructions (with On-Off) and Ritualist vulgarity, brought together with the clever use of a telephone to connect the actions to real life. In the context of this chaotic gathering, even Zero Jigen’s ritual would have appeared nothing more than one of the various live events. The aforementioned Zone: Standing Here—Then? (November 1968) is an example of a stage event produced by theater artists in Kyoto. That year, Ikeda Shōichi, who had been active in the theater scene in Kyoto, moved to Tokyo and developed more Happening-like theatrical works. These events by theater artists indicated a cultural shift, with Happenings no longer the exclusive province of visual artists. Throughout the late sixties then, visual, theater, and film artists in Tokyo and Kansai were collaborating in experiments that mixed angura aesthetics and various elements from performing arts. These experiments shared common elements with Intermedia. But the artists—whether they practiced ritual performance art, theater, music, or butoh—were determined to overcome the restrictions of conventional “shows” with their fixed division of performer and audience. At the same time, these collaborative experiments point to the fact that the radical performances by visual artists of the early 1960s had now been swallowed into the broader landscape of performative experiments conducted by artists from other genres. After two Insanity Trade Fairs, artists from the Ritualists moved on to form Expo Destruction Group. They had recognized, perhaps, the limitations of their experiments in “total” theatrical spaces.

Chapter 8———Angura Culture and Happenings (1966 –1968)239

NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

Satō Shigechika, “Sore wa media messēji to naru ka” [Can it be a media message?], brochure for Intermedia, Lunami Gallery, May 1967. Kazakura Shō’s name is not listed in the brochure, but he did a performance using a balloon. Okabe Michio participated in the visual art section. Later, he used Zero Jigen’s rituals in his film Crazy Love of 1968. Ishizaki Kōichirō, “Intā media maesetsu” [Introduction to Intermedia], brochure for Intermedia. Satō, “Sore wa media messēeji to naru ka.” Kanesaka Kenji, “Kaijū tachi no yoru” [A Night of Monsters], brochure for Intermedia. “Tokushū=Banpaku to Anpo·EXPOSE·1968 Zenkiroku shūroku” [Special Issue: Expo and Anpo·EXPOSE·1968 Complete Documents], Design Review, no.6 (July 1968): 17. “Tokushū=Banpaku,” 17. See also Kagayake 60 nendai: Sōgetsu Āto Sentā no zenkiroku [Let the 60s Shine: Sogetsu Art Center complete documents] (Tokyo: Film Art, 2002), 387–398. Hasegawa Tokio and Nagai Kiyoharu later joined Taj Mahal Travellers. Hasegawa is currently director at Mithila Museum, Niigata. “Tokushū=Banpaku to Anpo·EXPOSE·1968 Zenkiroku shūroku,” 73. “Towards the end of the event, Shinohara suddenly started a Happening naked on the darkened stage. He looked like he was horizontally floating in mid-air with his hands and legs holding a stepladder. A firework was attached to the end of his penis, and once lit, a Happening of body art (?) momentarily came into view like a flower in the darkness.” “Tokushū=Banpaku to Anpo·EXPOSE·1968 Zenkiroku shūroku,” 55. “Tokushū=Banpaku to Anpo·EXPOSE·1968 Zenkiroku shūroku,” 74. Taki Kōji, “EXPOSE·1968: Nanika ittekure, ima sagasu hihyō,” [Criticism on EXPOSE·1968: Say something, now, I’m searching], “­Tokushū=Banpaku to Anpo·EXPOSE·1968 Zenkiroku shūroku,” 115. Masaki Motoi, “Sōgetsu Shinematēku no jidai: Jikken eiga to jikken eizō o chūshin ni” [Era of Sogetsu Cinemateque: Focusing on Experimental Cinema and Experimental Film], Sōgetsu to sono jidai 1945–1970 [Sogetsu and its time 1945–1970], Ashiya City Museum of Art

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

and History, Chiba City Museum of Art, ed., (Tokyo: Sōgetsu to sono jidai ten jikko iinkai, 1998), 274. “Songs and singers conveying deep messages were gaining attention in the Kansai folk song scene. In comparison to the more fashionable Tokyo folk scene, the Kansai folk scene foregrounded songs as ‘movements’ or as something closely related to everyday life. Such difference between Kansai and Tokyo’s folk scenes could be because Kansai continued to be strongly influenced by the utagoe (sing along) Movement and Zenkoku Kinrōsha Ongaku Kyōgikai (Rō-On, National Workers Music Association), and also had a (quantitatively) smaller market than Tokyo. In other words, Kansai had less restrictions set by the commercialism of the mass media, and thus had space for artists to pursue their individual freedom and ‘life-style.’” Nihon no fōku & rokku hisutorī 1: 60-nendai fōku no jidai [Folk & rock history in Japan 1: Era of folk in the 1960s], Maeda Yoshitake, Hirahara Kōji, ed., (Tokyo: Shinkō Music, 1993), 90–91. ‘Fūten’ was introduced in four TV programs on August 20 and 21. “Fūten-zoku” [Fūten Tribe], Shūkan TV gaido [Weekly TV Guide], September 8, 1967: 132–3. Yamaguchi Mamoru, “Fūgetsu-dō monogatari, moto shihainin no kaiko suru Shinjuku Fūge­ tsu-dō no 28 nen” [Fūgetsu-dō story: 28 years of Shinjuku Fūgetsu-dō remembered by an ex-manager], Yuriika, April 1987: 194–209. “Udon tabenagara sutorippu gekijō” [Appreciating Strip Theater while eating udon noodles], Heibon Punch (November 13, 1967): 35. Outside of Shinjuku, Satō Shigechika made an agreement with Jiyū Gekijō (Free Theater) to use a theater run by Jiyū Gekijō in Azabu for screening of angura films. Chamoto Shigemasa, “Angura datte shōbai ni narusa” [Angura can be a business too], Hōseki (June 1968): 146. Makirō was born in Tokyo in 1937. He exhibited an installation at Independent ’64. Later, he presented body paintings and street performances, and in 1967 formed Baramanji Kessha. He also appeared in Kawanaka Nobuhiro’s film Kama (Sickle) (not extant) and worked as an illustrator. He died in 2006. See Makirō Zusetsu musō yūran B-kyu geijutsu-ka no yase gaman Shaba-asobi gurafuti [Illustrated fantasy sightseeing by B-level artist’s

240

21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

PART II———THE EVOLUTION OF ANTI-ART PERFORMANCE

stubborn pride: Grafitti of earthly dalliances] (Tokyo: Jiyū kokuminsha, 1994). Mazura Ryūdan was born in Tokyo in 1935. His real name is Matsudaira Ryūmon. He quit his position in the faculty of Literature in the Graduate School, Department of Philosophy at Kwansei Gakuin University. He exhibited at Yomiuri Independent and had a solo show at Tsubaki Kindai Gallery. See Endō Shūsaku, “Ishoku no gaka Mazura Ryūdan” [A singular artist Mazura Ryūdan], Gendai no kai-jinbutsu: Korian kanwa [Pleasant People in Modern Age: Korian’s tales] (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1972), 63–72. “Kiga kurutta no de wa arimasen” [They are not insane], Heibon Punch (August 29, 1966): 30; “Obakyū no kyōdai de wa arimasen” [They are not brothers of Oba-Q: This Strange Energy], Manga Taimuzu (September 3, 1966). Asahi Shimbunsha (Asahi Newspaper), 2000, CD-ROM. Yasuda Auditorium of University of Tokyo was a stronghold of the student struggle until January 1969. Yoshida Yoshie, “Hapuningu no henbō” [The transfiguration of Happenings], Tenbō, no. 128 (August 1969): 92. Yoshida, 92. “The shōgekijō movement gradually arose the previous year, and Happenings were much more focused for the first time in the theater world.” Ishizaki Kōichiro, Kanesaka Kenji, Tone Yasunao, and Satō Shigeomi, “Sinpojiumu: Hapuningu to wa nani ka!” [Symposium: What is Happening!], Eiga hyōron, vol. 24, no. 3 (March 1967): 65. Satō Shigechika, editor of Eiga hyōron, organized the symposium in response to Michael Kirby’s definition of Happening as a part of theater arts: “Sinpojiumu: Hapuningu to wa nani ka!”, 58–81 (see n. 27 above) Two nude women painted the floor as an advertising event for the Paramount Picture film The Swinger. Chida Ui was scheduled to perform but she arrived too late. See “Haru ni ukarete ‘zen’ei’ ha” [Avant-garde group in high spirits in spring], Shūkan Shinchō, no. 579 (April 1, 1967): 142–3; “Zen’ei urutora man tōjō, san-nin no ‘geijutsuka’ ni miru kyōki no seishun” [Avant-Garde Ultra Man: Crazy youth of three “artists”], Tokudane Nyūsu Tokuhō [Special Scoop News Report], no. 165 (April 26, 1967): 12–15; Mori Hideto, “Yūmei ni naritai onna Chida Ui [Chida Ui, the woman who wants to be famous], Shūkan F6 Seven, no. 76 (April 15, 1967): 96–97.

30. Members of the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles originated in South Korea. 31. Sanpa (three faction) Zengakuren formed as a new alliance of student groups in December 1966 and consisted of the Marxist Student League Central Core Faction, the Socialist Student League, and the Socialist Youth Union Liberation Faction. It was a leading force in the student movements until its disbanding in July 1968. 32. “‘Naki no Kijima’ hapuningu tōwaku ki” [Report: “Kijima-in-tears” bewildered by the Happening], Shūkan Taishū, (June 13, 1968): 28–31. 33. “Happening (English): A new artistic form that gives creative and aesthetic values to everyday actions.” Yoshida Yoshie, “Myūzu Shūkan kaisai” [Opening Muse Week], Bijutsu techō, no. 264 (March 1966): 79. 34. “Tokubetsu kōza: Hapuningu to wa nani ka?” [Special course: What is Happening?], Bijutsu techō, no. 264 (May 1967): 130–40. 35. “Symposium, Hapuningu to wa nani ka!” 58–81. 36. “Saikederikku e no shōtai” [an invitation to Psychedelic], Asahi Gurafu, (April 5, 1968): 45. See also “Genkaku geijutsu (saikederikku) wa nani o umidasuka?” [What will be born out of Hallucinatory Art (Psychedelic)?], Eiga hyōron, vol. 25, no. 4 (April 1968): 7–9. 37. “Saikederikku e no shōtai,” 44–45. This article announced that Yokoo Tadanori and Ichiyanagi Toshi were going do an “authentic” psychedelic show in September, but the plan was cancelled. 38. ST Puro, Shinohara Ushio & Tamai Shiho Psychedelic Illustration Exhibition (April 15–20, Miyuki Gallery). 39. For details of this project, see Gunma NOMO Gurūpu no zenbō [All About NOMO Group, Gunma], ed. Tanaka Tatsuya, (Takasaki: The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, 2016), 58–65. Exhibition catalogue. 40. The shopkeepers’ reactions were as follows: “What a great buzz! So glad we decided to give it a try.”; “When I saw it, I went ‘Wonderful! A great success’ and couldn’t help clapping my hands.”; “When I walk around the town at night, I feel that those buildings are alive.” From a round table talk, “Atarashii komyu­ nikēshon, NOMO ga kaitakushita ‘shattā geijutsu’” [A New Communication: “Shutter Art” invented by NOMO], Art 21, No. 2 (October 1966): 26, 28–29.

Chapter 8———Angura Culture and Happenings (1966 –1968)241

41. The Shutter Art in Maebashi was reported on television (NHK and NET, dates unknown), in newspapers (Sankei Shimbun, Gunma edition, August 8, 1966; Jōmō Shimbun. August 8; Tokyo Shimbun, Gunma edition, August 8) and in magazines (Geijutsu shinchō, September 1966, 122–123; Shōtenkai, no. 47, November 1966, 18– 19; Shin-fujin [New Woman], November 1966; Bijutsu Jānaru, no. 59 (November 1966): 59-61). 42. According to Sasaki Kōsei, “Jack” signified a common name, intended to present common and ordinary things as something special by changing the context and through its marketing strategies. Sasaki Kōsei, in an interview with the author, Kumamoto, August 11, 2007. However, according to Matsuo Kiyoshi, the group name was derived from “Japan Art Center (JAC).” Matsuo Kiyoshi, in a telephone conversation with the author, August 22, 2007. 43. “Jakku no kai kiyaku” [Jack Society Regulation], September 1964. 44. Hayashida Ryūta, “Zen’ei bijutsu to animēshon” [Avant-Garde Art and Animation], Sasaki Kosei Archive: 1928–2018 (Kumamoto: Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art, 2018), 55–56. Kobayashi Shichirō, interview by Hayashida Ryūta and Kurokawa Noriyuki, Sasaki Kosei Archive, 114–19. 45. Among these, Chiba Eisuke’s Mystery Zone and Matsue Kaku’s (a special guest) Art Gymnastic did not seem to be audience-friendly. The content of these programs and the reaction of the audience are unknown. 46. Yoshida (Ihara) Chizuko, interview by Haya­ shida Ryūta and Kurokawa Noriyuki, Sasaki Kosei Archive, 121. 47. Sasaki Kosei Archive, 65. 48. Zen Nihon Gendai Geijutsuka Kyōgikai ­Un’eibu (Administration Department of All-­Japan Contemporary Artists Council [AJCAC]), “Kyōgikai hossoku made no keika hōkoku” [Progress report of the establishment of the council], Art 21, No. 1 (August 1966): 6–9. 49. In fact, some of the AJCAC members saw AJCAC as an extension of Jakku no Kai. Sasaki Kosei Archive, 66, Yoshida (Ihara), interview, 124. 50. “Kore ga eiga senden?” [Is this a film advertisement?], Shūkan Shinchō, June 11, 1966; “Shinkansen,” Tokyo Chūnichi Shimbun, (May 25, 1966): 10. 51. “Dōkin sawagi” [Bed sharing incident], SSS (san esu), no. 14 (February 6, 1968).

52. Chida Ui, “Sekkyokuteki hiyorimi-shugi jissen ni yoru zen’ei tarento gyō: Jōkyōusettei ron” [Avant-garde celebrity business through proactive opportunism: Theory of situation setting], Art 21, no. 4 (December 1967): 48. 53. Chida, 48. 54. “Bijin wa zettai ni kudoku: Dezainā Gi Berunāru-shi no jissenteki joseiron” [I will absolutely persuade a beautiful woman: Designer Guy Bernard talks about how women really are], Heibon Punch (November 27, 1967): 120. 55. Chida, “Sekkyokuteki hiyorimi-shugi,” 48. 56. Chida, 48–49. 57. Kobayashi interview, Sasaki Kosei Archive, 117. 58. Chiba Eisuke was active in the Society for the Study of Ghosts. It may have been rumors in the everyday world that gave rise to his attempts to examine macabre things. See “Korezo natsu muki no kyokuchi: Obake o kenkyū suru kai” [This is the ideal summer activity: Society for the Study of Ghosts], Baitarī Meito [Vitally Mate], c. August 1966. 59. These were published, respectively, in Art 21, no. 2, 45; Art 21, No. 3, 53; Art 21, No. 4, 66. 60. Chiba Eisuke, in an interview with the author, August 26, 2006. No photographs or other documentary media of Chiba’s actions remain except for a photograph at Sankei Hall. Bijutsu techō, no. 335 (December 1970): 22. 61. See chap. 20, p. 445. 62. In the May and August 1966 events, the word “action” in the original Japanese title (aku­ shon) was written using kanji that correspond to the same phonetic readings: A (亜 Asia), Ku (苦 agony), Sho (庶 common), followed by the hiragana ん (“n”). 63. Zantō Kaigi formed in June 1964. Akiyama Yūtokutaishi joined later and had two group exhibitions at Nishimura Gallery in 1965. See “Contre Attaque·Guerrilla: Kaze ni mukatte idomu gerira shūdan” [Contre Attaque·Guerrilla: A guerrilla group that challenges the wind], Art 21, No. 2, 23. 64. The remnants of Gaga participated in the May Day event, Anti-Vietnam War Action Parade (June), and Baramon (October) in 1966. Gaga was a group that Sawahata Kazuaki and others formed in 1962. It took part in these events with the Ritualists, since Sawahata was friends with Matsue Kaku. 65. “Kinoshita” of Kinoshita Circus was the wellknown founder of a circus troop. But the name was written here in different kanji with the

242

66.

67.

68. 69.

70.

71.

72.

73. 74.

PART II———THE EVOLUTION OF ANTI-ART PERFORMANCE

equivalent phonetics: Ki (奇 crazy), No (脳 brain), shita (舌 tongue). Hayakawa Yoshio, Takahashi Suehiro, and Tanino Hitoshi formed the music band The Jacks in 1966. They released their first album Jakkusu no sekai (The World of The Jacks) from Tōshiba in 1968, which is said to be “the first album that demonstrated the possibility of Japanese rock.” Their sound, which was neither folk nor rock, gained popularity with the “introverted lyrics and dark, moody melodies.” Nihon no fōku & rokku hisutorī 1: 60-nendai fōku no jidai, 131–136. “Omatsuri Mei Dē sanka no ki” [Participation report of May Day fest], Jiyū rengō, no. 13 (June 18, 1967): 2. Nishioka Hiroshi, “Shigun,” Bijutsu techō, no. 260 (December 1965): 87. Katō Yoshihiro, “Zero Jigen gishiki seiron monogatari 2” [The true story of the rituals of Zero Jigen 2], Eiga hyōron, vol. 25, no. 7 (July 1968): 102–105. Saimon-gatari is a type of traditional storytelling or a song. “Originally, it [saimon-gatari] was a prayer used for wishes or as a congratulatory address to Shinto Gods and Buddha. Later, it was secularized and became a form of popular entertainment.” What Matsue sang was something similar to “mojiri saimon or niyake saimon, with quick witted humor” and “Uta (song) saimon recited, in a preaching style, with timely news topics in the lyrics.” Saimon entry by Yamaji Kōzō, in Sekai dai hyakkajiten 11 Kan [World Encyclopedia vol.11], (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2007 edition), 141. Suenaga Tamio, Ikinobiru tame no komyūn: Genkaku uchū soshite seikatsu kakumei [Commune for survival: The illusory universe and lifestyle revolution]. (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1973), 36. See also: Oral History interview with Suenaga Tamio, conducted by the author, Kurokawa Noriyuki, and Hosoya Shūhei, November 30, 2019, Oral History Archives of Japanese Art, http://www.oralarthistory.org/ archives/suenaga_tamio/interview_01.php　 Katō Yoshihiro, “Zero Jigen gishiki seiron monogatari 3” [The true story of the rituals of Zero Jigen 3], Eiga hyōron, vol. 25, no.8 (August 1968): 102. Katō, 103. Suenaga, Ikinobiru tame no komyūn, 37. The article mentioned could be “Torotsukisuto ga abareru” [Disruption by Trotskyists] and

75.

76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

83.

84. 85.

86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

“Gogatsu tsuitachi no torotsukisuto” [Trotskyists on May 1], Akahata, (May 3, 1967): 2. Kawanaka Nobuhiro, “Kore ga 8 generation da” [This is 8 Generation], Eiga hyōron, vol. 25, no. 12 (December 1968): 54–56. “Aru enerugī no hassan” [Releasing a certain energy], Sundē Mainichi, (May 29, 1966): 63. Yoshioka Yasuhiro, “Shokku o jien suru ‘eiga seinen’” [a “film buff” directing his own shock], Hōseki, vol. 2, no. 8 (August 1966). Kawanaka, “Kore ga 8 generation da,” 54. Makirō, Zusetsu musō yūran, 131, 134. Possibly referring to the 4th movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony. “Zero Jigen no kyōkiteki opera” [Zero Jigen’s insane opera], Art 21, no. 2 (October 1966): 50. Kawanaka Nobuhiro, “Eiga, nichijō no bōken” [Film, the Adventure of Everyday,] Tokyo Zokei Daigaku kenkyū hō bessatu 4,” [Tokyo Zokei Art University Research report, separate volume 4], 2006: 17. This is 8 Generation’s first film after its re-organization, as well as the only existing film documentation of Kurohata. However, it is impossible to screen the film as a result of vinegar syndrome. Kawanaka, 18. Translator’s note: Hana (flower) densha (train) is a decorated streetcar for advertisement or festive parades. Makirō, Zusetsu musō yūran, 82–83. The Jacks’ song Bara manji from their album Karappo no sekai (Empty World) is reminiscent of Baramanji Kessha. Katō Yoshihiro, “Zero Jigen gishiki seiron monogatari 6” [The true story of the rituals of Zero Jigen 6], Eiga hyōron, vol. 25, no. 12 (December 1968): 82. Makirō, Zusetsu musō yūran, 81. Makirō, 82. Makirō, 123–126. Katō Yoshihiro, “Zero Jigen gishiki seiron monogatari 6,” 82. Katō Yoshihiro, in an interview with the author, Tokyo, September 22, 2000. Katō, “Zero Jigen gishiki seiron monogatari 6,” 83. Suzuki Shirō of Kurohata was the planning manager for Honmoku-tei Theater. “Shōbaikke nuki no Ueno no angura” [Angura in Ueno without commercial interest], Biggu Komikku, vol. 1. No. 6 (September 1968): 201. According to Mugen kōbō (“Takenaka Rō no shigoto” [Takenaka Rō’s work] in Takenaka Rō, kettei­ ban rupo raitā kotohajime [Definitive edition:

Chapter 8———Angura Culture and Happenings (1966 –1968)24 3

The beginnings of a reportage writer] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1999), 305, Takenaka Rō was the producer of this event, but Katō denied it. Furthermore, the Mugen kōbō’ essay mentions that “Maro Akaji threw wet futon into the audience,” but Maro was not mentioned in other materials. However, in August 1966, Maro participated in Mayonaka no Varaeti hapuningu Baramon (Midnight Variety Happening: Brahman) at Chiyoda Salon Small Theater. Maro confirmed a photo of himself in Heibon Punch, vol. 3, no. 44 (October 24, 1966): 26. In “Gendaibijutsu no gojū nen” [50 years of contemporary art], Bijutsu techō, no. 355 (May 1972): 168, Shinjuku Shōnen-dan (=Akiyama Yūtokutaishi) is mentioned, but he did not participate. (Personal letter from Akiyama to the author, postmarked March 31, 2001). Itoi Kanji’s name was in the timetable hung at the venue, but he did not participate either. 94. Katō Yoshihiro, “Zero Jigen gishiki seiron monogatari, saishūkai” [The true story of the rituals of Zero Jigen, the final chapter], Eiga hyōron, vol. 26, no. 2 (February 1969): 90–91. 95. Kazakura Shō appeared in Kuni Chiya Dance Institute’s performance at Honmoku-tei Theater in April 1968. 96. Translator’s note: “Heraherahe” comes from a comical song Herahera-bushi with an outlandish dance initiated by San’yūtei Mankitsu, a vaudeville entertainer, around 1880. 97. Translator’s note: “Oppekepe” comes from a political satirical song Oppekepe-bushi, popular in the Meiji 20s (1887–96), performed by theater director and artist Kawakami Otojirō (1864–1911) during the Civil Rights and Freedom Movement in the 1880s. The song is said to be based on Herahera-bushi. 98. Hanaga Mitsutoshi, “Kongetsu no hōmon: Kyōki o uru hapuningu-ya Zero Jigen” [Visit of the month: Zero Jigen, a Happening businessman selling insanity], Eiga hyōron, vol. 25, no. 4 (April 1968): 80. 99. Admission was 500 yen. It was the first time that the Ritualists charged to see their performance. Hanaga, 80. 100. Hanaga, 80. 101. “Banpaku nazo kusokurae! Kichigai mihon-ichi ōnigiwai” [Fuck the Expo! Insane Trade Fair was bustling], Eiga hyōron, vol. 25, no. 5 (May 1968): 11. 102. See the photos in: “Gurafu no me” [Eye of Graph], Asahi Gurafu, no. 2301 (March 29, 1968): 96–97.

103. See the photos in: “Kyōki mihon-ichi to mei­ utta gishiki shūdan no hapuningu” [Happening by a ritual group, titled Insanity Trade Fair], Geijutsu seikatsu, no. 226 (June 1968). 104. Suenaga Tamio, in an interview with the author, Tokyo, July 12, 2007. 105. “Banpaku nazo kusokurae! Kichigai mihon-ichi ōnigiwai,” 10–11. 106. Hanaga, “Kongetsu no hōmon,” 80. 107. “Kyā! ‘Kichigai mihon-ichi’ taikai desutte?” [Eeek! “Insane Trade Fair”?], Josei Jishin, vol. 11, no. 51 (December 16, 1968): 140. 108. Makirō, Zusetsu musō yūran, 123. 109. What the man was actually “urinating” was holy water. Makirō, Zusetsu musō yūran, 123, “Harenchi na hapuningu geki” [Shameful Happening theater], Shūkan bunshun, vol. 10, no. 50 (December 16, 1968): 16. 110. “Kyā! ‘Kichigai mihon-ichi’ taikai desutte?” 140. 111. Makirō, Zusetsu musō yūran, 123–126. 112. Translator’s note: Basara was an aesthetic of showy extravagance that symbolized defiance against authority during the Muromachi period (1335–1573). 113. Suenaga, interview with the author. 114. Makirō Zusetsu musō yūran, 126. 115. Fuma Motohiko, Utsukushiki getsuyōbi no hitobito [Beautiful people on Monday], (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1994), 20. 116. Translator’s note: The official march of the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force. 117. Translator’s note: “Glico” is a name of a Japanese confectionary company, and this famous catchphrase appears on a box of caramel candy; it claims that one piece of candy supposedly contains enough energy to run 300 meters. During the performance, Akiyama dresses up as the man in the running shirt from the candy box. 118. Fuma, Utsukushiki getsuyōbi no hitobito, 20. 119. Katō Yoshihiro, “Zero Jigen gishiki seiron monogatari, saishūkai,” 95. Translator’s note: Mikawa Manzai is a style of folk entertainment from Mikawa region in Aichi prefecture that features a pair of comics who perform together. Manzai duos tour around the country, visiting homes to give blessings and engage in comical talks. 120. “Kyā! ‘Kichigai mihon-ichi’ taikai desutte?” 140. 121. Katō Yoshihiro, “Zero Jigen gishiki seiron monogatari, saishūkai,” 92.

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122. Katō, 140–41. 123. Katō Yoshihiro, “Zero Jigen gishiki seiron monogatari, saishūkai,” 94. 124. Katō, 93. 125. “Kyā! ‘Kichigai mihon-ichi’ taikai desutte?,” 141. 126. Katō Yoshihiro, “Zero Jigen gishiki seiron monogatari, saishūkai”, 91–92. 127. Katō, 95. 128. The series was titled Combined ostracism fetishism or inverted mollusks for chastity belts. 129. Iwakura Masahito named the group, but after he passed away, the other members did not consider the group name important and it was impossible to discern the intention behind the name. Yet, it is likely that the name was derived from Les Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir, a novel about the lives of postwar intellectuals. “The title of this book Mandarin originally meant government officials and prominent scholars in old China, especially in Qing Dynasty. Then it was used as a pejorative term for the intellectuals who possessed high ranks but stayed inside their specific field, indulging in trivial abstract debates and blind to the moving reality.” (Asabuki Sankichi, “Kaisetsu” [Commentary], Bōvowāru chosakushū [Beauvoir Collection], vol. 9 (Tokyo: Jinbunshoin, 1967), 439–440). The novel Les Mandarins was in the collection published from June to July 1967. De Beauvoir came to Japan with Sartre to give lectures in Tokyo and Kyoto in September and October of 1966. The novel was previously translated and collected in Gendai sekai bungaku zenshū (Contemporary World Literature Collection), published by Shinchōsha in 1957. It is likely that Iwakura read this translation and adopted it as the group’s name after Beauvoir’s visit to Japan in 1966. 130. There was a movement protesting against the government’s legalization of the National Foundation Day on February 11, 1966 in Tokyo. The protesters thought that the National Foundation Day was a restoration of prewar nationalism. Zero Jigen carried out Masked Procession in front of the Imperial Palace on the first Emperor’s Birthday in 1967. 131. Sasaki Kosei Archive, 88–89. 132. Komori Saihei, “Geijutsu no aki, zen’ei ha hassuru” [Autumn Art Season: Avant-garde school in vigor], Kobe Shimbun, evening edition (September 18, 1967): 3. 133. Komori, 3.

134. Teigen [Proposals], flyer for Reaction in Summer, August 1968. 135. These Manifestoes were also reprinted for an invitation to 7 Dimensions in August 1968. 136. I is pronounced ‘yi,’ a Chinese letter which means unit, position, and phase. Reiko Tomii, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016), 209. 137. Tōno Yoshiaki, “Body Art to wa nanika” [What is Body Art?], Bijutsu techō, no. 258 (October 1965): 18. 138. “Bum” (bamu) means “an idler, vagabond, lazy-bone, drunkard, debauchee,” Yamada Kaiya, Ai amu hippī: Nihon no hippī mūvumento ’60–‘90” [I am a hippie: Hippie Movement in Japan ’60–’90] (Tokyo: Daisan Shokan, 1990), 38. Nanao named the group “Bum”; Mamo (Katō Mamoru) later named the spinoff group “Buzoku.” Terada Yoshirō, “Posuto komyūn no hippī shisō: Yamao Sansei no raifu hisutorī” [Hippie philosophy of the post-commune: Yamao Sansho’s life history], Tōyō Daigaku Daigakuin kiyō (Shakaigaku Kenkyūka) [Tōyō University Graduate School Bulletin (Department of Social Science)] (Tokyo: Tōyō University, March 2005): 86. 139. “Warera genshi jin, ‘Sekai no metsubō o yokoku suru shūkai to gyōretsu’” [We the Primitive: Rally and Parade Predicting The End of the World], Asahi Gurafu, (May 5, 1967): 108–111. 140. Surprisingly, it was Adachi Masao who was asked to direct this event. Adachi Masao, Eiga/Kakumei [Film/Revolution] (Tokyo: Kawadeshobō Shinsha, 2003), 127. This was perhaps because Katō Mamoru, a member of Bum, was also involved in Sa’in at Nihon University Film Study Institute. Also, Koike Ryū, who was close to VAN, later joined Kosugi Takehisa’s Taj Mahal Travellers. These interactions indicate that members of VAN and people related to the group were among the originators of the commune movements in the late 1960s. 141. Yamada Kaiya, Ai amu hippī, 40–41. 142. Sasaki Kōsei, in a personal letter to the author, April 2006. 143. Chiba Eisuke, personal record. 144. Katō Yoshihiro, ed., “Nenpyō: Zero Jigen” [Chronology: Zero Jigen], Ragan, no. 3 (December 1986): 21. 145. Yamada Kaiya, Ai amu hippī, 51. 146. Hayashi Yōko, “Gaka tachi no bijutsushi 58: Hori Kōsai” [Painters’ art history: Hori Kōsai],” Bijutsu techō, no. 902 (February 2007): 173.

Chapter 8———Angura Culture and Happenings (1966 –1968)24 5

147. A film screening of Exptance (sic.) with Film at LSD in Shinjuku, and a Happening, Viva Kyoto #2, in front of Takashimaya Department Store in Kyoto. 148. According to Yoshida Yoshie, it was in the end of 1968 (Bijutsu techō, no. 335 [December 1970]: 22), but Chiba’s accounts and records of Sankei Hall indicate that it possibly took place at Hoashi Mariko’s Concert on December 8, 1967. 149. Other events around this time include 000 plan: 8 events for midnight by Sekine Nobuo, Suga Kishio (both Mono-ha artists) and Kobayashi Hakudō (artist) in May 1967 at Shinjuku Pit-inn. In May 1968, Fujimichō Atelier, including Kobayashi Hakudō, organized the large-scale Happening Festival at Shinkō Kaikan, Yokohama, with 50 participants performing in a dark space attended by an audience of 200 people. Kobayashi Hakudō interview, B zemi “Atarashii hyōgen no gakushū” no rekishi 1967–2004 [History of “Study of New Expression” by B Seminar 1967–2004] (Yokohama: BankART, 2005): 26–28, 128. 150. It was published in a brochure for Reaction in Summer (August 1968), and re-printed in The Play’s newsletter, No. 1 (April 1969). 151. Ishiko Junzō, “Hapuningu igo to yobareru mono: ‘Kokoka kanataka hatamata dokoka’ ni miru sude no taiken” [What is called post-Happening: Bare handed experience in Here or There, or Where?], Eiga hyōron, vol. 25, no. 6 (June 1968): 77.

152. Ishiko, 77. 153. Ishiko, 78. 154. It was staged again as the 17th performance of Hakken no Kai between March and May of 1968. The script was published in Eiga hyōron, vol. 25, no. 11 (November 1968): 99–116. 155. Uryū Ryōsuke, Shōgekijo zen undō shi: Kiroku Hakken no Kai [History of Little Theater Movement: Document Hakken no Kai] (Tokyo: Zōkeisha, 1983), 110. 156. Ishiko Junzō, “Hapuningu igo to yobareru mono,” 79. 157. “Keikan mo engisha? Angura Tenjō Sajiki, rojō no hapuningu” [Is a Policeman also an actor? Angura Tenjō Sajiki’s street Happening], Asahi Shimbun, (May 26, 1970): 22. 158. Uryū Ryōsuke, Shōgekijo zen undō shi, 104. 159. Okada Takaaki, ed. “Kazakura Shō ryakunenpyō” [Brief chronology of Kazakura Shō], Kikan, no. 12 (May 1981): 85. 160. Uryū Ryōsuke, Shōgekijo zen undō shi, 104. Uryū claimed that the On–Off work was based on Ishiko’s idea, while it was in fact Tone’s idea. From a personal email from Tone Yasunao to the author, February 14 and 19, 2010.

CHAPTER 9

The Various Anti-Expos (1969–1970) From Revolt to a Revolution in Consciousness

かくして、ある日、突然〝バリ祭〟なる語が誕生し、 〔引用者註・京都大学〕教養部バリケ ード内にＧＯ─ＧＯのリズムが高らかに鳴り響き、ビートルズが戦士の子守唄として登場 する。 《裸のラリーズ》が歌い、恐る恐るバリ内を訪れたミーハー族がいつしか踊り狂 い、ワイセツ罪でパクられ、保釈直後の荒木一郎がギター片手に弾き語り、プライベー ト・フィルムの上映や、 《プレイ》、 《ゼロ次元》などのアーティスト集団によるハプニング がうち続き、あげくは《部族》という大和民族型ヒッピー集団が全国より押し寄せ、何ん やアレは、男同士がキスしとるやないか、いったい闘争とコレはどういう関係にあんのや と、良識あるセクト諸氏から一大ヒンシュクをかったものだ。 （しかし、ココが大事）。 まさしく、これぞ〝全国全狂頭〟の大祭典であり、まことに面白おかしく、しかし、 実は真面目このうえなく演じられた六〇年代の葬列であった。 小松辰男

Suddenly one day, out of nowhere, you start hearing the word Barisai (Barricaded Festival). The triumphant beat of go-go rhythms thumps inside the barricades of the Faculty of Liberal Arts [of Kyoto University], Beatles songs became warriors’ lullabies. Hadaka-no-rarīzu (Les Rallizes Dénudés) starts to play—and fans who a minute earlier barely dared cross the barricade break out into frenzied dancing. Araki Ichirō, just released on bail after being arrested for public obscenity, sings and plays guitar. There are screenings of private films and Happenings by The Play, Zero Jigen, and other artist groups. Members of Buzoku [The Tribe] pour in from across the country. Some of the more straight-laced student leaders are appalled—what’s this about—men kissing each other! What’s that got to do with our struggle! (A lot, in fact). Yes, this was the great festival of Zenkoku Zen-kyō-tō [All-Japan All Crazyheads].1 The 1960s were dead and this was their funeral. It may have looked fun; it was actually pretty serious.2 —Komatsu Tatsuo

1.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

We cannot talk about 1970 without talking about The Japan World Exposition (Expo) in Osaka. The total number of visitors—staggeringly—was equivalent to over 60% of Japan’s population at the time. It is generally claimed that Expo ’70 marked the end of the era of social protests that had dominated the late ’60s: protests against modernization, the postwar era, and art led by student movements (such as Zengakuren and Zenkyōtō), citizens’ movements such as Beheiren, and finally angura and counter-cultural groups. It is also claimed that Expo ’70 ushered in a new seemingly endless era of conservative governments and consumer culture. And while not all protests came to a halt that year, many movements

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 91. Riot police use fire hoses on protestors in the Yasuda Auditorium • January 18, 1969 • The University of Tokyo

that had been gaining momentum up until 1968 ended by 1969, stifled by the state, which had similarly succeeded in their pursuit of the gentrification of major urban spaces ahead of the scheduled extension of the Anpo in June 1970. As for the student movement, riot police removed the barricades from University of Tokyo [fig. 91] in January 1969. Strongholds at Nihon University Zenkyōtō collapsed in February followed by the arrest of its chairman, Akita Akehiro, in March. In August, the Diet forced through the Act on Temporary Measures concerning University Management.3 In September, riot police destroyed the student headquarters in the clock tower at Kyoto University. That same month they were summoned to Waseda and Keio Universities, where again they removed barricades. In October, it was the barricades at Tama Art University… February 1969 saw the emergence of the “folk guerrilla” movement in Shinjuku, the center of angura culture, with young Beheiren demonstrators gathering at the Shinjuku Station West Exit “Plaza” and singing antiwar songs [fig. 92]. In May 1969, police removed the protestors and even larger crowds gathered in retaliation. In June, 7,000 people rallied at West Exit to sing folk songs and clashed with armed police, result in the arrest of 64 people. In July, the “West Exit Underground Plaza” signboard was changed to read “West Exit Underground Passage,”4 indicating that people were only meant to “pass” through and not assemble or sing. Under this kind of police pressure, the folk guerrilla movement evaporated.

 92. Folk Guerrilla • 1969 • Shinjuku Station West Exit Plaza, Tokyo

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Around the same time, restrictions against angura culture, including performances, were becoming increasingly prevalent. Kara Jūrō’s Jōkyō Geikijō (Situation Theater), for example, was forced to abandon its tent performances at Hanazono Shrine in Shinjuku after June 1968. In January 1969, it set up a tent in Shinjuku Central Park (without permission) and performed Koshimaki Osen / Furisode Kaji (Loincloth Osen / Kimono Conflagration). Kara was arrested on site for violating the City Park Act. Meanwhile, when Kawanaka Nobuhiro’s underground film theater was shut down by the company that owned it, he struggled to find another regular screening venue. Closing the cinematheque wasn’t just about the films—it signified defeat within the bigger picture of our current situation. The state and its authority had utterly thwarted us; it bared its fangs at the scent of any socially disruptive element, paving the way both for the Anpo renewal and the Expo in 1970. Huge swathes of Shinjuku residents began to support its gentrification campaign,5 eager to kick out the undesirable youths.6 […] Day by day, the hangouts of young people disappeared. The bustling scenes of the Shōwa Genroku7 had become a thing of the past. Rumors swirled around that the police were rounding up residents of the “Green House”8 in a “fūten hunt” and were roughing them up at the Yotsuya Police Station Judo dōjō.9

July 1969 saw the arrest of members of Expo Destruction Group. A Shinjuku fūten leader was arrested in the same month.10 The urban clean-up that had preceded the Tokyo Olympics was happening all over again, but on a larger scale. And the police were not the only problem; as Takenaka Rō wrote in a weekly magazine in June 1969, “Shinjuku has become impotent.”11 Legitimate underground culture had been tainted, he believed, and “angura had become just another popular trend.”12 Another phenomenon that marked the progress of gentrification was the “Pedestrian Paradise” introduced in Ginza, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, and Asakusa in August 1970 (during the Expo), and then in Kyoto’s Shijō Avenue in November [fig. 93]. These one-day mini-Expos—family-friendly spaces with less exhaust pollution and no risk of traffic accidents, demonstrations, or guerrilla attacks—would become a model adopted by large cities throughout Japan.

 93. First Pedestrian Paradise • August 2, 1970 • Ginza, Tokyo

250

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PART II———THE EVOLUTION OF ANTI-ART PERFORMANCE

FROM INTERMEDIA TO IBENTO (EVENT)

The emergence—and subsequent demise—of Expo Destruction Group coincided with an increase in the number of events featuring “intermedia” in their titles. Participants in those events included former members of Group Ongaku (Kosugi Takehisa, Shiomi Mieko, and Tone Yasunao), as well as Kazakura Shō13 and Gulliver. None of these, we can assume, engaged with Expo Destruction Group. In December 1969, Kosugi formed Taj Mahal Travellers, an improvisation collective aimed at overcoming the constraints of conventional music concerts; but as the nomadic, hippie connotations of its name suggest, Taj Mahal Travellers was never overtly committed to politics. In February 1969, former Group Ongaku members were involved in a large-scale event, Cross Talk/Intermedia, an expanded version of a series of Cross Talk events originally held in November 1967. It was billed as Japan–U.S. Joint Art Festival: Cross Talk/Intermedia. Akiyama Kuniharu and Yuasa Jōji from Japan, and Roger and Karen Reynolds from the U.S. assisted in planning, and it was organized by the American Culture Center with Pan American Airline as major sponsor. It was staged at the Yoyo­ gi National Stadium’s Second Gymnasium, attracted more than 3,000 visitors daily (over 10,000 in total), and boasted the most advanced sound and projection equipment available at the time, including a fourteen-channel diffusion system designed by sound director Okuyama Shigeyuki.14 Other venues considered by Akiyama and Yuasa were Komazawa Olympic Gymnasium, Aoyama Gakuin University Gymnasium, Waseda University Gymnasium, Meguro Skate Rink, and Harumi Wharf Display Hall. Conventional art museums and Sogetsu Art Center’s performance hall had been ruled out early on, on account of their size. Documentary photos in the April issue of Bijutsu techō indicate it was indeed a large-scale spectacle. Organized by a U.S. governmental institution with sponsorships from major enterprises (Sony, Pioneer and others) to cover its costs—including vast amounts of equipment and A-list artists15—it was a prelude to Expo ’70, which was scheduled for the following year. But the prospect of the event including any sort of antiestablishment performance was entirely out of the question. Another large-scale event, that like Cross Talk/Intermedia “was more san-gei kyōdō [collaboration between industry and the arts] than san-gaku kyōdō [collaboration between industry and academia], making it look again like a pre-Expo event” (Ishiko Junzō)16 was Electromagica: International Psytech Art Exhibition at Ginza Sony Building from April to May 1969. It was sponsored and coordinated by JEAA (Japan Electric Art Association) with commercial sponsors including Sony, Pan-American Airways, Nippon Keikinzoku (Nippon Light Metal Co.), Tōyō Rayon, and Yamagiwa Electric Co. The production cost was ten million yen and its total expenditures reached thirty million yen.17 Ishiko Junzō complained that the works in the exhibition looked on the whole like nothing more than elaborately engineered toys. […] The event claimed to explore the total liberation of sensory perception through technology, but in reality, it failed to explore ways of overcoming distinctions between things and humans. By over-focusing on the material object, it ended up, conversely, reinforcing the rationalism of European Modernism.18

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The same insidious collaboration between government, industry, academia, and the arts continues to lie behind countless “technology art” and “media art” events in Japan today. It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss in detail the avant-garde artists who collaborated with Expo ’70, but a brief glance at some of the names helps put the activities of Expo Destruction Group in context. Among the artists discussed in this volume, visual artists such as Takamatsu Jirō, Yoshimura Masunobu, and Yamaguchi Katsuhiro were commissioned by Expo ’70 to create sculptural works (Yamaguchi also worked as a chief producer of Mitsui Co. group). Akiyama Kuniharu and Ichiyanagi Toshi (composers), Yokoo Tadanori (designer), Isozaki Arata (architect), Tōno Yoshiaki and Nakahara Yūsuke (art critics) also cooperated in the large-scale corporate and state-led event. Members of Gutai, led by Yoshihara Jirō (who was a member of the Expo Art Exhibition Committee) also participated in Expo projects—they exhibited at the entrance of Midori Pavilion, created a collaborative work at an outdoor exhibition, and performed at Gutai Art Festival—the group’s last big moment in the spotlight. This period is also marked by the emergence of new spaces that hosted different types of events, which included performance art. These were no longer the conventional movie houses or theaters, designed for specific media such as film, theater, and music but that occasionally made space for performance art. Instead, these new spaces became renowned venues for performance art: Angura Pop in Shinjuku, which sometimes staged psychedelic shows; Mugen (Dream and Phantom), directed by Hamano Yasuhiro, which opened January 1968 in Akasaka; the discotheque Space Capsule which opened October 1968, also in Akasaka; Space Laboratory Hair in Shibuya, which re-opened in early 1970 under new management; and the live house (live music club) Station ’70 which also opened in December 1969 in Shibuya.19 Space Capsule, in particular, was managed as a “total theater” by a stellar cast that included architect Kurokawa Kishō, interior designer Awazu Kiyoshi, Ichiyanagi Toshi as planner of shows, and theater group Tenjō Sajiki, which regularly held performances.20 3.

THE RISE AND FALL OF EXPO ’70 DESTRUCTION JOINT-STRUGGLE GROUP

Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group (Banpaku Hakai Kyōtō-ha, hereinafter “Expo Destruction Group”) launched its activities in Nagoya in February 1969, the same month that Cross Talk/Intermedia took place. We should nonetheless preface our discussion of the group—which represents the very last time that Anti-Art performers of the 1960s would come together as a collective—by noting that well before Expo Destruction Group, other cultural figures, designers, architects, and critics, had voiced opposition to Expo ’70. The earliest manifestation of the anti-Expo movement was in fact a street demonstration and statement by the Revolutionary Designers League, formed by Andō Norio in June 1968. In November, Architects ’70 Action Committee organized Smash the Expo! All Architects Rise Up Rally at Tokyo Fujin-jidō Kaikan (Tokyo Women and Children Hall) in Shiba, Tokyo, followed by a street demonstration with 200 participants that processed toward the Expo Association office in Ginza.21 Earlier, in his 1967 essay, “Konkyochi no

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shisō” (Philosophy of Base), architecture critic Miyauchi Yoshihisa questions the motives of architects who had been offered huge projects by the Expo committee.22 According to Miyauchi, discussions conducted during the spring and summer of 1968 had inspired students, young architects, scholars, critics, designers, and editors to form the Architects ’70 Action Committee. Their zōhan (revolt) statement not only criticized the Expo itself—which they saw as aimed at enhancing state power through the illusion of scientific and technological progress—but also targeted specific architects who served the establishment, deeming them the “pseudo avant-garde” (by that point, commissions for the architectural designs of the Expo facilities had already been completed).23 It was against this backdrop that in November  1968, Katō Yoshihiro attended a roundtable talk for Design hihyō magazine. The participants were Hara Hiroshi, an architect who had already been invited to cooperate with the Expo, Arimura Keiko, architecture journalist and member of Architects ’70 Action Committee, Narita Katsuhiko, an artist from Mono-ha, and two other architects, an architecture student and a designer. While some used the occasion to express anti-Expo sentiments, Katō himself refrained—in fact he did not mention Expo Destruction Group, merely voicing his expectation that Zero Jigen should have the right to perform in a place where people could gather. It seems likely, then, that Katō was influenced by the anti-Expo movement led by architects and designers in the talk. Arimura made the point that Zero Jigen was unable to attract audiences because it lacked Zengakuren’s “awareness for issues such as human liberation and freedom.”24 Katō agreed: “You’re right, we should follow [Zengakuren’s] business policy! We’ll change our pitch for next year…I shall take your advice into consideration.”25 This may have been the moment Katō first conceived of the Eejanaika26 procession at Expo ’70, anticipating the power of the event for large-scale mobilization, and also when he devised the group’s new “business” slogan, “Expo destruction” (banpaku hakai), with the hope of attracting a wider membership. Eight days after this round table talk, Grand Insanity Trade Fair was held at Iino Hall. It was here that, as we saw in the previous chapter (see p. 226), Katō witnessed the limitations of the Ritualists’ rallies (gishiki-ya taikai).27 Three months later, an Intermedia event, 8 Generation + Zero Jigen (February 22 and 23, 1969), took place at Theater 36, but there are no records confirming that it was intended as an anti-Expo (hanpaku) or “Expo Destruction” (banpaku hakai) event. Anti-Expo Insanity Trade Fair held March  29–30 in Kyoto with the same participants is the first time  94. Expo Destruction Group performing netai • March 23, 1969 • Shinjuku, Tokyo

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“Anti-Expo” (hanpaku) actually appears in the title of an event. Shortly before the Kyoto event, Katō’s First and Second Manifesto of Expo Destruction Action was published in Angura tsūshin (Underground News), edited by Iwata Shin’ichi. The ideas behind Expo Destruction Group thus took shape between late February and March 1969. Based on Katō’s account of the group’s activities, published in October 1969, we can assume Expo Destruction Group was launched in February; in this account, he refers to the event in Nagoya, in which both Mizukami Jun and Yoshida Minoru participated,28 as “Anti-Expo Insanity Trade Fair.”29 Following the Nagoya event, in March  1969, Zero Jigen performed netai (its “lieon-the-ground” routine, which directly translates as “lying body”) in Shinjuku [fig.  94]. Straight afterwards, it organized Anti-Expo Insanity Trade Fair at the restaurant Danshaku in Kyoto. This event, joined by Kokuin, Kanesaka Kenji, and Koyama Tetsuo from Tokyo, together with Mizukami Jun and other members of The Play from Kansai, brought together the core members of Expo Destruction Group. The group also performed netai at Akao Gallery, Midōsuji Street, and at the Expo’s headquarters in Osaka. In May 1969, the Expo Destruction Group organized Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally over three days in Kitakyūshū and Fukuoka.30 A large number of groups came together, building momentum for the movement: Zero Jigen, Kokuin, Collective Kumo, and Collective He, as well as Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Sakurai Takami (Kyūshū-ha), and members of The Play (including Mizukami Jun). This marked the climax of the Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group movement. In June, Smash the Expo Black Festival was staged by Zero Jigen, Kokuin, Akiyama, and Koyama in Ikebukuro, Tokyo. Participants set off in a bus travelling from Tokyo to Nagoya and on to the barricades of Kyoto University, where they performed the Zenra katate-age (Fully nude one-hand raise) action on the roof [fig. 95].31. During the performance at Kyoto University, Mizukami attempted a solo ritual, assisted by Suzukida Asako, sliding down a rope from the roof (see plate 25, p. 15), but he fell midway and was forced to drop out of the event. The accident proved to be polarizing within Expo Destruction Group, particularly with regard to the issue of professional responsibility, and became one of the factors behind the group’s later breakup. The next day, Sakurai and Shingai Kazuyoshi (Collective He) from Fukuoka participated in Harenchi Demo (Shameless demonstration) in Kyoto. The group concluded with a ritual in the streets of Osaka, returning to Tokyo by way of Nagoya University. It is fair to say that this trajectory symbolizes not only the peak for Expo Destruction Group, but also the terminus point for all of 1960s Anti-Art performance.

 95. Expo Destruction Group performing Zenra katate-age • June 10, 1969 • Balcony of Building A, Faculty of Arts, Kyoto University

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 96. Expo Destruction Group performs at Antiwar Expo • August 10, 1969 • Osaka Castle Park

 97. Expo Destruction Group performs at Anti-Expo Teach-in • September 22, 1969 • Yamate Church Hall, Shibuya, Tokyo

In July, police investigating the connection between Expo Destruction Group and student activists ordered the editors of Shūkan Myōjō, a weekly showbiz magazine, to submit as evidence photos documenting the group’s event in Ikebukuro,32 leading to the arrest of Katō Yoshihiro, Suenaga Tamio and three other members of Kokuin, Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, and Koyama Tetsuo for public indecency. Supporters of Expo Destruction Group, such as Kawanaka Nobuhiro, Watanabe Chihiro of Posutā demo no Kai (Poster Demonstration Group) and Yoshida Yoshie, considered appealing against the arrests. Kawanaka insisted that the “Expo Destruction Trial” should be heard in court during Expo ’70, but no one agreed; ultimately, instead of going through with the trial, the defendants unanimously decided to accept the public indecency charge and pay the fine. Kawanaka, upon hearing this, realized: “it’s all over.”33 Despite this worsening situation, in August, a month after the arrest of Katō and others, Expo Destruction Group took part in a large-scale event, Antiwar Expo (Hanpaku), involving over 200 organizations. The event, organized by Kansai Beheiren and others, took place at Osaka Castle Park [fig. 96].34 Subsequently, Expo Destruction Group held its last performance on stage at Anti-Expo Teach-in (September  1969) at Yamate Church Hall, Tokyo [fig. 97]. According to Yoshida Yoshie, the Teach-in was intended as a critical review of Antiwar Expo, and as an affirmation of the “Smash the Expo” manifesto. Despite its bold and optimistic political statements conjuring “the final battle of

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’71,” Katō (representing Expo Destruction Group) clashed with Zenkyōtō, and the event ended in deadlock, with the two parties talking over each other in the debate.35 Yoshida, who had previously been relatively unsympathetic to Zero Jigen, was moved by Katō’s dogged perseverance: “Katō was standing on a platform facing jeers of ‘Nonsense!’” he wrote, “He looked hurt and worn out. For a moment, I felt a surge of something warm— perhaps friendship—toward Katō Yoshihiro, whom I had always viewed from a certain distance.”36 The Yamate Church meeting was primarily concerned with the Anpo renewal in 1970 rather than the Expo, and Yoshida lamented that “urgency was given to dealing with the imminent political struggle, while the cultural struggle was forced to take a back seat.”37 He was aware that the cultural revolution he had entertained such high hopes for had reached a crisis point. The infighting intensified among filmmakers as well. In October  1969, Sogetsu Film Festival was “smashed” ( funsai) by filmmaker Ōe Masanori, Katō Yoshihiro, Kanesaka Kenji, and others (see p. 266). But Kanesaka accused fellow anti-Expo supporter, Satō Shigechika, of embezzling film rental fees from the Japan Filmmakers Cooperative (Japan Coop);38 Satō then resigned from the management of Japan Coop, and Kawanaka followed.39 Kawanaka later said that he had in fact prevented Ōe and Okabe Michio from removing films from Japan Coop. 40 He also vehemently blamed Kanesaka for his double dealing in film festivals, refusing his support of Smash Sōgetsu Film Festival movement as “revolution in cinema and cinema of revolution are automatically different,” which also marks the end of “joint-struggle” for Expo Destruction. 41 Indeed, after September 1969, the activity of Expo Destruction Group was notably limited. 42 Zero Jigen’s principal work of 1970 was the film Inaba no Shiro Usagi (The White Hare of Inaba), a 16mm film compilation of the group’s rituals, which cost large amounts of both money and time. Meanwhile, in July 1970, Iwata Shin’ichi became involved in the Gomi saiban (Garbage Trial) in Nagoya. As a group, Zero Jigen was in decline. Suenaga Tamio, whose commitment to political struggle remained unwavering, disbanded Kokuin and formed Peak, focusing now on the production of music events and workshops. Koyama Tetsuo distanced himself from radical performance after a solo exhibition in November 1970. After recovering from his accident, Mizukami Jun did not rejoin Expo Destruction Group, and also departed The Play after the group performance at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto in August 1970. 4.

THE AIMS OF EXPO ’70 DESTRUCTION JOINT-STRUGGLE GROUP

What were the aims of Expo Destruction Group? The Architects ’70 Action Committee claimed that hanpaku (anti-Expo) was: First, the belief that Anpo and Expo should be seen as one and the same thing; second, the belief that the Expo ’70 struggle should be fought on multiple fronts—politics, the economy, and culture; and third, a critical stance from which to criticize and condemn intellectuals, the officially recognized Left, and established architects who had been co-opted into the establishment. 43

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But Katō and Suenaga’s own statements as Expo Destruction Group members did not mention blocking the Anpo renewal as a political aim (or at least, it did not seem to be of primary importance). We can reasonably suppose, as Yoshida Yoshie writes, Considerable visionary and strategic differences existed between the direct guerrilla tactics of Expo Destruction Group, the Antiwar Association [Hansen kyōkai] which planned to organize Antiwar Expo, and Architects ’70 Action Committee who aimed to reject and destroy Expo ’70, which they saw as “the Anpo within us.”44

Suenaga also writes that “there was a sharp confrontation between the folk guerrilla/angura group and the antiwar sects, exacerbating the uchigeba [violent internal conflict]45 that had manifested at the Yamate Church meeting.” While Kokuin had been politically committed long before forming Expo Destruction Group, Zero Jigen’s participation in political activism was seen, even among the group’s sympathizers, as “an abrupt conversion [tenkō]”46. A series of essays by Katō titled Banpaku hakai katsudō dai 1–4 sengen (Expo Destruction Action Manifesto No. 1–4), published in the May to September  1969 issues of Eiga hyōron, is helpful in making sense of Zero Jigen’s intention. Katō’s typically outrageous writing style is difficult to follow, but by cross-referencing his text with additional essays by Kawanaka Nobuhiro and Suenaga, we can summarize Expo Destruction Group’s activities into the following two concepts: 1. Resistance against the technological control of consciousness Katō Yoshihiro: Information apparatus (technology) is “the violence of contemporary society.” The entire apparatus of the Expo is a celebration of control and managerial systems apparatus that will imperceptibly rule over mankind for the next century. Expo’s slogans state, “Peace and Order for Mankind” and “No Violence Allowed.” But the violence of twentieth century rulers is precisely “peace and order”—Peace-lovers who aim to blind humanity and paralyze its consciousness through the domination of information technology are the new violent rulers of the twentieth century. Primitive violence such as wielding a geba-bō [the wooden sticks used by student protesters] and manning a tank, are as fake as pro-wrestling. True violence is but the indirect, soft, and unconscious brainwashing of human sensibility. 47 2. Power in numbers: large-scale rituals Kawanaka Nobuhiro: If the Expo site is intended as a place to “see” [miru], we should make ourselves “seen” [mirareru], instead of fighting against it. We should not just silently observe the vast and splendid but empty stage built at huge cost from the national purse. We must become the “content” of that stage. […] This may sound no different from the self-vindication of artists who participate in the Expo. But rather than destroy the metaphorical “lion’s body” from within 48 and exercise (with minimal impact) what little artistic conscience is permitted by the control system—our fantastic plan is to sit back and watch the tragedy of their conflicting interests, transforming their entire

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construct into our own stage. As for how, precisely, we will do this: we will perform simple actions such as “walking with one hand raised” and “lying on the ground” at the Expo site—but on a huge scale. 49

In order to secure the numbers necessary to achieve these large-scale synchronized actions, the group held a series of publicity events (“people’s festivals”50) in various cities from Tokyo to Fukuoka, under the slogan “Expo Destruction” (banpaku hakai). The general idea was nothing new for Katō; since its inception, Zero Jigen’s actions (street rituals for example) had focused on the pleasure of “being seen” in urban environments.51 Meanwhile, synchronized bodily expressions requiring no specialist physical training and involving multiple performers—aimed at achieving a sense of solid uniformity—was also central to its repertoire. But it was the Expo ’70 that changed things, and under these circumstances the creation of a sense of monumental presence, drawing on the power of numbers, became newly salient. Yet, astonishingly, even these seemingly non-violent collective actions of katateage (raising one hand) and nekorobi (lying on the ground) were banned from the Expo site. In November 1968, the provisional Special Regulations on Security Inspection published a list of “prohibited actions,” which included “occupying a space to make a scene or harassing others” and “staging a mass demonstration, rally, or speech.”52 There was no guarantee that Expo Destruction Group’s collective katate-age and nekorobi would not fall under these prohibited categories.53 And although Hori Kōsai and others had planned a rally at the Expo site on its opening day, they were forced to abandon their plan because of the extremely heavy security.54 What is important, however, is that in its Expo Destruction Group rituals, Zero Jigen turned its back on the strategies it had implemented since 1964: innovative staging, new ways of appealing to the popular media, calculating how to avoid police intervention. One explanation for this tactical change is that while its rituals did not traditionally require much physical training, in order to achieve a sense of not just scale, but sheer, monumental presence, it was necessary to sacrifice the wide range of individual talent and styles, represented across the members of Kokuin, Koyama Tetsuo, Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Mizukami Jun and others, in the name of collective unity. Actions were therefore restricted to simplified gestures such as katate-age and nekorobi. But it could also be linked to Katō’s belief that, in order to survive, the group needed to respond to the changing times rather than prioritizing a “house style.” Moreover, unlike large organizations such as Zengakuren, Zero Jigen would have difficulty finding people to replace members if they were arrested.55 Notwithstanding, it is clear that in its Expo Destruction Group rituals, Zero Jigen’s bodily expressions had lost both their stylistic originality and dramatic tension,56 and was thus a conversion (tenkō) in that sense as well. Yet Katō insisted that “unified rituals increasingly powered by clashes between individual groups at the Expo grounds could create a “total ritual” capable of triggering a revolution in consciousness, whereby individual and collective identities could be discarded and sublimated into insanity.”57 Photographs of the events in Fukuoka, for which the most documentation remains, show that Zero Jigen, Akiyama, The Play (Mizukami and others), Sakurai Takami, and Collective Kumo did in fact perform joint and non-individualized group actions at the finale of each event.58

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THE RITUALS OF EXPO ’70 DESTRUCTION JOINT-STRUGGLE GROUP

From contemporary accounts, we can piece together some of the details of Expo Destruction Group’s performances in 1969. In February 1969, at the event titled 8 Generation + Zero Jigen (or Anti-Expo Insanity Trade Fair, see note 29), 8 Generation stages a live screening using ten projectors on a round turntable along with Yoshida Minoru who, suspended in the air, produces noises from equipment attached to his body. Mizukami Jun, wearing a white lab coat, projects a cityscape onto a box, which he overlays with scenes of a masturbating woman as he simultaneously pulls a string from the box. An unidentified performer blows up a balloon borrowed from Kazakura Shō (Kazakura himself did not participate). There are various other attractions: light art, a trapeze, and a young female vendor who appears during intermissions.59 Performances in Nagoya, Kyoto and Fukuoka, meanwhile, were staged to live music by an R&B band, which itself draws attention to the fact that, with the exception of the chindon-ya at Honmoku-tei Theater and a band at a cabaret venue, Zero Jigen had rarely used live music in the past.60 Ritualists, it appears, were now being drawn into contemporary Intermedia trends and switching to Intermedia-style approaches in their performances—regardless of whether the equipment for 8 Generation’s multi-projection, or Mizukami’s film projection, or Yoshida’s performance, or even the band itself seemed unimpressive compared to the lavish high-tech spectacles at Expo. In a discussion of the May 1969 Kyūshū Rally (in Tobata and Fukuoka City), Katō makes an interesting observation: I noticed the frequent appearance of the Japanese national flag in rituals performed by the groups. For example, in The Play’s ritual, a number of small national flags are hung on a rope. Lit candles are placed on the ground under the exhibition hall window in the form of a constellation chart. Candles are then carried to the upper window using a rope ladder and wax smeared crudely onto the face of a man who appears at the window. When the man mysteriously performs the marvels of the rope attached to the flags, Collective Kumo exposes their unsettling, painful proclivities in a rape scene; a woman in a sailor uniform is stripped naked by men in their underwear on top of a large Hinomaru [Japanese flag]. A group of ten men from Kyūshū (who have joined uninvited) run around Meiji Seimei Hall carrying an enormous American flag. Plainclothes police arrive to announce the cancellation of the screening of Cybele, a film by Donald Richie and Zero Jigen, but when they see the Hinomaru flag attached to Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, who is in the middle of performing the Glico kyōgen ritual in a helmet [fig. 98] and performers carrying the Star-Spangled Banner while dancing to Kimi ga yo [the Japanese national anthem], they are completely flummoxed and finally leave without saying a word.61

Akiyama’s ritual was intended as a satire of popular nationalism, but the use of the national flag by other artists may have been a reaction to the vision of “nation” (kokka) that was embodied by Expo ’70. The act of hanging national flags on a rope was performed by The Play members Mizukami Jun, Miki Tetsuo, and Okamoto Hajime [fig. 101]. According to Mizukami,62 the action evolved from the Rope Mechanics Orientation Ritual, a ritual

 98. Akiyama Yūtokutaishi performs at Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally • May 3, 1969 • Tobata Culture Hall, Kitakyūshū, Fukuoka

 99. Collective He performs at Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally, right: Shingai Kazuyoshi • May 4, 1969 • Nōmin Kaikan, Fukuoka

 100. Miki Tetsuo performs Tear Wax during Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally • May 4, 1969 • Nōmin Kaikan, Fukuoka

 101. Performance by members of the Play at Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally, left to right: Mizukami Jun, Okamoto Hajime, Miki Tetsuo • May 5, 1969 • Meiji Seimei Hall, Fukuoka

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of stretching out a 100-meter-long braided string, which he had also attempted at Kyoto University. In the Fukuoka version, the action was accompanied by shakuhachi (bamboo flute), yokobue (Japanese flute), and a person making a clashing noise by striking stones together. It was Miki’s face that was smeared with candle wax [fig. 100]. Shingai Kazu­ yoshi and members of his group, Collective He, “writhed around a sorceress with rubber hoses connected to their penises” [fig. 99], and an unidentified participant from Fukuoka (mistaken by Kato as a member of He) “literally laid bare the urge to flush out the old blood from his body by thrusting a knife into his flesh.”63 The sado-masochistic violence and critiques of nationalism contained in the satirical use of the national flags distinguish these performances from the work of the Ritualists in Tokyo, suggesting that while it may have been bankrupt as a cultural movement, Expo Destruction Group was nonetheless still developing new kinds of bodily expressions. Even Zero Jigen developed a new repertoire. The group’s new Buck-naked Hot Bath at the Bathing Tent Ritual, according to Katō, was the “main act of Kyūshū Rally.”64 It was Zero Jigen’s f irst theater piece with dialogue. A woman rolled up in a futon is brought in on the shoulders of two men. The men shout “To the bath! To the bath!” and jump with her into a bathtub [which is partitioned by low curtains], whereupon Sakurai, the creature that slept at the bottom of the bathtub, shouts, “A woman! A woman,” grabbing the woman into his arms and tearing at the string, rolling her out of the futon. The two men drag the futon with the woman lying on it using red and white ropes, spinning her around, and then the man playing the shakuhachi uses the flute to suck on the skin of the maiden; the two men, in surprise, raise both arms and begin shouting “Kōshin65 you beggar!!”66

In June 1969, Expo Destruction Group chartered a bus and launched a series of rituals in Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Osaka, marking the climax of its activities. The first event was Smash the Expo Black Festival at Ikebukuro Art Theater. The group’s iconic performance Zenra katate-age (Fully nude one-hand raise) was held on the balcony of the Liberal Arts Department, Kyoto University, a stronghold of the student movement, and witnessed by a large audience. Many documentary photos and articles about these performances, which ultimately led to the arrest of Expo Destruction Group members, still remain. The ritual in Ikebukuro was more visually impressive. It unfolded thus: That night too, male performers donning helmets decorated with wings, rope belts, and puttees, carry a girl who is also wearing a helmet on their shoulders and walk around shouting “Essa! Essa!”67 Then the men lower the girl onto the ground and begin ripping off her clothes. While the audience watches, stunned, the performers—both men and women— strip down to their unisex white underwear. Then a man, assumed to be the leader [Akiyama Yūtokutaishi], appears brandishing a flashlight. He blows a whistle and orders, “Down to your knees!”—Oh my god, a dozen men and women lined up in a row, swiftly dropping their underwear to their knees, exposing parts of the body no one should show! [see plate 24, p. 15] […] Next, they prostrate themselves, and the leader pokes their asses with a penis-shaped padded spear as he cries “Here

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 102. Expo Destruction Group performs at Smash the Expo Black Festival, rear center: Akiyama Yūtokutaishi • June 8, 1969 • Ikebukuro Art Theatre, Tokyo

I go! Yaiyaiyai!” Those who are poked roll over one by one [fig. 102]. Apparently, this wasn’t an exercise for fairies, it was just part of the ritual. The scene of it, naked men and women lying on newspaper strewn all over the floor—Was it pathetic? Dirty? It’s hard to say.68

After this event, members of Expo Destruction Group, together with student activists, paraded around with one hand raised in the air and performed netai (lying body) in various venues in Kyoto. But it is difficult to call these new routines “rituals” as such, since the actions contained no new elements and were necessarily simplified so that they could be performed synchronously en masse. 6.

THE “SUICIDE” OF COLLECTIVE KUMO

Expo Destruction Group’s rituals could only take place in student-occupied campus spaces or angura theaters. Their radical expressions were therefore not very different from those staged at Grand Insanity Trade Fair at Iino Hall in 1968. There must have been artists who chafed at these restrictions: at the very least we know that during Kyūshū Rally in May 1969, Collective Kumo performed an action independently that consisted of simply walking through the main streets of Tenjin (the central area of Fukuoka) wearing yukata while carrying a female member of the group. Subsequently, however, the group’s performances took aim not at the principal enemy (Expo ’70), but at Expo Destruction Group—which had obviously come into being with the specific aim of protesting the Expo ’70. This tendency to oppose anything and everything was typical of Collective Kumo’s Moriyama Yasuhide; additionally, Moriyama had a falling-out with Katō Yoshihiro and Suenaga Tamio at the Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally venue in his hometown of Tobata. He envisaged “barricading the [Tobata] Culture Hall as a symbol of the establishment, that the cancellation of the Culture Hall itself should be ritualized.”69 Nicknamed “naked terrorists” in a later retrospective of the group,70 Collective Kumo in many ways resembled Zero Jigen, but in fact, Moriyama was always severely critical of Zero Jigen.71 Collective Kumo did not participate in any exhibitions or events in Tokyo. They had nothing to do with Expo ’70, with major Intermedia events, or with other contemporary

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trends such as Happenings that were currently making headlines in the popular media. They were not part of the Ritualists’ collaborations, or the rise of conceptual art, or the commune movements. The group’s distance from major contemporary cultures is particularly striking in the context of 1960s Anti-Art performers (its spectacular path toward self-destruction is discussed in chapter 19). Collective Kumo was born out of a restructuring and overhaul of Zelle, a post-Kyūshū-ha group based in Kitakyūshū, with new members selected and others “purged”—much like Katō Yoshihiro had turned art group Zero Ji Gen into the Ritualist group we know as Zero Jigen. Although Moriyama was born in 1936, the same year as other Anti-Art artists (such as Kyūshū-ha’s youngest members, Neo Dada artists, Zero Jigen members, and Akiyama Yūtokutaishi), he only made his debut in the Kyūshū art world in 1968. Little more than a drifter up until this moment, he had kept his keen eyes trained on developments in the art world during the 1960s. He made no effort to make his name in the art world, which revolved around Tokyo, let alone on the “international stage.” Nor did he seek media exposure like Shinohara Ushio, Zero Jigen, and Jack Society. Instead, he focused on deliberately exposing the futility of “artistic expression” through the vulgarity of his actions. His genuine commitment to remain a minor local artist drew the respect of exKyūshū-ha members, Kikuhata Mokuma and Hataraki Tadashi, and the much younger Shingai Kazuyoshi, a leading member of Collective He. We can identify some commonality between Collective Kumo’s actions and those of the Ritualists, such as Zero Jigen and Kokuin, in their blending of specifically Japanese references, and their sexual thematics. The fundamental difference, however, was that Moriyama pitted himself not against the state, or businesses, or political parties, not against the authorities of the art world nor even the general public, but against “avant-garde art” (what today we would call “contemporary art”) itself. In his view, however violent and provocative, avant-garde art was ultimately no more than artistic expression and so he railed against, seeking to destroy it “like a samurai cutting down a commoner on the street.” Behind this complex mindset lay Moriyama’s ambivalence towards Kikuhata Mokuma, who was both the target of his anger and, in some ways, his motivation. Through its extreme nihilism, Collective Kumo announced the death of 1960s art, Happening, and ultimately, itself. In July 1970, in an increasingly self-destructive and radical move (even ex-Kyūshū-ha sympathizers were distancing themselves from Kumo members at this point), Moriyama and Shingai exposed their naked lower bodies as they stood on the roof of Denshūkan High School (Yanagawa, southern part of Fukuoka Prefecture). The school was Shingai’s alma mater and at the time was the target of an ongoing protest against the dismissal of certain staff members, including Shingai’s former teacher, for their left-leaning teachings. Finally, in November 1970, Moriyama was arrested for public indecency when he raised a straw mat with a picture of a penis—the equivalent of a metaphorical “suicide.” 7.

IBENTO SPREAD TO PROVINCIAL CITIES

As the anti-Expo movement rumbled on, Intermedia performances were becoming a regular part of the ibento (event) programs both in larger metropolises and provincial cities. Two large-scale events, for example, were held in Fukuoka Prefecture at the same

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 103. First Outdoor Art Show • February 25, 1969 • Parking lot in front of Yahata Civic Center, Kitakyūshū, Fukuoka

time as Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally and the “revolt” actions by Collective Kumo. One of the events was All-Kyūshū Outdoor Art Show: Gazing at One World, held in February  1969 at the plaza in front of Yahata Civic Center, Kitakyūshū City. The other event was Kyūshū Renaissance: Grand Festival of Heroes at Hakata Playland in Fukuoka City, held in February 1970. Neither event staked any political claim (to be anti-Expo, anti-Anpo, or anti-establishment), and their objective was simply spectacular entertainment. As such, they were the precursors of what we today call ibento (event). The 1st All Kyūshū Outdoor Art Show [fig. 103] was supposed to take place in Susaki Park in front of Fukuoka Bunka Kaikan (Culture Hall, present-day Fukuoka Prefectural Museum of Art), Fukuoka City. This was also the venue of the 3rd Trends of Contemporary Art Kyūshū Exhibition, organized chiefly by Kikuhata Mokuma, which had gained the attention of the national media at the time. But since the park manager refused to grant a permit for the Outdoor Art Show, it took place instead in the front plaza of Yahata Civic Center. The event, which used mobile cranes and a sound and lighting system, was “unprecedented in its scale.”72 It included theater performance, visual art, dance, photography, ikebana (flower arrangement) and even kite flying, and it attracted the participation of a large number of local artists. To the “music” of firecrackers and the sound of wild voices, two women suspended in the air from a large mobile crane announce the opening of the event. Spotlights crisscross the sky, and a group of youths in fancy-dress perform a weird theatrical act on the temporary stage.73 […] Finally, the performers go-go dance till they collapse, surrounded by smoke from smoke bombs that have been set off, while music—resembling sutra chanting— plays. That is the end of the performance. The production cost of this show, including the mobilization of six cranes, was a million yen.74

The event was organized by Group No. 1, led by Tōya Masami—formerly of Zelle, the precursor to Collective Kumo. Tōya had anticipated drawing the attention of art critics invited to the Trends exhibition taking place nearby, and the event was indeed reviewed by Tokyo-based Czech art critic Vlasta Chihakova in Bijutsu techō75 (with photos by Hanaga Mitsutoshi). Group No. 1’s manifesto, however, coming in the wake of the demise of the student movement and revealing no sense of the emotional destructiveness of Dadaism,

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merely stated: “when we continue to betray our own existence, and to be betrayed, we will gain another viewpoint […] we tap into the potential of ‘new-vision’ [original in English]” but without clarifying method or aim. The way Tōya, in an interview, expresses that “I want true freedom, if only in the world of images,”76 to the contrary betrays a sense of stagnation. Kyūshū Renaissance: Grand Festival of Heroes [fig. 104] took place in February 1970. From the title, which recalls the November 1962 Grand Assembly of Heroes, the event may seem to have been aimed at recreating the sensation of Kyūshū-ha at its peak; however, this new event was devised by Izumi Takayoshi, a fashion designer,77 instead of Sakurai Takami, and the general manager was Obana Arao (the younger brother of ex-Kyūshū-ha painter Obana Shigeharu and manager of Snack BOBO, a local bar). Visual artists were involved, but the event was mixed-genre, and the artists were to an extent sidelined by other performers such as poets, film producers, designers, and music composers. The program included “twenty fashion works by Koshino Junko and other designers, thirty films including Donald Richie’s Five Philosophical Fables, poetry readings, a slide show of paintings, Kanesaka Kenji’s photographs, go-go dancing, and more.”78 Kanesaka Kenji and his partner Machida Kusumi were visiting Fukuoka at the time, and Zero Jigen’s core members (Katō Yoshihiro, Iwata Shin’ichi and Kamijō Junjirō), Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, and Sakurai and Ochi Osamu of Kyūshū-ha all performed together. Although the event appeared to be a continuation of the Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally and largely replicated its list of participants, Kyūshū Renaissance contained no sign of protest against the Expo, which was opening in a month’s time, and its aim—judging from an account of the Fukuoka organizers’ roundtable discussion that appeared in the newspaper—was unclear.79 The organizers made several proposals, including: initiating research into fashion trends, seeking to reverse fashion’s “top down” chain of command from Paris to Tokyo, and Tokyo to the rest of Japan; promoting interactions among artists; and paving the way to “total art” by using the kind of innovative technologies that made possible the Expo and even the Apollo lunar mission. They also discussed the importance of “delving into the roots”80 of art instead of just following shifting trends. This synthesis of fine art, technology, commercial art, and fashion was nothing new in Tokyo at the time, and it would not have been out of place at the Expo. There was no real necessity, then, for Zero Jigen—which already had its own style and repertoire—to participate in the project, to which it seems they were in fact largely indifferent, and instead they focused mainly on their shooting of Inaba no Shiro Usagi.  104. Kyūshū Renaissance • c. February 26, 1970 • Hakata Playland, Fukuoka

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Kanesaka Kenji, however, in an essay introducing “rebel artists from local cities”81—Iwakura Masahito (The Play), Matsuzawa Yutaka, Iwata Shin’ichi, and Gulliver (Azuchi Shūzō), among others—expressed high expectations for Kyūshū Renaissance, celebrating both the scale of the performances and the energy of the participants. His sympathy for Sakurai Takami and Ochi Osamu is understandable since he himself had been involved in San Francisco’s hippie scene. But his view that the “ancient land of Hakata” (the old name for Fukuoka82), which had been cut off, historically, from the center (Tokyo) and considered of only marginal importance, was “forming a new type of commune,” was surely due to the fact that collectives like Kyūshū-ha, Collective Kumo and Collective He were then achieving national recognition. Still, neither Kanesaka nor Machida, who visited Nishinippon Newspaper office to publicize the event, were the antiestablishment provocateurs and organizers of angura culture that they had once been. Their journey from Tokyo to the regions beyond the capital spread the word about angura culture was no more than a pitch for an “enjoyable Happening party,” hiding any hint of radicalism.83 It is hard to understand what Kanesaka’s true intention here was, given his role only a few months prior in the cancellation of the Sogetsu Film Festival. Kyūshū Renaissance, therefore, was effectively an amusement, or a commercial ibento (this term is used in the same sense in Japan today) rather than a venue for avant-garde art or political demonstration. In fact, even Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally the previous year, although it had historical significance in that it was the first and last joint performance by Kyūshū-ha, Collective Kumo, Collective He, The Play, and Zero Jigen, failed to attract the same publicity as the Zenra katate-age action in Ikebukuro and at Kyoto University. It too failed to muster the national anti-Expo movement that Katō Yoshihiro had dreamed of. It is perhaps unsurprising that Moriyama Yasuhide, ever ready to pick a fight with the art world, protested against Kyūshū Renaissance (by then, Harumoto Shigeto and Katō Isao had already left Collective Kumo). Together with Shingai Kazuyoshi, his admirer from Collective He, he distributed satirical flyers with the title Kyūshū Re-nonsense (riffing on Kyūshū Renaissance). He and his partner then simulated intercourse on a large Anti-Expo flag spread on the ground at a busy intersection in central Fukuoka (just as they had done as a street performance for Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally the previous year, but this time without collaborators) [plate 27, p. 16 and p. 440]. The inanity of the action points to the fact that by this moment, all parties—both the critics and the criticized had reached a terminal stage, with no new strategies or a path forward. 8.

CHALLENGING THE ARTS/SYSTEMS

Many of the performative expressions of this period were undoubtedly anti-Expo. They protested against the gigantic “ritual” of state and corporate powers, the triumph of technology, economic development, and internationalization. But their protest was often half-hearted, and the issue of Anpo renewal itself was often brushed under the rug. And there were other pressing problems: the fact that cultural figures were now being drawn into entertainment-focused commercial events like Expo ’70, and the emergence of new institutional structures—museums, for example, and competitions for fine art, film, and design.

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There were, in fact, a series of “revolts” (zōhan) against art competitions in 1969. One prominent example, widely reported in the media, was a demonstration opposing the Film Art Festival Tokyo 1969, set to take place at Sogetsu Art Center in October 1969. The effort, which ultimately resulted in the cancellation of the festival, was led by Smash Sogetsu Film Festival Joint-Struggle Council, whose members included Newsreel (a newspaper edited by Ōe Masanori, Kanesaka Kenji, and Hara Masato), Suginami Cine Club,84 Nichidai Zenkyōtō Eiga-han (Nihon University Zenkyōtō Film Section), and Expo Destruction Group. The Council’s objections were: 1) The festival is too commercial. 2) The system for selecting artworks and awarding production grants is too authoritarian. 3) The organizers’ claim, that the festival will be a new site for revolutionizing film and enhancing the freedom of creativity, is untrue. 4) The festival aims to strengthen the position of Sogetsu Art Center within wider cultural structures and to place affiliated cinema clubs under its control.85

As Masaki Motoi points out,86 the “revolt” exposed a division between the “pro-Expo side” (those on the side of authority and capital) and the “anti-Expo side” (anti-authority, anti-capital). A year earlier, at EX·POSE, this division had not yet been visible; in fact, one of the reasons for the protest was that the Film Festival committee included artists who cooperated with Expo ’70.87 It is also likely that the presence of angura artists now exacerbated old hostilities between “Anti-Art” artists and “Sogetsu” artists that dated back to the early 1960s. Nonetheless, wrecking this rare occasion for experimental film, still in its nascent stages, to gain some form of public recognition, cannot have endeared the supporters of avant-garde art. Opportunities for experimental film to place itself on a proper footing and win commercial support were few and far between—especially when compared to films by major production companies, or visual artists and designers with access to open competitions. Notably, filmmaker Kawanaka Nobuhiro did not participate in the protest, possibly because he had witnessed the infighting amongst experimental filmmakers following the arrests of Expo Destruction Group members.88 Other art competitions that led to protests included the Nihon Senden Kaigi (Nissenbi, Japan Advertising Artists Club) competition, opposed by Bijutsuka Kyōtō Kaigi (Bikyōtō, Artists’ Joint-Struggle Council) in August; Art Festival of Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in September; and the juried Nitten (Japan Fine Arts Exhibition) in December. In addition, on April 15, a group headed by art critic Okada Takahiko and artist Tanikawa Kōichi demanded an open jury for the competition section of Contemporary Art Exhibition, organized by Mainichi Shimbunsha. In September, Sakurai Takami, Collective Kumo and Collective He protested against Asahi West-Japan Art Exhibition in Fukuoka. Only the August Nissenbi protest ended with the cancellation of the event. These revolts against the Japanese art world and its structures of authority, epitomized by Nitten, were ultimately ineffectual, possibly because the structures of the art world were already too strong. Riot police were stationed at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum during a jury session for the Nitten exhibition, and the police arrested Bikyōtō members as soon as they took out their flyers.89 The following year, in 1970,

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Enoki Chū sent a letter requesting the reform of the Niki-ten juried exhibition where he had been exhibiting his works each year. When he received no response, he decided to become a member of Group Zero, enabling him to work independently outside of the existing art system. There had been similar opposition to the authoritarian structures and patriarchal iemoto system of official juried exhibitions (such as prefectural exhibitions [ken-ten] , Nitten and exhibitions of other major art societies) far earlier; examples include Kyūshū-ha in Fukuoka in 1958 and Rozo-gun in Mito in 1960.90 But by 1970, it was the authority of the avant-garde itself—visual artists, film directors, and designers— that had become the main target of protest. Revolts also targeted the art museum system. One key example is the Gomi saiban (Garbage Trial) in Nagoya. In July 1970, officers of the Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum removed exhibited works by N.A.G. (New Art Group) which appeared to be and were, in fact, trash. A small group of artists filed a lawsuit against the museum in protest; they were subsequently excluded from the conservative Nagoya art world for decades, along with the artists who supported them, including Yamada Kyōichi.91 Iwata Shin’ichi from Zero Jigen, who lived in Nagoya, was not directly involved in the exhibition, but he supported the young artists by forming Gomikandan (Garbage Sex Brigade), and the group’s good-humored demonstrations were documented in Katō Yoshihiro’s film, Baramon. Yet these protests against the institutional structures of the art world did not develop into anything more substantial. Nor did they lead to new forms of bodily expression, as had happened in the early 1960s during the post-Anpo period. The group Bikyōtō is a case in point. It was founded by Hori Kōsai, who had performed a street ritual in 1967 similar to Zero Jigen’s performances with Hikosaka Naoyoshi. In June 1969, Hori, Hikosaka, and others held an exhibition inside the barricaded Tama Art University. They then formed Bikyōtō that July as a collective for political struggle, carrying out multiple revolt actions. The group disbanded after a year but in the fall of 1970, it re-formed as Bikyōtō Revolution Committee, which aimed to criticize the “arts/system” (geijutsu/seido) through creative activities, by holding exhibitions outside of the museum and gallery system and producing and publishing critical writings. Its later activities, like Mono-ha’s bodily expressions, are beyond the scope of this volume. Hikosaka’s first Floor Event was performed completely naked for documentary photographs, but it is clear here that the expectation that the living body could be relevant as a channel of opposition had disappeared. Like Group I (see pp. 232–3), Bikyōtō’s attempts to critique, dismantle, and then to reconstruct the system that hitherto had sponsored and supported different art forms, had been reduced to nothing more than an internal art-world problem. The huge potential of performance expressions that cut across art, music and film, had been lost, and with it, the creative relationship with urban space, mass media and audiences. Even efforts to recover the combined richness of formal artworks and the body—which had been wrenched apart by social hierarchies that differentiated between high art and popular art, folk art and marginal art—had come to nothing. All that was now left was a visually sterile and theoretically abstruse “contemporary art.”

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THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE PLAY

While Mizukami Jun and other members of The Play can be counted amongst those who took the risk of participating in the political activities of Expo Destruction Group, The Play’s collective actions were very different from those of Zero Jigen which had by then abandoned its earlier style of performance in favor of political activities. The Play’s April Fool Happenings: Hospital (April 1969), for example, took place during the heyday of Expo Destruction Group. The event was organized in an abandoned hospital in Osaka, and with typical nonchalance the group explains, “we went to perform some rituals there simply because we found an interesting site.”92 Ikemizu Keiichi captures a skeletal account of the event: …a masked woman and a man covered in white paint [Fukunaga Toyoko and Ikemizu Keiichi] holds a box, while a young man [Okamoto Hajime] in a white lab coat controls a moving object; a rotating light that flashes on and off, ropes stretched from wall to wall in the basement [Okamoto]; red liquid sprays all over the delivery room. A man [Nakata Kazunari] stands on his head, with his head inserted in a globe. A white cloth in a shape of a circle spread across a rooftop. A card game [played by Mizukami Jun and Suzukida Asako] takes place in a room with only a door.93

These performances demonstrated a marked development from The Play’s first exhibition in Kobe in August 1967. The use of a white cloth on ground or floor to transform everyday space into ritual space was typical of the group’s performance style, and their declaration that “death hovered over each of these ceremonies”94 was a reference to the fact that the site was a ruined hospital. The collective performance consisted of an arrow sign (often used by Mizukami) in the middle of a magic circle drawn on the floor (this was Miki Tetsuo’s idea) with candles (see plate 17, p. 11). Judging from photographs, it was the most “ritualistic” of all performances enacted by The Play. In the same month (April 1969), The Play created an environmental installation using smoke, sound, film, and plastic bags at the Marshmallows & Hot Air exhibition at Gallery Iteza, Kyoto. At the 9th Contemporary Japanese Art Exhibition (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum) in May, Ikemizu staged a Happening in which he ate meals inside an installation space filled with egg-shaped sculptures (Mizukami Jun and Suzukida Asako also performed solo rituals here). In August, during 7 Dimensions at Trends in Contemporary Japanese Art (National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto), the group conducted Happenings every Sunday for seven weeks both inside and outside of the museum, using white fabric arranged in the shape of a cross as their stage [fig. 105]. It is difficult to grasp a complete picture of these actions—which took place simultaneously inside and outside the museum (as well as upstairs and downstairs)—but they appear to have included a combination of choreographed performances by multiple members that played down individual contributions, and independent individual actions—such as Nakata Kazunari setting off a smoke bomb outdoors. In 7 Dimensions, which turned out to be the last collective performance by The Play, the group quarreled with an anti-JCP student activist group that was collecting donations.95 According to Ikemizu, the students were angry and upset that The Play—a group that they considered to be antiestablishment—was

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 105. The Play, 7 Dimensions • c. August 1969 • National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto

participating in an exhibition organized by a national art museum protected by the government.96 It seems likely that the students were also offended by The Play’s well-organized but ultimately meaningless action. However, Okamoto Hajime, Mizukami Jun (who took part in 7 Dimensions) and Miki Tetsuo also participated in Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally in May 1969, and Iwakura Masahito participated in Antiwar Expo in August 1969 with his usual miniature steam locomotive.97 There still existed different individual styles and political stances within The Play, despite the fact that the group was largely identified with anonymous and unified actions. After 7 Dimensions, The Play’s activity focused on large-scale outdoor projects including White Cross: As a matter of sight and thought (March 1970) and Sheep (August 1970, see plate 16, p. 11). In these performances, the body as the main medium of expression gradually disappeared. The group’s most prominent works, Current of Contemporary Art [fig. 106] in July 1969 on the heels of the Expo Destruction Group member arrests, and Sheep, emphasized their commitment to nomadic, communal lifestyle on the outskirts of the city. But in Voyage (August  1968), for which The Play released a huge egg-shaped sculpture into the ocean, and in the projects that came after White Cross, the group’s main focus shifted to the installation of giant man-made artifacts in the natural landscape, symbolizing the struggle between man and nature. The living body itself, and the planning and negotiating and collective physical labor required to realize bodily expressions, was thus

 106. The Play, Current of Contemporary Art • July 20, 1969 • River Uji, Kyoto to Nakanoshima, Osaka

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ultimately erased by the material “artwork.” It may have been this shift in focus that led Mizukami Jun, who had been doing solo performances independently of The Play (including during his involvement with Expo Destruction Group), to finally leave the group at the end of 1969. From the perspective of performance art history, however, The Play is significant for its specific use of the term hapuningu. Even actions more appropriately termed “artwork” than bodily actions (such as creating a giant white cross on a mountainside) were classified by the group as hapuningu. A hapuningu, for The Play, meant instigating something that could not (or should not) occur in a specific public space (or time). It understood the term in its general, rather than specifically artistic sense (see chap. 2.2, pp.  62–3). A hapuningu was a way of observing urban life from the outside, from the standpoint of primitive lifestyles and forms of labor—in the same way that Ikemizu reflected on humans and the city in his solo work, Cage. It was a way of breathing new life into the city and disrupting its orderliness. In Ikemizu’s words, a hapuningu should help dismantle “fixed ideas or conceptual ways of thinking” and in so doing “expand our consciousness.”98 In 1970 he declared, “I am always thinking of hapuningu—of what to do next.”99 But for The Play, hapuningu was also an important way of resisting the contemporary rise of “concept art.”100 Their works were the product of collective acts of physical labor, performed in a specific location and based on pragmatic negotiations with local city authorities—they were bounded by neither the limitations of the individual nor the reductiveness of conceptual constructs. 10. A NEW GENERATION OF COLLECTIVE ACTION: FROM “UNDERGROUND” INTO THE LIGHT OF DAY Only a collective could physically and technically execute the large-scale projects produced by The Play, but similar projects were also carried out in urban spaces by a younger generation of groups. In September  1969, for instance, Kyūmin poured four colors of paint onto the intersection at Ginza 4-chōme—cars driving through it spread their painted tracks across nearby streets. This action, which struck at the very center of Tokyo, was the most provocative example of a hapuningu (in the sense of “causing an incident”) in the mode of The Play.101 More performative but non-violent interventions in the urban spaces were carried out by En Gekijō (Circle Theater) in Tokyo, to which Kyūmin belonged, and Group Zero in Kobe. En Gekijō was formed by Ikeda Shōichi (later known as Ikeda Ichi), who began his career in a theater troupe in Kyoto and moved to Tokyo in 1968. The group, which labeled its artistic activity “multi-play,” created large-scale artworks, using enormous plastic balloons and projecting films in urban spaces and on the beach. In the summer of 1969, Ikeda also created artworks for an outdoor exhibition with artists Murata Takashi and Akashi Susumu. At this exhibition, Ikeda’s Non-Horizontal line consisted of floating plastic balloons on the surface of the sea to form a 200-meter-long line. Murata’s work involved an explosion of kerosene in an oil drum, while Akashi’s work used smoke; all received favorable attention. From that point forward, En Gekijō consistently rejected the ossification of all set value systems and advocated for the importance of “Flow(ing)

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Work.” Central to its practice were experiments that integrated the inside and outside of the theater, and interventions in urban spaces. In an interview, Ikeda describes the performance Multi-Play No.3: Transient Image—Murder Game (July 1970) as “piping hot,” and even “impossible to repeat.”102 The following is Yoshida Yoshie’s account: The Yotsuya Public Hall was divided into two spaces using an iron pipe structure as a partition. The performances occur simultaneously on either side, although interpenetrating, until eventually the partition is removed, creating a single space of frantic action. As the audience moves to the rhythms of the play, they become totally wrapped up in it. There’s rock music by The Mops, the roaring sounds of the Taj Mahal Travellers, the dazzle of flashing images and lights. A motorcycle runs through the audience, people desperately clinging to their seats. And finally, everyone gets up and starts go-go dancing with the actors. Flowers are handed out and people are encouraged to hold them up high and go out into the city. The actor-audience relationship is nullified. Theater is nullified. The space, the environment expanding and then dissolving into something even vaster.103

Even though the actors and audience ultimately went out onto the streets, the performance was essentially staged in an existing theater space. In contrast, a more noteworthy event in performance art history was En Gekijō’s earlier work, Multi-Play Flowing Event: Soft and Soft Life104 [fig. 107] from February 1970. In Soft and Soft Life, a group of approximately fifty people, including En Gekijō members and visual artists such as Maita Masafumi and Haraguchi Noriyuki, go shopping at Mitsukoshi Department Store in Ginza, holding artificial flowers. They gradually make their way up to the roof, where all the performers re-unite. Then they party at a bar before taking a bus to a beach. The performance was an attempt to theatricalize everyday behaviors with minimal set up, and to connect a closed urban commercial space with an open natural space through the flow of their collective actions. En Gekijō’s various attempts to remove the boundary between actor and audience, to undo hierarchical structures (in spatial, material, and institutional terms) and to create a more expansive, fluid performance environment, distinguished it from The Play, which employed distinct formal structures for its performative projects. En Gekijō also banned any kind of audience abuse (unlike Akuta Masahiko’s Gekijō Komaba [Theater

 107. Ikeda Shōichi＋En Gekijō in Flowing Event: Soft and Soft Life • February 22, 1970 • Rooftop of Mitsukoshi Department Store, Ginza, Tokyo

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Komaba]) and rejected Kara Jūrō’s Privileged Body Theory, which was prevalent at his venue Aka Tent (Red Tent), as well as the entitlement and exclusivity that characterized much of angura culture. It aspired to “open spaces where diverse, dynamic flows can ‘interchange’ [kōtsū], rather than closed theater spaces predicated on the illusion of static ‘occupation’ [senkyo].”105 These priorities may have reflected Ikeda’s background (he studied chemistry 106 in university and was born and raised in Kyoto, where the grotesque aesthetic of angura culture was not popular). As Yoshida Yoshie frames it, “[En Gekijō] rejected the concept of theater, and yet its performances were still too theatrical to resurrect a sense of genuine violence.”107 Ikeda was keenly aware of the weakness of and dangers inherent in the exclusivity of Anti-Art performance and angura culture more generally, but as Yoshida suggests in his essay, “the excitement of his performances belonged to an already authorized space, and the energy generated from the integration of sound and body could equally well happen in a discotheque.”108 Moreover, Ikeda’s ability and ingenuity as a theater director, demonstrated in various commercial events (rock festivals, fashion shows), meant that his work risked being sucked into a commercial context and co-opted by the establishment. Group Zero109 (renamed Japan Kobe Zero in 1972) was formed by young artists including Enoki Chū in Kobe in 1970, and while its work resembled that of En Gekijō in some respects, its direction came from visual artists. The group’s activities began with Proposal for the Japanese Archipelago, a collaborative installation by sixty-eight participants at Sanchika Plaza, Kobe in September  1970. In May  1971, it organized Rainbow Revolution at Motomachi Shopping Arcade in Kobe, mobilizing 150 people and performing simultaneously in several venues; this may have been the largest-scale performance organized by visual artists in Japanese performance history. The concept behind the piece was that each of the performers “had a lifespan of just one day, and they had to live it to the fullest, but by evening they were exhausted and simply vanished.”110 Although the performance included mock-ups of people dying by hanging [fig.  108], given that it took place within the context of The First Kobe Festival, organized by the municipal government, the scenes cannot have been as brutal as comparative work by the Ritualists.111 At The Second Kobe Festival in 1972, Group Zero staged White Cloth: 400m2, in which thirty-three participants walked through the streets carrying an enormous sheet of white cloth [fig. 109]. This intervention in the urban space using a large, transformable object was reminiscent of En Gekijō’s Shinjuku Turbulence (June 1970), when its members walked through Shinjuku carrying a huge transparent plastic tube [fig. 110]. Contemporaneous with En Gekijō and Group Zero was Nagoya group Produkushon Gasu 112 (Production Ga‘s, hereinafter “Ga‘s”).113 Their first exhibition in August 1969 filled a gallery space in Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum with 60,000 balloons, which were then released into a busy shopping district. In September 1970, they carried out Screening, in which five members wearing white clothes line up to act as a human projection screen. In June 1973, they bought the vacant seats at a movie theater and occupied them with 500 plastic dolls114 [fig. 111]. In addition to these large-scale setups that intervened in real urban spaces, the group self-produced a record around June 1970, and in 1971 they published a weekly magazine consisting only of blank pages. The magazines were sold at conventional record shops and bookstores, reflecting the group’s interest in intervening in mainstream commercial information and distribution systems.

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 108. Group Zero, Rainbow Revolution • May 16, 1971 • Motomachi Shopping Arcade, Kobe

 109. Group Zero, White Cloth, 400m2 • May 1972 • Sannomiya, Kobe

 110. En Gekijō, Shinjuku Turbulence • June 1970 • Shinjuku, Tokyo

While works by En Gekijō and Group Zero were body-based and theatrical, those by Ga‘s were oriented more towards installation and the manipulation of product distribution systems. Yet, they all engaged in large-scale interventions in the city; we can cite, for example, En Gekijō’s transformation of urban space through its expansive theatrical staging, the well-organized group actions of Group Zero, and the innovative media interactions (such as replicating the marketing strategies of commercial advertising agencies) of Ga‘s. And in the sense that their works intervened in urban spaces, they can justifiably be called Happenings (hapuningu). Like The Play, moreover, these groups preferred to remain non-confrontational both in their organization and their work, and they were ready to negotiate and cooperate with institutions and authorities. They thus avoided the risk of criminal repercussions inherent in Anti-Art and swept away the vulgarity and violence of the Ritualists’ performances, which often drew on medieval and premodern cultural traditions. The fact that they were able to fully make use of places available for urban

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 111. Production Ga’s, Scala Theatre Doll Installation • June 3, 1973 • Scala Theater, Nagoya

residents within urban “festival” spaces as events—such as Kobe Carnival—and to develop new types of media interfaces demonstrates that their sensitivities and methods belonged to a new generation of artists.115 En Gekijō in particular displayed a bucolic sense of liberation in its work. Ikeda described it as “theater in the broad light of a sunny day, expression as an extension of life, ”116 in contrast to the darkness of angura (underground) culture of the late 1960s. Ga‘s had a similarly optimistic and relaxed approach to its work, combined with a mischievous sense of humor that marked a generational change. The following review of Ga‘s by Takahashi Ayako applies, to some extent, to other groups of the same generation: [Ga‘s] had nothing to do with anarchism, its humor was innocuous. Even if the group had an underlying antipathy to authority and the system, these were neither the target nor the theme of its actions. Its relationship with society, channeled through its involvement with the public and its adoption of the structures of public media, set it apart from the Anti-Art generation. Its unique combination of the extravagant and the easy-going is part of the allure of “post Anti-Art.”117

Nevertheless, the name “Ga‘s” points to organizational differences between the three new-generation groups described here, as well as artists’ groups formed around 1960, including performance groups such as Zero Jigen and Jōkyō Gekijō. These earlier groups were often under the direction of charismatic leaders. The name “Ga‘s,” on the other hand, was formed from the Chinese character ga (我) (meaning “I” or “me,” with possible connotations of egotism) combined with the English plural suffix “s,” indicating that the group was made up of equal individuals.118 It was premised on “an image of inclusivity, of soft embrace, without the self-assertion of the ego.”119 This calls to mind Ikeda Shōichi’s vision of performance as “an extension of life, unfolding in the broad light of a sunny day.” Whereas Ga‘s was a collective consisting of a small number of visual artists, En Gekijō was essentially a theater troupe. It brought together people from diverse backgrounds, including aspiring artists with no artistic background and ordinary young people; in this sense it was similar to Kokuin.

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But the name “Ga‘s” also means “gas” (as in a gaseous substance), reminiscent of Collective He (literally, “Collective Fart”) in Fukuoka. A founding member of He explained that farts are “slightly smelly, formless, and disappear quickly.”120 That these new-generation groups were concerned with the invisible and the formless—wind and gas—is interesting. Both En Gekijō and Ga‘s made use of enormous transparent tubes in their actions; Ga‘s filled up a gallery with balloons, later releasing them into the city at large; the dolls it installed in the movie theater were inflatable. Group Zero carried a large sheet of cloth through the streets that billowed in the wind. And in June 1970, Gulliver, together with En Gekijō and others, executed Flying Focus, a film projected onto a huge transparent plastic tube in Rekisen Park, Tokyo. The ambient, shapeshifting nature of these objects as avant-garde art may have been a reflection of the fluid ambiance of the era itself. The use of the living body to do battle with the city, that had been demonstrated in Anti-Art performances by groups such as Zero Jigen, no longer had a place in urban interventions by artist groups after around 1970.121 11.

FROM THE CITY INTO NATURE: TOWARD OPEN, FLUID SPACES

This period also saw a shift in performance venues from urban spaces to wide-open natural spaces, such as mountains and beaches. It was a shift evident even in the work of Zero Jigen, which was fundamentally an urban performance group. Although its collective and naked performances had begun at nighttime in a city park in August 1964, from 1968 on its members increasingly performed rituals in non-urban outdoor venues. The venues appearing in the film Inaba no Shiro Usagi included Goshiki-en Park (Nagoya), Ōdaru Hot Springs (Izu, Shizuoka) and Kujūkuri Beach (Chiba) [fig. 112]. The kitsch, concrete statues installed by a temple at Goshiki-en Park to represent the life of Shinran 122 were particularly successful in evoking the strangeness of ritual (see chap. 13.4, p.  342). But the shift to the countryside was also a functional one, since in order to freely perform naked the group needed to avoid city regulations. A similar move toward outdoor

 112. Ritual by Zero Jigen in The White Hare of Inaba • March 15, 1970 • Kujūkuri Beach, Chiba

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 113. Performance • 14th Gar Gar Contemporary Art Exhibition: Street Demonstration Show • November 26, 1966 • Sukiyabashi Park, Tokyo

spaces can be found in venues used by The Play and En Gekijō, as well as by Taj Mahal Travellers123 in Tokyo, “image, image”124 in Kansai, and GUN in Niigata. One factor behind this shift may have been the closure of many vacant urban spaces ahead of Expo ’70; nonetheless, it is clear that the new generation of artists sought out open, communal spaces unencumbered by organizational, spatial or temporal constraints. The hippie group Buzoku went a step further, creating communes in remote islands and mountains where it sought to establish an alternative lifestyle apart from urban civilization. Gar Gar Contemporary Art Society (hereinafter “Gar Gar”)125 from Saitama epitomized these trends. Formed in 1961 by Fukuda Katsuhiro (Katsubon) and other artists living in Ōmiya, the group established itself in Tokyo in 1965. Each of its works was conceptually distinct from the others, and over time its exhibitions evolved into performance. In April  1966, it exhibited a work designed to be touched by the audience, and in August a work comprised of old shoes collected from people living in the area. In September  1966, members paraded in a downtown area carrying paintings hung from carrying poles, in May 1967, the group exhibited an array of mobile objects, while a performative work involving moving a large sculpture in a park took place in November 1967. But the group was ultimately interested in creating material artworks that bore the energetic imprint of their interactions with audiences and environments, as suggested by a painting demonstration and performance at Sukiyabashi Park in November 1966 [fig. 113], when the paintings were subsequently exhibited.126 Its activities were always positive and wholesome, with no trace of political radicalism or the darkness of angura culture, and no ambition to cater to new trends in art or appeal to critics. Despite the group’s indifference to both contemporary trends and media attention, and its commitment to its own way of working, intriguingly its work still followed the general tendencies of the late 1960s—such as the shift from city to nature, a move towards genre-crossing collaborative events, and non-confrontational relationships with the audience. In February 1967, for a performance on Yume-no-shima Island [fig. 114], members wore white clothes; in another performance at Zaimokuza Beach in August of the same year, they banged painted oil drums. In these outdoor performances, the bodies of the performers merged with the sunlight, waves, and wind in the natural setting. Later on, Gar Gar collaborated with the modern ballet dancer, Itō Mika, and musicians in Fear of the “Quiet Sea” (August 1969, directed by Itō, with music by Ichiyanagi Toshi) at Space Capsule. In

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 114. Performance • 16th Gar Gar Contemporary Art Exhibition: Happening in the Wilderness • February 19, 1967 • Yume-no-shima Island, Tokyo

November 1969, it organized an outdoor event, Enlivening Objects: Company of Fire and Water, at Kujūkuri Beach. Gar Gar Buys You [fig. 115], at The Open-Air Festival of Contemporary Art in Kodomo-no-kuni Park (Children’s County Park, Yokohama) in April  1970 experimented with audience participation. For this project, Gar Gar members asked the audience to perform actions themselves, paying them for their performances. This was both an attempt to reverse the performer-audience relationship, and a tongue-in-cheek protest aimed at the commercialization of performance art. Throughout the sixties, Gar Gar tried to convey, through the creation of outlandishly large objects, a vast sense of scale, and it continually came up with new ideas, always striving to respond authentically to the times. Uchida Yoshirō has suggested that Gar Gar eventually stopped performing when new groups began to emerge on the scene (he may have been thinking of groups such as The Play). Fukuda Katsuhiro, on the other hand, more interestingly proposes that the group may have been discouraged by the huge budgets and the large-scale performances of the Expo ’70, with which the average artist could not compete.127

 115. Gar Gar Buys You • Open-Air Festival of Contemporary Art • c. April 1970 • Kodomo-no-kuni Park, Yokohama

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12. ANTI-ART ARTISTS AFTER 1970 By the early 1970s, many of the groups that had contributed to the rise of performance art in the 1960s and that had been influenced by the Anti-Art movement were disappearing. Unbeat and Hi-Red Center disbanded in 1964, and by the mid-1960s their members had moved overseas or stopped holding performances altogether. The main players of the late 1960s—Kurohata, Jack Society, Kokuin, The Play, and the artists who collaborated with them—had also turned away from performance art by 1970, either returning to painting or shifting their focus to other kinds of projects. After MAD/MAP in Sendai, October 1970, Itoi Kanji abandoned performance art and even Zero Jigen, the longest-enduring of the 1960s performance groups, ceased its rituals around 1972. Collective Kumo’s activities as a performance group ended with Moriyama Yasuhide’s arrest in November 1970, although his court case on charges of public obscenity continued from 1971 to 1973. Festival of Human and the Earth, however, organized by Ozaki Masanori and Yoshida Yoshie in August 1971, was a significant event in that it connected the late 1960s counterculture movement with the 1970s. It introduced a new generation of music and theater artists at the same time as it broke with the Ritualists’ performances of the late 1960s. Yoshida even had an extraordinary face-to-face meeting with Minobe Ryōkichi, then-Governor of Tokyo, to obtain permission to use Yoyogi Park. He managed to attract a large number of participants and huge audiences.128 He also succeeded—much to his satisfaction—in carrying off the event without the intervention of the authorities or any accidents.129 Although organized by an art critic, the main players at the event were musicians and theater troupes, such as rock band Zunō Keisatsu (Brain Police), En Gekijō led by Ikeda Shōichi, Peak led by Suenaga Tamio, and Banzai-tō (Banzai Party) [fig. 116],130 one of the new performance groups. Some performances took place outside of designated spaces and there were others not registered in the official program. By removing the distinction between performers and audience, the festival “laid the groundwork for a series of chain-reactions rippling through the audience, as those witnessing the actions themselves became participants”131—a marked contrast with hapuningu that took place in closed angura spaces, or gishiki (rituals) held in urban spaces. This marked a new stage in the organization and management of events, setting the scene for transformations and new developments.

 116. Airship event by Banzai-tō at the Festival of Human and the Earth • August 1971 • Yoyogi Park, Tokyo

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Zero Jigen also participated in Festival of Human and the Earth together with Hare Krishna, who were on a mission tour from the U.S. at the time.132 We can assume from the scenes in the film Baramon (Brahmin, 1972), in which the monk members of Hare Krishna and Zero Jigen joyfully sang and danced together, that Zero Jigen began to seek a communal sense of unity in the bounded space-time of the festival. In the same month, Zero Jigen participated in Japan Phantom Field Festival: Celebrate in Sanrizuka, which was held amid the Sanrizuka Struggle against the construction of Narita Airport. In September 1971, Zero Jigen staged rituals at Hōsei University [fig. 117], followed by Keio University in October. In June 1972 the group performed rock opera Ai no Asama sansō (Asama Mountain Villa of Love); Ai no Orinpikku (Olympics of Love) presumably took place in September of the same year. In February 1972, Zero Jigen performed in Sendai with Saitō Yoshiaki. These were its final performances, a testament to the group’s incredible longevity as a performance art group and to the dynamic leadership of Katō Yoshihiro and Iwata Shin’ichi. Suenaga Tamio of Kokuin (together with Zero Jigen, one of the leading Expo Destruction Group member groups) also remained active in genre-crossing communal events such as Festival of Human and the Earth. Having disbanded Kokuin in early 1970, Suenaga formed Peak with a mixture of new members and former Kokuin members. In April, he organized a concert, Street Fighting Rock, in Meiji Park. What is noteworthy about his activities after 1970 is that rather than rest in the simple transience of “events,” he organized “workshop” sites, as they might be called today, which allowed people from different backgrounds and diverse social movements to interact and debate. These workshops provided a forum for not only artists from the worlds of music, film, theater, and poetry, but also citizen and activist groups representing feminist and gay movements to come together. The workshops at Survival ’72: Open Free Seminar in Hayama in February 1972 focused on alternative lifestyles, covering issues related to family, sex, and food.133 Since Suenaga only began his career as an artist after the end of the Yomiuri Independent, he cannot be categorized as a major Anti-Art artist, but his indefatigable pursuit of a revolution in consciousness, premised on the inseparability of “art” and “life,” suggests that he was exploring the same possibilities as the Anti-Art movement. Itoi Kanji’s activities also drew to a close in 1970. In April 1970, he ran naked through the Expo ’70 Festival Plaza. The last large-scale performance event in which he participated was MAD/MAP (Mutual Art Damage of Multiple Actionist Project) in Sendai in

 117. Ritual by Zero Jigen • September 9, 1971 • Hōsei University, Tokyo

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October 1970. Organized by Toshima Shigeyuki,134 this was a series of unlicensed guerrilla performances carried out simultaneously in various locations throughout the city, which took place on the first day of the Pedestrian Paradise.135 The performances included radical acts that had already become rare during this period. Male members from Toshima’s group, Hanzai Himitsukessha Burakku-dan (Criminal Secret Society Black Corps), carry bags of soil from a park on their backs; a female performer removes all of her clothing on a train; and Toshima rolled up pornographic prints and images of the Vietnam War into the paper tube of a giant party horn, which he displayed (blew?) in a shopping arcade, which led to his being questioned by the police.136 A photograph of Itoi running down Ichiban-chō, the busiest street in Sendai (see plate 28, p. 17), was presumably taken at this event; following this event, Itoi disappeared from mainstream performance art in Tokyo and Sendai. On the whole, Itoi conducted his performances mainly as homage to what Ōsugi Sakae called the “blind actions”137 of other artists and activists (rather than as expressions of his own individuality), and it is conceivable that, with the decline of these actions and expressions, he was losing the opportunity to react to the work of others. While other artists were abandoning performance, however, Kazakura Shō, Mizu­ kami Jun, and Akiyama Yūtokutaishi continued their actions throughout the 1970s. Yet, performances by Kazakura were largely just encore performances of his repertoire from the mid-1960s, even if he sometimes participated in events with artists and dancers of the new generation. Mizukami Jun, the first Anti-Art performer from Kansai, continued to work on new styles and form new alliances even after leaving Expo Destruction Group. In August 1969 he participated in The End of the Illusion We Call Art, an exhibition/symposium at Shinano Art Museum in Nagano, where he met like-minded artists such as Matsuzawa Yutaka, Yamazaki Hideto, Sunohara Toshiyuki, and Maeyama Tadashi. They went on to co-organize the exhibition Nirvana: For the Final Art at Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art in August 1970.138 According to an account by Fukuzumi Haruo, “small pieces of paper with enigmatic texts and signs, a paper propeller, photos”139 were “scattered on the walls and on the floor as if they had been forgotten or abandoned.”140 Other exhibits included a radio hung from the ceiling that broadcast high school baseball games, sand and pieces of paper scattered on the floor, and an acrylic box with clock parts inside. The gallery, however, “looked almost empty.”141. Perhaps this impression by Fukuzumi had in mind the blockbuster Spanish Art Exhibition being held at the museum at the same time; by comparison, the Nirvana exhibition was an inhospitable affair, offering its audience no eye-pleasing “artworks” to enjoy. Even Horikawa Michio’s distribution of five-yen coins to the audience (similar to Gar Gar Buys You)—a stunt which, if conducted today, would elicit audience participation and dialogue—appears to have left spectators bewildered.142 There can clearly be no comparison between Nirvana and the national event that was Expo ’70, but even compared to Tokyo Biennale: Between Man and Matter, a now legendary exhibition curated by Nakahara Yūsuke held three months prior, Nirvana received little mention (Tokyo Biennale is still referred to as Japan’s first large-scale experiment in site-specific installations and conceptual art). Nonetheless, Nirvana is notable for taking advantage of the international network of mail art 143 during the pre-internet period, and it also raised important questions:144 it offered a hard look at the human condition, using uncompromising slogans such as “anti-materialism” and “eliminationism”;

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was critical of economic growth and urbanization; and called into question the art exhibition system, both by encouraging audience participation and progressively removing exhibits from the space.145 Mizukami continued his work for several decades after the exhibition, both as an event organizer and a performer. His longevity owes much to the fact that his work was based around non-material media, such as sound, signs, texts, and language, and that it required neither physical training nor large-scale stage setups and so was easily combined with other genres such as poetry and music. Furthermore, while conceptual art, which became a major trend in the 1970s, was partly based on imported Western methods, it also incorporated the intrinsic desire for rituals that had been developed by artists (including Mizukami) throughout Japan since the mid-1960s. Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, by contrast, stands out in that he developed a new type of performance art after 1970. From around 1967, he had been conducting pop happenings (tsūzoku kōdō) satirizing contemporary phenomena: Japanese nationalism (the subject of his performance Glico146), militarism (Cavalryman Private Adachi Mamoru147), moral education (Ninomiya Sontoku148), and Japanese tradition and authority (noh-pon, see chap. 8.10, p. 224). He was active as a member of Expo Destruction Group events (particularly those held at Art Theater in Ikebukuro) and one of the main actors in Katō Yoshihiro’s film, Inaba no Shiro Usagi. There is currently insufficient documentary evidence of his early solo performances in the 1960s to understand how his leading role in the student movements and labor union activism impacted these performances. His earliest confirmed solo performance is from June 1970, when he commuted to the company at which he worked wearing a steel helmet and running shirt instead of formal business attire.149 His first solo performance on stage was Pop Happening: Akiyama Yūtokutaishi Singing Military Songs (October 1971), accompanied by a film screening at Space Laboratory Hair in Shibuya. He most powerfully demonstrated his talent as an ex-union organizer and entertainer when he ran for the Tokyo gubernatorial elections of 1975 and 1979, performances that maximized the productive possibilities of urban space and mass media.150 NOTES 1.

A homonymic pun on the name “Zen-kyōtō” (an abbreviation of Zengaku kyō-tō kaigi, All-Campus Joint-Struggle Committees): “kyō” is now written “狂,” crazy; and “tō”, “頭,” head—to read “crazy heads.” 2. Komatsu Tatuso, “Shiteki ‘Seibu kōdō’ shōshi” [Seibu Auditorium: a personal account], Yume wa kōya o: Komatsu Tatsuo tsuitōshū [Dreams in the Wilderness: Komatsu Tatsuo Memorial Collection], ed. Komatsu Tatsuo Memorial Editorial Committee (Kyoto: Sunlead, 1987), 39. 3. The “Act on Temporary Measures concerning University Management” set out measures to be taken in case of managerial emergency during the student movement. It was abolished in 2001. 4. The word “Plaza” on the signboard was covered with black tape. Sekine Hiroshi,

“Shinjuku nishiguchi hiroba no rekishi” [History of Shinjuku West Exit Plaza], Shisō no Kagaku, special issue, no. 193 (June 1970): 17. 5. This campaign was carried out as Operation Sunflower from June 5 to August 31, 1969. “Angura sunakku nado kenkyo: Shonichi no Shinjuku ‘Himawari’ sakusen” [Arrests at angura bars in Shinjuku: The first day of “Operation Sunflower”], Mainichi Shimbun, June 6, 1969, 11. “Shinjuku jōka sakusenga sutāto” [The Shinjuku clean-up operation begins], Mainichi Shimbun, June 6, 1969, 18. 6. Kawanaka Nobuhiro, Eiga: Nichijō no jikken [Film: Experiment of Everyday] (Tokyo: Film Art, 1975), 344–345. 7. Translator’s note: Shōwa Genroku refers to the era of high economic growth during the

282

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

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1960s—named after the late 17th century Genroku period (1688–1704) which similarly saw rapid economic growth and high levels of urban consumption. The phrase was first uttered in 1964 by the Free Democratic Party politician Fukuda Takeo. Green House, a small green area in front of Shinjuku Station East Exit, was a major hangout spot for hippies. Kawanaka, Eiga, 345. “Fūten no bosu o taiho” [Fūten boss arrested], Tokyo Taimuzu, July 16, 1969, 11. Takenaka Rō, “Imani Shinjuku hara to naru: Angura wa kaze to tomo ni sarinu—soshite nani ga hajimarunoka” [Soon Shinjuku will be a wilderness: Angura is gone with the wind—what now?], Karā shōsetsu, vol. 1., no. 1 (June 1, 1969). Takenaka. Kazakura was asked to cooperate with the Expo ’70, but declined. See “Kazakura Shō to kataru” [Talking with Kazakura Shō] at No. 3 Warehouse, Fukuoka, April 29, 2006, published in “Karada ni sensō o kakaete: Kazakura Shō no hapuningu genten” [Embracing the war through the body: The origin of Kazakura Shō’s Happening], Aida, no. 150 (July 2008): 16. Yuasa Jōji, “Insaido repōto= Kurosu Tōku/ Intāmedia wa kōshite hirakareta: Hirogerareta kūkan e no kairo” [Inside report: The Launch of Cross Talk/Intermedia: A Circuit to Expanded Space], Bijutsu techō, no. 311 (April 1969): 96–134. Except for Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, Shinohara Ushio was the only visual artist involved in Cross Talk/ Intermedia. Shinohara and Misawa Kenji made plastic balloons for a stage set for Matsumoto Toshio’s film screening with music by Yuasa Jōji, but the balloons were not Shinohara’s original artwork. Ishiko Junzō, “Gendai bijutsu no teiryū” [Undercurrents in Contemporary Art], Biiku bunka [Art Education Culture], July 1969, reprinted in Ishiko Junzō chosakushū 2: Imēji-ron [Ishiko Junzō Collection Vol. 2: Essays on images] (Tokyo: Ramasha, 1987), 214. Ishiko, 212. Ishiko, 212. For Station ’70, see Mizuma Sueo, Āto ni totte kachi towa nanika [What Is the Value of Art] (Tokyo: Gentōsha, 2014), 74–88. “I got Kara Jūrō and Terayama Shūji’s groups to come in and asked them to perform during intermissions in the music, and Hijikata to dance.” See Ichiyanagi Toshi and Isozaki Arata, “Kakyō sareru rokujū nendai ongaku shīn”

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

[Bridging music scenes in the 1960s], Intercommunication, no. 26 (fall 1998): 109. Oku Eiryō (Kitamura Yoshio), “Kongetsu no shōten: ‘Bankokuhaku’ funsai no ugoki” [Monthly Focus: Smash Expo Movement], Bijutsu techō, no. 314 (June 1969): 10. Wareware ni totte Banpaku to wa nanika [What does Expo mean for us?], ed. Hariu Ichirō, (Tokyo: Tabata shoten, 1969), 69–84. Architects ’70 Action Committee, Sengen [Manifesto], November 17, 1968, Wareware ni totte Banpaku to wa nanika, 289. “Kyōdō tōgi: Warera wa fukanō ni chōsen suru” [Group discussion: We challenge the Impossible], Dezain hihyō [Design Review], no. 8 (January 1969): 131. “Kyōdō tōgi,” 11. Translator’s note: Ee janaika were carnivalesque religious celebrations praying for social reform, that occurred across Japan at the end of the Edo period, from June 1867 to May 1868. The name is taken from a colloquial Japanese expression that roughly translates to “Who cares?” or “Why not?” Translator’s note: The taikai held by the ­Ritualists had varying names but were created as a loosely connected series of performance events. The Japanese word taikai is frequently used to refer to sporting events, such as meets and tournaments. We have commonly translated it as “rally.” Gutai’s Yoshida Minoru, who participated in Biogode Process in Kyoto, also made unexpected appearances in these events in Nagoya, Kyoto, and Fukuoka, with Expo Destruction Group. Katō listed the event at Theater 36 as “Anti-­ Expo Insanity Trade Fair, a manifesto for the destruction of cultural technocratization using rituals and films.” Kato Yoshihiro, Erosu no banpaku hakai: Banpaku Hakai Kyōtō zenra gishiki, futō taiho no jittai [Expo Destruction with Eros: The buck-naked ritual of Expo Destruction Joint-Struggle, the truth of the unlawful arrests], Dezain hihyō, no. 10 (October 1969): 120. Koyama Tetsuo did not participate in Kyūshū Rally, perhaps in order to prepare for Vitamin Show in Tokyo on May 7. “At 5:30, in the light of the setting sun, 11 of them stood naked and raised one of their arms on the roof of the main building of the Faculty of Arts, Kyoto University, while staring at the clock tower, the symbol of the university, behind the barricades.” Kanesaka Kenji, “Kongetsu no shōten: Hanpaku kyōtō-ha no taitō” [Monthly Focus:

Chapter 9———The Various Anti-Expos (1969 –1970)283

32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

Rise of the Anti-Expo Joint-Struggle Group], Bijutsu techō, no. 316 (August 1969): 19. Katō Yoshihiro, “Tsui ni yatte kita futō taiho: Banpaku hakai katsudō dai yon sengen” [And finally unlawful arrest: Expo Destruction Action Manifesto No. 4], Eiga hyōron, vol. 26, no. 9 (September 1969): 53. Suenaga Tamio, “Banpaku hakai burakku fesutibaru jiken” [Expo Destruction Black Festival Incident], Me (Eye), Suginami Cine Club, no. 3 (November 1969): 85. Kawanaka Nobuhiro, “Eiga: Nichijō no bōken” [Film: adventures in the everyday], Tokyo Zokei Daigaku kenkyūhō bessatsu 4 [Tokyo Zokei University Bulletin, Appendix 4], March 2006: 32. Unknown author (Chi), “Yogenteki na ‘chiisana daijikken’: Hanpaku no itsukakan” [Prophetic “little big experiment”: 5 days of Hanpaku], Asahi Jānaru, vol. 11, no. 34 (August 24, 1969): 89. See also a record of a public talk by a member of Kansai Beheiren, Yamamoto Kenji, Banshō Ken’ichi, “Kansai Beheiren no katsudō to ‘Hanpaku (Antiwar Expo)’” [The Efforts of Kansai Beheiren (Kansai “Peace for Vietnam!” Committee) and Hanpaku (Antiwar Expo)], Ritsumeikan Journal of Peace Studies, no. 21 (March 2020): 97–117. https://www.ritsumeikan-wp-museum. jp/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/097-117 Yoshida Yoshie, Kaitaigeki no maku orite: Rokujū nendai zen’ei bijutsushi [The curtain falls on deconstruction theater: A history of 1960s avant-garde art] (Tokyo: Zōkeisha, 1982), 180. See also Suenaga Tamio, “Kaichō! Kyōki banpaku jigoku: Banpaku hakai, koremade no kiseki” [Open! Crazy Expo Hell: Expo destruction, its history until now], Kōzō (Structure), no. 86 (February 1970): 122. Yoshida, Kaitaigeki no maku orite., 181. Yoshida Yoshie, “Hanpaku seiryoku wa teitai shitaka” [Has the force behind anti-Expo come to a halt?], Bijutsu techō, no. 320 (December 1969): 10. Japan Coop is an organization for distributing and screening personal films founded by Satō Shigechika, the chief editor of Eiga hyōron, and others, in 1968. Filmmakers were able to register their films without a fee or judging. It was funded by rental fees from the films. Kawanaka Nobuhiro, “Eiga: Nichijō no bōken,” 24. Kawanaka, 33. Kawanaka, 34. Kawanaka Nobuhiro, “Chikayoruna! Kanesaka Kenji wa CIA no inu dearu” [Keep away! Kanesaka Kenji is a dog of CIA], Eiga hyōron, no. 27 (September 1970): 35–37.

42. Expo Destruction Group’s last recorded action is a Teach-in on December 6, 1969, at Osaka University of Arts, in which Suenaga participated and saw three naked students performing the one-arm-raising ritual wearing long loincloths with writing on them. Suenaga, “Kaichō! Kyōki banpaku jigoku,” 128–29. 43. Miyauchi Yoshihisa, “‘Non’ o iwanai kenchikuka: Sono taisei sanka o kokuhatsu suru” [Architects who do not say “non”: I condemn their celebration of authority] ed. Hariu, Wareware ni totte Banpaku to wa nanika, 100. 44. Yoshida, “Hanpaku seiryoku wa teitai shitaka,” 10. 45. Suenaga Tamio, Ikinobiru tame no komyūn: Genkaku uchū soshite seikatsu kakumei [Commune for survival: The illusory universe and lifestyle revolution] (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1973), 60. 46. Makirō from Baramanji Kessha writes that, although Katō Yoshihiro was critical of Matsue Kaku’s political messaging in Kurohata’s rituals, his own Expo Destruction Group rituals “had gone beyond the domain of gratuitous action or artistic expression. They had become little different from Zenkyōtō’s slogan shouting.” He was bewildered by Katō’s “seemingly sudden conversion.” Makirō, Zusetsu musō yūran B-kyu geijutsu-ka no yase gaman Shaba-asobi gurafuti [Illustrated fantasy sightseeing by B-level artist’s stubborn pride: Grafitti of earthly dalliances] (Tokyo, Jiyūkokuminsha, 1994), 157. 47. Katō, “Tsui ni yatte kita futō taiho,” 53. Katō accused the Intermedia group based in Sogetsu Art Center of being “Expo subcontractors.” Katō Yoshihiro, “Banpaku hakai katsudō dai ichi sengen” [Expo Destruction Action Manifesto No.1], Eiga hyōron, vol. 26, no. 5 (May 1969): 46–47. 48. Translator’s note: A Chinese proverb for a person who harms an organization (for instance) where they work, despite the fact that they themselves benefit from the organization. 49. Kawanaka, Eiga: nichijō no jikken, 348. 50. Kawanaka, 349. 51. See Katō’s text in the epigraph of chapter 13. 52. Wareware ni totte banpaku to wa nanika, 281. 53. Kawanaka wrote that one more provision, “do not lie down without permission,” was added to the Regulations, but this is not confirmed. See Eiga: Nichijō no jikken, 351. 54. Kuroki Shinzō (pseudonym of: Hori Kōsai), “Banpaku repōto No.1” [Expo report No.1], Kyoto Daigaku Shimbun [Kyoto University Newspaper], April 20, 1970: 6.

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55. “I think about Zero Jigen as a business. I can’t afford for my business to go bankrupt. Zengakuren students come out in swarms like maggots even though many of them get arrested, but Zero Jigen membership is limited (laughter)—girls especially don’t come back after the first time (laughter).” “Kyōdō tōgi: Wareware wa fukanō ni chōsen suru” [Group discussion: We challenge the impossible], Dezain hihyō, no. 8 (January 1969): 130. 56. Suenaga Tamio, a friend of Katō, lamented that Zero Jigen “had abandoned the artistic skills it had nurtured over the past ten years.” Suenaga Tamio, “Han-banpaku katsudō wa ‘geijutsu / bunmei (kindai / anakuronizumu)’ kaitai sengen tariuruka!!” [Can anti-Expo action be a declaration of the dismantling of Art/Civilization (Modernity/Anachronism)!!], Koebukuro, No.7 (April 20, 1969): 1. 57. Katō Yoshihiro, “Banpaku hakai katsudō dai san sengen” [Expo Destruction Action Manifesto No.3], Eiga hyōron, August 1969, 78. 58. Counter to Katō Yoshihiro’s intentions, some actions did demonstrate diverse individualities. For example, at Black Festival in Ikebukuro, in an action that suited him perfectly, Akiyama Yūtokutaishi took a rod and prodded other members in their rears. Mizukami Jun did not participate in the naked hand-raising on the roof at Kyoto University, but enacted his own work, Rope Dynamics Orientation Ritual, using a red arrow sign and a code. Koyama Tetsuo, who did not participate in Kyūshū Rally, performed his ultimate ritual of killing a calf at Tōshiba Hall around the same time (see chap. 15.3, pp. 369–71). 59. “Shibireta! Kōfun no Zero Jigen taikai: Kyoto kōen kettei!” [Electrifying! Zero Jigen’s exciting rally: The next performance in Kyoto is decided], Angura Shimbun [Underground Newspaper], no. 2 (March 25, 1969): 2; Kawanaka, Eiga: Nichijo no jikken, 338. 60. See chap. 8, p. 219, 221 and chap. 13.4, p. 338. 61. Katō, “Banpaku hakai katsudō dai san sengen,” 79. 62. Mizukami Jun, in a fax to the author, November 20, 1997. 63. Katō, “Banpaku hakai katsudō dai san sengen,” 79. 64. Katō, 79. 65. Sakurai’s given name is “Takami,” but the characters can also be read “Kōshin,” which became his nickname. 66. Katō, “Banpaku hakai katsudō dai san sengen,” 79.

67. Translator’s note: this is a common call-out (kakegoe) used during collective dances. 68. “Tokubetsu shuzai: Zenra de chōsen sareta Yoshinaga Sayuri to Sakamoto Kyū: ‘Banpaku funsai!’ o sakebu ‘geijutsuteki’ gebatai no cho­ kusetsukōdō” [Special report: Naked challenge to Yoshinaga Sayuri and Sakamoto Kyū: Direct actions of a Gewalt (violence) group demanding “Smash Expo”], Shūkan Myōjō, June 29, 1969, 34. See also the following article from another weekly magazine: Hirata Minoru, “Suppadaka no gebaruto: Banpaku hakai burakku fesutibaru” [Naked Gewalt: Expo Destruction Black Festival], Shūkan Taishū, June 26, 1969. 69. The manager of Tobata Culture Hall demanded the cancellation of the event immediately when it opened. Katō, “Banpaku hakai katsudō dai san sengen,” 78. 70. “Hadaka no terorisuto” [Naked Terrorists] was the title of a serialized article on Collective Kumo by Nonaka Akihisa, Nishinippon Shimbun, December 4–7, 1997. 71. “Shūdan Kumo are perceived to be similar to Zero Jigen in terms of their naked orgies, but we do not condone Zero Jigen’s lack of criticality in its use of the angura boom.” Moriyama Yasuhide kōenkai: Hikari no hyōmen toshite­ no gin’iro” [Moriyama Yasuhide Talk: The silver as a surface of light], Moriyama Yasuhide: Decomposition & Recomposition, ed. Kurokawa Noriyuki (Kitakyūshū: Kitakyūshū Municipal Museum of Art, 2018), 245. In fact, Zero Jigen began performances prior to the emergence of angura culture, so this criticism is not correct (see also chap. 19.6, pp. 432–3). 72. “Mebaeta kakushinteki ugoki: Kyūshū gendai bijutsu no dōkōten, Zen Kyūshū yagai geijutsu shō” [The emergence of new progressive movements: Movements of Kyūshū Contemporary Art Exhibition, All-Kyūshū Outdoor Art Show], Asahi Shimbun (West Japan edition), March 1, 1969, 7. 73. The performance was enacted by a group including Ōtsuka Shuzō, Takamuku Kazunari, and others who were students at Kyūshū Sangyō University. The performance was supposed to feature a woman wearing a fluorescent-painted cape that glowed under black light as she turned into a butterfly and flew away. However, the performance failed because of the bad synchronization between the crane and the lighting. Two groups comprised of men and women played Hanaichimonme (a children’s play song). Takamuku also carried out a demonstration in which he carried a large Stars-and-Stripes flag

Chapter 9———The Various Anti-Expos (1969 –1970)285

74. 75.

76.

77. 78.

79. 80. 81.

82.

83.

84.

during Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally (Takamuku, interview by the author, October 26, 2007, Fukuoka). Takamuku, who had a close friendship with Sakurai Takami and Shingai Kazu­ yoshi, continued to work as a performance and visual artist in Fukuoka long after these events. “Zakkichō” [Miscellaneous notes], Mainichi Shimbun, Kyūshū edition, February 1969, 13. Vlasta Chihakova, “Wakai enerugī no kyōdōtai” [Community of Young Energy], Bijutsu techō, no. 312 (May 1969): 14–15. “Kitakyūshū de hapuningu shō o kikakushita Tōya Masami san (39)” [Tōya Masami (39) organizes a Happening show in Kitakyūshū], Mainichi Shimbun, Kyūshū edition, March 5, 1969: 9. Sakurai Takami, in an interview with the author, July 28, 2006, Fukuoka. “Geijutsu no bungyō taisei kuzureru: Kesshū suru Kyūshū no wakamono tachi” [The division of labor in the art world has collapsed: Young people in Kyūshū gather together], Nishinippon Shimbun, evening edition, February 23, 1970: 3. “Geijutsu no bungyō taisei kuzureru” “Geijutsu no bungyō taisei kuzureru” Kanesaka Kenji, “Geijutsu bangaichi no hitobito” [People of no address in art], Asahi Gurafu, no. 2410 (March 20, 1970): 37. The term bangaichi (no address) became popularized through the 1965 outlaw film, Abashiri Bangaichi where it meant a prison, such as the one in Abashiri, Hokkaido. It came to be widely used to refer to a site for outlaws. Translator’s note: Hakata, which now remains as the name of the central station and a ward in Fukuoka City, originally signified an old part of the city that was a port town for merchants, in contrast to Fukuoka located west of Hakata, which was a town for samurai warriors. In fact, because only a few members of Kyūshū-ha, Collective Kumo, and Collective He were from Hakata, Kanesaka seemed to emphasize the historical connection of Hakata to the Chinese continent in this article, rather than as the birthplace of these artists. “‘Eiyūtachi’ raihō: Geijutsu no moyo’oshi PR” [“Heroes” come to publicize Art Event], Nishi­ nippon Shimbun, February 26, 1970, 12. Suginami Cine Club was an independent screening organization founded by Sasaki Ki’ichi, Noda Shinkichi, Hasegawa Ryūsei, Fuma Motohiko, and others. It published a newsletter Me (Eye) from 1969. It disbanded in 1972. Suginami Cine Club, “Wareware wa naze Sōgetsu Fesutibaru o funsai suruka: Keika to shiryō” [Why we smash

85.

86. 87.

88.

89.

90.

91.

92. 93.

the Sogetsu Festival: Progress and documents], Me, No. 3 (November 1969): 9–22. From the Suginami Cine Club leaflet quoted in Masaki Motoi, “Sōgetsu Shinematēku no jidai: Jikken eiga to jikken eizō o chūshin ni” [­Sogetsu Cinematheque and its times: Focusing on experimental cinema and experimental film], Ashiya City Art Museum and Chiba City Art Museum ed., Sōgetsu to sono jidai: 1945– 1970 [Sogetsu and its time 1945–1970] (Kobe: Sōgetsu to sono jidai jikkō iinkai, 1998), 277. Masaki, 276. This event was organized by the committee (Awazu Kiyoshi, Iimura Takahiko, Takemitsu Tōru, Teshigahara Hiroshi, Nakahara Yūsuke, Matsumoto Toshio, and Yamada Kōichi) and the Sogetsu Art Center. Among the committee members, Awazu, Iimura, Takemitsu, Teshigahara, and Matsumoto presented their works at Expo ’70. Kanesaka was said to have held a personal grudge against Sogetsu Art Center as he had not been included in the committee. Akiyama Kuniharu, “Sōgetsu Āto Sentā” [Sogetsu Art Center], Akiyama Kuniharu et al., Bunka no shikakenin: Gendaibunka no jiba to tōshizu [Instigators of Culture: Magnetic field and perspective of contemporary culture] (Tokyo: Seido-sha, 1985), 496. After Expo Destruction Group’s members were arrested, Kanesaka was isolated from both the film and art world (see n. 41 above). Hariu Ichirō, Sengo bijutsu seisuishi [The rise and fall of post-war art] (Tokyo: Tokyo Shoseki, 1979), 184. Rozo-gun was a group founded in 1955, Mito, Ibaraki. SW (Watanabe Seiichi), Rozo-gun, Japanese Art 1960s: Japanese Summer 1960–64, Asai Toshihiro and Ohashi Hiromi eds., (Mito: Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito, 1997), 84–85. See also Nagamiya Kinji, “Rozo-gun kō: 1970 nen made no katsudō to sono hyōka” [A study of Rozo-gun: An examination and analysis of its activities up to 1970], Geisō, Bulletin of the study of philosophy and history of art in University of Tsukuba, no. 25 (2008): 127–49. Yamada Kyōichi, Nagoya-ryoku āto hen: Nagoya sengo bijutsu katsudōshi [Nagoya power art edition: History of Nagoya postwar art activities] (Tokyo: Waizu shuppan, 2007), 65–66. Ikemizu Keiichi, “Hospital: April Fool Happenings,” Play 1967–1980 (Osaka: The Play, 1981), n.p. Ikemizu. The identities of performers noted in brackets [ ] are based on information

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conveyed by Ikemizu, in personal emails to the author, November 4, 2008 and July 23, 2020. 94. Ikemizu. 95. Ikemizu. Also Takahashi Tōru, “Nanajū nendai e no mōhitotsu no kiroku” [Another document for the 1970s], Ōru Kansai (All Kansai), vol. 5, no. 1 (January 1970): 117. 96. Ikemizu Keiichi, in an interview with the author, January 28, 2007, Kyoto. 97. “Kuruma janai ‘zeromogira’ da: Hanpaku, korezo ‘ningensei kaifuku’” [Not a car, but a “zeromogira”: Anti-Expo, this is the ‘revitalization of humanity’], Mainichi Shimbun, Osaka edition, August 17, 1969. 98. Takahashi Tōru and Ikemizu Keiichi, “Gendai­ bijutsu iroiro taidan 1: ‘Nansensu’ demo kamawanai” [Various reflections on contemporary art 1: “Nonsense” is fine], Ōru Kansai, April 1970: 138. 99. Takahashi and Ikemizu, 139. 100. “I’m not interested in any act or artwork that ends in mere embodiment of artists’ concepts.” Ikemizu Keiichi (The Play), “Purei: Nichijō seikatsu tono kyōkai o toriharatte” [The Play: Removing the boundaries of art and everyday life], Bijutsu techō, no. 335 (December 1970): 89. 101. “Mahiru no hapuningu” [Midday Happening], Asahi Shimbun, September 7, 1969, 16. “Hen na geijutsu” [Strange art], Shūkan Shōnen Sandē, March 21, 1971: 6–7. 102. Ikeda Ichi (Shōichi), in an interview with the author, Tokyo, July 13, 2007. 103. Yoshida Yoshie, “Maruchi purei no ‘Kashō Satsujin gēmu’” [Multi-Play’s Transient Image— Murder Game], Suingu Jānaru (Swing Journal), November 1970: 169–170. 104. English titles were often given by artists who did not major in art at universities in Kyoto, such as Mizukami Jun, Ikeda Shōichi, and Gulliver. 105. Ikeda Ichi (Shōichi), “Ofu Shinjuku=gekiteki naru nōto 1: Geki no hassei, sono yokan” [Off Shinjuku: Theatrical notes 1: The emergence of theater, and where it might be headed], Kikan Shinjuku, no. 1 (January 1982): 4. Also see Ikeda Shōichi, “Maruchi purei sengen: Kōzō kūkan ni kanshite1” [Multi-Play manifesto: Structural space 1], Kyoto Daigaku Shimbun (Kyoto University Newspaper), March 3, 1969, 3–4. Ikeda Ichi (Shōichi), “Ofu Shinjuku=gekiteki naru nōto 2: Hirakareta ‘ba no engeki’” [Off Shinjuku: Theatrical notes 2: Opening up the “site” of theater], Kikan Shinjuku, no. 2 (April 1982): 3.

106. Ikeda was born in Osaka, and graduated from the Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University, in 1967, majoring in polymer chemistry. 107. Yoshida, “Maruchi purei no ‘Kashō satsujin gēmu,’” 170. 108. Yoshida, 170. 109. “Zero” meant “starting from zero,” and was also derived from Kamoi “Rei” (“rei” can also mean “zero” in Japanese) who was a leader at the oil painting school “0,” from which Group Zero was born. Enoki Chū, interview by the author, April 9, 2006, Osaka. 110. Everyday Life / Art: Enoki Chū (Kobe: Nomaru edishon, 2006), 21. 111. Minato no matsuri (Port Festival) and Kobe Carnival (in which Group I and The Play participated) developed into Kobe Festival in 1971. 112. The official name was “Production Ga‘s” with an upside-down apostrophe (Tsunoda Minako, a curator of Nagoya City Art Museum, in a personal email to the author, July 16, 2020). For Ga‘s, see: Tsunoda Emiko, ed., Purodakushon Gasu, Leaflet of Exhibition in Permanent Collection Gallery (Nagoya: Nagoya City Art Museum, 2010). 113. Members of Ga‘s were students of Aichi Gakugei University (present Aichi University of Education): Kawai Eiji, Katō Hisakatsu, Itō Shin’ya, Tomita Hidekazu, Katō Yasuo, Hioki Takashi, Kawai Yamato, and Koide Katsuichi. Kawai and Koide were science major students, which might have contributed to Ga‘s’s commitment to “ideas that were not bound by the framework of ‘art.’” Takahashi Ayako, “Jōkyō to jōhō no nakade: Seishun to tōjin no tokumei geijutsu, Purodakushon Gasu ni okeru posuto hangeijutsu” [In response to the social situation and information society: The anonymous art of youth and consumption. Post Anti-Art of Production Ga‘s], Rear, No.14 (July 2006): 49. 114. “Fuiri no eigakan ga chōman’in!” [Unpopular movie theater overcrowded!], Chūnichi Shimbun, June 3, 1973. 115. In contrast to the main players of Anti-Art who were born in the mid-1930s, Ikeda, Enoki, and members of Ga-s were all born between 1943 and 45. 116. Ikeda Ichi, interview by Yamaoka Sakiko, January 30, 2004, “Interviews with Artists vol. 3, Ikeda Ichi,” in Independent Performance Artists’ Moving Images Archive (IPAMIA) https://ipamia.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IkedaIchi_interview1.pdf. 117. Takahashi, “Jōkyō to jōhō no nakade,” 52.

Chapter 9———The Various Anti-Expos (1969 –1970)287

118. Another meaning of the group’s name could be the first person possessive (“my”) since it was originally written with the character for “I, me” and an apostrophe (我’s). 119. Takahashi Ayako, “Jōkyō to jōhō no nakade,” 49. 120. Kitajima Tadashi, interview by the author, June 5, 2013, Fukuoka. 121. Exceptions were Enoki Chū’s solo activities. In 1970, when the Pedestrian Paradise opened in Ginza, Enoki walked around wearing only a loincloth and revealing the Expo symbols formed on his belly and back through sunburn. In 1977, he executed Going to Hungary in hangari (half-shaved head) project, and in 1979, presented Bar Rose Chū, which was a pioneering work about trans-genders in Japan. These notable performances by Enoki, as well as performances by other artists in the 1970s, require further study. 122. Translator’s note: Shinran (1173–1263) was a Buddhist monk and founder of the Jōdo Shinshū sect. 123. Taj Mahal Travellers held Picnic Concert: From Dawn to Dusk at Ōiso Beach in December 1970. 124. image, image was a Kansai based group that collectively created and presented giant sculptures in natural spaces, similar to The Play. From 1968, the group conducted a project in which the members floated a 6-meter-high slide on Lake Biwa and other sites. “Purei: Nichijō seikatsu tono kyōkai o toriharatte,” 90. 125. The Japanese name is Gaga (written in katakana), but the English translation here uses its basis in referring to the French word “gars gars,” meaning “boys,” to differentiate it from another group, Gaga (written in hiragana), in Tokyo. 126. Saitama Gendai Bijutsu ten (Saitama Contemporary Art Exhibition) in Saitama Hall, Urawa, January 1967. 127. Uchida Yoshirō and Fukuda Katsuhiro, interview by the author, January 14, 2007, Tokyo. 128. The official police estimate counted “10,000 overall attendees, 3,000 concurrently at its peak, with 1,500 sleeping in the open overnight” but actual attendance numbers were likely much higher. Yoshida Yoshie, “Ningen to daichi no matsuri” [Festival of Human and the Earth], Ryubō no kaihō ku [Liberated zone of wanderers] (Tokyo: Gendaisōbi-sha, 1977), 91. 129. Shino (Shinoda Takatoshi), “Ningen to daichi no matsuri bekken” [A glance at Festival of Human and the Earth], Bijutsu techō, no. 348 (November 1971): 66–72. 130. Banzai-tō was led by Dan Masayuki, its “party leader,” based in Jiyūgaoka, Tokyo. Its

performances consisted of cheering banzai (hooray) en masse and raising a flag with “LSD” written on it. It also organized events such as rock concerts and bazaars. Suenaga Tamio and Nakamura Masaharu, Urutora torippu: Chōhatsu sedai no shōgen [Ultra Trip: Testimonies of the long-haired generation] (Tokyo: Tairiku shobō, 1971), 178–82. Dan Masayuki, “Hana no Tokyo dai-hakurankai ni okeru banzaitō tōjō no ki” [A note of Banzai-tō’s appearance at Glorious Tokyo Grand Exposition], Kuro no techō (Black Notebook), vol. 1, no. 7 (November 1971): 68–69. “Banbutsu zettai kōtei! Yonimo fushigi na ‘Banzai-tō’” [Absolute affirmation of everything! Extremely strange Banzai-tō], Bijutsu techō, no. 346 (September 1971): 27. 131. Yoshida, “Ningen to daichi no matsuri,” 96. 132. Fax from Katō Yoshihiro to the author, October 18, 2007. 133. Suenaga Tamio, “Bio-ekorojī shinkōchū” [Bio-ecology in progress], Bijutsu techō (November 1972): 95–99 (see also chap. 16.3, p. 379). 134. Toshima Shigeyuki, born in Hachinohe, Aomori, in 1946, was a theater director, playwright, curator, and clinical psychiatrist. After graduating from Medical School at Tohoku University, he returned to his hometown and established Molecular Theater based in Hachinohe. He was also a curator of ICANOF. Toshima died in 2019. Toshima Kazuko, his elder sister, was a dancer, and Toshima Hironao, his elder brother, was a painter. 135. Translator’s note: Hokōsha tengoku (Pedestrian Paradise) is a term used to indicate the temporary prohibition of cars on the roads in downtown areas for environmental measure, which became popular in Japan starting in the 1960s. 136. Toshima Shigeyuki, in an email to the author, October 24, 2007. In May 1971, a performance event Diplopia Arrival was held in various locations in Sendai, involving Toshima, Ma­ tsuzawa Yutaka (participating via mail), and dance group Parnirvana Pariyaya Body (Tsujimura Kazuko, Sekido Rui, Suzuki Yūko). 137. “What I like most is a blind action by a human being or an explosion of spirit itself.” “Bokuwa seishin ga sukida” [I like a spirit], Ōsugi Sakae goroku [The sayings of Ōsugi Sakae], Kamata Satoshi ed. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2001), 20. Originally published in 1912. 138. Mizukami Jun’s report on the preparatory meeting for Nirvana exhibition reveals his thoughts on “anti-Expo”: “It [Nirvana] is an assertion of

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spirit-based civilization as opposed to the material-based civilization displayed and celebrated at the Japan World Exposition. Nirvana is not a reform of material structures but a reform of spiritual structures and aims to expand the common ground of the spirit.” Fukuzumi Haruo, “Ningen fukkō o motomete: Mono o tsukuranai sakka tachi. Niruvāna ten shuzai ki” [In search for Human Renaissance: Artists who do not make things. Report of Nirvana exhibition], Bijutsu techō, no. 333 (October 1970): 197. 139. Fukuzumi, 197. 140. Fukuzumi, 192 141. Fukuzumi, 192 142. Fukuzumi, 195–96. 143. Important conceptual artists from the U.S. and Europe including Jan Dibbets, Robert Barry, and John Bardessari, participated in Nirvana. 144. The experiment at Nirvana developed into On-e (Sound Meeting) in July 1971, organized by Matsuzawa Yutaka and managed by Tanaka Kōdō who proposed the original idea. This event was carried out around a meisō-dai (meditation platform) built on trees in a hill forest near Matsuzawa’s house in Shimosuwa, Nagano. The participants, in addition to Matsuzawa and Tanaka, included artists from the 1950s generation—Ikeda Tatsuo and Maeda Jōsaku—and those from the 1960s generation—Kazakura Shō (who participated later on), Kawanaka Nobuhiro, Sekido Rui (butoh dancer), Hanaga Mitsutoshi (photographer), Mizukami Jun, Yoshida Yoshie, and the participants of Nirvana exhibition, including Kawatsu Hiroshi and Sunohara Toshiyuki. Tanaka Sanzō, who later worked as an art writer for the Asahi Shimbun, also participated. The list of participants testifies to the wide range of the genres and generations in Matsu­ zawa’s network. For the event, see Yoshida Yoshie, “Seitaigakuteki komyūn” [Ecological Commune], Ryūbō no kaihō ku, 75–83; Yoshida Yoshie, “Ishiki kakumei no keiki toshite no ‘shizen’” [“Nature” as a trigger for consciousness revolution], Ryūbō no kaihōku, 98–104;

Sō Sakon, “Warera ‘gendai no geijutsu’ ni se o mukete” [We turn our back on “contemporary art”], Geijutsu shinchō, (September 1971): 56–61. 145. The exhibition occupied thirteen rooms on the first day, half of the rooms on the second day, and one room on the third day. Fukuzumi, “Ningen fukkō o motomete,” 201. 146. See chap. 8, n. 118. 147. According to the story narrated on a SP record Akiyama had since childhood, when Private Adachi joined a scout team during the Japan-China War, he was left alone in the enemy’s territory. But Adachi managed to return to his battalion guided by the ghost of his brother who died in the war. Akiyama performed Private Adachi running around in a running shirt, a helmet with a picture of a peach, and a Hinomaru flag on his back. Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Tsūzokuteki geijutsuron [On the art of vulgarity] (Tokyo: Doyō-bijutsusha, 1985), 82–84. 148. Translator’s note: Statues of Ninomiya Sontoku (Kinjirō in his childhood, 1787–1856) as a child, reading as he carries firewood on his back, are often displayed at Japanese schools as models of virtue and diligence. In later life, Ninomiya became a leading philosopher, moralist, and economist. 149. “Jinzaikaihatsu ihen sono ni: Katte kuruzo to isamashiku, Tetsukabuto, pantsu icchō de jikokeihatsu suru bijinesuman” [Accidental Human Resource Development #2: Have the courage to win, A self-enlightened businessman wearing an iron helmet and a pair of underpants], Shūkan Posuto, June 5, 1970. 150. Iwata Shin’ichi of Zero Jigen also ran as a mayoral candidate in Nagoya in 1973, prior to Akiyama. For background information on ways in which Iwata’s project differed from Akiyama’s, see KuroDalaiJee, “Iro no hitotsu taranu kakumei: Reinbō shichōsen ni miru isedai no kyōtō to danzetsu” [A revolution missing a color: Cross-generational joint-struggle and divides visible in the “Rainbow Mayor Election”], Rear, no. 41 (March 2018): 46–55.

CHAPTER 10

The Rise and Fall of Anti-Art Performance From Action to Activism

1.

FROM “PUBLIC DEMONSTRATION” TO “PUBLICITY” TO “AUTONOMOUS PERFORMANCE”

Part II of this book has been an attempt to rewrite the history of 1960s avant-garde art from the perspective of performance art. The following is a brief history of its major moments in order to set up several vantage points from which to understand the development of 1960s performance art. For young artists beginning their careers in the late 1950s, the most standard route to public recognition was to have their works accepted by juried exhibitions of major groups and prefecture-sponsored competitions—by the official art system as such. For those who rejected this trajectory, the only remaining possibilities were to exhibit at Independent (non-juried) exhibitions, rental galleries open to experimental works, and outdoors, at parks and other urban spaces. With no established reputation or personal connections to figures in the art world, these artists needed to find new ways to get their work noticed, to gain public recognition and critical acclaim. It was at the same in time, in the late 1950s, that the Informel whirlwind hit Japan. George Mathieu’s public painting demonstrations inspired Shinohara Ushio to come up with his own form of self-branding—the Mohawk hairdo and action painting—as a means of regaling the media not with his “artwork” but with an image of “the artist” himself. These publicity performances evolved into showy spectacles, in which he would appear with female models, and were ultimately succeeded by “body painting” and other types of performance in the late 1960s. The late 1950s to the mid-1960s also saw an increase in street actions by the likes of Kyūshū-ha, Neo Dada, Zero Jigen, and Jack Society, designed specifically to publicize the groups and their exhibitions. These included mobile exhibitions (Zero Jigen, Hamaguchi Tomiji, Kankō Geijutsu Kenkyū-jo [Sightseeing Art Research Institute], and Gar Gar) when artists carried their works around the streets; these street actions were initially simply designed to accompany their principal exhibitions. This evolution was taken a stage further with performances by groups like Zero Jigen, which started off as peripheral to exhibitions but became gradually integrated with the exhibitions. It is at this point in the evolution that performance (pafōmansu) as an independent expression, distinct from both the exhibition and the physical artwork, began to emerge. Artists like Chida Ui of Jack Society, inspired by Shinohara Ushio, would take this a step further, relying exclusively on performance for her own publicity, abandoning formal exhibitions and traditional art journals. This development was obviously made possible by the growing importance of popular media such as television and weekly magazines.

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FROM “INTERVENTION” TO “INDEPENDENCE” TO “DIFFUSION”

Not all performance art originated in this way. Some visual artists, for example, conducted performance as an “intervention” at pre-existing events—which could include theater, dance/butoh, music performances, film screenings (such as Ritual of Sa’in), live television broadcasts, and debates and political rallies (such as the opening ceremonies of Jiritsu Gakkō, May Day rallies, and student campus protests). These interventions were performed by leading Anti-Art artists who had participated in the Yomiuri Independent Exhibitions—Kazakura Shō and early Zero Jigen members (who intervened in theater performances), as well as Akasegawa Genpei, Kosugi Takehisa, and Tone Yasunao, who collectively intervened at rallies and film screenings. Former members of Hi-Red Center and Group Ongaku continued to perform interventions after the groups disbanded, and this was continued from the mid-1960s by the next generation of artists (e.g., Baramanji Kessha intervening in a pop music concert). Some artists also began hosting independent performance events outside of normal exhibition parameters and arranging their own venues. The earliest examples are Banquet Commemorating the Defeat in the War and Grand Assembly of Heroes, both in 1962, followed by Japan Super-Art Trade Fair in Nagoya in 1964, and Muse Week and Flux Week in 1965. These last two events included exhibitions of artworks and film screenings as well as performances. The application guidelines and organization of venues at Gifu Independent in 1965 and Sakai Independent in 1966 clearly show that performances were now officially incorporated as recognized artistic expressions. Performances could also be conducted independently, typically in outdoor spaces, and outside of the framework of exhibitions. Examples include performances by Unbeat, Hi-Red Center, Zero Jigen, and Kurohata. Hi-Red Center’s solo activities were short-lived, but Zero Jigen, with its extraordinary energy and incredible originality, remained active until the end of the 1960s, becoming the most (in)famous performance collective of the era. Works by these groups tended to be interventions in specific urban locations at specific times. Subsequently, between 1967–8, some visual artists began conducting solo and joint performances on stages (for example, solo performances by Zero Jigen and Koyama Tetsuo, joint performances by the Ritualists, and performances that prioritized spatial installations over the body, such as The Play’s Zone). From the late 1960s, meanwhile, Happenings (hapuningu) had largely come to denote a specific type of show-biz culture, losing much of their initial impact. Dismayed by this trend, artists began to focus on ways of overcoming the temporal and spatial constraints of Happenings. In Soft and Soft Life and Shinjuku Turbulence by En Gekijō, collective performances by Group Zero and Gar Gar (after 1967), and performances after 1969 by The Play, actions deliberately spread into wider urban spaces or vast natural environments. Ultimately, for hippie groups like Buzoku, the boundary itself between life and artistic action was gradually eroded; this tendency was also visible in the Taj Mahal Travellers, who developed musical performances that extended beyond the spatial and temporal frame of the concert.

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3.

FROM “INDIVIDUAL” TO “COLLECTIVE” TO “COLLECTIVE OF COLLECTIVES” TO “NETWORK”

As we saw in Kazakura Shō’s 1957 “stool Happening,” performance art began as an idea conceived and enacted by an individual artist. Between 1962 and 1964, former members of Neo Dada and Group Ongaku also performed primarily (and randomly) as individuals rather than as collectives. A transition from individual to collective performance emerges in the work of Unbeat, whose members enacted multiple individual performances simultaneously. But collective performances governed by an overall framework and common sets of rules began to appear in the early 1960s, as new avant-garde art groups were forming throughout Japan. The overall framework of Banquet Commemorating the Defeat in the War (1962), for example, was a group of participants dining together, during which time individual artists presented solo performances. For Muse Week (1965), the rules included performers wearing a black glove (whoever wore the glove became the performer, whether they were an artist or audience member), while actions had to be performed in designated time frames. Hi-Red Center’s Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropolitan Area (Cleaning Event, 1964) and Zero Jigen’s Nagoya events (1963–4) were directed or planned by a single member of the group, or with the whole group’s consensus. In the same vein, Kurohata’s theatrical performances from 1966 to 1967 were directed by Suzuki Shirō, with Matsue Kaku as lead actor performing solo “art gymnastics” routines. The Play, which gathered artists who had been holding performances in the Kansai area, often incorporated unified performances in addition to those by individual members. This combination of synchronized group work and individual actions continued up until 1969 with 7 Dimensions, staged on white fabric arranged in the shape of a cross. After Current of Contemporary Art (1969) and Sheep (1970), however, The Play focused on collaborations agreed in advance by the group and then performed anonymously, their performances gradually eradicating both individuality and corporeality. The move towards collective anonymity became increasingly apparent after 1967, seen in the uniform masks and costumes of Zero Jigen and Kokuin; Group I’s pursuit of the impersonal (hininshō) is an extreme example. The desire for anonymity was widely shared, not only as an artistic strategy, but also as a cultural concept. The utopian ideal of the commune, permitting the individual to dissolve into the group, can be identified in theatrical experiments by En Gekijō, Group Zero, and Kokuin. Transformations in the organizational structure of groups also reflected this tendency: by the late 1960s, there was a move amongst new generation groups toward collaborative relationships that valued cooperation and parity between members, in contrast to the type of privileged position of the director, exemplified by Katō of Zero Jigen. Various new forms of cooperation between collectives emerged in the late 1960s, an extension of the gradual progression from individual to group of individuals, to unified actions, and ultimately to anonymous collectives. Nationwide networking between individual artists became a feature of events that incorporated performances, such as Japan Super-Art Trade Fair (1964), Gifu Independent Exhibition (1965) and Sakai Independent (1966). Networking possibilities had already emerged with the Yomiuri Independent Exhibitions, which had functioned as a platform for artists from regional cities. But the

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development of mass media, improved transport systems, and the type of inter-regional publications such as those launched by Asai Masuo, followed by Kokuin. In this vein, Art 21 (magazine of All-Japan Contemporary Artists Council) that permitted groups and artists to communicate with one another further supported their development. Expo Destruction Group represents a confluence of the two major trends identified above: the movement toward anonymity, which erased individuality and stylistic variations between different artists and groups; and the movement toward collectives of different groups, and wider networking between collectives. Even after the disbanding of Expo Destruction Group in 1970, nationwide networking between the younger generation of artists and activists active in the counterculture of the times continued, evidenced in Suenaga Tamio’s “lifestyle revolution” and workshops. The network of artists engaged in language, writing and body-based art following the Nirvana exhibition led by Matsuzawa Yutaka, joined by Mizukami Jun, also marked a new form of artist alliance post-1970. At the same time, in the late 1960s, Itoi Kanji, Akiyama Yūtokutaishi and Koyama Tetsuo, who earlier had participated in these networks, returned to individual works. Itoi, who was instinctively the least predisposed to group activity, consistently lived and acted as an individual, whether at Expo ’70 or on the streets of Sendai, although he occasionally joined group actions to pay homage to other artists such as Zero Jigen and Kurohata. Even though very few people actually saw Itoi’s actions—which were never announced in advance—he was able to remain part of a national network of artists and left-wing activist groups by means of his mail art. On the other hand, Akiyama, also a solo performer, ran in the Tokyo gubernatorial election, a stage that gave him huge artistic exposure even in the megalopolis. Both artists adhered to the spirit of Anti-Art, but they chose radically different ways of engaging with the wider social context. 4.

FROM “EVENT” TO IBENTO

Numerous avant-garde art events took place at Sogetsu Art Center in the early 1960s, but many of these were instruction pieces—in which the artist produced an instruction either to be performed by themselves, or by members of the audience. Largely conducted by composers or musical performers, these works did not necessarily involve bodily actions and tended to be quiet conceptual experiments, visually unimposing and restrained. Led by artists such as Shiomi Mieko, who had been involved with Fluxus in the U.S., and Kosugi Takehisa, who returned to Japan after experiencing the American and European experimental music scenes, this type of work continued until the latter half of the 1960s. But by the mid-1960s, visual artists also began incorporating performances into their exhibitions—key examples being Insanity Trade Fair and Gifu and Sakai Independent. At events such as Muse Week, performance took precedence over exhibition. A further development in performance events, evident at Intermedia (1967), was the participation of not just visual artists but of filmmakers as well (of both the old and new generations). And although the Anti-Art artists active in the early 1960s were still around, from the late 1960s onward a new cohort of artists with no connection to Anti-Art began staging total “environments” using spectacular film projections, light,

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sound, motion, and architectural space. This trend towards film and sound attractions expanded exponentially at Expo ’70, driven by the growing popularity of “intermedia” (which was not object dependent), the advancement of film and audio technology, and corporate sponsorships. It divided artists into two camps, pro-Expo and anti-Expo, which each organized events independently of one another. Another kind of event—exemplified by Kobe Carnival—began to appear around the same time as Expo ’70, that also appealed to a new generation of artists. Often organized by government agencies and businesses, these events—forerunners of present-day āto ibento (art events)—were designed to encourage “civic engagement” and “international exchange,” but were largely just consumer-driven entertainment. There was no place here for political street demonstrations and guerrilla (or unauthorized) performance. Artists, musicians and political activists who condemned the veiled political “brainwashing” of Expo ’70, meanwhile, organized their own events. Key examples are the rock festival organized by Suenaga Tamio’s Peak and Festival of Humans and the Earth, organized by Yoshida Yoshie.1 These are the roots of today’s alternative (as opposed to government-sponsored) art events. 5.

NEW SOCIAL SPACES: THE STREET AND THE MASS MEDIA

High economic growth, and the radical urban renewal and jōka (purification and gentrification)2 projects carried out in preparation for the two major national events, the Olympics and the Expo ’70, brought home to artists the massive influence exerted on living spaces and lifestyles by state and capital. The realization impelled them to active resistance. The majority of performances in Tokyo in the early 1960s took place on the streets of Ueno and Ginza, home to large numbers of art museums and galleries. Their aim was to attract the attention of regular exhibitiongoers. By the latter half of the 1960s the stage had shifted to Shinjuku, the new center of a westward-expanding Tokyo, an entertainment and recreational hub for those who had relocated to Tokyo from other regions, and an international center of angura culture. No longer restricted to fine art environments, performances became a part of a broader cultural arena in which they could interact with other artistic genres. The popularization of performance art (hapuningu, as it was known at the time) went hand in hand with a growing uptake of television sets in homes, and the proliferation of weekly magazines. Both helped to overcome the physical limitations of onetime-only and site-specific performance. But as variety shows and television broadcasts began to use hapuningu to attract visitors and increase audience ratings, Happenings themselves came to be viewed as publicity stunts3 and many artists welcomed them as such. Some of these Happenings were actually prearranged by the producers. Scheduled into fashion shows and a staple feature in angura entertainments, hapuningu lost the impact they once had. After 1969, as every in-between space (sukima) of the city became regulated, controlled, and even closed off by the authorities, artists determined to shake free from every form of constraint began to relocate their performances to the natural environment, to

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vast spaces including mountains and beaches. This change overlapped with the efforts of the hippie movement to build new types of community and new ways of life. As a result, direct confrontation with the cultural institutions and political powers that dominated the city faded. 6.

BEYOND THE POLITICAL: TOWARD CULTURAL REFORMATION

One consequence of these trends was that the political edge of performances from the late 1950s to the early 1960s was largely lost, or at the very least, transformed. Just as Kazakura Shō’s “stool Happening” had emerged from his own reservations about the efficacy of routine left-wing theater, many performance artists of the Anti-Art generation became sympathetic to the New Left when it burst onto the stage as a key player in the 1960 Anpo Struggle, after breaking with the “Old Left” (dominated by the Japanese Communist Party). But there was still a divide between political and artistic action in the early 1960s, even though some artists, such as Sakurai Takami and Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, joined the struggles of labor unions. It was in this context that artists and activists within VAN and League of Criminals, and also Akasegawa Genpei began to make interventional anarchic actions—classifiable as neither strictly political nor strictly artistic—to bridge the gap between art and politics and challenge the stagnation of the post-Anpo period. Kurohata was one group that pushed the direct connection between its political and artistic action, and it remained staunch in its strong anti-American and anti-Vietnam War messaging. Soon after, Kokuin, whose members came from diverse backgrounds beyond art, including film, theater and manga, also became involved in political activism. The group aimed for the wholesale reform of culture by producing documentary films on the student struggles, publishing mini-komi4 zines, and, finally, forming Expo Destruction Group with Zero Jigen. But Kurohata lost its driving force following the departure of Matsue Kaku, whose uncompromisingly rebellious spirit brought him close to self-destruction. As a member of Expo Destruction Group, Kokuin committed itself more fully to the anti-Expo movement than Zero Jigen, but after the dissolution of Expo Destruction Group, it shifted focus to music events and workshops for the “revolution of lifestyle,” rather than performance. At the end of the 1960s, some activist artists and filmmakers shifted their hostility to target art and cultural systems themselves, as seen in the attack on Sogetsu Film Festival and campaigns against open-call competitions organized by the likes of Nissenbi (Japan Advertising Artists Club) and the Mainichi and Asahi newspapers. Collective Kumo made no effort to appeal to the public and took no part in angura culture, instead turning its rebellious energies to factional infighting (which it helped provoke) within the local art world. Eventually it conducted self-destructive actions that were designed to lead to arrests by the police. Conversely, the collective actions of En Gekijō and Group Zero strove for a more fluid, inclusive communalism among its membership and within its relationship to the audience, rejecting the anti-modernity and audience-baiting of angura performance. Yet, their aversion to politics meant that their works risked ending up as anodyne entertainment and officially approved “art.”

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Over the two decades from the 1950s to the 1970s, then, artists’ actions failed to attain the level of a social movement or to engage wider audiences on political and urban issues. They also failed to align with specific social issues, such as women’s liberation, discrimination against Korean and Chinese residents in Japan, and the environmental pollution. Nonetheless, some of the groups formed in the latter half of the 1960s did uphold, to a certain extent at least, the early 1960s legacy of anarchistic direct action and politico-cultural revolutionary convictions. These groups continued to oppose government-led “brainwashing,” conventional social relations, and advanced technology. The Play is a good example of a group that continued its activities well into the 1970s, while its work did not step beyond the bounds of art. 7.

ANTI-ART AND PERFORMANCE

In the final years of the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, a key characteristic of Anti-Art was the expansion, or penetration, of artwork into “real” space. There are three dimensions to this expansion: 1) Artists attempted to reveal the rawness of everyday life—its corporeality and vulgarity—often referencing Japan’s premodern culture and social mores (Kyūshū-ha and Itoi Kanji are good examples); 2) Artists took advantage of popular media to market themselves and attracted attention by making large works from everyday and inexpensive materials (e.g., Shinohara Ushio); 3) Artists used the objets (buttai) (e.g., Nakanishi Natsuyuki and Takamatsu Jirō) or the body (shintai) (e.g., Kosugi Takehisa and Kazakura Shō) as a means for the work of art to penetrate, permeate into the space of reality. These three trends belong within Miyakawa Atsushi’s definition of Anti-Art as the “descent into the vulgar everyday.”5 The second and third, in particular, directly led to performance art. The first trend is illustrated in the work of the late 1960s by Zero Jigen and Kurohata, Itoi Kanji, Koyama Tetsuo, and others, which engaged with the rawness of everyday life and drew from premodern Japanese performing arts. Around 1967, performances by these “Ritualists” reached their climax, fed by a thriving angura culture, particularly evident in theater and butoh, committed to anti-modern styles and the presence of the naked body. Another trend that emerged in the late 1960s was the erasure of traces of physical actions or gestures in artworks—examples are made-to-order FRP (fiber-reinforced polymer composites) or stainless-steel sculptures, works by Mono-ha that used largely unaltered natural materials, and conceptual works. In performance art, too, the exposure of bodies and physical movements became increasingly less important. Instead, we begin to see growing attention to the creation of total audiovisual “environments,” conceptual works based on the playful use of texts, symbols and images (photos and film), and collective art projects aiming to provoke “incidents.” The disappearance of the vulgar body—or what Kara Jūrō called “the privileged body”6—was in a sense the death of Anti-Art. But the popularization of Anti-Art in popular freak shows and its spread into youth culture were perhaps an inevitable part of its destiny, as the majority of Anti-Art artists themselves ultimately returned to the mainstream contemporary art world by resuming the creation of art objects.

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ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS AND GROUPS

Part III turns to the activities of individuals and groups that fit less easily into the chronologies established in part II, in the sense that their developments were independent from the overall progressions of postwar performance art. Specifically, the ensuing chapters will cover Kyūshū-ha, Asai Masuo, Zero Jigen, Kurohata, Koyama Tetsuo, Kokuin, Itoi Kanji, Collective Kumo, and female artists. I will clarify at the outset that the fact that an artist does not feature by name in part III does not mean that they played an insignificant role in the history of Anti-Art performance; however, the work and major performances of Neo Dada artists—such as Shinohara Ushio, Kazakura Shō, Akasegawa Genpei, and other Hi-Red Center artists—have already been discussed in part II, and have also been covered amply by existing publications. Joint performances by The Play from the period 1967–1970 were also discussed in part II. It is hard to categorize The Play as a performance group, considering its projects as well as its distance from Anti-Art after 1970; for this reason, it does not feature in part III. Mizukami Jun, one of the founding members of The Play, was one of the earliest artists to present ritual performances and he continued this work after he left the group. Current research, however, suggests that his very individual and idiosyncratic performance style did not follow the overall tendencies of Anti-Art. Kyūshū-ha, on the other hand, does feature in the discussion of part III, despite its being difficult to describe as a performance group. As touched on in part I and in greater detail in part IV, the group’s commitment to the fundamental tenets of Anti-Art around 1960 meant that its work in fact followed a similar trajectory to performance art. Notwithstanding that actions by Unbeat, which pioneered collective street performances, and Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, a Ritualist and member of Expo Destruction Group, both belong within Anti-Art performance, they are only briefly discussed in part II due to the current paucity of materials and research about them. Female performers active in Japan in the 1960s are similarly under-researched at present, although evidence suggests that their performances were not part of the Anti-Art movement. Their work nevertheless raises important questions not only for art history but for social history as well. Female artists from different generations and styles are therefore discussed in part III, in the hope of stimulating future research. Although part III is largely chronological, it also examines different movements as they emerged, in addition to developments within groups themselves, teasing out some common threads. For example, Kyūshū-ha and Asai Masuo were not exact contemporaries, but they shared a belief in regional social movements led by common people. While Kyūshū-ha was unable to abandon its commitment to “art” despite its political convictions, Asai’s philosophy of questioning “art” was certainly linked to the commune movement of the late 1960s—although as an individual he was comparatively powerless and isolated. And while neither Kyūshū-ha nor Asai succeeded in fully developing performance as a medium of artistic expression, they exemplified the struggles during the transitional period between the social movements of the 1950s and the new social and political conditions of the 1960s.

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Similarly, influenced by the leftist political movements of the 1950s, Kurohata saw its efforts to respond to the 1960s through folk entertainment and street theater end in its ultimate dissolution. Kokuin, on the other hand, responded to the new Zenkyōtō (student movement) era by seeking out communes and engaging in new cultural and political networks. Meanwhile, Zero Jigen and Koyama Tetsuo, whose performances explored the deep layers of Japanese body culture,7 were relatively untouched by the political concerns of Kurohata and Kokuin and, unlike other Ritualists, were alert to the need for media coverage. Even so, three out of the four groups/artists mentioned in this paragraph united to form Expo Destruction Group (Kurohata dropped out), despite their differing political attitudes. Itoi Kanji and Group Kumo did not participate in Expo Destruction Group, but they observed its activities from a distance. Itoi was perhaps the most independent of the artists discussed in part III and did not belong to any “movement,” but he nonetheless continued to deliver tributes to other performers (not only artists but all who expressed themselves through action), while embracing a radical form of anarchism. Collective Kumo remained even more “local” than Itoi; dismissive of the growing influence of avant-garde art and angura culture in Fukuoka and Tokyo, the group tried to expose the fundamental invalidity of these types of “art.” In a sense, both Itoi and Group Kumo used their work to critique the Anti-Art performance of the 1960s: while Itoi’s performances were delivered as tributes, Collective Kumo’s work was an act of mockery. NOTES 1.

Examples of such alternative events in 1972 are as follows: in February, Survival ’72: Open Free Seminar (Suenaga Tamio, Zero Jigen, Hare Krishna mission, Kanesaka Kenji, Children’s Citadel, Suwa Yū [translator of Beat poems], Ōe Masanori, Tanaka Mitsu of Gurūpu Tatakau onna [Group Fighting Women], Tōgō Ken [Gay activist]) in May; Earth Day ’72: A Day of Re-birth of the Earth (Suenaga Tamio, Zero Jigen); in August, The 3rd Festival of the Japan Sea: Thinking of the Provinces, at Fujimi-machi, Nagano (Suenaga Tamio and others); in September, ’72 Shura Festival on Ukishima Island, Chiba (planned by Ikeda

2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

Ichi [Shōichi], with participation by En Gekijō, Soejima Teruto [Jazz critic], Gulliver, Fujieda Shizuki [filmmaker], Shin-taidō group [group of spiritual martial arts]). See chapter 21. See section 1 of this chapter. Translator’s note: Many of the magazines and newsletters that were self-published by new cultural and political groups from the late 1960s to 70s were called mini-komi (communication) magazines. See chapter 3.3. See chapter 20.1. See chapter 20.5.

Kurohata in National Memorial Ritual for Yui Chūnoshin • December 1, 1967 • Shinjuku Station West Exit Plaza, Tokyo • (see p. 360)

PART III

TRAJECTORIES OF ANTI-ART PERFORMERS

CHAPTER 11

Kyūshū-ha The Folk in the City

1.

KYŪSHŪ-HA AND ANTI-ART

Kyūshū-ha, an avant-garde art group formed in Fukuoka City in 1957, was active in Fukuoka and Tokyo until around 1968. Kyūshū-ha was slightly preceded by Gutai (1954–72) and emerged under the influence of Art Informel. From its initial focus on painting, Kyūshū-ha shifted focus to objets, incorporating asphalt and other mediums redolent of everyday life. The use of everyday materials made Kyūshū-ha a pivotal proponent of the Anti-Art trend seen in the final years of the annual Yomiuri Independent Exhibition. By its peak in 1962, Kyūshū-ha members were also conducting experimental Happenings. Although they subsequently engaged in the creation of installations and other experiments, their opportunities for presenting work in Tokyo dwindled after the conclusion of the Yomiuri Independent in 1963, and Kyūshū-ha gradually dissolved. Highly influenced by the West and Tokyo, Kyūshū-ha left behind little truly original or innovative work over their decade of existence. Moreover, any performances held in their name were conducted sporadically by a mere handful of members. In retrospect, I think it can be said that they failed to develop a unique mode of expression with their performance art. As such, they may not seem to warrant treatment as an independent art movement in their own chapter of this book. Nonetheless, Kyūshū-ha is distinguished among their cohort of contemporaries with Anti-Art tendencies by virtue of their conscious and variegated “descent to the vulgar everyday,” along with a certain politicism which cannot be extrapolated from their art-historical styles and methodologies alone. Even if their movement ended as a study in trial-and-error, Kyūshū-ha deserves recognition for their contributions toward an unabashedly raw form of self-promotion, encouraging the connection between art and everyday life, and spurring viewer engagement and intervention in society, thus leading the way toward “performance.” As a caveat, the actual issues problematized by Kyūshū-ha were far more complex than those raised by their contemporaries in Tokyo and in the farther-flung regions of Japan. For the purposes of this chapter, I have endeavored to focus only on those issues that pertain to our themes of Anti-Art and performance.1 Writing in the catalogue accompanying the Kyūshū-ha retrospective held at the Fukuoka Art Museum in 1988, Hariu Ichirō offered the following observation of Kyūshūha in relation to other avant-garde groups of the era: Of this milieu, the Kyūshū-ha from Fukuoka exuded an energy erupting like hot magma from some deep strata, with an intensity not quite matched by other groups. Many reasons for this come to mind: first, their stance that from the outset was not looking toward the center [Tokyo] or overseas [for recognition], but rather emphasized their traits as Kyūshūites as they threw down the gauntlet to Tokyo; second, their rejection of Modernism and attempts to unite artistic and social revolution; third, the non-hierarchical nature that made their members a ragtag nebula of brilliant personalities roiling in constant, collective motion.2

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In a nutshell, here Hariu identifies the defining characteristics of Kyūshū-ha as their: 1) strategic localism vis-à-vis Tokyo as the center; 2) synthesis of the political vanguard and artistic avant-garde as an anti-Modernism; and 3) anti-authoritarian, democratic organization. However, these points can only be understood within the context of the sociopolitical climate informing Kyūshū-ha’s activities in the decade from 1957, a period of profound social upheaval in Japan and a discussion I will save for part IV. To elaborate on the second trait as it relates to Anti-Art, I quote Kikuhata Mokuma: “Precisely because Kyūshū-ha was sustained by the crude art of the impoverished farmer who pioneered new frontiers […] we did not have to capitulate to the international vanguard, unlike Osaka’s Gutai, which readily ceded the keys to their castle.”3 As evinced by the deliberate comparison with Gutai, Kyūshū-ha’s works—or rather their activities as a whole—were diametrically opposed to Gutai’s thorough sanitization of the traces of “everyday life” as they ignored the “political” and “social.” Such a predilection for mass movements and the mundane is also difficult to locate in what could be called the Anti-Art mainstream in Tokyo, encompassing elite groups such as Neo Dada and Hi-Red Center. The same applies to other groups in Tokyo, Kansai, Nagoya, and elsewhere. Particularly in the latter half of the 1960s, regional groups also became increasingly self-sufficient within their given systems and the approaches of “avant-garde art.” By contrast, Kyūshū-ha did not fit tidily within the paradigm of “art”; what distinguished them was their amateur’s audacity and boldness, their thirst for cultural movements born from fraternization with labor unions and poets, and their sympathy for the laborers in the Miike Coal Mine dispute, close to home in Fukuoka Prefecture. From these sources flowed the “primal energy” (to borrow the Tanigawa Gan phrase4) of the common people, before the old Japanese lifestyle was irrevocably altered by the tidal waves of urbanization and internationalization. 2.

EARLY PERIOD: PAINTING (1957–59)

Kyūshū-ha was formed by painters who exhibited at non-Nitten salon exhibition societies such as Nika-kai (Nika Association), Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyōkai (Independent Art Association, and Jiyū Bijutsu Kyōkai (Free Art Association), or who attracted attention at open-competition exhibitions including the Fukuoka Prefecture Art Exhibition and the Nishinippon (Western Japan) Art Exhibition. Prior to the group’s founding, the core members had all participated in Persona, an outdoor exhibition in the Fukuoka city center organized jointly by painters and poets in November  1956. They were Sakurai Takami (1928–2016), Matano Mamoru (1914–1989), Ochi Osamu (1936–2015), Ishibashi Yasuyuki (1930–2001), and Kuroki Yōji (1927–2019). In 1953, Kuroki together with fellow young Nika exhibitors Terada Ken’ichirō (1931–1985) and Yonekura Toku (1929–2008) opened a shared studio dubbed “Blue House” (Ao no Ie) in the Tenjin district in downtown Fukuoka. Blue House became a place for socializing with artists affiliated with other exhibition societies, including Kinoshita Shin (1929–2001) and Kikuhata Mokuma (1935–2020) who exhibited in Dokuritsu Exhibition. The first from this cohort to foray into Tokyo were Sakurai, Matano, and Ochi, who participated in the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition in March 1957. In the same month, Sakurai and the Nika Association

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helped bring Art of Today’s World (Sekai konnichi no bijutsu, Éxposition international de l’art actuel)—the exhibition that caused Tokyo to be swept up in the “Informel whirlwind”—to Fukuoka, where it made an indelible impact on the young artists. These events added to the momentum of the circle of like-minded young artists that coalesced around Sakurai and Matano. Familiar faces from Blue House were joined by Obata Hidesuke (1930–2014), Obana Shigeharu (1926–2016), Owari Takeshi (b. 1936), Tabe Mitsuko (b. 1933), Chō Yoriko (unknown), Yagara Yutaka (1932–1994), and Yamauchi Jūtarō (1929–2009), heralding the official start of Kyūshū-ha with the 18 Artists of Group Q exhibition in August 1957. The most famous photograph of Kyūshū-ha was taken at a street parade (plate 1, p. 3) in downtown Fukuoka that proceeded from Tenjin to the Nakasu district in conjunction with an outdoor exhibition held in November of that year. The name “Group Q” that can be seen crowning the parade banner was an alternative name for the group.5 That a group of artists who resided in Fukuoka Prefecture—merely one of seven prefectures on the island of Kyūshū—would co-opt the name Kyūshū suggests a conscious appeal to the region’s aggregate otherness when viewed from Tokyo. They made their difference from Tokyo their calling card, as evinced by the pamphlet text for Kyūshū-ha san’nin-ten (Three Artists of Kyūshū-ha), their first group exhibition held in Tokyo in February 1958, in which Matano writes, “Above all, I would like Tokyo to take note of our group’s rejection of conventional formalism and desire to hammer a new view of humanity into painting.” In this statement, we can also see the group’s interest in a “new view of humanity” and an anti-formalism that was an important lodestar for their early work. Yet from the outset, Kyūshū-ha surpassed the figurative/illustrative work of Socialist Realism;6 even the somewhat figurative paintings of Sakurai and Yamauchi expressed the plight of the oppressed with an immediacy wrought by the objets and matière of Informel. An archetypal example is Sakurai’s Lynching (1958, collection of the Fukuoka Art Museum), realized with asphalt and scrap waste. Presumably, this is what critics were describing when they used phrases such as “tormented self-flagellation”7 and “masochistic”8 in contemporary reviews of this early work. Asphalt was an idiosyncratic, even emblematic material, synonymous with Kyūshū-ha’s paintings of this period (as well as some objets from their middle period). At the time of Kyūshū-ha’s launch in the late 1950s, Fukuoka’s roads were just beginning to be paved as part of an ambitious city- and prefecture-wide road-improvement project. As Kikuhata Mokuma would later recall, “Back in those days there was still hardly any paving in Fukuoka, the roads were a rough muddy mess.”9 Asphalt was a physical symbol of urbanization that lent itself to more than just paving. Also used widely for waterproofing at the time, the material would have been cheaply available at building supply shops. As asphalt did not require much technical skill to use, it was suited for quickly finishing large-scale works.10 Ochi Osamu was the first 11 to incorporate the material that would subsequently be used by many of the group’s members. Among Kyūshū-ha’s extant works, asphalt features most prominently in a painting by Obana Shigeharu12 [fig. 118] that depicts the soot-blackened face of a miner, demonstrating how the aforementioned interest in a “view of humanity” is also latent in these asphalt works. Asphalt has manifold implications: it represents the transition from the dirt roads of farming villages to the paved roads of the city; it is a material obtained by refining oil, a symbol of modernity; it is moreover a material that symbolizes the Miike Struggle, sparked amid the

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 118. Obana Shigeharu, Self Portrait • c. 1958–59

shift from coal to oil energy, its glistening hot black materiality capable of representing the coal, the blackened miner’s face, and the energy of the downtrodden masses. It was the consummate material for manifesting the Kyūshū-ha ethos: “to elevate the energized stuff of the lowly masses, through our own alchemy, to the status of painting royalty.”13 Alongside the asphalt Informel-esque paintings, the group was also already engaged in other experimentation that would carry over into their middle phase. For example, Ishibashi Yasuyuki’s paintings on mushiro straw mats and Ochi Osamu’s tiny paintings affixed to sudare bamboo blinds did not merely add objets to a painting’s surface; they conversely replaced the base materials (e.g., canvas, board) of painting with something evocative of everyday Japanese life. Experiments in this vein led to the creation of Ochi’s first objet work, executed using a paper lantern, which was shown at Three Artists of Kyūshū-ha and the 1st Kyūshū Independent in 1958.14 Collaboration was another important facet of Kyūshū-ha’s paintings in this period. A collaborative work they attempted to submit to the 1958 Yomiuri Independent— made out of garbage from the group’s Momochi Beach house studio wrapped in straw mats15—intertwined the quotidian and the communal in an experiment that exuded the fearless anarchism that was characteristic of the era. But it was Torn-Apart Individuality (Hikisakareta kosei) that was ultimately presented at the 1958 Yomiuri, a more calculated experiment that sought to transcend the “individuality” of each single artist. Attri­ buted in the exhibition catalogue to “Matano and fifteen others,” the work was actually created by five artists (perhaps they wanted to convey the group had sixteen members who worked in the studio), who each painted a two-section panel that they broke in half and reassembled with the panels of the other artists.16 During this productive period, the group was also at its most active as a movement (undō): they began publishing a journal, held meetings for open debate and to critique each other’s work at various venues including Nōmin Kaikan (Farmers’ Hall), protested the Fukuoka Prefecture Art Exhibition, and organized two Kyūshū Independents. However, Sakurai’s calls to expand the group’s membership in the style of a “united people’s front” met resistance from Kikuhata and other members who argued for adopting the “guerilla tactics of the elite few,”17 and Terada was forced out for continuing to show his work at an open-call exhibition by Nika. This turn of events opened a rift that led to the departure of core members Ochi, Kikuhata, and Yamauchi, who subsequently formed Dōkutsu-ha (Cave School)18 in late 1959, marking an end to the unusual elation and idyllic collectivism that had characterized Kyūshū-ha’s early period. The exodus continued

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in November of that year, when modernists including Surusumi Seiryō (1925–2001) and Saitō Hidesaburō (b. 1922) split to form Group Nishi-nihon, setting the stage for Kyūshūha’s middle period marked by growing anti-modernist leanings. 3.

MIDDLE PERIOD 1: OBJETS (1960–61)

Kyūshū-ha entered a new period as its ranks were replenished with the arrival of Ōguro Aiko (1937–1995), Ōyama Uichi (1922–2000), Taniguchi Toshio (b. 1932), Hataraki Tadashi (1934–1996), and Miyazaki Junnosuke (1930–1989), who would all become central figures in the latter half of the group’s existence. In terms of artwork, this new period was defined by its objets, building on the aforementioned pioneering experiments of Ochi Osamu, who rejoined the group following the Dōkutsu-ha’s dissolution. In May 1960, he presented Chap with a Protruding Navel (Deppari Taishō), mangled shopping basket objets covered in asphalt. In April 1961, Ochi was invited along with Kikuhata Mokuma to participate in Experiments in Contemporary Art at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, presenting objets made with mannequin wigs. At that September’s Kyūshū-ha exhibition, he contributed perhaps his most iconic objets, consisting of cigarette butts glued to the inside walls of glass showcases. This was followed by Deguchi Nashi (No Exit), minimalistic box objets shown at Yomiuri Independent in 1962. These ominous, menacing works constituted a sharp break from the early Kyūshū-ha works that were rather blusterous in size. From 1961 on, other Kyūshū-ha artists also began to incorporate more objets into their work. Ōguro, Taniguchi, Tabe, and Miyazaki created works comprised of multiple identical objets pasted onto surfaces, recombinant three-dimensional assemblages, and iterative installations that expressed human energy as a collective social or biological “flock.” In quintessential Kyūshū-ha fashion, these works featured a conspicuous use of material evocative of day-to-day Japanese life. From the early to middle period, Ochi enlisted culturally coded, everyday items found in the average Japanese home such as sudare blinds, paper lanterns, sliding screens, stands for Hakata dolls19 and shopping baskets—including those related to the domestic labor performed by women—violently deforming and coating them in tar-black asphalt in an unblinking examination of the fate of those who could not escape from impoverished daily life. Perhaps we can locate in his work a pent-up anger and hopeless despair that darkened the homes of lower-class laborers and the common masses untouched by modernity. Ōguro’s dishware and Taniguchi’s rice paddles and woks limn the kitchen; Tabe’s Jinkō taiban (Artificial Placenta, 1961), which has enjoyed reappraisal as a trailblazing Feminist work in Japanese avant-garde art, might also be contextualized within this theme of domesticity.20 Artificial Placenta and other objets made during this middle period are indicative of the group’s growing anti-modernist attention to an indigenous folk ethos. This was taken to an extreme by Kikuhata upon his brief return to Kyūshū-ha after his stint with Dōkutsu-ha. Two works presented in 1961—Slave Genealogy (By Coins) (Dorei keizu (kahei ni yoru)) at the National Museum of Modern Art show, and an altar-esque work at the Kyūshū-ha exhibition at Tokyo’s Ginza Gallery—were remarkable not only within the Kyūshū-ha’s oeuvre, but within the entire era of art, for their direct depiction of occult

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fetishism in premodern society. This direction was pursued to increasingly grotesque effect, as in Ishibashi’s bottle objets that evoked biological specimens (1961), Ōyama’s tower made of junk waste (1962), and Hataraki’s urinal (1963). 4.

MIDDLE PERIOD 2: HAPPENINGS AND INSTALLATIONS (1962–64)

Although the 1961 Kyūshū-ha exhibition capped the end of the objet period with ample ambitious and substantial work, organizational and conceptual crisis ensued. The exhibition was Kikuhata’s last with Kyūshū-ha; he completely broke with the group and embarked on an independent career as a popular artist with a solo show at the Minami Gallery in 1962. The suspension of the Yomiuri Independent following the 1963 edition was another development that cannot be ignored. As discussed in part II, the suspension dispersed the unbridled energy of young artists across Japan in search of new avenues for presentation and recognition at regional Independent exhibitions and national artists’ organizations, but Ōyama Uichi was the only member to participate in regional Independents. Kyūshū-ha did not revive the Kyūshū Independent in Fukuoka of their early days and only rarely collaborated with the other regional collectives that were cropping up nationwide.21 Their activities instead centered on group exhibitions in Tokyo and Fukuoka, as well as their individual members’ solo shows at the Naiqua and other galleries in Tokyo. Isolated from the nationwide network of artists and concentrated in Fukuoka, without a sympathetic advocate availed of a mass media microphone like those based in Tokyo, they unsuccessfully struggled to garner support from audiences22 and their aspirations toward a movement fizzled out. A notable stylistic feature of this period was a move toward “venue art” (kaijō geijutsu)—essentially, installations. Obana Shigeharu led the way with an exhibition23 conducted in his home circa August  1962; Ōyama Uichi, Taniguchi Toshio, and Hataraki Tadashi also embraced the installation format for their solo exhibitions in 1964. As the conventional group exhibition format was inherently inconducive to such installations, this shift toward venue art was possibly a factor that weakened Kyūshū-ha’s cohesion as a collective. An attempt to transcend the static viewing of art, these installations were also in line with Sakurai’s notion of a “commanding art” that compelled viewer participation in the work.24 An important outgrowth of this period was the group’s experimentation with Happenings, which embodied a more conscious, strategic approach than their earlier demonstrations (such as the 1957 parade). Moves to meld installation and performance climaxed at Momochi Beach in November 1962 with A Grand Assembly of Heroes (Eiyūtachi no daishūkai). As discussed in part II (chap. 6.13, p. 157), the event was one of the earliest in Japan organized by artists with a primary focus on performance, rather than the exhibition of work. From a collaboration led by Sakurai Takami with Chō Yoriko and Baba Takehisa to an experiment in viewer-participation by Tabe Mitsuko, the ritualistic action of Obata Hidesuke, and an exercise in hole-digging by Miyazaki Junnosuke that was even more lonesome and futile than the collective act of hole-digging by of Group I at Gifu Independent, Grand Assembly should be recognized as an attempt to overcome their past objet-based works. Following the event, however, none of the artists managed to further develop their performance practice.

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 119. Hataraki Tadashi performs at the Kyūshū-ha Exhibition • December 1963 • Shinten Kaikan, Fukuoka

Of all the Kyūshū-ha artists, Hataraki Tadashi went to the greatest lengths to intellectualize Happenings [fig. 119]. However, his calls to “stake everything on the encounter between art and antisocial incidents,”25 and to take action to transcend the institutional art system, failed to elicit support. Although the June 1962 performance by Hataraki (p. 150) was the most happening of any Happenings conducted by a Kyūshū-ha member in an urban space and could even be considered one of the earliest in Japan, it was ultimately a failure; its overly conceptual bent was further complicated by Hataraki’s unfamiliarity with performance, and he was detained by the police before he could provoke the general public as hoped. In March 1965, Sakurai quit his job at the Nishinippon Shimbun upon the resolution of a long labor dispute at the company and left for the U.S. With his departure, Kyūshū-ha entered their next period. 5.

LATE PERIOD (1965–68)

Without a platform to present their work in Tokyo apart from sporadic solo shows, Kyūshū-ha became an even more local group. The final Kyūshū-ha exhibition in 1965 featured many large-scale works that made use of the spacious Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall, which had opened only a year prior. At the same time, there were a conspicuous number of works with popular themes and an impersonal style that verged on Pop Art. Although this exhibition was a high-water mark for the group in terms of technical execution, it showed signs that they had begun to lose the brilliant energy of the painting phase, the objet phase’s defiant and folk qualities, and also their knack for audience involvement. Sakurai returned to Japan in October 1967, in time to participate in what would effectively be Kyūshū-ha’s last exhibition as a cohesive group: Possibilities of Art through Artist Collectives (Gurūpu rengō ni yoru geijutsu no kanōsei-ten), held in May 1968. The exhibition’s theme, “Sex Museum,” was proposed by Obata Hidesuke. In response, Miyazaki Junnosuke invited other artists to modify his work in a collaborative project that manifests how the group endeavored to explore the necessity of the collective until the last. The last collective performance of Kyūshū-ha was by a contingent that included Sakurai Takami, Taniguchi Toshio, Tabe Mitsuko and Yonekura Toku, which performed at the RKB (RKB Mainichi Broadcasting) TV studios in February  1968, but Sakurai’s

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concept for the performance—smashing a plaster Venus de Milo with a hammer—was nothing short of uninspired. The program seems to have been orchestrated for the sake of educating the public on “avant-garde art,” with commentary provided by art critic Kishida Tsutomu. Around this time, the member most enthusiastic about performance was Tabe, who had also made an appearance on the same TV program (pp. 387–8). In May 1969, Sakurai participated in the Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally (Banpaku hakai kyūshū taikai). Although the name “Kyūshū-ha” was used on rally flyers and signboards, the names of Obana Shigeharu and Hataraki Tadashi were listed separately (Tabe also participated to shoot a documentary film), suggesting that “Kyūshū-ha” here effectively referred only to Sakurai.26 In 1970, Sakurai, joined by Ochi, participated in Kyūshū Renaissance: Grand Festival of Heroes (Kyūshū runessansu: Eiyūtachi no daisai­ ten, see chap. 9.7, pp. 264–5), performing in a ritual used in the Zero Jigen film Inaba no Shiro Usagi (The White Hare of Inaba). But by this point, it seems fair to say the Kyūshūha had already ceased to exist. 6.

THE AVANT-GARDE IN TRANSITION: FARM FOLK AND URBAN MASSES

As our quick sprint back through Kyūshū-ha’s history has illustrated, their trajectory was anything but smooth and cohesive; on the contrary, their almost naïve ambition to earnestly live out myriad contradictions precipitated a series of membership schisms, strategical pivots, unrealized ideas and half-baked experiments. However, when we take stock of the full breadth of their trajectory, their optimistic energy and ceaseless self-critique, I think we must acknowledge that Kyūshū-ha was an important group, both from a cultural viewpoint encompassing the sociopolitical context of their time, as well as within the context of the history of performance that I have attempted to lay out in this book. One reason Kyūshū-ha cannot be shoehorned squarely into the framework of art history is their intimate entanglement with their place in time. As I will detail in part IV, the late 1950s ushered in an era of great social change that washed across Japan, touching every aspect of lifestyles led in every corner of the nation. Fukuoka was no exception, and the waves of social tumult would have been lapping palpably at Kyūshū-ha’s own shores. After all, Kyūshū-ha was most active in the midst of landmark labor struggles at two powerful corporations in their homebase of Fukuoka, where some of the members worked. In 1957, the same year the group was founded, both Yagara Yutaka and Tabe Mi­ tsuko were employed full-time at Iwataya Department Store, and Kikuhata Mokuma did part-time work for the rakuyaki ceramic shop at the same store, which became involved in a labor dispute considered to be the largest in the history of all Japanese department stores. In 1964, a prolonged six-month labor dispute embroiled the Nishi­nippon ­Shimbun, the newspaper where both Sakurai Takami and Matano Mamoru worked. Sakurai, a committed union member, only left for the U.S. after the union secured victory in the dispute. Without Sakurai’s dream of empowerment through collective action27 and his faculties for agitation and organization, Kyūshū-ha would undoubtedly have been indistinguishable from the other run-of-the-mill artist groups of the time. The extent of the union’s impact on the group was encapsulated by Tabe, when she said,

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“There was pressure that if we shifted to the secondary union [which was more willing to compromise with the company than the original militant union], we would be struck from Kyūshū-ha’s roster.”28 1960, one of the peak years of Kyūshū-ha, also coincided with the labor dispute at the Miike Coal Mine. Located in Ōmuta, an hour’s train ride from Fukuoka City, the Mitsui-Miike Coal Mine had helped drive the nation’s modern industrial development. However, mass layoffs precipitated by the energy revolution’s transition from coal to oil led to the Miike Struggle, an all-out standoff pitting “total capital versus total labor.” Together with the Anpo protests against the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty that same year, the Miike labor dispute was a shocking watershed moment at a liminal crossroads for postwar Japan. The impassioned struggle of the Miike coal miners struck a chord with many of the Kyūshū-ha members,29 even those who were not directly involved in union activities or who otherwise created apolitical work. To understand Kyūshū-ha’s working-class consciousness, it is also important to note that few members received formal art training.30 Fukuoka did not yet have any art universities or specialized trade schools like those in Tokyo and Kyoto. The handful of members who studied art did so under the auspices of teacher training programs and design departments; the other members who went to university all pursued more practical fields of study. Notably, some members—including core members Ochi and Kikuhata— entered the workforce immediately after graduating from junior high or high school; they were either self-taught or learned to paint from workplace hobby groups and local Fukuoka artists who exhibited on the open-call art society circuit. Precisely because Kyūshū-ha’s members were amateurs without substantive formal training, their work had a pronounced “marginal art” quality. Thus, while they lacked technical flair in the development of their work, perhaps this amateurism is why they were able to harness everyday materials in the creation of such unconventionally free-thinking work, instead of moving toward formal experimentation removed from their own lifestyles. The connection between this awakening to labor consciousness and amateur cultural movements echoes Circle Village (Sākuru mura), a movement that emerged in Fukuoka in parallel with Kyūshū-ha’s most active period. In addition to being an organized labor movement, Circle Village—named after the eponymous poetry journal (195861) published by a group including Ueno Eishin, Morisaki Kazue and nationally-known poet-critic Tanigawa Gan—could also be seen as an attempt to empower women, workers, and ordinary people by encouraging them to express themselves through the power of the word.31 As I discuss in part IV, such activities aligned with the late 1950s zeitgeist that produced the New Left movement as an alternative to the centralized leftist political establishment, which played a critical role in the Anpo protests in 1960. Kyūshū-ha’s local endeavors can also be located within this larger narrative, where the failed Anpo protests fomented an anarchism that would in turn set the stage for performance intersecting with culture and politics. Recalling Hariu Ichirō’s words at the beginning of this chapter, as a movement, Kyūshū-ha needed to aspire to both an artistic revolution and a lifestyle revolution with sociopolitical implications. In practice, however, the extent of their “movement” was limited to seeking more forums for the exhibition of “avant-garde art” and growing their artist community. Kyūshū-ha’s democratic, non-hierarchical membership; mutual

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critique; publication of a journal; eagerness to expand their group; embrace of critics; organization of their own Independent exhibitions; attempt at resurrection with Grand Assembly of Heroes; performances in urban spaces; collaborative creation of work; and viewer-participation are all indicative of their oscillation between two goals: an ambition to appeal to the art world through radical experimentation and a desire to create a cultural movement that would marshal the masses. Ultimately, Kyūshū-ha’s inchoate movement fell short of raising the profile of avant-garde art in Fukuoka or catalyzing any measurable social change. Their shortcomings notwithstanding, we must judge the Kyūshū-ha members within the context of their time and place in history, lest we condemn them ex post facto. In the wake of Anpo and Miike, Kyūshū-ha’s lionized masses were mollified by the “Affluent Society” of the 1960s economic boom, and their former energy was subsumed by hedonistic consumption. In response, Sakurai Takami was alarmed by the commodification of art,32 and an essay by Hataraki Tadashi revealed the old guard’s frustration with the tastes of urban youths and the public’s desire for “domestic bliss.”33 Tanigawa Gan argued the disjunction between the image of the idealized masses (taishū) and the reality of masses transformed in the march of time could be seen even before the start of the economic boom, in the synchronous disparities between Anpo and Miike: There was an essential difference in the energy of these two protests. The Miike Struggle managed to storm the stronghold of pseudo-populism with its feverish energy of negation. By contrast, the cool repudiating energy of the Anpo Struggle failed to break through its rampart walls. The Miike Struggle unleashed an anarchistic energy, buttressed by the reflexive spirit of communal republicanism of the miner-as-productive-soldier; in the Anpo Struggle, the response of the urban dwellers in the capital was merely a mass discharging [of energy] without [a sense of association with any particular] social class. In short: one was anarchism, the other was nihilism.34

Kyūshū-ha earned an important place in the annals of Anti-Art performance for its middle period experiments with performance and for its brand of popular anarchism. When Sakurai refers to the “vulgar masses,” he invokes not the reality of an urban horde steadily being tamed and subjugated by the modern social institutions of Japan’s period of rapid economic growth, but rather the miners and farmers (including Zainichi Koreans and other discriminated groups) who appear in the writings of poet-critic Tanigawa Gan, the downtrodden masses as a fictional/fantastical ideal, brimming with primal energy and the will to resist—the common people (minshū). The “descent into the vulgar everyday” within the Anti-Art of Kyūshū-ha not only sought to drag art down to the level of everyday life, but dreamed of overthrowing the entire cultural construct from the position of a “common people” situated on the lowest rung of society—in the nether regions to be explored in part IV—and in this regard was an all-important origin point for the development of Anti-Art performance.

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NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

For a more detailed overview of Kyūshū-ha, see Kuroda Raiji, “Isetsu: Bijutsu undō to shite no Kyūshū-ha, kyōsei suru seisaku­shatachi” [An alternative story: Kyūshū-ha as an art movement, creators in a commune], in Kyūshū-ha ten: Hangeijutsu purojekuto [Group Kyūshū-ha: Anti-Art Project], exh. cat. (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1988), 14–23; revised edition reprinted in Kyūhsū-ha taizen (Fukuokashi bijutsukan sōsho 6) [Kyūshūha encyclopedia], eds. Yamaguchi Yōzō and Kurokawa Noriyuki (Fukuoka: Fukuoka City Foundation for Arts and Cultural Promotion, 2016). For an English adaptation, see Kuroda Raiji, ed./trans. Tomii Reiko, “Kyūshū-ha as a Movement: Descending to the Undersides of Art” (1988, revised in 2005); “Appendix: An Overview of Kyūshū–ha” (2005), Josai University’s Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Special Issue “1960s Japan: Art Outside the Box”, vol. 17 (December 2005): 12–35; 36–50.. Hariu Ichirō, “Kyūshū-ha tenmatsuki” [Kyūshū-ha: The Full Story], in Kyūshū-ha ten, 6. Kikuhata Mokuma, “Rekishika sareru ‘Kyūshū-ha’” [Kyūshū-ha historicized], Kikuhata Mokuma chosakushū 2: Sengo bijutsu to hangeijutsu [Writings of Kikuhata Mokuma, vol. 2: Postwar art and Anti-Art] (Fukuoka: Kaichōsha, 1993), 104. “The only way to descend is one step at a time. No leap was ever subjective. Down, down, to the very root, where the darkness fills the depths, there you’ll find the mother of all creation. The origin of all existence. Primal energy.” Tanigawa Gan, “Genten ga sonzai suru” [The zero point exists], Boin [Vowels], no. 18 (May 1954); reprinted in Genten ga sonzai suru [The origin exists] (Tokyo: Ushio Shuppansha, 1976), 13. See Matano Mamoru, “Kōki” [Postscript], in Kyūshū-ha, no. 1 (September 1957); Tabe Mitsuko, “Uzō muzō no honne” [True feelings of all forms], in I Discover Jesus Christ Is a Woman, (Fukuoka: Tōka Shobō, 1987), 72. Tabe said she proposed the letter “Q” because it had “the most interesting shape of all the letters in the alphabet,” in a phone interview with the author, May 2005. However, Yamauchi Jūtarō said that Surusumi Seiryō was responsible for the name. See Yamauchi, “Dare de mo shirita­ gatteiru kuse ni chotto kikinikui Kyūshū-ha

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

tanjō hiwa” [Everything you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask about the birth of the Kyūshū-ha], transcript of 18th IAF Lecture at Fukuoka Airefu, February 21, 1997. See Kyūshū-ha taizen, 267. Even work such as Sakurai Takami’s early semi-abstract attempts in social commentary and Matano Mamoru’s Sugō Jiken [Sugō Incident] (1958), now in the collection of the Fukuoka Art Museum, retain a sense of realism, even within their modernist style. Kishida Tsutomu, “Gaitō ni deta ‘bijutsu no aki’” [Fall art season goes to the streets], Nishi­ nippon Shimbun, November 3, 1956. “There are undercurrents of something akin to masochism…but the showing off of one’s wounds for sympathy is more domineering.” Nakahara Yūsuke, “Tenrankai senpyō” [Exhibition reviews], Bijutsu techо̄ , no. 173 (May 1960), 156. Kikuhata Mokuma, “Hangeijutsu kidan” [Anti-Art tales], reprinted in Writings of Kikuhata Mokuma, vol. 2, 135. Yamauchi Jūtarō’s Tōyō [The Orient] is one example of a large-scale work that incorporated asphalt. Although the 6x8 meter work was shipped to the 1958 Yomiuri Independent, it was ultimately not displayed, as it could not be stretched onto a wood frame. Yamauchi, interview with the author, June 9, 2005. Ochi first realized asphalt’s potential as a medium while working at a printing company (Seihan, which later became Toppan), where acid-resistant asphalt was used to coat the interior surface of pallets used to wash offset-lithography plates used in the H.B. wet plate color printing process. Ochi Osamu, in Group Kyūshū-ha, 134. See also remarks by Yamauchi and Ōkuma Masayuki (Toppan Printing Co.), “Everything you always wanted to know,” Kyūshū-ha Taizen: 269–270. According to Obana, a pair of glasses were originally attached to the painting to accentuate the miner’s face. See Obana Shigeharu’s remarks in “Everything you always wanted to know,” Kyūshū-ha Taizen: 277. Sakurai Takami, “Han gaimen sengen joron” [Introduction: Anti-appearances proclamation], Kiroku to geijutsu, no. 5 (August 1962): 43. Reportedly “painted on a paper lantern,” in “Bikkuri tettei shita zen’ei buri” [Golly! Now

312

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

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that’s truly avant-garde!], Nishinippon Shimbun, April 22, 1958, 7. Mushiro, Mushiro was attributed as a “Kyūshūha joint work, Yamauchi, Ochi, Ishibashi” in the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition Catalogue. “We each put together two pieces of plywood and made a painting. Then we drew straws and split each of our paintings in two, randomly reassembling them into a single, enormous work.” Sakurai Takami, “‘Eiyū-tachi no daishūkai’ no hōkoku oyobi 1964-nendo ‘Eiyū-tachi no daishūkai’ no teian” [Report on the Grand Assembly of Heroes and a proposal of the Grand Assembly in FY1964], Kyūshūha, no. 7 (October 1963): 5. An entry form on the back of Matano Mamoru’s An Image of Betrayal (Uragiri no imēji, 1958), now in the collection of Fukuoka Art Museum, indicates it was part of Torn-Apart Individuality. Kikuhata Mokuma, “Hangeijutsu kidan,” 32–33. The extent of the short-lived Dōkutsu-ha’s activities was a single group show held in the Ginza Gallery from May to June 1960, after which point Ochi and Kikuhata returned to Kyūshū-ha. Made by Ochi’s mother. Sakurai Takami, “Kyūshū-ha no kigen Ochi Osamu ni tsuite” [The origins of Kyūshū-ha: On Ochi Osamu], in I Discover Jesus Christ Is a Woman, 296. Tabe made the work while pregnant. “If they invented an artificial placenta, then women would be truly liberated for the first time.” Tabe Mitsuko, “Purakādo no tame ni” [For the placard], Kyūshū-ha, no. 5 (October 1961): 7. Artificial Placenta was recreated in 2004 and is now held in the collection of the Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto. Ōyama Uichi mailed his work for exhibition at the Gifu Independent, but did not make the trip in person. Zen’ei Tosa-ha’s Southern Japan Contemporary Art Exhibition (August 1967, Kōchi Education Hall) was a regional exhibition that featured a very rare combination of Kyūshū-ha members with Taniguchi Toshio, Hataraki Tadashi, and Funaki Yoshiharu. The Play’s Ikemizu Keiichi and Mizukami Jun, Group I’s Kawaguchi Tatsuo, Okayama Young Artists Group’s Terada Takehiro, and Gutai’s Horio Sadaharu were also present, but their presence did not develop into a further relationship with Kyūshū-ha.

22. “If you want to know how far all our neighbors deem us to be their enemies, well, we are their most progressive enemies.” Sakurai Takami, “Shin’ai naru minasama e” [To my dear colleagues], a meeting notice dated October 1962. 23. Report of A Grand Assembly of Heroes, Kyūshūha, no. 7 (October 1963): 15. As this text first appeared in the “Han gaimen sengen joron,” September 1962 edition of Kiroku to geijutsu (see note 13), the exhibition was likely held in August. 24. “In short, viewers can’t just be passive viewers. We have to let them play a central role through the work.” Sakurai Takami, “Meirei suru geijutsu: Eiyū-tachi no daishūkai, Nyūyōku ni tsuite” [Commanding art: On A Grand Assembly of Heroes and New York], Kyūshū-ha, no. 7 (October 1963): 28. 25. Report of A Grand Assembly of Heroes, Kyūshūha, no. 7 (October 1963): 13. 26. Credited as a “documentary filmmaker,” Tabe’s role was merely to document the event with an 8mm film camera. Obana participated in a portion of Sakurai’s group performance, but the extent of Hataraki’s involvement is unclear. 27. On the subject of the potential for collective group action, Sakurai said, “If there are too many grasshoppers in one field, when the time comes to take flight together, their wings that were once cramped…spread to find air,” Kyūshū-ha exhibition symposium, 1988. See Kyūshū-ha Taizen: 239. 28. “Kyūshū-ha o hōdan suru 1: Sengo bijutsu ni miru gurūpu no dōkō” [Free talk on Kyūshūha: Trends of groups in postwar art] in Tabe Mitsuko, Nisen’nen no ringo [Apples in the year 2000] (Fukuoka: Nishinippon Shimbunsha, 2001), 182. 29. Of particular interest in the Everything you always wanted to know transcript are comments by Saitō Hidesaburō and Obana Shigeharu, who both participated in Miike as organiz­ ers in their respective union movements. Although Saitō felt that it for the first time legitimized his voice as a Kyūshū-ha member, he was ultimately unable to leverage the experience in his paintings. By contrast, Obana, who also discussed his coal miner work (see note 12), said he felt there was a confluence of energy between Miike and Kyūshū-ha. See Kyūshū-ha Taizen: 276–277.

Chapter 11———K yūsh ū-ha313

30. The only Kyūshū-ha members who received some semblance of formal art training in an academic setting were Funaki Yoshiharu (studied art and craft education at the Fukuoka University of Education), Miyazaki Junnosuke (in the “specialized arts” department at the Kyoto University of Education), and Owari Takeshi (studied design at Arita Technical High School). Other members such as Saitō Hidesaburō (studied fisheries science at Kyūshū University School of Agriculture), Terada Ken’ichirō (studied business at Two-year College of Seinan Gakuin University), Sakurai Takami (vocational training at Fukuoka University of Education), Ishibashi Yasuyuki (machining at Yame Technical High School) pursued more career-oriented courses of study.

31. See Matsubara Shin’ichi, Gen’ei no komyūn: “Sākuru-mura” o kenshō suru [A commune in illusion: A study of Circle Village] (Fukuoka: Sōgensha, 2001). 32. Sakurai, “Meirei suru geijutsu”, 23–25. 33. Hataraki Tadashi, “Teitai no genjitsu ni kōsuru” [Resisting the reality of stagnation], Kyūshū-ha, no. 5 (September 1961): 1–5. 34. Tanigawa Gan, “Teikei no chōkoku” [Overcoming conventional forms], Minshushugi no shinwa: Anpo tōsō no shisōteki sōkatsu [The myth of democracy: An ideological summary of the Anpo struggle] (Tokyo: Gendai Shichōsha, 1966), 31.

CHAPTER 12

Asai Masuo Dreaming of Revolution from the Bottom

《アンドロメダ》に集るうすぎたない狼たちは次々と芸術の花園にクソをたれていっ た。芸術の花園で女のオシリをベロベロなめたり、同性愛にふけったり、たくわんをコリ コリたべたりした。卑俗な日常的行為を芸術行為に変質させていった。 狼たちにとって絵をかいたり詩をつくったりすることもセックスしたり食べたりす ることも同じ次元の行為なのであって、すべてはいまを全的に生きるということにかかわ っている。 狼たちは命名した、パンティをはくことは芸術だ、ボクシングをすることは芸術 だ、フォークとナイフでトンカツをたべることは芸術だ、赤ん坊のオシリをたたくことは 芸術だ。そして狼たちは、街頭で、路地裏で、美術館で即興演奏の会場で行為した。イ メージをつくり吠え生活そのものに芸術を止揚するために。 あさいますお

One by one, the mangy wolves that flocked to Andoromeda deposited their steaming piles of shit among the flowers in the garden of Art. They ravenously licked the girls’ asses, indulged in homosexual pleasures, and crunched on yellow pickled radish in this artful garden. Assuredly they perverted vulgar everyday acts into artistic action. To the wolves, the act of making paintings and poems was on the same dimension as eating and having sex; after all, everything relates to living the present moment to the fullest. The wolves decreed: putting on panties is art; boxing is art; eating pork cutlet with knife and fork is art; spanking a baby’s bottom is art. And the wolves did their act on street corners, back alleys, art museums, and all those other dens of impromptu performance. They created their image with a howl so as to sublate life itself into art.1 —Asai Masuo

1.

PIONEERING THE COMMUNE

Few remember the name Asai Masao (1942–1966) [fig. 120], an artist forgotten to local obscurity in Seto, Aichi Prefecture—though it is debatable whether he should be called a “visual artist” at all. However, Asai’s efforts to resurrect the festivals of premodern common peoples, harkening all the way back to the Jōmon period,2 make him an archetypal early pioneer of communes and thus an integral touchpoint in the annals of 1960s Anti-Art performance. As someone who himself led a humble life as an anonymous laborer in a regional city, Asai had a great affection and empathy for the socially disadvantaged—whether the impoverished children of Zanichi Koreans and Chikuhō coal miners, or young women forced to leave their homes under the cover of night—and created a small community populated with his fellow youth. Asai shunned the “elitist” Hi-Red Center and revered Zero Jigen,3 read Tanigawa Gan, loved the manga of Mizuki Shigeru, demonstrated an interest in art education, published many mimeographed magazines, and was an active organizer and participant in performances and other events.

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 120. Asai Masuo • December 5, 1965 • Asai’s home in Nagakute, Aichi

Responding to the social tumult of his times with an idealist’s earnest naïveté, he dreamed of “social, artistic, and sexual revolution.”4 Yet before his regional practice could make a blip on the radar of Tokyo’s art world or in the mass media, Asai met a tragic, untimely end in the summer of 1966, only a year before the vagabond fūten tribe appeared outside Shinjuku Station as an icon of the counterculture. As an everyman (shomin) who stepped forward as a torchbearer of the early 1960s intellectual and cultural zeitgeist, Asai not only bridged Kyūshūha and Zero Jigen but was also an important harbinger of the counterculture to come after Kokuin in the latter half of the 1960s, from the angura scene to hippie communes and the mini-komi zine community that arose as a predigital social network. Asai loathed the “beret-wearing” artist crowd of the Nitten (Japan Fine Arts Exhibition) and juried exhibitions by artists’ societies;5 apart from Zero Jigen, he had little interaction with avant-garde artists. As a consequence, few firsthand accounts remain of Asai’s life, making it difficult to reconstruct the network of actors in his orbit. Moreover, very few photographs survive as a window into Asai’s activities; the sole substantial photographic record is a collection of images taken by Yoshioka Yasuhiro, which I will discuss later in this chapter. However, the vast corpus of mimeographed magazines edited and published

 121. Senteiten, No.2 (January 1963)

 122. Andoromeda, No.7 (August 1964)

 123. GeGe, No.2 (March 1966)

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by Asai himself enables us to tentatively retrace the trajectory of his activities and thought. Asai’s earliest known surviving self-published zine is Gendai o miru me (Eye on the Present, 1960–61), produced in the immediate wake of the 1960 Anpo protests, followed by Teiten (Bottom Zenith, publication dates unknown); Senteiten (Lowermost Apex, 1962–63) [fig. 121]; Bijutsu kyōiku tsūshin (Art Education Newsletter, 1963–1964); Andoromeda (Andromeda) (1963–1965) [fig. 122]; and finally GeGe (1966) [fig. 123], published the year of his death. Asai also issued many publications aimed toward children, such as Kuroi kaku (Black Core, 1962), produced with the children of Miike miners; Kappa tsūshin (Kappa Newsletter, 1962–63) with the children of Zainichi Koreans; Entotsu mogura (Smokestack Moles, 1963) with the children of workers at the Seto pottery; and Doramu-kan (Steel Drum, 1964-65).6 These homemade publications had a wide reach, creating a network of like-minded readers spanning from Zero Jigen, based in nearby Nagoya, to those in Tokyo, including critic Yoshida Yoshie7 and artists such as Suenaga Tamio and Itoi Kanji,8 who were sympathetic to the cause. For instance, although Suenaga never met Asai in person, he was deeply moved by Asai’s zines and would later panegyrize him as “possibly one of the original hippie freaks.”9 2.

CHILDREN AS SUBJECTS We fight our own fight. Rejecting all interference from adults We stand on autonomous ground We continue fighting To fulfill our promise of destruction and creation Rooted in the children’s own fundamental desire10

Asai Masuo was born in 1942 in Nagakute, Aichi Prefecture. Although he never received formal arts training, his uncle, Asai Masaomi, was a nihonga painter, and a young Masuo began making abstract and surrealistic paintings in high school. From an early age, Asai expressed an uncommon interest in the arts, even writing an essay on Klee. A descendent of the sixteenth-century feudal lord Azai (or Asai) Nagamasa, Asai’s family was of some means and operated a fertilizer business. Although Asai’s writings suggest a sharp and expansive intellect, he never attended university. After graduating from high school in the spring of 1961, he drove trucks for the family business as a “laborer, hauling cement, transporting fertilizer, collecting payments, and fielding orders.”11 All the while, he traveled across Japan to study the living conditions of lower-class workers from Chikuhō down south in Fukuoka to Iwate in the north, interacted with intellectuals in the orbit of Shisō no Kagaku, penned a prolific assortment of writings ranging from criticism to poetry and records of his activities, and edited and self-published zines. He also organized a number of events, in a testament to the outsized mental energy contained in his diminutive frame.12 A precocious reader beyond his years, Asai was astutely sensitive to the sociopolitical dynamics at play on the eve of the Anpo protests, perhaps the product of a prolonged bout of pulmonary tuberculosis through junior high school that left him with a weak constitution and empathy for the socially disadvantaged. In high school, Asai

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participated in the Aichi Prefectural Student Council and as a third-year student joined in some of the Anpo protests. Unlike the books he read while on his sickbed, real-world political action fostered solidarity with his fellow citizens and an acute awareness of the “efficacy of organizations free from organizational [hegemony],” formative experiences that heavily influenced his future discourse on the subject.13 That said, Asai undoubtedly got his start amid the “post-Anpo” anarchism, similar to the young artists and political activists discussed in chapter 6. After graduating from high school, Asai embarked on fieldwork surveying Korean minority communities, the flophouse district in Kamagasaki, and settlements in the Tōhoku region.14 Potentially as a result of his connections with Fukuokan workers he met in Seto—at the time, the seat of a booming ceramics industry for overseas export—he traveled to Fukuoka in August 1962 and spent twenty days at the Miike Coal Mines in Ōmuta. A particularly notable aspect of Asai’s fieldwork is his attention to the children who lived in these working-class communities. Politically, the children of Miike were a focus for the settlement movement at the time, as well as groups such as the Minsei (Democratic Youth League of Japan, a student organization under the Japanese Communist Party) and Zengakuren. Asai saw the children not merely as disenfranchised youths but also as comrades in the Miike Struggle.15 It was this concept of a revolution that returned agency to the children—war orphans (of which there would still have been many), street urchins, and the progeny of Zainichi Koreans he met in Seto and the hisabetsu-buraku—that would lead Asai to create his “commune.” The somber expression visible on Asai’s face in a photograph he took with children from the local school for ethnically Korean students, at what appears to be a slag heap in Seto [fig. 124] is particularly telling. This concern for the welfare of children led Asai to develop his own pedagogical approach to children’s art. In January 1958, Asai joined the Nihon Jidō-ga Kenkyū-kai (Japan Children’s Picture Research Association), founded by color theorist Asari Atsushi, who was a mentor of Suenaga Tamio. In June 1961, Asai sent Asari a lengthy letter.16 As a visual artist, Asai’s oeuvre seems to have centered around childlike illustrations of the kind that graced his zines, with a style reminiscent of Klee and Miró [fig. 125]. Asai apparently made no distinction between twentieth century avant-garde art and manga, experimenting with “Neo-Dadaist manga” and putting on a few manga exhibitions. Mizuki Shigeru was a particular favorite of his; in his writings on the famous

 124. Asai Masuo with local children • Date unknown • Seto, Aichi

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 125. Untitled drawing by Asai Masuo • Date unknown

manga artist, Asai highlighted Mizuki’s disregard for the trends of the time and willingness to expose the fearsome realities lurking in the everyday, praising how Mizuki’s “pages breathed with the peculiar rhythm of the common people” and were imbued with a nihilistic undercurrent.17 Ever light of foot, Asai paid pilgrimage to Mizuki’s home. Even out of the steady stream of assistants and eccentric characters that filtered in and out of the artist’s home, Asai appears to have left an indelible impression. He appears in two memoirs by Mizuki,18 who describes him as “the man who invented Graveyard Kitarō’s ‘GeGeGe’ song.”19 His studies of child art, manga, and laborers’ lives were not isolated endeavors, but very much a part of the larger discourse in Japan at the time. In June 1961, Asai contributed an essay20 to Gekkan Teihein (The Monthly Bottom), a mouthpiece for Teihen no Kai (The Bottom Society), edited by Mori Hideto. Although the specifics of Mori’s involvement in Teihen no Kai are elusive,21 he was also a prominent editor of Science of Thought. As I will discuss in chapter 22.2 (p. 471), Science of Thought was a central voice at the time that espoused a “philosophy of the people,” and was known for its reportage of the lifestyles of ordinary people and research into popular mass culture, including children’s games and manga. Asai’s own interests can certainly be located within this larger shift in postwar cultural attitudes. 3.

“RISE UP, ORGANIZERS OF THE BOTTOM ZENITH!”: REVOLUTION FROM THE FAR MARGINS

Asai would later have a falling out with Teihen no Kai. He laid out his grievances in an essay decrying the Teihen no Kai pivot from “the dewy promise of youth” to a “social pyramid structure.”22 Asai felt that the group’s eagerness to expand its ranks made it “ossify and formalize” into “a skeletal group.” The group balked at publishing the essay in its bulletin, and Asai went his separate way, founding the Teiten no Kai, a “more nihilistic and anarchistic” breakoff group, based in Seto. Asai declared his independence in “Rise Up, Organizers of the Bottom Zenith!” a lengthy essay penned in November  1961 and self-published in a mimeographed pamphlet in January  1962. When read in conjunction with Teiten no Kai e no Shōtai (Invitation to the Teiten no Kai), a more fiery piece

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of agitation published in the November 1963 issue of Science of Thought, we can gain a clearer picture of the central seed of Asai’s own thought that germinated the commune in Seto and led to his subsequent performances and events. According to “Rise Up, Organizers of the Bottom Zenith!” Asai first dreamt of a primitive communist system, and then ultimately of an uprising against the central government spearheaded by brusque backwater “country samurai” in the spirit of Taira no Masakado and Fujiwara no Sumitomo23—Asai’s language here is reminiscent of Shinohara Ushio’s “bottom-rung samurai” ( jige-zamurai)—culminating in a revolution of marginalized peoples, from lowly farmers to fishers, vagrants, Zainichi Koreans, kakure kirishitan (“hidden Christians”), and everyone else on the fringes of Japanese society. After a subsequent encounter with Tanigawa Gan’s notions of origin (genten) and organizers (kōsakusha), Asai began to think that by transforming the bottom (teihen) into the bottom zenith (teiten), he might upend the social pyramid and compel the passive people on the bottom rungs of pyramidal society to an active revolution. However, as this inverted pyramid would not eradicate (zetsumetsu) the woes of the existing system of social classes, Asai next arrived at the notion of the nonhierarchical and fluid Andromeda Nebula,24 a name he bestowed on his longest running mimeographed magazine, Andoromeda. Andoromeda’s contributors were “manga artists, poets, students, blue collar workers, and ‘vagabonds’ (lumpen, from German),”25 and it was established with an “unorganized organization created in a moment and destroyed in an instant” in which “the autonomy of the individual” was synonymous with the “autonomy of the group.” Asai asserted that this style of organization would overcome the “village”-like insularity typically endemic in such circles.26 Although Asai’s thought and conduct were reminiscent of the anarchic sects that arose in a rebuke of the Old Left’s hegemony and calcification in the Anpo years, he eschewed overt political messaging in his criticism, publications, and events. It is not entirely clear how these theories of organization and movement informed Asai’s subsequent performance practice. One catalyst may have been provided by Mori Hideto, a man for whom Asai’s admiration was not diluted even after breaking with Teihen no Kai. Mori proposed building a “stronghold at the foot of the Yatsugatake Mountains” as a base for a “marauding troupe of itinerant performers”—in other words, planning to erect a prefab house in the countryside and start a commune. Though difficult to determine the timeframe of when exactly Mori proposed this plan, we know that Mori introduced Asai to Ohara Kaichi27 in Tokyo in the summer of 1963.28 Ohara would become an important partner in the Jōmon Festival, and this notion of a countryside commune resonated with him and Asai alike. We also know that due to a lack of funds, the plan never progressed beyond Mori renting a small apartment room in Tokyo (in the interim, Asai returned home to Nagakute) which became a hangout for more radical youths including the League of Criminals.29 As such, we can date the plan to sometime around the autumn of 1963 or early 1964. Seemingly taking a cue from Mori’s conception of “‘festival’ as a chaotic whirlpool of art, sex, and everything else,” Asai sought to realize a more “pure festival” with more “pristine conspirators” in Seto.30 Ohara reunited with Asai and together organized the 1st Jōmon Festival (Dai ikkai Jōmon-sai), held at Seto Civic Center in April 1964. It was at this time that the bulletin transitioned from Senteiten to Andoromeda. The festival was also motivated by frustration with the local art scene in Seto. In July 1963, Asai published a rebuke31 of artists and ceramicists in Seto but was met with

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silence. Realizing the “limits of verbal critique,” he sought to draw on “concrete action” to express “art in its native colors” through the Jōmon Festival, which he planned together with Ohara Kaichi and Naka Takehisa.32 4.

JŌMON FESTIVAL

Around this time, Asai and his circle began to call themselves a “Jōmon tribe,” begging the question: what was it about the neolithic Jōmon period that captivated Asai? Although Okamoto Tarō had “discovered” Jōmon earthenware pottery in 1951 (as recounted in a seminal essay published in Mizue the following February), a more direct catalyst may have been the unearthing of Jōmon period artifacts at sites within the Seto city limits in 1956 and again in 1962,33 which established that the Seto earthenware tradition originated at the Sanage kilns. Either way, it is clear that Asai read Okamoto’s appraisal of Jōmon culture, as he called out Okamoto for overlooking the fuller scope of the Jōmon people’s “unity of body and thought” and “original model for the fleshly body and eros,” due to his “ appraisal of Jōmon pottery solely from the perspective of art.”34 In contrast with Yayoi period pottery, which he saw as the expression of an “aesthetic/ideology of an anti-democratic spiritualism, colored by the logic of the oppressor who seeks harmonious accord between the oppressor and the oppressed,” Asai extolled Jōmon pottery as “an erotic expression of an ideology of non-ownership, born of a classless society.” In other words, “Jōmon” to Asai represented a political concept, which prompted him to conceive of the Jōmon Festival as “a swirling whirlpool of eros and madness.” Our Jōmon Festival will be a place for the liberation of the full energy of humankind […] a frenzied, kaleidoscopic dance of life and sex. It will be a battlefield, to elevate our communal body of emotion to a collective body of thought, and art. Join us as we together reach the orgasm of human life. We reject the ephemeral romanticism for the primitive past, invoking the energy of primal community and drawing on the latent energy of the alienated modern man to wager all on this very moment, in hope of breaking through to the future.35

Asai poured this ardor into the program for the 1st Jōmon Festival, an outline of which I have attempted to reconstruct below. Devised with a ritualistic conceit, participants donned white face masks and proceeded into the darkened gallery space, where they erected an altar for Asai’s work and lit candles as if worshipping a sacred religious icon. The event segued into a spoken word— or rather screamed word—“jam session of masked half-naked Jōmon revelers who screamed at a naked young female sacrifice perched atop an oil drum altar”36 to the beat of a pre-recorded African drum soundtrack. According to an account by Itō Masuomi, amid an orgiastic mix of tires, wire, and nude photos, [visitors] passed through the anus of a Cro-Magnon man, where they were greeted by a smirking Mona Lisa with the upside-down rusty brown Seto landscape at her back, and naked men stripped the Mona Lisa bare; when all that remained of her was an X-ray photograph, Stalin appeared in the buff over the heads of the onlookers.37

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Unfortunately, no photographs or other documentation of the event have been found that would help make sense of the chaos. Audience members were also made to wear masks and some were reportedly so overwhelmed by the spectacle that they ran out of the venue in fright. Late into the night, participants took to the streets and marched in a processional demonstration. In response to a Tokyo art correspondent who sought to draw parallels with Neo Dada and Anti-Art, Asai dismissed Neo Dada as “entitled children” and “a petite bourgeoisie revolution within the narrow confines of art.” Distancing himself from “criminal movements that took aim at art and politics through literature” à la the League of Criminals, Asai asserted that his group’s goal was to create “a human revolution focused on action itself, in all its many forms, both real and surreal.” Furthermore, in the pages of Andoromeda, Asai makes the distinction that whereas the avant-garde art festival as conceived by critic Tōno Yoshiaki had the trappings of a “professional art festival,” their own Jōmon Festival was the product of “perfect amateurs.”38 This phrase, “perfect amateur,” was a neologism devised by Mori Hideto with an affinity to Asai’s endeavors, as I discuss in part IV (see chap 22.1, pp. 468–9). Asai followed the Jōmon Festival with a variety of public performances (Asai called them akushon [actions]) in the city streets. In July and August 1964, two events were evidently held in Gifu City—Zenra Gaitō Kōshin (Nude Street Procession) and 24-Jikan Danjo Kanzume Seishin Nikutai Gekitotsu-kai (24-Hour Coed Sleep-in for the Collision of Spirit and Flesh)39—but photographs or written records of these events have yet to be uncovered. If the titles of the events seem to echo Zero Jigen, consider that Asai in fact participated in a late-night ritual conducted in Nagoya’s Peace Park as an offshoot of Zero Jigen’s Japan Super-Art Trade Fair, which began on August 30, 1964; however, Asai differed stylistically from Zero Jigen, as is evident in his Red and Blue Experimental Exhibition. Held on August 9 in the Seto Miyamae Plaza, the exhibition consisted of lining up “our playthings” and shrieking; young men in white gowns dancing madly around a totem pole; a man enclosed in a metal cage on a bridge glowering at passersby; and finally, the immolation of the aforementioned playthings.40 The last large-scale event organized by Asai was the 2nd Jōmon Festival, held at Kasai Gallery and Kami-Suwa Station in Suwa, Nagano from July to August 1965. The festival was an ambitious event with a full docket that encompassed a manga exhibition, poetic drama performance, jam session, street procession, and discussion. 41 For the manga exhibition Kūsō no GeGeGe (Imaginary GeGeGe), a gallery was fashioned into a festive space festooned with “erotic manga and objets.” On the festival’s opening day, July 31, “A throng of men and women pushed their way into the gallery, clamoring as they scrawled graffiti on the walls. A youth who had returned from Vietnam scrawled sexual provocations, while children drew Monster Q-Tarō (Obake no Q-Tarō, from Fujiko Fujio’s popular manga) and the working-class daughters of backstreet machinists offered hearts.”42 During a performance on August 1, Kuroi shūjin-tachi (Black Prisoners), three men—either wearing loincloths or completely naked—were marched down the street with hands tied behind their backs. The “prisoners” dragged white cloths on the ground in front of Kami-Suwa Station, where they proceeded to perform yoga, sit zazen, lie around on the ground, and stand on their heads [fig. 126]. That night, a jam session titled Blue was held, featuring a musical performance with oil drums, Buddhist chanting, ko’uta (traditional short songs accompanied by shamisen guitar), and humming. The following day, participants ran through the

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 126. Performance by Asai Masuo’s group at 2nd Jōmon Festival • August 1, 1965 • Suwa, Nagano

heart of the city, noisily rolling the oil drums down the street. Sexual Lake (Sekusharu-na mizu’umi), a poetic drama (shiteki engeki) with an emphasis on free improvisation and chance, was a relative success in its intent to involve a variety of people in town, as itinerant entertainers (tabigeinin) turned the masses (taishū) into festival organizers and performers. Yet, as time went by, Andoromeda gradually disbanded due to mounting dismay over the tepid response to these many demonstrations and events. Compelled to introspect on the viability of a local movement, Asai ultimately concluded that “Andoromeda failed to descend into the deepest depths of Seto.”43 Reading into this lament, we can see Asai grappling with a more essential problem than the underwhelming reaction of the audience and media alone; due to the paucity of primary documents, however, it is difficult to discern precisely what Asai meant. In November 1965, Asai published the final issue of Andoromeda and held a funeral service for the magazine in January the following year. Although he later launched a new magazine GeGe (the first issue bore the title “GeGeGe”), it seems his creative activities had already crested by this point. After the conclusion of the 2nd Jōmon Festival in September 1965, Ohara Kaichi, an integral member dating back to the first issue of Andoromeda, set out on a wandering journey across Japan with a handcart in tow. 44 His departure may have been another factor in the cooldown of Asai’s activities. 45 5.

AFTER THE JŌMON FESTIVAL

In December 1965, Asai was photographed by Yoshioka Yasuhiro for an article in Hōseki magazine, providing the precious sole substantive record of Asai’s performance practice. 46 Based on Yoshioka’s photographs of the performances and Asai’s own account, the following transpired. On December 5, in the first part of the action, Asai and company walk from the city center to a stone quarry, dragging with them white cloths, a chair, a plastic trash bag and a painting panel [fig. 128]. 47 Next, in Last Supper, we see Asai seated at a table on a bridge in Seto along with two men, drinking coffee with milk and muttering incantations around an empty birdcage centerpiece (see plates  8-9, p.  7). Donning sheets of white cloth over their heads and sprawled on the street, they transpose

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everyday acts that occur in the privacy of the home onto public space, 48 ostensibly similar to a later performance Asai held in downtown Nagoya in April 1966, in which futon mattresses and “erotic bags” were laid out for men and women to pile onto or into to sleep, read manga. In the following scene, we see Asai at the ruins of a large, abandoned kiln in the center of Seto [fig. 127], an event conducted around a table with voice and sound—according to Yoshioka, “a jam session of poetry and voice”—that was presumably one of the performances Asai frequently staged in the kiln with a cohort of high schoolers, art students, bar hostesses and other youths. Asai’s final documented performance occurred in May 1966, on the closing day of a joint exhibition with Okamoto Shin’ya (the future husband of Asai’s younger sister Yasuko) held at the Seto Civic Center. Titled Doro! Shigeki (Mud! A Poetic Drama), Asai and Okamoto disassembled a clock on a muddy riverbank in the middle of a downpour. In late July 1966, Asai presented his works for the last time in the Zero Jigen Exhibition held at the Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum. Without waiting for the exhibition to end, Asai joined a workshop at a temple near Izu’s Yawatano shore at the invitation of Mori Hideto. On July 31, Asai was discovered floating unconscious among the waves, evidently after having hit his head on a rock while out for a swim, and he died soon thereafter. (One written account deemed the incident a suicide, 49 but this seems unlikely, as that year Asai had been actively producing new paintings50 and was also reportedly planning an upcoming trip to New York.51) In Sunairo no chīsai hebi (The small sand-colored snake, 1978), Yamashita Chieko—novelist and former teacher at Asai’s high school—describes how Asai’s bereaved acolytes dug holes in the mountains as part of an experimental “action”: The Jōmon Festival is finished. Finished before we could complete Masuo’s plan to build a commune like our primitive ancestors, rejecting the modern potter’s wheel in the name of the Jōmon people… We had only just begun… Masuo had to go and leave us behind. […] Now without Masuo, we will never get back the pure energy to complete our primitive metamorphosis. Our Jōmon pit-house decayed, all that remains are Masuo’s unfinished paintings. Masuo, the lowest common organizer. Masuo, the boy who dreamed of an uprising and sought to create a primitive community. Masuo is gone, all too sudden and soon…52

 127. Performance by Asai Masuo’s group in an abandoned kiln, left: Asai Masuo • December 5, 1965 • Seto, Aichi Prefecture

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 128. Performance by Asai Masuo's group, dragging white cloth, etc. • December 5, 1965 • Seto, Aichi

While Asai seems an eccentric young pupil in the narrator’s eyes, in this passage, Yamashita offers a sense of the charismatic influence he had on his fellow youths. In September  1966, nearly two months after Asai’s death, Zero Jigen and Ohara Kaichi organized Memorial Service for Asai Masuo, where Katō Yoshihiro engaged in a ritualistic pulling of a handcart loaded with the limp bodies of men and women. Katō edited a final issue of GeGe as a tribute to Asai, which was published in conjunction with the memorial service. In his own eulogy published in the issue, Katō did not hold back with his assessment of Asai’s limits: “You had too much faith in your own vitality and your insatiable heart. You were all too set in your provincial complex. This made you all too unguarded when choosing where to let your heart flower. You were not hardy enough to survive in manure scraped from squalid fields.” Yet, he continued, “You alone glimpsed what no one else could see in the impenetrable hinterlands and through your festivals envisioned eternal revolution, independent of all others, a pure you alone born like the beautiful phoenix in a brilliant flash momentarily extinguished, a lone fearsome drill honed to a piercing point”—uncommonly high praise from Katō’s famously acerbic tongue.53 The marked differences in strategy and style between the two artists make Katō’s affinity for Asai all the more touching. Mori Hideto also praised Asai for “expending every ounce of his feeble flesh toward his all-consuming dream of attaining the lost wildness of Japan’s Jōmon people” and lauded him as “a brilliant feral beast.”54 After Asai’s death, Naka Takehisa and others from Asai’s group in Seto continued to pursue the Teiten no Kai notion of the “bottom zenith” through their research of ceramicists, and organized another Jōmon Festival in 1972,55 though little is known about this event. 6.

DREAMING OF REVOLUTION FROM THE BOTTOM ZENITH

What meaning and function did Asai locate in his poetic drama as an analogue for action and performance? Did he indeed succeed in recovering the “lost wildness of Japan’s Jōmon people”? Clearly, Asai did not possess the media savvy of Jack Society or the political messaging of Kurohata; nor did he seek the raw corporeality of Zero Jigen and Koyama Tetsuo. Apart from the Jōmon Festival—a lofty concept, albeit one lacking in its execution—Asai did not leave behind any writing that directly addressed the issue of

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bodily expression. And so, we can only surmise an answer to these questions based on records of his artistic practice. Over two Jōmon Festivals, Asai deployed street processions, yoga, headstands, along with masks, altars, totem poles, percussion, erotic objets and images to create the festive space of a primal community. He also frequently took to the streets, lying in bedsheets, eating meals, and reading manga, with performances that stand out for exposing private everyday acts to the eyes of public spaces. The performance of these domestic acts in urban spaces is a theme that intersects with the early days of Zero Jigen. Nevertheless, as underscored by Katō Yoshihiro’s eulogy, Asai’s radically earnest ideological undertakings were never fully fleshed out with requisite brawn. Even during Japan’s economic boom, Asai did not wage an all-out assault on the city or court media coverage. Perhaps Asai’s actions and events were never meant to address the unsympathetic adult and were intended, rather, as a call to the young men and women of his generation with whom he sought to create community. Had Asai only lived a few years longer, he would not have been isolated, even in Seto. As a nexus of the nascent hippie counterculture, surely his circle had the potential to expand across all of Japan.56 In addition to being an early advocate of communes, Asai’s activities were also distinguished by the prevalence of female members in his circle, an element that would be seen in Kokuin and other groups in later years. Many female writers contributed to his zines and as Asai explicitly stated, “I am quite interested in a transformative human movement driven by empowered women activists.”57 This inclusivity was girded by Asai’s writings on Jōmon culture, particularly his views on earthenware and dogū (clay figures). Although these Jōmon artifacts are generally presumed to have been made by men, Asai conversely saw the vessels as a self-expression of female sexuality in a matriarchal society.58 The historical validity of this belief aside, it is evident that Asai expected a similar agency from his contemporary female peers, and from the outset was in support of a “sexual revolution.” At present, it is difficult to unpack what Asai meant by a “transformative human movement driven by empowered women activists.”59 Even regarding the “sexual revolution,” there is no indication that Asai put forward any concrete proposals to address systemic issues such as marriage, the family, or financial independence from the female perspective. Although Asai did discuss anarchic organizations and movements with some specificity, his ideas were not necessarily conducive to achieving the “social revolution” he desired. Although Asai was critical of the intelligentsia’s (chisei-ha) overreliance on logic, He could not take seriously the arguments of the so-called seikatsu-ha [lived life school, those who are more concerned with question of how to live than with theoretical or political thought]; whenever confronted with their raw problems and rhetoric, the conversation always devolved to levels of incoherence far more starkly than when he provoked controversy among the chisei-ha [intelligentsia].60

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Asai’s activities were but the product of a utopian fantasy, far removed from the lifestyle and mentality of the average citizens who “grandstanded about [Asai and company] as a scourge on public morality in Seto, particularly the gaggle of middle-aged women in rimless glasses who showered them with incensed invective.”61 As a result, it seems this aspiring revolutionary’s sole recourse was to pursue an artistic revolution with a select circle of friends. In an essay published posthumously, Asai summarizes his own ideological trajectory as follows: After Anpo, we abandoned our forward position in Eye on the Present. As we made our retreat, we discovered “zero,” the “origin,” and the “bottom.” From there, we descended to the Bottom Zenith, and with that as our point of reference, we found the center of spiraling Andromeda. Guided by a reappraisal of Jōmon eros, we at last arrived at GeGe.”62

The “descent” here described by Asai could not be a further cry from prominent art critic Miyakawa Atsushi’s characterization of Anti-Art as a “descent into the vulgar everyday.” As evinced by the epigraph that opened this chapter, Asai positioned eating, sex, politics, and art on an equal plane in an attempt to “pervert vulgar everyday acts into artistic action.” In this sense, rather than Miyakawa’s theory of Anti-Art, perhaps Asai tracks more closely with the experimentation of Kyūshū-ha, which sought to “elevate the energized stuff of the lowly masses, through our own alchemy, to the status of painting royalty,” in the words of Sakurai Takami. We can see that Asai attempted to expand on this ethos through his performances and communes. Asai and Kyūshū-ha also shared a common ideological milieu in the writings of Tanigawa Gan and the Miike Coal Mine dispute. However, unlike Kyūshū-ha, Asai was utterly unconcerned with garnering recognition from the established art world—after all, what concerned him was social revolution. Even if Kyūshū-ha peered into the “bottom” depths and entertained fantasies of an “origin,” none of its members elected to descend any further. It was Asai, with his “fearsome drill,” who dug into the “bottom” in search of the “bottom zenith” that could turn the social hierarchy on its head, and of the moving body of Andoromeda, which held the secret potential to ceaselessly liquidize and overthrow the hierarchy. We can only wonder how Asai’s dream might have fared in that span of time from the end of the 1960s, when the promise of a return to nature and hippie communes fizzled out. Would he have managed to create another social system of his own? And what, in the end, did Asai arrive at with GeGe?63 Though his questions were altogether half-formed and his actions premature, Asai’s work was imbued with a unique purity that remains palpable today. Someday, perhaps, a successor will rise from the depths in response to his utopian dream. We will wage the revolution through crime and destruction. We desire a rightful communism, a body united in a society of the commons, as an artistic and sexual community, as an alternative to existing system based on private ownership.64

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NOTES 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

Asai Masuo, “Andoromeda” [Andromeda], Nihon Dokusho Shimbun, August 2, 1965, 2. Translator’s Note: The earliest historical era in Japan, spanning roughly from 14,000 to 300 BCE. This article, attributed to a certain “T.S.,” is of particular interest as a demonstration of the group’s affinity for Zero Jigen over Hi-Red Center. “Rather than the sleek, clever logic expounded by the Hi-Red Center know-italls, I feel something far more powerful in the awkwardly unadorned and messily sincere lifestyle of Zero Jigen. If Hi-Red Center is the avant-garde aristocracy, Zero Jigen are the rear-garde plebians.” See T. S., “Zero Jigen to sono shūhen” [Around Zero Jigen], Andoromeda, no. 8 (September 1964). Asai Masuo, “Teiten no Kai e no shōtai” [Invitation to the Teiten no Kai], Shisō no Kagaku [Science of Thought], no. 56 (November 1963): 38. Asai Masuo, “Seto, Bijutsu, Jōkyō/Danshō (1)” [Seto, Art, Situations/fragments (1)], GeGe, no. 2 (March 1966). Itō Masuomi, “Hadaka no teiten kōsakusha: Asai Masuo no koto nado” [The naked bottom zenith organizer: on Asai Masuo and more], Shisō no Kagaku [Science of Thought], no. 75 (May 1968): 79–80. Yoshida Yoshie, “Tandoku kōisha no chōgekijō” [The solitary actor’s supertheater], Bijutsu techō, no. 335 (December 1970): 45; and Yoshida Yoshie, Kaitaigeki no maku orite: Rokujū nendai zen’ei bijutsu shi [The curtain falls on deconstruction theater: A history of 1960s avant-garde art] (Tokyo: Zōkeisha, 1982): 176. Although Itoi Kanji never met Asai in person, they enjoyed a written correspondence through the introduction of Katō Yoshihiro. Regarding Asai, Itoi said: “It would have been more interesting if he had been around. [His premature death] was such a terrible pity. He was truly a genius.” Itoi, in an interview with the author, Sendai, August 22, 2004. Suenaga Tamio, Ikinobiru tame no komyūn: Genkaku uchū soshite seikatsu kakumei [Commune for survival: The illusory universe and lifestyle revolution] (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1973): 37. Asai Masuo, “Itan no kodomo tachi no sengen” [Proclamation of the heretical children], Senteiten, no. 2:2 (January 1963). Asai Masuo, “Tsūshin M No. 1” [Correspondence M No. 1], GeGe, no. 3 (September 1966).

12. “Slight of build, [Asai] was hardly 37.5 kilograms.” Mori Hideto, Yūmin no shisō [Ideology of the Idle] (Tokyo: Koken Shobō, 1968), 42. 13. Itō, “The Naked Bottom zenith organizer,” 78–79. 14. Itō, 79. 15. Asai Masuo, “Miike no kodomo-tachi” [The children of Miike], in Senteiten, no. 2:2. 16. Asai Masuo, “Asari Atsushi-shi e no tegami (senkyūhyakurokujūichi-nen roku-gatsu nijūroku-nichi): jidōga kenkyū no zenshin no tame ni” [A letter to Mr. Asari Atsushi (June 26, 1961): For the advancement of child picture research], Senteiten, no. 2:1 (August 1962): 3. Asari wrote of Asai, “I think he was a genius,” in Suenaga, Commune for Survival, 193. 17. Asai Masuo, “Mizuki Shigeru no manga” [The manga of Mizuki Shigeru], Andoromeda, no. 10 (June 1965). 18. Mizuki Shigeru, “Nichiroku” [Daily diary], Nihon Dokusho Shimbun, September 12, 1967, 8. 19. See Mizuki Shigeru, Neboke jinsei [Half-Asleep Life] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1999), 210–213; and Mizuki Shigeru, Karan koron hyōhaku-ki [Diary of a Drifting Life] (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 2000), 177–179. In Mizuki’s letter to Asai, he wrote on his desire to become a Jōmon person and participate in GeGeGe. “Gege e no tayori” [Letters to GeGe], GeGe, no. 1 (December 20, 1965). 20. Asai Masuo, “Kiretsu no tanima” [The valley of fissures], Gekkan teihen [Monthly Bottom], no. 13 (June 1961), 215. 21. Ohara Kaichi, “Shinde kara Asai Masuo ni omotta koto” [Remembrances of the late Asai Masuo], GeGe, no. 3 (September 1966). “Teihen no kodomo no e ni tsuite” [On the pictures of the children at the bottom], in Senteiten, no. 2:1; originally written as “Teihen no Kai shokun e no tegami” [A letter to my confrères in the Teihen no Kai]. 22. The onomatopoetic title “GeGe” and Asai’s idiosyncratic use of language seemed to anticipate the vernacular of twenty-first century Japanese youths. 23. Translator’s Note: Taira no Masakado (903– 940) and Fujiwara no Sumitomo (893–941) were court nobles and warriors in the Heian era (794–1185) who rebelled against the central government in Kyoto.

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24. Asai Masuo, “Hōki seyo! Teiten kōsakusha” [Rise Up, Organizers of the Bottom Zenith!], Zero kara no sōzō, no. 1 (January 1962). 25. Asai, “Andoromeda.” 26. Asai, “Invitation to the Teiten no Kai,” 36-37. 27. Ohara Kaichi (b. 1940, Hamamatsu) was an important ally who participated in many events organized by Asai and eulogized him with a long tribute published in the third issue of GeGe. Ohara subsequently published Denden mushi nihon o aruku: onboro riyakā man’yū-ki [A snail’s wanderings across Japan: Diary of a leisurely journey with a rickety pullcart] (Tokyo: Daiwa Shobō, 1967), an account of his travels around Japan with a cart, but unfortunately did not write on Asai and his activities in Seto. 28. Ohara, “Remembrances of the late Asai Masuo.” 29. Ohara, “Remembrances.” 30. Ohara, “Remembrances.” 31. Asai Masuo, “Genshoku no shisō no ketsujo” [The lack of thought on native color]. In this now-lost manuscript, Asai criticizes ceramicists who saw Nitten as the highest calling, as well as painter Kitagawa Tamiji and his epigones, and the painter’s group Doronko-kai. See Asai Masuo, “Seto, Art, Situations/fragments (1).” 32. A native son of Tokunoshima Island in Kagoshima Prefecture, Naka Takehisa (1944–1998) relocated to Seto, where he was employed by an exporter of ceramic ware in 1961. A meeting of the Teihen no Kai convened on the final day of his solo exhibition at the Seto Civic Center in December 1963. In 1971, he reportedly conducted performances on the streets of Nagoya and Seto. Sengen: Senmuha 100-nin no shisō to kōdō [Declaration: 100 postwar youths’ philosophy and action], ed. Tahara Sōichiro (Tokyo: Shakai Shisō-sha, 1972), 124–135. Naka was subsequently active as ceramic doll artist and author of Tokunoshima ni atta kodai ōkoku: Yamatai koku no jitsuzō [The lost ancient kingdom on Tokunoshima Island: A true portrait of ancient kingdom Yamatai] (Tokyo: Bungeisha, 2002). 33. The discovery of Late Jōmon period artifacts at the Ōtsubo site in 1956 and Final Jōmon/ Kofun period artifacts at the Dairoku site in 1962 was widely reported in the news. Hattori Fumitaka (Seto City Art Museum), in an email to the author, January 10, 2009. See also Aichiken no chimei (Nihon rekishi chimei taikei dai

34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

47. 48.

nijūsankan) [Geographical names in Aichi Prefecture (Compendium of historical place names in Japan, vol. 23)] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1981): 271. Asai Masuo, “Jōmon doki/dogū ron” [A study of Jōmon earthenware and clay figure], Andoromeda, no. 4 (April 1964). In this essay on Jōmon earthenware, we can see the strong influence of Mori Hideto. Asai Masuo, “Invitation to the Teiten no Kai,” 37. [Asai Masuo], “Hōkoku Jōmon sai” [Report on the Jōmon Festival], Andoromeda, no. 5 (May 1964). Itō Masuomi, “Teiten no Kai: Sono matsuri” [Teiten no kai: Its festivals] in Kyōdō kenkyū: shūdan [Joint research on collectives], ed. Shisō no Kagaku Kenkyū-kai (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1976), 406. Asai, “Report on the Jōmon Festival.” [Asai Masuo], “Andoromeda tanshin” [Brief news from Andromeda], Andoromeda, no. 8 (September 1964). [Asai Masuo], “Hōkoku reddo and burū jikken-ten arui wa andoromeda kyōki-ten” [Report on the red and blue experimental exhibition; or the andromeda lunacy exhibition], Andoromeda, no. 7 (August 1964). As Asai asked Suwa-based artist Matsuzawa Yutaka to deliver a report on the “Art and Eros” panel discussion, Matsuzawa may have been involved in the event in some form. [Asai Masuo], “Hōkoku dai nikai Jōmon sai” [Report on the 2nd Jōmon Festival], Andoromeda, no. 11 (September 1965). Asai, “Seto, Art, Situations/Fragments (1).” See Asai Masuo, “Correspondence M No. 1”; and Ohara, A snail’s wanderings across Japan, 24. Around the time Ohara left the group, another member Abe Kenji (a contributor to GeGe, no. 3, who subsequently took the pseudonym “Abe Beat”) also decamped to Yatsugatake. See Ohara, “Remembrances of the late Asai Masuo.” Yoshioka Yasuhiro, “Aru enerugī: ‘Nisemono no heiwa’ wa oretachi no teki” [A certain energy: “False peace” is our enemy], Hōseki, vol. 2, no. 2 (February 1966). Asai Masuo, “Gege memo,” GeGe, no. 1 (December 20, 1965). Asai Masuo, “Gege memo,” GeGe, no. 1 (December 20, 1965).

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49. See Matsuzawa Yutaka’s chronology in Matsu­ zawa Yutaka Tokushū-gō [Special Issue: Matsuzawa Yutaka], Kikan, no. 13 (Fukuoka: Kaichōsha, 1982), 52. 50. His series Fuzai Kaiga [Absent Paintings], incorporating newspaper photographs and other found material, was reportedly created at a pace of a painting (approx. 2,6×1,9m) every two days, reaching 20 paintings total. One was titled, Kawara On no yokushitsu ni okeru Akasegawa Genpei no nise sen’en satsu o taiho suru ninshinchū no Burijitto Barudō [A Pregnant Brigitte Bardot Arresting Akasegawa Genpei’s Model 1,000-Yen Note in the Bathroom of Kawara On]. See Asai, “Correspondence M No. 1.” 51. Okamoto, in an interview with the author. 52. Yamashita Chieko, “Tenohira no iki” [Breath on a palm], Sunairo no chīsai hebi [The small sandcolored snake] (Tokyo: BOC Shuppanbu, 1978), 175. 53. Katō Yoshihiro, “Henchi tero Jōmon-jin oboegaki-chō” [Notes on the Jōmon regional terrorists], GeGe, no. 3 (September 1966). 54. Mori, Ideology of the Idle, 43. 55. Itō, “Teiten no Kai: festivals,” 406.

56. Rather than confronting social issues head-on, Asai withdrew to the comparative countryside in order to create a community of like-minded individuals from his own generation. In this respect, Asai presaged the blogs and social networking services now ubiquitous in the Internet age. 57. Asai, “Report on the Jōmon Festival.” 58. Asai, “A study of Jōmon doki/dogū.” 59. In October 1965, Asai and his group conducted a three-day event I Love You Exhibition on the streets in Seto, in which they distriburted heart-shaped objects to all women passers-by, aiming to fill the city with the hearts. However, it is not certain if the heart objects triggered any subjective actions of those women with the young men’s playful behavior. Asai Masuo, “Gege memo.” 60. Itō, “The Naked Bottom Zenith Organizer,” 80. 61. Itō, 80. 62. Asai, “Correspondence M No. 1.” 63. In “Atogaki” [postscript] by Asai in the inaugural issue of GeGe (December 1965), the new journal’s founding concept was not presented, while he kept on “Andoromeda” as an eternal movement. 64. Asai, “Invitation to the Teiten no Kai,” 38.

CHAPTER 13

Zero Jigen Bodies Revolting against Modernity

人と車とがより多く集合している場所だけが「ゼロ次元」全裸集団の会場となり、僕達 は「街を強姦」し始めた。裸のかたまりが走り出すと、車も人もビルも、高度成長をめざ す都市全体が、スローモーション映画のようにゆっくり動きを停めて、人間の美しい肉 体にギョッとしながら見物しているのを僕の肉体が直視した。僕達が走る時、街の全て の事物も僕達と同じように裸の素顔を露出した。実に僕達の肉体を「東京の街」が見つ める「視線」の中に、その銀座が身にまとっている外皮がアッと脱がされ、その正体を「 東京見物」したいがために「ゼロ次元」は「裸」になったのが本音である。 加藤好弘

[Seeking out] only those places most packed with people and cars as the stage for the Zero Jigen all-nude collective, we began our “rape of the city.” As our naked throng started to run, everything in the rapidly growing city—all the cars, people, and buildings—ground to a gradual halt like a film in slow-motion. My own flesh bore unblinking witness to the spectators who gawked in shock at the beautiful human bodies in their midst. When we ran, everything in the city exposed its true face, as naked as ourselves. Ginza was instantly stripped of its outer veneer. This is precisely why Zero Jigen became naked. We were motivated by a desire to see the true Tokyo, within the city’s own gaze. —Katō Yoshihiro1

1.

A ZERO JIGEN REVIVAL?

Formed in 1960 by a group of visual artists based in Nagoya, Zero Jigen transformed into a more experimental performance collective in 1963 and remained active until around 1972. Zero Jigen was undoubtedly the most important group in the history of Anti-Art performance. Over the course of this book, I introduce many performers who possessed their own unique and individual styles; however, were it not for the outsized impact of Zero Jigen throughout the 1960s, any discussion of Anti-Art performance history in this era would necessarily have been very different, or perhaps not even possible at all. At the very least, without Zero Jigen, Anti-Art performance history would surely be much more fragmentary and offer far less substance for critical examination. The reasons are threefold. First, the group enjoyed an impressive longevity. Out of all the individuals and groups from a visual art background who were active in performance art at the time, Zero Jigen consistently staged the largest number of performances over the longest span of time.2 Even if the majority of Zero Jigen’s performances involved props and spatial staging, they were distinguished by a central emphasis on motion and primacy of the raw body, including near or full nudity. Second, although core members such as Katō Yoshihiro and Iwata Shin’ichi studied fine art and began their careers as painters, the group did not seek the recognition of establishment art critics and did not limit their activities to conventional fine art venues such as museums and

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galleries. Instead, the group courted coverage in the scandalous weekly gossip magazines, boldly exposing their performances to the wider public gaze in urban spaces ranging from bustling street corners to cabarets, strip clubs, and university campuses barricaded during the student protest movements. Going beyond established art systems, Zero Jigen amply exploited the new social spaces that emerged in the 1960s, with the proliferation of mass media in a city transformed by the Tokyo Olympics and a period of rapid economic growth. Third, Zero Jigen developed a uniquely native style, free from any discernible influence from the Happenings and performance traditions of the West. Although at times vulgar, obscene, and inscrutable, it was these qualities that could be called the archetype of Anti-Art performance. Over half a century later, Zero Jigen continues to shock even modern audiences with their ritualistic performances that have been preserved for posterity in photographs and film. Despite Zero Jigen’s importance, the group has largely eluded critical attention, apart from a special feature in the art magazine Ragan,3 edited by Mizutani Takashi, and his interviews with Iwata Shin’ichi, a core member in Nagoya. 4 As discussed in part I, even when Zero Jigen has appeared in the criticism and historical narratives of Japanese postwar art to date, the group receives only passing treatment as a single trend within the context of the broader currents of the 1960s. It is no surprise that Zero Jigen’s vulgar performances (one of their trademark poses involved crouching naked on the ground with candles lit between their buttocks) and proclivity for obscene language (characterizing their activities as a “rape” of the city and likening their monthly rituals to “menstruation”) would be rejected by genteel art historians with antiquated tastes and critics who sought to explain Japan in juxtaposition with Western art theory. However, in recent years, Zero Jigen has been the subject of an overdue reappraisal by the art world and a new generation. This revival has been precipitated by critics such as Sawaragi Noi, who has shone light on Zero Jigen, Itoi Kanji, and other 1960s performers in an attempt to decipher the sociopolitical significance of overlooked subcultures conventionally outside rarified “art.” The stagnation faced by youths in present-day Japan has also given new resonance to these themes. Katō Yoshihiro himself remained an active practitioner of performance, film, and agitation until his death in 2018, and his work was given new life in a retrospective photobook published by Zero Jigen sympathizer Hirata Minoru.5 One would hope that my own writings and presentations, including talk events in the U.S., South Korea, Taiwan, and Europe, have also helped foster a greater appreciation of Zero Jigen among a wider audience.6 Without further ado, let’s take a quick sprint back through the activities of Zero Jigen. 2.

PROTO ZERO JIGEN (1960–62)

At its inception, Zero Jigen was not yet a performance collective. Formed in June 1960 in Nagoya by four young artists (Kawaguchi Kōtarō, Koiwa Takayoshi, Umeda Masao, and Iwata Shin’ichi), Zero Jigen held its first group exhibition in September 1960 at the Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum. At the time of its founding, “Zero Jigen” was written with an alternate spelling, 0次現 (zero ji gen, “emergence after zero”).7 For the group’s third exhibition in October 1962, the orthography was changed to 0次元 (Zero Dimension),8 as

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 129. Zero Jigen, naked tea gathering • c. August 1962 • Nagoya

had been initially proposed by Kawaguchi.9 Later in September 1960, the members exhibited at the Nagoya Young Artists Exhibition,10 joined by graduates of Tama Art University including Katō Yoshihiro, who had returned home to Nagoya in 1959 and was working as a junior high school teacher. Katō, Iwata, and Koiwa would become integral avant-garde members of Zero Jigen, who spearheaded the group’s shift toward ritualistic performance from the latter half of 1962. In August 1962, the group held a private naked tea gathering (sadō) at the home of Katō’s fiancée [fig. 129]. In October, at the third exhibition, Koiwa entered into a large box and took bites out of an apple.11 And by November, many members were engaged in ritualistic practices incorporating objets, sadō, poetry, and jazz. 3.

EARLY PERIOD (1963–64)

Katō incorporated sutras, incense, and other elements of Buddhist ritual in his solo exhibition at the Sakura Gallery in June 1963. However, Zero Jigen’s true start as a ritualistic collective came a few months earlier with their first public performance in January 1963, when over thirty participants crawled down the streets of downtown Nagoya to promote the Insane Nonsense Exhibition, held at the nearby Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum. Although a publicity stunt in the vein of Neo Dada’s parade through Ginza in 1960, the crawling motion represented a symbolic return to an infantile state—a return to “zero”12—befitting the group’s name. The performance was a deliberately understated production and participants wore their ordinary clothes. This simplicity was also a feature of a ritual conducted at the Yomiuri Independent in March 1963, where group members merely laid down in front of their artwork (see chap. 6.12, pp. 153–4), in an early example of the netai (lying body) conceit that would become a signature part of their repertoire. By contrast, an August 1963 performance, Ritual to Taste a Female Body (Nyotai Shishoku Kai), was more elaborate in scale, entailing a large table set up on a street in Nagoya’s Sakae district, around which participants proceeded to eat a meal with a bandaged woman (Takahashi Kōko) as the table centerpiece [fig. 130]. In January 1964, group members walked through department stores and underground shopping arcades in downtown Nagoya, Katō in “long momohiki underwear wearing an enormous handmade penis strapped to his back with a medical corset”;

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 130. Zero Jigen, Ritual to Taste a Female Body • c. August 1963 • Sakae, Nagoya

 131. Zero Jigen perform with Iwata Shin’ichi (left), Katō Yoshihiro (center), Koiwa Takayoshi (right) • January 16, 1964 • underground shopping arcade in Sakae, Nagoya

Iwata in camel undergarments with sack-like objects slung over his shoulders; and Koiwa draped in transparent vinyl with a toy propeller on his head [fig. 131]. In July, the same trio marked the group’s Tokyo debut at the Naiqua Gallery with This is Zero Jigen!!, conducting successive solo exhibitions and ritualistic performances inside the gallery, in front of Shimbashi Station, and in a Shinjuku coffee shop. These performances shared a focus on objets and eccentric costumes but did not yet evince particularly unique modes of physical expression or experimental staging. The following year, the group unveiled their first fully nude public performance under the cover of night at a park during Japan Super-Art Trade Fair (see chap. 7.5, pp. 185–6), a pivotal event held in August 1964. The performance opens with a group of men and women standing side by side in a single file line. To the beat of a taiko drum, they march up a long stone staircase, which has a landing every thirtieth step. Each time they reach a landing, they remove an article of clothing. Upon reaching the wide clearing surrounding a Shinto shrine at the top of the staircase, the now fully naked participants form a circle. After limbering up with a peculiar exercise, the men split into two groups and lie down with their backs to the ground. The women then climb atop this fleshy futon and lying face down, are ferried across by the men, who rock their bodies back and forth like rollers on a conveyor line. According to Katō,13 this concluding act envisioned men as sharks and women as white hares in reference to an ancient Japanese myth that would become an oft-repeated motif, culminating in the 1970 film, Inaba no Shiro Usagi (The White Hare of Inaba). The event was also indicative of Katō’s growing influence in orchestrating the group’s performances.

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4.

MIDDLE PERIOD (1965–68)

In January 1964, Katō relocated to Tokyo and worked as the president of Meisei Electric Co.14 Two employees, Nagata Satoshi and Matsuba Masao, would join Zero Jigen’s cast of frequent performers. This Tokyo cohort linked up with Iwata Shin’ichi and other members15 back in Nagoya for important events. Both groups organized their own individual events in their respective cities. However, given Katō’s flair as an agitator combined with access to the national news media and a wide roster of supporters and collaborators, Tokyo became the group’s primary stage. Around this time, founding member Koiwa Takayoshi16 left the group and was replaced by Kamijō Junjirō. After meeting Itoi Kanji while a student at Tohoku University, Kamijō moved to the capital and on Iwata’s introduction, joined Zero Jigen, becoming a core member during the group’s most prolific period. As the group’s membership changed, so did its approach to rituals. Katō poured his business income into the group’s rituals, transforming them from simple, instinctive acts into far more ambitious productions. From 1967–1968, the group produced their most mature work in terms of both style and production value; indeed, this period could be deemed Zero Jigen’s peak. In tandem with this stylistic evolution, the group withdrew from the museum and gallery scene, concluding with a Naiqua Gallery [fig. 132] exhibition in November 1965. While the group continued to take to the streets in bustling city hubs such as Hibiya, Shinjuku, and Shibuya, they began to increasingly deploy site-specific performances tailored to each location. In light of public indecency law, the group’s outdoor performances in city spaces only rarely featured nudity. Instead, they enlisted culturally coded costumes and props to draw a contrast between the modern urban West (hats, suits, and formal morning attire, face masks, umbrellas, and white gloves) and the premodern domestic Japan (underwear, futon bedding, kyahan gaiters, red and white striped cord used in traditional festivals, the Japanese flag, dolls, and an actual infant strapped to their backs) [fig. 133]. These props and costumes engendered a great many variations, deployed in combination with a repertoire of stock gestures including a raised-arm salute, a skipping gait, lying on the ground, posing on their backs with legs splayed, and entangling themselves on the ground. In contrast to the street rituals, Zero Jigen was able to conduct more esoteric, fully nude performances in the  132. Zero Jigen installation • 20th Century Museum Ass World Ritual Exposition • November 1965 • Naiqua Gallery, Tokyo

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 133. Zero Jigen, Ritual for Crazy Love • June 16, 1968 • Shinjuku, Tokyo

comparative privacy of an underground storage room at Kashima Shrine and inside a tent at the Gifu Independent Exhibition, among other locations. It was in these venues that the group would subsequently deploy their infamous trademark ketsuzōkai pose,17 in which a line of fully nude men crouched down on all fours with lit incense or candles fixed on their bare derrières (see plate 19, p. 12). In particular, the performance at ­Kashima Shrine circa January  1965 [fig.  134] was a notably pared-down production, executed without props apart from moxa and candles on the naked men’s buttocks, making it resemble less of a “performance” than an installation in which the human body itself was the medium. Conducted without an audience, the ritual at Kashima Shrine could even be seen as a photoshoot orchestrated to document the pose. However, free from the inherent need to cater to audiences in the group’s live shows, the performance became one of the most visceral of all Zero Jigen’s ritual acts, presenting the nauseating, smutty, and vile qualities of the human body in an unabashed display of Katō’s peculiar vision. This period was also marked by a clever use of urban spaces on a larger scale. A representative example is Metropolitan Chinchin Streetcar Funeral with Hanging Nooses and Futon (Toden Kubitsuri Futon Chinchin Sōgi, see plate 18, p. 12), conducted in March 1967. For this performance, male participants don facemasks with the likeness of a Western man and sit on the long benches on both sides of a streetcar with rope nooses tied to the overhead handgrips, flanking the women who lie on the streetcar’s floor. The sudden appearance of such vehicles in the everyday landscape symbolized conveyance to another fantastical world, a trope that frequently featured in Katō’s work from 1964 onward. As another example of a representative performance in Zero Jigen’s peak years, I would like to examine Ultrasonic Wave Operation: Bathhouse Meeting (Chō-Onpa Furo Shūgi), conducted in  134. Ritual by Zero Jigen • c. January, 1965 • Kashima Shrine, Tokyo

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 135. Zero Jigen, Poster for Ultrasonic Wave Operation

August  1967. As alluded to above, Zero Jigen throughout their existence intermixed two types of rituals: those conducted in public spaces that, governed by indecency laws, drew on a diverse range of strategies, costumes, and props; and those conducted in more private venues where the naked body itself took center stage, free from the authorities’ eyes. Although Ultrasonic Wave Operation might best fall into the former category, the performance managed to straddle both the public and private, as it began on the streets and moved to a bathhouse. Conduced at Zero Jigen’s prime in 1967, the performance was also heavily documented in photographs, film, magazine articles,18 original storyboard drawings by Katō, posters, and flyers that reveal many of the defining characteristics of Zero Jigen’s rituals—characteristics that I will introduce in detail below. The group printed posters [fig. 135] and flyers promoting Ultrasonic Wave Operation, held on August 25, 1967, at a high-end bathhouse in Shibuya equipped with ultrasonic waves. Although the flyer touted appearances by the “full Zero Jigen cast” and gave a long list of names including Itoi Kanji, the actual roster seems to have been shorter. Katō Yoshihiro and Nagata Satoshi were clearly photographed without masks. Masked individuals presumably included regular cast members Kamijō Junjirō, Matsuba Masao, and another man who wishes to remain anonymous. Other participants uncredited on the flyer were Suzuki Seiichi, who traveled from Sendai to make a last-minute appearance, a woman with the initials S.K., Miyata Harumi, and Kawanaka Nobuhiro, who

 136. Zero Jigen, Ultrasonic Wave Operation • August 20, 1967 • Yamanote Line, Tokyo

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 137. Zero Jigen, Ultrasonic Wave Operation • August 20, 1967 • In front of Hachikō statue, Shibuya, Tokyo

filmed the event. The flyer states that admission was 1,000 yen but free for “registered members” who were instructed to “bring an umbrella,” with the additional caution that “men must wear a suit jacket as the venue will be air-conditioned.” The group also clearly sought audience participation in the ritual with a request that umbrellas be unfurled by one out of four viewers in the dining area and one out of two in the baths. To give a chronological play-by-play, the performance begins in the morning at Katō’s house in Meguro, with a procession led by Katō and Nagata dressed in formal morning attire, striped neckties, white gloves, and hats. They are followed by five men wearing similar formalwear and masks modeled after the bust of Agrippa (a common subject used for plaster cast drawing exercises). Carrying umbrellas and futons, the group is followed by Miyata and S.K.19 They travel by bus to Meguro Station and board the train to Shibuya [fig. 136]. On the train, one of the masked men sprays foam on Katō. The other masked men stand and watch with their black umbrellas held open in the train car. 11:15 a.m. The ritual begins outside Shibuya Station. The five masked men kneel down in front of the Hachikō statue.20 Two unfurl their umbrellas [fig. 137]. Miyata and S.K. begin to spray foam on their own clothes, where they sit on benches a short distance from the men. Katō raises his white-gloved hands high into the air. 11:40 a.m. They pass through the Tōkyū Department Store on their way to the bathhouse. 1:15 p.m. Elaborately costumed street marching bands (chindon-ya) launch into a saxophone and taiko drum performance in the bathhouse’s dining hall. The men strip down to their underwear and march around the room behind Katō (still wearing his hat) with their umbrellas aloft. Miyata, wearing makeup with her long hair untied, crawls across the ground to join the other men who step up onto the dining hall table. The men bend over to assume the ketsuzōkai pose and light candles on their buttocks. Intermission.

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 138. Zero Jigen, Ultrasonic Wave Operation • August 20, 1967 • Japan Ultrasonic Bathhouse, Shibuya, Tokyo

2:00 p.m. Audience members take their seats in chairs set up around the great bath and raise their umbrellas. The musicians enter the room, followed by the men (once again clothed) who carry a futon mattress. The men, still dressed and wearing face masks, wade into the circular tub and walk in a circle around its perimeter [fig. 138]. The men spray foam onto Miyata’s clothes where she lies on the ground. Using scissors, they strip her down to her underwear. The men remove their masks, put on women’s panties, and crouch down on all fours. Miyata sprawls across their backs. Nagata sprays foam on Miyata [fig. 139]. Katō pulls down everyone’s panties and ties candles to their buttocks, then lights the candles. By appropriating the city’s transportation system and a recreational bathhouse, Ultrasonic Wave Operation deftly blurred the distinction between public tension and private release. The performance is also indicative of the group’s knack for blending the eerie and the ridiculous.21 As seen in the films Crazy Love (directed by Okabe Michio, March– May 1968) and Japan ’69: Bizarre Sex Zones (directed by Nakajima Sadao, July–September 1968), the archetypal street ritual featured an amalgamation of costumes (formalwear, gas masks, etc.) and props (futon mattresses, Japanese flags, etc.). However, one of Zero Jigen’s boldest performances was a far simpler, barebones procession: the Buck-naked Gas-masked Walking Ritual (Zenra Bōdokumen Hokō Gishiki, see plate  21, p.  13) of December 1967. Katō and two other men don gas masks and walk around Shinjuku Station  139. Zero Jigen, Ultrasonic Wave Operation • August 20, 1967 • Japan Ultrasonic Bathhouse, Shibuya, Tokyo

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 140. Promotional street performance by Zero Jigen for the movie, It’s a Strange Heaven • May 24, 1966 • In front of the Geijutsuza theatre, Yūrakuchō, Tokyo

carrying a woman on a stretcher. Next, they pull a toddler around an underground shopping mall (accompanied by another masked man and two women). At this point, the performers strip down to their gas masks and a pair of gaiters. With their right arms raised in the air, they march at a brisk clip through the passageway in the Kinokuniya Building. Out of many ritualistic performances in public spaces, Buck-naked Gas-masked Walking Ritual is the only one with exposed genitalia in a bustling downtown district known to survive in photographs and a film, Phenomenology of the Zeitgeist, by Miyai Rikurō. In addition to these individual rituals, Zero Jigen also participated in the Gifu Independent in August 1964 (pp. 185–6). As discussed in chapter 7 (pp. 175–9), the event, along with Japan Super-Art Trade Fair in 1964, provided an opportunity for artists and performers with Anti-Art tendencies to meet and collaborate in the post-Yomiuri era. However, it was from the Yoyogi May Day festival in 1966 that Zero Jigen began to associate and perform with Kurohata, 8 Generation, Itoi Kanji, and Kokuin, giving rise to the “Ritualists” (gishiki-ya), whose activities peaked in 1968. The sheer number of performances, frequent media coverage, and creative breadth during this period was astonishing. The earliest article about Zero Jigen to run in a popular, non-art publication was written by the photojournalist Hirata Minoru for the weekly magazine Suiri in March 1965. From 1966 until 1968 (predating the creation of the Expo Destruction Group), hardly a month went by where the name Zero Jigen did not appear on the newsstands.22 Zero Jigen’s knack for promotion caught the attention of film director Tsuboshima Takashi, who tapped them for It’s a Strange Heaven (Kurēji da yo Kisōtengai), a comedy starring the Crazy Cats, released in May 1966 [fig. 140]. The group conducted another street ritual in December 1967 to promote the Japanese theatrical release of Gérard Oury’s war comedy La Grande Vadrouille (The Great Ramble).23 Both events were covered by newspapers and weeklies. In October 1967, Zero Jigen appeared at Club Hana-densha alongside Kurohata and others in a ritual with live musical accompaniment that was reportedly a resounding hit with the audience (but not with the manager) of the Asakusa strip club (see chap. 8.8, p. 219). In 1968, Katō emerged as one of the darlings of a flourishing angura scene that included Kara Jūrō, Kanesaka Kenji, Ōbayashi Nobuhiko, and Yokoo Tadanori. Along with artists such as Kokuin, Koyama Tetsuo, Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, 8 Generation, Kurohata, Chida Ui and Baramanji Kessha, Zero Jigen participated in a series of prominent events that year at the Honmoku-tei (March), Angura Pop (October),

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 141. Ritual by Zero Jigen for Cybele • August 25, 1968 • Yanaka Cemetery, Tokyo

Shinjuku Pit Inn (November), and Iino Hall (November). Indeed, from the latter half of 1967 through 1968, Zero Jigen found growing opportunities to complement their street activities with performances in theatrical settings, ranging from olden vaudeville halls to the new hotspots of Shinjuku subculture. These venues allowed the group to take a more radical approach than was possible on the city streets. During this period, Zero Jigen continued to add to their film credits. In addition to the aforementioned Phenomenology of the Zeitgeist, Crazy Love,24 and Japan ’69: Bizarre Sex Zones, the group also appeared in Donald Richie’s Cybele (August  1968) [fig.  141], Kanai Katsu’s Mujin Rettō (The Deserted Archipelago, February  1969), and Matsumoto ­Toshio’s Bara no Sōretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses, March 1969). This filmography is a testament to how Zero Jigen captured the imagination of a diverse range of film directors in genres spanning from commercial to cult, documentary, and experimental. The films are also valuable resources that provide a high-quality record of the myriad settings and styles encompassed by the group’s ritual practice during their most prolific period: the immersive immediacy of the Naked Gas Mask Walk Ritual; the illustrative span from early tea gatherings to the archetypal street ritual of Crazy Love; the childbirth ritual in an expansive tatami mat studio documented in Japan ’69: Bizarre Sex Zones; or Cybele as a “pastoral ritual in five acts.”

 142. Katō Yoshihiro, storyboard for Cybele

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 143. Ritual by Zero Jigen • September 22, 1968 • Goshiki-en park, Aichi Prefecture

As Cybele was never intended for screening in the nation’s general theaters, the film offers a particularly provocative window into some of the group’s rawest ritualistic acts.25 In the opening scene, men in suits repeatedly skip toward each other in a field, collide, and fall on their backs. In the second act, the now fully naked men sit on the ground in a circle and smear boiled rice on their bodies with dopey expressions. In the third act, a woman lights bundles of incense lodged in the men’s buttocks, and in the fourth act, ties string around their penises and pulls them up a flight of stairs. Based on the myth of Cybele, the ritual tells the story of a goddess’s revenge on men who raped her. Katō’s original illustrated plans [fig. 142] envisioned the castration scene graphic detail—in his storyboard, a dismembered penis dangles in the air—revealing a masochistic desire underlying the program. The Buddhist undertones of Cybele’s setting in Yanaka Cemetery were echoed in rituals such as the Puppet Show (Ningyōgeki Engi) and Futon-Filling Ritual (Futon-zume Gishiki) [fig. 143], conducted from March 1968 at Goshiki-en,26 a vast park surrounding a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Nagoya. As documented in The White Hare of Inaba, this outdoor space allowed the group to perform with relative impunity, developing a style that would lead into their later years. 5.

ANTI-EXPO (1969)

As discussed in chapter 9, Expo Destruction Group was formed in early 1969, as a united front of practitioners including Zero Jigen, Kokuin, 8 Generation, Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Koyama Tetsuo, and Mizukami Jun (see chap 9.3, pp. 251–7). Deploying simple gestures and performances in protest against Expo ’70, Expo Destruction Group garnered support from youth across the nation, from Nagoya to Kyoto, Osaka, and Fukuoka. Expo Destruction Group’s apogee was a series of ritual performances, the Smash the Expo Black Festival that began at the Ikebukuro Art Theater in June 1969, then traveled to Hama­ matsu, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kyoto. During this tour, the Expo Destruction Group began to wear their distinctive winged helmets in identification with the student activists. After naked performances in Ikebukuro and on the balcony of Kyoto University’s Department of General Education, Katō, Koyama, Akiyama, Suenaga and three other Kokuin members were arrested in July. However, Zero Jigen and Kokuin (as Expo Destruction

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Group) continued to perform anti-Expo rituals at the Antiwar Expo held in Osaka Castle Park in August, followed by the Anti-Expo Teach-In held at Yamate Church in Shibuya in September. 6.

LATE PERIOD (1970–72)

Zero Jigen’s activities in 1970 centered on rituals for Inaba no Shiro Usagi, a feature-length 16-mm film directed by Katō with a runtime of over two hours [fig. 144]. Completed at year’s end after great expense and energy,27 the film was comprised of multiple ritualistic performances. However, during production, the group did not conduct a single street performance—given the high likelihood of police interference—to shoot scenes as Katō had aimed. Inaba no Shiro Usagi was missing the spontaneity of the early Middle Period, as well as the elaborate costumes and staging of the late Middle Period. Although the film introduced new elements such as a small white cloth tent (p. 275) with a picture of a peach, there was still much repetition of their stock repertory. Rather than a cohesive “Zero Jigen” production, the film features outside individuals—such as Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, who appears in every chapter of the film—in an extension of the open-arms ethos of the anti-Expo era. As such, it would be a stretch to view the film as a definitive collection of Zero Jigen’s rituals. Nonetheless, the film could be seen as a coda to certain aspects (although not all) of Zero Jigen’s activities over the preceding decade. Namely, in the revival of the choreographic device in which a woman traverses the bodies of naked men, first seen at the 1964 ritual in Nagoya Peace Park [fig. 45, p. 186]; the satirical transposition of folklore, in which the “white hare = the new humanity = woman” who ironically requires the support of “sharks = men = an oppressive society that equates eroticism with genitalia” in order to jump free (“trip”) in her psychedelic pursuit of “cosmic eros”;28 and the closing scene along the Tama River, manifesting a melancholic return to reality in line with Katō’s conception of rituals as a journey between the commonplace and a fantastical other world. While Inaba no Shiro Usagi had a coherent throughline in the group’s still-active ritual practice in 1970 and a narrative arc that resolved with the Tama River scene, its sequel, Baramon (Brahman, 1975),29 was a more hodgepodge collection that signaled the dissolution  144. Ritual by Zero Jigen for The White Hare of  Inaba • July 7, 1970 • Bar Sebastian, Shinjuku, Tokyo

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 145. Ritual by Zero Jigen for Brahman • October 1971 • Ōdaru Hot Springs, Izu, Shizuoka

of Zero Jigen. Brahman did contain footage of the June 1969 performance at Kyoto University that offers a valuable look at anti-Expo era ritual practice, and a September 1971 ritual at Hosei University amidst an electrified crowd of students. Yet the bulk of the film consists of rather inert performances at the Ōdaru Hot Springs [fig. 145], Yume-no-shima (Tokyo’s artificial “Island of Dreams,” built on a landfill), a gathering of Hare Krishnas,30 and a scrapbook-esque record of the activities of the Gomikandan (Garbage Sex Brigade) group led by Iwata Shin’ichi. Brahman also documented rituals performed at the Nihon Gen’ya-sai (Japan Phantom Field Festival) in Sanrizuka (August 1971) and Earth Day ’72 at Kinuta Park (May 1972)—two venues where the flame of activism continued to burn post-Expo. However, as Zero Jigen’s former zeal for intervention in urban space and performative ingenuity waned, their rituals became dominated by an almost manic euphoria. This impression was reinforced by the film’s many scenes with song and dance from the Hare Krishnas, who captivated Katō at the time, presaging his gradual pivot away from an extrospective interest in the restrictions of the city, toward an introspective interest in disciplining the body and Hinduism. This evolution was made clear by a sadomasochistic ritual conducted solely by the Tokyo group at Katō’s home in September 1972. Meanwhile, Iwata and others back in Nagoya derived inspiration from the Asama-Sansō incident31 of February 1972 in Ai no Asama sansō (Asama Mountain Villa of Love), conducted at Nagoya University. This ritual reportedly had a script and rehearsals, indicative of the increasingly theatrical tack taken by the Nagoya group under Iwata’s leadership32 (Katō was in the audience for the performance but did not participate). Although no physical record has since been found, Ai no orinpikku (Olympics of Love), conducted on the streets of Nagoya after the terrorism at the Munich Olympic Games in September 1972, was likely the Nagoya group’s last public performance. By this time, the “garbage trials” had already become a flashpoint in the Nagoya art scene, when a group of artists sued the Aichi prefectural government for refusing to exhibit work made of literal garbage (see chap. 9.8, p. 267). In solidary, Iwata formed Gomikandan (Garbage Sex Brigade) in 1971 and launched a group bulletin titled Gomi Kanpō. As an outgrowth of these activities, he launched Super Ichiza, a “rock kabuki” troupe that continued to perform until 2008. In 1973, Iwata even ran for mayor of Nagoya. The diverging of paths of

Chapter 13———Zero Jigen34 5

key members Katō and Iwata was yet another indicator that Zero Jigen had reached the end of the road—albeit a long road with trailblazing performances that stretched back throughout the 1960s at an incredible pace.33 7.

KEY FEATURES OF ZERO JIGEN’S RITUALS

Over their decade of existence, Zero Jigen engaged in a diverse and prolific range of ritualistic practices that is not easy to summarize in tidy categories. However, perhaps the defining features could be distilled as follows: ① Collectivism/Anti-individuality Solos acts by individual members were rare. Instead, they drew on the effect of several (up to around a dozen) participants performing the same gestures and poses in unison to manifest their presence as a gestalt mass in a space, challenging even the chaos of the city. As no special training or technique was required, the cast was interchangeable, allowing performers to be added or subtracted to suit each situation. To a certain extent, the rituals thus compelled anonymity by depersonalizing individual faces, physiques, and movements. Nudity, masks, and the ketsuzōkai pose all exemplify the erasure of individuality. ② Impotence of the flesh Although Zero Jigen’s rituals frequently featured full or partial nudity, they did not seek to present an idealized masculine physique, or pander to the media with female eroticism. On the contrary, their performances emphasized the ataxic decay, stagnation, and desexualized objectification of the male body [fig. 146]. The submissive ketsu­ zōkai crouch and netai poses put the focus on the performer’s body rather than their face, thereby denying their individual subjectivity and relegating the body to a passive, object-­like state. The crawling, colliding, collapsing, and entangling of limbs can also all be construed as a deterioration or objectification of the flesh.

 146. Ritual by Zero Jigen with sacks and rope • c. July 6, 1964 • Ginza, Tokyo

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 147. Childbirth ritual by Zero Jigen for Nippon ’69 Sex Bizarre Zone • September 29, 1968 • Toei film studio, Kyoto

③ Sex as male fantasy Despite the group’s reputation in popular tabloid magazines quick to conflate nudity with sex, very few performances made direct reference to sexual intercourse between men and women.34 In the early period, there was instead a notable amount of male masturbation, a prime example being Katō’s Masturbation Machine shown at the Naiqua Gallery exhibition in 1964, accompanied by a ritual around Shimbashi station near the gallery that depicted a man masturbating. Sexual impotence was presented as another latent obsession of men, expressed with women reclining and trampling over naked men’s backs. Such masochistic acts remained a persistent motif throughout Zero Jigen’s existence. As seen in Cybele, the act of dragging men by string tied around their penises (castration in the original plan) is an example of a masochism that also relates to the impotence of the flesh. From the Middle Period onward, a conspicuous number of scenes depicted childbirth as a latent fixation for women. These include Birth Scene, conducted on May Day 1967 (a red candle fixed on a woman’s abdomen); The Deserted Archipelago in 1968 (a group of men appear between a woman’s thighs); and Nippon ’69: Bizarre Sex Zones (a man masturbates on the birthing table) released later that year. ④ Contrasting Cultures Cultural signifiers—the premodern, infantile, domestic Japanese and the modern, (adult) male, urban West—are intentionally made to both coexist and contrast (see plate 20, p. 13). Naked bodies, revealing underwear, and futon mattresses exemplified the East, while suits, hats, and facemasks represented the West. Performers often shouldered objects in a metaphor for the pitiful bodies of everyday laborers and common folk seen around town with young children strapped to their backs. The combination of premodern/domestic costumes with props (gas masks, gaiters, and Japanese flags) and gestures (the Nazi-esque one-arm salute) parodied the foolishness of Japan’s prewar militarism/nationalism and the nation’s futile attempts to modernize literally embodied with the chiseled militaristic body.35 ⑤ Traditional body culture As a corollary, the group also made frequent reference to traditional expressions of the body in Japanese rituals, performing arts, and childhood games. sadō utensils and

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 148. Nanba gait, as performed by Zero Jigen in childbirth ritual for The Deserted Archipelago • February 10, 1969 • unknown location, Tokyo

Buddhist ritual items featured in the group’s rituals from their experimental phase from late 1962 through the Middle Period. This Buddhist influence is evident in the group’s early incorporation of incense and sutras, as well as their use of religious venues including Kashima Shrine, Goshiki-en, and Yanaka Cemetery. Even the ketsu­zōkai (ass world) pose was named after the esoteric Buddhist term taizōkai (womb world), one of the two realms in the mandala. As Iwata would later note,36 the group also unconsciously incorporated gestures and other elements from kabuki theater. This can also be seen in the group’s use of the ipsilateral nanba37 gait, where the left leg swings in tandem with the left arm (and vice versa), an ambulatory motion Takechi Tetsuji asserted originated in the Japanese farming classes [f ig. 148]. Examples of child’s play include a “train” game in which participants proceed in a single f ile line holding a rope around them; a “caterpillar” game in which participants squatted on the ground and shuffled forward holding the next man’s waist [f ig.  149]; and hana ichi monme [f ig.  150], similar to Red Rover. The scene in Cybele where the men sit in a circle and pass their neighbors handfuls of boiled rice is also reminiscent of a children’s game. ⑥ Synchronicity Another characteristic of Zero Jigen’s rituals is how disparate elements often proceed in parallel without apparent relation to each other. Already in the group’s nascency, Ritual by Sound (Collective Mixed Ritual) in November  196238 was a hodgepodge attempt to “cram as much ‘gay and lesbian sex, the destruction of  149. “Imomushi korokoro” motion by Zero Jigen • November 10, 1965 • Kashima Shrine, Tokyo

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 150. “Hana ichi monme” motion by Zero Jigen, as seen in Crazy Love • May 26, 1968 • Sendagaya, Tokyo

 151. Zero Jigen ritual, Demonstration of All Catalogued Repertoires • May 24, 1966 • Geijutsuza theatre, Tokyo

objects, cult dancing, sadō, poetry reading, eating contest, wedding ceremony, jazz, etc.’ as possible into a juicer,” reflecting Katō’s predilection39 for “a parallel synchronicity (indefinite time dimension, Zero-ing of time)” that would “blenderize (synchronize) and condense”40 variegated actions and events. In the earliest example documented on film—a ritual in Nagoya performed circa August 1964—men sit and lie down off to the side, unrelated to the main ritualistic actors who wrap their bodies in plastic sheets. In a May 1966 performance at the Geijutsu-za, the small tatami room where Katō’s family “led an ordinary everyday life” coexisted onstage with the absurd spectacle of a man, fully wrapped in bandages like a mummy, blowing air into a woman’s vagina through a rubber hose41 [fig. 151]. These synchronistic tendencies continued through Inaba no Shiro Usagi, which opens with a July 1970 ritual at the Goshiki-en, where women lie on the ground with little concern for marching men. ⑦ Reciprocity with place Katō’s zeal for conducting rituals in such a diverse range of venues throughout the 1960s has little compare—not only among his fellow performance artists, but also among those contemporaries active in the theater and butoh contexts. As Katō expresses in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, Zero Jigen’s acts on the city streets not only exposed them to onlookers, but also allowed them to observe Tokyo as an ontological object. In an earlier interview, Katō likened the relationship between performer and place to the Buddhist monk who stands under a waterfall:

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Ever since antiquity, this method—waterfall and man—has been used to travel to another universe. Zero Jigen replaced the waterfall with the city. […] Just like the monk struck by the waterfall, so too were our bodies struck by the city. 42

This cosmic relationship with the city and anonymizing collective actions were both at the crux of Katō’s overarching philosophy on a “zeroing” of subjectivity—namely, through the erasure of personhood and self-ego, the body becomes an object-like quantity in space, leading to a greater consciousness of the universe. Perhaps these characteristics can be even further distilled as follows: First, points (1), (2), (3), and (7) all relate to the rejection and transcendence of the modern Self—what Katō dubbed the “twenty-first century ego.” Stripped of individuality, physicality (and sexuality), performers engaged in infantilizing child’s play and other acts “humiliating” for grown men, thereby prompting them to shed their sense of shame. In this process, we can see the group’s guiding concept of a symbolic return to a “zero” state. After reaching a certain denouement with Inaba no Shiro Usagi, it is revealing how Katō next explained the ritual within the Zero Jigen experience: Rituals of a trancelike forgetting of the self and denial of the ego refer to a state of neardeath. Ceremonies in this selfless state are no different from insanity. The reason we found death and insanity to be dangerous and detestable was because they were all too unknown. Humans fear setting foot in alien territory. People choose accidental suicide because it seems to offer a faster path to ecstatic oblivion than ego death. Zero Jigen’s rituals are a method to prevent circumvention of this journey and prolong our stay in the selfless egoless ecstatic world. Over and over, we repeat this long journey to an alien dimension, in an attempt to expand it to infinity. […] If insanity is eros that begins the moment we have stopped being human, then rituals summon the world of death when time and habits have stopped. In this way, rituals are a ceremony to summon the universe inside the sacred savage body of the person that seeks to perceive the universe. 43

The second defining undercurrent running throughout Zero Jigen’s ritual practices was an anti-Modernism/post-Modernism seen in points (4), (5), and (6). Katō’s rejection of modernism can also be seen in remarks made in 1967: History proceeds on a vertical axis. Moving from past to present to future. We’re trying to create a horizontal universe, unrelated to this vertical history. We want to create an expansive universe in a space removed from the history of humankind. 44

This could also be interpreted as a rejection of the “development” (or illusion of progress) posed by the modernization, urbanization, and globalization evident in the city rapidly rising around Zero Jigen at the time. Although Buddhism, street busking, militarism, and the squalor of quotidian Japanese life may seem anachronistic on first glance within this ascendant milieu, these allusions were Zero Jigen’s way of confronting audiences with the existence of an underlying culture that could never be escaped or erased, no matter how headlong Japan sought modernity. Even so, Zero Jigen did not make an overt value assessment of the latter in their binaries between clothing and the naked body,

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Western and Japanese culture, individual and collective consciousness, or the modern and premodern. Rather, as seen in Ultrasonic Wave Operation, they found meaning in the coexistence and peripatetic balance of both. They used the word ritual (gishiki) to connote a framework for temporarily traveling between past, present, and future; this world and the next; the everyday (ke) and the extraordinary (hare); reality and dreams. Zero Jigen’s rituals responded to their place in time, at a historical crossroads for Japan’s cities, society, and lifestyles. No other individuals or groups managed to plumb the realities of 1960s Japan so provocatively against the steady march of restriction and repression taking place in the city, arriving at the universal question of the reconstruction of the body and the self. In their pursuit of Anti-Art as a “descent into the vulgar everyday,” Zero Jigen was not afraid to put skin in the game to expose the realities of the contemporary human condition, elucidating the tumultuous lifestyle shifts in the non-Western cultural sphere in a globalized era—a naked cry that continues to resonate into today’s world. NOTES 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

Katō Yoshihiro, “Kokyō Nagoya no Sakae-machi de geijutsu teroristo zenra shūdan ‘Zero Jigen’ wa tanjō shita” [The naked collective Zero Jigen was born in Sakae-machi, Nagoya, my hometown], Ragan, no. 3 (December 1987): 7. According to Katō, “over 300” performances by 1971. “Adachi Masao intābyū 3 Katō Yoshihiro: kenran taru hakujitsu no tōkai gishiki” [Adachi Masao Interview 3 with Katō Yoshihiro: Self-Effacement Ritual in Broad Daylight], Bijutsu techō, no. 340 (March 1971): 154. At the time of writing, I have counted 130 performances with near certainty. See n. 1 above. See “Iwata Shin’ichi ga kataru Iwata Shin’ichi teki sekai” [The world of Iwata Shin’ichi as told by Iwata Shin’ichi], in Iwata Shin’ichi, Gendai bijutsu shūen no yochō: 1970, 80 nendai no Nagoya bijutsu kai [Signs of the end of contemporary art: Nagoya art world of the 1970s and ’80s], ed. Mizutani Takashi (Nagoya: Super Kikaku, 1995): 220–56. Hirata Minoru, Zero Jigen: Katō Yoshihiro to rokujū nendai [Zero Jigen: Katō Yoshihiro and the Sixties] (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo, 2006). The present chapter builds on my previous essays. Kuroda Raiji, “1960 nendai nihon no pafōmansu kenkyū I: Bunka to shite no Zero Jigen joshō e no hashirigaki [Performance art in 1960s Japan 1: A sketch for the first chapter of Zero Jigen as a culture, in Kajima bijutsu kenkyū nenpō [Kajima Art Study Annual]

7.

8.

9. 10.

no. 18 supplement (November 2001), Kajima Foundation for the Arts: 362–76; KuroDalaiJee, “The Rituals of Zero Jigen in Urban Space,” R, No.2 (March 2003), 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa: 32–37. Kawaguchi Kōtarō said he came up with the name after reading Fantasia Mathematica, an anthology on mathematical topics edited by Clifton Fadiman and translated into Japanese by Miura Shumon (Arechi Shuppansha, 1959). “We started from nothing. Without anything to rebel against. Without the expectation of social status to be gained from our art movement or activities. Without hurdles to participation for those who sought a new mode of expression. As such, we wanted to create a forum where individuals could collide. In a sense, the idea was to pursue a positive nothingness. This thinking may have been rooted in my own personal interest in the Zen concept of nothingness.” See Kawaguchi Kōtarō “Zero Jigen Zenshi: Kawaguchi Kōtarō ni Kiku (Early history of Zero Jigen: Interview with Kawaguchi Kōtarō),” interview by Mizutani Takashi, Ragan Nōto [Naked Eye Note], no. 1 (September 1994). Over the years, the group used the numeral “0” interchangeably with the word “zero” when writing their name in Japanese. The name “Sofuto Ninjin” [Soft Carrot] was also considered. See Katō, “The naked collective,” 4. Due to illness, Iwata did not present work at the first Zero Jigen exhibition from

Chapter 13———Zero Jigen351

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

September 1–4. His name is listed as among the exhibitors in the catalogue for the Nagoya Young Artists Exhibition, held from September 19–24. Iwata Shin’ichi, “‘Zero Jigen’ hassei, katsudō, pawā no kongen” [Zero Jigen: emergence, activities, and sources of power], Ragan, no. 3 (December 1986): 10. Koiwa Takayoshi, “Zero Jigen,” Nihon chō-geiju­ tsu mihon ichi [Japan Super-Art Trade Fair], Zero Jigen Shōkai (August 1965): 4; and Itō Takao, in an interview with the author, August 25, 2002. Katō Yoshihiro, “Zero Jigen kyōso ketsuzōkai mandara kyōten go yaku shū (sono 3)” [Zero Jigen founder ketsuzōkai mandala sutra terminology in translation (part 3)], GeGe, no. 3 (September 1966). The company specialized in the manufacture and sales of components including electromagnetic clutch brakes, motor brakes, automated control panels, defrost timers, and defrost heaters. Katō was a self-taught engineer and had a patent to his name. Founded in January 1964 in Shimomeguro 3-chōme, the company’s headquarters moved to Shimomeguro 2-chōme, 4-chōme, and Ōhashi 2-chōme, closer to Shibuya. Regulars included Yahagi Masahide (an employee at Iwata’s jazz café, Goodman), Saitō “Metsubō” Masao (a former student at Katō’s junior high school), and Morikawa Riko. See “The world of Iwata Shin’ichi,” 248. For more on Morikawa, also see “‘Motomu patoron’ ni sanpi gougou” [Opinion split on the much talked-about “Calling all patrons!”], Rejā Nippon [Leisure Japan] (July 21, 1968): 1. Koiwa and Iwata partnered to launch Zero Jigen Shōkai, a painting rental business that found financial success in Gifu as a purveyor of frames. However, Koiwa had a falling out with Iwata and withdrew from Zero Jigen. Iwata Shin’ichi, in an interview with the author, November 11, 2000. See also Iwata, “Zero Jigen: emergence, activities, and sources of power,” 14. Although Koiwa left Zero Jigen sometime after the Zero Jigen Exhibition held at the Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum in 1966, he appears to have continued to create work on his own, including a piece titled Zero Jigen Shōkai shown at the 12th Kyoto Independent Exhibition in 1968. Photographs indicate that the ketsuzōkai posture appeared at Kashima Shrine on multiple occasions, but are difficult to date with

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

certainty. Two early confirmed performances of ketsuzōkai were held at the July 1965 exhibition at Lunami Gallery and the Gifu Independent in August 1965. See “Ketsusakuna ‘gishiki’” [Massterful “rituals”], Shūkan Sankei [Sankei Weekly] (September 11, 1967); “Bīnasu wa doko da: Zero Jigen gurūpu no fushigina matsuri” [Where’s Venus? The curious festivals of the group Zero Jigen], Baitarī meito [Vitally Mate] (September 12, 1967); and “Tokyo no sora no shita de ranchiki sawagi, gendai no shōkon, iyōna hadaka no gishiki ni kyōjiru zen’ei geijutsu-ka shūdan” [Debauchery under the Tokyo skies, modern salesmanship, avant-garde artists gone mad for a bizarre brand of rituals,” Shūkan Wadai [The Weekly Gossip], October 5, 1967. An alternate plan had an unmasked K.T. and S.K. walking in their regular clothes, then being sprayed with foam by Katō and Nagata from behind. Translator’s note: Hachikō is the name of a dog famed for his remarkable loyalty. Each day, Hachikō would head to Shibuya Station to wait for his master, the agricultural scientist Ueno Hidesaburō—a routine the Akita breed dog continued alone for nearly a decade after the professor’s death in 1925. The statue, installed in 1934, still serves as a common rendezvous point in front of Shibuya Station. An encore performance at the ultrasonic bathhouse was conducted in September 1968 for the Takahashi Keizō Show broadcast on TBS. Katō’s illustrated plans have survived and indicate that the event was expanded with ritual acts including the dragging of a futon bearing a woman up Dōgenzaka, Katō eating chicken meat inside the tub, and two women drinking milk. See “Kyōjin gurūpu wa odoru” [The group of lunatics dance], Shūkan Wadai [The Weekly Gossip], December 2, 1967. From 1966–68, Zero Jigen was widely covered in popular magazines oriented toward the general public (to say nothing of newspapers, art magazines, and film magazines). In 1966, articles appeared in Hōseki, Shūkan Taishū (January); Nyūsu Tokuhō (February); Shūkan Manga Taimuzu, Shūkan Manga Sandē (April); Bessatsu Nyūsu Tokuhō (May); Shūkan Shinchō (June); Shin-fujin (July); Heibon Punch (August); and Shūkan Manga Taimuzu (September). In 1967, Nyūsu Tokuhō, Asahi Gurafu (February); LIFE Asian Edition (March); Shūkan Shinchō, Nyūsu Tokuhō (April); Shūkan

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

Asahi Geinō (July); Shūkan Sankei, Baitarī meito (September); Shūkan Wadai (October); Shōri, Shūkan Wadai, Shūkan Manga Taimuzu, SSS (November); Asahi Gurafu, and Sandē Mainichi (December). In 1968, Asahi Gurafu, Doyō Manga (January); Doyō Manga, Shūkan Asahi Geinō, Josei Jishin, SSS, Shūkan Taishū (February); Sandē Mainichi, Asahi Gurafu, Rejā Nippon, Purei Bōi (March); Biggu Komikku (May); Asahi Gurafu, Yangu Redi (June); NON, Shūkan Bunshun, Bessatsu Shōsetsu Gendai (July); Chūō Kōron (August); and SSS (July). Katō participated only as a producer and did not perform himself. The cast included Koyama Tetsuo, Chida Ui, and others. Kokuin, (Azuchi Shūzō) Gulliver, Koyama Tetsuo, Chida Ui, and Tone Yasunao also appeared in the film. The script was reproduced in Eiga hyōron, vol. 25, no. 10 (October 1968): 84–93. Screened in January 1969 as part of the New Works by Donald Richie installment of the Sogetsu Cinematheque series at Sogetsu Art Center. The film is included on the DVD, A Donald Richie Film Anthology (Tokyo: Daguerreo Press, 2004). This large park to the east of Nagoya in Nisshin houses Goshiki-zan Daian-ji Temple, a Pure Land Buddhist temple. States by Asano Shōun depicting episodes from the life of Shinran, founder of the Pure Land sect, can be found at multiple locations on the park grounds. Screened at the Haiyū-za on December 17, 1970. See “Wasei poruno firumu himitsu shisha kai sen’nyū rupo” [Reportage from inside a secret screening of Japanese porno film], Purei Bōi (February 2, 1971), 32–35; and Suenaga Tamio, “‘Gishiki’ to iu na no LSD: Zero Jigen gishiki eiga ‘Inaba no Shiro Usagi’ tanjō” [Do you call LSD a “ritual”?: the birth of the Zero Jigen ritual film The White Hare of Inaba], Kuro no Techō vol. 1, no. 6 (June 1971): 92–93. “It was a tragic myth that the hare could not soar without the shark’s back as a springboard; with The White Hare, we commenced a collective trippy ritual, in an effort to revive an internal universe (eros); this (shark) culture that would encapsulate eros in penises (genitalia) can go suck a dick; any civilization that represses pleasure (eros) is doomed to fail.” See Katō Yoshihiro, “Kojiki-teki torippu-kō” [Tripping through the Kojiki] in “Uchū-teki erosu e no tabi: Zero Jigen gishiki eiga ‘Inaba no Shiro Usagi’ yori” [A journey to cosmic eros: From the Zero Jigen ritual film The White Hare of Inaba], Heibon Punch (February 7, 1970).

29. Originally presented under the title Baramon-zoku [The Brahman Tribe] at the Artist Union Symposium ’76, held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in January 1976. 30. The International Society for Krishna Consciousness was founded in 1966 by the Indian guru A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977) to spread the teachings of the Hindu deity Krishna in the West. Known for congregational chanting and dancing, the Hare Krishnas rose to prominence amid the 1960s counterculture movement with supporters including the Beatles’ George Harrison. In 1970, the group’s first Japanese temple was established in the Ōhashi neighborhood of Meguro by Sudama et al. See Kanesaka Kenji, “Hare kurishuna hare hare… Nihon ni jōriku shita kōkotsu no oshie” [Hare Krishna Hare Hare… The ecstatic teaching that has made landfall in Japan], Asahi Gurafu (June 5, 1970), 48–55. 31. Translator’s note: In February 1972, five members of the ultra-leftist United Red Army occupied Asama Mountain Villa (Nagano Prefecture) for ten days, taking the manager’s wife hostage. The televised standoff riveted the nation for days until the armed police could storm the villa, free the hostage, and arrest the culprits. The deaths of two police officers during the assault led to a decline in the popularity of leftist movements in Japan. 32. Iwata, “Zero Jigen: emergence, activities, and sources of power,” 16. 33. In May 1975, Katō abruptly published the Gekkan Zero Jigen [Zero Jigen Monthly]. Illustrations in the magazine, such as Zero Jigen Taisō [Zero Jigen Exercise], indicate the rituals had become more a means for ecological body modification, rather than sociopolitical resistance. 34. A rare documented example that overtly suggests sexual intercourse can be found in The White Hare of Inaba scene filmed in Katō’s apartment (March 1970). 35. Takechi Tetsuji was critical of attempts to “modernize” the body through militaristic regimentation that swept Japan from the Meiji period onward (see chap 20.1, p. 444). 36. Iwata Shin’ichi, “Rokku kabuki to Ōsu Opera: Sūpā Ichiza no oitachi” [Rock Kabuki and Ōsu Opera: The Story of Super Ichiza], Engeki (November 1996), 27. 37. Takechi Tetsuji, Dentō to danzetsu [Tradition and Extinction] (Tokyo: Fūtōsha, 1969), 27–34. 38. The invitation for Katō’s solo exhibition in June 1963 bore the title, “Oto ni yoru gishiki

(shūdan kongō gishiki)” [Sound ritual (mixed group ritual)]. An alternate title, “Shūdan kongō danshoku gishiki” [Mixed group homosexual ritual], was given in 99, ed. Suzuki Takashi, Usami Hitoshi, and Murase Kunimori (Nagoya: Fūbaisha, 1963), 11. 39. Katō’s penchant for synchronicity was also evident in from his criticism of the November 1968 performance at Iino Hall (see chap. 8.10, p. 226). 40. Katō Yoshihiro, “Zero Jigen, matano na o ‘kyōki teki nansensu (mushō kōi-in) no monogatari’” [Zero Jigen or a story of “crazy nonsense (gratuitous act institute)”], Kikan, no. 9 (June 1964): 21.

41. See “Chinkina ‘Zero Jigen’ no gishiki ni sen’nyū suru” [Infiltrating the strange Zero Jigen rituals], Nyūsu Tokuhō (February 22, 1967): 20–21; and “Kore ga eiga senden?” [Is this a film publicity stunt?], Shūkan Shinchō, June 11, 1966. 42. Katō, “Adachi Masao Interview 3 with Katō Yoshihiro,” 154. 43. Katō Yoshihiro, “Kaette kita Urutoraman” [The return of Ultraman], in Urutora torippu: chōhatsu sedai no shōgen [Ultra-trip: The testimony of the long-haired generation], ed. Suenaga Tamio and Nakamura Masaharu (Tokyo: Tairiku Shobō, 1971), 112–14. 44. “Infiltrating the strange Zero Jigen rituals,” 19.

CHAPTER 14

Kurohata Political Theater on the Street

1.

FROM LEFTISTS TO THE RITUALISTS

Formed in 1961,1 Art Gymnastics Attack Team Kurohata (Bijutsu Taisō Shūdan Kurohata, hereinafter “Kurohata”2) began to stage performance expressions in 1963. Its period of peak activity occurred between 1966–67, and like Unbeat before it, it would become a specialist performance group. From its base in Shinjuku, it played a pioneering role in launching the activities of the “Ritualists” (gishiki-ya), working with Zero Jigen, Kokuin, and Akiyama Yūtokutaishi. None of the core members of the group—Matsue Kaku (Kakujirō) (1936–84) [fig. 152], Suzuki Shirō3 (1935–97), Takahara Yūji (Takamagahara Yūjirō, 1936–2001)—are still alive, and few materials documenting their activities remain. One seminal resource for understanding the group’s work is Takahara’s semi-fictional4 Shōwa no ekin chinkon (Requiem for a Shōwa Ekin, 1996), which allows us to build a rough picture of the group’s activities along with documents and accounts by other artists and photographers of the time. The following account by the photographer Hanaga Mitsutoshi describes Matsue’s career up to the formation of Kurohata: He was born in Nagasaki, a high school classmate of the singer and performer Maruyama (later Miwa) Akihiro. He moved to Tokyo at the same period as Maruyama. In 1964, the year after the collapse of the Yomiuri Independent, he executed large-scale paintings, using predominantly Ryūkyūan red paint and depicting the vibrant folk world of Brahmanism. He exhibited them in Japan Independent that year5—which had already been shunned by former participants—possibly as a means of disrupting it. But feeling scorned (the exhibition itself had ended up much like a conservative official salon) and increasingly isolated, he burned them outside in front of the museum in the late afternoon of the last day. Suzuki Shirō transformed his act into a semi-theatrical—almost ritual—demonstration. Suzuki started out as a cultural organizer for the Japanese Communist Party in Aichi Prefecture, but ended up leaving the party and became a lighting engineer for Mayama Miho’s Shinseisaku-za theater (New Production Company).6 He was an advocate of popular and indigenous art forms, rejected Tokyo-centrism, and also worked with a traveling female sword troupe and striptease act. His snobbist approach led him to hit it off with painter Matsue Kaku. For Matsue, who kept his aesthetic tumult hidden within himself, this newfound friendship with Suzuki spurred him to stop painting and turn to Ritualist performance.7

Matsue met Takahara at Musashino Art School8 before he graduated in 1963. In November that year, the pair held their first group performance at Hanazono Shrine in Shinjuku, titled Towards Cultural Revolution: The Collective Scream of the Young (Let’s get drunk on action painting and flamenco). Matsue and his wife were keen flamenco lovers, and he also performed with Zero Jigen (which had just moved to Tokyo) at Café Spain in Shinjuku

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 152. Matsue Kaku • Date and location unknown

in July 1964. In November, he participated in the flamenco festival at Shinjuku Hall9 and painted on a ceiling of the flamenco pub Nana (which still exists as of 2022) in Shinjuku Golden Street. Another characteristic of early Kurohata is its connection to traditional leftist cultural movements (before the emergence of the New Left), evident both in its continued participation in the Japan Independent (sponsored by Japan Art Society) and in its relationship with Shigun. Having exhibited at the final Yomiuri Independent in 1963, Matsue continued to exhibit at the Japan Independent from 1964 to 1967. A split between the two exhibitions had appeared during the Yomiuri’s last years; following its collapse, many artists who had benefitted from the national media exposure and critical attention of Yomiuri refused to switch to the left-leaning Japan Independent. Matsue, however, remained sympathetic to the political objectives of Japan Independent and continued to exhibit there, despite the fact that he was largely overlooked. It is surmised that he continued to participate for the opportunity it afforded him to create disruptive action.10 Kurohata was unusual among the Ritualists in its outspoken antiwar and anti-American stance, and the group likely saw performance as a way of overcoming the overly schematic art of the Old Left (Suzuki, who directed Kurohata’s performances, was originally a cultural activist for the Japanese Communist Party, as is evident in Hanaga’s account).

 153. Matsue Kaku in the May Day rally • May 1, 1965 • Yoyogi, Tokyo

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Zen’ei Bijutsu Shūdan “Shigun” (Avant-Garde Art Group “Visions,” hereinafter “Shigun”)11 formed as early as 1954 and remained active until at least 1970, though the actual date of its dissolution is unclear. It held a total of twenty-five group exhibitions. Shigun’s work was political and cross-genre; it saw itself as an “elite revolutionary group centered on avant-garde art, encompassing literature and theater, music, film, and science,” and “an avant-garde art corps using visual and tactile action to consolidate the antiwar and anti-fascist front.”12 It is noteworthy that at the 1964 May Day rally in Shiba Park, Shigun actually invited other avant-garde art groups in Tokyo to join its 14th Shigun group exhibition. Kurohata presented a work on this occasion. Shigun subsequently conducted group demonstrations on May Day 1965 and again the following year, with Kurohata participating each time [fig. 153]. At May Day 1966, participants included Zero Jigen, 8 Generation, and Itoi Kanji, while May Day 1967 saw the debut of Kokuin. Shigun’s May Day rallies thus played a crucial role in bringing together a number of Ritualists (who would go on to organize joint-performance events together) for the first time. Kurohata may have been a driving force in the Ritualists’ formation, but it was Shigun who originally introduced Kurohata to the May Day rallies before the other Ritualists. Following its participation in the first May Day event, Kurohata continued to collaborate with Shigun. In September 1964, Kurohata premiered “Inventive Art Gymnastics” at the 15th Shigun Exhibition at Ginpō-dō Gallery, and in September 1965 performed a Happening at the 18th Shigun Exhibition at the Tsubaki Kindai Gallery. The continuous collaboration between the groups was based on a close alignment of (cross-genre) artistic and political stances. 2.

RELIGIOUS RITUALS AND POLITICAL THEATER Kurohata’s Matsue Kaku used to walk around reciting popular saimon, strumming a homemade biwa and dragging a chain. He would dress in a navy blue hanten jacket, tight-fitting worker’s trousers, black tabi socks and traditional sandals. As a painter, he was originally associated with the Japan Independent but in 1966–7 he performed multiple anti-Vietnam War rituals in the streets of Tokyo, in an effort to draw attention to the threat posed by the war to future generations. His saimon chanting was a revival of popular saimon of the Edo period (vulgar versions of ritual chants by ascetic Yamabushi priests). Traditionally performed by itinerant entertainers who also peddled kawaraban, a type of mini-komi zine, saimon was an art form deeply rooted in commoner culture, and one of few forms of entertainment available in premodern times to the lower classes. Some of the boneheads on the May Day executive committee called Matsue a Trotskyist, but this was ridiculous.13 —Yoshida Yoshie

Photographs and contemporary accounts, including Yoshida Yoshie’s above, offer insight into key aspects of Kurohata’s performance. Firstly, from Hanaga’s account of Matsue’s painting style and also his use of signboards emblazoned with bold kanteiryū lettering,14 we can see the strong influence of ukiyoe from the twilight years of the Edo period, as well as of the work of the Tosa artist Ekin 15—folkloric, sanguinary, eerily unnerving and

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 154. Kurohata, Art Gymnastics Escalation Battle • February 9, 1966 • In front of Shinjuku Koma Theater, Tokyo

modelled after traditional Japanese culture. Secondly, the group’s performance was also informed by traditional Japanese performing arts—the ancient una­ ri roaring ritual, saimon recitals, biwa accompaniment—and also religious rituals, as seen in their props: Brahman monks’ robes, Buddhist altars and so forth. Thirdly, Suzuki’s theater direction introduced a political dimension to the work, which incorporated protests against wars in India, Pakistan and Vietnam. Meanwhile, events described as “art gymnastics” instead of “Happening” or “ritual” seem to have referred to solo performances by Matsue. At the Shigun exhibition at Ginpō-dō Gallery, Matsue stood on the pavement outside the gallery in a pair of pants, wailing a flamenco melody and making movements like basic karate forms.16 But more typically (according to multiple written and oral accounts) he would appear with thick eyebrows, bulging eyes, wearing an old-fashioned padded kimono, and swinging an iron ball.17 Indeed a sense of inherent violence or danger is characteristic of his work—battlefield scenes, for example, with explosive noises and fire. Uncoincidentally, Matsue in fact referred to his performances as “blasts” (happō). The strong folk influence, intense visual imagery, violence and theatricality of Kurohata’s work make Zero Jigen seem comparatively more modern. Although in the early 1960s Matsue and his group participated in flamenco performances and exhibitions organized by Shigun, after the Kurohata Exhibition at Kondō Gallery in July 1965 they began to hold more performances independently. In August 1965 they participated unofficially at Gifu Independent, where they performed jointly with Zero Jigen. Then, in August 1966, they participated in the Sakai Independent, performing Sound and Poetry Ritual for Art Gymnastics. In the “Portfolio Exhibition,” Matsue submitted a graphic work printed with an anti-Vietnam War message.18 Between 1965–67, the group performed numerous presentations at galleries, May Day venues, coffee shops, little theaters, community centers, and on the streets of Shinjuku. One of the photographs of the group’s early work dates to February 1966. This was a performance about urban warfare between the U.S. military and Viet Cong guerrillas, staged in the plaza in front of the Shinjuku Koma Theater [fig.  154].19 In October, the group performed the Vietnam War drama Baramon (Brahman) at the Chiyoda Salon Small Theater: First on was a male stripper covered in silver powder. For the main performance, a man appears, covered in red paint with a cross on his face, strumming the mandolin, and sobbing and wailing plaintively. This is the Red Demon. Next comes a terrifying, chain-swinging figure who rages around the stage—the Black Demon. […] All the while, grotesque pictures are projected onto the background amid the steady beat of a melancholy saimon melody,

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with someone occasionally shouting “Baramon!” or calling out to the God. […] A naked boy appears as a Viet Cong soldier, his hands tied behind his back. He is shot with a toy machine gun, but revived when a monk recites a sutra in a loud voice, subsequently performing a “traditional kappore dance20 to a beat drummed on a nabe pan”—provoking guffaws of laughter.21

The event, titled Midnight Variety Happening, was devised in conjunction with Sawahata Kazuaki of Gaga,22 who had been asked to come up with a plan to fill seats at a struggling theater and turned to his friend Matsue for help. As the title also suggests, the event was more entertainment-oriented than subsequent performances at Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka; nonetheless, they shared a number of features in common: elements derived from traditional performing arts—such as demons, saimon recital, kappore dance— and religious references (Brahman or Buddhist monks’ rituals). The publicity leaflet also lists the joint participation of other artists including Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Kawanaka Nobuhiro, Suenaga Tamio, Watanabe Chihiro, marking this as an early collaboration between Anti-Art performers who would go on to form Expo Destruction Group. Two months later, in December  1966, Akiyama, Kawanaka and Fuma Motohiko (who later became a novelist) participated in Ritual Tsuina (a Shinto ritual for driving out evil spirits) at the Shinjuku Art Festival. Held at Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka, this seems to have been a full-blown stage work that combined political drama with religious rituals and entertainment. The following description is derived from accounts by Fuma and Takahara Yūji.23 On the left and right side of the stage, members of Shigun are working on a drawing of a plaster sculpture. Tachibana Yoshirō24 is performing flamenco. These “artistic” activities are interrupted by an explosion, which leaves on stage only a man in workman’s overalls, laying bricks, as Suzuki Shirō launches paper planes, representing the bombing of north Vietnam. A second explosion follows, and Takahara appears from the second-floor seats, dressed as a Viet Cong soldier. A group of American soldiers, headed up by Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, marches through the aisle onto the stage. The two—Takahara and Akiyama—stand facing each other across the audience. Then the American soldiers capture and torture the Viet Cong soldier and try to shoot him. Takahara (playing the Viet Cong soldier) sings a song, and Akiyama (the American soldier) responds with noh-pon (his trademark act, see chap. 8.10, p. 224). The Viet Cong soldier is shot and falls from the stage. Matsue Kaku then appears, “his body entwined in chain and carrying a large blank stupa. He represents a compassionate Brahman monk and recites a sutra.” When “the revival ritual” is performed, the Viet Cong soldier comes back to life, a worker’s song is played, and a horizontal banner stating “Support North Vietnam” is displayed. In February  1967, at the Japan Independent, Kurohata individually performed Brahman Ritual: Anti-Vietnam War Happening. The performance included a sculptural work taken from an exhibit in the gallery, and its production was both more radical and more serious, shorn of its entertainment elements. Takahara provides the following detailed account.25 The first part consists of Ritual Offered to the Spirits, in which Matsue and others, dressed as monks with shaved heads, carry a Buddhist altar—fashioned from a large disused western-style chest of drawers, and painted with depictions of the god Shiva and stylized genitalia—from the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (the exhibition hall) to Shinobazunoike Pond. In the second part, Revelation of the Sexual Body,

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 155. Kurohata, Brahman Ritual: Anti-Vietnam War Happening • March 2, 1967 • Near Shinobazunoike pond (presumed), Ueno, Tokyo

Matsue faces the altar and performs a wild dance, reciting a sutra. [fig. 155]. Then, in the third part, Burial Service, gasoline is sprinkled on the altar, which is set alight, and fireworks explode. 3.

ASCENT AND DEMISE

Kurohata’s work continued in this vein. December 1967 saw its climactic performance, Ko Yui Chūnoshin Tsuitō Kokumingi (National Memorial Ritual for Yui Chūnoshin) in Shinjuku, documented in photographs and articles by Hirata Minoru.26 Yui Chūnoshin was an Esperantist who, only a month prior, had immolated himself in front of the prime minister’s office in protest of the Japanese government’s cooperation with the United States in the Vietnam War. Matsushita Ippei also participated in the Kurohata ritual.27 Participants initially gather at the Tsubaki Kindai Gallery; a group wearing helmets and holding red flags is on the street outside28 and the funeral procession follows, joined by 8 Generation, Zero Jigen, Itoi Kanji, and Makirō of Baramanji Kessha, who chants sutras. Headed by a man (possibly Makirō) dressed as a monk in white robes with straw sandals and a Buddhist staff, the procession makes its way through the streets of Shinjuku, carrying a portrait photograph of Yui. Matsue and Takahara carry dolls on their backs that have been fashioned in their own likenesses. When they have reached the West Exit of Shinjuku Station, they erect a banner that reads, “Anti-Vietnam War records. Immolation ritual, Kurohata headquarters. National Memorial Ritual for Yui Chūnoshin.” They spread out a red cloth and put the two dolls at either end (see plate 15, p. 10). Each man faces his own doll, representing his alter ego, and chants a sutra. They then set fire to the dolls shouting “We oppose the Vietnam War! Abolish Anpo!” At that very moment, fireworks that have been inserted into the dolls explode. Matsue and Takahara, facing the flames, recite prayers. Zero Jigen, wearing gas masks, raise both hands in the air. Itoi, with a cross shaved onto his head, is the only member unfortunate enough to be caught and taken away by the police. Just two years later in 1969, a large folk rally held at the West Exit was dispersed by riot police (see chap. 9.1, p. 248), so it is astonishing that this memorial ritual—involving fire and the risk of conflagration—was even allowed to take place at the busy Shinjuku Station. The intensity of Matsue’s work became increasingly more extreme. At 9 p.m. on December 9, Zero Jigen performed Buck-naked Gas-masked Walking Ritual. In the early hours of the following day, at 2 a.m., Matsue poured gasoline over himself and his

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daughter Tsuina, attempting to set them both alight in a double suicide. Katō Yoshihiro and others present acted desperately to prevent this from occurring.29 Subsequent to this event, Matsue abruptly stopped performing and Kurohata lost its momentum. For Insanity Trade Fair at Honmoku-tei Theater in March 1968 and Grand Insanity Trade Fair at Iino Hall in November—events which marked the climax of the Ritualists’ performances—Matsue merely contributed the poster design and committed himself to other behind-the-scenes work. Other members of the group performed at Iino Hall, but Katō was underwhelmed by their performance (see chap. 8.10, p. 225). According to Takahara, after the attempted self-immolation, Kurohata joined a group exhibition at a gallery in Shinjuku, where Matsue exhibited “paintings of blood-drenched kabuki actors” and Takahara exhibited a “salted salmon.”30 There were stalls selling cotton candy and grilled squid; the politics, violence, and passion all were gone. Matsue set fire to a flowerbed in Shinjuku,31 and Akiyama Yūtokutaishi performed his trademark “Glico” (see chap. 8, n. 117).32 What was it that drove Matsue to attempt double suicide with his beloved daughter? What led to the loss of political commitment in Kurohata’s performances, and why did these performances come to a halt? Did Matsue suddenly choose to prioritize his family life? Given its political credentials and the artists it had collaborated with, Kurohata could have participated in Expo Destruction Group, but from that point on never again performed with other Ritualists or political activists. According to Yoshida Yoshie, when members of Kokuin were arrested in July  1969, those opposing the arrests met at Matsue’s house,33 and Matsue appeared on stage in December 1970, after a screening of Inaba no Shiro Usagi, Zero Jigen’s film.34 Thereafter, his name disappears from 1960s performance history. He subsequently devoted himself to painting, where he achieved a measure of success.35 As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, much of the history of Kurohata remains obscure, erased along with the passing of its members. Nevertheless, the group succeeded in establishing a performance style that was completely independent from other leading Anti-Art artists. Through May Day rallies and events organized in Shinjuku, it brought together a wide array of artists. Matsue’s Ukiyoe-inspired pictures and kanteiryū lettering helped brand the image of the Ritualists as they left their mark on 1960s performance history. It is conceivable that the combination of folk art, traditional performing arts, and politics—also characteristic of 1980s Korean madang theater36—could have led to the invention of an autonomous performance art rooted in the people’s culture in Japan. Their use of premodern performing arts to address the problems of modern society can also be found in the theater of Kara Jūrō and other parts of the angura culture of the late sixties. Katō Yoshihiro, however, was critical of Kurohata. He complained that the effervescent energy of their street performances was diluted by their ideological slogans.37 And Kurohata’s rigorous commitment to Old Left ideals of social justice, as seen in their participation in demonstrations under the red flag,38 may have seemed outdated and irrelevant in the context of angura culture and the Zenkyōtō student movements. Kurohata was a group both slightly ahead of the times and slightly behind the times; for this reason, it has now largely disappeared from history. Still, its sympathy for the anticolonial war in Vietnam, interest in Indian and Japanese magic and religions, and strategies of resistance to global imperialism by non-Western cultures suggest that it may be time for a new appraisal of its significance.39

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NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

Based on the chronology provided in Bessatsu Kurohata [Kurohata: Special Edition] (May 1966). There are no known sources confirming the derivation of the name Kurohata. The name literally means “black flag,” the symbol of the anarchism, as opposed to the red flag of the Communist Party, and “Kurohata” written in katakana is also the name of the Bulletin of the Japan Anarchism Federation published in 1956–62. The name “Kuroi me” [Black bud] was used at Gifu Independent in 1965 and in joint exhibitions with Gaga, but the origin of this title is also unknown. There is also a newsletter titled Kurohata, which the author discovered after the Japanese edition of this book, published by “Art group Kuroi me no Kai” (no. 5 and 7, 1964–5); consequently, it appears that group’s name at some point changed from “Kuroi me” to “Kurohata.” There are no reference materials for Suzuki other than: Takahara Yūji, Shōwa no Ekin Chinkon [Requiem for a Shōwa Ekin] (Tokyo: Kindai Bungeisha, 1996); Hanaga Mitsutoshi, “Kongetsu no hōmon: Zero Jigen to hapuningu senjutsu” [Visit of the Month: Zero Jigen and Happening Tactics], Eiga hyōron vol. 25. no. 5 (May 1968); “Shōbaikke nuki no Ueno no angura” [Angura at Ueno without business], Biggu Komikku (Big Comic) vol. 1. No. 6 (September 1968): 201; and Suzuki’s own writings: Suzuki Shirō, “Jibun no tsura ga magatte iru no ni kagami o semeru buyō-ka-tachi: Josetsu [Dancers, bent faces and blaming the mirror: Preface], Art 21, no. 4 (December 1967): 39–40. The names that appear in Takahara’s book have been changed from the members’ actual names. Matsue did not exhibit at Independent ’64 in June 1964, which was held only once, so this may then be a reference to From the song Heaven and Hell: 1, 2, 3 and 4 exhibited at the 17th Japan Independent in February of the same year organized by left-oriented Japan Art Society. Founded in 1950 by playwright Mayama Miho (1922–2006). Mayama was interested in grassroots theater and worked mainly in local cities. Hanaga, Zero Jigen to hapuningu senjutsu, 78. This became Musashino Art University in 1962, while Matsue was still a student.

9. This festival was not just a flamenco performance but a rally protesting the closure of the night class at Musashino Art University. According to Bessatsu Kurohata, Matsue performed “art gymnastics,” but we have no details of Takahara’s Spein no hiru (Spanish noon) or Suzuki’s Kūkan gekijō (Spatial theater). 10. The title suggests that Matsue’s Konmyunisto no te (Hand of the Communists), exhibited at the 1965 Japan Independent, contained comments critical of the Japanese Communist Party. 11. Shigun’s members were: Nishioka Hiroshi, Kawai Kaname, Kawai Yoshihiro and Kitayama Yasuto. See Nishioka Hiroshi, Zen’ei bijutsu shūdan: Shigun [Avant-Garde Art Group Shigun], no. 4 (August 14, 1965). 12. Nishioka Hiroshi, “Shigun,” Bijutsu techō, no. 260 (December 1965): 87. 13. Yoshida Yoshie, Kaitaigeki no maku orite: rokujū nendai zen’ei bijutsushi [The curtain falls on deconstruction theater: A history of 1960s avant-garde art] (Tokyo: Zōkeisha, 1982), 167–68. 14. Translator’s note: kanteiryū was an Edo period script used for theater publicity. Its name derived from the nickname (Kantei) of its inventor, Okazakiya Kanroku. 15. Translator’s note: Ekin is the popular name of the painter Kinzō (1812–76). Born in Tosa (currently Kōchi City), he studied with the Kanō school in Edo, but was thrown out as a result of slanderous accusations and returned to his hometown where his screen paintings of kabuki themes gained popularity. 16. Takahara, Showa no Ekin Chinkon, 85. 17. Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Hōmatsu ketsujin retsuden: Shirezaru chōzen’ei [Biographies of the evanescent great: The unknown super-avant-garde] (Tokyo: Nigensha, 2002), 75. 18. At the Sakai Independent, alongside the standard categories of “Indoor Exhibits,” “Outdoor Exhibits,” and “Happenings,” there was also a section dedicated to presentations made through printed materials. In addition to Matsue, participants in this category included Ikemizu Keiichi, Matsuzawa Yutaka, Group I, and All-Japan Contemporary Artists Council. 19. [Yoshioka Yasuhiro], “21 Seiki ni idomu bijutsu taisō gurūpu” [Art Gymnastics Group

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20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

Challenges the 21st Century], Hōseki, vol. 2, no. 4 (April 1966). Translator’s note: kappore odori is a comical dance style that was a popular form of street performance in the Edo Period. “Gin’iro no sutorippu: hapuningu wa genshi-geijutsu, Kurohata no shō ‘Baramon” [Silver strip: Happening is a primitive art. Kurohata’s show “Brahman”], Heibon Punch, vol. 3. no. 44 (October 24, 1966): 27. Formed in 1962. The group’s first exhibition was at Ginza Gallery in July 1964, and a Happening with Matsue Kaku was held on the Chiba coast in July 1965. Also participated in May Day 1966 and the Anti-Vietnam War Action Parade in 1967. Fuma Motohiko, Utsukushiki getsuyōbi no hitobito [Beautiful Monday People] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1994), 14; Shōwa no Ekin Chinkon, 99–103. Tachibana was the manager of the flamenco pub Nana when it opened in 1963. Shōwa no Ekin Chinkon, 139–41. See also: “Aru gishiki: Betonamu hansen o ‘geijutsu’ shita wakamono-tachi” [A certain ritual: Young people who make art from the anti-Vietnam War movement] (Shūkan Asahi Geinō, no. 1076 (March 19, 1966). [Hirata Minoru], “Gurafu no me” [Graph Eye], Asahi Gurafu [Asahi Picture News] no. 2287 (December 22, 1967): 80–81; Hirata Minoru Chō geijutsu: Zen’ei bijutsuka-tachi no ashiato 1963–1969 [Art in Action: The 1960s Avant-Garde Works and Profiles of Young Japanese Artists] (Tokyo: Sangokan, 2005), 115–19; Hirata Minoru, Zero Jigen: Katō Yoshihiro to rokujū nendai [Zero Jigen: Katō Yoshihiro and the Sixties] (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2006), 29–39. See also Showa no Ekin Chinkon, 156–59. Showa no Ekin Chinkon, 157. Makirō, Zusetsu Musō-yūran: B-kyū geijutsuka no yasegaman, Shaba asobi gurafiti [Illustrated fantasy sightseeing: B-level artist’s

29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

stubborn pride, grafitti of earthly dalliances] (Tokyo: Jiyū kokumin-sha, 1994), 136–37. “Mahiru no gaitō de gishiki o suru Zero Jigen, Kurohata gurūpu” [Rituals on the streets in broad daylight: Zero Jigen and Kurohata], Bijutsu techō, (February 1968): 30–31; Shōwa no Ekin Chinkon, 147–48; “Zero jigen to hapuningu senjutsu,” 79–80. Shōwa no Ekin Chinkon, 183. Shōwa no Ekin Chinkon, 188. Shōwa no Ekin Chinkon, 190. The first time he performed this, Akiyama wrote the word “Darico” on the shirt, but this time it was “Glico,” Shōwa no Ekin Chinkon, 190. Kaitaigeki no maku orite, 172. Matsue can be seen in the photo in Shimizu Shōjirō’s “0-Jigen: keishichō yo, sakarauna” [Zero Jigen: Police, don’t disobey] Naigai Taimuzu (December 24, 1970). Shōwa no Ekin Chinkon, 195–96, 214. Madang means a garden or a plaza. Madang-­ guk theater is a type of folk drama accompanied by dance and music performed in outdoor spaces such as rural areas in Korea. It was rediscovered and re-introduced by Kim Jiha and others from the ’70s. In the 1980s, it was often performed in urban areas and dealt with contemporary political issues. See Yang Mingi, Kamen geki to madan geki: Kankoku no minshū engeki [Mask and madang theater: Korean folk drama], trans. Kubo Satoru (Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 1981). Hanaga Mitsutoshi, “Gerira sakka no kōmyaku o saguru: Insaido ruporutāju” [Searching for the veins of guerrilla writers: Inside reportage], Bijutsu techō, no. 289 (November 1967): 114. Makirō, Zusetsu Musō-yūran,” 136–37. For Kurohata’s literary works, see KuroDalaiJee, “Yakeato no gishiki: Kurohata to 1960 nendai bunka no kasō” [Ritual at Ruins after Fire: Kurohata and the underside of 1960s culture], Shakai bungaku, no. 36 (August 2012): 31–43.

CHAPTER 15

Koyama Tetsuo A Visceral Rebellion

1.

JACK SOCIETY

Koyama Tetsuo appears in Akiyama Yūtokutaishi’s book 1 as the founder and leading artist of Vitamin Art, and whose performances involved defecation. If that were all one knew about Koyama as an artist, it would be all too easy to imagine him as someone devoid of any serious conceptual grounding or artistic ability, someone who simply aimed to shock through thoroughly bad-taste methods. In fact, though, Koyama—with his long but little-known history of performance, a breadth of development that encompassed multiple “Anti-Art” tendencies, interest in the body right down to its innards, and original style that took its cues from traditional farm-village performance—truly is someone who cannot be overlooked by anyone hoping to understand the performance art of this period. He is similar in that sense to Zero Jigen, who stand out among the Anti-Art performers for their bad taste but were conceptually consistent and held particular significance in postwar Japanese cultural history. Koyama was born in 1943 in Nozawa, in rural Nagano Prefecture. Along with Chida Ui and her circle, with whom Koyama briefly joined forces, he belonged to the youngest generation of Anti-Art performers. He arrived in Tokyo in 1963 and received his arts education at Taiheiyō Oil Painting Institute, graduating in 1965. The timing of his graduation meant that he just missed the opportunity to exhibit at the Yomiuri Independent, and so he instead made his debut at Independent ’64 (June 1964), where evidently he exhibited four miniature paintings featuring microorganisms and imaginary space creatures. Although he subsequently continued to paint, he also joined Jack Society, having heard that it was a group where nothing was off-limits. The Gifu Independent (August 1965) is the next exhibition in which Koyama’s participation can be confirmed. However, as previously discussed (see chap. 8.5, p. 209), at this point Koyama had not yet developed his own original mode of performance and merely took part in a group demonstration in the local shopping district. In May 1966, he participated in a street performance on the television program Saturday Show. In June, when a sizeable number of Jack Society members

 156. Koyama Tetsuo munching on a cabbage leaf on Katsura Kokinji Afternoon Show • June 17, 1966

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appeared on the Katsura Kokinji Afternoon Show, another television program, he delivered the “Vitamin Art Manifesto” while munching on a cabbage [fig. 156]. Although the text of this manifesto sadly does not survive, Art 21, the bulletin of the All-Japan Contemporary Artists Council, provides a useful point of reference, introducing Koyama thus: “Reality exists in a state of constant malnourishment. The abilities that regulate this condition—for instance, cabbage-eating ability, jacking ability—make him the conceptual nutritionist of abilitocracy”2 Based on what the bulletin reveals about Koyama, we can surmise his manifesto articulated a belief that art was necessary to rectify real world problems and nourish people, in the same way that vitamins help regulate the body, yet differently than calories and carbohydrates, which do no more than fill the belly. Given that the fundamental principle of Jack Society was to sell their ideas as artists, it is possible to see “Vitamin Art” as nothing more than a catchy slogan, but Koyama continued to develop the concept of “vitamins,” connoting the invigoration of the physical body, up to and including his most shocking and outré performances in 1968–1969. Before he could fully realize that particular idea, he briefly changed course and started performing with Chida Ui, who also belonged to the Jack Society. 2.

“DATING” WITH CHIDA UI Incidentally, a “date,” if you will pardon my crude language, consists of people failing to communicate, surreptitiously groping in the shade of the trees in woods and forests, or squeezing one another’s hands in a gloomy and silent manner at those establishments known as shin’ya kissa [late-night tearooms]. We—who are rich in humanistic spirit and the heart for service—have set up what we call a Dating Association, or might otherwise call “Dating for Communication,” in order to hold dates that even third parties will be happy to behold. —Dating Show invitation card, November 1966

In September 1966, Koyama and Chida devise the idea of turning “dating” into a show in public spaces. It was conceived of and organized by Sasaki Kōsei, the artist who led the performances of Jack Society. The manner in which they presented Dating Show as a “fabulous new product” and a “moneymaking publicity stunt of new techniques and art forms for modes of thinking based on the complete affirmation of individual phenomena”3 is a sales pitch typical of the Jack Society under Sasaki. In November 1966, they held the first Dating Show outside the Koma Theater in Shinjuku and a second one soon after at Sukiyabashi Park, both of which reportedly drew several thousand spectators. 4 In the Shinjuku performance, Chida, wearing a red cloth resembling a cape, and Koyama, with several mannequin heads attached to his clothes, apply makeup to one another’s faces (see plate 11, p. 8). Koyama also bites into the neck of a chicken and drinks the fresh blood; Chida then uses a saw to cut off its head (see chap. 8.6, pp. 210–1). At Sukiyabashi, Koyama begins by attracting people’s attention through bizarre antics, such as licking motorcycles parked nearby; then he and Chida stick their heads out of a stretched white cloth, and Sasaki Kōsei, his face concealed by a mask with finger protectors stuck onto it, paints both their faces white. When the white cloth is removed,

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 157. Koyama Tetsuo performing with a hose in his mouth in Second Dating Show (Chida Ui at right) • November 27, 1966 • Sukiyabashi Park, Tokyo

Koyama thrusts lengths of rubber hosing into his mouth and makes extravagant movements with his arms and legs [fig. 157], then does a series of improvisations with Chida, such as crawling along the ground and licking their shoes while holding them in their hands. In addition to Sasaki (who appeared in the Shinjuku show), Jack Society members Kobayashi Shichirō, Ihara Chizuko (moving an object with numerous rubber balls attached) and Chiba Eisuke (moving inside a plastic bag) also took part. As far as we can tell from the photographs, Koyama and Chida’s double act stood out and was very much the main attraction, with the two of them displaying a talent for street performance that could seize the attention of passersby in large numbers. Koyama’s later personal style was very much evident in the performance in front of Koma Theater, where he provoked the physical disgust of the audience with his mannequin heads and chicken-killing. Incidentally, the reason Koyama was able to use mannequins so extensively was because he worked at a mannequin factory; he consequently used them frequently up to and including his final performance at Toshiba Hall (May 1969). Eventually, the Koyama-Chida duo quit Jack Society and started to perform independently. They took part in Swinger Party5 (March 1967), Bum Academy Second Festival (April 1967), and in Great Ramble Operation (December 1967), where they performed with Zero Jigen. It was around this time that Koyama started wearing sunglasses; his mask and samurai sword in Great Ramble Operation give him the edgy persona of a yakuza [fig. 158], but he maintains the stylistic choice he originated in Shinjuku, attaching a mannequin’s head to his groin area.

 158. Koyama Tetsuo in Great Ramble Operation • December 15, 1967 • Hibiya, Tokyo

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SOLO CAREER

Koyama and Chida attracted attention from Zero Jigen for their abilities as street performers, but really it was only after going solo that Koyama went all-in on a different kind of concept to Chida. The first such performance (see plate 12, p. 9) was Vitamin Show, which he presented in January 1968 between Sukiyabashi and Ginza, the location of the second Dating Show. His characteristic mannequins remained a part of his style, but this time he wears only underpants, exposing more of his body as he tries to express the Vitamin Art idea with a more elaborate production. The concept, which predated Koyama’s teaming up with Chida, is visible in the way he scatters fruit around and drinks water (or some other liquid) from a large sake bottle inscribed with the word bitamin (vitamin) in large characters. The scene becomes even more complex as Koyama is accompanied by a pair of women facing a Go board. They first move only the white stones, and then only the black ones, creating a structure of disparate worlds advancing in parallel, reminiscent of the work of Zero Jigen. But an even more critical aspect of the performance is the addition of actions and apparatus associated with farming. Specifically, Koyama incorporates the clank-clank of a pedal-operated threshing machine as a sound effect and sprays toilet air freshener using a backpack pesticide sprayer [fig. 159]. Koyama, who was originally from the country (inaka), found the big city desiccated, lacking blood and guts. With this performance, he attempted to bring into the city the physical body and the organic qualities of the farming village. He sought to “spill the guts of the inaka [countryside],” based on his memories of performing shishi-mai (the lion dance) when at primary school.6 This idea escalates at the Insanity Trade Fair at Honmoku-tei (see chap. 8.9, p. 221) in March 1968. At this event, after performing a “a sort of contemporary dance based on an arrangement of the lion dance,”7 Koyama defecates onto a plate, decorates his feces with a small paper Japanese flag on a toothpick in the style of a special kids’ meal at a restaurant, then smears his feces on apples that he has brought with him in a bucket before tossing them into the audience. A performance he gave at Olympic, a cabaret in Yokohama, is another instance where he is confirmed to have defecated on stage; the precise date is unclear, but the year is thought to be 1968, and the month probably around May, given that photographs show the performance was part of a show held for the Yokohama Port Festival. Even by Ritualist standards, this performance was particularly bizarre:

 159. Koyama Tetsuo in Vitamin Show • January 1, 1968 • Sukiyabashi Park, Tokyo

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 160. Koyama Tetsuo defecating on stage • 1968 • Olympic, Yokohama

with sentimental enka ballads playing in the background, Koyama and three other men dressed in everyday clothes (they proceed to remove their shirts and trousers), their faces slathered with thick white makeup reminiscent of rustic theatricals, make facial expressions as though moaning and groaning, embrace one another, point their fingers out toward the audience (see plate  13, p. 9), and then place their palms together as if in prayer. At this point, a prop resembling a gohei—a wooden wand with paper streamers attached which is brandished together with jangling bells in the lion dance—is brought out. This is the moment that Koyama, with a mannequin head dangling from his groin area, defecates onto the plate [fig. 160]. After planting the little paper flag in his feces, he picks up a fan and fans the plate with it. Needless to say, all other performances planned for the cabarets under the same owner as Olympic were canceled. In another performance by Vitamin Art, men and women, wearing only loincloths and underwear, groan with limbs intertwined, fondling the mannequins placed on the stage at the Grand Insanity Trade Fair (see chap. 8.10, pp. 225–6) at Iino Hall, November 1968. Somehow, this performance manages to generate a sense of pathos, something that carries over into Koyama’s performance at Toshiba Hall. As a member of Expo Destruction Group, Koyama took part in rituals in Ikebukuro and Kyoto in June 1969. We can, however, see that he was dissatisfied with this sort of anti-individualistic unitary collective action because, instead of participating in the Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally held in Fukuoka on May 3–5, he gave a solo performance titled Vitamin Show8 on May 7 at Toshiba Hall in Ginza. It was a performance that fully realized everything to which he had aspired: the “show,” which involved the on-stage slaughter of a calf, was not only Koyama’s final performance—it was also probably the most extreme of all of the Ritualist performances. With the help of Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, who worked at a Toshiba affiliate company, Koyama rented the very high-grade auditorium in Ginza on the pretense that he was going to put on a nihon buyō (traditional Japanese dance) recital. Three months in advance of the show, he purchased a roughly one-month-old calf, which he got a farmer to rear on his behalf. Although he did get anxious when the calf grew rather faster than he had expected, he claims that slaughtering it was not part of his initial plan. For the performance, mannequins (the shoulder-up variety), vegetables and apples—a source of “vitamins”—line the stage. The curtain rises to reveal a white piece of fabric stretched out at its four corners, making a sort of tent from which stick out the heads of

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 161. Koyama Tetsuo in Vitamin Show • May 7, 1969 • Toshiba Hall, Tokyo

 162. The final scene of Vitamin Show • May 7, 1969 • Toshiba Hall, Tokyo

Koyama and a woman (Arisu). The cloth falls to the ground and the two make dancelike movements beneath it. They then briefly exit the stage and an experimental flicker-­ effect film provided by Kawanaka Nobuhiro is projected, while men and women dressed like monks appear, their palms pressed together in prayer. Koyama and Arisu have now stripped down to their underwear; Koyama has a splendid, muscular physique. Two men drag the calf out onto the stage where Koyama uses a kitchen knife to slit its throat, dousing himself with blood in the process [fig. 161]. Arisu plays around with a snake9 and the men once again perform the gesture of prayer. A young girl in a navy blue sailor-style school uniform comes on stage, playing a Beatles tune on the recorder as she wanders about [fig. 162]. Koyama originally intends to spread out the calf’s innards on the stage and then hold them in his arms but has expressed that he was unable to do so.10 Even so, owing to its extensive setup, it was a full-bodied, almost two-hour performance. As far as we can tell from photographs and eyewitness accounts, this show, which I believe ranks as one of the most shocking shows in the whole history of Anti-Art performance, linked together his concepts—vitamins to food (apples, the calf), to blood and guts—and displayed items from the organic world of the farm village in deliberate opposition to the city (something Koyama had been doing since Vitamin Show at Sukiyabashi). In doing so, Koyama raised questions about the rapidly urbanizing society of Japan at that time, through means entirely different to Zero Jigen. Despite the contrast between the bloodiness and gruesomeness and the inorganic mannequins, we can glimpse

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a yearning for something pure and a mischievous sense of humor in details like the flag planted in the feces, the prayers for a creature facing imminent death, the young girl’s recorder. It is for this reason that, among all the Anti-Art performers, Koyama leaves a particularly strong impression. In July 1969, after the show at Toshiba Hall, Koyama was arrested along with Katō Yoshihiro, Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Suenaga Tamio, and several other members of Expo Destruction Group and never performed again. His typical humor was, however, on display at his solo exhibition at the Tsubaki Kindai Gallery in November  1970, which he gave the (girlish) shōjo-style title of Holy Celebration (continued): Flowers and the Beatles and the Buddha, designing an invitation decorated with shōjo manga and exhibiting paintings onto which he had affixed hair and pubic hair. Even if tinged with eroticism, the images of women that appear in his later paintings and doll-based works are infused with a longing for a purity of soul. NOTES 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Hōmatsu ketsujin retsuden: Shirarezaru chōzen’ei [Biographies of the evanescent great: The unknown super-avant-garde] (Tokyo: Nigensha, 2002), 30– 33; Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Buriki otoko [Tin plate man] (Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 2007), 105–6. Chiba Eisuke, Koyama Tetsuo, Sasaki Kōsei, “Jakkingu, POP ikō no shisō to henkaku, Iesu āto-ron” [Jacking, Philosophy and Reform after Pop, Yes Art], Art 21, no. 3 (January 1967): 31. Koyama Tetsuo, “Dētingu Shō” [Dating Show], Art 21, no. 3: 10. According to Koyama, Shinjuku drew a crowd of 2,000 and Sukiyabashi a crowd of 4,000 people. See “Dētingu Shō,” 10. Chida arrived late and did not take part. Mori Hideto, “Yūmei ni naritai onna Chida Ui” [Chida Ui, the woman who wants to be famous], Shūkan F6 Sebun, no. 76 (April 15, 1967): 97.

6. Koyama Tetsuo, in an interview with the author, April 10, 2006, Saitama. 7. Koyama Tetsuo, interview. 8. Anonymous, “Mōretsu! Butai de ushi-goroshi” [It’s insane! Slaughtering a calf on stage], Shūkan Heibon (May 22, 1969): 53; “Ushi no zōmotsu no naka de sekkusu o suru onna no ko Arisu (Nandemoya)” [Anything-goes Arisu, the girl who has sex in cow’s guts], Heibon Punch (June 16, 1969): 27–28. 9. Although cows and snakes feature in myths from all around the world, for Koyama, rather than being symbolic, these animals were simply things associated with the natural environment of the farming village and the food people eat. 10. Koyama Tetsuo, in an interview by Kurokawa Noriyuki. Shibuya, April 29, 2006.

CHAPTER 16

Kokuin The Search for a Revolution of Consciousness

告陰……人間精神（大脳）の奥からの叫びとしての表現拡張─解放運動である。それは 今だに芸術などと呼ばれている観念的世界とは、はっきり決別することにより、無差別 広範な表現行為を意識的に推進し、同時に〝表現〟としての特殊性を消滅してゆくこと をめざしている。 末永蒼生

Kokuin—a movement for the extension/liberation of expression that screams from the depths of the mind (cerebrum). By separating it clearly from the conceptual world that is as yet still referred to as art, we deliberately encourage indiscriminately broad expressive acts, while we simultaneously look to eliminate “expression” as a category its own.1 —Suenaga Tamio

1.

SECESSION FROM “ART”

Kokuin (“Heralding the Shadow”) was formed in spring of 1967 and debuted at the May Day venue (see chap. 8.7, p. 214) that year. They were active under this group name until the end of 1969. In March 1969 they participated in the Expo Destruction Group; along with its dissolution, the activities of Kokuin as a performance group also ceased. Suenaga Tamio, Kokuin’s leader, was born in Ikebukuro in 1944 to painter Suenaga Taneo, an inhabitant of “Ikebukuro Montparnasse.”2 As a result, he was surrounded by art from his early childhood. He moved to Nagasaki to avoid the bombings in the capital but returned to Tokyo at the age of eighteen, where he studied art at Toshima Art Institute under the tutelage of painter Shimaki Ritsu.3 However, he began to question the way the work of art seemed to require cutting out a piece of the human mind in order to commodify it, 4 and perhaps it was because he belonged to the youngest generation among the Ritualists that he did not particularly cling to “art,” and instead began to have a strong inclination toward activities in other fields—be it politics, film, music, or other subcultures. Suenaga first formed Shikaku (Sight)5 with his friends at Toshima Art Institute, and the group held its first exhibition in October 1964 at Mudo Gallery in Ginza. The direct trigger that pushed him towards performance was Shinjuku Art Festival (see chap. 14.2, p. 359) in December 1966, where he participated in the Vietnam War-themed Ritual Tsuina, a performance to drive out evil spirits, held by Kurohata along with other groups. Another huge influence on Suenaga’s activities during and after his Kokuin period was color psychology, which he learned from Asari Atsushi.6 Asari, himself a painter, was influenced by psychological research that was part of the American art education that came to Japan in the late 1940s; he developed a method of diagnosing physical

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ailments and suppressed psychological problems through the analysis of colors in children’s pictures and published quite prolifically on the subject. Asari also established Japan Children’s Picture Research Association, and Suenaga frequently participated in its activities. While he felt the limits of Asari’s deterministic color psychology, Suenaga found within it a way to liberate human minds that were entrapped in a certain mold by the system of education. 2.

THE RITUALS OF KOKUIN

The “Kokuin Manifesto” leaflet distributed on May Day 1967 at Kokuin’s performance debut was published in the August issue of Koebukuro under the names of Suenaga and Yokota Gen’ichirō. It states: “We will part from the tiny world called ‘art’ and establish a new genre that expresses the whole of human existence.”7 They extolled children’s art as an exemplar of that kind of self-expression, based on the research of Kitagawa Tamiji, Kubo Sadajirō, and Asari. Also worthy of note is their statement that “what human expression conveys is at once a transmission of self and further a method for the relentless pursuit of pleasure,” arguing that “in response to the society as a human community, particularly in the political conditions of today, it [expression] also has a connotation of strong speech.”8 We can read in their performances, which expressed a desire for sex and food that went beyond socially accepted standards, a confrontational attitude with regards to politics that meshed with Expo Destruction Group; in this attitude we can already begin to make out a point of departure for their activities. With this sort of ideology as a basis, their actions on May Day—two members painting themselves red and cuddling atop a green lawn [fig. 163]— displayed their interest in color alongside their inclination toward the pursuit of corporeal pleasure. Kokuin’s core membership consisted of: Suenaga as the group’s founder; designer H.K.,9 his partner and a member of Group Shikaku whom he met at Toshima Art Institute; accessory artist Ishibashi Hatsuko, who spontaneously joined the May Day performance; and I.S., a manga artist who published under the pen name Mizumachi Riryō (Sachio).10 These four were arrested in July 1969 after the Smash the Expo Black Festival by the Expo Destruction Group,  163. Kokuin performance for May Day, right: Suenaga Tamio, left: Muta Kunihiro • May 1, 1967 • Yoyogi, Tokyo

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 164. Ritual by Kokuin, rear left: Suenaga Tamio • April 4, 1968 • In front of Ikebukuro Station, Tokyo

which tells us that they were core members up until the end. Other members included filmmaker Yokota Gen’ichirō, who also belonged to 8 Generation (he left the group in its early stage); Muta Kunihiro (Yoda Makao11), Suenaga’s cousin, who also participated in Zero Jigen’s rituals but left in 1968; musician Nakamura Masaharu;12 and a woman (identity unknown) who also appeared on the stage with Tenjō Sajiki. Some of the members were from Nagasaki,13 but the group included young people from a broad range of cultural backgrounds, including fūten, who came and went freely. In September 1967, when Kokuin held Ritual Series for the Rite of Food and the Funeral of the Art World (Shokugi oyobi Bijutsu-kai Soshiki no tame no Renzoku Gishiki) at Akane Gallery in Ginza, their numbers had grown to fifteen.14 Looking at the content of their rituals, among which the title Shokugi (meaning “rite” or “ritual” [gi] of “food” [shoku]) frequently recurs, we can see a spiritual energy (or libido) based on the instinctual human appetites for food and sex. This applies to the ritual performed at Insanity Trade Fair in March 1968 and again on television for the Katsura Kokinji Afternoon Show (broadcast live!) that April, in which Muta hung sausage and bread from between his legs while semi-nude women ate them. It also holds for the rituals at Shinjuku disco LSD, described below, which made use of sausages and tofu. Kokuin’s performances were also characterized by the use of rope and whips to tie and strike performers’ bodies, as well as the identical paper masks and white clothes that performers wore (see p. 90 and plate 22, p. 14), on display in their ritual in April, held in front of Ikebukuro Station and in its underground passageways [fig. 164]. For the performance at Honmoku-tei, Suenaga’s pairing of a white naval uniform with a white fundoshi (loincloth) (see plate 23, p. 14) mocked, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, the “homosocial” characteristics concealed within nationalistic and militaristic conventions. In a Happening titled Shinjuku In (March 1968) held at Shinjuku disco LSD, Kokuin was joined by Aome Umi, Gulliver, and Chida Ui. The Happening, which took on the character of a psychedelic show befitting of the venue [fig. 165], was fortunately recorded in detail by Fukasaku Mitsusada, whose account I summarize below. The ceiling lights are turned off and wild go-go music is playing. In the glow of blacklight, a woman removes pills from a box marked “LSD” (these are actually sleeping pills), distributing them to the audience. A long rope colorfully painted with DayGlo paint is made into a large circle which is passed through the hands of the audience,

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 165. Shinjuku In by Kokuin • (foreground center: Aome Umi, rear center: Gulliver) • March 20, 1968 • LSD, Shinjuku, Tokyo

just as in Buddhist tradition believers pass a long strand of prayer beads around a ­circle ( juzu-mawashi). Three men appear wearing fundoshi and jackets, carrying something on their shoulders shrouded in white paper and bound with white cloth. They open the package and take out a black-skinned mannequin that is missing one leg. The mannequin is painted with primary colors and has something like a loincloth wrapped around its waist. The wrapping is removed, revealing a big sausage, which two female performers then eat with forks. The mannequin is removed from the scene momentarily; when it returns, carried by the three jacket-and-fundoshi-wearing men, a woman has been bound to it with chains, her body and the mannequin body intertwined. The mannequin is set on the floor with the woman still attached, and then dismantled by the men and women who surround them. One of the men in the jacket and fundoshi lies on his back, holding up trays full of tofu and bottles labeled “LSD.” “Aphrodisiac,” “Homosexual/Lesbian Hormone Compound.” The woman sprinkles the contents of each bottle on the tofu and consumes it with a spoon. Finally, they take down the cloth that had been affixed to the ceiling and walls, and go-go dance in a flashing strobe light.15 After this Happening, Kokuin’s performances began to incorporate elements such as masks, food, S&M accessories, and military gear; use props that included mikoshi (portable festival shrines), which they used to carry women through audience seats; and in their staging blend popular and high-class entertainment styles, with both classical music and theatrical sword fighting of the sort seen in provincial theatrical performances. Together these elements combined into their performance style as they progressively developed even larger-scale productions, as seen in Grand Insanity Trade Fair at Iino Hall (see chap. 8.10, pp. 223) in November 1968, directly before they participated in Expo Destruction Group. 3.

EVER-EXPANDING MIND REVOLUTION

Performance, however, was not Kokuin’s only expressive activity, as is suggested by the “Kokuin Manifesto.” Unlike Zero Jigen, whose ideological shift toward alignment with Expo Destruction Group appeared too embarrassingly abrupt, Suenaga maintained a confrontational attitude towards politics before and after his involvement with Expo Destruction Group. Namely, by producing and screening documentary films of political

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struggles and establishing genre-crossing networks through his mini-komi zines, Suenaga consistently worked towards an alliance across the new generation to seek liberation from technology’s control over the brain. As these activities were reported in popular media, a member of the Kyoto University Barricade Committee visited Kokuin’s office in Ikebukuro in order to request Expo Destruction Group’s cooperation with their festival,16 which in turn led to the ritual on the balcony of the university in June 1969, the grand finale of Expo Destruction Group’s activities. For Suenaga, the “colorful helmets, jumpers, and geba-bō [the wooden sticks that were the student activists’ weapon-of-choice]” inside of the campus barricades “were the highest fashion of the time. The students were the artists of the era, filling the barricaded campuses with graffiti in primary colors—red, green, and yellow, full of the agitation of revolution—a wonderful living art museum.”17 This viewpoint, free from the framework of “art” and in this way reminiscent of marginal art and Tone Yasunao’s essay,18 is intriguing in how it reveals the inclinations of Suenaga, who plunged into a diverse scene at the intersection of politics, culture, and popular entertainment while still retaining his artistic interest in colors. These sorts of interests manifest within the characteristics of Kokuin as a group and are worthy of special mention among the performance groups formed by artists in the 1960s. What made Kokuin so distinct from other performance groups? The distinction is evidenced, first of all, by Maki and Makao’s Ritual: “Kiss Kiss Kiss” (Maki to Makao no Gishiki “Kisu Kisu Kisu”) May 1965, a performance in which Muta Kunihiro and female member T.M. kiss for twenty minutes straight in Yūrakuchō. Kokuin’s members held performances independently without Suenaga, such that Kokuin constituted a non-centric and free organization. The autonomy of the women who made up half of the group differentiated it from groups like Kurohata with only male members and a strongly masculine character, as well as from Zero Jigen, for whom women performers appeared to be no more than the instruments of Katō Yoshihiro’s male fantasies and strategic bait for the media. For this reason, it is perhaps no surprise that Suenaga, even after Kokuin, would go on to collaborate with women’s liberation activists who sought new approaches to sex and family life. Second, participation in political demonstrations and the act of documenting action on film was an important part of Kokuin’s activity as a group. Not only did they record their

 166. Kokuin tsūshin [Kokuin Newsletter], No.5 (September 15, 1968)

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 167. Koebukuro [Bag of Voices], No.1 (August 1, 1967)

own performances, they also filmed the Second Haneda Incident 19 in November 1967 for an article in Koebukuro, followed by the Ōji Field Hospital Struggle20 in March 1968, the Hibiya Struggle21 that June, and the Shinjuku Riot that happened on International Anti-War Day in October. They shot with 16mm film, an unusual advantage for independent filmmakers, and showed the films at university rallies.22 In June 1969, they raised the Kokuin flag and participated in an anti-Anpo demo, which was also rare behavior for an angura group. The third point of note is their activism and organizational ethos, which shared more in common with the Zenkyōtō generation than it did with other art groups formed in the early 1960s, as represented in their two zines. One was called Kokuin tsūshin (Kokuin Newsletter), a zine created for the dissemination of the group’s ideas and reporting on its activities. It is unclear when its first issue was published, but the third (June 1968) to the ninth (c. May 1969) issues are extant [fig. 166]. The other was Koebukuro (Bag of Voices) [fig.  167], which collected articles from readers as well as Kokuin members. It was first published in August  1967, soon after Kokuin was established, and the last extant issue is the ninth, published September  1969. This zine mainly featured miscellaneous political essays, but Akiyama Yūtokutaishi contributed several times, and Watanabe Chihiro (founder of the Poster Demonstration Group Association) wrote an essay about Zainichi Korean issues.23 There were poems, critical essays, manga by Kokuin member Mizumachi

 168. Peak, No.1 (April 20, 1970)

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Riryō, and other types of work as well. The zine contributed to the development of a network that linked diverse genres, personalities, and different regions of Japan. Both Kokuin tsūshin and Angura tsūshin24 (Angura newsletter, edited and published by Zero Jigen’s Iwata Shin’ichi) are valuable documents that convey the political incidents and popular culture of that era. Suenaga and the other members continued to develop Kokuin’s policies, and after the Expo Destruction Group broke up, they formed another group, Peak, in 1970. They were joined by former New Left activist Iwabuchi Hideki and others, and released a newsletter [fig. 168]. Peak also produced rock concerts in locations such as Meiji Park and Yoyo­g i Park, continuing to exchange with other groups that pursued cultural reforms. One example of this exchange is Survival ’72: Open Free Seminar, held at the student dorms of Kanto Gakuin University in February 1972, in which Zero Jigen and Kanesaka Kenji, another anti-Expo member, also participated. Suenaga performed a demonstration of his color psychology therapy, Children’s Citadel gave a lecture on sex and childrearing, and women’s liberation group Group Tatakau Onna (Fighting women) and gay liberation movement activist Tōgō Ken also participated.25 “To quit the consumption game and to instead produce the necessities for life with one’s bare hands in a courageous way of living”26 was what Suenaga and his comrades pursued in their activities, which continued throughout the 1970s, and would connect them as well to today’s citizen’s movements: Public reaction to a book published in 198827 spurred me to do art therapy based on color psychology and conduct workshops based on those methods, and this is an attempt to release the mind from a state of self-repression, including a subconscious one. People come in all the time, people of all ages, genders, and occupations, seeking a place to express themselves within today’s almost excessively stressed-out society. The idea of this borderless place is one thing I also pursued back in the 1960s, and my activities now are connected to what I was doing in those days. Society reflects the individual consciousness of each and every human that comprises it. So long as we as individuals do not develop a freer consciousness, the repressive and violent structure of our world will never change. What the creators of the 1960s, including myself, have tried to do since then is to find a way to continue regenerating the Self, which has been ground down by the apparatus of education and culture, causing us to lose the ability to think critically.28

NOTES 1.

Suenaga Tamio, “Kokuin undō, shinkōchū” [Kokuin activities, underway], Kokuin tsūshin, no. 3 (June 10, 1968). 2. Translator’s note: Ikebukuro Montparnasse was an area of Tokyo in the 1920s in which a concentrated number of artists resided. 3. Shimaki Ritsu (1923–2002) was born in Tokyo. He studied at Ōmori Western Painting Institute, and after the war, opened an art school for children in Nishi-Ikebukuro. While

also active as a painter, showing works at the Jiyū Bijutsu exhibition and the Bijutsu Bunka exhibition, he opened Toshima Art Institute in 1951. In 1956, he became a member of the Japan Children’s Picture Research Institute and worked as the secretary general. See Shimaki Ritsu sakuhinshū [Ritsu Shimaki 2002], ­Matsuo Kazuo ed. (Tokyo: Shimaki Michiko, 2003). 4. Suenaga Tamio, in an interview with the author, Tokyo, July 12, 2007.

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5. Group Shikaku’s members were Sano Yūji, Suenaga Tamio, and Tanabe Tei. H.K. joined the group for an exhibition at Mudo Gallery in October 1965 6. Suenaga Tamio, Ikinobiru tame no komyūn: Genkaku uchū soshite seikatsu kakumei [Commune for survival: The illusory universe and lifestyle revolution] (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1973), 175–81. According to Suenaga, his encounter with Asari was “fated,” because the École de Tokyo that his father Taneo established before the war was joined by Asari and others, including Takiguchi Shūzō. 7. Suenaga Tamio and Yokota Gen’ichirō, “Kokuin sengen” [Kokuin Manifesto], Koebukuro, no. 1 (August 1, 1967), 11. 8. Suenaga and Yokota, “Kokuin sengen,” 11. 9. Anonymous, according to the member’s wishes. Some of these members performed anonymously throughout their active years, and wish to remain anonymous today because of the bold, and sometimes criminal nature of the group’s behaviors, which on occasion led to arrest. The author was unable to contact some of the other members personally to request their approval to be identified in this book, and so their anonymity will be preserved accordingly. 10. Mizumachi’s manga was published in a special issue of major manga magazine. Mizumachi Sachio, “Anchi no sedai,” Shūkan shōnen sandē, no. 612 (August 25, 1970): 203–32. A drum set written with “PEAK” in this work indicates the author was associated with Suenaga’s group. 11. Makao, reverse of okama (a Japanese slang term for an effeminate man), is Muta Kunihiro’s nickname. “Hapuningutte naani?” [A Happening? What could that be?], Josei Jishin, vol. 11, no. 21 (May 27, 1968): 144. . 12. Nakamura Masaharu was born in 1949. From the editors’ introduction to Urutora torippu: Chōhatsu sedai no shōgen [Ultra trip: Testimony of the long-haired generation] (Tokyo: Tairiku Shobō, 1971) which Nakamura edited together with Suenaga, “[Nakamura] moved to Tokyo in 1967 in order to become a musician. In addition to his musical activities, he is also well-acquainted with everything from cerebral physiology to electronics.” This book is a valuable record of the various cultural movements and communes that were going on all over Japan at that time.

13. Suenaga Tamio, I.S., and Watanabe Chihiro were all friends from the art club at Nagasaki Higashi High School; Nakamura Masaharu and Muta Kunihiro were also from Nagasaki. 14. Suenaga, “Kokuin undō, shinkōchū.” 15. Fukasaku Mitsusada, Shinjuku kōgengaku [Shinjuku Modernology] (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1968), 176–79. See also Mutō Chimi (composed by Miyai Rikurō), “Machi o senryō shita angura bunka” [The angura culture occupied the city], Mainichi Gurafu, no. 952 (May 26, 1968): 17. 16. Suenaga Tamio, in an interview with the author, Tokyo, July 12, 2007. 17. Suenaga, Ikinobiru tame no komyūn, 41–42. 18. Tone pays attention to the font particular to university signboards used for political statements. Tone Yasunao, Gendai geijutsu no isō: Geijutsu wa shisō tariuru ka [The topology of contemporary art: Can art be ideology?] (Tokyo: Tabata Shoten, 1970), 131–36. 19. Following the First Haneda Incident on October 8, 1967, the Sanpa (three factions) Zengakuren attempted to prevent Prime Minister Satō Eisaku from going to the United States, clashing with police near Haneda Airport on November 12. 20. As wounded soldiers from the Vietnam War increased beyond the capacity of the existing American Army Field Hospital in Asaka, the relocation of the field hospital to Ōji was planned; the Sanpa Zengakuren and local communities opposed the plan, demonstrating on March 8, 1968. 21. June 15, 1968, an Anti-Vietnam War Youth General Rise-up Rally was held at Hibiya Open Air Concert Hall. On this day, Zenkyōto of the University of Tokyo occupied Yasuda Auditorium. 22. After the publication of the Japanese edition of this book, Kokuin’s documentary films were discovered and screened. The films are: Maboroshi no burakku fesutibaru: Shinjuku bangaichi hen [Phantom Black Festival: Shinjuku no-address district], Kokusai Hansen-dē: Jūga­ tsu nijūichinichi, yoru, Shinjuku [International Anti-War day: Night October 21, Shinjuku], and Betonamu hansen/anpo funsai/Okinawa tōsō shōri/Satō hōbei soshi tōitsu kōdō [Unified action for anti-Vietnam War, smashing Anpo, victory of Okinawa struggle, and prevention of Prime Minister Satō’s visit to U.S.]; all were directed by Suenaga, 1968.

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23. Watanabe Chihiro, “Kono konwaku kara” [From this bafflement], Koebukuro, no. 3 (May 1, 1968): 2. Watanabe Chihiro (1944– 2009), as the Poster Demonstration Group, participated in the performance by Kurohata et al. at Chiyoda Salon Small Theater (October 1966, see pp. 358–9), Black Festival (October 1968), Smash the Expo Black Festival (June 1969), the Cultural Destruction Conference (September 1969), and more. Afterwards, he was active as an etching artist, graphic designer for books, and a novelist. 24. The author was subsequently able to track down issues no.1 (February 1), no. 2 (March 25) and no. 3 (May 25), all published in 1969.

25. Around this time, supporting members of the Black Panthers and Jerry Rubin, one of the co-founders of the Youth International Party, visited Suenaga at his home in Tokyo from the United States. They were introduced to Suenaga by Kanesaka Kenji. 26. Suenaga, Ikinobiru tame no komyūn, 12. 27. Suenaga Tamio, Shikisai jiyū jizai [Free and good use of colors] (Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 1988). 28. Suenaga Tamio (interview), “Kokuin to ano jidai ga mezashita mono” [Kokuin and what that era tried to achieve], Bien, no. 17 (December 2002): 41. Corrected based on the author’s personal correspondence with Suenaga, May 19, 2010.

CHAPTER 17

Women Performers Challenge and Isolation

1.

ABSENT ENTIRELY? FEW IN NUMBER? OR JUST UNDERESTIMATED?

We can consider performance by artists that occurred within the context of Western avant-garde art practice to have three dimensions: first, it was (originally 1) a form of anti-commercialism, rejecting “artworks” that could be preserved and sold; second, it was resistance against the white, male, upper-class, and heterosexual mainstream and its authority; third, and even more fundamentally, it was about questioning the division of “art” and “life,” demonstrating an objection to a society that consecrates the former as sacred. From these perspectives, we can understand performance as an effective and important tool from a feminist perspective. In comparison to Jackson Pollock’s “actions,” said to be one of the origins of performance art in their overt masculinity, female artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, and Ana Mendieta used performance to challenge a system of values centered on men and raise issues surrounding gender equality.2 To be sure, performance contains within it the potential for this kind of critique. When considering the history of bodily expression in Japan’s avant-garde arts, however, it would be an understatement to say that this history is marred by an enormous absence—foremost, in its treatment of the practices of female artists, practices of resistance against social oppression around issues of gender. It is within this history that part III of this book, focused entirely on individual men and groups led by men, is situated. Artists groups formed in the 1950s, such as Gutai and Kyūshū-ha, had few female members, but these members nonetheless played important roles. From 1960 onward however, beginning with Neo Dada, in many cases women were completely absent (the list of exclusively male groups is extensive: the homosocially named Gar Gar, taken from the French gars gars; Kurohata; NOMO; Group I; GUN; and so on). Even in the few instances where groups included female members, they conspicuously almost exclusively performed alongside men (for example, The Play’s Suzukida Asako with Mizukami Jun [fig. 169]). It must be emphasized that there are extremely few examples of Japanese women in Japan,

 169. Suzukida Asako performance • c. March 1968 • Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art

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performing either solo or in a group led by women, who challenged androcentrism and the patriarchy, or who endeavored to critically reconstruct a uniquely female physicality like the abovementioned female artists in the West (which includes Japanese and other nonwhite women). 2.

THE ERASURE OF THE BODY: TANAKA ATSUKO, ONO YŌKO, SHIOMI MIEKO

The female artists who independently held multiple performances in Japan from 1957 to 1970 under the circumstances described above were Tanaka Atsuko of Gutai; Tabe Mitsuko of Kyūshū-ha; Shiomi Mieko of Group Ongaku; Kishimoto Sayako, who was involved with Neo Dada and Zero Jigen; Chida Ui from Jack Society; the female members of Kokuin [fig. 170]; Hayashi Miyori of the Okayama Young Artists Group; and Ono Yōko, who was active in Japan from 1962 to 1964. There were also several women who consistently performed with Zero Jigen,3 but even if these experiences were liberating to them personally, they did not necessarily design and direct their own bodily expressions. As touched upon in chapter 4 (pp. 103–5), there is no doubt that Tanaka Atsuko’s performances were original and pioneering, and for her, the living body was something to be transcended by physical, perceptual, and formal means; however, she did not hold any solo performances apart from her work with Gutai, 4 and her time spent creating bodily expressions within group performances was so short-lived that her outstanding ideas could never impact artists in Kansai, Tokyo, or other regions. While back in Japan for a short time, Ono Yōko performed on the gala stage of Sogetsu Art Center, put on guerrilla-style street works, participated in a concert by John Cage, and engaged in a great number of and, moreover, a diverse variety of performances, in which she both performed herself and directed others. Most of her pieces placed an emphasis on the reactions of the audience to her behavior, rather than her body itself. The performance that featured her body more centrally than her other performances was Cut Piece, held at Sogetsu Art Center in August 1964. In this work, Ono sits on stage, inviting audience members to freely approach and cut off pieces of her clothing. Given its possible feminist readings, this was a historically significant work. Yet Ono’s provocative title,

 170. Performance by female members of Kokuin • June 8, 1969 • Ikebukuro Station, Tokyo

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 171. An article showcasing Cut Piece by Ono Yōko

“Strip Show,” was taken verbatim as the headline of a weekly magazine [fig. 171]. She left the following words as she departed from Japan: “I did various things here [in Japan], but it seemed that what I was doing was not understood and disappeared into thin air. I always felt as if I were talking to a wall.”5 After Shiomi Mieko joined Group Ongaku, she performed Event for Dec 24 at the opening of the 2nd Okayama Young Artists Group Exhibition, which was held in her hometown in December  1963. She involved Hayashi Miyori, a female member who had works in the exhibition. Shiomi also had Hayashi join her performance at Flux Week in September 1965 (p. 187). Shiomi was originally a musician and thus, compared to Tanaka and Ono, her expressions were not so much focused on the physical body as they were on the sounds and poetry her surreptitious actions evoked. Similarly, few of Hayashi Miyori’s conceptual works may have foregrounded physicality, but at the 2nd Okayama Young Artists Group Exhibition opening, Hayashi drew attention by presenting her practice of “body art,” lying down inside of a glass case for a piece titled Incubus of Cube, with a sign reading “look at this person” (kono hito o miyo) affixed to the case [fig. 172]. Hayashi’s performance was similar to Ono’s Cut Piece in how she exposed her body to the viewer’s gaze. Her state of motionlessness and passivity towards the audience was another quality shared with Ono’s performance.

 172. Hayashi Miyori, Rippōtai no muma [Incubus of Cube] • December 24, 1963 • Okayama Prefectural Cultural Center Art Museum

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CHALLENGE TO FEMININITY: KISHIMOTO SAYAKO, CHIDA UI, TABE MITSUKO

In contrast to the female artists previously discussed, Kishimoto Sayako and Chida Ui used their bodies to make dynamic movements in performance in the latter half of the 1960s. Kishimoto hailed from the same high school as Neo Dada’s Akasegawa Genpei and Arakawa Shūsaku and Zero Jigen’s Iwata Shin’ichi and Koiwa Takayoshi, and she participated both in early Neo Dada activities and with Zero Jigen for its lie-in (nekorogari) at the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition. At the Neo Dada Beach Show of July 1960, she wore a bikini and concealed her face as the male members of Neo Dada mercilessly threw paint at her. Yet beginning in 1965, with the financial support of her family, she began holding solo exhibitions that featured ambitious, large-scale works, won the Shell Art Award, and began to attract the attention of art magazines. In February 1967 at a solo exhibition at Sakura Gallery in her hometown of Nagoya, she erased large paintings with white spray paint and slashed the canvases as an expression of resistance against the commercialization of art and artists.6 Around the same time there was an extremely rare performance that featured only female artists—Kishimoto alongside Chida Ui and Miyata Harumi (who appeared in Zero Jigen’s rituals during this period) [fig. 173].7 The details of the performance cannot be confirmed, but it was speculated that the performance may have been held for a weekly magazine and recorded by its photographer. Thereafter, Kishimoto went on a hiatus from all artistic activity from 1969 until 1975.8 From the 1980s, she began to use her women’s liberation spirit and her skills as a humorous orator to perform in the political arena, but painting stands out as the medium she used most over the course of her career. Chida Ui, as noted in chapters 8 and 15, participated in Jack Society and distinguished herself as a performer with Dating Show, which she created together with Koyama Tetsuo [fig. 174]. However, it is hard to know what sort of original ­performances she did from simply looking at photos and articles that document Dating Show—although we do know that she and Koyama put makeup on one another, and that she cut off a chicken’s head with a saw. Later, her skills in manipulating mass media like television and magazines would become a performance of sorts, and she excelled in that role, given her good looks and acclaimed talent as a novelist later in life. Through meeting Shinohara Ushio, Chida had been awakened to the possibilities of being a “celebrity artist”

 173. Kishimoto Sayako performance • c. July 1967 • Komazawa Olympic Park (presumed), Tokyo

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 174. Chida Ui performs at First Dating Show • November 23, 1966 • near Shinjuku Koma Theater, Tokyo

and declared her allegiance to “proactive opportunism” and “mono-sexualism.” In her attempts to become famous, she sold portrait photographs of herself at exhibitions and appeared on the TV program “Kōhaku nandemo gassen” (Red and White Whatever Competition) in a swimsuit, using materials such as mannequin heads and cake and smearing paint with her hands and feet. As a result, she was bashed in the media and called a “Stripping at 17?.”9 She went on to make regular appearances in weekly magazines as a pin-up girl [fig. 175] and was a natural-born performer for the media. Chida attacked muscular men, declaring a plan to “assassinate” Mishima Yukio (though the details are unclear)10 and stabbing a beer bottle into a nude photo of him on television shouting, “I have raped him!”11 Interestingly, she not only attacked masculinity, but also acted the male part in lesbian pin-up shots12 and attempted to rise above both masculinity and femininity, explaining “it is too graphically suggestive of sex” and “in conflict with my mono-sexuality.”13 This liberation from gender that Chida attempted was also expressed in the artistic methods of Tabe Mitsuko throughout the 1960s in quite unusual and pioneering ways. Tabe’s “body art” paintings, objets, and installations often used a female body motif, and she occasionally attempted performances that dealt with women’s issues. At Grand Assembly of Heroes (1962) she tried to drive nails into the bottom half of mannequins, but the mannequins were harder than expected and so she got one of the male artists to do it; we might interpret this work as a challenge to commonly accepted notions of feminine beauty, or a wholesale rejection of gender, as was also seen in her 1961 objet piece Jinkō taiban (Artificial  175. Chida Ui in Dating Show at the Seashore, on the left: Katō Yoshihiro • June 1967 • Enoshima, Kanagawa

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 176. Tabe Mitsuko (center) performs during Possibility of Art through Artist Collectives • May 1968 • Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall

Placenta). Following Grand Assembly of Heroes, at the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition in 1963, she submitted a zippered body suit entitled Ura to omote (Back and front) as a painting; it was displayed on the wall, but nobody put it on or used it in a performance.14 At Fukuoka bar Snack BOBO (sunakku bi-o-b-io) in July  1967, she performed a Happening with Obana Shigeharu in which a nude woman is covered with soap bubbles—but the concept for this piece was hardly a fresh idea, even then. In May 1968 at Kyūshū-ha’s final exhibition, Tabe held a performance using a sewing machine to continually sew a long, penis-like object [fig. 176] and exhibited an electric washing machine that stirred gourds with rubber umbilical cords, made to appear like fetuses; these works displayed Tabe’s unique views on gender. In her February  1969 performance at the 3rd Trends of Contemporary Art Kyūshū Exhibition, Tabe participated in a parade, carrying a mannequin on her back as she walked through the city. This piece was similarly related to the concept of housework, appealing to housewives’ struggles with childrearing, as captured in photo documents and in an interview 15—but it seems that no one took any notice of her actions. 4.

GENDER, UNDERGROUND

As argued above, some of the performances by female artists in Japan in the 1960s are notable in ways that are significant beyond the femininity angle. However, excluding Shiomi Mieko, who was active in music and intermedia event activities, and Ono Yōko, who had a substantial body of work in the United States before and after her Japan period, most performance by women artists was quite fragmentary and lacking in continuous and active development. It must be said that female artists in Japan offered very few challenges to the conventions of art and society, unlike the performances of Kusama Yayoi that were scandalous even in New York, and those of Kubota Shigeko, who held just one solo performance of Vagina Painting.16 Nevertheless, the female artists from this chapter who remained in Japan threw themselves into the world of contemporary art, a world that even today affords little recognition from society and no guarantee of a basic livelihood. And in their day, they were even more so at the mercy of male critics and artists. Even for women with incredibly strong convictions, taking on such personal

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challenges as making femininity a focal point of performance, exposing their own bodies to the public and mass media, or taking on the risk of challenging male chauvinism was never an easy task.17 These issues, furthermore, were not only faced by visual artists; the angura theater of the 1960s also had no female directors, and it was not until the late 1970s that shōgekijō companies invited female promoters. Nishidō Kōjin remarked that angura groups were oriented towards human emancipation, but ironically, they had a military model and recreated the Emperor System in their male chauvinism and patriarchy.18 It is certainly true that Kurohata, Zero Jigen, Kokuin, and even Akiyama Yūtokutaishi often held performances in a military style (if only to mock militarism). They often utilized naked female performers and thereby appeared to be dealing with issues of “sex,” but Zero Jigen were most uncritically attached to a male-centered value system. Even further, among male artist-performers in Japan in the 1960s, almost no one questioned the pressures and violence surrounding the body’s function and symbolism within real society with regard to sexuality in general, and gender and homosexuality in particular. It seems, as well, that in the present this tendency has not changed. Why is that? Perhaps that question is one left for us today to answer. NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

Actually, artifacts such as handcuffs used by Chris Burden, blackboards with scripts by Joseph Beuys, as well as performance photographs and video records are sought-after objects within of the art market. Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Zero Jigen’s initial performances included female participants such as Kishimoto Sayako and Takahashi Kōko, but it is hard to say they took on a voluntary or central role. Moriyama Riko and Takei Emi (Takei appeared in Inaba no Shiro Usagi [The White Hare of Inaba] under the name “Ereki Shokku” [electric shock]) were female members of Zero Jigen in the group’s later period. See the following for interviews and analysis: Suzuki Yūko, “Kaihō no tsuikyū; Hapuningu gishiki shūdan Zero Jigen ron” [Pursuit of liberation; Thesis on Happening ritual group Zero Jigen] (Thesis, Nagoya Zokei University Fine Art Department, 2005). See chap. 4, n. 35. From Nagano Chiaki’s film for television program, Aru wakamono-tachi [Some Young People]. Transcript by Yoshimoto Midori. See “Some Young People―From a nonfiction theater transcript of a documentary film directed by Nagano Chiaki,” Josai University’s

Review of Japanese Culture and Society, vol. 17 (December 2005): 103. 6. Neo Dada kara 21 seiki-gata majo e: Kishimoto Sayako no hito to sakuhin [From Neo Dada to a 21st century witch: Kishimoto Sayako, her life and art], ed. Fukazawa Junko et al., (Tokyo: Josei to āto purojekuto [Women and art project], 1997), 14; for details of the performance, see Ishizaki Takashi, “1960 nendai made no Kishimoto Sayako” [Kishimoto Sayako before and in the 1960s], Bulletin of the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, no. 28 (January 2021): 40–41. 7. When Jack Society was set to appear on the “Katsura Kokinji Afternoon Show,” July 10, 1967, they produced a flyer that read “[Chida Ui] appeared in Young Lady in July together with Kishimoto Sayako and Miyata Harumi.” The photo [fig. 173] was likely used in the magazine Young Lady, but the issue number could not be confirmed. 8. During this period, Kishimoto still appeared in roundtable discussions: Zadankai (sono ichi) hanpaku toka harenchi toka gendai no āto toka: Intāmedia wa inpomedia ka? [Symposium (1) Anti-Expo, shamelessness and contemporary art, so on: Is intermedia impotent media?] Angura Shimbun, vol. 2 (March 1969). Also, there are reports that she held a “Bed-in Show” at the Ginza Pedestrian Paradise around 1970–71

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

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under the pseudonym Mari. See Deta! Korezo kaijo: Mugen hassō-shi Kishimoto Mari [Here she is! The real mystery woman: Master of infinite ideas, Kishimoto Mari], Hōchi Shimbun, July 8, 1977. Other writings about Kishimoto can be found in footnote 6, Kishimoto Sayako no hito to sakuhin, and the following sources: Kishimoto Sayako 1939–1988, ed. and published by the Kishimoto Sayako Posthumous Exhibition Preparatory Committee, 1990; Panel discussion, Hariu Ichirō, Iwata Shin’ichi, Murata Daisuke (MC), Takahashi Ayako (editor), 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa for Real Utopia: Stories of the Unlimited, “Kishimoto Sayako to sono jidai ni tsuite” [Kishimoto Sayako and her time], Rear, no. 17 (September 2007): 46–53. Takahashi “Tōru,” 17 musume ni sutorippu? Kōhaku nandemo gassen (NTV) no muchi to yakekuso [Stripping at 17? The ignorance and desperation of “Red and white whatever contest” (NTV)], Nihon Dokusho Shimbun, no. 1406 (May 8, 1967): 8. Chida Ui, Mishima Yukio no ansatsu keikaku [Mishima Yukio assassination plan], Heibon Punch (October 30, 1967): 20. Kore ga angura da! Saike de harenchi na gendai fūzoku no subete [This is underground! Everything about psychedelic and shameless contemporary popular culture], Guruppe 21 Seiki ed., (Tokyo: Futabasha, 1973), 175–76. “Neko to Ui: Josei dōshi hontō ni aishiatteiru futari” [Neko and Ui: Two women who really love each other], Josei Jishin, vol. 11, no. 17 (April 19 and May 6, 1968, double issue). Kore ga angura da!, 176. Kokatsu Reiko, “Tabe Mitsuko shiron: ‘Zen’ei (Kyūshū-ha) o koete’” [Tabe Mitsuko: Beyond the avant-garde Kyūshū-ha], Bijutsu undōshi kenkyūkai nyūsu [Club for Art Action History Newsletter], no. 93 (May 2008): 7.

15. For a photo of Tabe’s street performance with the baby doll on her back, see “I Can’t Give Up Hope” The Art of Tabe Mitsuko, Shōji Sachiko ed. (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Art Museum, 2022), 44; also Tabe Mitsuko, in an interview with the author, May 25, 2008. 16. Performed during Perpetual Fluxfest, at Cinematheque in New York on July 4, 1965. She attached a brush with red paint on it to her underwear and used it to paint on paper placed on the floor. It really looked like she was painting with her genitals, and it made not only male spectators uncomfortable but female spectators as well. Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 182 17. Ono Yōko is the grand-granddaughter of the founder of the Yasuda zaibatsu; Kishimoto Sayako is the daughter of a doctor; Kubota Shigeko is the daughter of the first woman to graduate from Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music and niece of dancer Kuni Chiya. Such women artists with a lineage of high-level financial and cultural capital stand out, which could be why the work of female artists is not seen to have the same stench of everyday life as Kyūshū-ha, nor the politics of Kurohata, nor the vulgarity of Zero Jigen. Details of the personal history of these artists are in Zen’ei no josei 1950–1975 [Japanese Women Artists in Avant-Garde Movements, 1950–1975], ed. Kokatsu Reiko and Yoshimoto Midori, exh. cat., (Tochigi: Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, 2005). 18. Nishidō Kōjin, Enshutsuka no shigoto: rokujū nendai, angura, engeki kakumei [The work of a director: 1960s, angura, theater revolution] in Enshutsuka no shigoto: rokujū nendai, angura, engeki kakumei. ed. Japan Directors Association (Tokyo: Renga Shobō Shinsha, 2006), 60–61.

CHAPTER 18

Itoi Kanji Dadaist Devotee

1.

THE LEGEND OF ITOI

The name Itoi Kanji appears sporadically throughout the annals of 1960s art. While not necessarily a prolific performer, Itoi surfaced at pivotal moments in Anti-Art performance history. When Unbeat was founded as the first performance collective to emerge in the genre’s nascency in Japan in 1959, Itoi was there. When Tōno Yoshiaki popularized the term “Anti-Art” in 1960, Itoi was there as one of the artists exhibiting at the Yomiuri Independent. In 1962, when the Grand Assembly of Heroes took place in Fukuoka, signaling a liminal shift from Anti-Art to performance at the dawn of the performance art era in Japan, Itoi was there. In 1964, the year that saw the cancellation of the Yomiuri Independent and debate on Anti-Art, there was Itoi—in a loincloth, dashing through the streets of Ginza dressed like a torchbearer, on the eve of the Olympics, the very symbol of the nation’s rapid development and internationalization. Itoi was also there as a fellow Ritualist in Zero Jigen’s performances from 1966–67, at the advent of Japan’s counterculture scene. When the Japan World Exposition was held in Osaka in 1970—the event of the decade symbolizing national and corporate success in the face of crackdowns on antiestablishment activists and the institutionalization of avant-garde art—Itoi was there, streaking through history. In recent years, the writings of Takekuma Kentarō1 and Sawaragi Noi2 have shone a long-overdue spotlight on Itoi, bringing his activities to the attention of a younger generation.3 In September 2008, an exhibition of archival materials on Itoi curated by Uehara Seiichirō attracted a sizable turnout in Tokyo. 4 Even so, Itoi is a slippery figure to situate in the span of performance art history, for multiple reasons. First, Itoi’s performances were rarely announced in advance. They were either conducted spontaneously without a premeditated pretext, or else participated, even if uninvited, in events organized by other artists. As a result, very few written or spoken accounts, photographs, or printed matter were ever created from which we might retrace his activities. Many of the precious materials in Itoi’s own personal collection were ultimately scattered as mail art or otherwise lost over the years. As we will see in this chapter, Itoi did on occasion collaborate with other groups; yet he was essentially a lone wolf, whose independent actions did not have much bearing on other artists and did not trigger a larger organized movement. Even when Itoi’s name appeared on an event roster as a performer, it was often in a supporting role. As a visual artist, he generally did not travel to the exhibition site in person but rather simply sent paper works and other small objects. For someone with such a long career with a focus on performance, Itoi did not necessarily present as much work in formal settings as one might expect. Moreover, Itoi’s acts were unlike the straightforward publicity stunts of the Jack Society or the catchy bizarre eroticism of Zero Jigen, and they lacked the messaging of Kurohata and Kokuin. As such, in the eyes of the average viewer, Itoi would surely have seemed to be either a madman, or else the performer of a stylized rebellion as a sort of fashion.

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Even so, Itoi was held in special esteem not only by those who had actually seen his performances, but even by many people who had never even met him. The former group included Sendai-based painter Miyagi Teruo, who described being “deeply touched” by Itoi’s performance: “I did not sense the slightest trace of obsequiousness. It was sanctity, itself.”5 Kamijō Junjirō, a future core member of Zero Jigen who met Itoi in Sendai, would go so far as to say, “I respect him like a God.”6 Itoi was certainly neither glamorous nor straightforward. Why, then, did he become the subject of such mythologization? In order to understand the legend of Itoi, we must look not only at his activities during the historical crossroads mentioned at the start of this chapter, but also retrace his steps stretching back to the 1950s.7 2.

SPIRITUAL LIFE OF THE WARTIME GENERATION

Born in Tokyo in 1920, Itoi was of the wartime generation. Already twenty-five years old by the war’s end, he was already quite long in the tooth compared to the other Anti-Art performers, who were primarily born in the mid-1930s, a detail I will further discuss in chapter 23. From Itoi’s generational cohort, Hamaguchi Tomiji (1921–2009) and Matsuzawa Yutaka (1922–2006) also engaged in performative work during the 1960s. Yet whereas they did not politicize their war experience in their work, Itoi held perhaps the strongest antiwar sentiment among all artists of the wartime generation. Itoi was drafted into the army and sent to Kagoshima, where he trained as a jibaku-hei, an infantry version of the kamikaze pilots, instructed to run out with a bomb and intercept enemy tanks that made landfall. Ultimately, the war ended without such a land assault, and so Itoi never saw combat on the battlefield. Itoi did however hear talk of atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers in China; the shock of these brutalities would lead Itoi to a lifelong, fervent rejection of war, murder, and violence itself. Of his later nude acts, Itoi said, “the idiocy of the butchery of battle aroused an unstoppable [impulse to] resist through a return to the original naked state of birth.”8 (Itoi’s emphasis) Unlike artists in Neo Dada and other avant-garde groups that emerged across Japan in the 1960s, Itoi had no formal training in fine art. Although Itoi was enamored with Picasso and deeply influenced by Okamoto Tarō’s discourses, he did not attend art school. He thoroughly inhabited the “secular” world of company offices and physical labor. Unlike the members of Kyūshū-ha, many of whom often defined themselves as “painters,” Itoi never considered himself to be a “painter,” nor did he receive any formal training for that matter. Perhaps to Itoi, avant-garde art was something akin to a hobby (shumi). The “hobby” referred to here is not a hobby in the conventional sense, but rather a drive towards creation and experimentation. One of Itoi’s shumi was haiku, likely stemming from his mother, who enjoyed composing them, as well as the influence of Iida Gakurō, publisher of the poetry magazine Asobi: Renku to Haiseki, who lived in Sendai near the ancestral home of Itoi’s father. In particular, Itoi was impressed by how Iida encouraged common workers and housewives to take up recreational painting, printmaking, and haiku. Itoi joined in the haiseki9 “game,” creating prints for Asobi magazine between April 1954 and November 1960.10 Itoi also differed from other artists in his aversion to open-call art societies and other group exhibitions. As such, his sole avenue for presenting work was solo shows in

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rental galleries, as well as the Independent exhibitions (such as the Yomiuri, Gifu, and Sendai Independents),11 to which he regularly contributed. A rare exception was the 1953 Kahoku Art Exhibition, an open competition in Sendai. But in principle, Itoi seems to have eschewed (or even rejected) judging and acclaim for his work. Moreover, he was utterly divorced from group activities and movements. As for Itoi’s co-generational cohorts, Hamaguchi founded the Zen’ei Tosa-ha (Avant-Garde Tosa School), garnered acclaimed at home in Kōchi, and served as director of the Kōchi Prefectural Art Exhibition. Even Matsuzawa, the stoic and solitary artist, went on to form a group of acolytes and artists with like-minded ambitions. By contrast, Itoi’s solitude was far more absolute. 3.

BODY OF STEEL

When considering the trajectory of Itoi’s later philosophy and action, a particularly pertinent biographical detail would necessarily be his background as a competitive gymnast, making use of his robust physique from the end of the war through the 1950s. In elementary school, Itoi received top marks in P.E. and earned a special commendation for fitness. As a junior high school student, he began competing as a gymnast in 1933. A photograph in Kyoto from 1942 [fig. 177] shows Itoi performing a handstand on the parallel bars, the muscles of his torso and arms rippling impressively. In November 1946, Itoi competed in the gymnastics event at the inaugural National Sports Festival but did not finish in the top 10; however, he placed second in the horizontal bar at the Ōita Prefectural Sports Festival in November  1948.12 The muscular strength, explosive agility, and pose-striking motor skills he developed during this period would go a long way toward his later performances that were “truly marvelous, [with] not a movement wasted,”13 in the words of Miyagi Teruo. Perhaps the experience of performing in front of large crowds at these tournaments is another factor that acclimated Itoi to showing his body in public spaces. Interestingly, Itoi took note of how the ancient Olympics were conducted in the nude, and the existence of pools in Tokyo that once allowed skinny-dipping, for hygienic purposes.14 Such naked athletics may have also informed his later view that nudity was the true state of man. Itoi’s pride in his physical strength is supported by an admonition he sent to his eldest son: “Emulate your father’s body of steel and learn from your mother’s strength of character.”15 However, as if in an act of self-denial, Itoi continually subjected his body to an unusually

 177. Itoi Kanji performs an impressive handstand • 1942 • Kashifuji Ironworks, Kyoto

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grueling degree of physical labor. In April 1944, Itoi married into the family of a Nishijin-ori brocade weaver in Kyoto and had a son. The following year, he was conscripted and sent to Tagawa, Fukuoka to work gruelingly long hours in the Furukawa Ōmine Coal Mine along with American POWs and Korean forced laborers. After two months in the mines, he was transferred to Kumamoto and Kagoshima for counter-tank corps training. Itoi divorced in April 1946 and returned to the Ōmine mine in 1947. In November 1949, he moved to Tokyo and worked at the Shibaura Refrigerator factory until October 1952. Working conditions were harsh and even Itoi’s body did not hold. Itoi could have enjoyed a comfortable life as the son-in-law of a venerable old silk textile-maker in Kyoto. Perhaps physical labor was unavoidable in the ’40s and early ’50s due to external factors such as conscription during World War II and economic rebuilding during the Korean War era, but after war’s end, there no one to order Itoi to return to the mines. Perhaps Itoi felt better equipped for a life of physical labor (with room and board) than for a career in business. Even so, there was surely other work available at the time, and even if he wanted to perform physical labor, there would have been no need to choose such harsh labor conditions in the mine or relocate all the way to Tokyo for factory work. It is almost as if Itoi sought out pain as a form of self-mortification in penance for surviving the war. His first (and second) marriage were not happy; perhaps inner darkness may have been another factor that drove him to such punishing physical labor. Religion may have had something to do with Itoi’s attitudes toward the way he subjected his body to physical abuse of this kind. As a young boy, Itoi was introduced to Christianity by his religious grandmother and aunt. Itoi was baptized in elementary school and at age fourteen heard a sermon by the prominent Protestant social reformer Kagawa Toyohiko. After his second divorce, he attended a Tenrikyō16 spiritual training session in 1956, in an effort to learn to control his own anger and show more courtesy to others—a detail he specifically notes in a chronology he compiled later. Although Itoi was vehemently opposed to war and violence, he rarely expressed these convictions directly; perhaps this self-restraint was a result of how he learned to control body and mind through willpower. Hobby and spiritual training would ultimately intersect in Itoi’s conception of Dada and Zen. But it would be a few years yet before Itoi would arrive at this conception that would form the basis of his performance. 4.

THE PLASTIC ARTS AS SHUMI (1951–62)

Although Itoi had yet to arrive at performance, he was already producing other work from the early 1950s. In fact, he was a surprisingly frequent contributor to exhibitions during this period. Already in 1951, he had exhibited work at the Yomiuri Independent and held his first solo exhibition (Formes Gallery), all while juggling a full workload at the refrigerator factory. In October 1952, he quit his job, moved to Sendai, and remarried. After Itoi divorced in April 1955, he moved back to Tokyo. Preoccupied with caring for his infant son (born in 1954) for three years, Itoi did not exhibit during this interim. He resumed his activities with a solo show at the Kyūryūdō Gallery in July 1957. In 1958, he exhibited at the Yomiuri Independent under the pseudonym “Kan Itoi” (and continued doing so each year under various names until the Yomiuri’s conclusion in 1963). From

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 178. Itoi Kanji, Woodblock print • 1958

1957–60, he held three solo shows in Tokyo (and a “two-man” show with his son). In 1960, he followed with three more solo shows in Nakatsu, Ōita, where he lived with his relatives. A notable feature of Itoi’s work during this period was the aforementioned “hobby-like” (shumi-teki) character. For the 1957 Kyūryūdō Gallery show, Itoi exhibited “collage, origami, bonsai, tanzaku (long cards) inscribed with waka poetry and artificial flowers arranged in worn-out shoes,”17 and distributed copies of the magazine Asobi to visitors. For his solo show circa 1959 at the Ōmori Gallery, Itoi recalled making tea (the practice of chanoyu) for visitors. In 1958, he presented woodblock prints [fig. 178] at the Yomiuri Independent and in Asobi. Surviving prints evince a strongly hobbyist quality in their primitive technique and treatment of Japanese themes. In terms of individual works, Tamago (Egg) exhibited at the 1951 Yomiuri Independent, consisted of an “actual egg and a ping pong ball attached to an egg-shaped yolk on a 20cm x 15cm block of wood” [fig. 179],18 revealing his liking for collage, as well as his fascination with eggs, a theme that would play an important role in his subsequent art and performance works. An August 1959 show at the TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) Service Center featured a portrait of Itoi and other pastels drawn by his five-year-old son from his second marriage, exhibited alongside a collage by Itoi based on the boy’s works [fig. 180].19 More than just a doting father, the exhibition provides an early glimpse of Itoi’s tendency in later years to use art as homage to the work and actions of others, rather than as an assertion of the self. Other work by Itoi in the 1950s included orthodox paintings, as well as a large-scale

 179. Itoi Kanji, Sketch depicting Egg, a lost work exhibited at the 3rd Yomiuri Independent in 1951

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 180. Itoi Kanji, collage exhibited at Father and Son Collage Exhibition in 1959

action painting shown at Muramatsu Gallery in December 1957, in the wake of the Informel whirlwind. Perhaps in response to the political overtones of the 1958 Japan Independent, he exhibited a series of paintings about miners, with the titles Kiriha (Coalface), Kiretsu (Fissure), and Kanrosui (Sweet water). In February 1958, he struck up an acquaintance with Kagami Masayuki. In June 1959, he joined the Shōhei High School group (known later as Unbeat) with Kagami, Tashiro Minoru, and Nakajima Yoshio. At the end of 1959, Itoi was approached by Yoshimura Masunobu about joining All Japan, a precursor to Neo Dada, which would be formed the following year. However, Itoi declined, as he had his hands full raising his young son. These invitations to join two of the era’s most radical groups are a testament to how Itoi’s work must have caught the attention of young artists at the time. In 1960, Itoi was asked to model for Tōmatsu Shōmei in a photoshoot with Shinohara Ushio [fig. 181],20 yet another example of how the art scene had its eyes on Itoi. In March 1960, Itoi was among the Yomiuri Independent exhibitors whose work was famously called “Anti-Art.” Shortly after the formation of Neo Dada, Itoi moved to Nakatsu with his son in May  1960, where they lived in an aunt’s home until May 1962. Even in the tantalizing face of pivotal changes brewing in the Tokyo art world, Itoi prioritized his life with his son. Opening Itoi’s diary from this time, we find a poem interlacing love and sadness on one page with abutting excerpts from texts on Dada and Zen on the other. The spread demonstrates a mental tension torn between a desire for artistic  181. Itoi Kanji (left) and Shinohara Ushio (right) • 1960 • Site of the former Ichigaya Prison, Tokyo

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 182. Itoi Kanji, Instant Insanity Zen: Collection of Poems (1958–61) • pages from c. August 1960 • Nakatsu, Ōita

expression and childrearing, itself constituting an abstract work of art [fig. 182]. Although Itoi had little interaction with local artists in Nakatsu, his own thinking evolved dramatically during his time in the provincial city. In November 1960, he read up on Zen, buying five books on the subject by D. T. Suzuki (Suzuki Daisetsu). The next month, he purchased Georges Hugnet’s L’Aventure Dada (in Japanese translation by Ebara Jun), discovering an overlapping ethos shared between Dada and Zen. Itoi’s work from around this time can be grouped into three categories: objets, two-dimensional work (prints and photographs), and erotic imagery. This work set Itoi on a new trajectory, during which time he managed to develop from hobbyist to a “natural” man free from all social norms, metamorphosing into a Dadaist. This period began with a series of three consecutive solo exhibitions at the Nakatsu Chamber of Commerce and Industry Hall from August through October 1960.21 According to Nakatsu-based painter Inoue Sanosuke,22 the exhibition consisted of a collection of small yet distinctly eerie works, which included: a shirt covered in handprints,23 a signboard with lettering formed using Itoi’s own hair, a bundle of colored pencils stuck into a broken ashtray, and an objet assembled from eggshells. This eggshell objet may have been Momohiki [fig. 183]—“a penis of propagated eggshells protruding from torn momohiki trousers”24 rejected from the 1962 Yomiuri Independent—or else something in the same vein. During the Nakatsu era, it is also worth noting Itoi began to use photographic techniques. These photographic works can be grouped into three categories. The first was photograms (rayographs), which Itoi compiled into an album titled, Hikari no Hanga (Light Prints). Although Itoi began experimenting with the medium under the influence of Dada, he developed a different approach from Man Ray, who used objects to create his images. Instead, Itoi drew on transparent vinyl sheets, which he then overlaid onto the photo paper to create his exposures, in an extension of his earlier printmaking. The resulting photograms depict Zen practitioners, the Buddha, windswept  183. Itoi Kanji, Momohiki • Exhibited and prematurely removed from the 14th Yomiuri Independent • March 1962 • Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum

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 184. Itoi Kanji, Another Face, digitally edited scan of an original copperplate • October 1960

mountains, ancient Egyptian sarcophagi, and plants sprouting from the soil. Although some images vaguely resemble female genitalia, any Dada imagery was minimal; at this stage in his career, Itoi was still predominately exploring Japanese themes, as had been the case in his printmaking. Itoi also created etchings based on photographs. For Mō hitotsu no kao (Another face), he took a photo of an anthropomorphic, hat-wearing whisky bottle objet, and then made an etching based on the photo [fig. 184]. Another Face was displayed at the October 1960 exhibition in Nakatsu; only the original etching plate survives. In February 1960, Itoi posed with objets at the Arika Photo Studio in Nakatsu for portraits. The four resulting images are the earliest photographs with performative elements in the pre-performance era. One of the images [fig. 185] was used in Dadakko Kanchan, exhibited at the Yomiuri Independent in March 1961. Another image shot by Arika appeared in the League of Criminals book Akai fūsen aruiwa mesu-ōkami no yoru (Red Balloon, or the Night of She-Wolf),25 published in August 1963(see chap. 6.6, p. 139). In another image shot in profile, Itoi wears a woolen cap and crouches down with an arm extended in an enigmatic pose, while on the floor sits an objet crisscrossed with tape [fig. 186]. In a third image, Itoi looks straight into the camera, sporting a shaved head and a long goatee, with a pendant on display [fig.  187]. At first glance, Itoi appears to be sitting on the floor. In reality, he is cantilevered on the sides of his feet with his bottom suspended in the air in a precariously gymnastic pose. Meanwhile, his groin is covered by an objet decorated with eggshells and what seems to be a photograph of a nude woman.26 The above trajectory—from photogram in conventional printmaking  185. Portrait of Itoi Kanji taken at Arika Photo Studio in Nakatsu • December 1960

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 186. Portrait of Itoi Kanji taken at Arika Photo Studio in Nakatsu • December 1960

technique, to prints made from photographs of objets, and then photographs of his own body—next led Itoi to performance. In other words, perhaps performance was another “hobbyist” approach to art that did not require particular skill or special materials. All throughout the Nakatsu period, Itoi continued to exhibit at the Yomiuri Independent. It must have come as quite a shock to exhibitiongoers when Itoi scaled up from his usual hobbyistic little pieces and created large-scale work for the spacious galleries at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. “I don’t even know whether it was lewd or sacred or even art,” wrote Akasegawa Genpei, “But [Itoi’s work] is one of the defining impressions I have of the Yomiuri Independent.”27 At the 12th Yomiuri Independent in March 1960, Itoi exhibited Shōji (Sliding door), Eda (Branches) [fig. 188], Nehandadda (a portmanteau of Neo Dada and the Japanese for “Nirvana”) in the painting category, and Kōdō Da (Action!) and Ajikan (a meditation practice in Shingon Buddhism) in the sculpture category. A common thread connecting these works was their Japanese themes and use of everyday materials with the very minimal intervention on the part of the artist. For Shōji, Itoi removed the old sliding shōji doors from his Meiji era home, variously cutting out some of the paper paneling and pasting colorful strips of cellophane. Eda and Kōdō Da reused pieces of a tree from Itoi’s garden that had to be felled after a neighbor complained about its caterpillar infestation. For Branches, he wrapped the wood in colored vinyl tape then attached a plastic spider. The tree appears to walk in Kōdō Da [fig.  189], suggesting the call to action of the Anpo protests that year (“Now we have no choice but action!”), as well as the luridness and eroticism of the naked human  187. Portrait of Itoi Kanji taken at Arika Photo Studio in Nakatsu • December 1960

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 188. Itoi Kanji, Sliding Door and Branches • 12th Yomiuri Independent • March 1960 • Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum

body. Nehandadda [fig.  190] consisted of striped curtains in a wooden frame, a circular trivet, a bamboo broom, and a leather bag to which Itoi had pasted a woodblock print depicting an emaciated Shakyamuni engaged in ascetic training.28 While these three works were simultaneously unsettling yet humorous, Itoi took a more menacing approach with Ajikian [fig. 191]. The work was a “shacklike model made from pieces of a dilapidated fence from [Itoi’s] home in Ōmori, with a nude photograph strung up in the center like a hanging scroll.”29 As Akasagawa Genpei memorably writes: With grimy planks that look like they could have been stripped from an abandoned house on the outskirts of some village, [Itoi] cobbled together what resembled a small shrine or shack. Peer inside and there amidst the shadows was a nude photograph, in color but coarsely printed, the sort you would clip out of a lowbrow weekly magazine. There was a coldly clinical atmosphere that felt akin to how raw skin smarts when exposed to the air.30

The Arika Photo Studio portraits were also used in Dadakko Kan-chan, exhibited at the 13th Yomiuri in March  1961. Koten (Solo Exhibition) [fig. 192] was another rather weird work in the vein of Ajikan the previous year. The work consisted of plastic spiders à la Eda, a melon  189. Itoi Kanji, Action! • 12th Yomiuri Independent • March 1960 • Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum

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 190. Itoi Kanji, Nehandadda • 12th Yomiuri Independent • March 1960 • Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum

wrapped in paper snakes, a basket filled with fruit, a lion dance figurine, “a fivebead abacus [Itoi] used in grade school,” and invitations to solo exhibitions by Nakajima Yoshio and other artists, all strung to a frame cobbled together from scrap wood. This untechnical agglomeration of an odd assortment of objects and fragile framework of wood and paper were both undercurrents that would again be seen in the mail art project that Itoi continued well into his nineties. For Dada Kan no Kaban (Dada Kan’s Bag), exhibited at the 1963 Yomiuri Independent, Itoi packed a trunk suitcase with collages, objets, and papers with writing on them. Itoi then attached a note encouraging visitors to take a piece home with them, making it conceptually similar to mail art in the dispensing of his own possessions to people he respected. Another branch of Itoi’s plastic works featured obscene iconography. For example, the “rather indecent album documenting a night with his wife in graphic detail”31 presented at his first solo exhibition in Nakatsu; Jika Hatsuden (Self-generated Energy)

 191. Itoi Kanji, Ajikan (right) • 12th Yomiuri Independent • March 1960 • Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum

 192. Itoi Kanji, Solo Exhibition • 13th Yomiuri Independent • March 1961 • Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum

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 193. Itoi Kanji, Self-generated Energy • Exhibited and prematurely removed from the 14th Yomiuri Independent • March 1962 • Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum

[fig.  193] (“20 shares of real stock worth 5,000 yen each pasted around a woodblock print of a masturbating princess”) and Toranku (Trunk) (“opens on a diagram of men and women licking each other”), both rejected from the 14th Yomiuri Independent in 1962; and Herumetto (Helmet) (“a motorcycle helmet covered in a collage of erotic photos”),32 shown at the 1964 Sendai Independent. In photographs of Jika Hatsu­den taken by Yoshioka Yasuhiro, we can see that the work featured a mélange of stock certificates and an erotic shunga.33 The shunga was a print reproduced by an amateur artist in Tottori from a classic print; Itoi said the artist made the reproduction over dismay that the original had ended up in a collection in the United States. This union of sex and money, the ultimate fetishes, was reminiscent of Kikuhata Mokuma’s Slave Genealogy (1961), in which 5-yen coins were strewn amongst two wooden logs that evoked a couple in style of the Dōsojin traveler guardian. Compared to Kikuhata’s deliberate sculptural forms, Itoi’s work was shaped by a far more amateurish, slapdash touch that imparts a more ominous, foreboding impression. Whereas Kikuhata’s use of 5-yen coins was easily understandable in the traditional cultural context of offering coins at temples and shrines, Itoi’s stock certificates were a more fearsome rejection of the value of money. 5. FROM OBJET TO ACTION (1962–64) In May 1962, Itoi deposited his son, now a third grader, at his grandmother’s home in Sendai. The newly unencumbered Itoi left Nakatsu and moved in with Kagami Masayuki in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture; Itoi would reside in Ichikawa until October  1964. This Ichikawa era marked the first stage of his full-fledged performance practice. Itoi’s first performative act can be traced back to the solo exhibition at the Kyūryūdō Gallery in July 1957, when he went to the gallery wearing the yellow curtain from his home wrapped around his waist like a skirt, as it reminded him of the yellow used in the printed exhibition invitations. Such unconventional costumery was a frequent feature of Itoi’s practice that would evolve over the years. To a certain extent, these guises also seem to have been influenced by Shinohara. Although not yet evident in the 1960 photoshoot with Tōmatsu, by August 1962, Itoi could be seen wearing a Mohawk and facial hair at Banquet

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Commemorating the Defeat in the War. Three months later, Itoi conducted his first proper performance at the Grand Assembly of Heroes, organized by Kyūshū-ha in November 1962 in Fukuoka. Itoi came to participate in the Grand Assembly—one of the earliest collaborative performance events in Japan and a high-water mark for Kyūshū-ha—after seeing an advertisement in the October issue of Bijutsu techō magazine. Although the members of Kyūshū-ha were known in the art world from their frequent visits to Tokyo from 1957 onward, Sakurai Takami and Itoi met for the first time at the event. A description of Itoi’s performance at Grand Assembly can also be found in chapter 6 (see p. 159); let us however revisit the Kyūshū-ha’s Momochi Beach house studio in Fukuoka through Sakurai’s account of the proceedings: [Itoi] descended from the dark second floor carrying a single bag in his hand. Solemnly yet speedily chewing a piece of gum he had hidden away who knows where, he removed a white cloth from the bag and unfurled it on the floor, carefully made a cross on the cloth with vinyl tape, then removed his clothes and changed into a ceremonial outfit. [Itoi] pulled the cloth over his head. The cloth was adorned with his peculiar incantation-esque Dadaist symbols. Underneath the cloth, he began to violently shake something. Out came a paper container of Yukijirushi brand baby formula, a candy box [rigged] to open at the middle, a tube measuring about 10cm in diameter, and a photo album. Each item was passed around the audience from hand to hand in the dim candlelight. When the more curious and critically minded audience members opened the box of baby formula, they found photos of nude women and other surprises inside. The trick candy box was cleverly designed; unless you looked closely, you would not notice that it contained a beautifully mosaicked egg, but the intricate mosaic was too lovely for anyone to break. It seemed there was an important key hidden amongst all this, but as Itoi did not utter a single word, we would never know more. Ultimately, under the magical spell of object and object, and queries presented without answers, each individual was transported to their own time and secret place; yet this made everyone present part of a single shared incident—an incident that would be secretly cherished deep in the breasts of all there.34

Sakurai’s detailed account can be further fleshed out in Itoi’s own words. After descending the staircase, Itoi took out a [cloth] sack big enough to easily fit my entire body and pulled the sack over my head. Inside the sack, I stripped to the waist, painted my face white, taped a piece of paper to my back that read, “Dada Kan is still rebelling at age forty-two,” and from the hem took out small artworks that I handed out as presents to the audience, particularly peep boxes full of surprises. And when I finished handing everything out…I came out from the bag to show my face and that was a wrap.35 (Itoi’s emphasis)

As these accounts demonstrate, Itoi’s performance practice in this period still placed more of an emphasis on objets than on bodily expression. However, the bestowing of gifts (a concept seen in Trunk and in Itoi’s mail art), as well as the mix of the infantile and the indecent, are quintessential Itoi. The covering of his face with a cloth also calls to

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 194. Itoi Kanji, Sash worn at a performance in Ginza, October 4, 1964

mind his performances in Sendai and Ginza in 1964. The objets in a box of baby formula for distribution to the audience were also similar to a performance at the Super Avant-garde Group Exhibition in June 1963. A little over two weeks after the Grand Assembly of Heroes, Itoi participated in Unbeat events in Kyoto and Osaka on December 12–13, 1962 (see chap. 6.3, pp. 131–3). In Kyoto, Itoi stripped naked and climbed up a pine tree on the Kyoto Gakugei University campus. In Osaka, he tossed a bowler hat from the balustrade of a bridge, wearing a miniskirt without underwear—a strategy he would regularly employ in the homemade costumes of later years that would give viewers a peek at his naked body underneath. During his Ichikawa days, Itoi also performed together with Unbeat members Nakajima Yoshio and Tashiro Minoru. However, it was after Itoi relocated to Sendai in April 1964 (after Nakajima and Kaga­ mi Masayuki left for Europe) that he truly came into his own. That autumn, Itoi participated in the Sendai Independent, held from September to October. According to the exhibition catalogue, he showed Helmet and Zero no Otoko (Zero Man). The latter was “a kind of objet made from a white helmet of the sort worn by traffic cops, decorated with a photo collage in sexual colors.”36 Itoi also conducted performances in which he variously donned a cloth sack and stood like a statue on the objet’s display pedestal,37 and “wrapped his head in pure white bandages and laid on the floor with his arms and legs splayed, all while wearing an eye-popping bright red loincloth.”38 At this point, Tohoku University art club students Kamijō Junjirō, Suzuki Kōichi, and Suzuki Seiichi removed their clothes and “wrapped a rope around Dada Kan’s buttocks, then tied themselves to other naked students, who then crawled out of the venue in a single file line”39 while howling like dogs. The performance reportedly stirred up quite a commotion that culminated in riot police showing up at the venue. Itoi deployed a very similar style for his Ginza torch relay performance in October 1964, right on the heels of the Sendai Independent. For this performance, Itoi wrapped his face in white cloth and ran through the Ginza district carrying a torch made from a rolled-up newspaper with a red loincloth for its flame. Although Itoi started out wearing a white loincloth, he let it slip off midway. Itoi also wore a red sash with the messages “Celebrate the Tokyo Olympics” on the front and “Embodying the Olympic Flame” on the back [fig. 194], leaving no doubt that the performance referenced the Tokyo Olympics. It seems that such nude exercises came naturally to Itoi, given his background as a gymnast who had competed at the national level, coupled with his interest in the nudity of the original Olympic Games. While Itoi’s relay through Ginza was directly motivated by frustrations over the Sendai Independent and constraints on free expression, he fully expected the stunt to get him arrested and sent to a psychiatric hospital. Itoi was indeed

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arrested and institutionalized, and for a longer stay than he had anticipated (he would not be discharged until September 1965). Still, his experience at the hospital40 left him impressed by the “overwhelming sanctity of the insane.”41 6.

THE EVOLUTION AND END OF ACTION (1966–70)

Unfortunately, Itoi’s hospitalization meant he had to miss the Gifu Independent—a watershed event in the history of 1960s performance art (see chap. 7.3, pp. 175–9). Nonetheless, after being discharged and relocating to Sendai, he soon made up for lost time by participating in the All-Japan Insanity Trade Fair (’66 Yoyo Independent Avant-Garde Artist Action Meet), held in Yoyogi Park on May Day 1966. At the event, Itoi connected with Zero Jigen, Kurohata, 8 Generation, and other pivotal performers of the latter half of the decade. Itoi marched alongside Zero Jigen members (with dolls strapped to their backs). He wore sunglasses, a Mohawk, and a homemade “penis” costume—a primitive kantōi, or tunic [fig. 195] made out of a long piece of cloth with a hole in the middle for the head that would become a regular part of Itoi’s performance wardrobe—worn over his naked body. In September 1967, Itoi traveled to Tokyo and performed outside of Shinjuku Station, after seeing news reports of the vagabond fūten-zoku that gathered near the station’s east exit. Beheiren’s “Do not kill” advertisement in Okamoto Tarō’s calligraphy in the Washington Post in April of this year was well known in Japan, but the Shinjuku performance did not feature any particular message. Itoi only employed a similar style, lying on the ground in a sack made of black cloth and clear vinyl that revealed glimpses of his naked body. The same was true of his other performances in Sendai. For example, consider West Park Art Festival, held in Nishi Park in downtown Sendai in November 1967. Organized by the Sendai Gendai Sakka Kurabu (Sendai Contemporary Artist Club)—a group of artists that included Ishikawa Shun, Suzuki Seiichi, and Hasebe Akiyoshi, who were all frustrated with the 1964 Sendai Independent’s focus on elegant modernism, exemplified by Miyagi Teruo—the festival was conceived as a platform for a new young generation of artists, such as Ishikawa and Toshima Shigeyuki, who dug a trash pit as their performance. 42 As Toshima would later recall: Off in the grove’s shadows stood a man dressed in all black like a foreign priest. He swiftly rolled forward and stripped

 195. Itoi Kanji, Penis-shaped kantōi, worn often in Itoi’s performances

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off all his clothes; you could catch a glance of his penis and pubic hair. Then he briskly disappeared. When we went to the grove, we found a shabby Morinaga powered milk can. Upon opening the can, we found a penis enshrined inside with a wire to make it point upwards.”43

According to Ishikawa, 44 this cassock-like costume consisted of a student hat and a black gown with a transparent vinyl cutout on the back, which framed Itoi’s derrière. From these descriptions, we can imagine the getup combined the kantōi tunic and the cloth-vinyl costume from his Shinjuku Station performance earlier that year. During the festival, Itoi reportedly wrapped the park’s trees in toilet paper. 45 In May  1968, Itoi performed at the Shokkankaku Eizō Taikai (Tactile Film Meet) organized by Saitō Yoshiaki, 46 Hasebe Akiyoshi, et al. at Konishi Living, a gallery run by a handicraft supply shop in Sendai. Photographs show a mohawked Itoi wearing sunglasses while performing with an inflatable plastic mannequin of a woman’s lower torso [fig.  196]. In another performance in Sendai, he appeared with a penis-shaped object strapped to his forehead with an unidentified performer [fig. 197]. In January 1969, Itoi participated in a joint performance event organized by Saitō at the Fujiya Gallery in Sendai. For this humorous riff on the Year of the Rooster, Itoi began his performance with naked headstand, then danced while twirling a sausage as a penis proxy, simulated urination by pouring a stream of liquid from a plastic container, and for his grand finale, rolled forward and birthed a boiled egg from his mouth in a humorous nod to the Year of the Chicken. In October, he set up a portable gas stove in front of Sendai City Hall, boiled water, and made instant coffee. In January 1970, he stripped naked and infiltrated the throng of loincloth-clad revelers at the Ōsaki Hachiman Donto Festival. In this way, Itoi’s performances often took the form of endearingly innocent pranks, devoid of lewdness, eeriness, and antiwar overtones. However, it was in his Sendai period that Itoi also began to enact p ­ erformances that had distinct antiwar messages. In May 1969, Itoi appeared in the Konnichi no Shūdan-ten (Collectives of Today Exhibition), organized at the Miyagi Prefectural Hall by Toshima Shigeyuki and members of the Tohoku Gakuin University art club. At this event, Itoi debuted a placard printed with the words “Korosuna” (“Do not kill”). A precious photograph of the performance [fig. 198] shows the audience seated in chairs and what appears to be a light set  196. Itoi Kanji performs at Tactile Film Meet • June 1968 • Konishi Living, Sendai, Miyagi

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 197. Itoi Kanji, venue and date unidentified, Sendai, Miyagi

up on the floor, suggesting that Itoi’s performance was either planned in advance, or made use of a stage set for Toshima’s older sister, butoh dancer Toshima Kazuko. A note written by Itoi on the photograph’s reverse explains, “[I] lay down on my back on a crimson blanket, raised my bottom and removed my pants, stood up and removed my top. After naked backward somersault (two seconds), put on a charcoal-dyed garment over my naked body, donned my antiwar and peace cooking pot helmet and set off into the city in this see-through [outfit].” [fig. 199] With this performance, Itoi seems to have built on stock strategies—sheer garments that covered yet still revealed his naked body and sudden gymnastic maneuvers— while adding the text “Korosuna” and a humorous helmet with an antiwar message.

 198. Itoi Kanji performs at Collectives of Today Exhibition • May 1969 • Miyagi Prefectural Hall, Sendai

 199. Itoi Kanji walks behind student protestors • c. May 22, 1969 • Unknown location, Sendai, Miyagi

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 200. Itoi Kanji performs for articles near Itoi’s home in Sendai • September 20, 1970

Beheiren’s advertisement was more than two years before, so Itoi’s use of the “Korosuna” placard could have been a response to the monthly street demonstrations that Sendai Beheiren began in 1969. Itoi also deployed the “Korosuna” placard in a performance for Yoshida Yoshie on September  20, 1970. The moment was captured by photographer Hanaga Mitsutoshi and appeared the following March in the Weekly Shōnen Sunday magazine [fig.  200]. In another image (plate  29, p.  18) from the September  20 performance, published in Bijutsu techō,47 Itoi can be seen walking down a street, naked apart from a sash that reads, “Soldiers of World War II / We can kill each other no more,” indicating that Itoi’s use of “Do not kill” slogan and opposition to the Vietnam War were rooted in his own military experiences, although he never saw combat himself. Nevertheless, such overt antiwar messages were rare for Itoi. The above context provides clues to understanding Itoi’s “infamous” naked streak through history at the World Expo in April 1970. When viewed in this light, it seems that Itoi’s actions at the Expo were not motivated by a criticism of national issues such as the automatic extension of the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty or wartime-like mobilization to Expo ’70; nor was the stunt a Zero Jigen-like ploy for media attention in the public eye. Moreover, there seems to have been no connection to the “Do not kill” message in this act. In fact, Itoi ended up in Osaka entirely by happenstance after visiting his mother, who had fallen ill and was recuperating at a hospital in Yufuin, Ōita Prefecture. On the train ride home, he was flipping through the newspaper when he happened to read an article about a demonstrator who had occupied one of the eyeballs of the Tower of the Sun. Dubbed “Eyeball Man,”48 the demonstrator wore a helmet with Japanese Red Army insignia, and shouted, “Smash the Expo!” (Banpaku funsai!). The following article ran in the newspaper’s evening edition: April 27—At approximately 11:45 a.m., a naked man appeared near the steps leading up to the Tower of the Mother. The man had unkempt hair and a long beard in the hippie fashion. Hollering queerly, the barefoot man rapidly danced toward the Theme Pavilion entrance some thirty meters away, but was apprehended by the guards and police. […] The man claimed to be a painter and member of a Happening group.”49

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In a photograph [fig. 201] that accompanied the article, a bearded Itoi is seen wearing a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses. The assertion that Itoi belonged to a “Happening group” was a flagrant misreport; this nude streak was conducted solely of Itoi’s own accord and he was not a member of any group at this time. Rather, it was an independent act, intended by Itoi to “cheer on”50 the fearless audacity of the Eyeball Man, a fellow independent actor who took a solitary stand atop the enormous monument that symbolized an event of national significance and coverage by media outlets nationwide. Initially, Itoi had looked for a route into the Tower of the Sun’s other eyeball, but security was too tight. He next aimed for the nearby emergency staircase, in an attempt to simply climb as high as he possibly could. When that failed, running was his last resort. He managed to cover nearly fifteen meters of ground in the few moments before he was intercepted by the police.51 Yet in that time, Itoi had pulled off an individual “Happening” on the grounds of Expo ’70, a stunt that not even the Expo Destruction Group managed to achieve. In June 1970, Itoi made a cameo in Zero Jigen’s film, Inaba no Shiro Usagi, appearing with Akiyama Yūtokutaishi in a scene shot at Sebastian, a bar in Shinjuku run by Kagami Masayuki. As Itoi’s performance in the film was entirely directed by Zero Jigen, it is difficult to detect his signature spontaneous style of expression. However, when seen acting alongside Katō Yoshihiro, Itoi still stands out from the other performers with a distinctive screen presence in his slender frame, sunglasses, and red loincloth (of the phallic variety, which he also used in his Ginza performance). In October 1970, Itoi donned a red tunic and ran around the Higashi-Ichibanchō neighborhood in Sendai. The image (plate 28) reproduced on page 17 is the only surviving record of a live street performance by Itoi that was not intended to be photographed. The performance was likely conducted as part of the MAD/MAP event organized by Toshima Shigeyuki and other members of the Criminal Secret Society Black Corps. In April 1971, Itoi appeared in a scene shot for Kōya Hijiri, an unfinished film directed by Toshima. In March 1972, he relocated to Uji in Kyoto, to attend to his sick mother. Although Itoi continued his mail art project, after this point he disappeared from performance art history.52

 201. Itoi Kanji is apprehended by the police • April 27, 1970 • Expo ’70, Osaka

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THE PERFORMANCE OF ITOI KANJI

Unlike the other chapters about individual artists in part III, I have sought to detail the trajectory of Itoi’s personal life and artwork in this chapter, in addition to his performance practices. This is because he is an exceptional case; more so than any other artist, it is impossible to separate Itoi’s life from his art. In the following sections, I will examine the philosophy that informed his long life and artistic expression. 7.1

ZEN + DADA = NAKED

As we have seen thus far, nudity was a frequent and even defining feature of Itoi’s performances. From what did Itoi derive his fixation with nudity? Given the advent of the sexual revolution and the rise of scandal-loving mass media in the 1960s, “nudity” may not seem to be such a novel feature; indeed, from Zero Jigen’s many rituals to body painting shows and the hippie return to nature, nudity was almost a given for the era. However, there is an important distinction to be made in how the other artists who appear in this book (even Zero Jigen) sought to ascribe meaning to the body by using myriad costumes and props. Unlike Zero Jigen, who performed as a group and took precautions to avoid being caught in flagrante delicto in public spaces, Itoi acted independently and brazenly performed on the street either fully or nearly nude. Itoi rarely relied on ostentatious costumes or bizarre choreography, nor did he concern himself with promotion or police intervention. Itoi was almost exasperatingly informal and unguarded. Itoi took pride in his physical strength and athletic prowess. His youthful experiences as a gymnast at the national level also surely acclimated him to exposing his body to the eyes of a great many onlookers, as already mentioned. Whether performance or plastic artwork, Itoi’s oeuvre shared an unguarded vulnerability and antiquated corporeality redolent with the odor of everyday life—in other words, the very opposite of any appraisal of beaty and power of the body and sexual liberation. In order to unpack this point, we must first consider Itoi’s encounter with Dada and Zen. The earliest appearance of Dadaist influence in the titles and substance of Itoi’s work dates back to Anti-Art’s nascency: Nehandadda (exhibited at the 1960 Yomiuri Independent), and “Mō Hitotsu no Kao” Dada-ten (“Another Face” Dada Exhibition),53 Itoi’s third solo show in Nakatsu, conducted in October that year. In November and December, Itoi purchased those five books on Zen by D. T. Suzuki and Georges Hugnet’s L’Aventure Dada. Among the works he submitted to the 1961 Yomiuri Independent, one made an eponymous reference to Dada (Dadakko Kan-chan), and in the gallery Itoi hung up free leaflets of his Dada Kan Sengen (Dada Kan’s Manifesto), perhaps on the walls another exhibit (Solo Exhibition),54 marking the first documented public use of the pseudonym, “Dada Kan.” The first appearance of the influence of Zen on Itoi’s work is more difficult to pinpoint, as is the extent of that influence. After encountering Zen through D. T. Suzuki’s books, Itoi attended a lecture given by Suzuki in the summer of 1944.55 Although Itoi studied Zen with Iida Gakurō during his first stint in Sendai (1952–55), the profusion of

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excerpts from Zen reference texts that fill his notebooks from Nakatsu suggest that he delved into research on Zen in earnest around the same time as he did Dada. As Sawaragi Noi56 also notes, Japanese Dadaism has been enmeshed with Zen thought since the Taishō era. In a text published in Asai Masuo’s zine GeGe (September 1966),57 Itoi quotes a passage by D. T. Suzuki but replaces every instance of the word “Zen” with “Dada.” I once asked Itoi why he conducted performances. He responded with the following two parables about Zen monks: What is the Zen way to act and comport oneself? For example, one monk, buck naked, went to speak with the chief priest at another temple. The other monk set off in threadbare robes bearing a raw fish as a present to congratulate a colleague on his promotion. A high-ranking priest, realizing death was near, summoned his disciples and said: “Busy with the business of our temple, I had not time to play a game of Go, nor have I ever danced. The [ancient Chinese philosopher] Zhuangzi dreamed that he was a butterfly. Fluttering happily, he forgot whether he was a butterfly or a man. Just as Zhuangzhi, the priest enjoyed dancing in the dream of the butterfly, and when the dance was done, he died peacefully in a state of Nirvāna.58 (Itoi’s emphasis)

Itoi’s notebooks also contained the following passage:59 Being is Dada. Dada has no other meaning. Simply poetically, as a singer, as a dancer, as a crazed dancer.

在ることこそ、ダダだ。 ダダにはほかに意味はない。 ただ詩的に、うたい手として、踊り手として、 狂った踊り手として

From the above, we can surmise that Itoi’s naked actions were motivated by a desire to strip away the veneer of vanity and ego in order to offer the raw, true self to others,60 a desire for expression through a mode of “dance” that presents itself naturally through this denial of desire and service of others, and through the course of everyday life. Knowing full well that the resulting actions would, as with Dada, inevitably be mad, antisocial, and steeped in disorder, Itoi became naked in a Zen-like renunciation of the self. Although this confluence of Dada and Zen helps explain some of Itoi’s performances, it would take further catalysts to set into motion his boldest acts. 7.2

OBJET AS OFFERING, ACTION AS HOMAGE

At this juncture, we may consider the acts of hospitality (motenashi) and charity (kishin) towards others that were an integral part of Itoi’s work, spanning over half a century from his earliest activities through to the mail art project later in his life. Early examples of these values are how Itoi made tea for visitors to his solo show at the Ōmori Gallery (circa 1959) and handed out objets to spectators at the Grand Assembly of Heroes (1962). At the Yomiuri Independent (1963), he instructed exhibition visitors to take home objets from the paper bag in Dada Kan’s Bag. When participating in exhibitions in distant cities such as Nagoya and Sakai, Itoi would send his prints and photographs without

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requesting that they be returned after the exhibition’s close, effectively giving them away in what could be seen as an act of charity. The acts of disrobing and performing charity allowed Itoi to shed superfluous wealth and vanity. Even so, the mail art that he so generously distributed must have contained a great deal of material that would have been extremely valuable to Itoi himself, as well as to art historians. As a result of the mail art project, many important materials were dispersed into private collections and/ or lost entirely. But on a personal note, I was deeply moved on many occasions to receive his mail art—for example, an original photograph of his own mother, which must have been quite a dear heirloom. This charitable largesse—approaching the religious devotion of someone who donates all their worldly wealth to the church—relates to the first parable of the Zen monks. The majority of Itoi’s performances were conducted in homage to others, rather than as an original assertion or expression of his own point of view (the rare overt messaging of the “Do not kill” placard aside). In an interview with Takekuma Kentarō, Miyagi Teruo had the following to say about Itoi: He loved the youngsters who were making avant-garde work. He would stop by a solo show, and if there weren’t any paintings that he liked, he would slip out of the gallery without saying a word. But if he liked the show, he would perform a “ritual” on the spot. […] I think these “rituals” were a gesture of praise for beauty, in the truest sense.61

Such performances became more frequent beginning in 1967. When Itoi traveled all the way from Sendai to Shinjuku Station to conduct a performance for the fūten in September 1967, it seems he simply wanted to express his interest and approval of the vagabond youths, without the expectation of anything in return. Although he was not invited to the West Park Art Festival in November that year, he still performed and left behind a canned penis in the bottom of the hole dug by Ishikawa Shun and Toshima Shigeyuki, presumably as a token of his support for the young artists. In December, Matsue Kaku and others from Kurohata held the National Memorial Ritual for Yui Chūnoshin in honor of the Esperantist who self-immolated in front of the Office of the Prime Minister to protest the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. Itoi joined the memorial procession, offering his own homage to Kurohata as well as to Yui Chūnoshin. When Itoi participated in the January 1969 performance program organized by Saitō Yoshiaki, he did so as an homage to the younger artist. (Saitō reportedly thanked Itoi and said he was “delighted.”)62 Itoi’s nude streak at Expo ’70 was likewise an homage to the young Eyeball Man who single-handedly occupied the Tower of the Sun and became the talk of the nation. Although Itoi played an exaggerated character in Inaba no Shiro Usagi (1970), his cameo can be viewed as an homage to Zero Jigen as a truly supportive cast member. Finally, the fan letter Itoi sent in August 1971 to radio presenter Ochiai Keiko is another heartwarming example. In a curious choice of words, Toshima Shigeyuki described Itoi’s personality as that of a “parasite” (kiseitai).63 By this, Toshima meant that although Itoi did not have nearly as strong of anti-authoritarian leanings as Zero Jigen, he still indirectly pushed back against authority and war by cheering on other practitioners who expressed those convictions more vocally. For example, when Itoi wore the “Do not kill” placard over his

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unguarded naked body in performances between 1969 to 1970, he demonstrated his ideological opposition to war and violence, while simultaneously signaling his support for Okamoto Tarō and the Beheiren who originated the message. Of course, not all of Itoi’s performances fit so tidily into the framework of parasitic host as homage. A prime example is his October 1964 performance on the eve of the Tokyo Olympics. Then again, perhaps his actions in Ginza that day were an homage to the special freedom of the insane that he so admired, a freedom only allowed to exist within the confines of a psychiatric hospital.64 8.

THE VOICES OF RAGE NOW QUIET

The above attempt to map the philosophy and action of Itoi Kanji diverges considerably from the tack taken by Takekuma Kentarō and Sawaragi Noi. Specifically, I have a different interpretation of the role Itoi’s devoted resistance played amidst the government efforts to crack down on dissent and clean up the city, as discussed in part IV. There are a great many layers to the artist Itoi Kanji; if our interpretations appear conflicting, it is simply because we are all seeing a different cross section of the same, multifaceted man. Having acquired mastery over mind as well as body, Itoi did not confront others with anger and anguish, but rather always extended respect, hospitality, and praise. Although Itoi was loathe to express his own ideology in his artwork and actions, his output not intended for public presentation from 1970 onward—his private correspondence, diaries, and mail art—reveals yet another facet of his inner mind. It can also be seen, for example, in his empathy for the anarchist Mukai Takashi, born in the same year as Itoi, and for Esperantist Yamaga Taiji. Or how in February 1972, he purchased a single share of stock in Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, in support of the Beheiren’s shareholder activism to protest Mitsubishi’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Or how he was an avid reader of the house bulletins published by anarchists and other radicals.65 Or his strong opposition to politician Nakasone Yasuhiro,66 a proponent of militarism and prewar-style nationalism.67 Or the following poem sent to his family: Half a century so soon, have we forgotten the atomic bomb’s flash

半世紀 もう忘れたか 原爆光

Nation of plenty by wealth of weapons enriched the nation will fall

国富んで 兵器ふくらみ 国ほろぶ

Who said the butchers could arm themselves for slaughter with our own blood tax.68

血税で 殺戮の武器 誰がゆるす

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Behind such political statements, a purity of conviction: If you insist on staying true to your beliefs and living an honest, pure life realize you will encounter along the way every abuse, unjust antipathy, resistance. That’s why I say: “The purest person is the most misunderstood.”69

あえて信ずることをおし貫き、 純粋に生きようとすれば あらゆる罵言、不当な反感、抵抗 を覚悟しなければならない。 だから私は言ふのである 「純粋であればあるほど、 誤解されるのだ

I will not compromise I will be me and make my own world how wonderful the path chosen by the most selfish man in the world though parents and wife object with my child I walk the path70

私は だ協しない 私は 私なりに 私の世界をつくりたい すばらしい事だ 世界一のわがまま者が えらんだ道 親も妻も反対し 一人の子供と 歩む 道

And a peek into the idyllic bliss concealed within the lunacy of Itoi’s radical acts: all the flowers in bloom the children delight making garlands they play with the kokeshi dolls, too wearing flowery crowns atop their heads their little eyes smile as they laugh

花が いっぱい咲いた 子供が よろこんで 花わを造って 遊んでる こけしさんも 花かんざしを さしている お目々 細めて 笑ってる

a sea of flowers a sea of smiling faces overflowing with words of beauty happiness and joy welling up within71

花が いっぱい えがおが いっぱい 美しい言葉が溢れてる うれしさが たのしさが こみ上げて来た

Chapter 18———Itoi K anji415

美しい花 いっぱい 美しい えがおが いっぱい 美しい言葉が溢れた 怒声が消えた 美しい町 美しい国 ケンカのなくなった 世の中

a sea of flowers beautiful smiles everywhere overflowing with words of beauty the voices of rage now quiet a beautiful town, a beautiful country a world at peace72

NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

Takekuma Kentarō, Berabōna hitobito: Sengo sabukaruchā ijin-den [Extraordinary people: Biographies of the great postwar subculture figures] (Tokyo: Ōta Shuppan, 1998), 273–337. Sawaragi Noi, Sensō to banpaku [World wars and world fairs] (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 2005), 205–46. A community dedicated to Itoi Kanji on the social networking site Mixi had 595 followers at the time of this book’s writing (as of May 25, 2009). Among avant-garde artists, this ranked ahead of Shinohara Ushio (446 followers) and Zero Jigen (337 followers), but was eclipsed by the Gutai Art Association (730 followers). Akasegawa Genpei, who was also a popular author, had 2,556 followers. As of August 3, 2022, the Facebook group for “Dada Kan Itoi Kanji” has 1,443 followers. Kihō-ten Dada Kan 2008: Itoi Kanji hito to sakuhin [Kihō Exhibition Dada Kan 2008: Itoi Kanji, the man and his work] recorded around 1,600 visitors at the Gallery Artist Space venue in Ginza (September 8–20) and around 300 visitors at Gallery Para GLOBE in Higashi-kōenji (September 14–27). Around eighty people attended a symposium held on September 20 at the Mokubatei in Asakusa. Takekuma, Extraorindary people, 296. Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Tsūzoku-teki geijutsu-­ ron: Poppu Āto no tatakai [On the art of vulgarity: The struggle of Pop Art] (Tokyo: Doyō Bijutsusha, 1985), 123. As Sawaragi Noi provides a detailed account of Itoi Kanji’s life, I have focused here on newly discovered material and issues salient to Anti-Art performance. Itoi Kanji, in personal correspondence with the author, January 15, 2005. Haiseki refers to a “game” devised by Iida Gakurō, in which stones found by the banks

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

of rivers and roads were given creative titles based on what the stones resembled. Woodblock prints based on these stones appeared in each issue, along with credits to the stone’s namer, the woodblock carver, and printer. Similar to renku (linked verse) poetry, the haiseki game involved a certain social element and collaboration that presaged Itoi’s subsequent “mail art.” As far as I can tell, Itoi last appeared in the January 1962 of Asobi, as the discoverer of a “haiseki.” (Illustrated with a print by Iida Gakurō.) Itoi’s affinity for the Independent exhibition format is evinced by his participation in the Yomiuri, Japan, Yokohama, Sendai, and Sakai Independent (see chap. 7.2, pp. 173–5), as well as the May Day 1966 rally held in Yoyogi Park, dubbed the “Yoyo Independent.” However, Itoi did not participate in Independent ’64 in Tokyo nor other regional independent exhibitions, including Kyoto. Ōita Gōdō Shimbun, November 22, 1948. Takekuma, Extraordinary people, 296. Itoi Kanji, in an interview with the author, Sendai, August 21, 2004. Undated letter to Itoi Kanji from his son (from his first wife). Based on the content, the letter was presumably written circa October 1991. Translator’s note: Tenrikyō is a Japanese new religion founded in 1838 by Nakayama Miki, the wife of a poor farmer. It centers around the pursuit of the “Joyous Life,” which is cultivated through acts of charity and mindfulness called hinokishin. According to an autochronology prepared by Itoi Kanji, included in a letter to the author, June 22, 2004. Itoi Kanji, in personal correspondence with the author, January 15, 2004.

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19. “Itsutsu no bōya no koten” [A solo show by a five-year-old boy], Kahoku Shimpō, August 1959. Although the article appeared in the newspaper without a byline, Itoi said it was written by Shioda Nagakazu. 20. Itoi was photographed alone as well as with Shinohara Ushio. Tōmatsu Shōmei, “Ori” [Cage], Camera Mainichi, June 1960, 60–61. 21. The first two shows were held in August and September, respectively. Itoi Kanji, auto-chronology and in personal correspondence with author, November 2, 2005. 22. Born 1932 in Nakatsu, Ōita Prefecture. Founding member of the Ōita Zen’ei Bijutsu-kai [Ōita Avant-Garde Art Association] (1960). Recipient of the Asahi Prize at the Asahi Seibu Bijutsu-ten [Asahi West Art Exhibition] (1971). Member of Isō from 1981–84. Serves as a vice chairman of the Nakatsu Art Association as of 2010. 23. Perhaps Ashi-gata te-gata zome shatsu [Shirt dyed with hand and footprints], shown at the Gallery Para GLOBE during the second leg of the Kihō Dada Kan 2008 exhibition. 24. Takekuma Kentarō, “Dada Kan gishiki nenpu” [A chronology of Dada Kan’s rituals], Quick Japan, no. 7 (April 1996): 181. 25. Itoi contributed upon the request of Nagara Tō (Imaizumi Yoshihiko). Imaizumi, “Ekakidomo no hentekorin na arekore no maesetsu 12: Hanzaisha dōmei no manbiki ga gen’in de Akasegawa sen’ensatsu saiban no maku ga kitte otosareta” [Painters’ strange this and that prologue 12: Shoplifting by the League of Criminals caused the 1,000-Yen Note Trial], Aida, no. 61 (January 2001): 29. 26. The reverse of the print bears the inscription “1959.” However, it would have to date between 1960–1962 if it was indeed made in the Naka­ tsu era. The other print remains lost. 27. Akasegawa Genpei, Imaya akushon aru nomi! “Yomiuri Andepandan” to iu genshō [Now we have no choice but action! The “Yomiuri Independent” phenomenon] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1985), 161. 28. Itoi Kanji described the materials used in personal correspondence with the author, February 3, 2008. 29. Sawaragi, World wars and world fairs, 214. 30. Akasegawa, Now we have no choice but action!, 161.

31. Katō Yasuhiko, in an email to the author. Katō heard about the album from Inoue Sanosuke. 32. Takekuma, “A chronology of Dada Kan’s rituals,” 181. 33. Itoi Kanji, in personal correspondence with the author, November 29, 2007. 34. Sakurai Takami, “‘Eiyū-tachi no daishūkai’ no hōkoku oyobi 1964-nendo ‘Eiyū-tachi no daishūkai’ no teian” [Report on The Grand Assembly of Heroes, and a proposal of the Grand Assembly of Heroes in FY1964], Kyūshū-ha, no. 7 (October 1963): 12–3. 35. Itoi Kanji, in personal correspondence with the author, February 25, 1994. 36. Miyagi Teruo, “Sendai Andependan shinsa­ tsu-­k i” [Diagnosis of the Sendai Independent], Bijutsu Jānaru, no. 52 (March 1965): 41. Photo on p. 38. 37. Itoi Kanji, in an interview with author, January 15, 2005. 38. Miyagi, “Examination of the Sendai Independent,” 41. 39. Miyagi, quoted in Extraordinary people 296. 40. For an account of Itoi’s experiences in the psychiatric hospital, see Sawaragi, World wars and world fairs, 219–21. 41. According to the auto-chronology by Itoi Kanji, date unknown. 42. Ishikawa Shun, in an interview with the ­author, August 20, 2004. 43. Takekuma, Extraodrinary people, 307–8. 44. Ishikawa Shun, August 20 interview. 45. According to Toshima, Itoi affixed pieces of paper reading “Do not kill” and “A salutation” to the tree trunks and decorated his body with zany phrases that could be seen when he rolled in front of the children. However, Itoi said there was no writing on the paper, and does not remember whether he wrote anything on his body for this performance. Toshima Shigeyuki, “Itoi Kanji naorai nikudan kono maddo sutokku” [Itoi Kanji, naked talk after the festival, or this mad stock], Bijutsu techō, no. 335 (December 1970): 74; and Itoi Kanji, in personal correspondence with the author, November 17, 2007. 46. Born in Shiogama, Miyagi Prefecture. Graduated from Tōhoku University with a degree in electrical engineering. Died in an accident in 1979. According to Ishikawa Shun, Saitō became involved with Beheiren starting in high school.

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47. “Tokushū kōi suru geijutsu-ka” [Special feature: Artists in action], Bijutsu techō, no. 335 (December 1970): 40–41. 48. His real name was Satō Hideo. Born in Fuka­ gawa, Hokkaidō Prefecture, Satō worked as a civil servant at Asahikawa City Hall, but retired and became involved in activism. He participated in the Obihiro University of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine protests and was arrested for burning the national and prefectural flags on display at the Hokkaido prefectural government office. He was arrested again after student protestors barricaded Hiroshima University. See Kushima Tsutomu, Maboroshi bankoku hakuran kai [The ephemeral World Expo] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2005), 295; and Satō Hideo, “Taiyō no Tō o senkyo shite kara banpaku o mioroshite kangaeta koto” [Thoughts on the Expo as seen from my holdout in the Tower of the Sun], Chūo kōron, vol. 85, no. 11 (December 1970): 186–96. 49. “Hadaka no otoko tobidasu, haha no tōka kisei age sanjū-mētoru” [Hollering naked man streaks at foot of Tower of the Mother in bizarre 30-meter dash], Mainichi Shimbun (Osaka evening edition), April 27, 1970. 50. Itoi Kanji, in an interview with the author, August 22, 2004. 51. Although the Mainichi article reported that Itoi’s sprint covered thirty meters, Takekuma Kentarō and Sawaragi Noi both contend it was actually fifteen meters. See Takekuma, Extraordinary people, 277; and Sawaragi, World wars and world fairs, 225. Pureibōi reported the distance as 20 meters, in “Dohyā to asonjatta banpaku ningen moyō” [A look at the uninhibited human spectacle in play at the Expo], Shūkan Pureibōi [Playboy Weekly], no. 5, vol. 42 (October 6, 1970): 38. 52. In 1979 and 1980, Itoi walked naked along the promenade and department store in front of Sendai Station. The 1980 performance would be his last on public streets. Itoi Kanji, in personal correspondence with the author, September 4, 2004. 53. This title is taken from Itoi’s autochronology, as the original material that could corroborate the title has been lost. 54. Takekuma, “A chronology of Dada Kan’s rituals,” 181. 55. Itoi Kanji, in personal correspondence with the author, November 8, 2007.

56. Sawaragi Noi, Nihon, gendai, bijutsu [Japan/ contemporary/art] (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1998), 181–84. 57. Itoi Kanji, “Da da kan,” GeGe, September 1966. 58. Itoi Kanji, in personal correspondence with the author, July 3, 2004. 59. Itoi Kanji, included in personal correspondence with the author, June 22, 2004. 60. Sawaragi Noi’s description of Itoi’s nudity and burning of a 10,000-yen note as “subtractive acts” could also be seen as an excising of excess value, as opposed to self-assertion and productivity. See World wars and world fairs, 168. 61. Takekuma, Extraordinary people, 293–96. 62. Itoi, auto-chronology, June 22, 2004 63. Takekuma, Extraordinary people, 311–12. 64. Takekuma, 332. 65. Itoi read the Japanese Anarchist Federation journals Kurohata [Black Flag] and Jiyū Rengō [Libertarian Federation], edited and published by Ōsawa Masamichi; Niji no Kai [Rainbow Society] newsletter published by supporters of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front; and Iomu Tsūshin [IOM Newsletter] published by Mukai Takashi. Itoi was the same age as Mukai and held a special affinity for the anarchist poet-critic as “someone who gave his youth to the same war,” even contributing financially to Mukai’s cause. Itoi Kanji, personal correspondence with the author, May 2, 2006. 66. Translator’s note: Nakasone, a member of the Free Democratic Party, served as Prime Minister from 1982–87 and was a member of the House of Representatives from 1947–2004. 67. Ishikawa Shun, personal correspondence with the author, December 8, 2004. 68. From a piece of correspondence in the possession of Itoi’s eldest son. As the verses were written on a single sheet of paper in different pens, the date of composition is unclear. However, the verses were included in the same envelope as a letter dated December 2, 1991, and so were likely composed around this time. 69. Itoi Kanji, Hikari no hanga [Light Print], November 24, 1946. 70. From an unpublished notebook of poems, Sokkyō Zen Dada / Shishū 4 1958–61 [Instant insanity zen / Collection of poems #4, 1958–61].

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71. From Sokkyō Zen Dada / Shishū 4 1958–61. First verse undated, second verse dated August 10, 1960. In personal correspondence with the author on November 29, 2007, Itoi wrote he thought the poems might have been based on the writings of Sendai-based children’s author Suzuki Heki or Takahashi Manzaburō. However, I was unable to establish a direct

link between them in the archives at the Sendai Literature Museum. In a response on January 8, 2008, Itoi wrote that based on the 1960 date, it was likely an original verse he had written himself 72. Itoi, Sokkyō Zen Dada/ Shishū 4 1958–61 (unpublished manuscript, dated August 9, 1960).

CHAPTER 19

Collective Kumo The Total Negation of Expression

「集団蜘蛛」というのは普通どこにでもあったファイン・アートのグループではなく、破 壊のための破壊、反対のための反対、否定のための否定、という手段と目的を転倒さ せ、いかなる展望をも持たないと決意し、いかなる生産性をも拒否した条件闘争を目的 とせず、制度の変革を目的としないいわゆる「過激派」でありまして、まさに荒唐無稽、 つまりでたらめな事を文句あるかというタンカを喧嘩の切札とした、まさに究極のナン センス集団でありまして… 森山安英

Collective Kumo was not another run-of-the-mill “fine arts” group. We were so-called “radicals” who subverted method and objective—destruction for destruction’s sake, opposition for opposition’s sake, and negation for negation’s sake—disavowing all future prospects, unmotivated by systemic revolution and conditional struggle rejecting productivity in all its forms. We provoked a fight with wild absurdity as our trump card. We were collective nonsense in the ultimate extreme.1 —Moriyama Yasuhide

1.

THE LOGIC OF NEGATION

Shūdan Kumo (Collective Kumo [Spider]) was a performance art group that emerged in Kitakyūshū 2 in September 1968. Operating under various names and an evolving membership, the group remained active through de facto leader Moriyama Yasuhide (b. 1936) until November 1970, yet nominally existed until the resolution of an obscenity trial in November 1973. Collective Kumo first appeared in the national news media in March 1970, with an article in Shūkan Shinchō by Hirata Minoru (writing under the pseudonym Yamamoto Tarō).3 The group was back in the news following Moriyama’s arrest in November, featuring in a larger art world debate on the authorities’ regulation of artistic expression, 4 as well as a report on the court proceedings filed by former Kyūshū-ha member Hataraki Tadashi.5 However, Collective Kumo was often misunderstood; even Hirata mistakenly sought to contextualize the group within the national anti-Expo narrative.6 Collective Kumo was a distinct group operating in a local milieu, but this localism went largely unrecognized in their own time. Over the past few decades, Collective Kumo has gradually been recovered from obscurity, as new voices explore the group’s contributions to the Fukuoka art scene, as well as Japanese art history more broadly. Kikuhata Mokuma offered the first substantive account of Collective Kumo’s activities in “Tale of the Spider Web Castle,” a piece originally published in the Mainichi Shimbun in 1982, before the article was reprinted in his book.7 In 1997, the Fukuoka Art Museum held an exhibition of materials from Moriyama’s own personal collection. In 1999, texts from the exhibition were reproduced in an issue of Kikan magazine dedicated to Collective Kumo,

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 202. Moriyama Yasuhide in Tobata, Kitakyūshū, Fukuoka • 2006

providing researchers a valuable resource, supplemented with a chronology prepared by Moriyama, as well as a dialogue between Moriyama and Kikuhata.8 In 2002, Bien (Bian) magazine proclaimed Collective Kumo the “most radical [group] in the history of art.”9 In 2004, an exhibition of Moriyama’s paintings curated by Hanada Shin’ichi was held at the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, along with a talk event that garnered a sizable turnout.10 In 2006, a documentary interview with Moriyama was released by artist and director of Gallery Soap Miyagawa Keiichi (fig. 202). The art world’s interest in Moriyama and his collective grew even further after the release of the Japanese edition of this book, a retrospective of Moriyama focusing on his paintings by Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art in 2018,11 and a chapter on the collective in a book by young critic Yamamoto Hirotaka in 2022.12 As we will see, this rediscovery was greatly aided by the meticulous archive assembled by Moriyama, who viewed Collective Kumo’s writings, private correspondence, leaflets, and other ephemera as an integral aspect of the group’s activities. Another factor has been Moriyama’s recent engagement with the regional circle of younger generations of critics and artists in Fukuoka, whose interest in Collective Kumo’s activities is testament to the group’s continued relevance in the present day. Despite this recent resurgence of interest on the national stage, Collective Kumo was still one of, if not the most, local and obscure of all performance groups that appear in this book. Firstly, Collective Kumo turned a blind eye to Tokyo, contented instead to present their work exclusively within Fukuoka Prefecture. Although Moriyama generally kept abreast of developments on the national art scene, he was utterly disinterested in the approval of the establishment art world (i.e., gatekeeping critics and juried exhibitions). Secondly, the group’s activities centered around ephemeral performances—hapuningu (Happenings), in the Japanese sense of the term as informal, unexpected follies (see chap. 2.2, p. 62). Consequently, from the outset, very little of their output was preserved in physical form. Unlike Zero Jigen, they did not actively court the attention of documentary photographers and the mass media, and thus received almost no exposure in publications or TV on the national stage. Thirdly, their approach was steeped in a cold nihilism that was remarkable, even for the era of body idolatry and sexual liberation. Their performances appeared to lack the cohesion of a performative style, were highly spontaneous, tediously crude, and ultimately ineffective at compelling political or legislative change. Fourthly, Collective Kumo’s actions were heavily context-dependent.

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Compared to the elaborate style and staging employed by some performers, Collective Kumo was characterized by exceptionally simplistic acts, similar to Itoi Kanji. Although all performance (and more broadly, all human behavior) is inherently “contextual,” in the sense that it is time-, site-, and audience-specific, the sheer simplicity of Collective Kumo’s acts rendered them meaningless without further social context. In other words, each constituent physical element and object in their performances—for example, stripping off a sailor uniform, throwing feces, and copulating on the street—reveal little when viewed in isolation. Moriyama’s activities arose as an all-out rebuke of the 1960s “avant-garde” embodied by groups such as Kyūshū-ha, Neo Dada, and Zero Jigen, whose work was still scrutable within the framework of art criticism. In Moriyama’s own words that appear in the epigraph, this rebuke of the avant-garde entailed “disavowing all future prospects, unmotivated by systemic revolution and conditional struggle rejecting productivity in all its forms.”13 Kikuhata described these activities as an “attempt to sever all roads that converge on art,” by “negating art, negating art that negates art, negating art movements; negating alliances; negating the avant-garde; and latching onto [only] the sharpest and most radical.”14 What positive, constructive meaning are we to make from this rhetoric of negation? Collective Kumo is a story in four parts. From their launch as a fine arts group, Collective Kumo embarked on a centrifugal paring down of their ranks to a small Happening troupe, and then moved on to individualistic illegal acts. In this way, Collective Kumo’s philosophy of negation set them apart from among all the 1960s avant-garde groups in Japan, for their self-fulling narrative arc that could only result in their own demise. Over the pages that follow, I attempt to retrace their brilliant, parabolic arc as a body in motion, careening through the phases of inception to radicalization and self-destruction. 2.

FIRST PERIOD: FROM ZELLE TO THE SPIDER UPRISING – Possibilities of Art through Artist Collectives (May  1968, Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall) – Kumo Collective Art Fair (July 1968, Sekor Eyegglasses, Kokura) – Spider Uprising (September 1968, Kitakyūshū Municipal Yahata Art Museum)

Collective Kumo was prefigured by Group Zelle, formed by eight ambitious young artists15 based in Kitakyūshū, on the occasion of the Possibilities of Art through Artist Collectives exhibition. The name Zelle was proposed by Tōya Masami from the German for “cell,” suggesting individuals that form a collective whole.16 Although the word “cell” itself also has political connotations—for example, in the sense of a “Japanese Communist Party cell”—Zelle was almost indistinguishable from the many other groups of upand-coming artists across Japan at the time, eager to get their work accepted in juried exhibitions and make contact with the Tokyo art world. However, these eight members included Moriyama Yasuhide, who was tasked with writing the group’s charter. In his detailed description in the charter of the events leading to the group’s formation,17 we can already detect Moriyama’s ambition for a leadership role, and the importance he placed

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 203. Action painting by Matsumoto Hōnen (left: Harumoto Shigeto) • July 20, 1968 • Kokura shopping arcade, Kitakyūshū

on documentation as a necessary aspect of creating an organized movement. Moriyama (along with future Collective Kumo members Katō Isao, Harumoto Shigeto, and supporter Tashiro Tsuneo) similarly stood out at Possibilities of Art through Artist Collectives exhibition. Whereas the other artists in Zelle remained within the realm of abstract painting, Moriyama contributed plaster picture frames18 which he removed after three days (the exhibition lasted six), Katō showed a painting featuring a mechanical array of random numbers, Harumoto installed a monochrome 3D color sphere model atop a stereo, and Tashiro employed numerous zabuton cushions in an installation representing a seat “beside the modern hearth” (gendai no irori-bata).19 Following the exhibition’s close, Moriyama, Harumoto, and Katō sought to solidify their group’s identity, and pushed Tōya out. In his place, Tanaka Yukito, a Mainichi ­Shimbun journalist covering the art beat in Kokura, joined as an “observer”—perhaps in a curatorial or managerial capacity.20 It was Tanaka who came up with the name, Collective Kumo, in response to a request from the other members to find a name that would be “universally loathsome.” The word “Kumo” (spider) was derived in reference to “Tsuchigumo,”21 an ancient derogatory term for renegade aboriginal clans from Kyūshū, as well as a mythical race of giant spiders. The name was adopted at a group meeting; Moriyama was running late that day, and it was already decided by the time he arrived. The newly rebranded group held its first exhibition, Kumo Collective Art Fair, with work by Abe Fukuichi, Katō Isao, Satō Akemi, Tashiro Tsuneo, Tomiura Shizuo, Harumoto Shigeto, Matsumoto Hōnen, Moriyama Yasuhide, and Tanaka Yukito (credited under the pseudonym “Sarutoru,” written in kanji characters as a pun on “Sartre”). Although only a modest exhibition in the second-floor gallery of an eyeglass shop in Kokura, it was given the grandiose title “Art Fair” at the suggestion of Tanaka, as a commentary on the commodification of art. The group produced an exhibition pamphlet replete with humorous member bios and advertising copy offering their services for display and design work, in an accommodating nod to general audiences that would soon seem unimaginable from their Second Period onward. However, the work itself was a different story. Offerings such as Moriyama’s “faithful reproductions of pornographic photographs traced in ballpoint pen”22 certainly did not seem to cater to the average buyer. During the exhibition period, Matsumoto Hōnen produced an action painting23 in the middle of a nearby shopping arcade [fig. 203]. As an engrossed Matsumoto applies his paints, Harumoto follows closely behind “unnoticed” and strips the paint with gasoline24—This mischievous stunt exposed the ineffectiveness of multiple expressive voices (either by the Self or the Other), anticipating a trope that the group would explore further starting in their Second Period—Next, Tashiro spreads the paint-streaked gasoline that has dripped onto the ground with a mop. Moriyama attempts to set the gasoline on fire, only to be stopped

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 204. Poster for Spider Uprising • September 1968

by Tanaka, which creates a commotion among the onlookers, some of whose clothes are soiled as the scene unfolds.25 After the performance, disagreement over whether the group should shoulder the cleaning costs opened up a rift among the members, which would escalate into a full-blown schism at the Spider Uprising exhibition, marking the start of the Second Period and the formal birth of Collective Kumo. Despite the spooky exhibition poster [fig. 204], it seems that most of the work shown at Spider Uprising fell within the conventional rubric of “contemporary art,” including the trick art that was in vogue at the time.26 However, this exhibition was in fact contrived by Moriyama, Harumoto, and Katō in order to push out Matsumoto and other artists who imitated contemporary art trends.27 At Spider Uprising, Moriyama and his co-conspirators also schemed to “present obscenity that would run afoul of the museum’s code,” proclaim contemporary art as “akin to a flashy flower that bears no fruit,” and generally incite “fundamental destruction.”28 Moriyama did indeed receive pushback from the museum for his life-sized drawings of enlarged erotic photographs, which were ultimately removed against his protest. Spider Uprising brings into focus some of the signature strategies that Moriyama would regularly employ, leading up to the landmark obscenity case in the group’s Fourth Period. Firstly, instead of prioritizing his own work or asserting his own individual ideology as an artist, Moriyama tended to function as a sort of puppet master, deliberately sowing confrontation and division within the group. By doing so, he coaxed out the ideological nuances of the artists in his orbit, in order to recruit the optimal participants for his own movement. Moreover, Moriyama sought to challenge social taboos. By bringing sex and nudity into the hallowed chapel of the art museum, he exposed how expression is policed in these institutions at the intersection of politics and power. Spider Uprising unfolded with another bit of drama that was beyond the designs of even Moriyama. Midway through the show, Tomiura and Matsumoto withdrew their works and submitted them to the jury of the 1st Asahi West-Japan Art Exhibition, scheduled to be held in October at the same museum. Tomiura and Matsumoto were summarily struck from Collective Kumo’s roster, and a public notice was posted in the Spider Uprising gallery to that effect. Although Tanaka Yonekichi had newly joined the group for Spider Uprising, he too submitted work to the Asahi competition, and ended up winning first prize. As a condition for jumping ship, the artists had agreed to share half of the prize money. However, Tanaka reneged on the agreement, and left the group along with Tashiro, Satō, and Tanaka Yukito. In a surviving copy of the exhibition poster, the names of Satō, Tanaka Yukito, Tashiro, Tanaka Yonekichi, Tomiura, and Matsumoto were scratched out, indicating that they had been “purged” from the group after the incident

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 205. Collective Kumo reborn, left to right: Moriyama Yasuhide, Harumoto Shigeto, and Katō Isao • c. 1968 • In front of Katō’s home in Tobata, Kitakyūshū, Fukuoka

and underscoring Moriyama’s distaste for the juried exhibition format. Moreover, this application of the politicized word “purge” to infighting among a small circle of local painters evinced Moriyama’s flair for the dramatic and desire to control the script of his burgeoning avant-garde movement. Collective Kumo thus entered its Second Period, as the pared down yet elite trio of Moriyama, Harumoto, and Katō [fig. 205]. 3.

SECOND PERIOD: FROM THE KOKURA HAPPENING TO CRAZY GRAND RALLY OF THE THREE DEFORMED SECTS – Kokura Happening (c. November 1968, in front of Kokura Station) – No Art Festival (December 1968, in front of Kokura Station and Kokura Kita-ku Ward Office, Kitakyūshū) – Kumo Hatsumōde (January 1969, Yasaka Shrine, Kokura) – Yamada Ammunition Depot protests29 (c. January 1969, Kokura) – 3rd Trends of Contemporary Art Kyūshū Exhibition (February 1969, Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall, Fukuoka City) – Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally (April–May  1969, Tobata Culture Hall, Kitakyūshū; Nōmin Kaikan, Fukuoka City, Meiji Seimei Hall, Fukuoka City) – Crazy Grand Rally of the Three Deformed Sects (July 1969, Kokura Labor Hall)

The Second Period marked Collective Kumo’s peak as a Happening group, primarily consisting of Moriyama, Harumoto, and Katō. However, the group would undergo yet more membership changes in the first half of 1969, as a woman (“U.S.,” who wishes to remain anonymous)30 joined starting with the Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally, and Harumoto left after the Crazy Grand Rally. Unfortunately, no photographs are known to exist from the Kokura Happening, Kumo Hatsumōde, or Yamada Ammunition Depot protests. However, Moriyama’s testimony indicates that the group’s first Happening in Kokura involved a signboard, a newspaper article pasted in a window, and a crawling street performance, with Sakurai Takami from Kyūshū-ha. At the No Art Festival, the group handed out a card reading simply, “NO ART

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 206. Collective Kumo performs at No Art Festival, left: Moriyama Yasuhide, right: Harumoto Shigeto, rear: Katō Isao • December 31, 1968 • In front of Kokura North Ward Office, Kitakyūshū, Fukuoka

 207. Collective Kumo, Kumo Manifesto leaflet. Text by Moriyama Yasuhide and Katō Isao, designed by Harumoto Shigeto • c. November– December, 1968

 208. Collective Kumo, Kumo Manifesto card. Designed by Harumoto Shigeto • c. November– December, 1968

No. 35.” Moriyama affixed the cards to his body and sprawled out with legs and arms akimbo. Katō wrapped his body in surgical gauze and lay down on the ground. Meanwhile, Harumoto “sat” down horizontal to the ground in front of an overturned table with a whiskey bottle glued on top [fig. 206]. Along with the vulgar ritual performed at Kumo Hatsumōde (in which the men carried a woman on a door panel) and their participation in the Yamada Ammunition Depot protests (resulting in the group’s banishment from the organization that organized the protests), these acts presaged the interventions in urban space seen in the group’s Third Period. Around this time, the group published two versions of the “Spider Declaration,” which can be seen as their founding manifesto. The first was a silkscreen print of a typewritten text with a bright red border [fig. 207]. The second was a cut-up assemblage of said typewritten text and excerpts from the November 18 edition of the Asahi Shimbun [fig. 208]. As the mid-November date indicates, the manifestos were distributed at the No Art Festival.

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 209. Collective Kumo performs on Teatime Show, left: Katō Isao, rear right: Moriyama Yasuhide • February 25, 1969 • KBC studio, Fukuoka

 210. Collective Kumo performs on Teatime Show, rear: Moriyama Yasuhide, front: Harumoto Shigeto • February 25, 1969 • KBC studio, Fukuoka

Collective Kumo’s signature style and talents were most evident at two Happenings conducted during the 3rd Trends of Contemporary Art Kyūshū Exhibition. The first was aired live on the Teatime Show (2:30–3:30 p.m.) from the Kyushu Asahi Broadcasting (KBC) studios. While members of Collective He31 run amok in the studio, Moriyama, wearing a woman’s kimono and boorish white face makeup, strings a banner around his neck reading “tenka taihei” (all is at peace under the sun) and violently removes U.S.’s sailor uniform with Katō’s help [fig. 209]. Next, Moriyama diligently shaves Harumoto’s head [fig. 210]. The chaotic performance seems to have stunned the studio as a lurid departure from the Teatime Show’s usual light midday programming, which was primarily targeted at housewives. As Kikuhata eloquently recalls, “I had seen many a shaving act in Tokyo, but never anything quite so beautiful. Like two cranes in dance, an intoxicating aura rose up, and everyone watched spellbound.”32 The second Happening occurred during a lecture by Kikuhata, who organized the exhibition. Moriyama, Harumoto, and Katō projected their photos onto the wall behind the stage, and then stripped naked in front of Kikuhata and the assembled audience. Although vulgar and meaningless acts, the strategy loudly and clearly lampooned Kikuhata’s esteem in the contemporary art world, the pretentious tenor of art debate, and even the attempt to hold contemporary art exhibitions far from the center in Tokyo. However, as a dialogue between Moriyama and Kikuhata in the pages of Kikan would later reveal, this Happening was, incredibly, orchestrated by Kikuhata himself.33

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Kikuhata’s work was also in Collective Kumo’s crosshairs. When Moriyama and co. heard that Kikuhata was preparing a solo exhibition of silkscreen prints at Mudo Gallery in Tokyo, they opened the phonebook and called around to printers in the city. Pretending to be Kikuhata, they ordered more prints,34 which they signed “Collective Kumo” and displayed next to Kikuhata’s authentic prints at the 3rd Trends of Contemporary Art Kyūshū Exhibition. They subsequently sold off the bootleg prints at the Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally for the pitiful price of 100 yen apiece. The stunt could be seen as a commentary on how all contemporary art was susceptible to commodification and the copyright’s conferral of authority, or as Hariu Ichirō wrote, an “attempt to expose the deceit that is the signature in art.”35 Interestingly, Kikuhata caught wind of Moriyama’s plan in advance, yet allowed it to go forward in tacit approval. The incident also illustrates Moriyama’s resourcefulness as a “con” artist, stealthily employing a wide range of techniques to pull off his mischief. The Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally was held on May  3–5 amid nationwide protests against Expo ’70 as a symbol of government and corporate interests. Artists, poets, filmmakers, and critics from across Tokyo, Nagoya, Kansai, and Fukuoka—including Zero Jigen, Kokuin, Kyūshū-ha’s de facto leader Sakurai Takami, Mizukami Jun (and other members of The Play), Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, and Kanesaka Kenji—participated in the rally, which was one of the major events in Fukuoka art history (see chap. 9.5, pp. 258–61). Over the course of the rally, Collective Kumo conducted only two Happenings on their own. At a pre-event on April 27, Moriyama, Harumoto, and Katō wore yukata and walked through the Tenjin district in downtown Fukuoka carrying U.S. overhead [fig. 211], constituting the most succinct and orderly of all Collective Kumo’s Happenings. The second was conducted at the Tobata Culture Hall on May 3, when the group’s members in white shirts and ties, butt-naked from the waist down, tore the sailor uniform from U.S.’s body and attempted to shave off her pubic hair (plate 26, p. 16), in a sadistic Happening more typical of Collective Kumo’s style.36 Over the remaining two days at the Fukuoka venue, Collective Kumo members participated in joint Happenings with Sakurai and Zero Jigen. Their assimilation into the raucous sea of bodies at these joint performances conversely accentuated the one-off nature of their individual performance on the rally’s opening day.  211. Collective Kumo performs at a pre-event for Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally, left: Moriyama Yasuhide, right: Katō Isao • April 27, 1969 • Tenjin, Fukuoka

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 212. Performance for Crazy Grand Rally of the Three Deformed Sects, left to right: Sakurai Takami and Moriyama Yasuhide • July 5, 1969 • Kokura Labor Hall, Kitakyūshū

Throughout Collective Kumo’s history, the group never repeated the same act twice. They devised the most optimal (or perhaps worst possible) acts tailored to each specific site and situation. This approach—or “aesthetic,” even—distinguished them from Zero Jigen, who rehashed the same style in various venues. In the Tobata Happening, Moriyama attempted to break the fourth wall by pulling onlookers into the action. Harumoto, unable to take part in something so offensive, ended up withdrawing from Collective Kumo after the rally. Moriyama’s no-holds barred provocation was made even more evident at the Crazy Grand Rally of the Three Deformed Sects [fig. 212], an event attended exclusively by artists based in Fukuoka City and Kitakyūshū without any performers from Tokyo. One performance during the event culminated with Moriyama (and Shingai Kazuyoshi of Collective He) flinging excrement at onlookers [fig. 213], in a chaotic mutiny of the body that marked a stark departure from their past style, paving the way to their Third Period and a complete rejection of the increasing stylization of Happenings. Ultimately, this wild and anarchic Happening escalated from self-harm to abuse of the audience, as I threw feces and urine on these serious, upstanding individuals who paid admission and gathered in the venue out of a curiosity to learn more about what was taking place. Needless to say, it was an act of the utmost lunacy and, as I think everyone would agree, wholly socially unacceptable.37

As Moriyama would later reflect: By this time, Collective Kumo’s implosion had already begun. Our will for anti-expression hinged precariously on our disavowal of all future prospects. We walked a dangerous tightrope and gradually began to lose our balance. Our theory of all-out negation became a double-edged sword. Our distaste for parody as a methodology shifted toward an impulse for destruction, plunging headlong into the situational setting. Ultimately, you could say that the methodology of our movement became its very aim.38

Although well aware that the “complete negating of the negating of negating” was akin to “spitting at the ceiling, when naturally the spit would fall back into our own faces,”39 Collective Kumo still barreled headlong toward their own dismantling in their Third Period.

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 213. Performance by Moriyama Yasuhide et al. for Crazy Grand Rally of the Three Deformed Sects • July 5, 1969 • Kokura Labor Hall, Kitakyūshū

4.

THIRD PERIOD: FROM ANTI-COMPETITION ACTIONS TO THE DENSHŪKAN HIGH SCHOOL STRUGGLE – Protest of the Asahi West-Japan Art Exhibition (September  1969, Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall) – Protest of the 1970 Kyūshū: Will to Possibility exhibition (February 1970, Kitakyūshū Municipal Yahata Art Museum) – Happening at the Tenjin intersection (February 1970, Fukuoka City) – Happenings at the Denshūkan Struggle (July and November  1970, Denshūkan High School rooftop and other locations, Yanagawa, Fukuoka)

The Third Period began with protests against (1) an open-call exhibition sponsored by the Asahi Shimbun40 and (2) a thematic exhibition of contemporary art organized by the Kitakyūshū Municipal Board of Education. Moriyama’s protests were rooted in his skepticism over the public patronage of the arts by the government and corporations (i.e., the Asahi Shimbun Company). They were also motivated by criticism of artists who were content with an exhibition framework that did not guarantee freedom of expression. In this sense, the protests could be seen as an extension of the Spider Uprising in the group’s First Period, deploying their earlier premeditated violation of the museum and exhibition system, this time on targets that had even more social clout. At the Asahi Seibu exhibition, Moriyama attempted to enter the museum insisting he was submitting himself as an artwork, but in the end was rejected. In response, it seems he primarily voiced his protest by distributing leaflets. Following Harumoto’s departure in June 1969, the name “Collective Kumo” still appeared on a leaflet handed out at the 1970 Kyūshū: Will to Possibility exhibition in February 1970, although Katō too withdrew from the group in March. The 1970 Happenings in Tenjin and Yanagawa were conducted by Moriyama, U.S., and Collective He. In particular, the Happening at the Tenjin intersection was the most absurd of all Collective Kumo’s acts, and might even be seen as one terminus of the entirety of 1960s Anti-Art performance. Hataraki Tadashi provides an account of the day’s events: As the afternoon came to a close, evening crept through Fukuoka’s Tenjin district. […] Suddenly, a man and woman in yukata and nagajuban [kimono] rushed diagonally toward the

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center of the intersection, ignoring the traffic light. The man unfurled a large Japanese flag on the street and then got on top of the woman. The man stuck his head between his female companion’s thighs, his garment flung open, revealing his buttocks. The woman grabbed onto the man’s legs and pulled him closer, then lay there awhile, unmoving. From across the street, another young man draped in black cloth came running and mounted the woman, putting one foot between her hips and straddling the other over her leg. He peeled off the black cloth, which soon enough became a black flag [kurohata] erected between the woman and the man.”41

The man in the yukata was Moriyama; the woman in the nagajuban was U.S; and the man with the black flag was Shingai Kazuyoshi from Group He. As discussed in chapter  9, the Happening was conducted as a protest against the Kyūshū Renaissance of Sakurai Takami, Zero Jigen, and other artists and designers from Fukuoka (see chap. 9.7, pp. 264–5). Moriyama attempted to have sex with U.S. in the middle of the street but was unable to have an erection. They switched to the 69 position, 42 as documented in a photograph by Hirata Minoru (plate 27, p. 16, p. 440). Yukata and kimono similarly featured in the Kyushu Asahi Broadcasting shaving performance and in a Tenjin Happening for the Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally during the group’s Second Period. However, apart from these costumes and Shingai’s assistance, the Happening at the Tenjin intersection was an extremely raw, unadorned act. Already from the time of the Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally, Moriyama was at risk of being arrested for his suspected connections to anti-Expo activists and ultra-radical political sectarians such as the Chūkaku (Central Core) and Kakumaru (Revolutionary Marxist) Factions. 43 Moriyama had been “searching for a place to die,” and was soon presented with an opportune chance. In June 1960, three teachers (including Kayashima Hirokazu, one of Shingai’s former teachers) at Denshūkan High School in Yanagawa, Fukuoka were fired for allegedly bringing a left-wing slant into their classrooms. A large-scale demonstration was organized in response by activists from all over Japan. 44 In July, Moriyama and Shingai climbed atop the high school and exposed their genitals to the demonstrators below [fig. 214]. In November, they raised a banner made from a straw mat with a cartoonish penis drawing [fig. 215], and Moriyama was arrested as a result. The Denshūkan High School Happenings were primarily instigated by Shingai and fellow members of Group He, with Moriyama collaborating in a supporting role. Nonetheless, he eventually served himself up to the police. In this sense, the act was less about artistic expression, and closer to a mischievous prank—one that signaled an end to Collective Kumo’s Happenings and that led to a protracted court battle in the group’s final period. 5.

FOURTH PERIOD: THE OBSCENITY TRIAL

Although the name “Collective Kumo” fell out of use, except for the title of the newsletter Kumo tsūshin, Moriyama and his supporters remained active dealing with the ensuing legal fallout from December 1970 to November 1973. After his arrest in November 1970,

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 214. Moriyama Yasuhide (second from the left) and Shingai Kazuyoshi (fourth from the left) during the Denshūkan Struggle • July 19, 1970 • Denshūkan High School rooftop, Yanagawa, Fukuoka

 215. Moriyama Yasuhide with straw banner • November 29, 1970 • Yanagawa, Fukuoka

Moriyama was fined 30,000 yen in a summary trial, a decision which he then appealed. Rather than pursuing the cause for himself, it seems that Moriyama was reluctantly spurred on by passionate supporters including Hataraki Tadashi and Fukano Osamu, a journalist at the Fukunichi newspaper. 45 His supporters essentially argued that his acts were “art and not obscenity,” a defense that contradicted Moriyama’s own complete rejection of the potential of artistic expression. Characteristically, Moriyama’s interests seemed to have aligned with organizing supporters in their desire to challenge government authority, and also in the opportunity the trial presented to document the unwinnable struggle in leaflets (likely produced soon after his release from custody) as well as in the Kumo tsūshin (Kumo Newsletter), a compendium of court proceedings spanning fifteen volumes through November 1973. Although Moriyama’s writings on the case are not exactly easy reading, they offer valuable insight into Collective Kumo’s ideology: The first question is: “Why did we choose a political forum (i.e., the Denshūkan demo) as a locus for expression?” As a corollary viewpoint, we could say that “it merely happened to be the Denshūkan demo.” However, it is true that [Denshūkan is] not the sort of place where so-called “art” would customarily be a subject of discussion, such as in an art museum or an atelier. On one hand, we have the “abolition of art” [geijutsu no haiki46], which is the most urgent issue within contemporary art. On the other hand, we have an involvement that is only possible in the context of everydayness. We can only live in this truth, enveloped in

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the deep, dark shadow of politics. In other words, expression is to me a way of life. All forms of expression relate to everyday consciousness; and moreover, they will unavoidably intersect with taboos, in all of their many significances pertaining to systemic order. Thus, we should not be surprised, even if that expression is born out of a rage toward reality. 47

6.

FROM BODY TO CONCEPT

What are we to make of Collective Kumo’s activities from a performance perspective? Or rather, what was the legacy of Moriyama’s singular movement as a collective unto himself? Moriyama’s performances were far more minimal than the elaborate productions and exaggerated choreography of counterparts such as Kurohata, Zero Jigen, Kokuin, and Koyama Tetsuo. Moriyama rarely created props or stage settings for his performances. Granted, Moriyama’s choice of Japanese attire when appearing in cities and on daytime television could be seen as a deliberate attempt to bring into these public spaces a retro pornographic style reminiscent of “Pink films” and the erotic photographs sold as seedy souvenirs in hot spring resort towns. Yet it is debatable whether the simplicity of his actions—shaving, carrying a woman through town, stripping off her clothes, standing fully nude on stage, and attempting to have sex—constitute “performance” at all. As Hata­raki writes, “the detached anti-drama of Moriyama’s circle stood out in situ; his acts inevitably rejected the stylization of action.”48 As seen in the group’s Second Period, Collective Kumo’s knack for timing and the methods by which they made such interventions in public spaces left a vivid impression on witnesses, including Hataraki and Kikuhata. Whether at sites they chose themselves or platforms carefully devised by other artists, Collective Kumo deliberately sowed internal discord and explored the resulting strife. What was the object of Moriyama’s revolt? What did he mean by “situational revolution” ( jōkyō no henkaku) when he asked, “Can art become a weapon for situational revolution?” in the collective’s founding manifest? One clear undercurrent to all the group’s activities was criticism and rejection of the juried exhibitions that had become a key gateway to acceptance as an avant-garde artist in the wake of the Yomiuri Indepen­ dent. Of course, Collective Kumo was not unique in this respect: revolt was in the air in 1969–70, and many artists rebelled against the Japan Fine Arts Exhibition (Nitten), Japan Advertising Artists Club Exhibition, and even the Sogetsu Film Festival. Still, an important distinction is how Collective Kumo sought to disrupt even local exhibitions, such as the 3rd Trends of Contemporary Art Kyūshū Exhibition independently organized by artists in Fukuoka and the 1970 Kyūshū: Will to Possibility exhibition at the Kitakyūshū Municipal Yahata Art Museum, which in retrospect coincided with the most vibrant and ambitious chapter in postwar Fukuoka art history. Remarkably, Collective Kumo even took aim at Expo Destruction Group, and Zero Jigen in particular. Despite the stereotype that “1960s happenings = naked exhibitionism,” Moriyama said he could not forgive Zero Jigen’s “uncritical” surfing off the groundswell of lowbrow vices in the angura scene. 49 Although the mass media depicted Katō Yoshihiro as a subculture guru, Zero Jigen’s rituals not only predated angura as popular pastiche but emerged in Nagoya, away from the epicenter of counterculture. Even if Zero Jigen capitalized on the subsequent angura boom, they still developed an independent

Chapter 19———Collective Kumo4 33

mode of expression, as we saw in chapter 13. Of course, this historical nuance was not necessarily conveyed by the media’s narrative on Zero Jigen, hence Moriyama’s hostile stance from the outset. For example, this antagonism played out on the first day of the Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally in May 1969, when Collective Kumo set up a satellite venue in the Tobata Culture Hall—right next to a police station, no less—without telling the Tokyo contingent (Zero Jigen, Kokuin, etc.), provoking a desired rebuke from Kokuin. In July, they denounced the Expo Destruction Group in leaflets handed out at the Crazy Grand Rally of the Three Deformed Sects, with the satirically laudatory title, “O! Our Zero Jigen!” The acerbically critical text50 reads as classic Moriyama: The Tokyo angura have descended en masse, led by Zero Jigen front and center, like the pauper with one opulent plume in his cap, spread thin as a sheet of dried squid, how cleverly they prepared a failsafe to ensure they would not fall flat on their asses, while they indulge in their powerless little dances, on a “crazy” track that leads to nowhere, couching their inferiority complex toward the student protest movement in the lofty rhetoric of the “Anti-Expo Struggle,” conversely they have lost sight of the radical perspective, never to go beyond the blissfully closed consciousness of angura fashion

Unlike the members of Kyūshū-ha and Shingai Kazuyoshi, who mingled in Tokyo art circles, Moriyama crossed paths with Zero Jigen only once (at the Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally.) In that sense, it is remarkable that he homed in on Zero Jigen, recognizing their ability to skirt police intervention while garnering widespread media attention as an angura spectacle, capitalizing on the excitement of the student protests and the Expo era. From the text of the Crazy Grand Rally leaflet, we can also see that instead of an immersion in the everyday events of popular culture, Moriyama sought to “pose a spectrum of problems, whether you like it or not” and “summon tempestuous violence” to “manifest the magnetic field of all-piercing negation as a vantage point for revolution.”51 This sentiment was subsequently encapsulated in the slogan, “Interrogate your own ordinariness [nichijō-sei],”52 emblazoned on leaflets handed out at the 1970 Kyūshū: Will to Possibility exhibition in February 1970. Thus, perhaps what set Collective Kumo apart from other 1960s avant-garde groups was a critical distance from emotionalism and the physical body, which ties back into their “disavowal of future prospects.” According to Moriyama, Kyūshū-ha “rebelled in emotion only and was unable to sublimate the schema of Tokyo from their peripheral perch.”53 Meanwhile, Zero Jigen was partly informed by 1960s notions of sexual revolution and praise of the body, even if that was not their ultimate goal. Although ero (i.e., pornography) frequently featured in Collective Kumo’s performances, they presented such fleshly desires in an incredibly matter-of-fact light. They made desire self-destructive and despairing; it was not something for spectators to ogle in delight, but rather to watch from the sidelines with shameful despair. Hataraki Tadashi was an unflagging supporter of Collective Kumo. In his estimation, the group embodied a caustic criticism of the disingenuity of those pseudo-political artists who talked politics from their comfortable perch in the fine art world. Moreover, they were rebels, in the sense of sowing discord and standing up to the law, as well as rebelling through an Anti-Art that would never converge with “Art.”54

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 216. Leaflet for Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally • May 1969

Collective Kumo acted out a skepticism toward all the avant-garde art that emerged in the early 1960s. Their acts were both corporeal and conceptual (after all, it was the era of conceptual art), in that they challenged existing frameworks, whether avant-garde or Anti-Art. In this regard, they fulfilled a stated aim of the Kumo Manifesto, in which Moriyama avows, “We will create art as concept, action, and feeling, amidst a situational shift and revolution.” (emphasis mine) This conceptuality as critique of existing social and cultural institutions was evinced by the leaflets Moriyama produced and distributed throughout the collective’s existence. After Tanaka Yonekichi and Tomiura Shizuo absconded with their prize money in the Asahi West-Japan exhibition, Moriyama sent an official-looking invoice in October 1968, painstakingly typed on a Japanese typewriter. Subsequent publications were almost all homemade mimeographs with simple layouts and yet provocative content. Rather than simply supplementing Collective Kumo’s exhibitions and performances, these handouts could be seen as works of art in themselves—for example, the Kumo Manifesto (c. November 1968), silkscreened with a vivid red border around typed text. A leaflet printed for the Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally in May 1969 [fig. 216] bears the title, “Give us our bloody vices [ fūzoku]!” in large font, followed by the text, “From the shadows of the shaved and splayed vagina, the dark and hollow cave carved out in the underbelly, appears an erotic anti-Expo play, glowing in a kingdom of light,” and a passage decrying the “scribblings [referring to the paintings by artists] of the sodden juried

Chapter 19———Collective Kumo4 35

idiots.” The group’s name at the bottom of the flyer is decorated with a large drawing of a rose that has been hand-tinted red. Moriyama not only saved these flyers but also compiled them in the Kumo Newsletter alongside documents from the court case, subsequently donating them to the Fukuoka Art Museum. From this, we can discern that he considered these documents and leaflets to be as important as the group’s artwork itself. 7. ECSTASY Collective Kumo frequently took aim at Kikuhata Mokuma, star of the 1960s avant-garde. Yet despite any supposed rivalry, Kikuhata was sympathetic to Moriyama’s earnestness and a silent supporter of his actions. In the aforementioned Kikan dialogue, there was not the slightest hint of hostility between the two men. Their relationship seemed to be one grounded in mutual understanding. After all, it was Kikuhata who wrote the first profile of Collective Kumo, giving his imprimatur in his own idiosyncratic style. And though Kikuhata may have had the intricacy of an author, it does not mean that Collective Kumo’s story, written and produced by Moriyama, was a bust. In fact, Moriyama, who tricked museum curators and audiences alike, should be given his rightful due as a formidable tactician. A 2006 documentary interview with Moriyama opens with an unexpected word: ecstasy (hōetsu): “Call it Anti-Art or whatever you want, but it’s still art. [Collective] Kumo broke through all those categories, not afraid of any danger. That incredible feeling back then, a kind of ecstasy maybe, that only we knew.”55 Moriyama founded Collective Kumo knowing full well there was little chance of artistic recognition and that he would never again be able to return to “ordinary” society; and in that, there is a self-affirming heroism about him that does not betray a hint of regret. Perhaps Moriyama trusted that his tenacious spirit of negation and selfless action would convey something to a younger generation, through his archival material and his own words. This urgent anarchic impulse to enact situational subversion was irresistibly magical. Even if we had a premonition of our own imminent destruction, there was no taking away that fleeting, sweet moment we enjoyed like a once-in-a-lifetime dream. What was that moment…56

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NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Moriyama Yasuhide, handwritten manuscript for the lecture, “Hikari no hyōmen to shite no gin’iro” [Silver as the surface of light] (Kitakyūshū Municipal Museum of Art, May 16, 2004). Reprinted in Moriyama Yasuhide: Decomposition & Recomposition, ed. Kurokawa Noriyuki (Tokyo; grambooks, 2018), 245. Kitakyūshū and Fukuoka, approximately 50 km apart, are two largest cities in population in Fukuoka Prefecture located in north Kyūshū. Kitakyūshū City used to be the largest until the late 1970s with its steel industries developed from coal mines in Chikuhō area, south of Kitakyūshū. Collective Kumo was active in both cities, whereas Kyūshū-ha was based in Fukuoka City. Yamamoto Tarō [Hirata Minoru], “Hakata ni jōriku shita hanpaku gerira” [Anti-Expo guerrillas arrive in Hakata], Shūkan shinchō, March 21, 1970. The same photo was also featured in Hirata Minoru, “Gerira no uta (Nishi-­ nihon hen)” [Ode to the guerrillas (West Japan edition)], Kuro no techō, vol. 1, no. 6 (October 1971), 67–69. Moriyama Yasuhide Trial Preparatory Committee, “Moriyama saiban e no apurōchi, undō kiten de no hōkoku” [Approach to Moriyama’s trial: Report on the origin of a movement], in Urutora torippu: chōhatsu sedai no shōgen [Ultra-trip: The testimony of the long-haired generation], ed. Suenaga Tamio and Nakamura Masaharu (Tokyo: Tairiku Shobō, 1971), 157–62. See also Yoshida Yoshie, “Jiyū konpō, ikitsuku hate wa…” [Where will the free wrapping lead…], Bijutsu techō, no. 350 (January 1972): 269–70; and Hataraki Tadashi, “Nikutai to gengo no aida de: Moriyama Yasuhide no kōi o megutte” [Between body and language: On the acts of Moriyama Yasuhide], Kuragō, no. 8 (July 1975): 76–85. Hataraki Tadashi, “Sabakareru nikutai no rajikarizumu” [Radicalism of the body at trial], Bijutsu techō, no. 352 (February 1972): 4–5. Hirata incorrectly characterized their actions as “Anti-Expo” in the Shūkan Shinchō article. In fact, their actions were a critique of the Grand Festival of Heroes (see chap. 9, pp. 264–5). Kikuhata Mokuma, Hangeijutsu kidan [Anti-Art tales] (Fukuoka: Kaichōsha, 1986), 118–33. First published as “Hangeijutsu kidan:

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

kumonosujō monogatari” [Anti-Art tales: the tale of the spider web castle], Mainichi Shimbun (West Japan evening edition), September 30, 1982. Tokushū “Shūdan Kumo” to Moriyama Yasuhide [Special Feature “Collective Kumo” and Moriyama Yasuhide], Kikan, no. 16 (August 1999). “Sono hoka no arakure mono-tachi” [The other ruffians], Bien [Bian], no. 17 (November/December 2002): 43. Moriyama Yasuhide, “Hikari no hyōmen to shite no gin’iro” (see n. 1 above).　 Moriyama Yasuhide: Decomposition & Recomposition. Yamamoto Hirotaka, Posuto Jinshinsei no geijutsu / Art of Post-Anthropocene (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 2022). Moriyama Yasuhide, “Hikari no hyōmen to shite no gin’iro.” Kikuhata, Hangeijutsu kidan, 120. Katō Isao, Tashiro Tsuneo, Tōya Masami, Tomiura Shizuo, Harumoto Shigeto, Matsumoto Hōnen, Moriyama Yasuhide, and Yamaguchi Seinosuke. “Cells function on their own but combine to become a new lifeform.” See “Hanazakari wakate no gurūpu katsudō Kyūshū bijutsu-­ kai” [The activities of young groups in full bloom in the Kyūshū art world], Fukunichi, May 7, 1968: 4. Tōya pronounced the name “tseru” though the correct German is “tsere,” but the name was not important for other members; Moriyama remembers it as “zero.” [Moriyama Yasuhide], “Kitakyūshū gurūpu ‘Zelle’ seiritsu ni kansuru keika hōkoku” [Interim report on the formation of the Kitakyūshū group “Zelle”], Hihyō, no. 1 (May 1968): 21. Also exhibited at the 3rd Trends of Contemporary Art Kyūshū Exhibition in February 1968. Anonymous [Tanaka Yukito], “Burakku raito H” [Black light H], in “Kumo” shūdan shutsu­ gen! [Collective Kumo appears!], Kumo Collective Art Fair, July 1968. Exhibition brochure. Moriyama Yasuhide and Kikuhata Mokuma, “Taidan kumo no su no ue de” [A conversation above the spider web], in Kikan, no. 16, 16. Tanaka Yukito, in an interview with author, August 28, 1997. The Kumo Collective Art Fair exhibition brochure reads, “Akin to the indigenous tsuchigumo tribes who lived in

Chapter 19———Collective Kumo4 37

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

Kyūshū in prehistoric times, [we] seek to return to a primitive state and create new value.” Moriyama’s manuscript for the 2004 Kitakyūshū Municipal Museum of Art lecture echoes, “[The name] evidently came from the tsuchigumo indigenous tribes that thoroughly resisted the Yamato court in antiquity.” Moriyama Yasuhide: Decomposition & Recomposition, 245–6. Moriyama and Kikuhata, “A conversation above the spider web,” in Kikan 16, 17; and “Moriyama Yasuhide jihitsu nenpu” [Moriyama Yasuhide autochronology], in Kikan, no. 16, 57. [Supposedly Tanaka Yukito], “Zakkichō” [Notebook], Mainichi Shimbun (West Japan evening edition), July 22, 1968, 13. Matsumoto Hōnen, “Abangyarudo no jidai, Kitakyūshū sengo bijutsu shishi 8: Hapuningu de ōabare shita Moriyama Yasuhide” [Avant-garde era, a personal history of postwar art in Kitakyūshū 8: Moriyama Yasuhide, Happening madman], Nishinippon Shimbun (Kitakyūshū edition), March 13, 1994. Moriyama, “Autochronology,” 57. Tanaka Yukito, “Shūdan Kumo ten, tēma no nitsumekata ni motto kufū o” [Collective Kumo exhibition: Cooking up even more clever themes], Mainichi Shimbun (West Japan edition), September 23, 1968. Moriyama and Kikuhata, “A conversation above the spider web,” in Kikan 16, 18. Moriyama and Kikuhata, 18. Opposition to the Vietnam War led to increasing calls for the U.S. military to withdraw from a requisitioned ammunition depot in Kokura. From May to July 1968, protestors campaigned to block the shipment and transfer of munitions. In February 1972, the ammunition depot was returned to the Ministry of Finance. See Sakakibara Kenzō, “Yamada dan’yakuko tekkyo undō” [Yamada Ammunition Depo protest movement], in Fukuoka-ken hyakka jiten (gekan) [Encyclopedia of Fukuoka Prefecture vol. 2], (Fukuoka: Nishinippon Shimbunsha, 1982), 1021. Graduated from an all-girls’ high school in Fukuoka, where she was in the arts club. She was also involved in the design of Collective Kumo’s publications. Shingai Kazuyoshi (1947–88) was a leading member of Collective He and frequently collaborated with Collective Kumo. See F. K., “Kōdō no ue no nagaremono shūdan ‘He’”

32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

[Collective He, drifters above the mines], Sekai gahō, vol. 38, no. 9 (September 1969): 38–44; Fujita Ataru, “Shōwa no tazunebito dai ni bu (1) Shingai Kazuyoshi: Ganfaitā to yondekure” [Missing people from the Shōwa era part 2 (1) Shingai Kazuyoshi: Call me gunfighter], Nishinippon Shimbun, January 4, 1997; Yamano Shingo, “Kyūshū-ha kōza yowa: Shingai Kazu­ yoshi no koto” [Kyūshū-ha lecture anecdotes: On Shingai Kazuyoshi], IAF paper. no. 12 (March 1997); and Tatematsu Wahei, Rabu mī tendā: Shinshomin retsuden [Love me tender: Biographies of the new common folk] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 2001), 117–51. Kikuhata, Hangeijutsu kidan, 128. Kikuhata writes that Moriyama suddenly stopped shaving and left saying “I’ll stop!,” but it was actually Harumoto who left the scene. See Moriyama Yasuhide: Decomposition & Recomposition, 125. Moriyama and Kikuhata, “A conversation above the spider web,” 24. Moriyama Yasuhide, “‘Kumo-no-su jō’ ibun” [“The tale of the spider web castle” a curious report], leaflet for Kikuhata Mokuma chosaku­ shū 2 [Writings of Kikuhata Mokuma, vol. 2] (Fukuoka: Kaichōsha, 1993), 4. Moriyama, “‘Kumo-no-su jō’ ibun,” 4. Moriyama, “Autochronology,” 60. Moriyama Yasuhide, “Hikari no hyōmen to shite no gin’iro,” lecture manuscript. Moriyama Yasuhide: Decomposition & Recomposition, 246. Moriyama, “The tale of the spider web castle,” 6. Moriyama Yasuhide, “Hikari no hyōmen to shite no gin’iro,” 246. It was also the first protest against a regional art exhibition. “Bijutsu zōhan to konkūru-ten hamon nageta ‘Asahi Seibu bijutsu-ten’” [Artistic revolt and juried exhibitions: Asahi West-Japan Art Exhibition, making waves], Mainichi Shimbun (West Japan edition), October 24, 1969, 5. Hataraki, “Between body and language,” 76. Moriyama, “Autochronology,” 62. After his arrest, Moriyama learned that he had been closely monitored by the authorities for years. See Moriyama and Kikuhata, “A conversation above the spider web,” 28; and Moriyama, “Autochronology,” 64. For more on the Denshūkan High School struggle, see Denshūkan: Jiritsu tōsō sengen: Kokka to kyōiku [Denshūkan: Independence struggle declaration, nation and education],

4 38

45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

PART III———TR AJECTORIES OF ANTI-ART PERFORMERS

ed. Denshūkan Kyūenkai [Association to Save the Fired Teachers at Denshūkan], (Tokyo: San-Ichi Shobō, 1971). Moriyama said, “I felt obliged [to file suit]. Honestly, I did it grudgingly.” Moriyama and Kikuhata, “A conversation above the spider web,” in Kikan 16, 40. This phrase by Moriyama comes from the following essays: Aran Jufurowa [Alain Jouffroy], “Geijutsu no haiki” [Abolition of art], trans. Minemura Toshiaki, Dezain hihyō/Design Review, no. 8 (January 1969): 11–25; Aran Jufurowa [Alain Jouffroy], “‘Geijutsu’ o dō subekika: Geijutsu no haiki kara kakumeiteki kojinshugi e” [What should we do with “art”: From abolition of art to revolutionary individualism], trans. Minemura Toshiaki, Dezain hihyō/Design Review, no. 9 (June 1969): 134–49. Moriyama Yasuhide, “Iken chinjutsu-sho” statement submitted to the court, 1973. Reprinted in Moriyama Yasuhide: Decomposition & Recomposition, 310. Hataraki, “Between body and language,” 81. Moriyama’s aversion to Zero Jigen continues to this day. “I want to make it clear: I have nothing to do with [them]. Rather, I can’t forgive that sort of thing. I can forgive Nitten and amateurs. But I can’t forgive [Zero Jigen]. Moriyama Yasuhide, “Hikari no hyōmen to shite no gin’iro,” lecture manuscript. This part is deleted in the edited version in Moriyama Yasuhide: Decomposition & Recomposition, The leaflet cited Zero Jigen and Kokuin as performers, but they ultimately did not participate in the Fukuoka event.

51. Shūdan Kumo [Collective Kumo], “Ō wareraga Zero Jigen yo” [Oh! Our Zero Jigen], leaflet handed out at the Crazy Grand Rally of the Three Deformed Sects, c. July 1969. Reproduced in Moriyama Yasuhide: Decomposition & Recomposition, 174. 52. Shūdan Kumo, “Mizukara no nichijō-sei o kokuhatsu seyo” [Interrogate your own ordinariness], leaflet handed out at the 1970 Kyūshū: Will to Possibility exhibition, February 1970. Reproduced in Moriyama Yasuhide: Decomposition & Recomposition, 179. 53. Moriyama Yasuhide, “Hikari no hyōmen to shite no gin’iro,” lecture manuscript. Moriyama Yasuhide: Decomposition & Recomposition, 245. 54. Moriyama seems to have concurred with Hataraki’s assessment that the collective worked based on the equivalence of “anti” (反) with “revolt” (叛) and finally “crime” (犯). (In a clever play on words, all three of these Chinese characters are read with the same pronunciation, “han”). Moriyama and Kikuhata, “A conversation above the spider web,” in Kikan, no. 16, 29. 55. Miyagawa Keiichi (director/editor), Moriyama: Shūdan Kumo Moriyama Yasuhide intabyū [Moriyama: Interview with Moriyama Yasuhide of Collective Kumo] (unpublished DVD, Kitakyūshū: Soap_Land Records, 2006). 56. Moriyama, “The tale of the spider web castle,” 6.

Collective Kumo, protest Happening in response to the Kyūshū Renaissance • February 26, 1970 • Tenjin Intersection, Fukuoka • (see pp. 429–30)

PART IV

THE SPIRIT OF ANTI-ART PERFORMANCE

CHAPTER 20

The Nether Regions of the Body Rituals in Secular Space

1.

THE NETHER REGIONS OF THE BODY

In part IV, we will consider the characteristics of Anti-Art performance from the three dimensions of the “nether regions of the body,” “urban space and mass media,” and “rituality,” taking into account the trajectories and analysis of individual artists from the previous two sections. The genealogy of performance that Yoshida Yoshie describes as “bodies writhing about in the mud”1 does not begin with Jikken Kōbō or Gutai but in fact reaches back to the late 1950s with individuals such as Shinohara Ushio, Kudō Tetsumi, and Kazakura Shō, who would later carry a wing of the Neo Dada movement, and with Nakajima ­Yoshio’s Unbeat, before its eventual full-scale deployment with Itoi Kanji (who collaborated with Unbeat), Zero Jigen, and Koyama Tetsuo. The bodily expressions of these artists differed from the Gutai performances that demonstrated the production process of an artwork (although among these there are exceptions, as I have already mentioned), emphasizing instead the direct effects of the actions of their bodies. Because they did not have the techniques or conventions of theater or dance, they sought to create visual effects as artists, experimenting with spectacle and even daring to commit scandalous acts in the nude. This expressive power of the body and provocative attitude towards the audience were characteristics shared by the counterculture of the ’60s, the so-called “Age of the Body.”2 Kara Jūrō’s “Theory of the Privileged Body”3 embodies these characteristics, as do his plays featuring Maro Akaji and Yotsuya Simon at the height of Jōkyō Gekijō, which foregrounded the presence of individual bodies as they broke free of the domination of words and scenarios. Hijikata Tatsumi’s Ankoku Butoh (Dance of Darkness) in the early 1960s, which showcased the body as impotent and aberrant, also shared these inclinations. The movements of this art, theater, and dance were both literally and figuratively a movement toward the nether regions of the body. For that reason they were an important consequence of Anti-Art’s “descent into the vulgar everyday.” Here, “nether regions” refers literally to the exposure of the parts of the body that are normally covered by clothing, as seen in the exposure of the lower body in the works of Zero Jigen, Itoi Kanji, and Collective Kumo—this in contrast to most of the performances at Sogetsu Art Center, which were done in suits and neckties. The earliest likely instance occurred at the 15th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition in 1963, the site where Anti-Art performance made its first appearance, when Kazakura Shō exposed his private parts in the museum gallery (see p. 21). I must however quickly add that although the Anti-Art performances at the height of the movement featured nudity and sexual gestures, including those by Zero Jigen, Kurohata, Kokuin, Koyama Tetsuo and others, and although there are photographs and films of the nude rituals Zero Jigen performed in places like basements and deserted parks, where there was no concern of police intervention, few fully nude performances were held in public spaces or even on stage.

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PART IV———THE SPIRIT OF ANTI-ART PERFORMANCE

Furthermore, although nude or semi-nude women were often used to attract media attention, there are surprisingly few examples of expressions involving sex, which is readily associated with the naked body. Instead, what was important to these artists was the staging of difference that the gap between clothing and nudity brings about: between the modern and premodern, public and private, seriousness and playfulness. This staging of difference relates to the amateurism I will later discuss. Both Western modern dance and its polar opposite, Japanese butoh, require a high level of physical control and expressive power; due to their backgrounds as visual artists, however, none of the Anti-Art performers had any formal training in acting or dance. For this reason, within urban space that was gradually eliminating the body’s dark mysteries, their main method of expression was the strategic and direct display of the rawness of the body, most evident in the work of Zero Jigen and Itoi Kanji. In that sense, the performances Zero Jigen held in its early years—the fully naked tea gathering, undressing in a coffee shop, bathing in a sentō (public bathhouse) fully clothed, and the act of walking through Ginza wearing women’s panties over their trousers—all called attention to the strangeness of exposing the body’s “nether regions” in certain situations. The same can be said of the actions of Itoi Kanji, who was always devising creative ways of showing glimpses of his naked body in public places. Hence, when discussing the nether regions of the body, we must consider both its literal and metaphorical meaning. Otherwise, we risk reducing Anti-Art performance to the praise of physical beauty and sexual freedom, or the anti-civilization, return-to-nature ideals of Romantic art, in which case we may lose sight of the commonalities that do exist between these performances and those that did not feature nudity, or did so only as a tiny part of the performance. The metaphorical sense of “nether regions of the body” focuses on the expressive power of the body that had been corrected, hidden, and forgotten (or was in the process of becoming so) through modern education and training. Here again, we can cite the example of Hijikata Tatsumi’s physical powerlessness and crazy behavior in contrast to European-style ballet and modern dance, but at the same time we might also recall Takechi Tetsuji’s theory of the body, 4 which glorifies movement as it was before the post-Meiji education system re-modeled, standardized, and homogenized it. Takechi praised the agrarian body and criticized the militarism and totalitarianism of modern Japan that modified the body in order to modernize, in service of the nation. Takechi raises the example of a physical movement unique to agrarian people, called nanba, in which the right (or left) hand and the right (or left) leg are put forward at the same time when walking (specifically, when the right/left leg is extended, the right/ left upper body moves forward without twisting at the waist). Takechi is known for his work as a director who revitalized kabuki after the war, and we can find this very nanba movement shared by both kabuki and the hoi hoi odori of Zero Jigen’s repertoire, dancing while shouting “ho-i ho-i.” Taking up the Amino Yoshihiko view of history,5 which rejects the agriculture-centric view of Japanese history that equates “common people” with farmers, instead foregrounding the roles of merchants, fishermen, and nomads, it would be a mistake to reduce Japan’s premodern culture to one of an agrarian people as Takechi did, not to mention altogether essentialist as well. With this in mind, it is clear that Zero Jigen rediscovered aspects of premodern physical culture. The nanba style of moving was not

Chapter 20———The Nether Regions of the Body 4 4 5

the only thing Zero Jigen shared with kabuki; as Iwata Shin’ichi of Zero Jigen notes, “the pratfall form is the very pose that results from doing a tonbo (a kabuki move consisting of a mid-air somersault), with both legs raised in the air,” “the red-and-white sash and nanpa [sic] move are used in the final stage exit of Shibaraku,” and “the stage exit with the fishing line in the mouth from Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura (Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees), an even more obscene form, is exactly the same as the action performed in the film Cybele (1968, directed by Donald Richie), in which Zero Jigen appeared.”6 Still, the Anti-Art performers did not limit their premodern physical culture references to kabuki alone; it can also be said that they share the characteristics of the kawara kojiki (riverbank beggar)-style show rediscovered by Kara Jūrō, which encompasses Matsue Kaku’s saimon gatari, the esoteric and Shugendō-like rituals of Zero Jigen and Baramanji Kessha, and even the misemono (spectacles) of vulgar popular entertainment seen in artists such as Koyama Tetsuo and Akiyama Yūtokutaishi. It was not only these types of performances, focused on the body culture of premodern Japan (movements like the kata of kabuki and other styles from popular entertainment) that foregrounded the “nether regions” of the body; this tendency can also be seen in the transsexual butoh of Hijikata Tatsumi and the rituals of Zero Jigen, which reduced the mature, normative bodies of adult men to infantile, raw flesh, expressing the imbalance and disempowerment of the body. However, if we compare Zero Jigen to Jōkyō Gekijō, while the ideas of Jōkyō Gekijō were realized by actors with strong personalities like Maro Akaji, Zero Jigen presented anonymous bodies, in intentional opposition to individualization. By hiding their faces and getting down on all fours in the nude, or by wearing suits and gas masks, Zero Jigen effectively erased their individualism to emphasize the body itself. In this way, Zero Jigen was endowed with a visual artist’s characteristic “preoccupation with materials” which, as Susan Sontag, theorist of this era’s “camp” aesthetic, describes in her essay about Happenings, “is also expressed in the use or treatment of persons as material objects rather than ‘characters.’”7 Likewise, in contrast to the fact that the plays of Jōkyō Gekijō did not exclude dialogue even though they lauded the spontaneity of actors’ bodies over a script as part of their criticism of shingeki,8 Zero Jigen’s work generally featured no dialogue at all, instead placing emphasis on the movement and spatial arrangement of bodies. Even if these differences can be seen between the performances of visual artists and those of angura theater, they shared an orientation towards the nether regions of the body in the metaphorical sense of the undersides of modern society, of art, and so on. 2.

SECULAR SPACE: THE CITY AND THE MEDIA

The second characteristic of Anti-Art performance is that it often occurred in urban public spaces, outside of art museums and galleries. At a time when art’s aims and tastes and trials and thinking spun centrifugally toward all things beyond the artistic,9 it became necessary for performance to break out of institutionalized art spaces like museums and galleries. This development is not unrelated to the first characteristic of Anti-Art’s orientation towards the nether regions of the body, which led artists to choose venues of popular entertainment rather than the stage of high art.

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One thing we must keep in mind when examining this second characteristic is that before the early 1960s in Japan, with no alternative spaces, cheap rental spaces in public facilities, or newspaper-sponsored competitions, opportunities for young, unknown artists who wanted to exhibit their experimental art were severely limited. If they wanted to be free of the apprenticeship system (iemoto seido) and authoritarianism embedded in nationwide juried exhibitions and prefectural exhibitions, their only options were the Independent (non-juried) exhibitions or expensive rental galleries. It was within this situation that young artists living outside of metropolitan area, who had even fewer spaces or systems in which to display their works, formed their own groups, sharing costs and using their organizational abilities to fashion their own venues. This led to an exhibition in a park in Ōita by Shinseiki-gun (New Century Group), an artist group with members that later joined Neo Dada, to the first outdoor exhibition held by Kyūshū-ha in downtown Fukuoka and, additionally, to regional Independent exhibitions in cities such as Gifu. However, the reason why they held exhibitions in these urban spaces was not simply that they wanted a physical space to show their art. As unknown avant-garde artists, even if they had shown their work at, say, a gallery in the middle of the shopping district, they would have had to take special promotional measures in order to gain the attention of the media and get people to come to the show. And so Kyūshū-ha, Neo Dada and Zero Jigen held urban street performances, and other artists emerged who, like Zero Jigen, held most of their activities in spaces other than museums and galleries. Consequently, even after the Yomiuri Independent ended in 1964, one exhibition that was particularly noteworthy was Off Museum, held by artists who had given up depending on a media giant like Yomiuri Shimbun, and thereafter countless performances would come to be held in unused urban spaces and out in the vastness of nature as well. Exhibiting works of art in a place where they are not institutionally and physically protected puts the works in danger of being stolen or destroyed. There is also a risk that artworks will be rejected by venue managers or spectators with no interest in art, censored by the government, or that the artists may even be charged with illegal behavior and arrested by the police. For artists holding a show in an urban space, the only people who offer satisfying reactions to the work (who actively examine and respond to the work) are of the same ilk as the audience they would find in a gallery—people who are already involved with art, or who take pictures of it and place it in the media, thereby returning art to its usual context. Even so, this era is noteworthy for its extremely high volume of street performances. If a certain degree of perfection as a performance is desired, it is best to prepare a stage with the proper facilities as Gutai or Hijikata Tatsumi did. In fact, beginning in 1962, quite a lot of avant-garde art and music was introduced at Sogetsu Art Center, and even galleries began to support avant-garde music and performances. Nevertheless, many artists wanted to disrupt the boundary between art and life/reality, or to expose themselves to audiences and society beyond art and work with the possibilities of broad communication and boldly experimented in the streets, and thus their reasons for performing outside an art context extended beyond the simple explanation that there was nowhere else to show their work. The most basic aim in taking to the streets was publicity. It was not unusual for groups to do something noticeable in the streets in the downtown area on the first day

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of an exhibition in order to draw people to the venue; examples of this practice include Kyūshū-ha in 1957 in the Fukuoka downtown, Neo Dada in 1960 in Ginza, Zero Jigen in Sakae, Nagoya in 1963, and GUN in 1967 in Nagaoka, Niigata. However, in parallel with these performances for the sake of publicity., as can be seen clearly in Zero Jigen’s development, the exhibition itself became a stage for performance, and then ultimately performances came to be held in urban spaces, independent from exhibitions. Additionally, if they wanted to put on more serious performances, which occasionally involved nudity or violent acts, they used indoor spaces downtown normally used for adult entertainment, as there were limits to what could be done on the street—although the rules surrounding what could be done in public were laxer than they are today. This made possible even more radical expression by using female performers under the guise of shows “for men,” which drew the attention of the popular media, particularly weekly magazines. The bodypainting shows of Mazura Ryūdan and Makirō are one example of that style of performance, in which they painted women who were naked or wearing bathing suits. Performances were often held at Experimental Small Theater Modern Art in Shinjuku, which was said to be a strip club; 10 it was in that type of setting that Kara Jūrō, who could never survive off his theater career alone, put on “gold dust shows” to make a living, and also used scenes of actors covered with gold dust in his theater pieces. Zero Jigen used cabarets and a theater for kōdan storytelling as well as large-scale theaters for “high art” to perform their works (though their performances often disgusted the audience so badly that they were not allowed to use the same venue twice), and Japan’s first psychedelic show (see chap. 8.4, 206), aimed at a more intellectual and art-loving audience, was directed by Kanesaka Kenji and others with participants that included Shinohara Ushio, Gulliver, Chida Ui, Miyai Rikurō and Itō Mika, was held at Angura Pop, a disco in Shinjuku. In other words, these performances boldly extended into the worlds of entertainment and fashion, which caused them to be excluded from the hallowed halls of “high(-class) art” that were described in chapter 1. This transformation of performance into entertainment and popular culture ( fūzoku) paralleled the widespread use of the term Happening by the mass media, which even appeared in the title of a TV program (see pp. 204-5), and its acceptance and practice within youth culture, from Beatniks to hippies. Naturally, most of it was faddish and short-lived, but it is worth noting that, within the realm of popular culture, it was an alternative experiment that diverged from the giant cultural industry that Expo ’70 represented. The mass media, which can also be thought of as a virtual extension of urban space, was another important stage for Anti-Art performance. When artists performed on the street to promote their exhibitions, they did so not only with the aim of drawing attention from on-site audiences but also to make use of the mass dissemination power of the media. It was again Zero Jigen that appeared in weekly magazines more often than any other performers, often by hiring nude female performers to attract a male audience and readership, without failing to provide advance notice of their performances. Yet it was Jack Society that was by far the leader in targeting the media directly, with a faction of the group performing what they called “jackings,” and Dating Show by the duo of members Chida Ui and Koyama Tetsuo. Looking back, their style was fairly unsophisticated, and unlike other Anti-Art performances, they did not feature nudity or incorporate

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premodern elements. Regardless, in the sense that they used profane venues incompatible with “high art,” such as urban spaces and the popular media, the performances by that faction of Jack Society were an inevitable development of Anti-Art. As mentioned earlier, Yoshida Yoshie excluded practices by artists who targeted mass media when he selected his “Artists in Action”; however, as I explained in chapter 5.1 [pp. 109–112], we would miss an aspect vital to understanding 1960s performance as a whole if we ignored the way avant-garde artists such as Shinohara Ushio employed conscious strategies to be recognized by society (whether or not he was successful). Aside from the news coverage of performances in urban spaces, another important media relationship that emerged was performance that occurred in television studios. In the 1960s, along with the rapid growth of weekly magazines was the space that television afforded, where it was still possible to broadcast topics that would never receive airtime on television today. These were covered not only on the news but on other programs as well—fairly extreme performances were allowed to appear on TV quite often.11 Artists who appeared on such programs, if we count regional stations, included Akasegawa Genpei, Kosugi Takehisa, Zero Jigen, Shiki Group (Nakata Kazunari, founding member of The Play, et al.), Gulliver, The Play, Jack Society, GUN, Kokuin, Baramanji Kessha, Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Collective Kumo, and Collective He. Television today tends to allow for the introduction of cutting-edge art on late-night programs, but at that time, television stations were far less prepared to regulate the incomprehensible and the extreme. Unfortunately, however, there is no surviving footage of these broadcasts. 3.

PERFORMANCE AS RITUAL

The third characteristic of Anti-Art performance I will highlight is its ritualistic (gishiki-sei) nature. Here, “ritual” (gishiki) refers to religious and folk behaviors and practices, be their cultural origins Western or Asian, that have been passed down in societies and communities since premodern times, relating to life (including childbirth) and death, or initiation rites upon coming of age or when joining a specific group. In order to consider ritual in relation to Anti-Art performance, we will take note of how the word gishiki (ritual) was used prior to the term Happening becoming widespread in Japan. As I touched upon in chapter 6, the first performance in Japan to be called a “Happening” is said to be Ichiyanagi Toshi’s IBM: Happening and Music Concrète in November 1961 at Sogetsu Art Center. By 1966, this term was well-established within the art world; however, although a great number of performances had been held across Japan by the mid-’60s, few of them were referred to as Happenings. Instead, the designation gishiki (ritual) comes up frequently in the early ’60s. Arakawa Shūsaku called acts performed by the members of Neo Dada (formed in March 1960) gishiki, and this terminology went on to be adopted by other artists. Katō Yoshihiro and Iwata Shin’ichi from Zero Jigen, who used the term gishiki heavily, have confirmed that they got it from Arakawa.12 The earliest example of public performances called gishiki (儀式)―including those with the terms gi (儀) and shiki (式), both meaning “ritual” or “ceremony”―was Tsuitō-gi (Mourning Ritual) by Mizukami Jun. The act was held in front of the National Diet building in July 1960, directly after the end of the struggle against the Japan–U.S.

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Security Treaty, but no advance notice was given and there are no contemporary accounts or recordings of his performances with this title. More performances reminiscent of European estoeric rituals followed, although it is uncertain when such actions were titled. In 1962, Hijikata Tatsumi and Kazakura Shō conducted Execution Ceremony of Sade’s Testament at Banquet Commemorating the Defeat in the War in August; Mizu­ kami performed Seishin kaizō keikaku gi (Ritual plan for spiritual reform), in which he changed into a white robe in a coffee shop in Kyoto in June, and Cell + White Mass in November, also in Kyoto. In November 1962, filmmakers Adachi Masao and Okishima Isao, who were close with the Neo Dada artists, organized a performance at Grotesque Festival at the Nihon University College of Art Festival. Though the piece was entitled Museum, it was in fact a large-scale performance in the style of a European ritual (see chap. 6.7, pp. 142–3) and could very well be the first genuine gishiki performed in public. In the same month, Zero Jigen used a hut in an empty lot in central Nagoya to hold Oto to danshoku to hanafubuki ni yoru “Shūdan kongō gishiki” (“Collective mixed ritual” with sound, sodomy, and falling cherry blossoms). Then, Zero Jigen member Katō Yoshihiro, at the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition the following year in March 1963, explicitly labeled the collective act of lying down inside his artwork a “ritual,” as it was titled Aru nyūmetsushiki mandara 3/10 henkaku gishiki 1 (Mandala of a Nirvana-Entering Ritual: March 10 Revolutionary Ritual 1). He performed another ritual at his June 1963 solo exhibition at Sakura Gallery in Nagoya, Aka no gishiki (Ritual of Red), as it was called on the invitation. At the Kyoto Independent Exhibition earlier in March of that year, Mizukami presented a work titled Koshiki kōnin sukocchi girei mata wa omeruta no shinwa (Old officially authorized Scottish rite, or the myth of Omertà). In August in Tokyo, Hiraoka Masaaki and other members of the League of Criminals held Jazu to shi no adoribu ni yoru hanzaisha no kuromisa (Criminals’ Black Mass of Jazz and Adlibbed Poetry). These rituals of the early 1960s were concluded by the Sa’in no gi (Ritual of the Closed Vagina) held in Kyoto in May  1964 with a film screening and the participation of Akasegawa Genpei, Kazakura Shō, Kosugi Takehisa, as well as an unscheduled appearance by the League of Criminals (see chap. 7.5, pp. 182–4). The use of ritual-denoting terms gishiki, gi, and shiki continued into the late 1960s. Katō and Mizukami continued to label their art actions gishiki/gi into their later years, and Kurohata, a group led by Matsue Kaku that was active from the early ’60s, also had a theatrical performance in 1966 entitled Sosei no gishiki (Ritual of Resuscitation); in the same year, Nakata Kazunari was active as a member of Shiki Group before he joined The Play. In 1967, even Hori Kōsai and Hikosaka Naoyoshi, known for later forming Bikyōtō, held Jiko maisō gishiki (Self-Burial Ritual). 4. WHY RITUAL? So, why did these people, with their different backgrounds in art, film, and politics, call their performances rituals? It is interesting to note that some of these artists who used the word gishiki (ritual) hail from Nagoya, which even today has a unique urban culture. Both Arakawa Shūsaku and Katō Yoshihiro were born in Nagoya and lived there until high school, and

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Kyoto-born Mizukami Jun lived in Nagoya until 1957, then returned from Kyoto to live in Nagoya again in 1971, where he settled until his passing. Asai Masuo held events in 1964–65 which he titled Jōmon-sai (Jōmon Festival) and although he did not invoke the word gishiki, it can be inferred that he was interested in the “whirling erotic and frenzied festivals” that existed in primitive communities. Asai organized events in Seto, which is near Nagoya, and he also admired Zero Jigen. Nagoya is located near Kyoto and Nara, where it is easy to learn about Buddhist culture, and Ōsu is a traditional area centered on a shrine, a venue for popular culture, where Iwata Shin’ichi lived and his theater company Super Ichiza is located. The cultural and historical background of Nagoya could have influenced its people to develop an interest in the rituals found in Buddhism and traditional entertainment. The muddy, uncouth, esoteric, exclusive word gishiki did not suit Gutai, framed within the refined city culture of Kobe under Yoshihara Jirō, nor the pure Tokyoite Shinohara Ushio, nor the inclination for city culture of the publicity project of Jack Society, nor the theoretical clarity of Kobe’s Group I, nor the peaceful cheerfulness of Kansai’s The Play and Kobe’s Group Zero (although some of The Play’s early performances had a strong ritual element). Setting aside the hometowns of artists with their regional characteristics, when we look at the broader historical context, we can discern an interest in rituals within Okamoto Tarō’s essays from this period. Okamoto wrote accounts of his visits to holy places, detailing his experiences with Mikkyō (esoteric Buddhism) on Mt. Kōya in “Himi­ tsu shōgon” (Secret solemnity) and “Mandara shō” (Ode to mandalas) for the November– December 1962 issue of Geijutsu shinchō, and with Shugendō (mountain asceticism) on Mt. Haguro in “Shugen no Yoru” (Night of mountain ascetism), in the April 1963 edition of Chūo kōron.13 For young people around Japan who aspired to be avant-garde artists, Okamoto was a hero and a guru, and it is likely his writings had a big influence on them. His admiration for things like mandalas and the asctetism of Shugendō were shared by the works of Katō Yoshihiro and the rituals of Zero Jigen. However, it seems Okamoto was more interested in the spellbinding nature of the utaki (sacred place in nature for prayer) of Okinawa than in the physical action of gishiki; in utaki he found an absolute spirit that transcended the weakness of Japan’s aristocratic culture, the individualism and formalism of modern art. The advocate thought to have the most definite and widespread influence on the birth of performance as ritual was Shibusawa Tatsuhiko. As mentioned earlier, the ritual Kazakura performed with Hijikata in August of 1962 was entitled Execution Ceremony of Sade’s Testament. In Fukuoka in December of the same year, Shiga Kenzō and Miki Tomio, with the assistance of Kikuhata Mokuma, held a performance of butoh accompanied by the beheading of a chicken under the title of Yuigon shikkō (Execution of the Testament). These two titles are thought to come from The Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade held by Jean Benoit in December 1959 at the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Paris. Kazakura’s act of branding his chest (using a small anchor) is likely to have been directly influenced by Benoit’s own act of branding himself with the word “SADE.” Following Takiguchi Shūzō’s write-up of Benoit’s ritual with illustrations in the August 1960 issue of Mizue,14 many artists became aware of the performance; Takiguchi’s essay also uses a quote from Shibusawa’s book Sado fukkatsu (Sade Revival, 1959). Vocabulary relating to European rituals and esoteric traditions introduced in Shibusawa’s

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Kuromajutsu no techō (Notebook of Black Magic, 1961), Shinsei jutai (Immaculate conception, 1962) and Himitsu kessha no techō (Secret society notebook, 1966) were widely adopted by Anti-Art performers in the 1960s. For example, Kazakura Shō used Kabara (Kabbala) in numbering his performances, and Mizukami Jun used words such as misa (mass) and raruva (larva) in the titles of his works. Another example from later on is a group named Baramanji Kessha (Rosicrucian Society) which appears to be a reference to the German Rosenkreuzer, which Shibusawa introduced in Himitsu kessha no techō. Shibusawa’s Kuromajutsu no techō was serialized in the magazine Hōseki (Jewel), a progressive mystery magazine, from August of 1960 until November of the following year, and the chapters up through the July issue were published in a book that October. Interestingly, Shibusawa wrote the essays for Hōseki in response to requests from readers, which shows that the general public—not just the intelligentsia—was interested in European magic.15 A Japanese translation of Kurt Seligmann’s The History of Magic16 came out in July 1961, which introduced magic from around the world, mainly Europe, to a Japanese audience; this book was likely also a source of reference material for performance artists. Now, why were both the intelligentsia and the general public so curious about magic at the beginning of the 1960s? One reason might be found in Okamoto Tarō’s fascination with the folk culture of the lower strata of society, which held the potential to transcend modern values. Mizukami Jun’s study of rituals originated with an interest in folk cultures from around the world, including ancient Chinese rituals,17 and this interest encompassed objects such as shimenawa (sacred shinto straw ropes) and gohei (sacred shinto paper wands), which he used as tools for his “rituals.” However, it should be also noted that when Shibusawa writes about black magic and secret societies, there is a political context to his writings that goes beyond an ethnographic preoccupation with other worlds and cultures. Shibusawa argues that Western “savior religion,” as an orthodoxy, “preaches everywhere the gospel of goodness while building a brilliant earthly kingdom govererned by a authoritarianism derived from its prohibitive commandments.” By contrast, “magic reinforces the trinity of amorality, resentment and anarchy, inevitably following an isolated existential road.”18 He also writes about how people who participated in sabato (Witches’ Sabbath, a nighttime ritual done by a gathering of sorcerers) were “anarchists who rebelled against the medieval systems of stratified society and religion, asserting freedom of property rights and sex” and, because they were led by people who mobilized peasant revolts and the gatherings included aristocrats and upper class people, states they were “a little like the Beats.”19 Asaba Michiaki writes that Shibusawa notes, in his Shinsei jutai and other essays during the 1960 struggle against the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty, that the anti-Socialist/Communist Party, and anti-Stalinist actions of the Bund, and the mainstream faction of Zengakuren were a rebellious force against all established powers, which is how de Sade assessed the storming of the Bastille. De Sade’s infinite negation “pushes for a movement from monistic to pluralistic rule, ultimately taking it from pluralistic rule to no rule. This evolution demands not only the death of dictators, but also extinction of all political leaders.”20 This is exactly the spirit of anarchism, which I will discuss later. It is also significant to Japan’s political and economic context of that time that Shibusawa, influenced by Georges Bataille, exalted the values of consumption, play and

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anti-sociality21 as opposed to values of productivity and sociality. These are the values apparent in “sacrifices in ancient esoteric religion, wars depicted in the art of the Renaissance period, witch trials, revolutions, etc.”22 (even though, as Asaba states, the essay was a “rash agitation,”23 different from Shibusawa’s other essays, and as a result became a vanguard of high-consumption society).24 It is understandable that young people supported Shibusawa’s aspiration to connect rituals to political and cultural anarchism after their defeat in the struggle against the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty. However, even if the Western-style secret rituals that Shibusawa introduced influenced Japan’s artists, their influence did not last long and was not shared by the artists who appeared in the mid-’60s. Those artists more likely used those Western esoteric rituals and Japanese Buddhism, Shugendō, festivals and the like to dig up memories of something ritualistic imprinted upon their own present-day bodies. Artists active in Europe at nearly the same period as Anti-Art performers in Japan included Günter Brus, Otto Muehl and Hermann Nitsch of the Viennese Actionists. Their performances were introduced to Japan via magazines and films25 after 1968 and the most ritualistic of them all, performances of Nitsch’s called The Orgies Mysteries Theater, often used animal carcasses, guts, and blood. This is perhaps a reference to the ancient rituals seen in many cultures that saw death as a pathway to rebirth, but Japanese Anti-Art performers, unlike the Viennese Actionists, did not go so far as to use urine, feces, or semen. Even Zero Jigen, which seemed to draw a connection between esoteric Buddhism and sex, was not keen to partake of the visceral, grotesque ritual of the unorthodox Buddhist Tachikawa Sect, dating back to the Kamakura period, which entailed having sex and then smearing the resulting fluids on the skull of a honzon (principal deity).26 These attitudes suggest a difference in the carnivorous and physical culture of Europe, as compared to Japanese culture. I am reminded of the 1960s performance analysis of Yoshida Yoshie, where, after watching Muehl’s films, he posits that “a different tradition or way of life is required to dramatically externalize of this sort of internal combustion of the body”27 not because Japanese culture lacked this “other tradition or way of life,” but because for Anti-Art performers born after the mid-1930s, or growing up in major cities, they had already lost any memories of traditional communal rituals. Is that, however, actually true? 5.

MEMORIES OF TRADITIONAL BODY CULTURE

Although few performances in Japan featured guts and bodily fluids like the Viennese Actionists, it is not as though there were no such performances at all. As mentioned previously, during the Grotesque Festival, Hijikata Tatsumi, Obata Hidesuke, Koyama Tetsuo, and Miki Tomio killed a chicken, and Koyama defecated on stage and then smeared his feces on apples, throwing them at the audience, and also killed a calf on stage. Koyama maintains that this was a way of trying both to recover the natural energy from within the body that was being lost due to urbanization and to confront the metropolitan public with the necessity of killing life in order to survive. He based his actions on annual rituals and entertainment in farm villages he experienced growing up in the rural area of Nozawa in Nagano. One of the few examples of the use of blood and bodily fluids as a

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form of expression was when Baramanji Kessha performed a Japanese-style ritual with Shugendō-style costumes and direction, which entailed using red tomatoes to represent aborted fetuses and sprinkling urine-like liquid on the audience. Their leader, Makirō, was born in Tokyo but evacuated to Fukushima for six years during the war; it is possible that the festivals, folk creatures like tengu (mythical goblin-like creature with a red face, long nose, and wings) and spiritual phenomena he experienced there had an influence on his “ritual” style.28 The 1960s generation of artists did not reference memories of premodern rural beliefs and festivals as overtly as Koyama Tetsuo and Makirō, but they did incorporate into their performances elements of Yoshida’s “different tradition or way of life”: sadō, kabuki, saimon-gatari, chindon-ya, and other traditional performing arts and children’s games that barely remained as physical culture. Even so, as I will explain, in the 1960s, Ishiko Junzō and other intellectuals, such as those associated with Shisō no Kagaku (The Science of Thought), were broadly part of a movement that attempted to reevaluate traditional popular culture; popular entertainment targeting lower classes such as kawara kojiki experienced a rebirth within cutting-edge culture, as a form of counterculture alongside theater and butoh. The performances of Katō Yoshihiro and Iwata Shin’ichi of Zero Jigen, Matsue Kaku of Kurohata, and Akiyama Yūtokutaishi had an especially strong element of spectacle in their performances. What this type of performance and ritual have in common is their rejection of modernity and their attempt to recover a sense of community, even if temporarily or virtually, by obliterating the modern self through humor and masochistic suffering. For an archetype of this connection between popular entertainment and ritual, there is no better example than Zero Jigen. The esoteric settings seen in some of their work was not the only reason that all of Zero Jigen’s performances were called “rituals”;29 a ritualistic nature was bound up in their entire process of erasing their individuality through collective behavior and nudity by exposing themselves to the gaze of the urban crowd while engaging in embarrassing acts, obliterating their ordinary and social consciousness, and then returning again to ordinary life. It was also ritualistic in the sense that it did not require the individuality of the likes of Matsue or Akiyama, nor did it require any skill like butoh, which meant that anyone could participate and it was easily repeatable. It was a spontaneous expression of the people, not even considered “art,” and as such did not require any skill or experience. It was group performance in a public space. It had something in common with the odori nenbutsu30 that was popularized by thirteenth century priest Ippen Shōnin, who advised, “Display not a multitude of falsities; even when nude, conceal not your unsightly aspects—be earnestly, as a madman.”31 The impact of Ippen can be seen in the thinking of Katō Yoshihiro and Chiba Eisuke (Jack Society); Ippen’s way of life, wandering and spreading his faith, called sute hijiri (abandoned saint), was admired by Itoi Kanji as well. Consequently, it makes sense that Hana­ ga Mitsutoshi, whose sympathies with Zero Jigen and butoh dancers compelled him to continue photographing them and to follow performers who “cursed to death” polluting corporations,32 would write the following: Ippen Shōnin became a sute hijiri, sometimes leading more than a dozen people from Tōhoku to Kyūshū, while continuing to search for a new interpretation of Buddhism through

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actions without language. Finally in Saku, Shinshū [present-day Nagano] he stated, “Gradually they came together and became a single act” (from Ippen Shōnin kotobagaki [Ippen Shōnin’s recorded words]), and this was the beginning of odori nenbutsu. We must consider this the beginning of Japanese performance art.33

I have enumerated the three characteristics of Anti-Art performance: the nether regions of the body, urban space and mass media, and rituality, the varying weights of which depend on the artist. Some do not embody all three in their work, and some expressions were so extremely different that they could not possibly be tied together by a single concept. For example, Zero Jigen’s Katō Yoshihiro had a very self-aware, kitschy Japanese sense of humor, whereas Mizukami Jun was more serious, exuding stronger European esoteric religious elements. Itoi Kanji’s instantaneous actions and Akiyama Yūtokutaishi’s comedies in the style of kakushigei (parlor tricks) do not align with the concept of gishiki, in which a customary process must be strictly executed. However, if we include the performances of Koyama Tetsuo, who combined elements of village festivals, the esoteric, and urban kitsch, there is something shared across the range of all of these artists’ performance rituals and activities; it is this that I have termed Anti-Art performance. I grant it is a bit forced to reduce everything to these characteristics, but my aim in doing so is to raise issues for future research. At the same time, I also want to clarify the awareness these artists shared of the issues in Japanese society the 1960s and relate them to issues in Japanese society today, issues related to the steadily developing urban, cultural, and political hierarchical orders. As they used the emblematic growth of urban spaces and mass media of the period, the artists proposed a rediscovery of traditional physical culture to disturb the modern/urban order (i.e., regulations) and, potentially, overthrow the hierarchical order. Anti-Art performance was an energy oriented towards not only the nether regions of the physical body, but the nether regions of urban space, culture, and politics as well. NOTES 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

Yoshida Yoshie, “Tandoku kōisha no chōgekijō” (see chap. 2.1 p. 60) Ueno Kōshi, Nikutai no jidai: Taikenteki rokujū nendai bunkaron [Age of the body: A theory of 60s experimental culture] (Tokyo: Gendai Shokan, 1989). Kara Jūrō, Tokkenteki nikutairon [Theory of the Privileged Body] (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 1997). Takechi Tetsuji, Dentō to danzetsu [Tradition and Extinction] (Tokyo: Fūtōsha, 1969). Amino Yoshihiko, Nihon no rekishi o yominaosu [Reinterpreting Japanese history] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2005). Iwata Shin’ichi “Rokku kabuki to Ōsu Opera: Sūpā Ichiza no oitachi” [Rock kabuki and Ōsu Opera: The history of Super Ichiza], Engeki (November 1996): 27.

7. Susan Sontag, “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition,” Against Interpretation (New York: Picador, 1961), 267. 8. Translator’s Note: Shingeki is a modern theater genre in Western style, developed in the late Meiji period in contrast to traditional Japanese theater forms such as kabuki. 9. Translator’s Note: In the original Japanese, aims志向 inclination, tastes嗜好, trials試行, and thinking思考 are written with four different sets of kanji but all pronounced “shikō.” 10. “The programming was underground nudes, avant-garde drama, light play, 8mm films, Happenings, and discussions, not just trading in nudity alone.” Sekine Hiroshi, Wa ga Shinjuku! Hangyaku suru machi [Our Shinjuku! Rebel City] (Tokyo: Zaikaitenbōshinsha, 1967), 338.

Chapter 20———The Nether Regions of the Body4 55

11. Examples of performance art presented on television: 11PM (November 1965, 11 p.m. to 12 p.m.) on NTV (Nippon Television); Tadaima shōgo afutānūn shō [It’s Noon: Afternoon Show] (April 1965, 12 noon until 12:50) on Nippon Educational Television (NET, currently TV Asahi), which changed its name to Katsura Kokinji afutānūn shō [Katsura Kokinji Afternoon Show] the following January; Young 720 [Young seven-two-oh] (October 1965, 7:20 a.m. to 8 a.m.) on Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS); and others, including music programs and discussion programs for young people on NHK. 12. Iwata Shin’ichi “‘Zero Jigen’ hassei, katsudō, pawā no kongen” [Zero Jigen: Emergence, activities, and sources of power]. Ragan, no. 3 (December 1986): 12, and according to my interview of Katō Yoshihiro (May 28, 2001). With regards to Arakawa Shūsaku’s work in the 1961 Yomiuri Independent, Tōnō Yoshiaki writes, “This altar restores for us the ancient people’s custom of worship,” which indicates a familiarity between Arakawa’s work and “ritual.” Tōnō Yoshiaki, “Tozasareta kokoro no uchigawa: Arakawa Shūsaku 1 2 3 4 dōshitemo ga na [sic.] zushiki” [Inside a closed-off heart: Arakawa Shūsaku’s 1 2 3 4 by all means schematic], Yomiuri Shimbun, March 8, 1961, evening edition. In the same exhibition, a work by Akasegawa Gempei is exhibited, about which Ebara Jun writes, “It seems like each of them began to indulge in sunken rituals.” It is interesting to observe the shared impression it gave alongside Arakawa’s work. Ebara Jun, “Seimei fukikomu gishiki Akasegawa Gempei Nibanme no purezento” [Ritual breathes life: Akasegawa Gempei’s Second Present], Yomiuri Shimbun, March 6, 1961, evening edition. 13. Reprinted in Okamoto Tarō no hon 3: Shinpi nihon [Okamoto Tarō Book 3: Mystical Japan] (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1999). 14. Takiguchi Shūzō, “Sado kōshaku no yuigon shikkō shiki” [The execution of the testament of the Marquis de Sade], Mizue (August 1960): 24–30. 15. Asaba Michiaki, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko no jidai: Yōnen kōtei to shōwa no seishinshi [The times of Shibusawa Tatsuhiko: A spiritual history of Showa and the child emperor] (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 1993), 248–49. 16. Kurt Seligmann, trans. Hirata Hiroshi, Sekai kyōyō zenshū 20: Mahō, sono rekishi to shōtai [World Culture Collection 20: Magic, its history and true nature] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1961).

17. Mizukami Jun, in an interview with the author, Nagoya, April 28, 2006. 18. Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, “Jo” [Foreword], Kuro majutsu no techō [Notebook of Black Magic] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 2004), 4. 19. Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, “Sabato genkei” [Hallucination of Sabbath], Kuro majutsu no techō, 123. 20. Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, “Hanshakaisei to wa nani ka” [What is anti-social life?], Shinsei jutai [Immaculate Conception] (Tokyo: Kawade Bunko, 1987), 90. 21. Shibusawa, Shinsei jutai with reference to “Tero’oru ni tsuite” [About terrorism], “Hanshakaisei to wa nani ka” [What is anti-social?], “Seisansei no ronri o buchikowase” [Destroy the logic of productivity]. 22. Shibusawa, Tero’oru ni tsuite, 83. 23. “I think that around this time, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko had begun to step into territory that wasn’t necessarily part of his original intent, using the energy he still had, getting enthusiastic about destroying completely the prison of the ethic of productivity as a dominant value of postwar Japan, which was finally beginning to crumble, and pursuing the enemy for smashing.” Asaba, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko no jidai, 233. 24. Asaba, 260. 25. Iimura Takahiko, “Chokusetsu kōi no geijutsu” [The art of direct action], Bijutsu techō, no. 320 (December 1969), 61–79; Nitsch, Hermann, trans. Iimura Takahiko, “‘Yokuatsu kanjō no hassan’ no ato ni: O. M. Shiatā—Heruman Nicchi” [After catharsis, O. M. theater—Hermann Nitsch], Iimura, 83–84; Muehl, Otto, trans. Toda Haruo, “‘Saijitsu go no baka sawagi’ de wa nai geijutsu o ‘Materiaru akushon 1966’ Ottō Myūru” [Material Action 1966: Not just horseplay after the festival day, Otto Muehl], Iimura, 90–91; Matsumoto Toshio, “Yōroppa no chika eiga sakka tachi” [Underground filmmakers in Europe], Bijutsu techō, no. 334 (November 1970), 85–89; Satō Shigechika, “Ottō Myūru no materiaru akushon: Nikutai o hakai shite seishin o kaihō” [Otto Muehl’s material action: destroy the body and release the spirit], Bijutsu techō, no. 335 (December 1970): 192–205. Muehl’s films were shown at a screening co-organized by Tenjō Sajiki and Japan Underground Center, Ottō Myūru to Kurisuchan Borutansukī no sukatorojī + kairaku [Otto Muehl and Christian Boltanski’s Scatology + Pleasure], Tenjō Sajiki Chika Gekijō, October–November 1970.

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26. Manabe Shunshō, Jakyō tachikawa-ryū [Heathenistic Tachikawa Sect] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2002), 68. 27. Yoshida Yoshie, “Tandoku kōisha no chōgekijō,” 63 (see chap. 2, n. 1). 28. Refer to: Makirō, Zusetsu musō yūran B-kyu geijutsu-ka no yase gaman Shaba-asobi gurafuti [Illustrated fantasy sightseeing by B-level artist’s stubborn pride: Grafitti of earthly dalliances] (Tokyo: Jiyūkokuminsha, 1994), Chapter 1, “Kyōgaku suru yōshin” [Little God is Astonished]. 29. Even in the text on the flyer for a performance Inaba no Shiro Usagi [The White Hare of Inaba] at Die Platze in Azabu, Tokyo in 2006, Katō Yoshihiro ensured the word gishiki (ritual) was used on the flyer rather than pafōmansu (performance). Nakanishi Lemon, “2006-nen shigatsu tōka. Zero Jigen Inaba no Shiro Usagi saien no keii” [April 10, 2006. Zero Jigen The White Hare of Inaba details toward the revival], Yotsume, no. 1 (October 2006): 11. 30. Translator’s Note: The odori nenbutsu is a ritual dance performed while chanting, for

example voicing “namu Amida Butsu,” in Pure Land Buddhism. The bon odori festival dances performed throughout Japan today are said to have originated from this tradition. 31. Fujiwara no Arifusa, Nomori no kagami quoted in Ōhashi Toshio, Ippen Hijiri [Ippen the Wanderer] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2001), 48. 32. Umehara Masaki, “Gyakusatsu no bunmei o jusatsu seyo: Kōgai kigyōshu jusatsu kitō sōdan angyaki” [Curse Civilization of Slaughter: Esoteric Priests Pilgrimmage to Curse Owners of Polluting Corporations], ed. Inagaki Taruho and Umehara Masaki, Shūmatsuki no mikkyō: Ningen no zentaiteki kaifuku to kaihō no ronri [Esotericism at the end stage: logic of humanity’s total recovery and release] (Tokyo: Sanpō, 1973), 239–99. 33. Hanaga Mitsutoshi, “Nihonjin no kōi to hyōgen” [Japanese act and expression], Nihon no dada 1920–1970 [Japanese Dada 1920–1970], ed. Shirakawa Yoshio (Tokyo: Shoshi kaze no Bara, 1988), 23.

CHAPTER 21

The Nether Regions of the City From Sukima to Angura

1.

LOST RITUALS, RITUAL LOSSES

In the previous chapter, I described “the nether regions of the body” as the first characteristic of Anti-Art performance. As Japanese society changed dramatically in the 1960s, Anti-Art performance offered resistance in response to the threat of their elimination. All the same, both directly and metaphorically, the concealment and elimination of the “nether regions” during this era was carried out through urban improvement—a giant “ritual” by the name of “cleansing” ( jōka) undertaken by the state—which artists had no hope of combatting with rituals that were small in scale. Interestingly, Sakurai Tetsuo references the news before and after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics were held, and calls what the state did at this time a “cleansing ritual.”1 As a part of this “ritual,” a German-made rat poison was distributed with a label that read: “Let’s kill all the rats before the Olympics”; traditional houses in cities such as Kyoto and Kanazawa were demolished; the Ministry of Health and Welfare undertook a “National Beautification Movement”; vagrants were evicted from underground passages; the Act on Control and Improvement of Amusement Business was amended, with stricter laws surrounding late-night drinking establishments; limitations were placed on the use of sewerage trucks during the Olympics; plastic garbage bins replaced the old cement ones;2 there was a “movement to suppress evil books,” and so on. The so-called “Health Calisthenics” promoted in concert with the Olympics are a “cleansing” of the body, reminiscent of the military calisthenics which began in the Meiji Era as a part of compulsory education that led to the transformation of peasant’s bodies into the disciplined bodies of soldiers.3 Delving deeper, there are other phenomena Sakurai does not mention. For example, as touched upon in chapter 11, the paving of roads that progressed in regional cities was also part of this project. It was dubbed the “Ichioku sō keshō” (make-up for all 100 million people) by Inukai Michiko, who lamented the rapid demolitions of traditional houses in Kyoto and Kanazawa, 4 calling to mind wartime calls for all one hundred million citizens to contribute to the war effort (Ichioku sō gyokusai, “all 100 million people to die for the victory”), and it became a true ritual of kiyome (cleansing, purification) that found its way into every nook and cranny of everyday life. Within Sakurai’s observations appear strange words, quoted from Etō Jun: Thanks to the official slogan “Festival of Peace,” there is a secret ritual moving forward that only has meaning for the Japanese people. I’m absorbed into this ritual, so excited that I feel something almost like sexual satisfaction.5 (emphasis mine)

Sakurai explains the background for this “large-scale ‘hygiene’ operation” to be what Etō describes as “hoping to absolutely reject encountering strangers by bringing the world inside ourselves.”6 In Sakurai’s view, “it was as though the Japanese had an impulse to remove impurity [kegare] from the whole of Japan and purify [kiyomeru] Japan to prepare

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to take the whole outside world into its family.”7 Sakurai proposes that what Etō calls ecstasy was related to a type of ritual found in folklore known as “killing the stranger.”8 Did the government’s grand movements, reminiscent of the problems brought on by globalization today, or of policies designed by the local ruling classes of colonies to assimilate with the colonizers, progress smoothly due to the consent of the intelligentsia and the acceptance (resignation) of the common people? It is difficult to measure the precise meaning of this “sexual satisfaction,” but at the very least, Etō certainly experienced some degree of physical pleasure in response to this “ritual.” The 1960s’ period of rapid economic growth was a time when Japanese lifestyles and urban environments changed dramatically. During this period, bare earth was paved, cities were expanded, automobiles grew in number, streetcars were replaced by subways, and behavior on the street was increasingly restricted by various laws. As mentioned earlier, the expansion of cities and the mass media resulted in a temporary proliferation of sukima (spaces in-between, niches), but it also meant that the control of these niches would follow and progress. Still, this process accompanied the upheaval of the entire environment, involving not only the space of the city, but human lifestyle and the human body as well. One aspect of the process was something Ueno Kōshi called the “elimination of darkness,” which referred not only to the proliferation of electric lights, but also the apartment complexes that appeared toward the end of the 1950s. In the 2DK (two rooms and a dining-kitchen) layouts of the units, no unused space was left within the home— no places for darkness to collect, like hallway nooks or under the stairs. The open fields and vacant lots ordinarily found near homes disappeared as well. Further, metaphysical darkness was vanishing; births and deaths in the 1960s, for instance, occurred increasingly in hospitals instead of in the home.9 These changes meant that important moments in one’s life, times when ever since antiquity ritual was needed most, now occurred in controlled places removed from everyday life.10 The backdrop for this shift was the weakening of community ties and the rise of corporations and commercialism in its place, a steep drop in three-generation families, and the homogenization of time and lifestyles due to the progress of the information society. Ueno points out the collapse of the boundaries between business districts and residential districts, between entertainment districts and the outskirts,11 as likely another side of urban homogenization. Irokawa Daikichi explains: “During this time, the basic concepts in folklore studies of hare (special occasions such as weddings and festivals) and ke (the everyday) were collapsing and mixing everywhere, and in addition to money and energy, information—a new global value concept—came into the world.”12 This folkloric change was one cause behind the development of the ritualistic aspect of Anti-Art performance; however, within this ritualistic aspect, to be more precise, (Anti-)Art was an unconventional and inappropriate conversion of hare and ke to create a space and time in which the two would intermingle. In the “rituals” of Anti-Art, something rustic emerges within pristine urban space, a vulgar festival at a serious political rally; in such a setting, there is nothing to distinguish the intelligentsia from common folk, pretentious high-class culture from a playful gag. Still, no matter how bold the artists were, with their small, individual bodies, these settings were not created of their own power. It is important to recognize that this era in Japan produced the conditions

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that made possible (i.e., that tolerated) this sort of Anti-Art performance. These conditions were: the sukima (niches) of the cities, the popularization of culture, and the mutual trespassing between culture and politics. 2.

SHINJUKU: BIG NICHE IN THE BIG CITY

As I have already stated, Anti-Art performances were often held in urban spaces, including on the streets. Yet what enabled them was urban expansion, which created the temporal and spatial niches within which Anti-Art could flourish, at least until they became legally regulated. Although laws were established in response to urbanization and increased numbers of automobiles (namely the Urban Park Law in 1956 and the Road Traffic Law in 1960, respectively), as long as they did not expose their genitals or dirty the clothing of passers-by, large gatherings of people and strange behavior on streets were tolerated (at least on a temporary basis) in Ginza’s Chūō-dōri Avenue and Sukiyabashi areas, in front of Shinjuku Koma Theater, even in shopping districts such as Sakae in Nagoya and Tenjin in Fukuoka. No matter how laid-back the downtown area of Nagoya is in comparison to other large Japanese cities today, the things that Zero Jigen did in their Nagoya days (1963–4)—crawling down the street in a long line (see pp. 148–9) [fig. 30], or dining around a large table with a woman wrapped in bandages lying on top of it (see pp. 333–4) [fig. 130]—would simply be impossible. In 1964, when Katō Yoshihiro moved to Tokyo and began performing on the street in places such as Ginza and Shinbashi, he felt less free than he did in Nagoya, but there were still sukima (niches) for Anti-Art performance, even in Tokyo.13 At this point in its history, Tokyo’s urban space was rapidly expanding as a result of economic growth, but the administrative state had not yet caught up to legally regulate each and every corner as it does today. Kara Jūrō’s Jōkyō Gekijō continually targeted these urban niches. They held theatrical performances on the street in Sukiyabashi Park and in front of Shinjuku Station, in empty lots in Shin-ōkubo, in tents set up in Chūō Park and Hanazono Shrine in Shinjuku, and even on trucks parked in parking lots. As the lawn in front of Shinjuku Station’s East Exit became a gathering place for hippies and the plaza in the West Exit a site of a folk guerrilla gathering that attracted thousands of participants, the entire city of Tokyo had developed one big niche, and that niche was Shinjuku. As documented in the Jōkyō Gekijō performance which appears at the start of Ōshima Nagisa’s film Shinjuku dorobō nikki (Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, 1969), the Shinjuku of 1968 had become an underground cultural center, complete with performances, and this was the role the area took on within the giant city of Tokyo. By the late ’60s, Shinjuku was the point of intersection for over a hundred transport lines: buses, Toden trams, the private Keiō, Odakyū and Tōbu train lines, the Kokutetsu (now privatized as JR, Japan National Railways) Yamanote and Chūō lines, and the Marunouchi subway line. Shinjuku Station was a giant terminal that saw a total of 3.5 million passengers passing through it daily (approximately 1/3 the population of Tokyo!).14 As the metropolis of Tokyo expanded westward, Shinjuku was located at the exact bottleneck of its westward movement (Fukasaku Mitsusada calls this a shigarami [weir]). Furthermore, it lacked the hierarchy that was established in Ginza by

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government bureaucrats and businessmen from major corporations and so became a playground for a great number and wide variety of people. Ginza had always required its pleasure seekers to display a certain level of class to be accepted, but for many people, Shinjuku was a place where they could be free, since it was not where they lived or worked.15 In this way, however massive a town Shinjuku was, it was still a “niche” in comparison to Ginza. The rapid economic growth and development of transport networks also meant populations were flowing into Tokyo from other regions, the number of university students continued to grow, and Japan’s economic conditions allowed the standard-bearers of progressive culture to earn enough money to live working part-time.16 As a result, Shinjuku became a place where non-locals were accepted. This phenomenon made the news in summer of 1967, when hippie groups formed on the lawn by the station’s East Exit (known as the “Green House”). Subsequently, as explained in chapter 8 (see pp. 201–4), it became a place where performances were held, making use of the gaps (sukima) in time between musical performances, plays and film screenings at Fūgetsu-dō, Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka,17 Pit Inn, Theater Scorpio and Experimental Small Theater Modern Art. Moreover, Jōkyō Gekijō was known for its tent plays, the open spaces of the city like Kiō Shrine and Hanazono Shrine were used for plays and exhibiting artwork, and Zero Jigen used many locations around Shinjuku including Keio Department Store and Kinokuniya for its guerrilla rituals. Nevertheless, this period did not last long. As mentioned previously, Jōkyō Gekijō continued to find niches in the city to hold plays, but due to pressure from the police and a local shopping union bent on the “complete expulsion and elimination of the fūten-zoku, hippies, and anarchists,” they were no longer able to put on shows at Hanazono Shrine,18 signing off with the famous farewell remark, “If you want to see Shinjuku, do it now, as it will soon become a desert field” in June 1968. In January 1969, they used stunning diversionary tactics in Shinjuku Central Park to set up a tent and hold a play behind the backs of the police,19 but in the end Kara Jūrō was caught in the act and arrested for violation of the Urban Park Law. While the way the police tore the lawn off the Shinjuku Station East Exit “Green House” in order to eliminate the fūten-zoku is one example of the course of events that saw the sukima of Shinjuku appear only to later be locked down,20 the most emblematic example is what transpired with the West Exit Plaza. The site of the former Yodobashi Water Treatment Plant (which took up a large swath of land to the west of Shinjuku Station) was being redeveloped and a plan to build a huge business center with skyscrapers had begun in 1960 and was scheduled to be completed in 1968. After the project’s completion was vastly delayed, conflict arose surrounding plans for the use of the undeveloped land. One group (mainly the communities who lived in the areas neighboring the East Exit) called for a “New Asakusa-style entertainment area”; another (mainly the local residents of the areas near the West Exit) wanted it to be a business center on par with Ginza or Marunouchi. Ultimately, the latter won out and the redevelopment went through.21 The conflict was an archetype of urban redevelopment controversies that play out to this day, and thus Fukasaku Mitsusada predicted that this East-West divide would go on to form two Shinjukus. In the end, the will of the West Exit party won out and the underground culture that flourished in the East went into rapid decline, as it

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would remain until the present. As a part of the redevelopment project, the West Exit Plaza occupied a corner of the massive underground mall that connected the east and west. When it went into use in November 1966, its approximately 16,800 square meters of space22 formed quite literally a tremendous opening (sukima). It is here that Kurohata held their last large-scale ritual, National Memorial Ritual for Yui Chūnoshin, in December  1967, in which they occupied a sizeable area, culminating in the audacious act of building a fire. And in February 1969, Antiwar Folk Guerrilla began, gathering 7,000 people at its peak and transforming the West Exit Plaza into a giant assembly area. The riot police finally kicked out all of the people in the gathering in July 1969, with the rationale that the place was not a “plaza” but a “passage.” Up until that point, however, Shinjuku was the greatest sukima of the city of Tokyo, the West Exit Plaza fulfilling the role of the greatest sukima within it—a niche within a niche. After the West Exit Plaza ceased to function, those who resisted the authorities’ control established their own liberated zones in the early 1970s. These zones became the stages for Zero Jigen’s performances in its final period and included universities with strong student protest movements (1969–72), Sanrizuka for the Japan Phantom Field Festival (August  1971), Osaka Castle Park for the Antiwar Expo (August  1970), and Yoyogi Park for the Festival of Human and the Earth (August 1971). Meanwhile, Hokōsha tengoku (Pedestrian Paradise) events, where cars were temporarily banned from the streets as a campaign to reduce air pollution and noise, began in 1970 in Shinjuku, followed by Ginza, Ikebukuro, Asakusa and Kyoto, and became a regular event in Japan’s other big cities as well. Of the Pedestrian Paradises that began in Tokyo, Yoshida Yoshie sarcastically observes that it was a “collaboration between Governor Minobe Ryōkichi and Police Commissioner General Honda Hiromichi,” in which the “carbon monoxide levels dropped to zero and made the air fresh not in front of Shinjuku Koma Theater, but in the hearts of the powerful.”23 Yoshida, upon going to see the Shinjuku Pedestrian Paradise, recalls: Slightly before the Pedestrian Paradise ends at 7 p.m., a group singing folk songs begins a chorus of “go home, go home,” aimed at the police. […] West Exit Plaza was something the youth tried to turn into “a plaza for human beings,” but this was “a paradise given.” […] The police shout through speakers to move to the sidewalks, and precisely at 7, that group moved in unison to the sidewalk.24

At that moment, the traffic light just happened to turn green for pedestrians, and the group singing in a chorus rushed back into the street for a moment. It was as though they were expressing how freedom only remained in these slightest of spatial, temporal sukima within the city. Dissatisfied with this state of affairs, one year later Yoshida would go on to carve out a giant niche in the giant city with the Festival of the Human and the Earth, making a gigantic liberated zone in Yoyogi Park a reality. Just as the Pedestrian Paradise was a “paradise given,” so too was the Kobe Carnival25 held in May 1970 led by a Kansai business community energized by the Osaka Expo, an art square was set up in the Children’s Park in Kobe Higashi Yuenchi Park where performances were held. The carnival originated in 1967 as a way to highlight the internationality of the city of Kobe. And then along came the totally controlled event space

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of the Expo ’70 grounds that surpassed it all in scale, operating costs, and audience numbers.26 According to Irokawa Daikichi, it was the fashionable and new entertainment areas like Harajuku, Roppongi, and Kōen-dōri in Shibuya that made permanent the “little festive feeling”—that is, the hare—that Pedestrian Paradises supplied.27 These destinations were perhaps the start of the ubiquitous consumerism and Disneylandization28 (Expo-ization) that could be found in Japanese cities from the 1980s onward. 3.

THE NETHER REGIONS OF THE CITY: EARTH, GARBAGE, AND BODY

As quoted earlier, Etō Jun uses terms for premodern customs like gishiki (ritual), girei (ceremony), and kiyome (purification) to describe the urbanization movement of the 1960s, and significantly, Sakurai Tetsuo points out that within this language lurked an inclination to demand a cleansing of the family (miuchi). This inclination stemmed from the movement by the national government to eliminate entirely those activities that I refer to in this book as “Anti-Art performance”—by Kyūshū-ha, Neo Dada, Itoi Kanji, Zero Jigen, Koyama Tetsuo, and the others—and implies that the mindset of the Japanese people would allow it to happen. Indeed, the movement to control urban spaces had a variety of impacts on artists, not only in the direct loss of venues for their performances, but in a more metaphorical way—effectively, earth, the naked body, garbage, and all the strange things that could not be standardized were eliminated from the city. In Fukuoka, the home of Kyūshū-ha, a paving project began29 at the end of the 1950s to improve “Japan’s worst road,”30 and it was the asphalt that figured so prominently in their work, ironically, which ultimately separated the earth from the everyday life that Kyūshū-ha embraced. This was the first stage of urban development done in preparation for the Tokyo Olympics. Then, in October of 1964 when the Olympics were being held, Hi-Red Center organized Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropolitan Area (Be Clean!) in Ginza. Artists, dressed in white lab coats to look like public health center staff, cleaned the streets for no apparent reason; this act was their way of exposing the meaningless of the “purification rituals” held in preparation for the Olympics. Interestingly, the initial plan for this performance, which became a famous moment in art history, was not to clean but rather the opposite, to stuff garbage into the collection bins on the street. The fact that incidents by artists involving garbage occurred in the lead-up to landmark points in history, and moreover nearby the places those artists performed, was likely no coincidence. The first case of garbage in art came in 1958, when the Kyūshū-ha presented a work of garbage which was turned down for exhibition in the Yomiuri Independent. In the list of exhibits, it is listed as a collaborative work by Kyūshū-ha members Yamauchi Jūtarō, Ochi Osamu, and Ishibashi Yasuyuki titled Mushiro-mushiro (Straw mat straw mat), but in fact it was just the garbage left by each of the members from working on their own artworks at the seaside clubhouse they used during the winter off-season, all wrapped up in straw mats. The second garbage incident took place in May 1964 in Kyoto during Sa’in no gi (Ritual of the Closed Vagina), when Manabe Sōhei and Ōe Masanori scattered garbage they had gathered from around Kyoto in front of the event venue. Thereafter, the two went on to carry food scraps they had collected into museums and

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other venues, and in July of the same year they assisted Katō Minosuke in his solo exhibition that included displaying garbage in clear plastic bags in an art gallery. The third garbage incident occurred in July 1970 at the Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum, when N.A.G. (New Art Group) exhibited a large volume of garbage they had collected from bins in the entertainment district, resisting the museum’s insistent orders to remove it from the gallery, before it was eventually eliminated.31 N.A.G. later filed a lawsuit against Aichi Prefecture, and the case went on until 1975, but the artist group lost in the end. Iwata Shin’ichi of Zero Jigen helped the plaintiff artists with the court case and put on performances by a group Gomikandan (Garbage Sex Brigade). In this way, throughout the Anti-Art era, artists with different backgrounds in different cities tried to present garbage as artwork. Though we cannot think of Kyūshū-ha’s characteristically simple act of whimsy as equivalent to Manabe and Ōe’s intentional act of harassment, together with N.A.G., perhaps we might consider that all of these artists worked to resist the control over their daily life enacted through urban purification. The most important thing, however, was not the garbage itself but rather the drive to eliminate everything that was garbage-like: the odors of everyday life, naked bodies, and even human beings themselves. This drive was strengthened in response to two major national events, the Olympics and Expo ’70. In the mid-1960s, amidst a great social shift, one interesting way the nether regions of the body were depicted at this time was in Hasegawa Machiko’s cartoon, Sazae-san (1964). Released two weeks before the 1964 Olympics began,32 her cartoon showed a man wearing a yukata (summer kimono) that was stripped to his waist, beating a taiko drum at a festival. The man is cautioned by a policeman, who is worried that the Western women who have come to watch the Olympics will be offended by his nudity, and the man has to change into a hat, suit, and necktie before he can resume beating the drum. The line spoken by the man, “toyakaku iwaretakune’e kara na” (I don’t want any trouble), reflects the feelings of the common people in the face of rules forcing them to change their traditional customs, while also expressing how these rules can cause a loss of traditional performing art as bodily culture. The image of the man in a suit and hat beating a drum is quite Zero Jigen-like. During this era in which death and birth—human taboos that have existed since the dawn of time—came to be enclosed in hospitals, Zero Jigen exposed their wretched bodies in urban spaces and worked with scenes of childbirth, and Koyama Tetsuo and Makirō worked with abominable carnage and bodily fluids, like some kind of magical ritual from a farm village—all acts of rebellion against the tide of the times. In 1960, Masuzawa Kinpei (Neo Dada) affixed lightbulbs to his ragged clothes and walked around and lay down on the ground outside of Hibiya Gallery [fig. 18, p. 129], before entering the gallery to urinate on a futon mat. This work in the group exhibition may have been a way to make visible the people who existed the opposite end of the patrons of the nearby Imperial Hotel—the homeless population of the streets around the gallery. The futon would soon become a symbol Zero Jigen used to represent the Japanese way of life, as well as a device used frequently to symbolize the physicality (shintaisei) hidden in the city. Three days before the opening ceremonies of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, Itoi Kanji ran naked through Ginza, performing as though he was an Olympic torchbearer, and was committed to a mental hospital. The response to Itoi’s act once again calls to mind the Sazae-san cartoon, segregating and concealing his nudity from foreign visitors (here, Westerners).

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According to the recollections of Akasegawa Genpei and the others, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner said they would crack down on “ideological perverts,”33 a category that applied to all manner of hippies and extremists, in preparation for Expo ’70; as a result, the sukima of the city were lost. The success of this crackdown can be seen in how no performances by the anti-Expo faction or extremist student protests were allowed at the Expo, save for one helmeted man who occupied the Tower of the Sun calling himself a member of the Red Army, with Itoi Kanji cheering him on from below. NOTES 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

Sakurai Tetsuo, Shisō toshite no rokujū nendai [The ’60s as an idea] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1993), 32–47. The wooden and concrete garbage boxes that were permanently placed on the streets were replaced by moveable plastic bins. “Rojō no gomibako o nakushi: daitoshi no moderu chiku, gorin mokuhyō ni supīdo appu” [Let’s get rid of garbage boxes: Model districts in the Metropolis, speeding up towards the Olympics], Asahi Shimbun (evening edition), June 13, 1963, 6. Takechi Tetsuji, Dentō to danzetsu [Tradition and Extinction] (Tokyo: Fūtōsha, 1969), 54–60. Quoted in Sakurai, Shisō toshite no rokujū nendai, 34. Originally published in Fujin kōron (August 1963). Sakurai, Shisō toshite no rokujū nendai, 42. The original source for Etō’s words is Etō Jun, “Nihon to watashi 5: Katei no kōfuku” [Japan and Me 5: Happiness of the Home], Asahi Jānaru, no. 414 (January 29, 1967): 77. Etō Jun, “Nihon to watashi 5,” quoted in Sakurai, Shisō toshite no rokujū nendai, 43. Sakurai, Shisō toshite no rokujū nendai, 43. Sakurai, Shisō toshite no rokujū nendai, 43–45. Ueno Kōshi, Nikutai no jidai: Taikenteki rokujū nendai bunkaron [Age of the body: 60s culture experienced] (Tokyo: Gendai Shokan, 1989), 478–81. Irokawa Daikichi defines this as the “externalized phenomenon of initiation rites.” Irokawa Daikichi, Shōwa-shi sesō-hen [Showa History: Society], (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1994), 31. Ueno, Nikutai no jidai, 482. Irokawa, Shōwa-shi sesō-hen, 27–28. This can also be confirmed by a conversation between Takamatsu Jirō and Akasegawa Genpei; Takamatsu: “The world wasn’t standardized, and a lot of things existed without being particularly related to anything else, and I feel

like there was that social condition. Towards the second half of the ’60s, the economy was growing quickly and a lot of things began to get tidied up, and it got more difficult to do things. That social condition before that step, I feel like it was like that.” Akasegawa: “It was. There were still large niches.” Akasegawa Genpei, Tokyo mikisā keikaku [Tokyo Mixer Plan] (Tokyo: Parco Shuppan, 1984), 213. 14. “The number of passengers in one day with 1.3 million on Kokutetsu, 350,000 on Keiō, 650,000 on Odakyū, 850,000 on Seibu, 230,000 on the subway, and more on the bus and so on is 3.5 million. Total sales floor area for Isetan, Odakyū, Mitsukoshi, and Keio Department Stores is 170,000 square meters. The total area of the West Exit Underground Plaza is 46,000 square meters, and the area of the fukutoshin (metropolitan subcenter) planned site is 46,000 (sic.) square meters, there are 650 bars and cabarets around the station, 420 restaurants, 350 nomi-ya pubs and yakitori (grilled chicken) stands, 160 coffee shops, 110 inns, 50 erotic bathhouses, 17 peep shows, and 20,000 hostesses, Fūgetsu-dō coffee shop gets a thousand customers every day.” “Shinjuku,” Chūō Kōron, no. 971 (August 1968). 15. Fukasaku Mitsusada, Shinjuku kōgengaku [Shinjuku modernology] (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1968), 75–76, 96. 16. “We should not forget that one of the conditions that made it possible to realize a play like this was clearly the existence of the society undergoing rapid economic growth that allowed it. Rapid growth was certainly the evil reason why we had doubled prices instead of doubled incomes, make no mistake, but at the same time, the huge youth demographic was used as disposable temporary labor (part-time jobs) and the rapid growth secured its labor market, and the expanded tertiary industry

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increased demand for non-pros and semi-pros in mizushōbai [water trade, nighttime entertainment businesses]. In the labor market that expanded in this way, the shingeki leaders succeeded in selling their own labor to get by, while managing to maintaining their own plays as marginal art, and this was used as a base to enhance the quality of expression as marginal art, and made into an independent school of theater.” Kan Takayuki, Zōho Sengo engeki: Shingeki wa norikoeraretaka [Postwar theater: Has shingeki been overcome?, Expanded edition] (Tokyo: Shakai Hyōronsha, 2003), 203. 17. Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka had a seating capacity of 400 seats and was therefore too large to name a “little theater”; it did not belong to a specific theater company and instead was “purely a rental theater,” making it a step between “large theaters” and “little theaters,” which theater companies used to gain recognition. It became “an excellent midpoint as well as an avant-garde place for exchange.” Above ground, Shinjuku Bunka was a place for “daytime culture with rich artistic flavor,” and Theater Scorpio was a place for “decadent and strange dark culture,” as aimed by the owner Kuzui Kinshirō to contrast and interpenetrate the two. Nishidō Kōjin, “Shinjuku āto shiatā kōbō shiron: ‘Shinjuku 1962/76’” [The Rise and Fall of Shinjuku Art Theater “Shinjuku 1962/76”], Kikan Shinjuku, no. 1 (January 1982): 8. 18. “…although Jōkyō Gekijō’s Red Tent seemed at first so vulgar and away from good morals and manners, that in itself could not have been something so dangerous we had to banish it. Rather, the police and masters in the local shopping streets wanted the complete extermination and cleanup of the Fūten Tribe, hippies, and anarchists hanging around the Shinjuku Station Plaza and Hanazono Shrine at that time, and Jōkyō Gekijō was the first sacrificial lamb to be an example to the others, and I think that is the true picture of what happened.” Senda Akihiko, “Kara Jūrō + Jōkyō Gekijō no kiseki: Bōken no roman ni kaketa aka tento gekijō” [The trajectory of Kara Jūrō and Jōkyō Gekijō: the Red Tent theater that bet on the romantic adventure], Bessatsu Shinhyō Kara Jūrō no Sekai [Shinhyō Special Edition: The world of Kara Jūrō] (October 1974): 183. 19. Senda, 184–185; Shashinshū Karagumi Jōkyō Gekijō Zenkiroku [Complete Photographic

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

Documents of Karagumi and Jōkyō Gekijō], ed. Gekidan Jōkyō Gekijō (Tokyo: Parco Shuppan, 1982), 80–89. Fukasaku, Shinjuku kōgengaku, 123–124. Fukasaku, 90–94. “Shinjuku eki nishiguchi hiroba to sono shūhen” [Shinjuku Station West Exit Plaza and its Vicinity], SD, no. 37 (December 1967): 68. Yoshida Yoshie, “Gisei tengoku o hanzai ōdōri ni” [Fake paradise should become a boulevard of crime], Ryūbō no kaihōku [Wanderer’s liberated zone] (Tokyo: Gendai Sōbisha, 1977), 57–58, 60–61. Yoshida, 62–63. “Bankokuhaku no rinen to tanoshisa o Kōbe ni: Yume to hikari to ongaku no Kōbe Kānibaru” [Bring the concept and fun of the Expo to Kōbe: Dreams and light and music at Kobe Carnival], Ōru Kansai (May 1970): 34–40. Note that Group I participated in the May ’67 Kobe Carnival, and Group I and The Play both participated in the second carnival the following year. Yoshimura Masunobu, who was in charge of an event at the Festival Square, protested against interventions by the facilities manager and some members of the media to the event he had planned. Yoshimura Masunobu, “Omatsuri hiroba ka kanri hiroba ka: Kanryō-teki henshū no gisei” [Is it a festival square or a controlled square?: Victim of bureaucratic paranoia], Asahi Shimbun, August 11, 1970, 7. Irokawa, Shōwa-shi sesō-hen, 56–60. At the Ginza Pedestrian Paradise on August 2, Enoki Chū sunburned an Expo mark onto his stomach and held a performance. Nakagawa Osamu, Gisō suru nippon: Kōkyō shisetsu no dizunīrandazeishon [Japan disguises itself: The Disneylandization of public facilities] (Tokyo: Shōkokusha, 1996). Fukuoka-ken no rekishi [History of Fukuoka Prefecture], ed. Fukuoka-ken sōmu-bu sōmu-gakari shōgai-ka [Fukuoka Prefecture, General Affairs Division, General Affairs Section, External Relations Department] (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Prefecture, 1981), 271. From a statement made by a city councilor Matsunaga Kōshirō at the City council plenary session held on March 17, 1953. Fukuokashi-shi dai rokkan Shōwa-hen kōhen 2 [Fukuoka City History, Volume 6: Showa edition Part 2], ed. Fukuoka shiyakusho [Fukuoka City] (Fukuoka: Fukuoka City, 1971), 48.

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31. Nakamura Hideki, “Aichi kenritsu bijutsukan no gomi ronsō” [Aichi Prefectural Art Museum’s Garbage Controversy], Bijutsu techō, no. 333 (October 1970): 110–11; Iwata Shin’ichi, “Nagoya demo gomi sōdō: ‘Yagai chōkoku-ten’ wa chūshi” [Garbage strife in Nagoya as well: Outdoor sculpture exhibition cancelled], Bijutsu techō, no. 343 (June 1971): 25; Ishii Mamoru “Aichi kenritsu bijutsukan: Gomi saiban kesshin e” [Garbage trial on Aichi Prefectural Art Museum: Toward the conclusion], Bijutsu techō, no. 372 (October 1973): 12–13; Iwata Shin’ichi, Gendai bijutsu shūen no yochō: 197080 nendai no Nagoya bijutsukai [Notice to the end of contemporary art: 1970-80s Nagoya Art World] (Nagoya: Sūpā kikaku, 1995), 260–302; Yamada Kyōichi, Nagoya-ryoku āto-hen: Nagoya sengo bijutsu katsudō-shi [Nagoya power art edition: History of Nagoya postwar art activities] (Tokyo: Wides Shuppan, 2007), 61–72. 32. Asahi Shimbun, September 27, 1964. Reprinted in Hasegawa Machiko, Sazae-san, vol. 15 (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1997), 69.

33. It is not confirmed when and how the Police Commissioner General issued the order. According to Kawani Hiroshi, it was January 1964. Kawani Hiroshi, “Butsu to sakuhin to hōtei: Farusu sen’en satsu jiken saiban” [Illicit goods, artwork, and court: Model 1,000-yen note incident trial], Nihon Dokusho Shimbun no. 1373 (September 12, 1966): 8. However, according to an essay Akasegawa published in November of 1969 entitled Shisōteki henshitsusya (Ideological pervert), it was during the Japan–Korea Treaty Struggle and the Tokyo Action Front, so it must have been 1965. Akasegawa Genpei, Obuje o motta musansha [Proletarians with objects] (Tokyo: Gendai Shichōsha, 1970), 293. It was November 1965 in Akasegawa Genpei, Tsuihō sareta yajiuma [Exiled rubbernecker] (Gendai Shichōsha, 1972), 43. According to Hiraoka Masaaki, it was December 7, 1963. Hiraoka Masaaki, Hito no hajime [The beginnings of man] (Tokyo: Sairyū­sha, 2012), 174.

CHAPTER 22

The Nether Regions of Culture Marginal Art and the Quest for Popularity

1.

MARGINAL ART

How can we describe the character of Anti-Art performance that has emerged thus far? Something that is premodern, and anachronistically Japanese. Something not so much showy perversion as rather what is essentially the execution of esoteric, ritualistic action by healthy bodies in certain settings, the kind of thing that could become the subject of sociological or ethnographic study. Something that was not, in the end, able to become art, despite its similarities to the vulgar performativity of Ankoku Butoh and angura theater. Something different from art recognized by the majority, different from elite contemporary art, different from popular art for the sake of entertainment. Something that existed in the spatial and temporal niches (sukima) of the 1960s, from urbanization up until the eventual regulation of everyday life. Something that inevitably and fatefully transcended both conceptual game and visual pleasure, connected to everything from “upper-echelon courtier” to “bottom-rung samurai,” to the performing arts (geinō) of the lower classes, even to popular pastimes (shumi) of the masses in the way that it bore the vulgar body. Something that seems to be nearer to the world of popular performing arts rather than fine art, but never quite coincides with it. And something that disappeared from history, due to its unnameable nature. In order to further clarify this Anti-Art performance that evades both conceptual definition and historical placement, it is necessary to consider the concepts of taishū (masses) and seikatsu-sha (living people), as well as the concepts of kitsch and vulgarity. Soon after the war, in a magazine published in 1946 titled Shisō no Kagaku (Science of Thought), intellectuals such as Tsurumi Shunsuke tried to reevaluate popular culture (taishū bunka).1 There were two phases of this project. The first was the reevaluation of pre-existing popular culture—the critical aspect, so to speak.2 The second was a sociological and ethnographic perspective that went beyond the existing dichotomy of high art and popular art, foregrounding the area that straddles both or falls somewhere in between. One part of Tsurumi’s analysis that is quite well known is his concept of marginal art. According to Tsurumi, so-called “art” or “pure art” is something made by specialist artists for specialist recipients. In popular art as well, which is made up of “vulgar things, inartistic things and fake art,”3 there is a dichotomy between the producers, entrepreneurs and expert artists, and the recipients—the masses. Missing from this binary is a third zone, where “art made by non-specialists and received by non-specialists is accepted” and “exists in an amphibious place that is both a way of life and and art form,” a zone that he terms “marginal art” (genkai geijustu). 4 Among Tsurumi’s examples relevant to the art categories delineated in this book are: paintings in the category of pure art; kamishibai (picture story shows), posters, and nishiki-e (multicolored woodblock prints) in popular art; and grafitti, ema (votive plaques), hagoita (decorative battledore

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paddles), shinkozaiku (figurines made of rice flour dough), takoe (painted kites), nengajō (illustrated New Year’s greeting postcards), and ryūtō (floating paper lamps) in marginal art. In arts that involve movement of the body, ballet, kabuki, and noh are pure art; while Azuma Odori (Tokyo-style dance), Kyō Odori (Kyoto-style dance), rockabilly, twist, chanbara tate (swordfighting performed in theater) are popular arts; and the marginal arts include body movements of everyday life, rhythms of labor, dezomeshiki (acrobatic New Years performances put on by firefighters), kiyari (chorus sung when carrying heavy materials), play, courtship behavior, applause, Bon Odori (Bon Festival dance), Awa Odori (Awa, present-day Tokushima, dance), stilts, maritsuki (ball bouncing games), sumo, and shishimai (lion dance).5 Considering these examples, Anti-Art performance is certainly neither pure art nor popular art; the question is whether it can be counted as part of marginal art. Even so, it is interesting to consider that Anti-Art performance was born in the opportunity offered by the Yomiuri Independent, in which anybody could participate—any amateur, in any style, with any ideology, unrelated to any faction—as long as they could pay the listing fee. In fact, there were many marginal art-type works that were exhibited in the Yomiuri Independent. Little information about these works was recorded and they probably did not receive much notice, but we know from Akasegawa Genpei’s account that portraits of figures such as popular singer Mihashi Michiya and then-Crown Princess Michiko made by kinukosuri (a method of making portraits based on photographs by rubbing a silk canvas with a pencil) were exhibited practically every year.6 These are considered to have been the work of professional artisans, so the definition of marginal art does not quite apply, but it might be an example of kitsch, straddling both popular art and marginal art. Mori Hideto, the editor-in-chief of Shisō no Kagaku, accepting Tsurumi’s idea about non-expert artists, puts forward the concept of the “perfect amateur” (pāfekuto amachua, borrowing the terms directly from English) According to Mori, the relationship between the Japanese words kurōto and shirōto is not the same as the relationship between the English words “professional” and “amateur.” Kurōto and shirōto have nothing to do with differentiating what one does occupationally: In this case, “amateur” simply becomes a word to describe the person taking action. […] Thus the only appropriate translation for “amateur” is shirōto kōisha: a shirōto that takes action, a person taking action who rejects the expert. And amateurism is how we can understand the nature of non-expertism, and non-possession. What I posit as a perfect amateur is a double-edged sword that rejects professionals on the one hand, and shirōto on the other. In modern times, artists are elite professionals and become artists by breaking away from the masses, ascending to peaks that the masses cannot express. […] In contrast, the art of the wretched can only be expressed by falling to a point lower than masses’ standards.7 (emphasis mine)

This argument is reminiscent of Tanigawa Gan’s (who we might consider to be the spiritual backbone of Kyūshū-ha) well-known concept of kōsakusha: “the path of hypocrisy [gizen no michi] by which intellectuals are determined to face the public, and

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the public are sharply critical of intellectuals”8 In the same book, Mori also writes the following: We must reject the masses in general as simple and naïve, marginalized as victims. The idea that there are enemies and allies, and that the masses are our allies, must be rejected. We must not think of the masses quantitatively, but in their mass nature. There can be a lower-class quality to workers of the upper classes, and similarly an upper-class quality to workers of the lower classes. […] When I speak of the masses, those masses are always battling pros as amateurs, can only exist as militant amateurs. They are bad at singing, poor in character, anachronistic, shameless, disorderly, obscene, anti-literary, criminal, and revolutionary!9 (emphasis mine)

The fascinating thing about this concept of the “perfect amateur” is the new relationship it instantiates between pro and amateur, intellectuals and the masses. These relationships also carry through to the new type of communication that happened in 1960s tent theater and shōgekijō (little theater), which differed from that of shingeki up until that point. According to Kan Takayuki, tent and shōgekijo theater broke down shingeki’s Enlightenment foundation, and instead of an “artist to audience, top to bottom giving and receiving of a message,” it “destroyed the vertical relationship of didactic communication” through their signature style of “having the audience and the expression, or expressers, face one another,”10 a characteristic Tsurumi found in marginal art. Through these qualities, tent and shōgekijo theater surmounted shingeki, “Westernized from the waist up in a culture of modern intelligentsia and shitaifu (scholar-bureaucrats).”11 Mori Hideto and Kan Takayuki share a stance on finding marginal art in the culture of a developed nation in the 1960s. According to Kan, the true value of tent and shōgekijō theater is its quality of being somewhat obscene and grubby, within the norms of order and yet somehow ill-favored in its own representation; the theater as such is extremely inappropriate for the haunting, overripe urban spaces with their oversaturated illusions of wealth, but still is taking root there, propagating, and corroding the city from within.12

Kan’s description of shōgekijō theater as such agrees with the last sentence of Mori’s quote about manzai, “bad at singing, poor in character, anachronistic, shameless, disorderly, obscene, anti-literary, criminal, and revolutionary,” but it also applies to most Anti-Art performance by visual artists in a number of capacities, mediated by the concept of marginal art. Firstly, in its anarchistic politicality and subversive carnivalesque nature. Secondly, in the clear amateurishness of performances by artists such as Zero Jigen, Koyama Tetsuo and Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, who had no training in dance or theater, and the hobby-esque models made by artists including Asai Masuo, Mizukami Jun and Itoi Kanji, who had no formal art education. In particular, it is fair to think of the occult objects and mail art by Mizukami and Itoi, created by hand from cheap everyday materials, as examples of the “grafitti, ema, nengajō, and ryūtō” Tsurumi describes. Thirdly, in the stance of being “amateurs fighting with pros” taken by Anti-Art performers, who rejected (read: were rejected by) the “upper-echelon courtier” artists of Sogetsu Art Center,

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Hi-Red Center, and the intermedia artists (including Gutai) who took part in Expo ’70. And fourthly, on the point that their acts were frequently just on the verge of criminal. Tsurumi gives an intriguing example from the perspective of performance, in addition to the aforementioned hobby- and everyday art of the masses. He tells of how Miyazawa Kenji (poet and writer of childen’s stories, 1896–1933) event-ified (ibento-ka) the entire process of taking his agricultural school students on a school excursion.13 From this perspective, as Tomii Reiko writes, Akasegawa Genpei’s Model 1,000-Yen Note Trial became the biggest “event-ification” in Japan’s 1960s art world 14 through not only what happened in court but the movements of the people supporting and reporting on it, and the power of the mass media and its various news and discourses—this entire process becomes a work of art that falls into the category of marginal art. 2.

THE MASSES IN THE POST-ANPO PERIOD

This sort of new relationship between intellectuals (chishikijin) and the masses (taishū), and the creation of events where politics (reality) and culture (art) inevitably intersect, has certain political implications. For example, the “there” at the beginning of the following writing by Oguma Eiji refers to the area around the National Diet during the Anpo Struggle in 1960: Not only did students and labor union workers demonstrate there, but also ranks of theater troupe members and writers, a petition group of university professors, a group of small shopkeepers demonstrating with their noren curtains hoisted, and even “farmers holding mushiro flags (woven straw mats painted with slogans), Buddhists beating hand-held drums, and women bringing their children along.”15

However, “there” could also have been the venue for the Yomiuri Independent, or the Yoyo­ gi venue for May Day. where it had transformed into such a festive place that even Zero Jigen, Kurohata and other groups could participate (see chap. 8.7, pp. 214–7), or it could have been Osaka Castle Park where Antiwar Expo was held (see chap. 9.3, p. 254). That is because all of these were venues where professionals and amateurs, political activists, artists, intellectuals, students, and people from a variety of classes and occupations mixed together, either in political or in cultural gatherings. According to Oguma, at this point in time the word shimin (citizen) began to spread: “Amid the Anpo Struggle, the authority of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) was undermined, and when movements, independent of existing organizations consisting of workers and farmers, began to spread, the word that was used to describe people participating in these new movements was shimin.”16 The direct connection between intellectuals and performance artists in this situation is difficult to trace, outside of the interactions between Mori Hideto and Asai Masuo,17 and the network surrounding the Jiritsu Gakkō (School of Autonomy), described below. However, it could be supposed that, considering the larger ideological and social trends of the period, the artists inevitably focused on popular culture in its miscellaneous and multifaceted expansiveness, which held the potential to overcome traditional class divisions, in an attempt to create visual and performative expressions

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in the vein of Anti-Art. Which is to say, first of all, the political avant-garde saw the possibility for change in the actions of a subjective taishū as an independent entity, and second of all, the artistic avant-garde saw in the vulgar aesthetic consciousness of the taishū the possibility of overcoming elite art. Both of these issues are related to the issues of the marginal art particular to the 1960s. Before addressing the second point, I will tackle the first. Tsurumi’s and Mori’s hopes for the creative potential of the masses, which exist outside of the entertainment industry, were probably not unrelated to the overall state of ideology after the 1960 Anpo Struggle defeat. In the late 1950s, trust in the JCP—which had been so influential in the early postwar years and had established organizations in corporations, factories and universities—collapsed, and students led the New Left to a new era of power. But the Anpo Struggle, which was led by the Bund, the precursor to the New Left, ended in defeat. Meanwhile, in the span of the same year, an unprecedented strike at Miike Coal Mine also ended with defeat of its original union; 18 but it was Tanigawa Gan who saw major potential in the anarchic energy of the Miike workers, more than he found in the nihilistic urban masses of the Anpo Struggle [see p. 310].19 Tanigawa led the literary magazine for workers Sākuru mura (Circle Village), published around the same time as early Kyūshū-ha was most active (September 1958 to October 1961). Under these circumstances, in September 1962, Jiritsu Gakkō began inviting “a lineup of distinguished lecturers including Tanigawa Gan, Yoshimoto Takaaki, Akiyama Kiyoshi, Haniya Yutaka, Kurita Isamu, Mori Hideto, Nakamura Hiroshi, and more.”20Adachi Masao’s recalls: The idea to invite a ramen shop owner and learn how his ramen is made, how he has sold it, and how he has lived his life was the start of Jiritsu Gakkō, and it was unique for that time. The first time it was a ramen cook; the second time it was a night soil carrier, and we held an onsite study session about the life of a Tokyo Metropolitan Government Bureau of Public Cleansing employee aboard a night soil barge.21

The outline of the school clearly invites “street vendors, night soil captains, entertainers, bar wenches, waste pickers, craftspeople in micro enterprises and so on; in other words, mainly urban lower-level workers”22 as guest instructors. The original plan was for it to be a study group to learn from “the masses” (taishū), an attitude that recalls the “common people’s biographies” (shomin restsuden) and “exercise of recording daily life” (seikatsu kiroku undō) that were a part of the Shisō no Kagaku project “Philosophy of the People” (hitobito no tetsugaku).23 In short, Japanese intellectuals determined that when Soviet socialism came to power, Japan’s established leftist parties not only became unreliable due to their wavering policies but had even become oppressive organizations. After coming to this realization, they developed a movement to try to grasp the reality of the individual populace who did not belong to (or were not defined by) the class of political actors which used to be called jinmin (the people) or taishū (the masses). The steering committee for Jiritsu Gakkō included film critic Matsuda Masao, who had also been an activist with the Tokyo Action Front; Gendai Shichōsha editor Kawani Hiroshi, who had supported Akasegawa Genpei’s Model 1,000-Yen Note Trial along with Hi-Red Center; Hiraoka Masaaki and Miyabara Yasuharu, who formed the League of Criminals and held Happening-like activities(see chap. 6.6, pp. 138–41); art critic Imaizumi Yoshihiko, who

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would go on to become principal of Bigakkō; and Yamaguchi Kenji, an anarchist activist who organized Kōhō no Kai (Behind-the-line Society) to support the Taishō Coalmine struggle led by Tanigawa Gan.24 These ideological developments possibly warrant a more thorough examination; however, the decline in authority of the JCP and the rise of the New Left movement, the political situation reflected in both Anpo and Miike defeats, and the study of popular culture based on the “people’s philosophy” by Shisō no Kagaku likely led to a variety of cultural anarchisms, which, by way of Jiritsu Gakkō, manifested in the activities of HiRed Center, the Akasegawa Genpei’s Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident, Document 6.15 (a film by Adachi Masao and others which documented the Anpo Struggle, see chap. 6.7, p. 142), and the Happenings that occurred at the screening of Sa’in (Closed Vagina), which represented the desperate situation after the Anpo defeat (see chap. 7.5, pp. 182–4). It is likely no coincidence that the coming together of people to form Jiritsu Gakkō coincided with the early 1960s, the last years of the Yomiuri Independent—a venue where kitsch portraits of Crown Princess Michiko and marginal art by amateur artists and Anti-Art works could coexist. In reality, however, “the relationship between the students who gathered [at Jiritsu Gakkō] and the lecturers turned out to be like that of fans and stars, which felt wrong”25 to Imaizumi Yoshihiko and other executive members. As a result, they distanced themselves,26 and in February 1964, Jiritsu Gakkō ultimately announced a hiatus.27 Thus, their experiment in learning from the daily lives of the populace (taishū) ended soon after it had begun. Even so, it was impossible for art critics to understand the Anti-Art trend, born in the final days of the Yomiuri Independent, which saw its climax in the post-Anpo era, in relation to marginal art, as they were too focused on the discourse of Western art to contemplate the Japanese works they actually saw themselves, let alone to take the political situation into account in their discussions. Subsequently, the materials and spaces marked with the stench of people’s lives gradually disappeared from works of art, and along with them the anarchic politics of Anti-Art. The direct cause of the change was the sudden cancellation of the Yomiuri Independent in 1964, but another important piece of context was the progress of society far beyond elite intellectuals’ glorification of lower-class popular culture, as seen in Tsurumi, Mori and other members of Shisō no Kagaku. Katō Hidetoshi’s 1957 essay, “Chūkan bunka ron” (“On middle culture”), captures the changes in the cultural situation at the time from the perspective of the development of mass society (taishū-ka).28 Katō viewed postwar culture in three stages: 1945–50, 1951–55, and 1956–60. The first stage was a period centered around political “high culture” (kōkyū bunka),” exemplified by general magazines such as Chūō kōron, Kaizō, Sekai, and Tenbō. The second stage was a period of (anti-)political “mass culture” (taishū bunka), with Heibon magazine, radio quiz programs and singing contests. The third stage was a period of “middle culture” (chūkan bunka). Examples of this “middle culture” in the second half of the 1950s and beyond include weekly magazines that struck “an excellent compromise” between “the lofty aspirations of general magazines” and “a spirit of complete devotion to entertainment,”29 the shinsho series of academic books for beginners, musicals, and Torys (Suntory whisky) bars. Behind this culture was a new education system that increased the number of highly educated people, and the propagating capacity of mass media. We can add on to that the increasing mobility between big cities and

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rural areas and the fluidity of social strata resulting from the expansion of bullet trains and highways, which was not part of Katō’s analysis but is nonetheless significant. It was, so to speak, the progress of globalization within the localized region of Japan; however, it is important to note that Katō, unlike Tsurumi and Mori, did not believe in the revolutionary nature of lower-class popular culture, and rather saw the dangers of the emergence of a petite bourgeoisie, even the strengthening of fascism, in the age of “middle culture.” “About ten years from now [1967], the whole of Japanese culture will be painted over with neutral colors,”30 Katō predicted, and this was an inevitable situation; the question at hand at that point was whether it was possible to create a new “national culture.”31 The changes Katō foresaw developed beyond his imagination, due to economic growth, changes in living environment, the social homogenization of Japanese society, and the loss of revolutionary potential consequent to these factors. In actuality, the works of artists that began in the late ’60s no longer had the politicization, the stench of the everyday, emblematic of the Anti-Art era of the early ’60s; as part of Middle Culture, there remained room for compromise (no matter whether it was “excellent compromise”), such that intermedia and kinetic art was accepted by society, leading to “Expo art.” Meanwhile, although there were possibilities for marginal art within the practices that often did not require specialized skills such as Mono-ha and conceptual art, these art practices were not easily accepted or practiced by the general public due to their expressions beyond the understanding of commoners, and thus the art went on to be saved by its recognition within the contemporary art world. In this way, it came to be that the possibility of a revolutionary culture, which began to emerge through the meeting of the post-Anpo era avant-garde and lower-class popular culture, would all but disappear from both contemporary art, aimed at a small number of elites and at people overseas, and the “middle culture” born of the new majority that was created during the period of high economic growth. Here, we might include recent Neo Pop trends (represented by Murakami Takashi) and citizen participation-type art events in Japan as extensions of “middle culture.” 3.

KITSCH AS A POPULAR AESTHETIC

How did the contemporary art critics of the 1960s relate the practice of art to the mass-socialization behind it? As seen in chapter 3, the connection was not yet clear at the stage when the Anti-Art debate emerged in 1960, and in fact the debates that played out thereafter were far removed from the realities of Japanese society and art. It was only in the mid-’60s, after the terrible “high artistic” debate, that finally Anti-Art’s characteristic “descent into the vulgar everyday” was taken on by the aesthetic concepts of the vulgar and the kitsch. The important argument in this regard is that of Ishiko Junzō, who appeared in the third act of the Anti-Art Debate (see chap. 3.4, pp. 78–81). Clement Greenberg,32 a leading critic of Modernism, defined kitsch as something with qualities of “folk or rudimentary culture” for “the great mass of the exploited and poor—and therefore ignorant.” While this definition is passive and negative, in comparison, Ishiko tries to discern the positive and active posibilities of kitsch.33 Here, Ishiko refers to Tsurumi Shunsuke’s definition of marginal art, but takes issue with Tsurumi’s schematization, and instead proposes the

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concept of “kitsch” in its place. For Ishiko, kitsch “is a whole expression that covers both Tsurumi’s popular art and marginal art and can often function as pure art as well.”34 Specific examples of these visual expressions include murals in public bathhouses, covers of women’s magazines, mass market portrait photographs of celebrities, matchbox labels, the architecture and interior decoration of couples’ cafés (love hotels are today’s equivalent). Ishiko attempted his “reckless” definition of kitsch as follows: That is to say, kitsch is the name for all expressions that have a dynamic structure as a medium, containing elements of magic and practicality, being aesthetic while also very ethical, with value as a target of individual worship while also being suited for general everyday life and actions, that is born and vanishes with the times, while almost attempting to resolve communal illusion [kyōdō gensō] into self-illusion [ jiko gensō].35

Ishiko further states that kitsch is something that has “a vague but certain breadth and thickness of meaning/value, a history of living people that is, or is about to be, embodied.”36 Ishiko’s language here is characteristically abstruse, but we can infer that he was trying to say something important in the context of contemporary cultural studies. The 1960s were a time when kitsch was reevaluated by critics and cultural practitioners, as seen in the theater of Kara Jūrō and Terayama Shūji, as well as in the designs of Yokoo Tadanori and others who made their theater posters and stage design, which together constituted some of the most energetic and flamboyant parts of the culture of this period, with vulgar forms and styles that harbored the depth of common people’s sentiments. However, in contemporary art, although kitsch appeared in the works of Nakamura Hiroshi, Tateishi Kōichi, and Shinohara Ushio, it was not widely discussed by art critics, who admired American Pop Art as a paradigm and, further, all but ignored Yokoo, Terayama, and other aspects of so-called angura culture. The reason for this neglect was that, as mentioned earlier, 1960s angura theater had qualities of marginal art, while a corresponding movement was not found in the contemporary art of the same period, or perhaps because art critics did not think of kitsch as important. Under these circumstances, Ishiko’s words, quoted at the beginning of this book— “And that’s when expressions that we need not refer to as art, and which themselves have no need of being referred to as art, will flourish variously as the mode of history we might call the physicality of the living person”37—express precisely what emerges in his essay on kitsch. Ishiko’s unique perspective, extending beyond pure art, attempts to apprehend a domain that traverses the totality of popular culture, marginal art, and folk culture, a domain which might enable the partial (if not complete) rescue of Anti-Art performance even (or better yet, especially) in our present moment. As Fukuzumi Ren indicates,38 in the present, with the popularity of Neo Pop “contemporary art” by artists like Murakami Takashi, and manga and anime even showcased in public art museums, subculture has become a new third category of “capital art,” distinct from “pure art” and “popular art.” However, as long as we “own our own bodies,” Fukuzumi argues that still within capital art “exists a potential for a fourth category, marginal art,” characterized by its “primitiveness” (genshisei). As framed in this book, Anti-Art performance is typical of what Fukuzumi calls “a bizarre expression that could not even be considered art from the perspective of capital art.”39

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As Ishiko himself acknowledges, the word kitsch itself already conveys an elitist perspective. Take, for example, the artist who paints Mt. Fuji murals on the walls of public bathhouses. 40 To him, what he does is not “kitsch,” but “art.”41 Along similar lines, the experiments of Shisō no Kagaku and Jiritsu Gakkō were unable to deconstruct the relationship between intellectuals and the masses. Perhaps a little more time was needed for “middle culture” to spread and take root before such a change of social structure. However, by the time that change occurred, the revolutionary nature and creativity of popular culture that Tanigawa, Tsurumi, Mori, and Ishiko had hoped for had been lost in the course of rapid economic growth and the splintering of mass movements from the student movements. As Japanese art progressed from Anti-Art to Mono-ha and conceptual art, the greatly anticipated dialogue between politics and art, between the avant-garde and the masses, was lost, and the systems established in the 1960s gave rise to the “contemporary art” that exists still today. 4.

FROM POPULARITY TO ANTI-ART

The new conception of “popularity” (taishū-sei) born amid the dramatic changes to politics, society, and daily life in the 1960s, and the tendencies to find marginal art and kitsch in such changes, were actually intricately entangled with the development of Anti-Art, though the art world did not pay much attention to it. Katō’s “Chūkan bunka ron” was published in 1957, one year after Art Informel reached Japan’s shores; this was also the year Kyūshū-ha was formed. In February 1958, pro and amateur artists (and those in-between) intermingled at the Yomiuri Independent, where “a rockabilly-like fever”42 spread through the scene. Other signs of Anti-Art began to surface, and in April, Shinohara Ushio made his first appearance in a weekly magazine. Kyūshū-ha became this era’s symbol of the entanglement of Anti-Art and marginal art, as well as that of politics and popular movement. Firstly, since hardly any members of Kyūshū-ha had formally studied at art colleges, and because they were located in Fukuoka, a regional city with no art market nor nationwide media reach, members of Kyūshū-ha were mere “amateur painters” (they were certainly not “artists”). Secondly, they conducted collective experiments on descending into vulgar everydayness, and in a sense their direction was based on a certain theoretical necessity. These experiments mainly operated on the material level, but for Kyūshū-ha, the subject “material” was itself the lives of ordinary people (taishū no seikatsu). Their materials qua subject reeked of poverty, were almost obnoxiously Japanese, and were not durable (not to mention sometimes, in fact, literal garbage!); in their middle period, their material/subject developed into everyday objects as objets d’art, living spaces made into artwork, and bodily expression. Through these elements, Kyūshū-ha attempted to bring art closer to everyday life. Thirdly—and this may even be unique within the whole history of 1960s art—Kyūshūha (although this was not necessarily a unanimous decision) dreamt of the impossible path of a mass movement through avant-garde art. In 1960, when Tsurumi released his “Theory of Marginal Art,” the phrase Anti-Art had just surfaced at the Yomiuri Independent, eventually making its way into the Anti-Art debates of 1964. During this period, as explained in detail in chapter  6,

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spontaneous performance art was born in Japan. Exposing the naked body in a way that the art of Neo Dada, Group Ongaku, and Hi-Red Center did not, Zero Jigen revealed the nether regions of art—one might say, the “lower half of the body of art.” Once their performance experiments began in Nagoya in 1962, Zero Jigen performed work that Jikken Kōbō and Gutai could never have imagined, using the heritage of marginal art—popular Japanese traditional pastimes such as sadō (tea), Buddhist traditions like odori nenbutsu (see chap. 20, n. 30), popular performing arts, and children’s games. In 1964 they held their first outdoor naked ritual, and that year they began to advance on Tokyo in earnest. The image of scandalous naked Happeners soon made rounds in the popular media due to their heavy emphasis on nudity in their staging, literally exposing the nether regions by revealing their genitals and buttocks. Still, despite their widespread exposure, their performances in urban sukima (niches) not designed for art and their strategic use of the media can be understood as methods of marginal art unique to this era. The above elements in Kyūshū-ha and Zero Jigen can also be found in other artists to a greater or lesser degree. The transformation of vulgar everyday items into artwork is seen in many Anti-Art artists, especially Neo Dada. Shinohara Ushio targeted the media in his early days, as did members of Jack Society (both as a group and in their individual efforts). And the use of Japanese body culture can be found in Matsue Kaku, who favored Edo culture; Koyama Tetsuo, who sought his ideal of a revival of the farmer’s body; and Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, who ironically reenacted nationalistic actions. Surely the most emblematic practitioner of marginal art, however, was Itoi Kanji. Itoi had no arts education at all. He had experience with gymnastics, haiku, and Tenrikyō religious training (see chap. 18, n. 16). He tried his hand at woodblock printing, which did not require any special skills or materials. He then, after debuting his works at the Yomiuri Independent in 1951, exhibited “collage, origami, bonsai, tanzaku (long cards) inscribed with waka ­poetry, and artificial flowers arranged in worn-out shoes,”43 at his first solo show. His mail art, which he continued to produce into his nineties, was also based in this tradition of amateur hobbyism. Itoi eventually became known nationwide as a legendary performer, but he never sought society’s recognition as an artist, never attempted to join collective art movements and, above all, never harbored the ambition or desire to be supported or understood by the media or the masses. His performances did not require any special training (aside from his excellent physical power and reflexes)—he was an amateur through and through. Among the artists who emerged out of Anti-Art in the 1960s, Kyūshū-ha, Zero Jigen, and Itoi Kanji were notable for their amateurism and use of bodily expression in a marginal art-type culture, which formed the basis for Anti-Art performance. NOTES 1.

Amano Masako, Seikatsu-sha to wa dareka: Ji­ ritsu-teki shiminzō no keifu [Who are the living people?: A Genealogy of the Autonomous Citizen] (Tokyo: Chuō Kōronsha, 1996), 102–3. 2. “It was Shisō no Kagaku Research Group that first focused on the ideology of popular art to research the thoughts and feelings of the

masses by clarifying the relationship between experts and media and its actual impact on the masses.” Asai Shōji, “Hajime ni” [In the Beginning], Nihon no taishū geijutsu: Minshū no namida to warai [Japan’s popular art: Tears and laughter of the people], ed. Tsurumi Shunsuke, Kata Kōji et al. (Tokyo: Shakaishisōsha, 1962), 11.

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3. Tsurumi Shunsuke, “Geijutsu no hatten” [Development of art], in Genkai geijutsu ron [Theory of Marginal Art] (Tokyo: Chikumashobō, 1999), 14. First published in Kōza gendai geijutsu, dai ikkan “Geijutsu to wa nani ka” [Contemporary art lecture, volume 1: “What is art?”] (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1960) 4. Tsurumi Shunsuke, “Geijutsu no hatten,” 15–16. 5. Tsurumi, 88. 6. Princess Michiko by Yoshinaga Shihō appeared in the 1961 exhibition list (along with his Mr. Kennedy); the 1962 and 1963 lists had Mihashi Michiya by Fujiwara Shigeo. 7. Mori Hideto, Yūmin no shisō [Ideology of the idle] (Tokyo: Torami Shobō, 1968), 64. 8. Tanigawa Gan, “Kōsakusha no shitai ni moeru mono” [Things that sprout on the corpses of the organizers], in Tanigawa Gan, Genten ga sonzai suru [The origin exists] (Tokyo: Ushio Publishing, 1976), 56. First published in Bungaku (June 1958). 9. Mori, Yūmin no shisō, 119. 10. Kan Takayuki, Zōho Sengo engeki: Shingeki wa norikoerareta ka [Postwar theater, expanded edition: Can shingeki be overcome?] (Tokyo: Shakai Hyōronsha, 2003), 202. 11. Kan, 201–2. 12. Kan, 195. 13. Tsurumi, “Geijutsu no hatten,” 52–57. “The way he took the students’ economic circumstances into consideration, drafted a program for what to show them, grasped the purpose of the trip, the choral singing, eating, walking, and chatting with the students that would make up a drama of human relationship in the nine days [sic. a misreading of five days] was a marginal art for Miyazawa, and his narrowly-defined “work of art” is nothing but a play within a broadly-defined play.” Tsurumi, 57. 14. According to Tomii Reiko, as the “Model Thousand Yen Note,” as an object, moved, it created a “discursive space of work” that became known as “the Model Thousand Yen Note Incident”; later interpretations of the incident would create a new “discursive space of work.” Here, “discursive space of work” means the object’s interpretation and discourse grows and exceeds the control or intention of its creator. Tomii Reiko, “‘Nichijō e no kakō’ kara ‘geiju­ tsusei e no joshō’ e: Akasegawa Genpei hoka ‘mokei sen’en satsu jiken’ ni okeru sakuhin kūkan no seisei to idō” [From “descent into the everyday” to “ascent to artitstry”; The creation

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

and movement of space as art in Model Thousand Yen Note Incident by Akasegawa Genpei et al.], ed. Tokyo Bunkazai Kenkyūjo [National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo], Ugoku mono: Jikan/kūkan/kontekusuto [Moving things: Time/space/context] (Tokyo: National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, 2004), 378. Oguma Eiji, ‘Minshu’ to ‘aikoku’: Sengo nihon no nashonarizumu to kōkyōsei [“Democracy” and “patriotism”: Postwar Japan’s nationalism and public nature] (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2002), 517. The quoted segment is from Watanabe Michiko, Onna tachi no rokujū nen anpo (Jūgoshi nōto sengoshi hen 5) [Women’s 1960 Japan–­U.S. Security Treaty (Notes on home front history: Postwar 5)], ed. Onna tachi no genzai o tou kai [Society of women questioning the present] (Tokyo: Impact Shuppankai, 1990). Oguma, 524. Mori, Yūmin no shisō, 42–43. Translator’s note: The first union, Miike Tankō Rōdō Kumiai, Miike Rōso [Miike Coalmine Labor Union] went on strike, and a second union, the Miike Tankō Shin Rōdō Kumiai, Miike Shinrō [Miike Coalmine New Labor Union], was formed by the company to cross the picket line and resume production; in the end the first union lost the struggle. Tanigawa Gan, “Teikei no Chōkoku” [Overcoming conventional forms], Minshushugi no shinwa: Anpo tōsō no shisōteki sōkatsu [The myth of democracy: An ideological summary of the Anpo struggle], ed. Tanigawa Gan et al., (Tokyo: Gendai Shichōsha, 1966), 30–31. Imaizumi Yoshihiko, “Ekakidomo no hentekorin na arekore no maesetsu 4: Sōdai de no hanzaisha dōmei shusai no engeki shō to pure H.R.C. no kankei ni tsuite” [Painter’s strange this and that prelude 4: About the theater show organized by the League of Criminals at Waseda University and its relationship to pre-H.R.C], Aida, no. 52 (April 2000): 27. Other lecturers were Sano Mitsuo, Terada Tōru, Nakano Hideto, Hidaka Rokurō, Fujita Shōzō. Tanigawa Gan, “Jiritsu gakkō e no shōtai: Anata no naka ni kensetsu subeki jiritsu gakkō o tankyū shiyō!” (An invitation to Jiritsu Gakkō: Let’s seek out the Jiritsu Gakkō you need to build inside yourself!”, Byakuya hyōron, no. 9 (August 1962): 56. For more information on Jiritsu Gakkō, see the following: Nagara Tō, (Imaizumi Yoshihiko) “Jiritsu Gakkō no kito ni yoseru” [On the project of Jiritsu Gakkō],

478

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

PART IV———THE SPIRIT OF ANTI-ART PERFORMANCE

Keishō, no. 6 (June 1962); Nagara Tō, “Daini no teigen: Jiritsu Gakkō apīru” [Second proposal: Jiritsu Gakkō appeal], flyer submitted at a preparatory meeting for the Jiritsu Gakkō, reprinted in Kikan, no. 11 (January 1980): 43–44. Tanigawa Gan, “Kenryoku shiyō no kairō: Jiritsu Gakkō o megutte” [Corridor of power sublation: Around Jiritsu Gakkō], in Tanigawa Gan serekushon I: Kōsakusya no ronri to hairi [Tanigawa Gan selection I: Logic and contradiction of the organizer], (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyōronsha, 2009): 386–398. First published in Shikō (October 1962). Adachi Masao, Eiga/Kakumei [Film/Revolution], interview by Hirawasa Gō, (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2003), 101. Tanigawa, Jiritsu Gakkō e no shōtai, 56. Amano, Seikatsu-sha to wa dareka, 85. Imaizumi, Ekakidomo no hentekorin na arekore no maesetsu 4, 27; “Jiritsu gakkō nichiroku” [Jiritsu gakkō diary], Jiritsu gakkō sirīzu [Jiri­tsu gakkō series] no. 1 (April 1963): 17. Yamaguchi was instrumental in the founding of Jiritsu Gakkō. Mori Hideto, Jitsuroku waga sōmōden: Chishikijin tachi no shūen [Document of personal records of civilian activists: Last supper of intelligentsia] (Tokyo: Shirakwa shoten, 1982), 72. Imaizumi, Ekakidomo no hentekorin na arekore no ­maesetsu 4, 27. See the following on the views of the Jiritsu Gakkō steering group (Imaizumi Yoshihiko, Kawani Hiroshi, Kurita Isamu, Hiraoka Masaaki, Matsuda Masao, and Yamaguchi Kenji): “Jiritsu Gakkō ‘sensei gurūpu’ e no iken” [Opinions on the “teacher group” of Jiritsu Gakkō], Shippū dotō: Sengo anakizumu kankei shiryō 2 [Sturm und Drang: Postwar anarchism-related materials: 2], Anakizumu, no. 7 (March 2006): 133–35. “‘Jiritsu Gakkō’ mukigen kyūkō” [“Jiritsu Gakkō” indefinite school closure], Nihon Dokusho Shimbun, no. 1243 (February 10, 1964): 2.

28. Katō Hidetoshi, “Chūkan bunka ron” [On Middle Culture], Katō Hidetoshi Chosakushū: 6 [Katō Hidetoshi Collected Essays 6] (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1980), 259–90. First published in Chūō kōron (March 1957). 29. Katō, 262. 30. Katō, 272. 31. Katō, 272. 32. Greenberg, Clement, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 16. First published in Partisan Review, Winter 1939. 33. Ishiko Junzō, “Kicchu-ron nōto” [Notes on Kitsch], Ishiko Junzō Chosakushū dai ikkan: Kicchu-ron [The selected writings of Ishiko Junzō, vol. 1: Essays on kitsch] (Tokyo: Ramasha, 1986), 19. 34. Ishiko, 22. 35. Ishiko, 35. 36. Ishiko, 35. 37. Ishiko Junzō, “Kicchuron nōto,” 302 (see chap. 1, n. 1). 38. Fukuzumi Ren, “Iwasaki Takuji no kurashi to geijutsu” [Iwasaki Takuji’s life and art], Konnichi no genkai geijutsu [Marginal Art Today] (Yokohama: BankART1929, 2008), 43. 39. Fukuzumi, 43. 40. Translator’s note: The walls of public bathhouses were usually decorated with murals (called penki-e, pictures by house paint) of scenic vistas, with Mt. Fuji being the most typical example. 41. Ishiko, “Kicchu-ron nōto,” 28–29. 42. Kawakita Michiaki, “Rokabirī-ha to yosoku-teki chisei-ha” [The rockabilly school and the predictive intelligence school], Bijutsu techō, no. 141 (May 1958): 26–27. 43. According to an autochronology prepared by Itoi Kanji, included with a letter to the author, June 22, 2004.

CHAPTER 23

The Nether Regions of the Politics Undercurrents of Revolt

安保と安保の間にはちょうどこんな時代があった。日常生活の中で、あるいは街の雑沓 の中で、芸術界の直接行動と政治界の直接行動とが互いの顔も名前も知らずにすれ違 ったのである。… そうして街の雑沓の中では、双方の直接行動者によって芸術的にも政治的にも、 路上のすべてのものに平等な眼光がそそがれていた。その眼光はやがて日常空間を変 色させて、日用品を変貌させる。その光の中では表現行為と攻撃行為との異常接近が 発生していたのだ。 赤瀬川原平

This era came precisely between the two Anpos. In daily life, or within the throngs on the streets, the art world’s direct action and the political world’s direct action passed by one another without even knowing the name or face of the other… And amid the throngs of the city, political and artistic actors caught the eyes of the people who watched on, the glint in their eyes shining without discriminating between the artistic and the political—attentive to everything happening on the streets. The light in their eyes would come to change the hue of everyday spaces, transform everyday objects. Within this light was the genesis of an unusual proximity between acts of expression and acts of aggression.1 —Akasegawa Genpei

1.

THE GENERATION OF ANTI-ART PERFORMERS AND THEIR POLITICAL ACTION

The artists who performed Anti-Art took aim at the professionals from their position as amateurs, fired at high-class art using popular entertainment, shot at the head and the heart from down beneath the belt. It is difficult to discern any explicit politics in their works, but this is not for lack of interest or because their actions were without politics; the fact that their politics remained on an emotional level and that their actions were practically ineffectual does not necessarily mean that their actions remained within the frameworks of “art” and “culture.” In fact, considering Anti-Art performers’ individual ways of life and their words, it cannot be said that they were simply looking to innovate within art or for recognition within the art world—political inclinations can often in fact be found in them. From the latter half of the 1950s until around 1970, despite differences in the leaders and goals of movements and considerable ups and downs, there were active political movements that engaged a wide range of people. It was not only career politicians and activists or even workers partaking in politics during this period; many university and high school students participated as well. It became common for ordinary young people, even aspiring artists, to get involved in politics even if they did not fall into special circumstances or experiences that forced them to be politically active.

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In order to understand this development, it may be helpful to observe the generational peak of the artists who appear in this book; at the same time, though, we must also keep in mind that there was a considerable generational spread among them. By compiling a list of the artists and their supporters (see below), I hope to provide a general overview of the relationships between the generations. Observing the list, we can clearly see that the nucleus of Anti-Art performers was the generation born circa 1935. Artists born within the four-year period of 1934–37 include core members of Neo Dada, Zero Jigen, Hi-Red Center, Group Ongaku, The Play, Kurohata, and Collective Kumo, and it practically covers all their sympathizers as well. If we take 1935 as the median year of birth, the average artist of this period was ten years old at the end of World War II and twenty-five in 1960, the year of the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty and the beginnings of Anti-Art. By 1970, the year of the Osaka Expo, they would be thirty-five. By this math, they were in their final year of elementary school during Japan’s big shift from militarism to democracy, they experienced the changes to Japanese Communist Party (JCP) policy and internal turmoil during their college days, and the Anpo Struggle happened just as they were coming into their own in society. These factors led to their strong inclination to distrust both the state and the established left. The generation sandwiched between two age groups—those who came of age during the war (Itoi Kanji was drafted into the jibaku-hei corps near the war’s end and Hamaguchi Tomiji fought on the front lines in China) and those born in the 1940s, who were in their twenties during the period of rapid economic growth (namely the Baby Boomer and Zenkyōto generation, at the youngest end of which were Gulliver and Chida Ui)—were the leading actors of 1960s Anti-Art performance. The Anti-Art Performers and Their Associates, by Birth Year [ ]: Group membership or professional association ( ): Year of birth (last two digits of western calendar) bold: people of particular importance in this book. Born in the 1920s (age 16–25 in 1945, age 31–40 in 1960) 糸井貫二(20)、浜口富治〔前衛土佐派〕(21)、鶴見俊輔〔評論〕(22)、松澤宥(22)、白髪一雄 （28）、 〔具体〕(23)、針生一郎〔評論〕(25)、村上三郎〔具体〕(25)、桜井孝身〔九州派〕 佐々木耕成〔ジャックの会〕(28)、澁澤龍彥〔評論〕(28)、土方巽〔舞踏〕(28)、山口勝 弘〔実験工房〕(28)、秋山邦晴〔実験工房〕(29)、石子順造〔評論〕(29)、ヨシダ・ヨシエ 〔評論〕(29)　その他──三島由紀夫〔文学〕(25)、池田龍雄(28)

Itoi Kanji (1920), Hamaguchi Tomiji [Zen’ei Tosa-ha] (’21), Tsurumi Shunsuke [critic] (’22), Matsuzawa Yutaka (’22), Shiraga Kazuo [Gutai] (’23), Hariu Ichirō [art critic] (’25), Murakami Saburō [Gutai] (’25), Sakurai Takami [Kyūshū-ha] (’28), Sasaki Kōsei [Jack Society] (’28), Shibusawa Tatsuhiko [critic] (’28), Hijikata Tatsumi [Butoh] (’28), Yamaguchi Katsuhiro [Jikken Kōbō] (’28), Akiyama Kuniharu [Jikken Kōbō] (’29), Ishiko Junzō [critic] (’29), Yoshida Yoshie [critic] (’29); Other noteworthy figures: Mishima Yukio [writer] (’25), Ikeda Tatsuo (’28)

Chapter 23———The Nether Regions of the Politics481

Born from 1930–34 (11–15 in 1945, 26–30 in 1960) 東野芳明〔評論〕(30)、平田実〔写真〕(30)、宮崎準之助〔九州派〕(30)、今泉省彦〔評 論〕(31)、中原佑介〔評論〕(31)、佐藤重臣〔映画評論〕(32)、篠原有司男〔ネオ・ダダ〕 (32)、田中敦子〔具体〕(32)、吉村益信〔ネオ・ダダ〕(32)、川仁宏〔出版〕(33)、田部光子 〔九州派〕(33)、羽永光利〔写真〕(33)、林三従〔岡山青年美術家集団〕(33)、松田政男 〔評論〕(33)、森秀人〔評論〕(33)、金坂健二〔映画／評論〕(34)、働正〔九州派〕(34)、 水野修孝〔グループ・音楽〕(34)、吉岡康弘〔写真〕(34) 　その他──島成郎〔ブント書 記長〕(31)

Tōno Yoshiaki [art critic] (1930), Hirata Minoru [photographer] (’30), Miyazaki Junnosuke [Kyūshū-ha] (’30), Imaizumi Yoshihiko [critic] (’31), Nakahara Yūsuke [art critic] (’31), Satō Shigechika [film critic] (’32), Shinohara Ushio [Neo Dada] (’32), Tanaka Atsuko [Gutai] (’32), Yoshimura Masunobu [Neo Dada] (’32), Kawani Hiroshi [publisher] (’33), Tabe Mitsuko [Kyūshū-ha] (’33), Hanaga Mitsutoshi [photographer] (’33), Hayashi Miyori [Oka­ yama Young Artists Group] (’33), Matsuda Masao [film critic] (’33), Mori Hideto [critic] (’33), Kanesaka Kenji [filmmaker/film critic] (’34), Hataraki Tadashi [Kyūshū-ha] (’34), Mizuno Shūkō [Group Ongaku] (’34), Yoshioka Yasuhiro [photographer] (’34); Other noteworthy figures: Shima Shigeo [Secretary-General of the Bund] (’31)

Born in 1935 (10 in 1945, 25 in 1960) 秋山祐徳太子、岩田信市〔ゼロ次元〕、瓜生良介〔発見の会（演劇）〕、菊畑茂久馬 〔九州派〕、工藤哲巳、刀根康尚〔グループ・音楽／評論〕、中西夏之〔ハイレッド・セ ンター〕、交楽竜弾　その他──寺山修司〔天井桟敷（演劇）〕

Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Iwata Shin’ichi [Zero Jigen], Uryū Ryōsuke [Hakken no Kai (thea­ ter)], Kikuhata Mokuma [Kyūshū-ha], Kudō Tetsumi, Tone Yasunao [Group Ongaku/art critic], Nakanishi Natsuyuki [Hi-Red Center], Mazura Ryūdan; Other noteworthy figures: Terayama Shūji [Tenjō Sajiki (theater)]

Born in 1936 (9 in 1945, 24 in 1960) 荒川修作〔ネオ・ダダ〕、オチ・オサム〔九州派〕、風倉匠〔ネオ・ダダ〕、加藤好弘〔ゼ ロ次元〕、高松次郎〔ハイ・レッド・センター〕、松江カク〔クロハタ〕、森山安英〔集団 蜘蛛〕、横尾忠則　その他──宮田国男〔内科画廊〕、若松孝二〔映画〕

Arakawa Shūsaku [Neo Dada], Ochi Osamu [Kyūshū-ha], Kazakura Shō [Neo Dada], Katō Yoshihiro [Zero Jigen], Takamatsu Jirō [Hi-Red Center], Matsue Kaku [Kurohata], Moriyama Yasuhide [Collective Kumo], Yokoo Tadanori; Other noteworthy figures: Miyata Kunio [Naiqua Gallery], Wakamatsu Kōji [filmmaker]

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Born from 1937–39 (6–8 in 1945, 21–23 in 1960) 赤瀬川原平〔ネオ・ダダ／ハイ・レッド・センター〕(37)、池水慶一〔プレイ〕(37)、千葉英 輔〔ジャックの会〕(37)、牧朗〔薔薇卍結社〕(37)、水上旬〔プレイほか〕(37)、小杉武久 〔グループ・音楽／タージ・マハル旅行団〕(38)、塩見允枝子〔グループ・音楽〕(38)、足 立正生〔映画〕(39)、岸本清子〔ネオ・ダダ〕(39)、升沢金平〔ネオ・ダダ〕(39)　その他 ─ ─唐牛健太郎〔60年安保時の全学連委員長〕(37)、樺美智子〔60年安保時に死去し た東大生〕(37)

Akasegawa Genpei [Neo Dada / Hi-Red Center] (1937), Ikemizu Keiichi [The Play] (’37), Chiba Eisuke [Jack Society] (’37), Makirō [Baramanji Kessha] (’37), Mizukami Jun [The Play] (’37), Kosugi Takehisa [Group Ongaku/Taj Mahal Travellers] (’38), Shiomi Mieko [Group Ongaku] (’38), Adachi Masao [filmmaker] (’39), Kishimoto Sayako [Neo Dada] (’39), Masuzawa Kinpei [Neo Dada] (’39); Other noteworthy figures: Karōji Kentarō [Secretary of Zengakuren during the 1960 Anpo Struggle] (’37), Kanba Michiko [University of Tokyo student who died during the 1960 Anpo protests] (’37)

Born in the 1940s (5 or younger in 1945, 11–20 in 1960) 加賀見政之〔アンビート〕(40)、唐十郎〔状況劇場（演劇）〕(40)、河口龍夫〔グループ〈 位〉〕(40)、小松辰男〔演劇〕(40)、中島由夫〔アンビート〕(40)、平岡正明〔評論／犯罪者 同盟〕(40)、かわなかのぶひろ〔8ジェネレーション（映画）〕(41)、あさいますお(42)、お おえまさのり(42)、池田正一〔円劇場（演劇）〕(43)、小山哲男〔ジャックの会〕(43)、麿赤 児〔状況劇場（演劇）／舞踏〕(43)、榎忠〔グループZero〕(44)、末永蒼生〔告陰〕(44)、 ガリバー〔プレイほか〕(47)、堀浩哉〔美共闘〕(47)、ちだ・うい〔ジャックの会〕(48)　そ の他──山本義隆〔東大全共闘〕(41)、田宮高麿〔赤軍派〕(43)、永田洋子〔連合赤軍〕 (45)、秋田明大〔日大全共闘〕(47)

Kagami Masayuki [Unbeat] (1940), Kara Jūrō [Jōkyō Gekijō (theater)] (’40), Kawaguchi Ta­tsuo [Group I] (’40), Komatsu Tatsuo [Gendai Gekijō (theater)] (’40), Nakajima Yoshio [Unbeat] (’40), Hiraoka Masaaki (critic)/[League of Criminals] (’40), Kawanaka Nobuhiro [8 Generation] (filmmaker) (’4 1), Asai Masuo (’4 2), Ōe Masanori (’4 2), Ikeda Shōichi [En ­Gekijō (theater)] (’43), Koyama Tetsuo [Jack Society] (’43), Maro Akaji [Jōkyō Gekijō (theater)] (­butoh) (’43), Enoki Chū [Group Zero] (’4 4), Suenaga Tamio [Kokuin] (’4 4), Gulliver [The Play] (’47), Hori Kōsai [Bikyōtō] (’47), Chida Ui [Jack Society] (’48); Other noteworthy figures: Yamamoto Yoshitaka [University of Tokyo Zenkyōtō] (’4 1), Tamiya Takamaro [Red Army] (’43), Nagata Hiroko [United Red Army] (’45), Akita Akehiro [Nihon University Zenkyōtō] (’47)

2.

THE POLITICAL EXPERIENCE OF THE ARTISTS

Quite a few artists born around 1935 were involved in the political movements of the 1960s—not as artists, but as ordinary citizens and students. Akasegawa Genpei and Kazakura Shō met at the Sunagawa Struggle (Sunagawa Tōsō) in 1956; and three months after Neo Dada was formed in March 1960, the unified action at the 18th National Assembly

Chapter 23———The Nether Regions of the Politics483

to stop the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty (also known as the June 15 Incident, in which Kanba Michiko was killed) was joined by Arakawa Shūsaku, Kazakura Shō, Shinohara Ushio, Tanabe Santarō, Yoshino Tatsumi and Yoshimura Masunobu from Neo Dada, but each in an individual capacity. At this time, Yoshimura, who had participated in the Sunagawa Struggle and was accustomed to demonstrations, warned the other Neo Dada members of the potential danger of a clash with armed police.2 On July 19 at midnight, the night the treaty was automatically approved by the Diet, Neo Dada rampaged at the “White House” (Yoshimura’s home and Neo Dada’s headquarters) from the excitement of it all.3 Among the Anti-Art performers, the one man who continued to be the most politically active was Akiyama Yūtokutaishi. At the time, many young people passively committed to politics due to the influence of their older peers or via group organizers, but Akiyama liked to boast that he had been active in the Zengakuren movement against Yoyogi (the JCP) since his student days at Musashino Art College, working as the school’s student council president and taking part in the Sunagawa Struggle (1956), the Kinpyō Struggle (1956), the Police Duties Execution Act Struggle (1958) and the Anpo Struggle (1960); even after he entered the workforce in 1960, he maintained a leading role in an organization under the General Council of Trade Unions of Japan (Sōhyō). He ran for governor of Tokyo in 1975 and again in 1979, achieving a great feat in performance art history by turning his entire campaign into a work of art, with the political experience he cultivated in political movements since the 1950s forming the basis for his work. The membership of Kyūshū-ha was more of a hodgepodge in its early days, as compared to the cohesive group it became from its middle period onwards, linked by a shared consciousness. From the early group, members such as Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Kuroki Yōji and Yamauchi Jūtarō in particular were formalism-oriented artists without political minds. However, an important characteristic of Kyūshū-ha was that its members were slightly older than those of Neo Dada, and included some wartime generation members, as well as people who had not gone to art school and instead were employed full-time at companies and as schoolteachers, as a result of which they became involved in union activities to varying degrees. The godfather of Kyūshū-ha, Matano Mamoru, was originally a lyrical poet, but also worked as the general secretary for the Nishinippon Shimbun (West Japan Newspaper) Union;4 its de facto leader, Sakurai Takami, was on the executive committee in charge of the editorial department for the Nishinippon Shimbun. His loud, clear voice was useful in organizing activities, and in 1964 he even participated in the general strike.5 Yagara Yutaka, an early member, continued to be active in union activities as a member of the first union of Iwataya Department Store even after his departure from Kyūshū-ha. Incidentally, the heyday of Kyūshū-ha came between two long-term strikes at major companies in Fukuoka that time, Iwataya Department Store in 1957 and Nishinippon Shimbun in 1964. Compared to Kyūshū-ha, it is hard to find any indication that other groups willingly engaged in political activity, a statement that naturally encompasses Gutai, whose leader hated bringing politics into the group’s work and was himself the president of a large corporation in Ashiya, but also applies to other artists who came along toward the end of the Yomiuri Independent era such as members of Group Ongaku, Nakanishi Natsuyuki and Takamatsu Jirō of Hi-Red Center—though they did hold p ­ erformances in spaces that crossed into politics in the anarchistic atmosphere and interpersonal

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networks of the time. Aside from Akasegawa Genpei, who was by far the most obvious anarchist of all the 1960s artists, indicted under the Act on Control of Imitation of Currency and Securities (the Model 1,000-Yen Note Trial), it is hard to find continuous and willing political action by members of Neo Dada, perhaps due to the fact that many of them were sponging off their parents, or were otherwise born to rich families in regional towns.6 Yoshimura Masunobu, for example, who was born into a family of corporate leaders, opened his home to Neo Dada and became a patron of the group. Early members of Zero Jigen, who were close in generation to Neo Dada, did not display any distinct political consciousness, inclusive of Akasegawa, Arakawa Shūsaku, Kishimoto Sayako and Iwata Shin’ichi, who was a high school classmate of Kishimoto in Nagoya. Katō Yoshihiro of Zero Jigen claims he was a member of a JCP “cell” in high school,7 but he got his teaching license during his university years and soon became a teacher, choosing a practical lifestyle as an adult. After he moved to Tokyo, he used funds obtained by starting his own electronics company to pay for Zero Jigen’s activities, flexing his business acumen; the fact that he may have worked hard at sales notwithstanding, he was more of a small business owner than a worker. Iwata Shin’ichi, born to a wealthy pawn shop family, participated in the Ōsu Incident (1952) as a high schooler, where demonstrators clashed with the police at Nagoya Baseball Stadium and Molotov cocktails were thrown. Even though this experience caused him to feel disillusioned about the JCP, he still supported the defendants of the Garbage Trial in 1970 (see chap. 9.8, p. 267) and ran for mayor of Nagoya in 1973, representing the hippie generation more seriously than Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, who only used his political activities to poke fun at politics.8 From its middle period onward, Zero Jigen added politically-oriented members from Tōhoku University, one of whom was Kamijō Junjirō. Kamijō came to be known as the manager of Zero Jigen, remaining a core member until the group’s end. He was also a member of the Tōhoku University Bund in Sendai and held settlement activities in that capacity.9 For Zero Jigen, May Day, Antiwar Expo, and Sanrizuka were not so much places for political struggle as they were festive spaces full of freedom and built-in audiences, perfect locations to stage their rituals. Katō and Iwata, however, seemed to maintain a persistent political consciousness, whether in their activities as part of the Expo Destruction Group (Banpaku Hakai Kyōtō-ha), or in Iwata’s support of the Garbage Trial and candidacy for mayor of Nagoya, if parody political movements count.10 3.

THE ETHICS OF APOLITICAL REVOLT

Other than Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, few artist-performers willingly engaged in sustained political activity that can be considered to have had real impact. Within the Anti-Art generation, although some submitted politically themed artwork to the Japan Independent Exhibition11 and some engaged in political activity, it would be a major risk to assume they were all equally politically invested, or that their politics necessarily carried over into their artistic activities. Even among members of the same generation, differences in financial resources, cultural capital, upbringing and educational background were more pronounced than they would be today. Additionally, there were often considerable age gaps among artists who belonged to the same group or worked together, and also a spectrum of political

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and personal awareness of the social significance of their actions. Kyūshū-ha, for instance, was comprised of artists from both the wartime generation and the postwar generation. Groups such as Jack Society contained an even broader range of generations and artistic tendencies—from Sasaki Kōsei, who was of the wartime generation and had experienced being interned in the Soviet Union, to baby boomers like Chida Ui, who was a child of mass media society. And Jack Society consisted of a mix of (“pure art”) work-oriented and action-oriented artists. This mix of work- and action-oriented artists was also visible within Neo Dada, which was a small but elite group with a narrower generational range. Many artists in these groups were not involved in political activity at all. Within Unbeat, made up of young workers who may have self-identified as workers, Kagami Masayuki participated in the Anpo protest demonstrations,12 but neither of Nakajima Yoshio’s artworks nor activities had anything to do with politics. Even some years after Unbeat, among the Ritualists were artists who did not directly engage in political activism or deal with political motifs in their work, such as Mizukami Jun, Koyama Tetsuo, and Makirō from Baramanji Kessha. Conversely, artists whose political consciousness and artistic expressions were closely linked, like Matsue Kaku of Kurohata and Suenaga Tamio of Kokuin, were rather rare. As mentioned above, most of the members of Kyūshū-ha were urban workers, and at the time of the Miike Struggle, emotionally their sympathies were with the workers; however, they kept the creation and exhibition of their artwork separate from their careers and union activities. In that sense, their artistic activities differed from those of Circle Village, led by Tanigawa Gan. Kyūshū-ha may have utilized organizing techniques like labor unions and Circle Village, but it is there that the similarities stop. The artists who participated in the Sanson Kōsaku Tai (Mountain Village Organizing Corps) made illustrated flyers and distributed them to the workers and village residents; Kyūshū-ha did not engage in reportage about political struggles or working conditions.13 Though it was never actually staged, Yamashita Kikuji developed a kamishibai (literally “paper play,” a storytelling form using illustrated panels)14 in an attempt to expose the Akebono Village Incident;15 Kyūshū-ha never used art to raise awareness about the issues faced by workers and farmers.16 Although they supported the Miike laborers, Kyūshū-ha did not hold a gekirei shikishi (square cards with encouraging messages) exhibition like Japan Art Society (Nihon Bijutsu Kai) did in Ōmuta.17 Similarly, performance groups including Zero Jigen did not issue antiwar messages to the crowds of the city as the “folk guerrilla” did in Shinjuku, nor did they represent, as the songs of Okabayashi Nobuyasu, the sorrows of the San’ya day laborers’ poverty and the discrimination they faced as burakumin. In film, VAN made Document 6.15 in 1961 and showed it at the memorial gathering for Kanba Michiko, and Kokuin made a film to document the political struggles after the second Haneda Incident in 1967. VAN’s work was not so much a participation in direct citizen’s action as it was directed at advanced student activists. In contrast, Friends of Minamata Victims—Video Diary, a video project conducted by Nakaya Fujiko (with Kobayashi Hakudō) in 1972, was an intervention into the actions of victims of Minamata Disease and their supporters in protest of the polluting Chisso Corporation in Tokyo.18 Even if the activities of these artists and filmmakers were clearly politically motivated, they never attained the reach of the Minjung Misul (People’s Art)19 in South Korea, positioned within a mass democratization and popular culture movement against the dictatorship in the 1980s. Kobayashi Tomi, painter and writer of children’s literature, established

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Koe-naki-koe no Kai (Voiceless Voices Society) and participated in the Anpo Struggle, an action that had significant impact on Beheiren and the later citizens’ movement; nevertheless, this was the activism of a citizen rather than an artist, embodied by Kobayashi’s sitins and demonstrations, in which she purposefully avoided novel innovations that would attract media attention, instead daring to cultivate a style that “did not stand out from everyday life.”20 In sum, it should be said that “the direct action” of artists oriented towards the avant-garde in their expressions had not a single iota of influence over either of the two Anpo Struggles, nor over the various political issues that arose between them. Among avant-garde artists, no political statements were issued by any sort of broad coalition of individuals and groups. Looking to other fields of art—even contemporary music, which was considerably less political, held the Yagi no Kai (Goat Society)21 concert in November 1958, where a joint statement by composers, conductors and critics was distributed addressing the dangers that the Police Duties Execution Act posed to freedom of expression. In June 1960, people in the music trade held the Rally of Musicians to Protect Democracy at Sogetsu Art Center and submitted a resolution calling for the withdrawal of the Security Treaty vote, dissolution of the Diet, and resignation of Prime Minister Kishi. The participants and signatories numbered over 580, and afterwards they held a demonstration march to the Diet Building.22 Architects, who were even more likely to be involved with mega capital and calculated political moves, were faster than artists in launching a movement against the 1970 Security Treaty revision and Expo ’70, forming the Kenchikuka ’70 Kōdō Iinkai (Architects ’70 Action Committee, see chap. 9.3, pp. 251–2). Within this context, the Japan Art Society, born out of the spirit of postwar democracy with a left-wing inclination, joined the Society for the Criticism of the Anpo (Anpo Hihan no Kai), and the Zenkoku Bijutsuka Kyōgikai (National Committee of Artists), comprised of the Japan Art Society, Peace Council of Artists (Bijutsuka Heiwa Kaigi), Jiyū Bijutsuka Association and others, engaging in vigorous anti-Anpo activity.23 Although artist groups formed all over Japan during this period, avant-garde artists with Anti-Art tendencies rarely took collective political action. It would not be until the end of the 1960s that such political action materialized with Expo Destruction Group and Artists Joint-Struggle Council (Bijutsuka Kyōtō Kaigi, Bikyōtō). Could this be because art, compared to music or architecture, has less potential for monetization? And that, although many group experiments occurred during that period, on a fundamental level, art is based on individual activity? Or because, even though artists may have individually felt sympathy for workers, rebellious students, and people of the lower strata on an emotional level, they were unequipped to take action and disseminate information in a way that would influence society? For instance, Akasegawa Genpei recalls: I went to Sunagawa but could not do anything except sing Aka Tonbo [Red Dragonfly, a popular nostalgic song]. […] Even though I was at the site of the struggle, I felt like a piece of blotting paper soaked through with water, and came home without having mustered any strength for the cause.24

During the 1960 Anpo struggle, when Wakai Nihon no Kai (Young Japan Society)25 invited Kudō Tetsumi from the visual art community as a representative of the Neo Dadaists,

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Kudō shouted, “Now we have no choice but action!” Akasegawa records this anecdote as an episode that exemplifies how artists had neither the “political organizational mobilization” nor the “language skills.”26 As already noted, Neo Dada members joined the large June 15 demonstration, but Shinohara Ushio felt alienated, as though he did not fit in with the students forming protest scrums.27 Similarly, Moriyama Yasuhide, before he formed Collective Kumo, went to join a demonstration against the USS Enterprise port call in 1968 in Sasebo, Nagasaki, but was reported to have felt that it was “no place for a painter like me.”28After the formation of Collective Kumo in 1969, when the members participated in a demonstration protesting the Yamada Ammunition Depot along with activists from around the country, Moriyama and other members were excluded by the demonstrators—because their group did not seem serious enough—before they could be arrested by the police. The first action of Mizukami Jun in 1960 was to mourn the death of Kanba Michiko, who died in the Anpo Struggle; it was held without any advance notice and amounted to nothing more than a personal, introspective act—there was no visible artistic expression for onlookers to perceive. The strange performances of Zero Jigen, Kurohata, and Kokuin at May Day in 1967, which were obviously not serious political activity, were halted by the May Day organizing committee.29 In 1969, The Play were interrupted by students of an anti-JCP sect who broke into the middle of their performance at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, likely because they found The Play’s artistic expression in an exhibition hosted by a state-run institution to be nothing more than “bourgeois art” (a term graffitied by a member of the activist group at the museum entrance at the time).30 Itoi Kanji would display the message “Do not kill” at performances and for photos during interviews with critics, and went to see one of the monthly anti-Anpo rallies in 1969 in Sendai, but he never dared to lay bare extreme antiwar sentiments as Matsue Kaku did in urban spaces—though he did send letters of encouragement via post to Zero Jigen, Kokuin and Mizukami Jun, dedicate an act of praise to the “Eye Ball Man” who occupied the eye of the Tower of the Sun at Expo ’70 (see chap. 18.6, pp. 408–9), and generally kept abreast of the activities of anarchists. Lacking overt politics, society would only ever see Itoi as the crazy man who went streaking through Ginza and the grounds of Expo ’70. Regardless of whether it had political meaning, their participation in May Day, university disputes, the Sanrizuka Struggle and other political events for the purpose of performance rather than activism, is something unique to Anti-Art performers. Katō Yoshihiro used the political phrase “art terrorism” to describe the actions of Zero Jigen; they boldly staged their rebellion against the structures that adorned the end of Anti-Art performance history, which centered around the Expo Destruction Group, but these activities played out in the media not as political acts but as popular culture. Even given that Katō and Iwata Shin’ichi’s actions included legitimate critiques and rejections of Modern systems and aesthetics, and of the value systems of postwar Japan, either their actions were officially recognized as a new form of art called Happenings, or alternatively, were reported in weekly magazines under headlines such as “‘Avant-garde’ school: merriment in the spring,”31 “Pornographers under the name of avant-garde art,”32 and “Anti-Expo movement plans to smash Expo with eroticism,”33 surviving in underground theater as vulgar entertainment. Most ordinary people who saw their performances in person were likely bewildered, or just smiled awkwardly. In that sense, although Anti-Art performers

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may have been committed to the anti-system movement and made artwork based on leftwing themes, they were basically disconnected from political sects and devoted themselves to activity that could not be interpreted as political messages—in other words, to activity that can be described as “art.” Thus, the designs these artists had to influence the masses with the avant-garde, and to influence politics with art, were in practice entirely ineffective, their desires nothing more than soliloquies, daydreams and fantasies. It was Akasegawa Genpei’s turn of phrase, “ideological perverts” (shisōteki henshi­ tsusha), that ironically encapsulated the position of the Anti-Art performer so well that it became the title of his book. As explained earlier, the phrase was apparently taken from a conversation in which the police commissioner ordered a “crackdown on ideological perverts,” a crackdown that was a part of a nationwide “ritual” to “cleanse” the cities by “eliminating” anything that was non-conforming. To again cite Akasegawa words from the start of this chapter, when “the art world’s direct action and the political world’s direct action passed by one another without even knowing the name or face of the other,” the networks of both parties were connected wirelessly by this key phrase, “ideological pervert.” But why were “art” and “politics” both oriented towards “direct action” in the first place? One reason is due to the unique behavioral principles of the Anti-Art performance generation. There is a definitive difference between artists born in the mid-1930s and the important artists that led art in the 1950s. Artists born in the 1920s who began working as artists in the early to mid-1950s, for example Yamashita Kikuji (born 1919) or Katsuragawa Hiroshi (born 1924), were heavily influenced by Okamoto Tarō and Hanada Kiyoteru. They struggled to reconcile the political avant-garde with the artistic avant-garde, external reality (society/politics) with internal reality (unconsciousness/imagination), and communism with surrealism. In contrast, the generation of artists born in the mid1930s, sandwiched between Shima Shigeo (born 1931), who was active with the Bund during the Anpo Struggle, and Karōji Kentarō (born 1937) of the Zengakuren, seem to share attitudes with the leaders of the New Left Movement: While the rebellion of the first generation of postwar youth was extremely normative, ethical and idealistic, the rebellion of youth in mass society was more lifestyle-oriented, with a sense of mission to bridge the gap between idea and action. Put another way, a relationship was established whereby acting according to one’s heart automatically amounted to a rebellion against the existing society. […] The leaders of the Communist League [the Bund] were practically of the same generation as the prototypical sengo-ha [postwar generation of writers], which includes Ishihara [Shintarō] and Ōe [Kenzaburō]; in other words, as mentioned earlier, they belonged to the generation that embodied rebellion within the postwar mass society establishment. The Anpo Zengakuren movement was the materialization, in one fell swoop, of a younger generation’s inclination towards political rebellion, in response to the oppression of their time, which the radical part of the generation born in the early 1930s had perceived and questioned. (Kan Takayuki)34

If this were the case, then we can agree that many artists, having participated in some flavor of political activism in the late ’50s and having taken up political themes in their artwork, resisted the existing societal order not by “normative, ethical and idealistic”

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means but by “acting according to their hearts.” This attitude, however, was not related to acting according only to individual interests and sensibilities. Just as the Bund was more interested in pushing freedom of speech than democracy (majority rule), “even with the aid of violence and scheming,” as Nishibe Susumu puts it, in their “inclination toward anarchism,”35 artists held a “sense of duty” (shimeikan) that was a vestige of their “ethics” (rinri), which are difficult to pin down by their norms or concepts. Somewhere in this vicinity is the reason why there were hardly any Anti-Art performers who created work with a coherent political message, why they instead chose to act as “ideological perverts” even as they were self-aware of their lack of political efficaciousness. 4.

“DIRECT ACTION” IN THE MEDIA

In addition to the generational qualities thus far discussed, there is one more important element shared by much of the direct action (chokusetsu kōdō) that occurred in post-Anpo art and politics: the advancement of media technology. As a result of the concentration of the population into large cities in the 1960s, the spread of weekly magazines and television media that sought breaking news and scandals, and the parallel rise of the New Left that that came about amid the criticism of the established Left, graphic, physical clashes between crowds of students and citizens and police forces were quickly reported by the media and broadcast nationwide. In April 1959, the marriage of the crown prince was the focal point of a hotly contested battle for news scoops by weekly magazines, and the public’s desire to see the parade resulted in an estimated viewership of 15 million people (over 30% of the population) for the live broadcast. This was the media climate in which the Anpo Struggle occurred. The “clumsy strategy” of direct action by the central faction of the Zengakuren, going up against the police forces without any helmets or wooden sticks (geba-bō) and getting their heads bashed in, was perceived as “honest action,” which “gave people a better impression of them compared to the Socialist and Communist parties, who tended to capitulate to political transactions.”36 This perception was enhanced by the latest technology and would not have been possible without that power to transmit information. “At that time the newest form of communication technology, the telephone” promoted “a speed of information exchange beyond political leaders’ expectations,” and the promulgation of the mimeograph made it possible to print flyers and leaflets without depending on existing publishing channels. Above all, however, the newest and biggest form of media was television. “The Anpo Struggle was, as it were, the first political incident that people [in Japan] came into contact with on a ‘national’ level, via the television.”37 The spread of the television directly connected the whole nation to Tokyo’s political climate, and the reduced size and weight of broadcasting equipment made live on-site broadcasts possible. On Radio Kantō, “the sound of tear gas bullets exploding and sirens mixed with the voices of police yelling ‘arrest them!’ the reporter’s tearful voice saying ‘although I’m broadcasting live, the police punched me in the head’ while reporting on scene reverberated across the nation.”38 According to Oguma Eiji, via television housewives in Osaka were seeing demonstrators at the Diet attacked by right-wingers and the violent actions of the police forces, and were sympathetic to the demonstrators. Thus had television

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created an “Imagined Community” (Benedict Anderson).39 This is certainly comparable to the impact mobile phones and the internet had on civil movements following the communication revolution of the 1990s. In the art world, the Yomiuri Shimbun, a national media outlet, attracted young artists from all corners of Japan with its Yomiuri Independent Exhibition. Tone Yasunao, who featured in the Anti-Art debates in chapter 3, remarks, “We thought of the Yomiuri Independent not as a simple exhibition venue, but as an opportunity to exhibit our works through the mass media network of a newspaper company.”40 Okamoto Tarō influenced artists such as Itoi Kanji, through not only his writings but his television broadcasts as well. After the news coverage of Georges Mathieu’s painting demonstration at a Tokyo department store in 1957, it was Shinohara Ushio who was inspired by the possibilities of communicating avant-garde art to a broad segment of the general public, and more quickly than anyone else he understood that the development of mass media technology, and the systems created by the growth in its consumers, could be useful for artists as well. Jack Society and Zero Jigen quickly followed after him. All-Japan Contemporary Artists Council, which developed out of Jack Society, asserted the importance of lobbying the media, government agencies, Diet members, political, economic, educational and women’s organizations, and even further, insisted on the necessity of “media celebrities acting as representatives for artists.”41 Its bulletin, Art 21, focused on building a national network of avant-garde artists—an attempt to create an artist network through printing and the post that could also be seen in Asai Masuo’s mimeographed magazine, which he sent nationwide, Kokuin’s and Iwata Shin’ichi’s mini-komi zines, and even in Itoi Kanji’s mail art, Matsuzawa Yutaka’s fictitious exhibitions, and the language expression network in which Mizukami Jun participated. Aiming to surmount the siteand time-specific nature of exhibitions and performances, these projects were attempts by avant-garde artists to create “Imagined Community”—or in Yoshida Yoshie’s words, a “commune.” 5.

FROM “ART AND POLITICS” TO “THE POLITICS OF ART”

While some of the artists who were involved with Anti-Art performance had brief experiences with leftist movements and the typical, diagrammatic Socialist Realism under the influence of those movements, which depicted workers and their struggles, they went on to part ways with the established left-wing parties after losing trust in them due to their failure to understand the times, their authoritarian organizational structures, and their repeated changes in policy. In their art as well, they gave up on the futility of Socialist Realism and went on to experiment with post-Art Informel forms, materials, and spaces. According to Akasegawa Genpei, painters of his time were prompted to shift from the Japan Independent to the Yomiuri Independent because of their “yearning for the immediacy of painting that responds to the real world.” At first, this desire drove them to Socialist Realism, but Akasegawa interestingly points out that this pattern which came to “act as a kind of levee that maintains the distance between painting and the real world” in fact “is almost exactly replicated in the realm of politics, in the procedural bureaucratization of the revolutionary government.”42

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Instead, Anti-Art performers had a tendency to mock left-wing cultural movements. Kazakura Shō’s Happening on a stool, purported to have occurred in 1957, is considered to be the first example of art performance that was not based on painting, and it was at the same time a satirical intervention against left-leaning theater. Tabe Mitsuko of Kyūshū-ha based Placard (1961) after a eureka moment in which she asked herself “why are the placards for major labor union campaigns so similar to those of the right wing?”43 We might also see Akiyama Yūtokutaishi’s performances, in which he acts out a popified version of prewar nationalism and militarism, as his way of mocking the leftwing movements with which he had extensive experience. In addition to their rejection and satire of the styles of left-wing movements, many Anti-Art performers strategically used venues of political movements while knowing they were outsiders. Early examples of this practice include the event commemorating the first anniversary of the Anpo in 1961, the inaugural event of Jiritsu Gakkō in 1962, and the May Day performances by Kurohata, Zero Jigen, 8 Generation, and Kokuin in 1966– 67. The Expo Destruction Group of ’69 may have held the most authentic political actions, in the sense that it was the reorganization of several different artist groups attempting to form a united front with cultural practitioners and students outside the arts; however, save for the core members of Kokuin, it is fair to say that more so than spurring independent opposition movements against the 1970 Anpo and the Osaka Expo, the group simply utilized the sites of those kinds of movements for their work. For Katō Yoshihiro, who aimed to surpass Zero Jigen, Expo ’70 was the natural extension of the interest Zero Jigen had shown for urban spaces, spectators, and crowds since 1963, the ideal stage for demonstration where a large number of people were expected to gather. As such, they cannot be considered political actions on par with Beheiren, which led the anti-Expo movement. By the end of the 1960s, when Happenings were embraced as popular culture, performances came to be held in places with no connection to politics—on the streets of shopping districts, at strip clubs and discos, at the Expo Festival Plaza where Gutai held events and at the Kobe Carnival, where The Play and Group I performed. For this reason, as time went on more options for performance venues became available, especially in metropolitan cities. At the same time, however, the more the possibilities for venues expanded, the higher the likelihood that the government and/or the police would intervene; and as the aforementioned “cleansing” of cities and crackdowns on “ideological perverts” increased in severity, performance became detached from politics and enclosed into innocuous “cultural” (read: art) venues. It is precisely in response to this state of affairs that a certain type of performance artist, equipped with the spirit of Anti-Art that tended toward the “nether regions” of the body, culture, and politics, selected particular places for (and timings of) their works, and dared to take their acts to the limits of expression that those spaces allowed. An intriguing example—one of the ultimate examples of Anti-Art performance and yet incredibly minor and local—is the final act of Collective Kumo, held in 1970 in Yanagawa, Fukuoka. As mentioned in chapter 19, activists gathered from around the country to protest the firing of three teachers who were accused of teaching with left-wing bias at Denshūkan High School, holding demonstrations and protest actions. At a demonstration in July, Collective Kumo’s Moriyama Yasuhide and Collective He went up onto the roof of the school and exposed their genitals; at another demonstration in November, they

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raised a flag illustrated with a penis in the style of toilet wall graffiti, which resulted in Moriyama’s arrest. Before that point, Moriyama had cultivated a thoroughly nihilistic approach with his belief that no radical avant-garde performance can have any effectiveness or mass appeal whatsoever. By this point in time, Kyūshū-ha had practically disbanded, with only Kikuhata Mokuma having become a contemporary art star, and ex-Neo Dada and Anti-Art artists were submitting work en masse to exhibit at the Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan held by Mainichi Shimbunsha. Within these conditions, Moriyama attempted to reenact the uchigeba (violent internal conflict) of an exceedingly obscure local art group (he used the political term, “purge,” to describe it) and through this reenactment he aimed to tear down the values of the contemporary art world. In Moriyama’s mind, his doubts of leftist movements by Anti-Art artists—nay, of all manner of action that presumed political efficacy, be it the New Left movements, or citizens movements—overlapped with his apprehensions about avant-garde art that sought the recognition and support of state and enterprise, and about the artists who had begun to swarm towards special exhibitions at government art museums, competitions sponsored by newspapers, and Expo ’70. About the action that led to his arrest, Moriyama writes the following: To the act of demonstrating, which has become routine and weathered, losing its excitement in its ordinariness, I added the extraordinary and absurd act of “becoming naked”— which is in itself nothing but nonsense—in order to revitalize the protest-as-expression inside myself by recovering into our hands the intrinsic, festival-like energy that pointedly manifests lively laughter and joy and rage and sorrow. 44

Finding fault with every art and every movement, Moriyama, having already been abandoned by his colleagues in Collective Kumo, committed this act in his search for a “place to die.” But for Moriyama in that state, these positive words of his, seeking the “revitalization” of “protest-as-expression” through “something like street theater,”45 are quite unusual. The text was written during his trial struggle, so it could contain some degree of rhetorical appeal, but even so, he intriguingly chose a place of political dispute for his “place to die” rather than a space of “art” (which here includes Happenings and events). It may have been his gamble on the final possibilities of creating “Imagined Community” through major and minor media, within the hodgepodge of a “public” made up of diverse classes and occupations, just as it was at the time of the 1960 Anpo. A similar incident involving nudity on a roof occurred one year earlier, in June 1969 at Kyoto University, when Expo Destruction Group enacted Zenra katate-age (Fully nude one-hand raise). The responses to this act included: “They have no philosophy at all.” (angura researcher); “At the current stage, their actions have more negative effects than positive for the Zenkyōto movement” (Kyoto University Barricade Festival Executive Committee). 46 But was it truly such a folly that found no resonance with anyone? Was it not connected to the “provocative attitude towards conventional common senses and customs in art and social life” seen in the New Left?47 For example, in a manga from a weekly magazine titled Banpaku kaijō bakuha keikaku (Plan to blow up the Expo venue)

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 217. Cover of gekiga weekly  218. Osaka Castle Park Anti-Expo  219. Scene of the activist leader ranting in Plan to Blow Up the magazine Comic Magazine (July 16, (August, 1969) scene. The words Expo Venue. 1970) that includes the story Plan “Zero Jigen” can be seen in Plan to Blow Up the Expo Venue. Original to Blow Up the Expo Venue. story by Kunimitsu Shirō, art and dramatization by Yamaoka Reiji.

[fig. 217-218], which came out approximately one year later, the activist leader, who is about to be arrested when his plan to explode the Expo venue is foiled, screams the following during a meeting: Take off and throw away all the clothes you’re wearing now! Being totally naked is stronger than any other weapon today, isn’t it! […] All the news cameramen and televisions will shoot us at the scene of the opening of Expo. Then, through television, our moment of naked bodies will be delivered to households throughout the whole world!” [fig. 219].

Reading it back now, this is a hilarious scene in a less-than-well-made comic, hardly sympathetic to the young terrorists. But even so, there is no tone of ridicule regarding the absurdity of their actions, which anticipate the reporting power of the mass media. When it was published, Expo ’70 was underway and the actions of Expo Destruction Group the year before and arrests of its members were widely reported, so it was a timely piece; still, a certain type of reader who harbored a sense of unease about the Expo— not only university students who read Shūkan Shōnen Magajin, one of the most popular manga magazines, and Garo, a magazine for artistic manga, but also working-class men like the protagonist in Banpaku kaijō bakuha keikaku who read Comic Magazine, Japan’s first weekly dramatic comic (gekiga) magazine48—was likely the kind of reader with whom the author expected the work to resonate.

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ANARCHY OF THE BODY

The chronology in part II that concretely lays out the movement from Anti-Art to performance art is summarized from the perspective of this chapter as follows: A subset of artists became involved with the left-wing movements of the 1950s and used them as the subjects of their paintings.  Around the time of the 1960 Anpo, they shifted from painting to Anti-Art, creating work using everyday objects and the body.  In the years following the Anpo, some artists broke away from the existing left-wing organizations and ideologies, forming groups to carry out their own “direct actions.”  The Yomiuri Independent, an exhibition dependent on the power of mass media and an art museum, came to an end, leading artists to use their own media and venues to exhibit and hold performances.  After the mid-1960s, performance practice began to thrive in the “niches” of urban spaces and domains of subculture which expanded “outside” the realm of art in the 1960s; a subset of this practice merged with the Zenkyōtō movement.

If Anti-Art performance is not given its rightful place in each of these stages, it will all too quickly disappear from history. And an important piece of this narrative is the expansion and diversification of the media—newspapers, television, weekly magazines, and mini-komi zines—that played a major role in the development of Anti-Art performance. The expressions of Anti-Art performers and the artists who surrounded them were more political than the performance of this era in a broad sense—more than Jikken Kōbō, Gutai, and intermedia artists—and unmistakably did they aim to transcend “art” and reach “society.” When the rebellious generation (before receiving the blessings of rapid economic growth), “lifestyle-oriented, with a sense of mission to bridge the gap between idea and action” in the words of Kan Takayuki, synchronized with new media such as television and weekly magazines that were, in a certain sense, much more open than politics, young people who had roots in art threw themselves into performance as an expression of nonpolitical rebellion for various reasons, ranging from the influence of Dada, to mainstream media advertisement, to entertainment and hobbyist behavior. The Anti-Art performance artists were politically ineffectual; but more than that, they were unable to garner support or understanding from the general public, and they refused the efforts of the state and enterprise to reorder society, as well as the existing left-wing parties and their Stalinism. Further, they rejected art institutions and censorship that suppressed creativity, the critique of intellectual elites captivated by the West,

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and commercialism. They violated the order of the city, with their lowbrow, ritualistic, bodily art, at times even occupying urban spaces. The humanistic freedom—in the words of Herbert Read, not “a negative condition—the absence of control, the liberty of unlicensed conduct freedom” that “always implies freedom from,” but rather “a positive condition—specifically, freedom to create, freedom to become what one is”49—pursued by artists did not fit within the bounds of politics and culture, and if it must be given a name, can only be called anarchism. Anarchism, “an underground channel that has flowed since the start of human history”50 is difficult to define, but one general perception is that it is a faction of the former left-wing that has now lost its power, that immediately rejects all political parties, government organizations and even the representative system as fraught with newfound authority, and also an ideology that demands complete individual freedom while insisting on direct action, such as strikes. However, even if this behavior is thought to be a menace not only to institutional order but to the daily lives of citizens, the understanding that “anarchy” means “disorder” or “chaos” is incorrect. The etymology of “anarchy” comes from the Greek anarchos, meaning the state of being “without (an) a ruler (arkhos),” which is why the philosophy of pursuing peaceful and primordial community through mutual aid is an important aspect of anarchism. Now, if one takes the position that anarchism has become politically and socially void and only remains as an ethic, or that Ōsugi Sakae’s Taisho-era anarchism was also an individual emancipation, then perhaps anarchism as such was an even more important concept for religious people, and, for artists. For precisely this reason, anarchism gained support from the Neo-impressionist painters during the heyday of anarchism in France, from the 1870s to early 1880s.51 While it may be difficult to discern signs of Camille Pissarro’s sympathies toward anarchism in his paintings, Jérôme labeled the Impressionists “anarchists” and “crazies” (see p. 33), and it was not only academic artists like him but also the ordinary public who saw the bold painterly experiments that came after Impressionism as anti-social for the time. There were strong anarchistic inclinations in the actions of the New Left, which broke away from the Old Left and often raised the banner of anti-Stalinism, as well as in the actions of the various types of post-Anpo literati and intelligentsia; they can also be found in the activities of Tanigawa Gan, who was active at the same time as early Kyūshū-ha in Fukuoka—a circle for intense mutual criticism that eluded hierarchy and authoritarianism, his concept of an Oriental village, and his dream of a commune made up of laborers from the lowest rung of society, including discriminated peoples and Zainichi Koreans. The Bund tried to push freedom of speech “even if it took violence and scheming.” Jiritsu Gakkō, in which Tanigawa also participated, had a vision of creating solidarity between urban lower-class workers. This lineage of anarchism was carried on by the people who were involved in Jiritsu Gakkō: artists and musicians including Akasegawa Genpei, Tone Yasunao and Nakanishi Natsuyuki. The banner was then taken up by Imaizumi Yoshihiko, Kawani Hiroshi, Hiraoka Masaaki and Matsuda Masao, whose actions were neither defined as political nor cultural. Finally came Hi-Red Center and League of Criminals, and a shoplifting incident by a member of the latter triggered the Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident. Kawani and Matsuda, joined by Ishii Kyōji, Yamaguchi Kenji, and Sasamoto Masahiro, formed the Tokyo Action Front (Tokyo

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Kōdō Sensen)52 in May 1965, which participated in a struggle against the Japan-Korea Basic Relations Treaty. Sasamoto would go on to be arrested in October 1966 for joining the attack on Japan Special Metals in Tanashi, Tokyo, a plant that was manufacturing weapons; this incident would become the first known postwar direct action by anarchists. Ishii and Kawani were editors for Gendai Shichōsha, where they published books spanning culture and politics, work that leads them to found Bigakkō, an alternative art school where Akasegawa, Kikuhata Mokuma, Matsuzawa Yutaka and Mizukami Jun later become lecturers.53 In November  1967, the Esperantist Yui Chūnoshin, although much older than the people mentioned above, objected to Prime Minister Satō Eisaku’s support for the bombing of North Vietnam, and self-immolated in front of the prime minister’s residence. The following month, as an homage to Yui, a performance was held jointly by a group of Ritualists: Kurohata, Zero Jigen, Itoi Kanji, Kokuin, Baramanji Kessha, and 8 Generation.54 Looking at non-artists with anarchistic tendencies, Kawani Hiroshi was probably most deeply engaged with performance. A supporter of Hi-Red Center and editor at magazine Keishō (later, Kikan) and publisher Gendai Shichōsha, he continued to support the actions of artists throughout his life, and he himself conducted many performances in his later years. In the most extremely anarchist work of an artist of that era, the Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident, he became secretary-general of the group supporting the defendant, Akasegawa Genpei. Miyata Kunio of the Naiqua Gallery, the legendary base for avant-garde art, was a member of the Bund in Jikei University School of Medicine, and a close friend of Shima Shigeo, secretary-general of the Zengakuren.55 Yoshida Yoshie, the most antiestablishment art critic of the time, took a sustained interest in performance artists, filmmakers, and butoh dancers. Hanaga Mitsutoshi, a photographer who had a physical disability, continued to pursue the bodies of Zero Jigen and butoh dancers as subjects. Yoshioka Yasuhiro, another photographer, often shot Anti-Art performances; as a friend of Kudō Tetsumi, who was from the same hometown, he resolved to be “anti-establishment, anti-art, anti-photogenic” after the shock of the Anpo.56 Adachi Masao, the most radical filmmaker of the 1960s and a member of VAN, was a close friend of Neo Dada and Group Ongaku, and also expressed feeling an affinity with Zero Jigen.57 There were many such Anti-Art sympathizers who supported and implemented the anarchic radicalism that direct action brought. The transformation of garbage-like material or of garbage itself into art, which can be found in the work of Kyūshū-ha, Neo Dada, Jikken Ground ∧ in Kyoto and N.A.G. in Nagoya. Hi-Red Center’s interventions into the city in the Tokyo Metropolis. Zero Jigen’s carnivalesque overthrow of order through its juxtaposition of clothing and nudity, Western modernity and Japanese premodernity. Taking the black flag of anarchism as its very group name, Kurohata’s continual broadcast of antiwar messages. Jack Society’s pursuit of distribution and recognition systems that differed from the existing art establishment. Asai Masao’s local, dirty commune for art and sex, which he attempted to create with young men and women in Seto. Communes featured in the activities of two groups formed in the late 1960s as well: The Play created temporary communes for big projects without discarding their base of operations as city dwellers; Buzoku (“The Tribe”), by contrast, permanently relocated to the mountains and southern islands—but the two shared a common spirit. Though its refined, minimalist sculptures seemed to hold no

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connection to politics, Ikemizu Keiichi, a core member of The Play, offers the following anarchistic words: As long as visual artists are artists, they should carry the weight of the ideologies of the age they live in. […] The ideology of an artist must be fundamentally leftist […] and artists must be independent, moving entities that are able to develop their ideas in a position of complete freedom, not bound by anything, not state power nor religion nor art organizations.58

And the commune-oriented Buzoku who broke away from the city, longing for primal community: “We declare, we are gradually making a society that is supported by a very different system than the state, inside the shell of this state society.”59 The attempts at a fluid community that travels freely between the city and nature, the interior and exterior of the theater, as seen in productions like Multi-Play by Ikeda Shōichi’s En Gekijō. “The artist group as a spiritual collective, aiming to be a free commune” formed by groups such as Matsuzawa Yutaka with Mizukami Jun’s Nirvana, which demanded “equal, indiscriminate art, art freed from all constraints.”60 Although the methods and aesthetics differed depending on the artist and group, there are few Anti-Art performance practices that cannot be included within the concept of anarchism. The lineage of collective anarchism, which can be traced from Asai as its precursor to Kokuin, The Play and Buzoku, aimed to create communes where they would not be bound by existing political, cultural and lifestyle systems. Opposite this lineage is Itoi Kanji’s extreme brand of individualistic anarchism. Born in 1920, Itoi remembers spotting the radical anarchist Ōsugi Sakae soon after the Great Kanto Earthquake at the age of three. Whether or not this is true, Itoi’s thorough antiwar ideology, his display of his naked body as humanity’s original natural state, his amateurish and hobbyist expression and affinity for Zen and Dada made him by far the most anarchic of the main players in this book. Among his prolific works of mail art, which he continued to make and send into his nineties, were the anarchist newsletters Kurohata and Iom Tsūshin, publications from the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, certificates of participation in an antiwar shareholder movement to buy up shares in Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and a biography of anarchist and Esperantist Yamaga Taiji. Furthermore, Itoi’s individual anarchism was not unrelated to that of Kyūshū-ha in the late 1950s, Asai Masuo in the mid-’60s, and the commune-orientation of The Play and other art groups in the late ’60s. Just as Asai’s regional activities were known in other parts of Japan through his various self-published mimeographs, Itoi’s activities were known even by artists with whom he had no personal acquaintance because of his mail art—which made him a legendary artist. The “artists in action” described in Yoshida Yoshie’s essay (see chap. 2.1, p. 59), who were inclined towards “communes,” seemed to be establishing their own “networks” in an age before the internet. Perhaps this was the germination of a commune, an aggregate of solidarity between individuals, between individuals and groups, between groups, a body of resistance made from direct action that traverses culture and politics, akin to the solidarity of a new anarchism formed amid the globalization of today. With that in mind, even though the attempts at communes and networks disbanded and went bankrupt around 1970, and these artists failed to leave their mark on art history, for the first time, the practices of Anti-Art performance arise to remain significant to us today.

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THE CITY AND ASPHALT

Up until the mid-1950s, the integration of the political avant-garde and the artistic avant-garde, and the integration of surrealism and modernism were important issues; after 1955, the JCP lost its status as representative of the leftist movement, the New Left was established and developed, and major turning points like the Anpo Struggle and the Miike Struggle happened; and once the period of rapid economic growth of the mid1960s set in, the politics of avant-garde art took on a less explicit form, no longer visible as it was in the 1950s with reportage paintings. At the end of the 1950s, when Kyūshū-ha was established, with the rise of the New Left and the citizens movement as their backdrop, artists sought out venues to show their work not dependent on juried exhibitions by Tokyo-based arts organizations and prefectural exhibitions, and found them in the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition and the streets. Still, the state of affairs in which artists were overlooked or ignored if they failed to find favor with a small handful of critics remained unchanged, and before long a career trajectory for artists was established in international exhibitions and competitions. As we saw in the Anti-Art debates, “upper-echelon courtier” critics often used art ideologies popular in the West as a criteria, ignoring the work of “bottom-rung samurai” and “provincial samurai” artists who struggled in the quagmire of the local realities of Japan. Artists’ search for a social recognition system that did not depend on critics ended in failure, with the Anti-Art performers only able to make a name for themselves within the realm of popular culture. In fact, it appears as though all of this “artwork” (as in, the work of artists) would remain marginalized from the standpoint of the political and cultural insurrections of the 1960s as well. With the advent of Expo art concluded the disappearance of political resistance in avant-garde art, a development Sawaragi Noi describes as “the waterfall basin of the avant-garde.”61 The way the media incited the public’s fervor for Expo ’70 was, as Sawaragi and Oda Masanori identify,62 a sort of Taisei-Yokusan (imperial totalitarianism)-style “preparing for battle” mode that permeated every corner of the country, much like the propaganda of World War II. Many of the stars of 1960s art cooperated with the Expo and thereby became part of the “winning group.” In Japan, with few patrons for experimental arts that turned their backs to popular understanding and demand, and lacking the business opportunities that architecture and design offered—save for perhaps a tiny share of the massive state and corporate budgets—artists had few options for moving beyond the art world and connecting their expressive ambitions to society. Gutai, a global pioneer in practicing performative expression, put on an event at Expo ’70 [fig. 220] of which a color film remains, but this family-friendly, infantile show somehow evokes the vanity and powerlessness of present-day “art”—and the vacuousness of art history itself that emanated from Gutai as such. The career trajectories of artists are more diverse today than in the 1960s, and the art may seem to have become more socialized and internationalized; but in fact, many present-day artists are merely a part of community-oriented business, limited to projects that can easily get grants and sponsorship from governments and corporations, leaving creators vulnerable to the whims of the cultural industry and the international art world led by Western powers, thus losing their passage to freedom—trapped in the international exhibitions of today,

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 220. Gutai Art Festival Finale • August or September, 1970 • Expo Festival Plaza, Osaka

which operate with the same guise of “festive” as the Expo ’70 “Festival Plaza,” the same façade of “paradise” as the “Pedestrian Paradises.” Now, did all of the appetite for another lifestyle, another history, another expression intrinsic to 1960s avant-garde art flow away into “the waterfall basin” by way of economic growth and the completion of the urban cleanup? One reservation we might affix to the conclusion above is to consider that there has never been a detailed examination of the art—or rather, the activities of artists as a whole—of this period. The hypothesis of this book is that the political issues inherent in avant-garde art in the mid-’50s, the so-called “postwar-is-over” period, are succeeded by the performance practices of a certain type of artist through each of the stages that followed: the defeat of the Anpo Struggle, the development of urbanization and the mass media, the advent of mass consumer society, and finally, the cultural and political uprising of the late ’60s. As urbanization, internationalization, and the systemization of “modern art” simultaneously progressed, the mockery, critique, attacks, and resistance against the “mind control” of systems of art and culture and government continued, by the body, by vulgar entertainment, by life and sex and death, by the people forced to live shabby, uncomfortable, and inevitably Japanese lives, intermittent, isolated, often knowing that what they are doing will never have any effect, squeezing through their “niches”—from the Yomiuri Independent before its end to the Shinjuku Station West Exit “Plaza” before it became a simple “passage.” Their seemingly impulsive, meaningless, superficial, and sometimes unsavory behavior, too, was perhaps an expression of the critical spirit that focused on the underside, the shadows, the nether regions of the culture of their time. Be it collective or solitary, can it really be asserted that in this action was no hint of the dream of communes that could restore humanity? 　 Some of the “bottom-rung samurai” artists resisted the elitism and control of everyday life concealed in urbanization and internationalization through their performance, pressing ever deeper the “descent into the vulgar everyday,” onward toward the underground of culture, politics, and the body. During this era, however, roads were paved with asphalt, a material often used in the works of Kyūshū-ha, and the urban cleansing to prepare for the Olympics and Expo ’70 forced the body underground. On the days

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leading up to International Anti-War Day in Tokyo in October 1968, cobblestones were removed to prevent student activists from throwing them as weapons; in the summer of 1969, central parts of Tokyo were paved with asphalt, and the central streets of regional cities like Fukuoka were also changed from cobblestone to asphalt in January 1970.63 Hariu Ichirō once said that Kyūshū-ha, which used asphalt in their work, had the “energy of hot magma spewing from a deep stratum,”64—a countercurrent, flowing back from “a place filled with darkness,” in Tanigawa Gan’s words, “where the mother of all creation is. The origins of existence. Where there is a spontaneous energy”65—and all of this, in the wake of urban development, was completely paved over. This state of affairs persists to this day (2010). Anarchist Yamaguchi Kenji, who often worked with Kawani Hiroshi, referred to the graffiti at Université Paris Nanterre— sous les pavés, la plage, “Beneath the paving stones, the beach,” a symbol of the May 68 Revolution in Paris—when in 1998 he wrote: The world now has entered what is likely the absolute worst era for uprising and revolution. Global control systems, with their new masks of free-market ideology and neo-liberalism, are expanding to dominate the entire world. The cobblestones (paving stones) lining the streets of France thirty years ago [the time of the May 1968 Paris Revolution] are now almost completely replaced by hard and seamless asphalt. It’s the same in Japan. It is much harder to tear up asphalt than to tear up the cobblestones. At the very least, a pickaxe or some other tool is required. Tools, let alone pickaxes, that we hardly have at our disposal. We have to dispense with our fading, futile preparations, and begin again.66

What I have attempted in this book is one of those “fading, futile preparations.” But for that, it seems I must first find a pickaxe. In the end, can this book be that tool? Did this book, written by an author who has never held a pickaxe, successfully unearth the underground channels of 1960s Anti-Art performance? Or have its currents now dried up? I leave the answers to you, reader. NOTES 1.

Akasegawa Genpei, Tsuihō sareta yajiuma; Shisōteki henshitsusha no jūjiro [The expelled onlooker: Crossroads of the ideological pervert] (Tokyo: Gendai Hyōronsha, 1972), 22–23. 2. Yoshimura Masunobu, “Danmen no sunappu” [Snapshot of an aspect], Neo Dada Witnessed, ed. Kuroda Raiji (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1993): 6. Exhibition catalogue. 3. Yoshida Yoshie, Kaitaigeki no maku orite: Rokujū nendai zen’ei bijutsu shi [The curtain falls on deconstruction theater: Avant-garde art in the 1960s] (Tokyo: Zōkeisha, 1982), 97–98. 4. Matano would soon move to the Second Union. Sakurai Takami, in an interview with the author, Fukuoka, July 28, 2006.

5. Sakurai Takami, “Kyūshū-ha no kigen Ochi Osamu ni tsuite” [About Ochi Osamu, the origin of Kyūshū-ha], I Discover Jesus Christ is a Woman (Fukuoka: Tōka Shobō, 1987), 291. 6. Based on statements by Hariu Ichirō and Shinohara Ushio in a discussion. Isobe Yukihisa, Itō Takayasu, Shinohara Ushio, and Hariu Ichirō (moderator), “Han’ei no naka no kikikan” [A sense of crisis in prosperity], Bijutsu Jānaru, no. 46 (March 1964): 42. 7. Katō Yoshihiro, in an interview with the author, Saitama, January 22, 2005. “In my case, to do art was to become a Marxist. Those who did not study the leftist Marx were not artists or anything. To be a leftist or to be covered by that ideology was to practice art to fight. Art

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8.

9. 10.

11.

was a fight.” Katō Yoshihiro, “Katō Yoshihiro oral history,” interview by Hosoya Shūhei, KuroDalaiJee and Kurokawa Noriyuki, Saitama, August 21, 2015, Oral History Archives of Japanese Art, http://www.oralarthistory.org/ archives/kato_yoshihiro/interview_01.php See also the following interview for details on Iwata Shin’ichi’s left-wing activities in Junior and Senior high school: “Iwata Shin’ichi Oral History,” interview by Hosoya Shūhei, KuroDalaiJee, and Kurokawa Noriyuki, Nagoya, August 28, 2015, Oral History Archives of Japanese Art, http://www.oralarthistory.org/archives/ iwata_shinichi/interview_01.php See KuroDalaiJee, “Iro no hitotsu taranu kakumei: Reinbō shichōsen ni miru isedai no kyōtō to danzetsu” [A revolution missing a color: Cross-generational joint-struggle and divides visible in the “Rainbow Mayor Election”], Rear, no. 41 (March 2018): 46–55. Kamijō Junjirō, in an interview with the author, Saitama, February 18, 2007. Although The Play is known for its anonymous and collective projects among the 1960s art groups, some of its members had notably different backgrounds and ideologies and acted on their own, so detailed study is warranted. For example, Iwakura Masahito was the sole member from The Play to participate in the huge anti-Expo rally (Hanpaku), August 1969, and is thought to have had a individual political bent. Of the avant-garde artists who continually submitted Anti-Art-oriented works to the Yomiuri Newspaper-sponsored Yomiuri Independent Exhibition (inaugurated February 1949), many of them also submitted to the Japan Art Society-sponsored Japan Independent Exhibition (inaugurated December 1947), which was heavily influenced by left-wing political parties. The two independent exhibitions seem to have been ideologically opposed, but they shared postwar values of democracy and freedom of expression, and there were numerous artists who exhibited in both regardless of their political ideologies. Upon closer examination, however, although both exhibitions were unjuried, the avant-garde artists—including those inclined to Anti-Art—are thought to have submitted more political work to the Japan Independent than they did to the Yomiuri Independent. Here are some examples from the Japan Independent catalogue of Anti-Art and related artists who

exhibited artworks that are likely to have had political content: 1953: Kawaguchi Kōtarō (founding member of Zero Jigen), Himeyuri no tō (Tower of Himeyuri in Okinawa) 1955: Shinseiki-gun (led by Kimura Shigetoshi, with members Isozaki Arata, Yoshimura Masunobu, Kazakura Shō, and Akasegawa Genpei), Heiwa to utsukushiki seikatsu no tame ni (For peace and a beautiful life) 1956: Shinohara Ushio, Sunagawa-chō no fūkei (Landscape of Sunagwa town) 1957: Akasegawa Genpei, Afurika (Africa) 1958: Itoi Kanji, Kiriha (Working face in a coalmine), Kiretsu (Fissure), Kanrosui (Sweet water); Sakurai Takami, Ōtome-ka ni chintai suru kirinukareta ningen (Cut-out men stagnant in automatization), Shokuminchi no sora o tobu kirinukareta ningen (Cut-out men flying over the sky of the colony) 1959: Masuzawa Kinpei, Ryōshi (Fisherman), Yagara Yutaka, Shokuminchi no kao (Face of a colony) 1960: Yoshimura Masunobu, Chi no hatake (Field of blood) 1964: Matsue Kaku, “Tengoku to jigoku” no uta yori (From a song of “heaven and hell”); Yagara Yutaka, Ikari: Miike (Anger: Miike) 1965: Matsue Kaku, Konmyunisuto no te (Communist’s Hands); Yagara Yutaka, Itazuke Kichi kakuchō hantai: Nigatsu 1962 shigasha (sic.) jiken (Against the expansion of U.S. Base in Itazuke: Shigasha [misprint of shiyakusho=city government?] Incident, February 1962) 1966: Matsue Kaku, Tsuina gishiki emaki (Picture scroll of Tsuina ritual); Yagara Yutaka, Amerika wa Nihon kara Betonamu kara deteike (America, Go out from Japan and Vietnam) 1967: Kurohata, Baramon (Brahman) and and Baramon gishiki: Betonamu hansen happening [Brahman ritual: Anti-Vietnam War Happening (see chap. 14.2. pp. 359–60), Yagara Yutaka, Bakuon: Itazuke beigun kichi (Roaring in U.S. Base in Itazuke) Aside from these exhibits, Arakawa Shūsaku, Iwata Shin’ichi, Kazakura Shō, Kudō Tetsumi, Tabe Mitsuko, Chiba Eisuke, and Yamauchi Jūtarō also exhibited works in the Japan Independent, but it is not possible to determine from their titles whether the works were politically-inclined or not. Whether or not these avant-garde artists differentiated the two Independent exhibitions on the basis of ideology, or if they did not mind the politics of the

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exhibition so long as they could exhibit their work, is a question worth considering. Kagami Masayuki, in an interview with the author, Tokyo, September 19, 2008. In the early 1950s, JCP’s policy of armed struggle resulted in organizing and guerrilla activities in farming villages around the country. In June of 1952, in order to support the Mountain Village Organizing Corps opposing the construction of Tokyo Ogōchi Dam, artists such as Irino Tatsuya, Katsuragawa Hiroshi, Shimada Sumiya, Teshigahara Hiroshi, Bitō Yutaka, and Yamashita Kikuji spent about two months in Ogōchi Village, organizing workers and printing and distributing mimeographed newsletters. Katsuragawa Hiroshi, Haikyo no zen’ei: Kaisō no sengo bijutsu [Avant-garde in ruins: Postwar art in recollections] (Tokyo: Ichiyōsha, 2004), 118–35. Yamashita Kikuji, “Sabetsu o nozoku ana” [Hole to peer at discrimination], in Kuzureru numa: Yamashita Kikuji no sekai [A crumbling swamp: The world of Yamashita Kikuji], (Tokyo: Subaru Shobō, 1979): 48; Ozaki Masato, “‘Akebono mura monogatari’ kara, soshite ‘akebono mura monogatari,’ 1950 nendai. Kitarubeki Yamashita Kikuji ten no tame ni” [From Akabono Village story and Akebono Village story. 1950s. For the Yamashita Kikuji Exhibition to come], in Yamashita Kikuji ten [Yamashita Kikuji Exhibition] (Tokyo: Yamashita Kikuji Exhibition Executive Committee, 1996), 147. Exhibition catalogue. Translator’s note: In July 1952, a group of Mountain Village Organizing Corps members under the JCP broke into the house of a rich landowner and injured his family in Akebono Village, Yamanashi Prefecture, during the period of JCP’s armed struggle policy. Yamashita depicts this incident, including the episodes that transpired before and after, in his painting Akebono mura monogatari (Tale of Akebono Village), 1953. Irino Tatsuya, who worked with Yamashita Kikuji, reportedly made banners for demonstrations and then destroyed them after they were used. This is an interesting example similar to People’s Art (Minjung Misul) in 1980s Korea, but the details of this activity are unclear. See Kazu Kaido, “Reconstructions: The Role of the Avant-Garde in Post-war Japan,” in Reconstructions: Avant-Garde Art in Japan 1945–1965, ed. David Elliot and Kazu Kaido (Oxford: Museum

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

of Modern Art Oxford, 1985), 17. Exhibition catalogue. “Nihon biijutsu kai no ayumi 3: Anpo zengo, 1957–1962,” [Japan Art Society chronology 3: before and after Anpo, 1957–1962], in Nihon Andepandan Ten no 25 nen: Rekishi to sakuhin [25 years of the Japan Independent Exhibition: History and works], ed. Nihon bijutsu kai gashū henshū iinkai and kaishi hensan iinkai [Editorial committees for collected paintings and the society history], Bijutsu undō, no. 92&93 combined edition (May, 1972), 54–123. Nina Horisaki-Christens, “Nakaya Fujiko’s Contributions to Early Japanese Video,” in Resistance of Fog: Nakaya Fujiko, ed. Junya Yamamine, et al. (Tokyo: Film Art, 2019), 284–85. Exhibition catalogue. From the same catalogue: Nakaya Fujiko, Friends of Minamata Victims–Video Diary, 294–95; Hakudo Kobayashi, “Communication Media Called Video,” 315–16. Major references available in Japanese about Minjung Misul are Minshū no kodō: Kankoku bijutsu no riarizumu 1945–2005 [Art toward the Society: Realism of Korean Art 1945–2005], ed. Niigata Bandaijima Art Museum (Tokyo: Japan Association of Art Museums, 2007). Exhibition catalogue; Furukawa Mika, Kankoku no minshū bijutsu: Teikō no bigaku to shisō [People’s Art in South Korea: The aesthetics and ideology of resistance] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2018). Regarding its analysis compared with Japan’s postwar art, see Kuroda Raiji, “Fragmentary Notes on Postwar Japanese Avant-Garde Art Viewed from South Korean Minjoong Art,” in Art toward the Society, 231–240. Kobayashi Tomi, Koe naki koe o kike: Hansen shimin undō no genten [Listen to the voiceless voices: Origin of the antiwar citizens’ movement], ed. Iwadare Hiroshi (Tokyo: Dōjidaisha, 2003), 68. Composers Mamiya Yoshio, Hayashi Hikaru, Toyama Yūzō and others formed this group “to contribute to the national music of Japan” in 1953. “For the Yagi no Kai, the Yoshida cabinet’s drafting of the Subversive Activities Prevention Act (Habōhō) and the government’s attitude about the rearmament were acute issues.” Nihon sengo ongakushi: jō [Japan postwar music history: Part 1], ed. Nihon sengo ongakushi kenkyū-kai [Postwar music history research group] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2007), 210–13. For reference material about the

Chapter 23———The Nether Regions of the Politics503

22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

statement they distributed, see Thomas R. H. Havens, Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts: The Avant-Garde Rejection of Modernism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 129. Nihon sengo ongakushi; jō, 300–1. Nihon biijutsukai no ayumi 3, 54. Akasegawa, Tsuihō sareta yajiuma, 241. The singing of Akatonbo (Red dragonfly) that came of the victorious demonstrating group at Suna­ gawa is known as a “glorious scene from the postwar antiestablishment movement.” Kan Takayuki, Zengakuren (Tokyo: Gendaishokan, 1982), 76–77. Members included Asari Keita (theater director); Ishihara Shintarō, Ōe Kenzaburō and Kaikō Takeshi (writers); Etō Jun (­critic); Takemitsu Tōru (composer); Tanikawa Shuntarō (poet); and Terayama Shūji (poet and playwright). The group invited young artists to their rallies, but presumably did not include major visual artists among its members. Akasegawa Genpei, Imaya action aru nomi!: “Yomiuri Andepandan” to iu genshō [Now we have no choice but action! The “Yomiuri Independent” phenomenon] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1985), 151. This may have been because Shinohara Ushio was wearing a “strange American miliary hat.” Han’ei no naka no kikikan, 33. From a transcript of a Moriyama Yasuhide art lecture, “Hikari no hyōmen to shiteno gin’iro” [Silver as a surface of light], May 16, 2004, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art Lecture Hall. Printed in Moriyama Yasuhide: Decomposition & Recomposition, ed. Kurokawa Noriyuki (Tokyo: grambooks, 2018): 247. Katō Yoshihiro, “Zero Jigen gishiki seiron monogatari 3” [The true story of the rituals of Zero Jigen 3], Eiga hyōron, vol. 25, no. 8 (August 1968): 102. Play 1967–1980, ed. The Play (Osaka/Kyoto: The Play, 1981); Takahashi Tōru, “70 nendai e no mō hitotsu no kiroku” [One more record for the ’70s], Ōru kansai, vol. 5, no.1, (January 1970): 117. “Haru ni ukareta ‘zen’ei’ ha,” Shūkan Shinchō, April 4, 1967. “Zen’ei geijutsu to iu na no erogotoshi-tachi” [Pornographers in the guise of avant-garde art], Shūkan Manga Taimuzu, November 25, 1967. “Banpaku erosu-teki funsai o kuwadateru hapuningu undō” [The happening movement planning to smash Expo with eroticism], Shūkan Shinchō, March 14, 1970.

34. Kan, Zengakuren, 99–102. 35. Nishibe Susumu, 60-nen anpo: Senchimentaru jānī [Anpo ’60: Sentimental Journey], (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 1986), 24. 36. Oguma Eiji, ‘Minshu’ to ‘aikoku’: Sengo nihon no nashonarizumu to kōkyōsei [“Democracy” and “patriotism”: Postwar Japan’s nationalism and public nature] (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2002), 506. 37. Oguma, 522. 38. Oguma, 523. 39. Oguma, 523. 40. Tanikawa Kōichi, “Hangeijutsu sono muhō e no ishi to ai” [Anti-Art, its drive toward and love for lawlessness], Yuriika [Eureka], Special issue, vol. 11, no. 4 (September 1979): 83. 41. Zen Nihon Gendai Geijutsuka Kyōgikai Un’eibu (Administration Department of All-Japan Artists Council), Kyōgikai wa nani o surunoka [What does the council do?], Art 21, no. 1 (August 1966): 4. 42. Akasegwa, Imaya action aru nomi!, 67–68. 43. Tabe Mitsuko, “Purakādo no tame ni” [For placards], Kyūshū-ha, no. 5 (September 1961): 7. These words of Tabe’s are common to what was said before the 1960 Anpo “The phrases on the flyers of revolutionary parties and unions are repeating the same messages in different words, year in and year out.” Oguma, ‘Minshu’ to ‘aikoku’, 516. 44. Kumo (Moriyama Yasuhide), Kenryoku ni kikkō suru shi-teki disukabā Japan mata wa ‘kankō’ e no sasoi [My personal Discover Japan or invitation to the sightseeing as an antagonist to power], flyer (January 1971). Printed in Moriyama Yasuhide: Decomposition & Recomposition: 252. 45. Kumo, 252. 46. “Taiho sareta ‘hadaka no gishiki’” [“Naked ritual” leads to arrest], Yūkan Fuji, (July 18, 1969): 2. 47. Ōtake Hideo, Shin sayoku no isan: Nyū lefuto kara posutomodan e [The legacy of the New Left: From the new left to postmodern] (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2007), 21. See also an article that refers to a ritual on the roof at Kyoto University by the Expo Destruction Group. Iwasaki Chikatsugu, ‘Shinsayoku’ to higōrishugi [The new left and irrationalism] (Tokyo: Shinnihon Shuppansha, 1970), 31. 48. The magazine in which this work was published, Comic Magazine (first published in June 1966) is said to be the forerunner to gekiga magazines for young adults; it often adapted scenarios by popular novelists. Ishiko

504

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

56. 57.

PART IV———THE SPIRIT OF ANTI-ART PERFORMANCE

Junzō, Sengo mangashi nōto [Notes on postwar manga history] (Tokyo: Kinokuniya Shoten, 1975), 149. Herbert Read, “Chains of Freedom,” Existentialism, Marxism, and Anarchism: Chains of Freedom (London: Freedom Press, 1952), 21. Ōsawa Masamichi, Anakizumu shisō-shi: Jiyū to hankō no ayumi (zōho kaiteiban) [History of anarchism philosoply: A trajectory for freedom and rebellion (expanded and revised edition)] (Tokyo: Kokushokusensensha, 1990), 2. Yamanashi Toshio, “Shin-inshōshugi to anakizumu” [Neo-impressionism and anarchism], Nenpō: 1982 nendo [Annual report: FY1982], Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, 1984): 3–32. Ōta Masakuni, “Tokyo kōdō sensen kara higashi ajia han’nichi busō sensen e” [From the Tokyo Action Front to the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front], Demo watashiniwa tatakai ga matte iru: Saitō Nodoka no kiseki (Higashi ajia han’nichi busō sensen Daichi no kiba) [But the struggle waits for me: The trajectory of Saitō Nodoka (East Asia anti-Japan Armed Front “Tusk of the Earth”)], ed. Higashi ajia hannichi buso sensen e no shikei jūkei kōgeki to tatakau sien renraku kaigi [Support liaison council to fight death penalty and heavy penalty attacks on the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front] (Tokyo: Fūjinsha, 2004), 18–19. “Hippī shijuku ‘bigakkō’ e taiken nyūgaku” [Trial enrollment to hippie private school Bi­ gakkō], Shūkan Pureibōi (June 9, 1970): 86–88. Tanigawa Gan, Yui Chūnoshin, and the Tokyo Action Front members are, despite being of different generations and having different methodologies and ideologies, listed in Nihon anakizumu undō jinmei jiten [Who’s who of Japan anarchism movements], ed. Nihon anakizumu undō jinmei jiten henshū iinkai [Editorial committee for Who’s who of Japan anarchism movements] (Tokyo: Paru Shuppan, 2004). Shima Shigeo, Bunto shishi: Seishun no gyōshuku sareta sei no hibi: Tomoni tatakatta yūjin tachi e [Personal history of the Bund: Condensed fresh days of youth: To the friends who fought with me] (Tokyo: Hihyōsha, 1999), 13. Yoshioka Yasuhiro, Avant-Garde ’60s (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1999), 185. Adachi Masao, Eiga/Kakumei [Film/Revolution] (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2003), 133.

58. Ikemizu Keiichi, “Sōtaiteki na shisō mote: Nanajū nendai ni okeru bijutsuka no arikata” [Have a holistic ideology: Being an artist in the ’70s], Kobe Shimbun (May 22, 1970). 59. Yamada Kaiya, Ai amu hippī: Nihon no hippī mūvumento ’60–’90 [I am hippie: Japan’s hippie movement ’60–’90] (Tokyo: Daisanshokan, 1990), 61. 60. Matsuzawa Yutaka, “Jinrui yo shōmetsu shiyō: Ikō ikō (gyatei gyatei)” [Hey humanity, let’s cease to exist: Let’s go let’s go (gyatei gyatei)], ed. Shirakawa Yoshio, in Nihon no Dada 1920– 1970 [Dada in Japan 1920–1970] (Tokyo: Hakuba Shobō, 1998), 48. 61. Sawaragi Noi, “Zen’ei no takitsubo” [The waterfall basin of the avant-garde], Kokuritsu kokusai bijutsukan shinchiku iten isshūnen kinen; Yasei no kindai: Saikō sengo nihon bijutsu shi kirokushū [Record of Symposium series to commemorate an anniversary of the new location of National Museum of Art, Osaka: Wild modern: Rethinking postwar Japanese art history], ed. Shima Atsuhiko et al. (Osaka: National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2006): 97–98. 62. Sawaragi, “Zen’ei no takitsubo,” 101; Oda ­Masanori, Shōwa zankyō den ritānzu: Nippon banpaku 70 nyūsu [Return of the Shōwa echo: Japan Expo 70 news], 10+1 (September 2004): 115. 63. “Kuroi hodō: Machimachi no hyōban, Fukuoka no toshinbu” [Black sidewalk: Mixed reviews, Fukuoka’s city center], Nishinippon Shimbun (February 26, 1970), 12. 64. Hariu Ichirō, “Kyūshū-ha tenmatsuki” [Kyūshū-ha: The full story], Kyūshū-ha ten: Hangeijutsu purojekuto [Group Kyūshū-ha: Anti-Art Project] (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1988), 6. Exhibition catalogue. 65. Tanigawa Gan, Genten ga sonzai suru [The origin exists] (Ushio Publishing, 1976), 13. First published in Boin [Vowel] (May 1954). 66. Yamaguchi Kenji, “Asufaruto shakai o hikihagasō: Furansu gogatsu kaimei no sanjū shūnen ni atatte” [Let’s pull up the asphalt society: On the 30th anniversary of the France May Revolution], Yamaguchi Kenji ikōshū: Anarukoko­m yunizumu no rekishiteki kenshō [Essays by the late Yamaguchi Kenji: Historical examination of Anarco-communism] (Tokyo: Hokutō Shobō, 2003), 72.

Afterword for Myself

Why did I write such a book as this? It all began in March  2004 when Kurokawa Noriyuki, an editor at grambooks, a publisher in Tokyo, asked me to write a book on Japanese avant-garde art. At first, I thought I could simply gather up all the slapdash writings I had published on the subject, but the editor feared that this would result in an inconsistent patchwork of disconnected content, and so he asked for a completely new overview of the topic, no matter how long it took to write. Thus began my process of writing almost the entire book from scratch (save for the preexisting texts on Kyūshū-ha, Zero Jigen, and Collective Kumo, which I modified significantly), a task that required me to do an enormous amount of additional research and document collection. In the end, it took me six years and resulted in this very thick volume. I think only when I write (that is to say, I’m not ordinarily thinking about anything at all). Be it the Anti-Art theory at the heart of part I, the historical narrative of part II, the introductions of individual artists in part III, or the unifying theme of the “nether regions” that makes up part IV, as I wrote, I completed these all in my own way. I have no knowledge of philosophy or aesthetics or political theory and I am incapable of thinking logically, so I am sure that I have left plenty to complain about—especially in parts I and IV, where I was unsuccessful in concealing my inability to bring my argument to a convincing conclusion by appropriately applying logic. By comparison, part III was concrete and could be moderately supplemented with my imagination, which resulted in a most natural and comfortable conclusion. My suggestion to readers would be to start from the comparatively easy-to-read part III before moving on to the rest (I can hear you now: “You should have put that in the introduction!”). But even as I finished this book in my own way, what I could never have predicted is how massive the project would become. The biggest reason for this is part II, which forced me into the heavy and rough labor of rewriting the entirety of 1960s art history. Though there are many sources and exhibitions about the art of that era, I for some reason felt the need to rewrite it all over again. Returning to the initial question, one could say I was compelled to write this volume by my dissatisfaction with the existing art history scholarship and art criticism in Japan. I wrote about this in part I (at least, let’s say that I did), so I need not repeat it here. Another reason was my dissatisfaction with the art of Japan today. I wrote about that in part IV (again, let’s say that I did), so I need not repeat it here. The common thread between these two dissatisfactions is this: in all the vastness and diversity of human culture, this tiny realm controlled by some kind of power or authority that we know as “art” …is just so boring. But please don’t misunderstand my intention: I’m by no means trying to cause a commotion about the current state of art history research and art criticism, or for that matter, of Japanese society and culture. At any rate, I’m sure professional scholars will find it full of holes, but it would be a waste of my lifetime if I tried to surpass the work being done by people far smarter than I, and all of those working in more blessed environment. Any critique I have to level would be no more than spitting into the wind.

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Afterword for Myself

What I have written in this book, despite its casualness, is not a “tweet” competing for a handful of likes, nor is it a monologue spoken with the expectation that an audience will even hear it—it is no more than solitary ramblings and scribblings for myself, easily flushed into the void, no matter how incredibly long they may be. It goes without saying that this book will be of no use for market research or regional development, nor for business strategy or personnel management. It won’t help you shed pounds or brighten your skin. It won’t heal your broken heart or even provide any comic relief. Rather than a book that pretends to be academic while concealing its true ambitions as a business tome, I’d rather this book be of no use at all. But there is one effect I will allow—and that is that it become nourishment for the spirit of those who read it, the very spirit that Ōsugi Sakae once imagined when he wrote, “What I love most are the irresponsible acts of man. They are an explosion of spirit itself.” Yet even with the volume of words I have written, there were still some things I wasn’t able to write. Here are a few examples: First, the theoretical positioning of Anti-Art performance. Be it Anti-Art, Post-Anpo, or “the nether regions of culture,” each of these topics is riddled with its own complex set of issues, and it is beyond both my abilities and temperament to apply to them theories from the fields of art, history, sociology, cultural anthropology, or from cultural studies and performance studies in Western academia. It would also be beyond me to place these miscellaneous examples from Japan within a universal human cultural history—and so I leave these endeavors with the hope that specialists in their individual fields will take them on. Second, a deep and detailed discussion, with even more fact-checking, about the artists introduced in part III, not to mention other individuals and groups I was not able to cover separately. Because I was unable to gather testimony and could not find material about them, I gave up on pursuing several of the artists I wanted to introduce in part III, as I was unable to form a cohesive narrative about their art activities. As I ran out of time, I was forced to give up on the hunt for further materials. It is no easy task to write sufficiently about artists who dared to perform—their greatness, their whimsy, and their sorrow. Third, an exploration of comparative research on performance in non-Western art. In particular, South Korean art, in which performances began as early as 1967 and became part of Korean art history as haengwi misul (action art). In South Korea, shamanism, nong-ak (farmers’ performance) and other traditional performance culture is still alive to this day; moreover, action art was tempered through the resistance found in activism, during the political struggles and minjung (people’s) cultural movements since the 1980s. Further, comparative research of Japan’s performance art with that of artists in other parts of Asia (such as China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam), as well as South America and Africa, could reveal similarities and originalities of non-Western cultures in recycling ritual and entertainment traditions for performance, and shed light on the alternative practices that survive even under amid the expansion of the art market and market art. Fourth, the photographers that documented these performances, who should be duly evaluated as artists in their own right. In the study of performance history, photographs and film/video are indispensable. For some photographers, the very acts of witnessing and capturing was an expression of their own ideas, through the camaraderie

Afterword for Myself507

they showed with the artists and the broad dissemination of their photographs. The photographs of Hirata Minoru, Hanaga Mitsutoshi, Yoshioka Yasuhiro, among others, are scarcely covered by critics, yet these photographers have contributed far more to Japan’s art history than museum curators who simply shrug and say, “Well, there are no works of art to display so there’s no way to organize an exhibition.” For this reason, a separate examination of the role such photographers have played in art history is warranted. Lastly, the issues with public archives. Even in recent years as I researched and wrote these texts, artists and eyewitnesses were dying and materials were being lost. Not only must a comprehensive survey be done as soon as possible, but so too must permanent archives that can both preserve materials and enable public viewing be established. In present-day Japan, however, where cultural projects that do not produce immediate results are all too soon discarded, the significance of preserving documents of these grotesque, indecent, dangerous performances is not likely to be recognized. If I can toot my own horn in saying that I wrote this book in my own way, it is because I was fortunate enough to have had the social, economic, and physical conditions necessary to expend the time and effort to do so. And without the artists who dared to perform and the people who supported them, this book would not exist. The editor joked (was it a joke?) to me that “the people who get a gift copy and the people most likely to buy it are pretty much one and the same.” That’s of course because of the many artists, photographers, their family members, staff of universities, galleries, art museums and so on who provided support through interviews and sharing materials—and to them I offer my sincere gratitude. Also, to Munetoshi Jun’ichi, who made such a haunting and beautiful design, and finally, to publisher Ōnishi Toshikatsu, and to editor Kurokawa Noriyuki, who put an enormous amount of work into releasing such a horrible book. KuroDalaiJee July 30, 2010

Zero Jigen performance during Muse Week • December 18, 1965 • Meguro (presumed), Tokyo • (see pp. 189–90)

Another Afterword, Twelve Years On

It has already been twelve years since Anarchy of the Body (or Nikuana, as it is abbreviated in Japanese) was released. The impact of the black, box-like tome was significant, and reviewers of all major national newspapers seemed surprised to be contributing positive reviews. Though entirely inappropriate considering the title, it won a prize from a state agency (the Art Encouragement Prize from Bunka-cho, the Agency for Cultural Affairs), which also supported this translation through its Art Platform Japan (APJ) program. It was the only book by a solo author to be selected for English publication through the program’s translation initiative. The Japanese version went into its second printing a year and nine months after its release and continues to sell steadily, with mentions on social media indicating that it has a broad readership (or at least a “buyership”) for an art book. Nikuana did have a slight influence on art history and criticism, resulting in increased opportunities for Zero Jigen, Collective Kumo, Expo Destruction Group, and others to be featured in exhibitions. With these exhibitions, ambitious and talented curators have been able to broaden loose threads into a tapestry, improving the resolution of the crude outlines in Nikuana and opening up new underground channels. Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art has had the biggest contribution of any art museum, acquiring films, photographs, and other documents from the collections of Katō Yoshihiro and Iwata Shin’ichi, giving a permanent home to important documentation of Zero Jigen’s and many other Anti-Art performances. Photographs of performance art by Hirata Minoru have since been collected by major art museums both in Japan and abroad, and those by Hanaga Mitsutoshi also have become widely known through exhibitions and publications.1 Overseas, the first to take an interest in Nikuana and request a contribution to an academic journal was a researcher in Taiwan,2 and I was also fortunate to be given the Kim Bokjin Award by Korean art critics and curators. Zero Jigen also received acclaim and their documents were featured at Seoul Media Art Biennale as well as exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, followed by exhibitions of postwar Japanese art by Museum of Modern Art, New York, National Art Gallery, Singapore, and Zachęta–National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. I have also had opportunities to give talks on Anti-Art performance in Tokyo, Taipei, Hong Kong, Berkeley, as well as cities where these exhibitions were held. However, within an art system for which the collection of works by museums is an unwavering goal, there is little chance for Anti-Art to become established like Gutai or Mono-ha, as it generally leaves behind no objects to be distributed in the art market. Even at the level of discourse, Anti-Art performance is merely an offshoot of (if not a deviation from) art, difficult to correlate with Western art history. In the discourse of some critics in Japan as well, it appears that this thick book has never entered their field of vision, based on the way they still sum up postwar art history with discussions of only Okamoto Tarō, Gutai, Hi-Red Center, and Mono-ha. Much of Japan’s arts/museum world is still dominated by dilettantism and the entertainment industry. And this is exactly

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why there is more than enough reason to publish an English version of this book and rescue the history of Anti-Art performance through global art history discourse. In the twelve years since this book’s initial publication, many of the artists who played important roles within its pages have passed away. Among others, Kazakura Shō, Katō Yoshihiro, Iwata Shin’ichi, Sakurai Takami, Koyama Tetsuo, Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Sasaki Kōsei, and the eldest of them all, Itoi Kanji. The passing of Itoi in December 2021 felt to me like the true end of the era covered in this book, so I decided to end the Chronology with the day he died. When it comes to 1960s performance, since there were few means of recording back then, the work of research greatly depends on interviews with the artists who personally organized and enacted performances. With the death of these protagonists, their unrecorded stories are all but lost. All we can do now is continue to record oral histories from those who are living and preserve as much documentation as possible. Yet it appears that art museums and universities in the United States are the only places where the valuable documents of artists and critics are safely, permanently preserved after they pass away. Just as I had feared when I penned the “Afterword for Myself” of the Japanese edition, important materials have been lost, and film footage deteriorated, during these twelve years. This trajectory puts the history of Anti-Art performance in danger of disappearing, and archives are the only hope for its survival. Considering this state of affairs, I suppose one real value of this book is that that I managed to write it while many of the people involved were still around and the materials still available. I never expected Nikuana to be translated. I did not think I used any words or phrases that would be difficult to translate, but my regular twisted way of phrasing things, unnecessary jokes, gags that are not quite worth a laugh but might produce a little snicker in the back of the throat, pretentious pauses, accelerandos that ignore the ensemble, crescendos that are for no reason followed by violent codas and so on and so forth, might be lost on my English audience. At any rate, a struggle particular to Nikuana was how to translate all of the sketchy performance descriptions into English. Without photo or film documentation, I could often only guess whether the props and performers in question were singular or plural. The biggest problem, however, was undoubtedly the massive volume of the text. The original Japanese body text is 460,000 characters and the chronology is 140,000 characters, totaling 600,000 characters. The English translation exceeds 300,000 words: over 225,000 words for the main text and 80,000 for the chronology. It was simply too much for one translator to handle alone, so it was broken up between several translators, and, in order to improve the quality and consistency of the translation, we employed APJ’s unique system of having a cross-checker (in this case, me) working in conjunction with an editor. With this system, each piece of text was handled by a minimum of two and a maximum of four people around me, with several rounds of feedback. It meant an unexpected amount of labor for me, but I worked hard to rise to the honor of being selected, as well as to the efforts of the editor, translators, and program office. Still, the translation presented the opportunity to revisit the book, and as a result I was able to make many corrections based on research conducted after the release of the Japanese edition. So this is ultimately a “revised” edition of the book, and there is plenty of updated content for the readers of the original Japanese edition.

Another Afterword, T welve Years On 511

In writing this book, I oriented the work toward multiculturalism, discussing performance art that does not necessarily connect with Western art. If it could be of use in just one way, not only to those from and living in regions that use English as a common language, but also to researchers from non-Western regions, artists, cultural activists, political activists, activists who aren’t sure what genre they fit in, and people who can’t figure out what to do in life and spend their days in gloom… if this book can become food for their spirit, as I wrote in the afterword of the Japanese edition—then that, I hope, will be how everyone who voluntarily assisted in the research and writing of this book is rewarded for their service. Lastly, I offer my sincerest gratitude to Andrew Maerkle, Shima Yumiko, Daniel González, Jenny Preston, Giles Murray, and Claire Tanaka for the translation of the main text; Alice Kiwako Ashiwa for the translation assistance; Sarah Allen, William Andrews, and Grant Hargus for the translation of the chronology; Jason M. Beckman for editing the translation; Bunka-cho Art Platform Japan Translation Project Selection Committee, Hayashi Yasuta (Bunka-cho), Osaka Eriko (The National Art Center, Tokyo), Igarashi Mie, Mochizuki Mamiko, Koike Maki, and Okubo Renna (Bureau of APJ); the artists, photographers, their family members, researchers who helped my research and provided materials; and lastly, Leuven University Press. KuroDalaiJee August 30, 2022 NOTES 1.

After the publication of the Japanese edition, the acknowledgement of photographers as agents in art history developed for Hirata Minoru and Hanaga Mitsutoshi. See Reiko Tomii, “Hirata Minoru’s Actions, the 1960s: A Theoretical Consideration as ‘Photo Art’,” in Minoru Hirata: Action, the 1960s (Tokyo: Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film, 2014): 62–65; KuroDalaiJee, “Shintai no yūtopia o motomete: 1960 nendai nihon no pafōmansu shashinka tachi,” with Chinese translation by Lin Hui-chun, in Journal of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, ed. Gong Jow-jiun, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, no. 27 (May 2014): 37–59. Reprinted with English

translation in “In Search of a Utopia of the Body: Photographers of Performance Art in 1960s Japan,” trans. Reiko Tomii, in Mitsutoshi Hanaga 1000, ed. Kurokawa Noriyuki (Tokyo: 1000BUNKO, 2017): 972–990/992–1007. 2. “Art and Action in Postwar Japan: From Reportage Painting to the Expo Destruction Group,” ed. Chang Po-shin, trans. Shimada Yoshiko, http://act.tnnua.edu.tw/?p=6716. First published in Chinese in Yishu Guandian (Art Critique of Taiwan), no. 47 (July 2011), guest edited by Chiang Po-shin, trans. Lin Hui-chun, Tainan National University of the Arts: 13–31.

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Zero Jigen, ritual for The White Hare of Inaba • March 15, 1970 • Kujūkuri Beach, Chiba • (see p. 343)

Groups mentioned throughout the book

Japanese Name (abbreviated) Groups as referred to Japanese name in this book

Transliteration

English Translation

8 Generation

Eito Jenerēshon

8 Generation

Arushimisuto

Alchemist

8ジェネレーション

Alchemist

アルシミスト

All-Japan Contemporary Artists Council (AJCAC)

全日本現代芸術家 協議会

Zen-Nihon Gendai Geijutsu Kyōgikai

All-Japan Contemporary Artists Council

Architects ‘70 Action Committee

建築家’70行動委 員会

Kenchikuka ‘70 Kōdō Iinkai

Architects ‘70 Action Committee

Avant-Garde Art Society

前衛美術会

Zen‘ei Bijutsu Kai

アヴァンギャルド 芸術研究会

Avant-Garde Art Society

Avangyarudo Geijutsu Kenkyū-kai

Avant-Garde Art Study Group

Banzai-tō

Banzai Party

Avant-Garde Art Study Group Banzai-tō

万歳党

*”Banzai” is a common celebratory cheer in Japanese, similar to “hooray.” Baramanji Kessha

薔薇卍結社

Baramanji Kessha

Rosicrucian Society (literally: “Rose Manji Society”)

*The name might have been inspired by the 17th century Rosenkreuzer movement. Beheiren

ベトナムに平和を! 市民連合 (べ平連)

Betonamu ni Heiwa o! Shimin Rengō (Beheiren)

The Citizen’s League for Peace in Vietnam

* A New Left activist group that existed as a coalition of a few hundred antiwar groups. It is commonly referred to as べ平連 (Beheiren), an acronym of the words Betonamu, Heiwa, Rengō from group’s complete name. Bikyōtō Bizāru no Kai Bum Academy Buzoku Cella Art Association

美術家共闘会議 (美共闘) ビザールの会

バム・アカデミー 部族 ケラ美術協会

Bijutsuka Kyōtō Kaigi Artists Joint-Struggle (Bikyōtō) Council Bizāru no Kai

Bizarre Society

Bamu Akademī

Bum Academy

Buzoku

The Tribe

Kera Bijutsu Kyōkai

Cella Art Association

514

Groups mentioned throughout the book

Collective He

集団“へ”

Collective Kumo

集団蜘蛛

Criminal Secret Society Black Corps

犯罪秘密結社 ブラック団

Demokrato

デモクラート美術 家協会

Dōkutsu-ha

洞窟派

Emerarudo iro no soyokaze En Gekijō

エメラルド色の そよ風 円劇場

Envairomento no Kai

エンヴァイロメント の会

Expo Destruction Group

万博破壊共闘派

Ga‘s

ぷろだくしょん我S

Shūdan He [pronounced “hey”]

Fart Collective

Shūdan Kumo

Spider Collective

Hanzai Himitsu Kessha Burakku-dan

Criminal Secret Society Black Corps

Demokurāto Bijutsuka Kyōkai

Demokrato Artists Association

Dōkutsu-ha

Cave School

Emerarudo Iro no Soyokaze

Emerald Colored Breeze

En Gekijō

Circle Theater

Envairomento no Kai

Environment Society

Banpaku Hakai Kyōtō-ha

Expo ‘70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group

Purodakushon Gasu

Production Ga‘s

*The group name is a composite of the chinese characer ga (我), meaning “I” or “me” and the English plural suffix “s”; the Japanese pronunciation “ga-su” is also a play on the word “gas.” The official name is reported to have included an upside-down apostrophe.

Gaga

創造集団がが

Sōzō Shūdan Gaga

Creative Group Gaga

Gajumaru no yume zoku

がじゅまるの夢族

Gajumaru no Yume Zoku

Indian Laurel Dream Tribe

Gar Gar

ガガ現代美術会 (ガガ)

Ga Ga Gendai Bijutsu Kai (Ga Ga)

Gar Gar Contemporary Art Society

*Comes from the French “gars gars,” meaning “guys guys.”

Genshoku Gomikandan Group ∞

幻触

ゴミ姦団 グループ∞

Genshoku

Tactile Hallucination

Gomikandan

Garbage Sex Brigade

Gurūpu Mugendai

Group Infinity

Gurūpu Doro

Group Mud

Group Doro

グループどろ

Group Ei

グループ〈鋭〉

Gurūpu Ei [pronounced “ay”]

Group Sharpness

Group I

グループ〈位〉

Gurūpu I [pronounced “E”]

Group I

*I is pronounced “yi,” and its corresponding kanji character can be used to denote “unit,” “position,” and “phase.” Group N39 Group Nishinihon Group No. 1 Group Ongaku

集団N39

グループ西日本

Group No. 1

グループ音楽

Shūdan N39

Group N39

Gurūpu Nishinihon

Group West-Japan

Gurūpu nanbā wan

Group No. 1

Gurūpu Ongaku

Group Music

Groups mentioned throughout the book515

グループ視覚

Gurūpu Shikaku

Group Sight

GUN

新潟現代美術家集 団 GUN

Niigata Gendai Bijutsuka Shūdan GUN [pronounced “gan”]

Niigata Contemporary Art Group (GUN, “Group Ultra Niigata”)

Gutai

具体美術協会 (具体)

Gutai Art Association

Hakken no Kai

発見の会

Gutai Bijutsu Kyōkai (Gutai) Hakken no Kai

Discovery Society

Hai Reddo Sentā

Hi-Red Center

Jakku no Kai

Jack Society

Group Shikaku

Hi-Red Center

ハイ・レッド・セン ター

Jack Society

ジャックの会

*Was initally founded with the name JAC Society (“Japan Art Center”)

Japan Art Society

日本美術会

Nihon Bijutsu Kai

Japan Art Society

Japan Kobe Zero

Japan Kobe Zero

Japan Kōbe Zero

Japan Kobe Zero

Jikan-ha

School of Time Experimental Ground ∧

Jikan-ha

時間派

Jikken Ground ∧

実験グラウンド∧

Jikken Guraundo “A” [pronounced “ah”]

Jikken Kōbō

実験工房

Jikken Kōbō

Jōkyō Gekijō

状況劇場

Experimental Workshop

Jōkyō Gekijō

Situation Theater

Kaminari akagarasu zoku

雷赤鴉族

Kaminari Akagarasu Zoku

Thunder Red Crow Tribe

Koe-naki-koe no Kai

声なき声の会

Koe Naki Koe no Kai

Voiceless Voices Society

Kōhō no Kai

後方の会

Kōhō no Kai

Behind-the-lines Society

Kokuin

告陰

Kokuin

Heralding the Shadow

Kuni Chiya Dance Institute

邦千谷舞踊研究所

Kuni Chiya Buyō Kenkyūjo

Kuni Chiya Dance Institute

Kurohata

Black Flag

Kyūshū-ha

Kyūshū School

Kurohata

クロハタ

*The full official group name is 美術体操襲団クロハタ (Bijutsu Taisō Shūdan Kurohata), which translates to “Art Gymnastics Attack Team Kurohata.”

Kyūshū-ha

九州派

Late Night Alliance Violence Committee

Shin’ya dōmei 深夜同盟暴力委員会 bōryuku iinkai

League of Criminals Mono-ha

犯罪者同盟 もの派

Late Night Alliance Violence Committee

Hanzaisha Dōmei

League of Criminals

Mono-ha

School of Things

*Not a group; rather, a name applied to an artist movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

516

Mountain Village Organizing Corps N.A.G.

Groups mentioned throughout the book

山村工作隊

Ｎ・Ａ・Ｇ (ニュー・ア Enu Ei Jī (Nyū Āto Gurūpu) ート・グループ)

Neo Dada

ネオ・ダダイズム・ オルガナイザーズ (ネオ・ダダ)

New Reality Group

新現実集団

Nirvāna Nissenbi NOMO

Sanson Kōsakutai

ニルヴァーナ 日本宣伝美術会 (日宣美)

群馬NOMOグループ

(NOMO)

Neo Dadaizumu Oruganaizāzu (Neo Dada)

Mountain Village Organizing Corps N.A.G (New Art Group) Neo Dadaism Organizers (Neo Dada)

Shin Genjitsu Shūdan New Reality Group Niruvāna

Nirvāna

Nihon Senden Bijutsukai (Nissenbi)

Japan Advertising Artists Club

Gunma NOMO Gurūpu

Gunma Nomo Group

*Nomo is derived from “No (Ho)mo (Sapiens)” in English.

Okayama Young Artists Group

岡山青年美術家 集団

Okayama Seinen Geijutsuka Shūdan

Okayama Young Artists Group

Pārinirvāna Pāriyāya Tai

Parinirvana Paliyaya Body

Parinirvana Paliyaya Body

パーリニバーナ・パ ーリヤーヤ体

Peak

PEAK

Pīku

Peak

Poster Demonstration Group

ポスターデモの会

Posutā demo no Kai

れまんだらん

Poster Demonstration Group

Remandaran

Remandaran

Remandaran

*Based on the title of the Simone de Beauvoir novel Les Mandarins (1954) Ritualists

儀式屋

Gishiki-ya

Ritualists (literally, “Ritual Shop,” or “Ritual Sellers”)

*gishiki-ya refers not to a group but a school of performance art that encompasses artists and groups who developed a “ritualistic” performance style in the 1960s. Rozo-gun

ROZO群

Rozo-gun

Rozo Group

*“ROZO” comes from the French “roseau,” meaning “reed.” The suffix “-gun” translates directly to “crowd” or “herd.” Saitama Avant-Garde Artists Group

埼玉前衛芸術（青 年）作家集団

Sanka

三科

Saitama Zen’ei Geijutsu (Seinen) Sakka Shūdan

Saitama Avant-Garde (Young) Artists Group

Sanka

The Third Section

*The name is a play on “Nika,” the famous art association (“ni” meaning “two”; “san” meaning “three”)

Shigun

前衛美術集団 「視群」

Shinjuku Boy Troop

新宿少年団

Zen’ei Bijutsu Shūdan Avant-Garde Art “Shigun” Group “Visions” Shinjuku Shōnen-dan Shinjuku Boy Troop

Groups mentioned throughout the book517

Shinseiki-gun

新世紀群

Shin Seiki-gun

New Century Group

Shūdan Daku

Group Muddle

観光芸術研究所

Kankō Geijutsu Kenkyūjo

Sightseeing Art Research Institute

Space Plan

Supēsu Puran

Space Plan

Sūpā Ichiza

Super Theater

Tāji Maharu Ryokodan

Taj Mahal Travellers

Teihen no Kai

Bottom Society

Shūdan Daku

集団「濁」

Sightseeing Art Research Institute Space Plan Super Ichiza

スーパー一座

Taj Mahal Travellers

タージ・マハル 旅行団

Teihen no Kai

底辺の会

Teiten no Kai

底点の会

Teiten no Kai

Tenjō Sajiki

天井桟敷

Bottom Zenith Society

Tenjō sajiki

Upper Gallery

*Based on the Japanese title of the French film Les Enfants du Paradis (Tenjō sajiki no hitobito).

The Play Tokyo Action Front TR Alliance

プレイ

東京行動戦線 TR同

VAN Film Science Institute

ヴァン映画科学 研究所

Vava

VAVA

Vingt-ans

バンタン

Purei

Play

Tokyo Kōdō Sensen

Tokyo Action Front

TR Dō

TR Alliance

Van Eiga Kagaku Kenkyūjo

VAN Film Science Institute

Vava

Vava

Bantan

Vingt-ans

*From the French “vingt ans,” meaning “twenty years.”

Vitamin Art

ビタミン・アート

Bitamin Āto

Vitamin Art

VOL

VOL

Voru

VOL

Wakai Nihon no Kai

Young Japan Society

Yagi no Kai

Goat Society

Yoru no Kai

Night Society

Seinen Geijutsuza

Youth Art Theater

Bijutsu Shūdan “Zantō Kaigi”

Art Group “Remnant Council”

Tsueru

Zelle

Wakai Nihon no Kai Yagi no Kai Yoru no Kai Youth Art Theater

若い日本の会 山羊の会 夜の会 青年芸術座

Zantō Kaigi

美術集団 「残党会議」

Zelle

Zelle

*From the German “Zelle,” meaning “cell.”

Zero Jigen

ゼロ次元

Zero Jigen

Zero Dimension

*At the time of its founding, was written with an alternate spelling: 0

次現 (zero ji gen), which translates to “emergence after zero.”

Zero Society

０会

Zero-kai

Zero Society

Chronology

 marks additional information on chronology entries

• marks relevant historical events not directly related to art history

Boldface marks important events that are highlighted in the main text; we have also included the original Japanese titles for the names of events and exhibitions.

1945 AUGUST

The end of WWII. Itoi Kanji (aka DadaKan) is drafted as a jibakuhei (an infantry version of the kamikaze pilots) in Izakutōge, Kagoshima.  Itoi receives training to wear explosives on his body to attack the tanks of Allied Forces landing on Fukiagehama on the Satsuma Peninsula.

1946 MARCH 4-21 MAY

5-10

8-1 SEPTEMBER SEPTEMBER 10-26 11-1—11-3 12-3—12-7

Matsuzawa Yutaka graduates from the Department of Architecture and Architectural Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo. Nihon Bijutsu Kai (Japan Art Society) is established, with an inaugural meeting at Jiyū Gakuen auditorium, Mejiro, Tokyo. 1st Hokkaidō Independent Exhibition is held in Marui-Imai Department Store, Asahikawa. • S hisō no Kagaku (Science of Thought) begins publication by Senkusha. Inaugural meeting of Iwataya Workers’ Union is held at the Education Center, Fukuoka.  Iwataya, a department store in Fukuoka, has the second largest workers’ union in the department store industry, after Mitsukoshi. It becomes the All Iwataya Laborers’ Union in May 1957. Tabe Mitsuko and Yagara Yutaka, members of Kyūshū-ha (Kyūshū School), later work at Iwataya. Hokkaidō Independent Art League is established, Sapporo. Mizue art magazine begins publication by Nihon Bijutsu Shuppan. Sansai art magazine begins publication by Shibundō. Sasaki Kōsei returns to Japan from Manchuria. Itoi Kanji participates in the first National Sports Festival of Japan held in Kyoto, representing Kyoto in the gymnastics competition. The first exhibition of Hokkaidō Independent League takes place at Mitsukoshi Department Store, Sapporo.

5201947-1949

1947 JANUARY 3-31

APRIL 12-9—12-18

Japan Art Society begins publishing Bijutsu undō as an in-house journal, Tokyo.

• The Fundamental Law of Education and the School Education Law are promulgated.  The 6-3-3-year system of school education begins. In April, the National People’s Schools (kokumin gakkō) become elementary schools, and junior and senior high schools are established under the new system. Itoi Kanji works as a miner in Ōmine Coal Mine, operated by Furukawa Mining in Tagawa, Fukuoka Prefecture. 1st Japan Independent Exhibition (organized by the Japan Art Society), Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo.

1948 JANUARY APRIL

SEPTEMBER

9-18 11-21

Bijutsu techō begins publication by Bijutsu Shuppansha, Tokyo. Yoshimura Masunobu enrolls at Ōita Prefectural First High School, Ōita.  Isozaki Arata and Akasegawa Shun (the older brother of Akasegawa Genpei) are one grade above Yoshimura. In April 1951, the school becomes Ōita Uenogaoka High School. The Avant-Garde Art Study Group is formed at Kifukuji Temple, Hongō, Tokyo.  Members include Abe Kōbō, Ikeda Tatsuo, Okamoto Tarō, Segi Shin’ichi, Tanaka Hidemitsu, Teshigahara Hiroshi, Noma Hiroshi, Hariu Ichirō, and Hanada Kiyoteru. Z  • engakuren (All-Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Organization) is formed. Itoi Kanji participates in the Ōita Prefectural Sports Festival as an athlete in the giant swing event (gymnastics) and finishes second, Ōita.

1949 2-11—3-3

APRIL MAY

7-14

1st Nihon Independent Exhibition (sponsored by Yomiuri Newspaper) is held at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo.  It is called the “Yomiuri Independent Exhibition” to differentiate it from the exhibition organized by Japan Art Society; this name is later officially adopted after 1956. Kato Yoshihiro and Iwata Shin’ichi enroll at Maezu Junior High School, Nagoya.  K awaguchi Kōtarō is one grade above. Seiki no Kai (Century Society) is formed, Tokyo.  Members include Abe Kōbō, Ikeda Tatsuo, Katsuragawa Hiroshi, Kitadai Shōzō, Segi Shin’ichi, Sekine Hiroshi, Teshigahara Hiroshi and Yamaguchi Katsuhiro. Guest members include Okamoto Tarō, Sasaki Kiichi, Shiina Rinzō, Noma Hiroshi, Hanada Kiyoteru, and Haniya Yutaka. Avant-Garde Okayama Art Association (A.G.O.) is formed, Okayama.  Members include Sakata Kazuo and Nishina Yoshio. Nishino later joins Zero Jigen.

1949-1950521

NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER

Ohno Kazuo performs the first contemporary performance of butoh at Kyōritsu Auditorium, Kanda, Tokyo.  H ijikata Tatsumi views the performance on his second visit to Tokyo and is shocked. Itoi Kanji quits his job at Furukawa Mining, goes to Tokyo and begins working at Shibaura Reizo Co., Ltd.

1950 1-1 1-6

1-15 1-19 3-1 APRIL 4-19—4-30

4-21

6-6 6-25 7-11 7-24

8-10 8-31

Geijutsu shinchō begins publication by Shinchōsha. • The Cominform (Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties) criticizes the Japanese Communist Party’s (JCP) advocacy of nonviolent revolution.  The JCP splits into two factions: the Shokan-ha (which disagrees with the Cominform) and the Kokusai-ha (which agrees with the Cominform). Revival of Kyūshitsu Kai (Ninth Room Society), an avant-garde group within the Nika Exhibition, Tokyo. • The Japan Socialist Party splits into rightwing and leftwing factions at its fifth convention. The two factions are united in April. • The Liberal Party is formed, represented by Yoshida Shigeru. Isozaki Arata enrolls at the University of Tokyo. 1st Iwate Independent Exhibition, Matsuya Department Store, Morioka  Sponsored by the Iwate Branch of Japan Art Society, Shinsei Bijutsukai (Shinsei Art Society), and Iwate Kōgei Kyōkai (Iwate Craft Society). Held annually until the 9th exhibition in 1958. • The Japan Federation of Miners’ Unions (established in 1948) is reorganized into the Japan Coal Miners’ Union, with its union model based on individual membership. • General MacArthur orders the purge of twenty-four members of the Central Committee of the JCP from public office. • The Korean War breaks out. • General Council of Trade Unions of Japan (JCTU, Sōhyō) is established. • General Headquarters (GHQ) recommends a “red purge” to representatives of newspaper associations.  On July 28, the purge begins in the newspaper and broadcasting industry. On September 1, a Cabinet decision approves the purge of civil servants. • In accordance with Potsdam Orders, the creation of a National Police Reserve in Japan is promulgated and enacted. 35th Nika Exhibition pre-opening event, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo  A rtists, dancers, and half-naked female models, all wearing Nika Exhibition yukata (summer kimono) and dressed up in a kind of “Indian [Native American], aboriginal style,” parade through the streets with a portable shrine and band. This becomes a yearly event.

5221950-1951

9-27—10-1 9-29

10-17 DECEMBER

1951 2-23 2-27—3-18 APRIL APRIL MAY

5-23—27

6-1 6-16—6-24 6-21 JULY

7-4

7-10 7-21—7-22 SEPTEMBER

1st A.G.O exhibition at Tenmanya Department Store, 4F, Okayama

 Included is work by Nishina Yoshio.

Yokoyama Haruhi Ballet Company performs Shitsurakuen (Paradise Lost), Hibiya Public Hall, Tokyo.  K itadai Shōzō assists with stage design and costumes. • The Ministry of Education instructs schools to display the Japanese flag (Hinomaru) and sing the national anthem (Kimigayo). Yamamoto Takashi and Shimizu Kusuo open Tokyo Gallery in Ginza, Tokyo.

• The 4th National Conference of the Japanese Communist Party is held; armed struggle is proposed. 3rd Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo.  Itoi Kanji participates for the first time and exhibits his work, Egg. Yoshimura Masanobu enrolls at Musashino Art School, Tokyo. Satō Shigechika enrolls in the Department of Cinema, College of Art, Nihon University (withdraws in 1956), Tokyo. Itoi Kanji solo exhibition, Formes Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  This is Itoi’s first solo exhibition, which features paintings in shaped frames, paintings of the moon with luminescent paint, and drawings based on photos of his wife and son. Salon de Vingt-ans, the first exhibition of the group Vingt-ans, Asahi Newspaper Hall, Fukuoka.  Kuroki Yōji and Terada Ken’ichirō, who later become members of Kyūshū-ha, participate. Takemiya Gallery opens in Kanda, Tokyo. Demokrato Artists Association holds its first exhibition at the Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts. • Japan is admitted to UNESCO. 1st Shinseiki-gun (New Century Group) Exhibition, Kimuraya Atelier, Ōita.  The group name “Shinseiki” is initially suggested by Isozaki Arata, who is familiar with Seiki no Kai (Century Society) in Tokyo; “gun” (group, crowd) is added by Kimura Shigetoshi. Participating artists include Akasegawa Genpei, Kazakura Shō, and Yoshimura Masunobu, who later join Neo Dada. Shimomaruko Poetry Collection begins publication in Shimomaruko, Kanagawa Prefecture.  The magazine is published by members of Shimomaruko Culture Collective, a workers’ circle that includes Abe Kōbō, Katsuragawa Hiroshi, and Teshigahara Hiroshi. D  • iscussion of conditions necessary for armistice in the Korean War begins. Haruhi Yokoyama Ballet Company performs Kappa at Hibiya Public Hall, Tokyo. Set and poster design by Kitadai Shōzō. Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop) is formed, Tokyo.  Members include Akiyama Kuniharu, Kitadai Shōzō, Suzuki Hiroyoshi, Takemitsu Tōru, Fukushima Hideko, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, and Yamazaki

1951-1952523

9-1 9-8

9-10 10-16 10-24 11-16

11-17

Hideo. Kaidō Hideo (Yomiuri Shimbun) commissions Jikken Kōbō to direct the ballet Ikiru yorokobi (Joy of Life). • Commercial radio broadcasting begins in Japan (Chūbu-Nippon Broadcasting in Nagoya and Shin-Nippon Broadcasting in Osaka). • The Treaty of San Francisco and the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan (The Japan–U.S. Security Treaty or “Anpo,” as it is commonly known in Japanese) are signed. • Rashomon, directed by Kurosawa Akira, is awarded the Grand Prix (Golden Lion) at the Venice International Film Festival. • The JCP holds its 5th National Conference and drafts a more specific policy of armed struggle. • The Socialist Party again splits into left-right factions over the Treaty of San Francisco and the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty. In its first performance as a collective, Jikken Kōbō performs the ballet Ikiru yorokobi (Joy of Life) at Hibiya Public Hall, Tokyo, as part of the program for the Picasso Festival, to coincide with a retrospective of Picasso’s work at Takashimaya Department Store, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art opens in Kamakura.

1952 JANUARY 1-8 1-20 FEBRUARY 2-1—2-10 2-21

2-23 3-16

3-29 APRIL

Bijutsu hihyō (Art criticism) begins publication by Bijutsu Shuppansha. Bridgestone Museum of Art opens in Kyōbashi, Tokyo. Jikken Kōbō 2nd performance event, Performance of Contemporary Works, at Joshi Gakuin College auditorium, Ichigaya, Tokyo. Okamoto Tarō’s essay “Dialogue with the Fourth Dimension: A Theory of Jōmon Pottery” is published in the February issue of Mizue. Jikken Kōbō 3rd event, Takemiya Gallery, Kanda, Tokyo. • The Popolo Incident, Tokyo  A n undercover policeman is discovered taking notes during a performance of the Popolo Dramatic Troupe at the University of Tokyo, and his notebook is confiscated by students. • Weekly magazine Shūkan Sankei begins publication by Sankei Shimbunsha. • Nichigeki Music Hall opens in Yūrakuchō, Tokyo.  Okamoto Tarō works as a member of the stage design staff on the opening performance, Tokyo Eve. M  • embers of the Sanson Kōsakutai (Mountain Village Operation Corps) of the JCP are arrested in Ogōchi Village (present-day Okutama-machi), Tokyo. Iwata Shin’ichi and Koiwa Takayoshi enroll in the fine arts program at Aichi Prefectural Asahigaoka High School, Nagoya. Despite insufficient attendance due to illness, Iwata is allowed to graduate on the condition that he enroll in college.  Younger students at the school include Akasegawa Genpei, Arakawa Shūsaku, and Kishimoto Sayako, who all join Neo Dada. As a student, Iwata studies nihonga (Japanese-style painting) under Ishikawa Eihō.

5241952

APRIL APRIL

APRIL 4-1 4-28 5-1 5-9 JUNE

JUNE? 6-2

6-28

7-4 7-7

7-13 7-27 8-9

8-13 8-21—8-25

OCTOBER

10-30 12-1

Katō Yoshiro enrolls in the Commercial Course at Aichi Prefectural Meiwa High School in Nagoya. Shinohara Ushio enrolls in the oil painting course at Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music (present-day Tokyo University of the Arts), Tokyo. (He withdraws in 1957.) Kawani Hiroshi enrolls at Keiō University, Faculty of Letters, Tokyo. • Tezuka Osamu’s manga series Astro Boy begins in Shōnen, published by Kōbun-sha. • The Treaty of San Francisco and the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty go into effect. • Bloody May Day demonstrations occur in the public area in front of the Imperial Palace, Tokyo. • The American Cultural Center opens in Yurakuchō, Tokyo. Katsuragawa Hiroshi, Bitō Yutaka, Yamashita Kikuji, et al. participate in the Cultural Action Corps (Bunka Kōsakutai), Ogōchi Village, Tokyo  They stay for nearly two months in support of the movement by the Mountain Village Operation Corps against the construction of Ogōchi Dam. Akasegawa Genpei transfers from Maizuru High School, Ōita Prefecture to the fine arts program at Aichi Prefectural Asahigaoka High School, Nagoya. • The Sugō Incident in Sugō (present-day Takeda City), Ōita.  JCP members are falsely accused of detonating a bomb at a police station. This incident becomes the subject of a work by Kyūshū-ha artist Matano Mamoru. Shūkan Ogōchi publishes a flyer as an extra edition with illustrations by Katsuragawa Hiroshi, Irino Tatsuya, Bitō Yutraka, Yamashita Kikuji, and Shimada Sumiya, Ogōchi Village, Tokyo. These artists, along with Mita Genjirō and Nakayama Tadashi, publish a picture story as an issue of Shūkan Ogōchi, July 9. • The House of Representatives of Japan passes three bills including the Subversive Activities Prevention Act (effective July 21). Iwata Shin’ichi participates in the street demonstration during the Ōsu Incident, Nagoya.  The clash between demonstrators and police causes Iwata to distance himself from the JCP. • Yomiuri Weekly begins publication by Yomiuri Shimbunsha. The Korean Armistice Agreement is signed. For Jikken Kōbō’s 4th performance event, the group commemorates Sonoda Takahiro’s visit to Europe in Contemporary Works Concert at Joshi Gakuin College auditorium, Ichigaya, Tokyo. • Japan joins the International Monetary Fund (IMF). 2nd Shinseiki-gun Exhibition, Wakakusa Park, Ōita  Participating artists include Yoshimura Masunobu and Isozaki Arata. This marks the beginning of annual exhibitions held in the park. Itoi Kanji quits Shibaura Reizo Co., Ltd. and returns to Sendai, where his parents live. He remarries, with haiku poet Iida Gakurō serving as the go-between. He is employed at Sendai Seisen Factory, which is owned by his father. • Fourth Yoshida Shigeru Cabinet (until May 21, 1953) The National Museum of Modern Art opens in Takebashi, Tokyo.

1953-1954525

1953 2-1 2-22—3-5

MARCH MARCH 3-11—3-15 APRIL 5-11—5-20 5-21 5-22 6-13 6-21

6-22—7-4

JULY? 8-28 9-30

11-29—11-30

• N HK TV begins broadcasting. 6th Nihon Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum  Included are works by Iwata Shin’ichi, Kawaguchi Kōtarō, and Shimamoto Shōzō. Sakurai Takami graduates from Fukuoka Gakugei University (present-day University of Teacher Education Fukuoka), Fukuoka. Tabe Mitsuko starts working in Iwataya Department Store, Fukuoka  She learns drawing while employed in the painting department. 2nd A.G.O. exhibition at Tenmaya Department Store, Okayama  Included are works by Nishina Yoshio and Hayashi Miyori. Arakawa Shūsaku enrolls in the Fine Arts Course at Aichi Prefectural Asahigaoka High School, Nagoya. 17th Kahoku Art Exhibition, Fujisaki Department Store, Sendai  Included is a work by Itoi Kanji. • Fifth Yoshida Shigeru Cabinet (until December 10, 1954) • The Ishikawa Prefectural Assembly opposes allowing the U.S. military unrestricted use of an artillery range in Uchinada, Ishikawa. • The Uchinada Struggle in Ishikawa Prefecture marks the beginning of public protests against the U.S. military presence in Japan. Ao no Ie (Blue House), a communal atelier, opens in Fukuoka.  It is used by artists including those who will later become members of Kyūshūha: Kinoshita Shin, Kuroki Yōji, Terada Ken’ichiro, and Yonekura Toku. 1st Nippon-ten Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo  Included is Yamashita Kikuji’s Akebono mura monogatari (The Tale of Akebono Village). Sakurai Takami is employed by Nishinippon Shimbun Co., Ltd., Fukuoka. • Nippon Television Network Corporation, the first commercial network, begins broadcasting. Jikken Kōbō’s 5th performance and exhibition at Dai-ichi Seimei Hall, Hibiya, Tokyo.  A n “intermedia manifesto by all the members” includes music, auto-slides, sound poetry and other media. • First National Festival of Utagoe (‘the Singing Voice’), Hibiya Public Hall and Kyōritsu Auditorium, Tokyo.

1954 IN THIS YEAR

Kyoto Young Artists Group (Seibi) is formed in Kyoto.  This leads to the inception of the Kyoto Independent Exhibition. Matano Mamoru is employed by Nishinippon Shimbun Co., Ltd. in Fukuoka.  At Nishinippon Shimbun, Matano meets Sakurai Takami, and begins painting at Sakurai’s suggestion.

5261954

2-19

2-22—3-5

MARCH

3-1

3-1 APRIL APRIL APRIL MAY 5-1 5-7

5-15

6-19 SUMMER

SUMMER

Yoshimura Masanobu rents Kojima Zenzaburō’s former studio in Kokubunji, Tokyo as a residence and workplace. • R ikidōzan competes in his first international professional wrestling match, Kokugikan, Kuramae, Tokyo.  It is broadcast live on NHK and Nippon TV. 7th Japan Independent Exhibition is held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo.  Included are works by Yoshimura Masanobu and Chiba Eisuke. Kazakura Shō graduates from the Industrial Chemistry Course, Ōita Prefectural Ōita Technical High School in Ōita.  He assists the East Ōita Youth Theater Troupe and begins his association with Shinseiki-gun, becoming a member in summer 1955. Asobi (Play) begins publication in Sendai.  This monthly magazine on renku and haiseki is edited and published by Iida Gakurō. Renku is linked verse poetry; haiseki refers to a playful act of Iida’s conception—picking up rocks along the road or in riverbeds and giving them titles. Itoi Kanji has previously participated in haiseki and exhibits his work at Fujisaki, a department store. In the inaugural publication of the periodical, his name is listed as a judge, but he does not participate in the judging. • The Daigo Fukuryū Maru, a tuna fishing boat from Japan, is contaminated by radioactive fallout near the Bikini Atoll. Kudō Tetsumi enrolls at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Tokyo. Sasaki Kōsei enrolls at Musashino Art School, Tokyo. Miki Tomio enrolls at Chūbi Central Art School (Chūō Bijutsu Gakuen, Tokyo), and later withdraws. • Tanigawa Gan’s Genten ga sonzai suru (The origin exists) is published in the poetry journal Boin, Fukuoka. • Camera Mainichi begins publication by Mainichi Shimbunsha.  The magazine runs until April 1985. • Ho Chi Minh’s forces, the Viet Minh (League for the Independence of Vietnam), defeat the French army in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the last battle of the French Indochina War. Poetry journal Shika begins publication, Fukuoka.  Itahashi Kenkichi, editor; Osaka Kōji, publisher; cover and illustrations by Kuroki Yōji. • The first consolidated radio tower (TV tower) in Japan is built in Hisaya Avenue Park, Nagoya. Shigun (Visions) is formed, Tokyo  Members include Nishioka Hiroshi, Kawai Kaname, Kawai Yoshihiro, and Kitayama Taito, as well as others working in literature and theater. Their first exhibition is held at Chateau (coffee shop), Shinjuku, the same year. Zero-kai (Zero Society) is formed.  Members include Kanayama Akira, Shiraga Kazuo, Murakami Saburō and about fifteen others; also Tanaka Atsuko, who later joins. Active until 1955.

1954-1955527

7-1 AUGUST?

8-8 8-13 9-7

10-1—12-26

AUTUMN

11-3 12-10

• The Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) are established. The Gutai Art Association is founded in Kobe.  Members include Yoshihara Jirō (representative), Azuma Sadami, Isetani Kei, Ueda Tamiko, Uemae Chiyū, Okada Hiroshi, Okamoto Hajime, Shimamoto Shōzō, Sekine Yoshio, Tsujimura Shigeru, Fujikawa Tōichirō, Funai Yutaka, Masanobu Masatoshi, Yamazaki Tsuruko, Yoshida Toshio, Yoshihara Hideo, and Yoshihara Michio. • A national council is formed to conduct a signature-collecting campaign against atomic and hydrogen bombs. Itoi Kanji moves from Sendai to Ōmori, Tokyo. • Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Samurai), directed by Kurosawa Akira, and Sanshō Dayū (Sanshō the Bailiff), directed by Mizoguchi Kenji, are awarded the Silver Lion at Venice International Film Festival. Kami no kuni kara tanisoko mireba (Seven Peeping Toms from Heaven) at Nichigeki Music Hall in Yūrakuchō, Tokyo.  Composed and directed by Okada Keikichi and Katō Tadamatsu, with art direction by Jikken Kōbō using multi-projection of an auto-slide and the film Mobile and Vitrine. Zero Society holds an exhibition in the show windows of Sogō Department Store, Osaka.  Included are works by Kanayama Akira, Shiraga Kazuo, Tanaka Atsuko, Murakami Saburō. • Premiere of the film Godzilla by Tōhō Studios. • First Hatoyama Ichirō Cabinet (until March 19, 1955)

1955 JANUARY 1-1 1-7—1-11 1-13—1-19

FEBRUARY 2-1 2-1—2-16 2-2—2-14

MARCH 3-1—3-17

Yoshihara Jirō becomes president of Yoshihara Oil Mill Co., Ltd. • The JCP self-criticizes its strategy of armed struggle in Akahata. First exhibition of the Rozo-gun (Rozo Group) at Kawamata Gallery, Mito. Exhibition to mark the formation of Alpha Art Circle at Muramatsu Gallery in Ginza, Tokyo.  Included are works by 56 artists, including Matsuzawa Yutaka and Hamaguchi Tomiji. • Fūgetsu-dō (coffee shop) relocates and opens a new shop in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall and Art Museum opens in Nagoya. Joint exhibition by Kuroki Yōji and Terada Ken’ichiro in a meeting room in Iwataya, Fukuoka. 8th Japan Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.  Included are a collaborative work by Shinseiki-gun (New Century Group) and works by Yoshimura Masunobu. Yoshimura Masunobu graduates from Musashino Art School, Tokyo. 7th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.  Included are works by Gutai, Shinohara Ushio, Hamaguchi Tomiji, and Yoshimura Masunobu. Over 1300 works are exhibited, nearly twice the number the previous year, indicating a rise in up-and-coming artists.

5281955

3-19 3-23—3-31 3-29—3-31

APRIL APRIL APRIL APRIL APRIL APRIL

4-1

4-18—4-24 4-19

5-8—5-12

6-7 6-27 7-1 7-20 7-25—8-6

7-29 8-6

• Second Hatoyama Ichirō Cabinet (until November 22, 1955) Kyoto Independent Exhibition is organized by the Kyoto Young Artists Group and held at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art. Ballet Experimental Theater at Haiyūza Theater in Roppongi, Tokyo  W ith Matsuo Akemi Ballet Company, Jikken Kōbō stages performances that include Illumination, Kojiki ōji (Pauper Prince), and Mirai no Ibu (L'Eve Future, Future Eve). Akasegawa Genpei enrolls at Musashino Art School and studies oil painting, Tokyo (withdraws in 1957). Katō Yoshihiro enrolls at Tama Art University and studies painting, Tokyo. Kishimoto Sayako enrolls at Aichi Prefectural Asahigaoka High School and studies art, Nagoya. Tashiro Minoru enrolls at Shōhei High School in Tokyo. Nakajima Yoshio enrolls at Shōhei High School in Tokyo and studies painting under Tsukioka Eiki. Moriyama Yasuhide enrolls in the Special Course for Teacher Training in Arts and Crafts, Department of Education, Saga University (leaves without a degree in 1957). • K RT (Kabushikigaisha Radio Tokyo) begins TV broadcasting.  K RT changes its name to TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System) on November 29, 1960. • The First Asian–African Conference is held in Bandung, Indonesia. Gutai and Zero Society meet at Shiraga Kazuo’s home in Amagasaki.  Zero Society members Kanayama Akira, Shiraga Kazuo, Tanaka Atsuko, and Murakami Saburō later join Gutai. • The General Rise-up Rally to protest against the expansion of the Tachikawa U.S. military base is held in Sunagawa, Tokyo.  This marks the beginning of the Sunagawa Struggle. • Japan joins GATT (The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). Itoi Kanji’s second divorce; in May, he moves to Sannō, Ōta-ku, Tokyo. Munakata Shikō is awarded first prize in the Print Division at the 3rd São Paulo Biennial Exhibition in Brazil. • The Economic Planning Agency is established; it is tasked with formulating policies for high economic growth. Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Midsummer Sun, Ashiya Park, Ashiya, Hyōgo.  This is Gutai’s first outdoor exhibition. Included are Please Come In by Shiraga Kazuo, who uses an axe to hack a cone of red logs from the inside; and a work by Murakami Saburō which consists of asphalt roofing that has been splattered with paint from a bucket, of which he grabs an edge that he tears off while running. • At the 6th National Conference, the JCP engages in self-criticism, calling armed struggle “adventurism of the extreme left.” • 1st World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in Hiroshima, Hiroshima Public Hall.

1955-1956529

8-7 8-14—8-20 8-28 9-1—9-19

9-10—10-20 9-13

10-13

10-19—10-28

11-1—11-30 11-3 11-15

11-22 DECEMBER 12-5

• Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation (present-day Sony) sells the first transistor radio in Japan. Yoshimura Masunobu Solo Exhibition, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo Matsuzawa Yutaka moves to the United States.  Fulbright exchange scholar at Wisconsin State College, Wisconsin, USA 40th Nika Art Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo  Included are works by Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ochi Osamu, Kuroki Yōji, Saitō Hidesaburō, Sakurai Takami, Terada Ken’ichirō, and Yonekura Toku, all later members of Kyūshū-ha. Sakurai and Ochi’s works are selected for the first time. Backed by Okamoto Tarō, Ochi is a candidate for the Nika New Artist Prize. Mexican Art Exhibition, Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo • In the area to be requisitioned for the expansion of the U.S. Air Force base in Tachikawa, residents and police clash over required land surveys, Sunagawa, Tokyo. • The Rightist Socialist Party and the Leftist Socialist Party merge to form one Socialist Party at the Unification Convention held at Kyōritsu Auditorium, Kanda, Tokyo. 1st Gutai Art Exhibition at Ohara Kaikan in Minami-aoyama, Tokyo.  Gutai’s first exhibition in Tokyo; Shiraga Kazuo performs Doro ni idomu (Challenging Mud) and Tanaka Atsuko performs Bell. Murakami Saburō performs Kamiyaburi (Muttsu no ana) (Paper-Breaking (Six Holes)) for the first time on October 18 and Iriguchi (Entrance) on October 19. Joint exhibition by Matano Mamoru and Sakurai Takami, Hütte Coffee Shop, Futsukaichi, Fukuoka • Funabashi Health Center opens in Chiba. • The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is established at a convention held at an auditorium at Chūō University in Kanda, Tokyo.  The Democratic Party and the Liberal Party agree to unite. • Third Hatoyama Ichirō Cabinet (until December 23, 1956) “Gutai Art Manifesto” is published in the December issue of Geijutsu shinchō. An Evening of Creative Theater on the Circular Stage, Sankei International Conference Hall, Ōtemachi, Tokyo.  A performance of Tsuki ni tsukareta Piero (Pierrot Lunaire) and Gendai nō: Aya no tsuzumi (Contemporary Noh: The Damask Drum), written and directed by Takechi Tetsuji, with participation by Jikken Kōbō.

1956 IN THIS YEAR 1-23 FEBRUARY

Gary Snyder visits Japan and starts living in Kyoto. • Ishihara Shintarō is awarded the Akutagawa Prize for his novel Season of the Sun. N  • akano Yoshio’s essay “Mohaya sengo dewa nai” “(We are Postwar no longer)” appears in the February issue of Bungei Shunjū.

5301956

2-2—2-14

2-19 MARCH

3-1—3-17

APRIL APRIL APRIL APRIL

4-6—4-8

4-9 4-20 4-26 5-5

5-17 6-18 7-31

7-26 7-27—8-5

9th Japan Independent Exhibition is held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.  Included are works by Shinohara Ushio, Yoshimura Masunobu, a collaboration by Shinseiki-gun, and works by members of Shigun. Shūkan Shinchō begins publication by Shinchōsha. • I  t is the first weekly magazine founded by a publishing company.  Nam June Paik graduates from University of Tokyo with a degree in aesthetics and art history.  He later enrolls at Munich University to study philosophy. 8th Yomiuri Independent, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo  The name is changed beginning with this edition from “Nihon Independent” to “Yomiuri Independent.” Included are works by Yoshimura Masunobu. Akiyama Yūtokutaishi enrolls in the Sculpture Course at Musashino Art School, Tokyo. Arakawa Shūsaku enrolls at Musashino Art School (later withdraws), Tokyo. Kazakura Shō enrolls in the Oil Painting Course at Musashino Art School (withdraws in 1958), Tokyo. Harumoto Shigeto enrolls in the Special Course for Teacher Training in Arts and Crafts, Department of Education, Saga University, and rooms with Moriyama Yasuhide, Saga. Life magazine photographers document Gutai engaged in artmaking at Yoshihara Oil Mill factory, Imazu Beach, Nishinomiya, Kobe.  Performances photographed include Tanaka Atsuko’s costume changes, Shiraga Kazuo painting with his feet, Murakami Saburō bursting through paper screens, Kinoshita Toshiko using chemicals in art making, Motonaga Sadamasa’s smoke sculpture, and Yoshihara Michio painting with his bicycle. Gutai holds One Day Only Outdoor Art Exhibition in the ruins of a U.S.-bombed factory of Yoshihara Oil Mill on the banks of the Mukogawa River, Kobe. • The Urban Park Act is promulgated. Ishibashi Art Museum opens in Kurume, Fukuoka. Asari Atsushi publishes Jidōga no himitsu: Daredemo dekiru shikisai handan (Secrets of children’s pictures: Easy to master diagnosis based on color) from Reimei Shobō.  The book influences Asai Masao and Suenaga Tamio. • The film release of Season of the Sun (Nikkatsu), adapted from Ishihara Shintarō’s novel. Shimizu Kusuo opens Minami Gallery in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. • The Economic Planning Agency releases its Economic Survey of Japan (1955– 1956), the 1956 Keizai Hakusho (White Paper on the Economy).  K nown for its conclusion that “Japan is no longer in the postwar era.” • Egyptian President Abdel Nassar announces the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Outdoor Gutai Art Exhibition, Ashiya Park, Ashiya, Hyōgo.  Participating artists include Tanaka Atsuko with Stage Clothes; Motonaga Sadamasa, Murakami Saburō, Shimamoto Shōzō, Satō Seiichi with Human Bag.

1956531

AUGUST

AUGUST 8-1—8-30 OCTOBER 10-7 10-10—10-25 10-11—10-17

10-12

10-19 10-23 10-29 11-2—11-4

11-13—11-25

11-14 11-19 DECEMBER

12-1

Nika Exhibition Pep Rally, Banjiro Coffee Shop, Fukuoka  Held by painter Itō Kenshi, of the Fukuoka Nika Exhibition. Sakurai Takami and Ochi Osamu meet, which begins their close friendship. 1st Exhibition by Group Ōdo (Yellow Soil), Marui-Imai Department Store, Asahikawa, Hokkaidō. Summer Exhibition: Enjoying New Perspective and Space, by the members of Jikken Kōbō, Fūgetsu-dō; Shinjuku, Tokyo. Itoi Kanji completes the 184th session of Tenrikyō training, Nara. • Shūkan Asahi Geinō begins publication by Tōzai Geinō Publishing. 19th Ōita Prefectural Art Exhibition, Tokiwa Department Store, Ōita.  Included is a painting by Kazakura Shō, his first selection for exhibition. 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Kaikan Hall, Minami-aoyama, Tokyo.  Participating artists include Murakami Saburō breaking through paper in Tsūka (Passing Through); Shiraga Kazuo painting with his feet; Shimamoto Shōzō throwing bottles of paint; Yoshida Toshio painting with a watering can; and Tanaka Atsuko’s Denki fuku (Electric Dress). • The Sunagawa Struggle reignites when a second land survey is ordered, Sunagawa, Tokyo.  P rotestors and police clash. On October 13, the demonstrators sing Akatonbo (Red Dragonfly). Due to the strong protest, the government decides to halt the survey on October 14. Participants include Yoshimura Masunobu, Akasegawa Genpei, Akiyama Yūtokutaishi. Akasegawa and Kazakura later meet in Shinjuku. J  • apan and the Soviet Union sign a joint declaration to restore diplomatic relations. • The Hungarian Uprising begins; the Soviet military intervenes. • Israeli troops invade Egypt, starting the Second Arab–Israeli war. Persona Exhibition, west wall of Fukuoka Prefectural Office, Fukuoka.  “Persona,” referring to theatrical masks in Latin, alludes to the exposure of artwork on the street. This outdoor exhibition of poetry and visual art prompts the formation of Kyūshū-ha. Participating painters include Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ochi Osamu, Kuroki Yōji, and Sakurai Takami. Participating poets include Matano Mamoru, Amano Keizō, Harada Taneo, Itahashi Kenkichi, Kawaguchi Atsumi, Osaka Kōji, Kagami Akira, Suzuki Shōhei, Takamatsu Fumiki, and Tanaka Iwao. Art of Today’s World (Exposition International de l’Art Actuel), Takashimaya Department Store, Nihonbashi, Tokyo.  This exhibition is noted for stirring up the “Informel whirlwind.” Organized by Asahi Newspaper. • Shūkan Manga Times begins publication by Hōbunsha. • Electrification of the Tōkaidō Main Line is completed. Kagami Masayuki withdraws from Tokyo Metropolitan Technical and Chemical High School after two years.  He later attends Ochanomizu Art School and Asagaya Art School. • Shinjuku Milano-za Theater opens in Kabukichō, Tokyo.  It becomes the largest movie theater in Japan with entertainment facilities.

5321956-1957

12-18 12-23 12-28

• Japan becomes a member of the United Nations. • Ishibashi Tanzan Cabinet (until February 25, 1957) • Shinjuku Koma Theater opens in Tokyo.

1957 IN THIS YEAR

1-15—1-20 1-27 1-28—2-9

2-22 2-25 2-25—3-12

MARCH MARCH

3-1 3-5 3-5—3-10

Akiyama Yūtokutaishi is politically active in the student council of Musashino Art School and joins the Kinpyō Tōso (Kinpyō Struggle), against work performance evaluation for teachers (kinmu hyōtei, abbreviated as kinpyō), Tokyo. Gunma Prefecture Farmers’ Arts Troupe Doro (Group Mud) is formed, Takasaki, Gunma.  Its core members are from the Gunma Prefectural Seta Nōrin High School art club. Ishii Kyōji establishes Gendai Shichōsha in Tokyo. Art of Today’s World, Takashimaya Department Store in Nanba, Ōsaka.  The exhibition travels from Tokyo. • Nihon Torotsukisuto Renmei (Japan Trotskyist League) is formed, Tokyo. 10th Japan Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo.  Included are works by Akasegawa Genpei, Shinohara Ushio, Yoshimura Masunobu (aka Abi Kan), and Yagara Yutaka. • The first Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building is completed in Marunouchi, Tokyo. • First Kishi Nobusuke Cabinet (until June 12, 1958) 9th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo.  Included are works by Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ochi Osamu, and Sakurai Takami (first-time participants, who later become members of Kyūshū-ha); Arakawa Shūsaku, Ariyoshi Shin, Shinohara Ushio and Yoshimura Masanobu (Abi Kan) (future members of Neo Dada Organizers); and Iwakura Masahito (future member of Remandaran and The Play). The influence of Art Informel becomes apparent. Tone Yasunao graduates with a degree in Japanese literature from Chiba University, Chiba. Kanesaka Kenji receives a master’s degree in English literature from Keio University, Tokyo.  He is later employed by Shōchiku Co., Ltd. in the International Department. •Television broadcasting is extended to 11 p.m. • Nishinippon Newspaper Workers’ Union (Second Union) is formed, Fukuoka. Art of Today’s World, Iwataya Hall, Fukuoka.  The exhibition travels from Tokyo and Ōsaka. Ochi Osamu and Sakurai Takami, who help with the exhibition, ask Okamoto Tarō, who visits the exhibition, for his assessment. Tagaya Itoku, another visiting painter, later tells them that open call (juried) exhibitions have become outdated. This discussion becomes their impetus to form Kyūshū-ha.

1957533

3-8—3-10

3-13—3-19 3-17 3-18

3-31

APRIL APRIL 4-1 4-3—4-10 4-9—4-14

4-19—5-22 5-5

5-5

5-8 5-29

6-6

Yagara Yutaka solo exhibition of oil paintings, Basement Hall of Asahi Kaikan, Fukuoka.  Yagara is approached about joining the Iwataya Workers’ Union and begins to associate with Sakurai Takami and other future members of Kyūshū-ha. Kyoto Independent Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, Kyoto.  This is the first exhibition sponsored by the city of Kyoto. • Shūkan Josei (Weekly Women) begins publication by Kawade Shobō.  The magazine is later published by Shufu to Seikatsu Sha Co., Ltd. • The first underground arcade opens in Nagoya.  This marks the start of underground arcade construction in metropolitan areas. Ōita City Youth Festival, Ōita Prefectural Education Hall, Ōita.  K azakura Shō’s performance of repeatedly falling to the floor with a stool while seated in it may be considered the first Happening in Japanese art history. It is presumed to have happened at this festival. [pp. 114–5] Kosugi Takehisa begins studying musicology at the Faculty of Music, Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music, Tokyo. • Machi, a monthly manga magazine begins publication in Nagoya and is available through a book rental service. Matsuzawa Yutaka returns from the United States. 3rd Gutai Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, Kyoto. Ishibashi Yasuyuki and Sakurai Takami Two-Person Exhibition, Iwataya Social Room, Fukuoka.  Ishibashi plays recorded electronic music by Kon Shirō to accompany his exhibited works. The “Gathering of Young Artists” held on the last day brings together artists go on to form Kyūshū-ha. • Lockout due to the Iwataya dispute in Fukuoka.  The lockout lasts 53 days, the longest in department store history. Meeting at Fusaya Coffee Shop, Fukuoka.  A rtists who later form Kyūshū-ha hold a meeting to decide that all attending artists should exhibit their works in the Nishinippon Art Exhibition. Yoshimura Masanobu commissions Isozaki Arata to design his home/studio in Tokyo.  The request is made at a wedding party for Akasegawa Shun (elder brother of Genpei) at the Nippon Seinenkan Hotel. The house is completed about six months later. • Tokyo Coca-Cola Bottling sells Coca-Cola in 190 ml glass bottles (standard size) for general consumption. Gutai Art on the Stage, Sankei Kaikan Hall in Umeda (Osaka).  Gutai’s first public performance event includes Shiraga Kazuo’s Chō gendai sanbasō (Ultramodern Sanbasō), Tanaka Atsuko’s Butaifuku (Stage Clothes), Shimamoto Shōzō’s Buttai no Daboku (Material Destruction), and Murakami Saburō’s Byōbu to torikumu (Wrestling with Folding Screens). O  • gōchi Dam begins operation in Okutama, Tokyo.

5341957

6-7—6-16

6-10—6-15 6-16 6-22

6-23

6-24

6-27 6-30—7-11 JULY JULY

JULY 7-3

7-8

7-16

7-17 7-22—7-27

8th Nishinippon Art Exhibition is held in Tamaya Department Store, Fukuoka.  Included are works by Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ochi Osamu, Obana Shigeharu, Owari Takeshi, Kawakami Shōzō, Kinoshita Shin, Kuroki Yōji, Sakurai Takami (Honorable Mention), Sanui Yasushi, Tabe Mitsuko, Surusumi Seiryō, Chō Yoriko, Nishijima Masaomi, Yamauchi Jūtarō (Honorable Mention). Ishibashi uses coal tar in his painting Ah! Naval Ensign. Exhibition of the Alchemists, Tokiwa Gallery in Ginza, Tokyo.  Included are works by Ohara Hisao, Kuroki Fugujin, and Shinohara Ushio. Demokrato Artists Association announces that it will disband, Tokyo. Kuni Chiya Dance Institute holds a reception to commemorate the completion of a new building, Komaba, Tokyo.  Its name is changed from Seinen Dance Kenkyūjo (Youth Butoh Institute). • Zen’iwarō (All Iwataya Laborers’ Union) is formed in Fukuoka.  It is the merger of two labor organizations: the first Iwataya Workers’ Union and the Iwataya Temporary Employees’ Union, established on April 3. • Iwataya Workers’ Union is formed in Fukuoka.  This second union is established in opposition to Zen’iwarō. In 1958, its name is changed to Iwataya Department Store Laborers’ Union (Iwahyakurō). • The Tokyo Procurement Office begins preparatory surveys of Sunagawa, Tokyo. Zengakuren students clash with the U.S. military police. 5th Nippon Exhibition is held at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo.  Included are works by Yoshimura Masanobu and Takamatsu Jirō. Mizukami Jun moves to Kyoto from Nagoya. • The 2nd Kinpyō Struggle begins.  Conflict over teacher evaluations in Ehime begins to spread nationwide in reaction to a statement by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture at a committee meeting in the House of Representatives. • Shinjuku, along with Ikebukuro and Shibuya, is designated as a major secondary center ( fukutoshin) of Tokyo for further development. • Sukiyabashi Shopping Center opens in Tokyo.  The Sukiyabashi Bridge is demolished for the construction of an expressway on July 13. T  • he Tokyo Procurement Office resumes a survey to expand the U.S. military airfield into the town of Sunagawa in Tokyo.  Members of the Alliance against the Expansion of Sunagawa Base, students, and workers are indicted for entering the base and charged with trespassing. The Grand Meeting for Participating Artists in the Nishinippon Art Exhibition, Auditorium of Nishinippon Newspaper, Fukuoka.  Kyūshū-ha holds a meeting of artists whose works are rejected for mutual criticism, aiming to expand the group’s membership. Gutai Art on Stage, Sankei Hall in Ōtemachi (Tokyo). Itoi Kanji solo exhibition, Kyūryūdo Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo  E xhibited are oil paintings Kuro no doresu no fujin (Woman in the Black Dress) and Tulips; works of collage and origami; Musashino, an acorn bonsai; prints on shikishi cards with attached waka poetry and prints: Unmei (Fortune),

1957535

7-24 LATE JULY

8-1—8-31

8-5 8-14—8-18

8-29

9-1

9-3—9-10

9-5

9-12

Shirakame (White Turtle), Hoshizukiyo (Starry Night); and an ikebana work with artificial flowers arranged in tattered shoes. Itoi visits the gallery in a skirt made out of a curtain from his house, his first performative action. He distributes Asobi, a magazine published by Iida Gakurō, to visitors. Many people visit and buy exhibited works, including Fumon Gyō, Ay-O, and members of Asobi. [p. 116, 395] • Tokyo surpasses London to become the city with the largest population in the world (8,518,622). A meeting to establish Kyūshū-ha is held in a meeting room of Nishinippon Newspaper Co., Fukuoka.  The participants decide on an alias, Group Q, and publish a journal. Summer exhibition by Jikken Kōbō members, Fūgetsu-dō, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Included are works by Ōtsuji Kiyoji, Kitadai Shōzō, Komai Tetsurō, Fukushima Hideko, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro. Imai Toshimitsu returns to Japan from France. 18 Artists of Group Q, Iwataya Hall, Fukuoka.  Included are works by are Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ochi Osamu, Ono Mitsuko, Obana Shigeharu, Owari Takeshi, Kawakami Shōzō, Kikuhata Mokuma, Kinoshita Shin, Kuroki Yōji, Sakurai Takami, Sugawara Yōko, Surusumi Seiryō, Tabe Mitsuko, Chō Yoriko, Tokuda Junko, Matano Mamoru, Yagara Yutaka, and Yamauchi Jūtarō. This is the inaugural exhibition of Kyūshū-ha. Georges Mathieu visits Japan, arriving in Tokyo.  In Tokyo, he creates paintings at Okamoto Tarō’s home on August 31, Sōgetsu Mita School on September 1, and in the garage of Shirokiya Department Store on October 2. The work he makes at Shirokiya, Battle of Kōan (Kōan no eki), is now in the collection of the Sōgetsu Art Museum. He stays in Japan until September 19. Kyūshū-ha publishes the first issue of its journal Kyūshū-ha, Fukuoka.  In the addition to works by the 18 artists who comprise 18 Artists of Group Q, the issue includes works by Ōgami Toshiko and Sanui Yasushi. The journal, edited by Matano Mamoru, has a special feature on the Nishinippon Art Exhibition. Georges Mathieu Solo Exhibition, Shirokiya Department Store, Nihonbashi, Tokyo.  On the first day, Mathieu creates the Battle of Bun’ei (currently a part of the Centre Pompidou collections) in the store window before an audience. Shinohara Ushio attends and is very influenced by the performance. Michel Tapié arrives in Tokyo.  Shinohara Ushio shows Tapié his work during this visit. Tapié stays in Japan until October 11. Imai Toshimitsu and Michel Tapié give lectures, Asahi Newspaper Co., Ltd., Nakanoshima, Osaka.  On September 13 and 16, Tapié visits Yoshihara Jirō’s home and studio to view the works of Gutai.

5361957

9-12—9-15

9-25 10-1 10-2—10-7 10-4 10-8—10-10 10-11—11-10

10-15—10-20 10-18

10-22—10-26 10-25 10-29—11-3

NOVEMBER?

11-2—11-4

Georges Mathieu exhibition at Daimaru Department Store, Shinsaibashi, Osaka.  On 9.12, Mathieu paints Hommage au Général Hideyoshi (currently a part of the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art collections) before an audience on the roof of the Daimaru Department Store. The Japan Teachers’ Union (Nikkyōso) meets to voice nationwide opposition to • the work evaluation system. • Japan is elected as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Kudō Tetsumi Solo Exhibition at Galerie Blanche, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Holds an “artmaking demonstration” (seisaku jitsuen). • The Soviet Union successfully launches Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. 4th Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Kaikan, Minami-aoyama, Tokyo.  M ichel Tapié visits the exhibition. International Contemporary Art Exhibition Informel: Genesis of an Other Art is held at Bridgestone Museum of Art, Kyōbashi, Tokyo.  On November 10, Sam Francis and Imai Toshimitsu give a joint demonstration of making a billboard. The exhibition is sponsored by Yomiuri Newspaper and Bridgestone Museum of Art. Exhibition of works by Imai Toshimitsu and Sam Francis, Tōyoko Department Store, Shibuya, Tokyo. Shinseiki-gun publishes Shin-Seiki (New Century) No. 15, Ōita.  A kasegawa Genpei publishes a story, Saishuppatsu (Restart), and Kazakura Shō contributes a poem, Amefuri (Falling Rain), under his real name, Hashimoto Masayuki. 1st Exhibition of the Tsuchi Group, Bumpōdō Gallery, Kanda, Tokyo.  Included are works by Kudō Tetsumi and Horiuchi Kesao. • Doyō manga (Saturday comics) begins publication by Doyō Tsūshin-sha. Yamauchi Jūtarō and Surusumi Seiryō, two-person exhibition at Iwataya Art Gallery, Fukuoka.  On the invitation, the show is titled “5th Exhibition of Group Q.” Yoshimura Masanobu completes construction of his studio in Hyakunin-chō, Shinjuku, Tokyo  Basic design by Isozaki Arata. Called the “White House,” it becomes a gathering place for Neo Dada artists as well as other artists and cultural figures. グループQ・詩科 アンフォルメル野外展 Group Q & Shika (Poetry Section) in Informel Outdoor Exhibition, a street exhibition along the west wall of Fukuoka Prefectural Office.  Participating artists: Obata Hidesuke, Kikuhata Mokuma, Kuroki Yōji, Sakurai Takami, Matano Mamoru, Yagara Yutaka, Yamauchi Jūtarō, and poets Kagami Akira, Tanaka Hatsuko, and Yukawa Tatsunori. Wearing burlap coffee sacks with the letter “Q” on their chests and banging on oil cans, Kikuhata, Yamauchi, et al. engage in a publicity parade from the Prefectural Office, Iwataya Department Store (both in Tenjin) and Daimaru Department Store (Gofuku-machi) to Suijō Park (Higashi-nakasu).

1957-1958537

11-26—12-1 DECEMBER

12-1

12-5—12-10 12-10

12-16 12-16—12-22

12-22 12-24 12-24—12-28

12-31

Imai Toshimitsu and Sam Francis have solo exhibitions at Kintetsu Department Store, Nanba, Osaka. • Tatsumi Yoshihiro publishes Yūrei takushii (Ghost Taxi) in the December issue of Machi, a rental manga magazine.  Gekiga kōbō is printed on the cover page in the first use and coinage of the term gekiga (dramatic manga). • Japan Trotskyist League (Nihon Torotsukisuto Renmei) changes its name to Japan Revolutionary Communist League (Nihon Kakumeiteki Kyōsanshugisha Dōmei or Kakukyōdō). Young Artists Association Exhibition, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo  Participating artists include Katō Yoshihiro. Exhibition of new work by Kudō Tetsumi, with the spinal cord wave recording performance, Café Tabiji, Ikebukuro, Tokyo.  The performance is conducted every Wednesday from 6 p.m. and continues until the following year. • Waste landfill on Yume-no-shima in Tokyo Bay begins. International Contemporary Art Exhibition–Informel, 7F Hall, Daimaru Department Store, Yaesu, Tokyo.  Organized by Gutai. • The Japanese Teachers’ Union declares a state of emergency in the dispute over work performance evaluation for teachers. • N HK begins FM broadcasting, the first in Japan. Itoi Kanji solo exhibition, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  The exhibition features large action paintings and paintings with hand- and footprints. Itoi meets Shinohara Ushio, who suggests that Itoi once again show his works in the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition (Itoi had not exhibited works at the Yomiuri since 1951). Kyūshū-ha No. 2 is published, Fukuoka.  The list of members no longer includes Ono Mitsuko, Obana Shigeharu, and Sanui Yasushi. (However, Obana Shigeharu reappears in the listed in Kyūshūha No. 5 published on September 5, 1961.) The following artists are added to the group: Obata Hidesuke, Kuwatori Minoru, Saitō Hidesaburō, Terada Ken’ichirō, Nagahama Kazutoshi, and Hirayama Toshiko.

1958 IN THIS YEAR

Akiyama Yūtokutaishi is politically active, primarily anti-JCP (Zengakuren), Tokyo. Iwata Shin’ichi enrolls in Ochanomizu Art School in Tokyo.  Iwata works on the restoration of painted decorations at Asakusa Jinja. He later moves to Kyoto. Yagara Yutaka becomes a member of the All Iwataya Laborers’ Union in Fukuoka. Kikuhata Mokuma Solo Exhibition, Iwataya Art Gallery, Fukuoka.

5381958

JANUARY 1-25

2-4—2-10

2-8 2-10—2-15

2-11—2-15 2-11—2-16 2-22—3-3

MARCH

MARCH MARCH MARCH MARCH MARCH 3-12—3-27

Asai Masuo becomes a member of Nihon Jidō-ga Kenkyū-kai (Japan Children’s Picture Research Association). He leaves the group in the summer of 1959. Itoi Kanji’s woodcut print Genshigumo (Atomic Cloud) appears on the cover of Asobi magazine; an article in the issue features Yūnami Chidori (Evening Waves and Plover), a woodcut with haiku on a found stone, Sendai.  Genshigumo is printed in different colors from Issue 41 (January 25, 1958) to Issue 60 (August 25, 1959). Itoi Kanji Solo Exhibition, Kunugi Gallery in Ginza, Tokyo  E xhibited are large works of action painting such as Kyūsoku (Rest), Sanzen (Zen Meditation), Zen ni ikiru (Life in Zen) and Uchū ni fureru (Touching the Universe), as well as two smaller works. The largest, Uchū ni fureru, measures 1.8 m x 7.2 m. Visitors to the exhibition include Hariu Ichirō, Shinohara Ushio, Kuroki Fuguto, and Imai Toshimitsu. • The first Western Carnival is held at the Nihon Gekijō, Yūrakuchō, Tokyo. Three Artists of Kyūshū-ha, Tokiwa Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo  This exhibition by Ochi Osamu, Sakurai Takami and Yamauchi Jūtarō is Kyūshū-ha’s first exhibition in Tokyo. Ochi exhibits paper lanterns covered with asphalt, the first objet-based work by Kyūshū-ha. Imai Toshimitsu Exhibition, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo Miki Tomio and Kaneko Ken’ichi, two-person exhibition, Kunugi Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo Kagami Masayuki Solo Exhibition, Hibiya Gallery, Tokyo  Itoi Kanji visits the exhibition and the artists become friends. Kagami later visits Itoi in Ōmori. Itoi has placed a sign designating his workplace as the “Itoi Kanji Art Institute.” Kyūshū-ha, collaborative work, Momochi-ya, Fukuoka  Momochi-ya, a seaside clubhouse on Momochi Beach near central Fukuoka, serves as a collective studio for making large works, including one of the collaborative works shown at the Yomiuri Independent. One work made of garbage at the clubhouse is submitted to the exhibition, but is not accepted. Kawani Hiroshi graduates from the Department of Literature, Keio University, Tokyo, majoring in French literature. Kishimoto Sayako graduates from the Art Course, Aichi Prefectural Asahigaoka High School, Nagoya. Kudō Tetsumi graduates from the Department of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music. Sasaki Kōsei graduates from Musashino Art University, Tokyo. Takamatsu Jirō and Nakanishi Natsuyuki graduate from the Department of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music, majoring in oil painting. 10th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.  Included are works by Akasegawa Genpei, Arakawa Shūsaku, Shinohara Ushio, and Yoshimura Masanobu (later, members of Neo Dada); Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ochi Osamu, Obata Hidesuke, Owari Takeshi, Katae Masatoshi, Kawakami Shōzō, Kikuhata Mokuma, Kinoshita Shin, Saitō Hidesaburo, Sakurai Takami, Chō Yoriko, Yagara Yutaka, Yamauchi Jūtarō (whose painting is not displayed

1958539

3-17—3-22 SPRING APRIL

APRIL APRIL?

4-1 4-1 4-2—4-6 4-4

4-12—4-20

4-21—4-27

due to its large size), Obata and Saitō (collaborative work); Sakurai, Matano Mamoru and Yagara (collaborative work); Matano and 14 others (collaborative work); Itoi Kanji, Kagami Masayuki, Kudō Tetsumi, and Miki Tomio. Mushiromushiro (Straw Mat-Straw Mat), a work made “jointly by Kyūshū-ha: Ishibashi, Ochi, and Yamauchi,” is rejected for exhibition. Critic Kawakita Michiaki characterizes the exhibition as a “rockabilly craze.” Yoshimura Masanobu Solo Exhibition, Tokiwa Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo James Lee Byars visits Japan and lives in Kurashiki. Kagami Masayuki transfers to Shōhei High School, a four-year high school, in his third-year.  He meets Nakajima Yoshio and Tashiro Minoru, who are fourth-year students. Mizukami Jun enrolls in the Faculty of Law, Kyoto University. Nakajima Yoshio, Mūbingu obuje (Moving Object), Ochanomizu Station, Tokyo  This street performance, which presumably happened soon after Kagami enrolled at Shōhei High School, is staged near Ochanomizu Station by Nakajima along with Kagami Masayuki, Tashiro Minoru, et al. (including a group from Shōhei High School) who later form the Unbeat Organizers. Nakajima’s performance extends onto the tracks and interrupts train service; he is reported and taken by the police for questioning. [p. 118] • Work performance evaluations (Kinpyō) for teachers and moral education classes begin. • The Anti-Prostitution Act with penal regulations is promulgated. 2nd Exhibition of Group Tuchi, Kunugi Gallery, Tokyo.  Included is work by Kudō Tetsumi. 2nd Gutai Art on the Stage, Asahi Hall, Nakanoshima, Osaka.  Performances include Shiraga Kazuo, Futatsu no ōgi (Two Fans); Sumi Yasuo, Chū ni egaku (Painting in space); Yoshihara Michio, Onkyō ensō (Rock around the Clock); and Yoshida Toshio, Nuno ni yoru gishiki (Ceremony by Cloth), an enactment of a wedding ceremony on stage. International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai, Takashimaya Department Store, 3F Hall, Namba, Osaka.  Co-curated by Michel Tapié and Yoshihara Jirō and co-sponsored by Sankei Shimbun and Osaka Shimbun, it is the main event of the contemporary art section of the Osaka International Festival. 1st Kyūshū Independent Exhibition, Nishinippon Newspaper Auditorium, Fukuoka.  Included are works by Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ōgami Toshiko, Ōyama Uichi, Ochi Osamu, Obata Hidesuke, Obana Shigeharu, Owari Takeshi, Kawakami Shōzō, Kikuhata Mokuma, Kuwatori Minoru, Saitō Hidesaburō, Sakurai Takami, Surusumi Seiryō, Sugawara Yōko, Tabe Mitsuko, Chō Yoriko, Terada Ken’ichirō, Terada Midori, Tokuda Junko, Nagahama Kazutoshi, Miyazaki Junnosuke, Morinaga Jun, Yagara Yutaka, and Yamauchi Jūtarō. Mushiro-mushiro (Straw Mat-Straw Mat), the work not accepted for the 10th Yomiuri Independent, is exhibited at this first independent exhibition organized by Kyūshū-ha. On this occasion, Hariu Ichirō visits Fukuoka for the first time, and an art discussion meeting is held on April 21 at the Nōmin Kaikan (Farmers’ Hall). Hariu finds

5401958

4-21 4-27

5-16 5-27—6-2 JUNE 6-1 6-3—6-8

6-12 6-17

6-24—7-6 6-28 JULY JULY 7-2—7-14

7-3—7-8 7-6—7-10

7-20 7-27 7-28—8-2

AUGUST

the driving force of “rockabilly craze” of the 10th Yomiuri Independent in the works exhibited here. • Shūkan Taishū (Weekly Populace) begins publication by Futabasha. Shinohara Ushio is featured as a “rockabilly painter” in Shūkan Sankei (Weekly Sankei).  This is Shinohara’s first appearance in the media. • N HK TV surpasses 1 million subscribing viewers. International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai, Okamasa Hall, 6F, and Model Shop 3F, Nagasaki. Asai Masuo writes essay “Paul Klee: The Smiling Saint,” Nagakute, Aichi. • Shūkan terebi gaido (TV Guide Weekly) begins publication by Terebi Gaidosha. Shinohara Ushio Solo Exhibition, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo  Following Shinohara’s debut as a “rockabilly painter” in the weekly magazine, this exhibition is well-visited and garners much attention. Shinohara holds daily demonstrations of action painting, and his performance is accompanied by live music on the last day. [pp. 111–2] S  • econd Kishi Nobusuke Cabinet (until July 19, 1960) Dialogue between Shinohara Ushio and rakugo (comic storytelling) artist Yanagiya Kosan is broadcast on radio.  R adio Tokyo program “Radio Sketch 2000th Broadcast: One Day Announcers, vol. 2: Kosan and the Rockabilly Painter.” Recorded on June 4. International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai, Fukuya Department Store 8F, Hiroshima. Sōgetsu Kaikan (Sogetsu Art Center) opens in Akasaka, Tokyo. Katsuragawa Hiroshi is elected Secretary-General of a new committee of the Japan Art Society at a general meeting and committee meeting of the association. • The 3rd Kinpyō Struggle begins. 11th Japan Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo  Included are works by Sakurai Takami, Yagara Yutaka, Yamauchi Jūtarō (Kyūshū-ha); Akasegawa Genpei, Arakawa Shūsaku, Kazekura Kazakura Shō (later members of Neo Dada); Itoi Kanji, Kagami Masayuki, and Kudō Tetsumi. Exhibition of Young Artist Association, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo  Includes works by Katō Yoshihiro. 3rd Exhibition by Group Ei, Mimatsu Shobō Gallery, Shiba, Tokyo  Included are works by Kudō Tetsumi and Shinohara Ushio (guest artist). Kudō stages a happening (Anti-Art) with eggs and tomatoes and Shinohara engages in action painting with India ink. [pp. 112–3] • The term danchizoku, used to refer to public housing project residents, is used in Shūkan Asahi, published by Asahi Shimbunsha. • Shūkan Myōjō (Weekly Rising Star) begins publication by Shūeisha. Chō Yoriko Solo Exhibition, Tokiwa Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo  The invitation notes her affiliation with Kyūshū-ha and includes a poem by Matano Mamoru. Akasegawa Katsuhiko (Genpei) Solo Exhibition, Coffee House, Shibuya, Tokyo.  E xhibits include oil paintings influenced by African art.

1958541

AUGUST

8-2—8-7

9-1—9-14 9-2—9-7 9-9—9-14 9-13—9-18 9-15

9-20

9-22 9-25—9-30 9-25—10-25

OCTOBER 10-1 10-8

10-15—11-25

10-16

Kyūshū-ha stages an outdoor demonstration, Kego Park, Fukuoka.  Participating artists: Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Sakurai Takami, Chō Yoriko, Terada Ken’ichiro, Terada Midori, Sakurai Takami, Matano Mamoru, and Yamauchi Jūtarō. The making of a work in the style of Informel is performed for TV broadcast. Kyūshū-ha Exhibition, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo  E xhibited are works by Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ochi Osamu, Obata Hidesuke, Owari Takeshi, Kawakami Shōzō, Kikuhata Mokuma, Kinoshita Shin, Saitō Hidesaburōo, Sakurai Takami, Tabe Mitsuko, Terada Ken’ichiro, Terada Midori, Matano Mamoru, Morinaga Jun, and Yamauchi Jūtarō. This is the first group exhibition of Kyūshū-ha at Ginza Gallery. Independent Shizuoka, Shimizu City Youth Hall, Shizuoka. International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai, Takashimaya Department Store, 8F Hall, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Kudō Tetsumi New Works, Tenmaya Gallery 2F, Okayama.  Kudō performs Happening Anti-Art to drum accompaniment. International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai, Marubutsu Department Store 5F, Kyoto • The Japan Teachers Union (Nikkyōso) stages the national united action to oppose the work performance evaluation (kinpyō) requirement. Over 900,000 people participate. • Inaugural issue of Sākuru mura (Circle Village) by Kyūshū Circle Research Society, Fukuoka.  Contributors include Ishimure Michiko, Ueno Eishin, Tanigawa Gan, Morisaki Kazue. S  • hūkan Jitsuwa (True Stories Weekly) begins publication by Nihon Jānarusha. 4th Exhibition by Group Ei, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo  Included are works by Kudō Tetsumi. 6th Gutai Art Group Exhibition (Gutai Group exhibition in New York), Martha Jackson Gallery, New York.  The first Gutai exhibition abroad, it travels to four cities in the U.S. Asai Masuo writes a study of Miyazawa Kenji, Miyazawa Kenji: Notes on the Smiling Saint, Nagakute, Aichi. • “Asakaze,” the first long-distance sleeper train from Tokyo to Hakata, begins service with newly designed cars; it is known as the Blue Train. • The government submits a bill to the Diet for the revision of the Police Duties Execution Act.  To control the political actions of the masses, the bill expands police authority to interrogate and ask questions about employment, search belongings, enter premises, etc. Vincent van Gogh Exhibition, Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo.  Nakajima Yoshio is moved by the exhibition. It travels to Kyoto Municipal City Museum of Art in December. • The Socialist Party and other groups form the National Conference to oppose the deleterious revisions to the Police Duties Execution Act.

5421958-1959

10-19 11-1 11-5

11-12—11-17

11-14—11-16

11-27 DECEMBER DECEMBER 12-7 12-10 12-13 12-23

Rozo-gun (Rozo Group) is formed and publishes the inaugural issue of Rozo in Mito. • The Kodama express train begins service from Tokyo to Kobe. • Demonstrations against the Police Duties Execution Act intensify. The General Council of Trade Unions of Japan (Sōhyō), All-Japan Labor Union Congress (Zen nihon rōdō kumiai kaigi, Zenrō), students, intellectuals and others unite in the opposition struggle. Exhibition of Young Artists Association, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo.  Included are works by Katō Yoshihiro, K. T., and Hageshita Iwao (later members of Zero Jigen). Kyūshū-ha Street Exhibition of Oil Painting, along the wall of Fukuoka Prefectural Office, Fukuoka.  Included are works by Obata Hidesuke, Kikuhata Mokuma, Saitō Hidesaburō, Sakurai Takami, Tabe Mitsuko, and Terada Ken’ichirō. According to a newspaper article, twenty member artists participate, and 25 works are exhibited. • The Imperial Household Agency announces the engagement of Crown Prince Akihito and Shōda Michiko. Kosugi Takehisa and Mizuno Shūkō begin performances of musical improvisation on campus at Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music. • Daiei opens as “the store for housewives” in Sannomiya, Kōbe. Group Shiro begins publication of its journal Group Shiro, Shizuoka. • The Bund, Kyōsan shugisha dōmei (The Communist League) is formed, Tokyo. • At the 13th Zengakuren Congress in Tokyo, the Japan Revolutionary Communist League (Kakukyōdō) assumes leadership of the organization. • Ceremony to celebrate the completion of Tokyo Tower, Tokyo

1959 IN THIS YEAR

JANUARY 1-1 1-1—1-6

1-10 1-22—1-27

7th Art Exhibition of the Daily Life of Working People, Matsuzakaya Department Store, Ginza, Tokyo  Sasaki Kōsei receives the exhibition award. Akiyama Yūtokutaishi participates in street demonstrations as head of the student council, Musashino Art School (present-day Musashino Art University), Tokyo. Moriyama Yasuhide quits his job at Kinoshita Shōten and begins “the life of a beggar/thief” in a shack at the foot of Mt. Adachi in Kitakyūshū. Mizukami Jun forms a poetry group and publishes an independent journal, Ikada (Raft), in Kyoto. • The Cuban Revolution; Batista flees Cuba and Castro takes power. Young Artists Association Exhibition at Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum in Nagoya.  Included are works by Katō Yoshihiro. • N HK Education Channel begins television broadcasts. Miki Tomio and Kaneko Ken’ichi two-person exhibition, Kunugi Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.

195954 3

1-27 FEBRUARY FEBRUARY 2-1 2-18—3-1

2-21 2-22—2-27 2-28—3-15

MARCH MARCH 3-5—3-10 3-9 3-15 3-17

3-23 3-28

3-30

APRIL APRIL APRIL

Experiments with LSD, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo. Kazakura Shō, Kosugi Takehisa and Tone Yasunao become acquainted in Tokyo. • Toshiba announces the first color television that is 100% made in Japan. • Nihon Educational Television (NET), present-day TV Asahi, begins broadcasting. 12th Japan Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo.  Included are works by Tabe Mitsuko and Yagara Yutaka (Kyūshū-ha); Masuzawa Kinpei and Yoshimura Masunobu (later, members of Neo Dada); and Itoi Kanji. • Battleship Potemkin, directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein, is screened for the first time in Japan at Kanagawa Prefectural Music Hall, Yokohama. Kikuhata Mokuma and Terada Ken’ichiro, two-person exhibition, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo. 11th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo  Included are works by Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ochi Osamu, Obata Hidesuke, Owari Takeshi, Katae Masatoshi, Sakurai Takami, Chō Yoriko, Funaki Yoshiharu (Kyūshū-ha); Akasegawa Genpei, Arakawa Shūsaku, Shinohara Ushio, Yoshimura Masunobu (later, members of Neo Dada); Itoi Kanji, and Kudō Tetsumi. There is a noticeable difference between artists who have mainly exhibited in “open-call” (juried) exhibitions and those who have predominantly shown and developed with the Independent exhibitions. The number of works submitted declines. Katō Yoshihiro graduates from Tama Art University, Tokyo. Nakajima Yoshio and Tashiro Minoru graduate from Shōhei High School, Tokyo. Miki Tomio Solo Exhibition, Kunugi Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. • Asahi Jānaru (Asahi Picture News) begins publication by Asahi Shimbunsha. • The Tokyo Metro Marunouchi Line from Ikebukuro to Shinjuku is completed. • Shūkan Shōnen Magazine (Kōdansha) and Shūkan Shōnen Sunday (Shōgakkan) begin publication.  The issues are dated 3.26 and 4.5, respectively. • Eighty-six scholars and intellectuals publish a statement to voice their apprehension over revision of the Anpo. • The Japan Socialist Party, General Council of Trade Unions of Japan (Sōhyō), Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikyō), and other organizations together form the People’s Council for Preventing the Revision of the Security Treaty. • The Tokyo District Court acquits the defendants in the Sunagawa Incident of July 1958 (a decision known as the “Date Judgment”) on the grounds that the presence of U.S. military forces in Japan is unconstitutional. Akasegawa Genpei returns to Nagoya from Tokyo for surgery. Ohara Kaichi enrolls at Musashino Art School, Tokyo.  He withdraws after two years and begins working with Asai Masuo. Kishimoto Sayako enrolls in the nihonga (Japanese painting) program at Tama Art University, Tokyo.

54 41959

APRIL 4-1 4-10 4-12 4-14—4-19 4-15 4-15 4-20 4-20—4-26

MAY

5-3—5-10

5-12 5-14 5-19—5-24 5-24

5-26 JUNE JUNE

6-5 6-13 6-20—6-24

Adachi Masao enrolls in the Department of Cinema, College of Art, Nihon University, Tokyo. Katō Yoshihiro returns to Nagoya and teaches art at Wakaba Junior High School until April 1963. • Crown Prince Akihito marries Shōda Michiko in a televised ceremony.  The broadcast is watched by an estimated 15 million viewers. • Shūkan Gendai (Weekly Contemporary) begins publication by Kōdansha. Shinohara Ushio solo exhibition at Komatsu Arcade Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. • The People’s Council to Prevent the Revision of the Security Treaty organizes their first unified action. • Shūkan Jitsuwa Tokuhō begins publication by Futabasha. • Shūkan Bunshūn begins publication by Bungei Shunjū Shinsha. Kudō Tetsumi Solo Exhibition, Spiritual Fluidity and Its Condensation: 2-D painting and 3-D painting, Bungei Shunjū Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Kudō meets Kagami Masayuki. Vivo, an independent agency established by photographers, is formed in Tokyo.  Members include Kawada Kikuji, Satō Akira, Tanno Akira, Tōmatsu Shōmei, Narahara Ikkō, and Hosoe Eikō. 2nd Kyūshū Independent Exhibition, Nishinippon Newspaper Auditorium, Fukuoka.  Included are works by members of Kyūshū-ha. Kyūshū-ha holds a roundtable meeting at Nōmin Kaikan, Fukuoka, inviting Hariu Ichirō, Sekine Hiroshi and Tanigawa Gan. • Shūkan Heibon begins publication by Heibonsha. Yoshimura Masunobu Exhibition of Mural Painting, Tokiwa Gallery, Ōita. Hijikata Tatsumi presents Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors) at the All-Japan Art Dance Association: Sixth New Dancers’ Recital, Dai-ichi Seimei Hall in Hibiya, Tokyo.  Joint performance with Ohno Yoshito. The work focuses on male homosexuality in the works of Jean Genet, and borrows its title from the Mishima Yukio novel. Its anti-social theme shocks the dance world. Hijikata and Mishima become friends. • At a general meeting of the International Olympic Committee, Tokyo is chosen as the host city of the 1964 Olympic Games. Itoi Kanji joins the Shōhei High School group (later, Unbeat), Tokyo. • Marquis de Sade’s L’Histoire de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du Vice (Part 1, translated by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko) is published as Akutoku no sakae, by Gendai Shichōsha. • The Bund assumes leadership of the 14th Zengakuren Conference, Tokyo. The National Museum of Western Art opens in Ueno, Tokyo. 1st Emerging Artists Exhibition, Sakura Gallery, Nagoya.  Included are works by 48 artists, including Katō Yoshihiro. Curated by Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum with Ozaki Ryōji. With support from Sakura Gallery.

195954 5

6-28

6-30—7-5

7-13 7-13—7-18 7-16—7-20

7-27—8-1 8-3—8-8

8-7—8-8

8-15—8-31 8-17—8-22 8-21—8-26

8-24—8-29 8-29

8-31—9-5 SEPTEMBER

SEPTEMBER?

“Issues regarding the Revision of the Anpo,” a gathering with lectures and film viewing at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.  Co-organized by the Japan Art Society and the Peace Art Exhibition. The inaugural École de Tokyo exhibition, Mitsukoshi Department Store, Ikebukuro, Tokyo.  Included are works by Kudō Tetsumi. Kyūshū-ha No. 3 (Vol. 2, Issue 1) is published, Fukuoka. Shinohara Ushio Solo Exhibition, Bungei Shunjū Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. The Exhibition of Japanese works for XI Premia Lissone internazionale par la pittura is held at Ginza Gallery, Tokyo.  Included are works by Kudō Tetsumi. Miki Tomio Solo Exhibition, Kunugi Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. 1st Vava Group Exhibition, Bungei Shunjū Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Vava, an artists’ group based in Seki, Gifu Prefecture, holds annual exhibitions at the same gallery, with the exception of its third exhibition, which is held at Ginza Gallery. Itoi Father and Son Collage Exhibition at Tokyo Electric Customer Service Center, Meguro, Tokyo.  Included are Itoi Yoshirō’s Cray-pas (oil pastel) pictures and collages, and Itoi Kanji’s collages with colored tape-like strips of paper, based on his son’s pictures. Kagami Masayuki, 2nd Solo Exhibition, Lemon Sarō (teahouse), Ochanomizu, Tokyo. Sakurai Takami, 2nd Solo Exhibition, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Kyūshū-ha Exhibition, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo.  Included are works by Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ōyama Uichi, Ochi Osamu, Obata Hidesuke, Obana Shigeharu, Owari Takeshi, Katae Masatoshi, Kikuhata Mokuma, Sakurai Takami, Saitō Hidesaburō, Tabe Mitsuko, Chō Yoriko, Terada Ken’ichirō, Funaki Yoshiharu, Miyazaki Junnosuke, Yagara Yutaka, and Yamauchi Jūtarō. Chō Yoriko Solo Exhibition, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. • The Mitsui Miike Coal Mine in Ōmuta, seeking the early retirement of 4580 workers, presents a second corporate restructuring proposal to the Mitsui Miners Federation (Sankōren), marking the beginning of the Miike Struggle. Takamatsu Jirō Solo Exhibition, Gallery Hiroshi, Shinbashi, Tokyo. Itoi Kanji Solo Exhibition, Ōmori Gasō, Tokyo.  This exhibition was similar in content to the collage exhibition by him and his son in August. Kyūshū-ha meeting, Nōmin Kaikan, Fukuoka.  A dispute breaks out over the issue of exhibiting in open-call (juried) exhibitions. Terada Ken’ichiro withdraws from the group when Kikuhata Mokuma interrogates him about his intention to continue participating in Nika exhibitions. Questions of responsibility for this conflict lead to a critical division within the group, with Ochi Osamu, Kikuhata, and Yamauchi Jūtarō withdrawing at the end of the year.

5461959

9-1 9-1 9-5

9-8—9-20

9-11—9-15 9-12—9-17 9-14—9-19 9-15

9-25

9-26 OCTOBER

OCTOBER 10-2—10-7 10-4—10-10

10-10 10-12

10-13—10-18

Japan Art Society announces its opposition to revision of the Anpo. Tōno Yoshiaki returns from his travels in Europe and the United States. Hijikata Tatsumi performs a revised two-part version of Kinjiki at 650 Experience no Kai, September 5 at 6 o’clock: Six Avant-gardists, Dai-ichi Seimei Hall, Hibiya, Tokyo.  Performances by Ohno Kazuo, Ohno Yoshito, et al. Hijikata also performs in Agape no shishū (Agape’s smell of death), a work by Wakamatsu Miki. The other five are Mayuzumi Toshirō (music), Moroi Makoto (music), Kanamori Kaoru (stage design), Wakamatsu Miki (butoh), and Donald Richie (film). 15th Fukuoka Prefecture Art Exhibition, Iwataya Department Store 8F, Fukuoka.  Included are works by Kyūshū-ha members, which notably decline in number after this edition. Nakanishi Natsuyuki Solo Exhibition, Kunugi Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Exhibition of the Young Artists Association, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  Included are works by Katō Yoshihiro. Kudō Tetsumi Solo Exhibition, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. •Shibusawa Tatsuhiko publishes his first collection of critical essays, Sado Fukkatsu: Jiyū to hankō shisō no senkusha (Resurrection of Sade: The Pioneer Philosopher of Freedom and Resistance) from Kōbundō. Itoi Kanji’s woodcut Kingyo (Goldfish) appears on the cover of Asobi, a magazine published in Sendai; his lithograph Tenpyōbutsu is printed in the text.  Kingyo is printed in a variety of colors from issues No. 61 (September 25, 1959) to No. 81 (April 25, 1961). •The Isewan Typhoon strikes Nagoya and the Tokai region. Arts Festival, Sōgakudō Concert Hall, Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music, Ueno, Tokyo.  Kosugi Takehisa gives a premiere performance of Myūjikku konkureito to kigaku no tame no obuje sonōru (Musique concrète and objet sonore for instruments). Tōno Yoshiaki introduces Neo-Dada in the United States, referring to it as “crazy and scandalous” in the October issue of Geijutsu shinchō. Ishibashi Betsujin (Seiji) Solo Exhibition at Ginza Gallery, Tokyo. Allan Kaprow, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, Reuben Gallery, New York.  The event is considered to be the first event titled a “Happening.” Participants include Sam Francis, Red Grooms, Dick Higgins, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Lucas Samaras, and George Segal. • Nippon Broadcasting System begins Japan’s first 24-hour radio broadcasting. Evening of Lecture and Film on Security Treaty, Ohara Kaikan, Minami-aoyama, Tokyo.  Organized by Japan Art Society. Matsuoka Yōko gives a lecture and films are screened, including Security Treaty, directed by Matsumoto Toshio. Approximately 300 participate. Another gathering of similar content is held at Hibiya Library on December 5. Kudō Tetsumi Solo Exhibition, Kunugi Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.

1959547

10-18

NOVEMBER

11-5—11-9 11-9

11-11

11-15

11-21 11-21—12-5

11-27

DECEMBER

DECEMBER

DECEMBER DECEMBER?

12-7

• The Nishio Suehiro faction for the reconstruction of the Japan Socialist Party meets in Tokyo, and members announce their departure from the JSP to form the Democratic Socialist Party. Itoi Kanji Solo Exhibition, Ōmori Gasō, Tokyo.  A n exhibition of paintings incorporating objets, Chinese poetry, and pictures by his son. The artist performs sadō (teamaking) for visitors. Three-person Exhibition: Shima Kuni’ichi, K.T. (later, Zero Jigen), and Katō Yoshihiro, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. • A npo Hihan no Kai (Society for the Criticism of the Anpo) is established in Tokyo.  Members include cultural figures such as Nakajima Kenzō and Kamei Katsuichirō as well as Japan Art Society. • The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) announces the deregulation of import restrictions on trade with dollar regions (the start of trade deregulation). The formation of Group Nishinihon is announced in Fukuoka.  Members include artists who have left Kyūshū-ha: Kawakami Shōzō, Saitō Hidesaburō, and Surusumi Seiryō, and those who will later join Kyūshū-ha: Taniguchi Toshio, Nakanishi Kazuko, and Hataraki Tadashi. The Council of Artists to Oppose the Police Duties Execution Act is formed in Tokyo. Jean Fautrier Exhibition, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo.  This exhibition successfully arouses enthusiasm in the art world. Tōno Yoshiaki assists in the exhibition. T  • he People’s Council for Preventing the Revision of the Security Treaty organizes the 8th Unified National Action, in which 20,000 demonstrators enter the National Diet Building in Tokyo. Dōkutsu-ha (Cave School) is formed in Fukuoka.  A s a result of Terada Ken’ichiro’s departure from Kyūshū-ha, the group moves in a radicalizing direction. Ochi Osamu, Kikuhata Mokuma and Yamauchi Jūtarō criticize Sakurai Takami, and Yamauchi, representing the trio, reads a declaration announcing their departure from the group. The three artists then form Dōkutsu-ha. This is the first major split in Kyūshū-ha since its formation. Ochi and Kikuhata later return to Kyūshū-ha; Yamauchi does not. • Ninja Bugeichō: Kagemaru-den (Collection of Ninja’s Martial Arts: Life of Kagemaru) by Shirato Sanpei is published in installments (San’yōsha) until November 1962. • Marquis de Sade’s Prosperities of Vice: Part 2 (translated by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko) is published by Gendai Shichōsha. Yoshimura Masunobu sends a letter to Akasegawa Genpei, proposing the formation of All Japan.  A ll Japan later becomes Neo Dada. Itoi Kanji is also asked to join, but declines. Butoh Performance: 20 Women Avant-gardists, Toshi Center Hall, Hirakawachō, Tokyo.  H ijikata Tatsumi choreographs, directs and performs in Banzai Onna December 7, 1940 (Banzai Woman) with Onrai Sahina and Ohno Kazuo. He also performs in other works.

5481959-1960

12-7—12-12 12-2 12-16 12-23

Doi Junen Solo Exhibition at Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.

 Doi goes on to become a member of Jikan-ha (School of Time). 

• The Miike Mine, Mitsui Mining Co. begins sending notifications of layoffs in Ōmuta, Fukuoka. • The Supreme Court of Japan overturns the “Date Judgment” in the Sunagawa Incident, Tokyo. The Cella Art Association is established in Kyoto.

1960 JANUARY JANUARY

JANUARY

1-1—1-6

1-5—1-10

1-16

1-19 1-24 1-25

2-1—2-5 2-15—2-21

2-18—3-1

MARCH MARCH MARCH

Akasegawa Genpei returns to Tokyo from Nagoya and resides in Asagaya. Formation of All Japan at a meeting in Yoshimura Masunobu’s studio in Shinjuku, Tokyo  A kasegawa Genpei attends with Arakawa Shūsaku. “Towards a spontaneous cinema” by Jonas Mekas is published by Sekai Eiga Shiryōsha in the January issue of Sekai eiga shiryō (World cinema information).  K awanaka Nobuhiro is moved by the article and takes up filmmaking. Young Artists Association Exhibition, Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum, Nagoya.  Include are works by Katō Yoshihiro. Rozo-gun Exhibition, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo  This is the first Tokyo exhibition by Rozo-gun, which is based in Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture. P  • rotests at Haneda Airport attempt to prevent Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke from leaving Japan for the United States to sign the new Japan-U.S. Security Treaty; Tokyo.  Zengakuren members occupy the airport lobby; 76 are arrested, including Karōji Kentarō, Chair of Zengakuren. • The Anpo (Japan–U.S. Security Treaty) is signed in Washington, D.C. • The Democratic Socialist Party is founded. • Mitsui Mining orders a lockout at Miike Coalmine, and Miike Coal Mine Labor Unions (Miike Tankō Rōdō Kumiai or Miike Rōso) begin an open-ended strike in Ōmuta, Fukuoka Prefecture. 4th Kagami Masayuki Solo Exhibition, Shinbashi Gallery, Tokyo. Yoshimura Masunobu Solo Exhibition, Satō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  The formation of Neo Dada Organizers is discussed. Shinohara Ushio joins the meeting. 13th Japan Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.  Included are works by Ariyoshi Arata, Kazakura Shō, Masuzawa Kinpei, Yoshimura Masunobu, and Chiba Eisuke. Ikemizu Keiichi graduates from the Department of Art, Osaka University of the Arts. Kagami Masayuki graduates from Shōhei High School, Tokyo. Tōno Yoshiaki introduces Neo-Dada artists of the U.S. in his article “Yangā jenerēshon no bōken” (Adventures of the Younger Generation) in the March issue of Mizue.

1960549

3-1—3-16

3-2

3-16 3-17

3-18?

3-28 LATE SPRING APRIL

APRIL APRIL

APRIL

12th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.

 Included are works by:

Neo Dada: Kishimoto Sayako, Shinohara Ushio (Sekai saidai no jigazō [The Largest Self-Portrait in the World], Boxing Painting, Sōretsu rokabirī gaka [Brave rockabilly artist], Kaminari chōkoku [Thunder sculpture]), Tanaka Shintarō, Toyoshima Sōroku, and Yoshimura Masanobu; Kyūshū-ha: Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ueno Masayuki, Ōguro Aiko, Ōyama Uichi, Obata Hidesuke, Obana Shigeharu, Owari Takeshi, Katae Masatoshi, Kikuhata Mokuma, Sakurai Takami, Chō Yoriko, Terada Ken’ichiro, Tabe Mitsuko, Taniguchi Toshio, Funaki Yoshiharu, and Miyazaki Junnosuke; Jikan-ha: Doi Junen, Tanaka Fujio, and Nakazawa Ushio; Individual artists: Itoi Kanji (Nirvana Dada, Shōji, Eda [Branches], Ajikan, Kōdō da [Time for action], Ma [Time in-between]), Kudō Tetsumi (Zōshokusei rensa hannō (B) [Proliferating Chain Reaction B]), Kojima Nobuaki (Monument), Sasaki Kōsei, Shiga Kenzō, Nakajima Yoshio, Miki Tomio Tonō Yoshiaki refers to Kudō Tetsumi’s work as “junk anti-art” in the Yomiuri Newspaper (evening edition).  He comments on Kudo’s work Proliferating Chain Reaction (B) and refers to works by Itoi Kanji and Shinohara Ushio as other examples of “anti-art” tendencies. Hereafter, the term “anti-art” becomes more widely used. • Zengakuren calls the 15th National Congress, an extraordinary meeting, and the group splits into mainstream and anti-mainstream factions, Tokyo. • New Miike Miners Labor Union (Miike Tankō Shin Rōdō Kumai or Miike Shinrō) is formed in Ōmuta, Fukuoka Prefecture.  It is a second labor union in opposition to Miike Rōso, the first labor union. The group Neo Dada is formed at a meeting at Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Participants include Akasegawa Genpei, Arakawa Shūsaku, Kazakura Shō, Shinohara Ushio, and Yoshimura Masunobu. Itoi Kanji is present. Takiguchi Shūzō does not participate, but observes from the doorway. If the meeting was held immediately after the Yomiuri Independent, it may have been held during Miura Tsutomu’s solo exhibition (March 9–19). Miura was a member of the Shinseiki-gun. • At Miike Coal Mine, the second union moves to end the lockout. The two unions violently clash, Ōmuta, Fukuoka Prefecture. James Lee Byars moves from Kurashiki to Kyoto. Tōmatsu Shōmei photographs artists as models, Ginza Gallery, Ichigaya, and other venues in Tokyo.  Models include Akasegawa Genpei, Yoshimura Masunobu, Shinohara Ushio, Toyoshima Sōroku, and Itoi Kanji. Izumi Tatsu enrolls in the Department of Sculpture, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music, Tokyo. Itō Takao enrolls in the Department of Fine Arts, Aichi University of Arts and Sciences (present-day Aichi University of Education), Aichi.  Itō assists Katō Yoshihiro in organizing the Nagoya Young Artists Exhibition. Kamijō Junjirō enrolls in the Faculty of Agriculture, Tohoku University, Sendai.  A s a student, he is active in the settlement movement and becomes a representative.

5501960

APRIL 4-3 4-4—4-9

4-7

4-16

4-19

4-19—4-24

4-24—5-1

4-27 4-30 MAY

5-7—5-16

5-8

5-12

Takahashi Kōko enrolls at Aichi University of Arts and Sciences, Aichi. • Shūkan terebi jidai (Television era weekly), a TV guide magazine, begins publication by Ōbunsha; discontinued in August. Neo Dadaism Organizers Exhibition, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo  Included are works by Akasegawa Genpei, Arakawa Shūsaku, Ariyoshi Arata, Ishibashi Betsujin, Ueda Jun, Ueno Norizō, Kazakura Shō, Shinohara Ushio, Toyoshima Sōroku, and Yoshimura Masunobu. Iwasaki Kunihiko is listed as a participant on the flyer but does not exhibit work. Arakawa, Ueno, Kazakura, Shinohara, Toyoshima and Yoshimura engage in a performance, parading through the streets and then onto a train. They are photographed by Tōmatsu Shōmei and Jacqueline Paul. Art critic Segi Shin’ichi brings Michel Tapié to the exhibition. • The police confiscate copies of Akutoku no sakae (the Japanese translation of the second part of L’Histoire de Juliette, ou Les Prospérités du vice by Marquis de Sade) on charges of obscenity. Discussion forum with Takiguchi Shūzō, Tōno Yoshiaki and Ebara Jun at Yoshimura Masunobu’s studio, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  The meeting is attended by more than twenty avant-garde artists, including members of Neo Dada. 2nd Women Avant-gardists’ Dance Recital, Toshi Center Hall, Hirakawachō, Tokyo.  H ijikata Tatsumi choreographs, directs and performs in Yome: shigatsu jūkunichi tai’an (Bride: April 19, Auspicious Day) with Onrai Sahina. He also performs other works. 9th Gutai Art Exhibition, Takashimaya Department Store, 3F and roof, Nanba, Osaka.  Held with the International Sky Festival, the exhibition includes Gutai members and 18 artists from abroad. Geononnūmii Exhibition, Open Gallery of Ishibashi Art Museum, Kurume, Fukuoka Prefecture.  E xhibition by a group from the Faculty of Art, Saga University. Includes works by Moriyama Yasuhide. The exhibition by the same group is also held October 23–30. P  • resident Lee Seungman of South Korea resigns (April Revolution). • Sony begins sales of the world’s first transistor TV. Japan Art Society holds a shikishi (square card) exhibition to provide support and encouragement in the Mitsui Miike Mine Labor Dispute in Ōmuta, Fukuoka Prefecture. The World Design Conference is held at Sankei Hall in Ōtemachi, and other venues in Tokyo.  Japanese architects at the conference form the group Metabolism. Improvisational Music Performance at Mizuno Shūkō’s home, Chiba.  Automatism and Kore ga obuje da! (This is the objet!) are performed. Participants include Tanno Yumiko, Kosugi Takehisa, Shiomi Mieko, Toshima Mikio, Tone Yasunao, with Mizuno. • Clash between Miike Rōso (first union) and the police when strikers block access to the hopper at the Miike mine, Ōmuta, Fukuoka Prefecture.

1960551

5-16—5-21

5-20 5-20—5-25

5-26

5-27—6-7 5-28—6-2

5-30

5-30—6-7

JUNE JUNE

JUNE

6-3

6-3—6-4

Taniguchi Toshio Solo Exhibition, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo.  E xhibited works include Kōnai no seppa (Excavation site in the mine) and Jinkōtō (Artificial island) from the Miike series. T  • he Japan–U.S. Security Treaty is approved with only the support of the Liberal Democratic Party in the House of Representatives. Jacqueline Paul Robert Exhibition, The Japanese I Saw Them, Konishiroku Photo Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  The exhibition, comprised of 103 photographs, presumably include photographs taken of the Neo Dada group. • The People’s Council to Stop the Revised Security Treaty (Anpo kaitei soshi kokumin kaigi) coordinates the 16th Unified Action. In Tokyo, the Diet building is surrounded by 170,000 demonstrators. Nakanishi Natsuyuki Solo Exhibition, Kunugi Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Group exhibition of Dōkutsu-ha (Cave School), Ginza Gallery, Tokyo.  Included are works by Ochi Osamu, Kikuhata Mokuma, Yamauchi Jūtarō. It is the first and last exhibition by Dōkutsu-ha artists, who broke away from Kyūshū-ha towards the end of 1959. • Meeting against the passage of Anpo, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Young Japan Society (Wakai Nihon no Kai) plays a central role. The invitation is signed by Asari Keita, Ishihara Shintarō, Etō Jun, Ōe Kenzaburō, Kaikō Takeshi, Takemitsu Tōru, Tanikawa Shuntarō, Terayama Shūji, et al. Ochi Osamu Solo Exhibition, Satō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Curated by Nakahara Yūsuke. The exhibition includes Deppari taishō (Protruding navel), an objet coated with asphalt. Group Zero is formed in Kōchi.  It later develops into the group Zen’ei Tosa-ha (Avant-Garde Tosa School) Itoi Kanji leaves Ōmori and moves to Nakatsu, Ōita Prefecture.  He lives in Nakatsu, the hometown of his father Tatsusaburō, in his aunt’s house with his son, Yoshirō, for three years. Tōmatsu Shōmei’s photographs, Ori (Cage), are published in the June issue of Kamera Mainichi (The Daily Camera).  The issue includes photographs of Itoi Kanji, Shinohara Ushio, and Toyoshima Sōroku taken in April 1960 and quotes from a manifesto drafted by Shinohara Ushio for the 1st Neo Dadaism Organizers Exhibition held at Ginza Gallery. • Debut of Ōshima Nagisa’s film, Seishun zankoku monogatari (Cruel story of youth).  It receives attention as a Japanese nouvelle vague film. •The June Action Committee (Rokugatsu kōdō iinkai) participates in the Anpo Struggle in Tokyo.  A kiyama Kiyoshi, Oda Tatsurō, Tsurumi Shunsuke, Yoshimoto Takaaki as well as Nakamura Hiroshi, Katsuragawa Hiroshi, Yamashita Kikuji, et al. from Avant-Garde Art Society (Zen’ei Bijutsu-Kai) participate as the Revolutionary Artists Front (RAF, Kakumeiteki Geijutsuka Sensen). In Shinagawa Station, they engage in a sit-in to show support for the striking National Railway Workers’ Union and the National Railway Motive Power Union. On June 3, Yamashita participates, wrapped in a straw mat.

5521960

6-4

6-5

6-5—6-12

6-9

6-11

6-13

6-14 6-15

• The first action that includes the use of force to stop the revision of the Anpo is held in Tokyo.  It is organized by the People’s Council to Stop the Revised Security Treaty. Kobayashi Tomi et al. in Koe-naki-koe no Kai (Voiceless Voices Society) take part in demonstrations. Nationwide, 5.6 million people participate in demonstrations. Zero Ji Gen is formed in Nagoya.  Members are Kawaguchi Kōtarō, Iwata Shin’ichi, Koiwa Takayoshi, Ōtake Mutsuhiro, and Umeda Masao. The group name (Emergence after Zero) is later revised as “Zero Jigen,” meaning “Zero Dimension.” 1st All Kyūshū Independent Exhibition, Art and Craft Gallery, Yahata Civic Center, Kitakyūshū, Fukuoka Prefecture.  Participating Kyūshū-ha artists: Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ueno Masayuki, Ōguro Aiko, Ōyama Uichi, Obata Hidesuke, Owari Takeshi, Obana Shigeharu, Katae Masatoshi, Sakurai Takami, Taniguchi Toshio, Tabe Mitsuko, Terada Ken’ichiro, Chō Yoriko, Hataraki Tadashi, Miyazaki Junnosuke, Yamauchi Jūtarō and Yonekura Toku. • Gathering of Musicians for the Protection of Democracy (Minshūshugi o mamoru ongakuka no tsudoi) at Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  580 people in total participate in the meeting and sign on to the petition, from various organizations including Japan Music Club (Nihon Ongaku Kurabu), Japan Association of Contemporary Music (Nihon Gendai Ongaku Kyōkai), Music Pen Club (Ongaku Pen Kurabu), Eastern Music Society (Tōyō Ongaku Gakkai), Council of Young Musicians (Seinen Ongakuka Kaigi), and Japan Federation of Musicians (Nihon Ongakuka Rengōkai). R  • ally of Young Japan Society (Wakai Nihon no Kai), Toshi Center Hall, Hirakawachō, Tokyo.  A sari Keita, Ishihara Shintarō, Etō Jun, Ōshima Nagisa, Hani Susumu participate on stage with others from entertainment world: Aoshima Yukio, Ei Rokusuke, and the Crazy Cats. In the audience are Kobayashi Yasuhiko, Shinada Yūkichi, Yoshimura Mari, and Yoneyama Mamako. It is thought that Kudō Tetsumi, representing all artists, announces “Now we have no choice but action!” at this meeting. Akiyama Yūtokutaishi is employed in the technical research department of Elmann Co., Ltd, Tokyo.  A kiyama is in charge of industrial design. • At the Miike Mine, labor and management clash at sea over the unloading of cargo, Ōmuta, Fukuoka Prefecture. • In the 18th Unified Action, the People’s Council to Stop the Revised Security Treaty demonstrates in front of Diet building in Tokyo.  A group of demonstrators from the leading sect of Zengakuren surround the Diet building; Kanba Michiko is killed in the clash with the police. Participants include Neo Dada members Arakawa Shūsaku, Kazakura Shō (with a group from Musashino Art University), Shinohara Ushio, Tanabe Santarō, Yoshino Tatsumi, Yoshimura Masunobu; Akiyama Yūtokutaishi also participates.

1960553

6-18

6-19 6-20 6-20—6-25 6-23 6-25 JULY?

JULY JULY

7-1—7-10

7-12—7-16

7-12—7-17 7-15 7-15 7-19 7-20—7-22?

Neo Dada event, Yoshimura Masunobu’s Studio, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  This event protests the Security Treaty that will be ratified at midnight. A TV crew comes to Yoshimura’s studio to record the event. J  • apan–U.S. Security Treaty is automatically ratified at midnight. • Hi-Lite cigarettes are introduced to the market for the first time. Tanaka Fujio and Yoshimura Masunobu Two-person Exhibition, Kunugi Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. • The Japan–U.S. Security Treaty ratification papers are exchanged; Prime Minister Kishi announces his decision to resign. • The Road Traffic Act is enacted. Mizukami Jun, Tsuitō-gi (Mourning Ceremony), a Happening in front of Diet Building, Tokyo.  In memory of Kanba Michiko, who died on June 15 in the clash with police after demonstrators entered the grounds of the National Diet Building. Mizukami and a friend stretch a hemp rope across the site where she was crushed to death and hang a rock in the center. This is Mizukami’s first performance. Sekido Rui enrolls at Kuni Chiya Butoh Institute (Kuni Chiya Butoh Kenkyūjo) and participates in their performances, Tokyo. • The Tokyo Metropolitan government announces its project to develop Shinjuku as the second major city center.  Plans include the redevelopment of Yodobashi Water Purification Plant and its surrounding area. 2nd Neo Dada Exhibition, Yoshimura Masunobu’s studio, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Included are works by Akasegawa Genpei, Arakawa Shūsaku, Ueno Masayuki, Kazakura Shō, Kishimoto Sayako, Shinohara Ushio, Tanaka Shintarō, Tanabe Santarō, Toyoshima Sōroku, Yoshino Tatsumi (Danger, in which magnesium is burned), and Yoshimura Masunobu (Demonstration June 15, 1960). Kishimoto, Tanaka, Tanabe, and Yoshino participate for the first time. Ishibashi Betsujin, Iwasaki Kunihiko, and Ueda Shin are no longer a part of the group at this point. Shūdan Daku (Group Muddle) Exhibition, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Included are works by Masuzawa Kinpei. Yoshimura Masunobu visits the exhibition with Kazakura Shō, and this may have been the occasion on which he recruited Masuzawa for Neo Dada. The First Exhibition of Cella Art Association, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art. • Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke and his Cabinet resign. • Koe-naki-koe no Kai no Tayori (Letters from Voices of the Voiceless) begins publication, Tokyo. • First Ikeda Hayato Cabinet (until December 8, 1960) Neo Dada Beach Show, An’yōin Temple and Zaimokuza Beach, Kamakura.  Participanting Artists: Akasegawa Genpei, Arakawa Shūsaku, Ueno Masayuki, Shinohara Ushio, Kazakura Shō, Kishimoto Sayako, Tanabe Santarō, Toyoshima Sōroku, Masuzawa Kinpei, Yoshino Tatsumi, and Yoshimura Masunobu. In the garden of An’yōin, the male performers throw paint at

5541960

7-23—7-24

AUGUST

AUGUST

AUGUST

8-1 8-1 8-1—8-10 8-5—8-9

8-8—8-13

8-9

Kishimoto, who has covered her face. At the beach, Kazakura is thrown into the sea, rises up from the water with seaweed wrapped around his body, and gets naked on the sandy beach. On July 25, the performance at An’yōin and the revelry are broadcast on the TBS program From North to South in “Under this Flag,” a section showing news about summer camps in various parts of Japan. First recital of the Dance Experience Society by Hijikata Tatsumi, Dai-ichi Seimei Hall, Hibiya, Tokyo.  Created, directed, and choreographed by Hijikata Tatsumi. Performers include Ohno Kazuo and Ohno Yoshito. Stage design by Mizutani Isao. The program includes a message from Mishima Yukio. Before the performance, Hijikata visits Shibusawa Tatsuhiko to invite him and they become friends. Gurūpu Ongaku (Group Music) is formed in Tokyo.  Members are Kosugi Takehisa, Shiomi Chieko, Tsuge Gen’ichi, Toshima Mikio, Tone Yasunao, and Mizuno Shūkō. This marks the beginning of the group’s performances and tape-recorded music. Takiguchi Shūzō publishes “Sado kōshaku no yuigon shikkōshiki” (Ceremony to Execute the Testament of Marquis de Sade) in the August issue of Mizue.  He introduces the ritual performance by Jean Benoît at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in December 1959 in Paris, along with illustrations based on a report by Alain Jouffroy. It is considered to have influenced a butoh piece of Hijikata Tatsumi’s and a ritual by Shiga Kenzō and Miki Tomio. • The serialized publication of Shibusawa Tatsuhiko’s Kuromajutsu no techō (Notebook of Black Magic) begins in Hōseki (Jewel), continuing through October 1961. • Shūkan Manga Tengoku (Weekly Manga Heaven) begins publication by Geibunsha. • R iots by 3,000 day-laborers residing in the San’ya district in Tokyo. Tanaka Fujio and Kaneko Tokuzō Two-person Exhibition, Satō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Father and Son Children Picture Collage Exhibition, Nakatsu Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 3rd Floor Hall, Ōita.  Itoi Kanji’s first of three exhibitions in Nakatsu. Together with recent works, it shows works from the Itoi Father and Son Collage Exhibition in August 1959. Also included are poems by Nakanishi Ginpei, author of children’s literature. A series of solo exhibitions by Kyūshū-ha, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo.  Included are works by Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Obana Shigeharu, Katae Masatoshi, Sakurai Takami, and Chō Yoriko. Possibly due to the split in the group because of Dōkutsu-ha, separate exhibitions are set up to show the works of five members individually, in contrast to the 1958 and 1959 group shows. • The Bund splits into factions over the result of the Anpo struggle: Senki-ha (Battle Flag Faction), the Kakumei no tsūtatsu-ha (Kakutsū-ha, Revolutionary Notification Faction) and the Puroertaria Tsūchin-ha (Purotsū-ha, Proletarian Bulletin Faction).

1960555

8-15—8-20

AUTUMN SEPTEMBER

SEPTEMBER

9-1 9-1—9-3

9-1—9-4

9-5 9-6

9-10 9-12—9-16 9-17—9-20

9-19—9-24

Miki Tomio Solo Exhibition, Bungei Shunjū Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo  The exhibition consists of glass shards that cover the floor after beer bottles are thrown at several hundred whisky bottles tied together with wire. The First Exhibition of Gurūpu Doro (Group Mud), farm road in Gunnanchō, Takasaki, Gunma Prefecture. Dance and Music: Improvisational Union, Kuni Chiya Dance Institute, Komaba, Tokyo.  Tanno Yumiko, Kosugi Takehisa, Shiomi Mieko, Tsuge Gen’ichi, Toshima Mikio, Tone Yasunao, and Mizuno Shūkō participates. The group adopts the name Group Ongaku on this occasion. Asai Masuo begins publication of Gendai o miru me (Eyes to see the present), Nagakute, Aichi.  The bulletin continues until April 1961, publishing 8 issues. Matano Mamoru is appointed Secretary General of Nishinippon Newspaper Labor Union, Fukuoka. 3rd Neo Dada Exhibition, Hibiya Gallery, Tokyo.  Included are works by Akasegawa Genpei, Arakawa Shūsaku, Kazakura Shō, Kishimoto Sayako, Kinoshita Shin, Shinohara Ushio, Tanaka Shintarō, Tanabe Santarō, Toyoshima Sōroku, Hiraoka Hiroko, Masuzawa Kinpei, Yoshino Tatsumi, and Yoshimura Masunobu. Kinoshita, Masuzawa, and Hiraoka participate for the first time. Yoshimura covers his body with posters in a mummy-like fashion; Shinohara ties colored cloths around his body; Masuzawa hangs light bulbs and wires on his body, and they go for a walk in the street. In the gallery, Masuzawa pours urine on his work Imperial Hotel. Due to objections from the gallery manager, the exhibition, originally scheduled for one week, is cancelled after the third day. 0 Ji Gen exhibition, Small Gallery B, Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum, Nagoya.  Included are works by Umeda Masao, Kawaguchi Kōtarō, and Koiwa Takayoshi. Iwata Shin’ichi is unable to participate due to illness. • Ikeda Hayato becomes Prime Minister and announces his High Growth and Income Doubling Plan. • Special Meeting of the Japan Coal Miners’ Union (Tanrō) and decision is made to accept a mediated agreement with Central Labour Relations Commission; Ōmuta, Fukuoka Prefecture. • N HK and four other commercial broadcasting stations begin color TV broadcasting. 5th Kagami Masayuki Solo Exhibition, Shinbashi Gallery, Tokyo. Itoi Kanji Solo exhibition, Nakatsu Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 3F Hall, Ōita Prefecture.  This is Itoi’s second exhibition at Nakatsu with poetry and prints. Nagoya Young Artists Association Exhibition at Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum, Nagoya.  Features works by over forty artists, including Itō Takao, Umeda Masao, Katō Yoshihiro, Kawaguchi Kōtarō, Koiwa Takayoshi, Hageshita Iwao, Ishiguro Shōji, and Komoto Akira. The Nagoya Young Artists Association office is

5561960

9-21—9-25

9-30

OCTOBER?

OCTOBER 10-2

10-9 10-12 10-27—10-30

11-1

11-3

11-5

located in Katō’s home. Iwata Shin’ichi’s name is listed on the pamphlet, but he does not exhibit a work. Arakawa Shūsaku Solo Exhibition: Mou hitotsu no hakaba (Another Graveyard), Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  This exhibition results in Arakawa’s expulsion from Neo Dada. Bizarre Society (Bizāru no Kai) event, Ginza Gas Hall, Tokyo.  Organizers include Tomita Eizō (cartoonist and poet). Participating artists include Neo Dada members Akasegawa Genpei, Shinohara Ushio, Toyoshima Sōroku, Masuzawa Kinpei, Yoshino Tatsumi, and Yoshimura Masunobu. Yoshimura Masunobu marries, Tokyo.  H is bride, Ishizaki Midori, is the younger sister of art critic Ishizaki Kōichirō, and a dancer (member of the Tsuda Nobutoshi Dance Institute). Takiguchi Shūzo serves as the go-between. As a result of their union, Neo Dada loses its meeting place, which leads to the group’s breakup. Masuzawa Kinpei returns to Sendai from Tokyo. 2nd Six Avant-Garde Artists organized by the 650 Experience Society, Dai-ichi Seimei Hall, Hibiya, Tokyo.  H ijikata Tatsumi performs Sei kōshaku (Saint Marquis) with Ohno Yoshito. The other five artists are Mayuzumi Toshirō, Tōmatsu Shōmei, Terayama Shūji, Kanamori Kaoru, and Miho Keitarō. In addition to writing by Mishima Yukio and Takiguchi Shūzō, the program includes Avant-Garde and Scandal by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko. • Premiere of Ōshima Nagisa’s film Nihon no yoru to kiri (Night and Fog in Japan).  The film focuses on the Anpo struggle. Screening is suspended on October 13. •The Japan Socialist Party representative, Asanuma Inejirō, is assassinated by a 17-year-old right-wing extremist, Hibiya Public Hall, Tokyo. Itoi Kanji Solo Exhibition, Nakatsu Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 3rd Floor Hall, Nakatsu, Ōita Prefecture.  Itoi’s third exhibition in Nakatsu. The exhibition consists of “Dada Exhibition ‘Another Face’,” “Beat Formative Art,” and “The Beatnik Comes!” and includes the work Mō hitotsu no kao (Another Face), an etching based on a photograph of an objet. • Miike Labor Union (1st Union), after reaching a consensus in the general rally for united action, calls off the strike and resumes working. The Miike dispute is settled by compromise, Ōmuta, Fukuoka Prefecture. Divine Conception: Zero for Conduct (Invitation to JASA), 2nd Screening Room, Department of Arts, Nihon University, Ekoda, Tokyo.  The event is organized by Film Study Group (Asanuma Naoya, Satō Masao, Jōnouchi Motoharu) and Arakawa Shūsaku; JASA is the combination of the first letter of the names of these four members). The organizers falsely announce the screening of the film and leave the audience in the darkness, where Arakawa lies still on the ground, unmoving. [pp. 141–2] Concert of Music Concrete Group, Art Festival, Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music, Ueno, Tokyo.  Kosugi Takehisa’s premier Objet Sonore, Mizuno Shūkō’s Symphony for Concrete are performed.

1960-1961557

11-10—11-13 11-12 11-16 11-19—11-23

11-23

11-?—12-3

DECEMBER

DECEMBER DECEMBER 12-8 12-11

12-12—61-1-31 12-15 12-27

13th Rozo-gun Exhibition for Anti-Prefectural Exhibition, Ten’on Building Gallery, Mito, Ibaraki. • The Liberal Democratic Party, the Japan Socialist Party, and the Democratic Socialist Party participate in the first televised debate on NHK and other media. Itoi Kanji buys five books by D. T. Suzuki (Suzuki Daisetsu), Nakatsu, Ōita Prefecture. Exhibition of Paintings for Resistance and Setback: An Avant-Garde Trend in Japanese Postwar Art, Building No. 3, Waseda University, Tokyo.  Held at the Waseda University Festival, co-organized by Waseda University Newspaper, Revolutionary Artists Front (RAF) and Criticism Movement (bulletin of Avant-Garde Art Society [Zen’ei Bijutsu Kai]). Planned by Oda Tatsurō. Works by Nakamura Hiroshi, Bitō Yutaka, and Yamashita Kikuji are exhibited. Katsuragawa Hiroshi and Ōtsuka Mutsumi distribute a pamphlet with their essays. 58th Shōhei High School Art Festival, Shōhei High School, Ochanomizu, Tokyo.  Organized by Shōhei High School Art Club, headed by Nakajima Yoshio. Exhibitions are held in three classrooms: Neo-Dada Exhibition in Room 1, Poetry and Painting in Room 2, and Coffee Shop Gallery in Room 3. Exhibition of Small Works by Kōchi members of Shinshō Association.  Held by Kōchi Branch of New Image Artists Association (Shinshō Sakka Kyōkai), which later develops into Avant-Garde Tosa School (Zen’ei Tosa-ha). VAN Film Science Institute is founded, Kunitachi, Tokyo.  Members include Asanuma Naoya, Adachi Masao, Kawashima Keiji, Kanbara Hiroshi, and Jōnouchi Motoharu. The group later moves to Ogikubo. • Tanigawa Gan et al. organize the Taishō Action Troop to support the Taishō Mine Struggle; Nakama, Fukuoka Prefecture. • The National Liberation Front, known as the Viet Cong, is officially formed in South Vietnam. • Second Ikeda Hayato Cabinet (until December 9, 1963). Itoi Kanji purchases Dada no bōken (La Aventura Dada) by Georges Hugnet, Nakatsu, Ōita Prefecture. The Japanese translation is published by Bijutsu Shuppansha. Shinohara Ushio Outdoor Action Painting Exhibition, Shinohara’s home, Ogikubo, Tokyo. Itoi Kanji takes photographs of four poses, including two nude, Arika Photo Studio, Nakatsu, Ōita Prefecture. • The National Income Doubling Plan is approved during a meeting of the cabinet.

1961 IN THIS YEAR

Gar Gar Contemporary Art Society (Ga Ga Gendai Bijutsu Kai) is formed in Ōmiya, Saitama.  Members include Iijima Hiroe, Uchida Yoshio, Ōshima Yasuji, Kinoshita Wataru, Saitō Kiyoshi, Saitō Shigeo, Saitō Takao, Toshima Tadashi, Harada Eiji, Fukuda Katsubon (Katsuhiro), Hoshina Kazuhiro, Mochizuki Takahiro, and Wakino Akira. “Gar Gar” refers to the French word “gars” for “young guys.”

5581961

JANUARY

1-2 1-3 1-20 1-23—1-31

1-25

1-31—2-4 1-31—2-4 FEBRUARY

2-1

2-2 2-10

The first and second Gar Gar exhibitions are held during the year at Shinohara Gallery, Ōmiya. Kurohata (Black Flag) is formed in Tokyo.  Members are Suzuki Shirō (theater), Takahara Yūji (literature), and Matsue Kaku (art). Mizukami Jun enacts Kikku dairisha yori no okurimono (Gifts from Kick Agency).  He travels to different areas of Japan and leaves assorted belongings he happens to be carrying as “gifts” on stakes and stones he encounters on his way. Akiyama Yūtokutaishi joins the Japan Metalworkers Unions, the most left-wing union within Sōhyō, Tokyo. Kagami Masayuki enrolls in the Faculty of Political Science at Political Science College; also enrolls at an East Asian Art School in Tokyo. • The “Roppongi Crowd” (those who congregate in Roppongi) becomes a noted phenomenon. Masuzawa Kinpei Exhibition: Corpse without Graveyard, Maruzen Bookstore, Sendai.  Installation of objets made with electric bulbs in wooden coffin-like boxes under the low lighting from bare light bulbs. • On their first Japan tour, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers give a concert at Sankei Hall in Ōtemachi (Tokyo). • The United States announces that it will sever diplomatic ties with Cuba. • John F. Kennedy is inaugurated as President of the United States. Arakawa Shūsaku Exhibition, Mudo Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  K azakura Shō gives a performance that involves opening the lid of Arakawa’s coffin-like works. Sogetsu Music Inn 11, Etcetera Jazz Session, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Yamaguchi Katsuhiro gives a public performance of the making of a painting, With Action Painting. 7th Group Ei Exhibition, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo.  E xhibiting artists include Doi Junen, Kagami Masayuki, and Tanaka Fujio. Kobayashi Shichirō Exhibition, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo. Hamaguchi Tomiji attempts to start Akai Ganshō (Red reef) movement, Kōchi.  Hamaguchi’s plan to paint the rocks red along the coast of Cape Muroto and Cape Ashizuri is unrealized. • Shimanaka Incident, Tokyo.  To protest the publication of the short story Fūryū mutan (Tale of an Elegant Dream) by Fukuzawa Shichirō in the magazine Chūō kōron (December 1960), a right-wing youth attacks the home of the magazine’s company president, Shimanaka Hōji, seriously injuring his wife and killing the housekeeper. N  • andemo mite yarō (I’ll go everywhere and see everything) by Oda Makoto is published by Kawade Shobō Shinsha. • Sakamoto Kyū’s record Ue o muite arukō (I look up as I walk) is released. The titular song, alternatively titled “Sukiyaki,” will go on to top music charts worldwide between 1961–3, including the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.

1961559

2-10—2-14 2-14 2-26

MARCH

MARCH 3-2—3-16

3-12 APRIL APRIL 4-12—4-30

4-19—4-24

MAY

MAY

Hamaguchi Tomiji Exhibition: Hamono (Knives), Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. • A kagi Keiichirō, an actor with the Nikkatsu Motion Picture Company, dies in an accident. Japan Art Society general meeting, Auditorium of Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Ueno.  At the meeting, a heated dispute breaks out over a review of the Anpo Struggle and the exhibits under common theme of “Struggle in 1960” in the 14th Japan Independent Exhibition. Asai Masuo graduates from Aichi Prefectural Nagakute High School, Aichi.  He begins research on Korean communities in Japan and laborers in Kamagasaki, Osaka. Asai Masuo publishes poetry in the March issue of Gekkan Teihen (Monthly Bottom), a magazine of the Teihen no Kai (The Bottom Society). The 13th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.  Included are works by Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ōguro Aiko, Ōyama Uichi, Owari Takeshi, Katae Masatoshi, Kikuhata Mokuma, Sakurai Takami, Tabe Mitsuko, Chō Yoriko, Terada Ken’ichiro, Yonekura Toku (members of Kyūshū-ha); Akasegawa Genpei, Arakawa Shūsaku, Ishibashi Betsujin, Kazakura Shō, Kishimoto Sayako, Shinohara Ushio, Toyoshima Sōroku, Tanaka Shintarō, Tanabe Santarō, Hiraoka Hiroko, Yoshino Tatsumi, Yoshimura Masunobu (members of Neo-Dada); Katō Yoshihiro, Hageshita Iwao (later members of Zero Jigen); Nakazawa Ushio, Tanaka Fuji, Doi Junen (later members of Jikanha), Itoi Kanji, Kagami Masayuki, Kudō Tetsumi, and Miki Tomio. Shigun begins publication of a journal of the same name in Tokyo. Ikeda Shōichi (Ichi) enrolls in the Department of Polymer Chemistry, Faculty of Engineering, Kyoto University. Nakajima Yoshio enrolls in the Department of Sociology, Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo. Experiments in Modern Art (Gendai bijutsu no jikken-ten), The National Museum of Modern Art, Takebashi, Tokyo.  Included are works by Arakawa Shūsaku, Ochi Osamu, Kobatake Hiroshi, Kikuhata Mokuma, Kudō Tetsumi, Shiraga Kazuo, Tanaka Atsuko, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Matsuzawa Yutaka, and Motonaga Sadamasa. 10th Gutai Art Exhibition, Takashimaya Department Store 3F Hall, Nanba, Osaka.  Included is Room of Signs by Mukai Shūji. The exhibition travels to Takashimaya, Nihonbashi, Tokyo, May 2–7. William Klein photographs Tokyo for Tokyo, a book of photographs taken in the city.  A rrives in Japan on May 5. Photographs in the collection include shots of Shinohara Ushio, Yoshimura Masunobu, Arakawa Shūsaku, and Hijikata Tatsumi. Itoi Kanji writes notes on Dada, Nakatsu, Ōita Prefecture.  Itoi’s notes begin “I haven’t experienced any psychological change; it’s just that this Dada sticks to me and follows me everywhere.”

5601961

5-7

5-11—5-15 5-15—5-27 6-6—6-14

6-11—6-19 6-15

6-16—6-23

JULY

7-8

7-13—7-14

7-15—7-19

7-25

“Mechakucha bīto gēru” (Crazy beat guerre), an article of an interview with Shinohara Ushio appears in Mainichi Gurafu (Mainichi Graphic).  Ōe Kenzaburo interviews Shinohara and Waseda Akihiro, both members of Bizarre Society (Bizāru no Kai). Nakazawa Ushio Exhibition, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Sam Francis Exhibition, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. 1st exhibition of Contemporary Vision, Satō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Curated by Tonō Yoshiaki. Included are works by Arakawa Shūsaku, Marcel Duchamps, Lucio Fontana, Jean Tinguely, Sam Francis, Henri Michaux, and Takemitsu Tōru. Tokyo, an exhibition of photographs by William Klein, Fuji Photo Salon, Ginza, Tokyo. A memorial gathering for Kanba Michiko, Kyōritsu Auditorium, Hitotsubashi, Tokyo.  Document 6.15 by VAN Film Science Institute is screened, with two-channel speakers installed inside and outside the site; spectators are riled up, and chaos ensues. [p. 142] 2nd exhibition of Contemporary Vision: Fetish of the Contemporary, in the case of Akasegawa Genpei (Gendai no jubutsu: Akasegawa Genpei no ba’ai), Satō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Curated by Ebara Jun. The program Art Salon (Tokyo Television, present-day TBS) broadcasts “Probing the depths of the mind: Experimental art with the hallucinogen LSD.”  Tsuruoka Masao appears on the program; Ebara Jun provides commentary. Kyūshū-ha No. 4 is published, Fukuoka.  The member roster no longer includes Ōgami Toshiko, Kinoshita Shin, Saitō Hidesaburō, Terada Ken’ichirō, Matano Mamoru, Morinaga Jun, Yagara Yutaka, and Yamauchi Jūtarō. Newly appearing members are Ueno Masayuki, Ōguro Aiko, Ōyama Uichi, Taniguchi Toshio, Nakanishi Kazuko, Hataraki Tadashi, Funaki Yoshiharu, Miyazaki Junnosuke, and Yonekura Toku. Membership turnover within the group is at its highest. Key founding members Matano and Yamauchi leave the group, while Ōguro, Ōyama, Hataraki, Miyazaki join and become core members, remaining active until the end of the group. Ochi Osamu and Kikuhata Mokuma, who had left to join Dōkutsu-ha return. Starting with this issue, Sakurai Takami replaces Matano as editor. A Grand Wedding Ceremony of Poetry and Show, Iino Hall, Toranomon, Tokyo.  Planning and production by the Contemporary Poetry Society (Gendai shi no Kai). Performers include Terayama Shūji and other poets, Baba Reiko, Kamoi Yōko, Honoo Kayoko, Yoneyama Mamako, Hijikata Tatsumi, and Tomotake Masanori. 1st Himeji Independent Exhibition, Shirasagi Gallery, Himeji.  Each edition of this Independent exhibition is planned with a common theme; the first exhibition’s theme is “woman.” U  • ekusa Jin’ichi introduces an exhibition of “Happening Groups” in SAC Journal No. 17 published by Sogetsu Art Center as the earliest introduction of “Happening” in Japan, but the exhibition actually consists of installations by George Brecht, Jim Dine, Walter Gaudnek, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Whitman.

1961561

AUGUST

AUGUST

8-1 8-14—8-18

SEPTEMBER SEPTEMBER

9-1—62-2-10 9-3

9-11—9-17 9-14—9-19

9-15

Group Zero, “Demonstrate for No Reason and Walk the Streets,” Ōtesuji area, Kōchi.  Sakata Kazu, Sudō Yasuo, Terao Takashi, Hamaguchi Tomiji, Hori Shinkichi, and Morita Shōichi of the Shinshō Sakka Kyōkai, Kōchi Branch (later the New Image School of Tosa, Shinshō Tosa-ha) and Takasaki Motonao of the Modern Art Association (Modan Āto Kyōkai) march through the streets with their heads protruding through a sign bearing the name “Group 0.” M  • y Life, Vol. 1, Leon Trotsky’s autobiography, is published by Gendai Shichōsha.  Translation by Kurita Isamu, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, and Hamada Taizō. Vol. 2 and 3 are published in September and October, respectively. • R ioting breaks out in Kamagasaki, a flophouse district for day laborers, Osaka.  O ver 2000 rioters clash with police. Yoshimura Masunobu Solo Exhibition: The Last Tableaux, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Sadada-shi no tō (Mr. Sadada’s Tower) is exhibited. Saitama Avant-Garde Young Artists Group (Saitama Zen’ei Geijutsu Seinen Sakka Shūdan) is formed in Urawa, Saitama. DaDa1961 is published, Nakatsu, Ōita.  The magazine is listed as published by “Asobi + Minoru + Dada Zen,” but the publisher is actually Itoi Kanji. “Minoru” is Tashiro Minoru of Unbeat. “Asobi” refers to a magazine published by Iida Gakurō. • Kotobukiya (present-day Suntory Holdings, Ltd.) begins a prize-offering advertisement: “Let’s drink Torys [whisky] and go to Hawaii!” Recital of Dance Experience Group, Dai-ichi Seimei Hall, Hibiya, Tokyo.  Includes performances by Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. Art direction by Kanō Mitsuo, Tanaka Fuji, and Yoshimura Masunobu. 6th Kagami Masayuki Exhibition, Satō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Kyūshū-ha Exhibition, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo.  Included are works by Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ueno Masayuki, Ōguro Aiko, Ōyama Uichi, Ochi Osamu, Obata Hidesuke, Obana Shigeharu, Owari Takeshi, Katae Masatoshi, Kikuhata Mokuma, Sakurai Takami, Taniguchi Toshio, Chō Yoriko, Tabe Mitsuko, Nakanishi Kazuko, Hataraki Tadashi, Miyazaki Junnosuke, and Yonekura Toku. It is the Kyūshū-ha’s last group show at Ginza Gallery. This is the most important exhibition of the group in its period of objet-based works, with many energetic and ambitious works, including Ochi’s work of glass boxes containing cigarette butts, Kikuhata’s installation with fetish objects of folk culture, Taniguchi’s installation with rice scoops, Tabe’s Artificial Placenta, and Ōguro’s painting pasted with dishes. A poster parodying that of a traveling theater troupe is printed to announce the “sudden arrival for performance,” and teacups with “Kyūshū-ha” on them (made by Kikuhata) are handed out. In the October 20 issue of Doyō manga (Saturday manga), the exhibition is introduced as one by “artists who challenge female sex organs.” The First Recital of Group Ongaku: Concert of Improvisational Music and Acoustic Objects, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  This is the group’s first and last recital. Participants and performing artists in Part 1: “Composition and Music Concrete” are Kosugi Takehisa, 0-S-3, 1961 (For Dramaturgy in an Indeterminate Time); Tone Yasunao, A Cave for David

5621961

9-19

9-28 OCTOBER

OCTOBER OCTOBER 10-5

10-5

10-16—10-20

10-16—10-20 10-21—10-24

NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER 11-1—11-4

Tudor or Piano-like Sound (a), (b), and (c) by Magnetic Tape; Shiomi Mieko, Mobile I, II, and III; Toshima Mikio, M-C. No. 1; Tsuge Gen’ichi, Music for Tape; Mizuno Shūkō, Three Dimensions for Brass Instruments, Tape Music. Part 2, “Improvisation is Group,” is a collective performance of Metaplasm 9.15. Kyūshū-ha No. 5 is published, Fukuoka.  The issue features critical essays by Sakurai Takami and Hataraki Tadashi, but contains no photographs of works. • The Economic Planning Agency announces a 13% increase in Japan’s GNP over the previous year. Hamaguchi Tomiji, Exhibition without Pictures (E no nai gaten), Kōchi.  Hamaguchi prints and sends an invitation to the inaugural exhibition of Kōchi Art Museum, an imaginary museum. The Cella Art Association opens Kita-shirakawa Art Village, Kyoto. • The 34th and final issue of Sākuru mura (Circle village) is published, Fukuoka. Public Discussion: “Anti-music and Anti-dance,” Wakamatsu Miki residence, Tokyo.  Performance by Wakamatsu Miki, Group Ongaku, et al. • Kuromajutsu no techō (Notebook of Black Magic) by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko is published by Tōgensha.  Originally serialized in 12 installments that were published in the August 1959 to July 1960 issues of Hōseki. Kazakura Shō Exhibition, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  K azakura exhibits objet-based works such as Cigarette Case (Cigarette is My Friend) and two-dimensional works. On 16, the event Chair is held, originally a work by Kazakura, adapted by Akasegawa Genpei, directed by Suga Toshinori. During the exhibition, he gives a performance blowing balloons in the gallery. Around this time onward, he begins to use Kabbalah numerology for his works. Doi Junen Exhibition, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Zero Ji Gen Exhibition, Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum, Nagoya.  The 2nd Zero Ji Gen Exhibition. Due to the absence of Umeda Masao, it is a two-person exhibition with Kawaguchi Kōtarō and Koiwa Takayoshi. The museum orders them to remove a work by Koiwa, which looks like garbage box, but the work is ultimately not removed. Beginning with this exhibition, the “0” in the group’s name is replaced with “zero” (ゼロ). K  • awani Hiroshi participates in Kōhō no Kai (Behind-the-lines Society), a support organization for Tanigawa Gan’s Taishō Action Troop (Taishō kōdōtai) in the laborers’ struggle in Taishō Coal Mine, Nakama, Fukuoka Prefecture, and meets Yamaguchi Kenji, Tokyo. Hanzaisha Dōmei (The League of Criminals) is formed in Tokyo. Members include Hiraoka Masaaki, Miyabara Yasuhara, and Morotomi Yōji. Dada (Dadaism Festival), Room 206, Meiji Gakuin University, Shirokane, Tokyo.  Unbeat Organizers is formed and begins performing “damacts.” Participants include Tashiro Minoru, the advisor of the Art Club at Meiji Gakuin University, and Nakajima Yoshio. Held as an event of the Shirokane Festival to commemorate the 84th anniversary of the University. The flyer titles the event Shitai kaibō jikkenchū (Experimental autopsy in progress).

1961-1962563

11-6—11-12

11-15 11-16

11-22 11-29—12-3 11-30

DECEMBER 12-4—12-10 12-7 12-11—12-15 12-13

12-13 12-21 12-28

Kudō Tetsumi Exhibition, Bungei Shunjū Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Impo bunpuzu to sono hōwa bubun ni okeru hogo dōmu no hassei (Distribution map of impotence and the appearance of protective domes at the points of saturation) is exhibited. A  • rt Theater Guild (ATG) is established in Tokyo. Miyabara Yasuharu and Odate Setsuko Solo Exhibitions, Coffee Shop Degas, Ekoda, Tokyo.  This is the first art activity by the League of Criminals. The 6th All-Japan Students’ Film Festival, Waseda University, Tokyo.  The film Wan (Rice Bowl) by Adachi Masao is screened. 1st Saitama Avant-Garde Young Artists Group Exhibition, Saitama Prefectural Art Gallery, Urawa. Ichiyanagi Toshi Recital, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  A concert by Ichiyanagi, who returned from U.S. in August. Performances by Kosugi Takehisa, Shiomi Mieko, Tone Yasunao, Mizuno Shūkō (Group Ongaku); and Takahashi Yūji, Takemitsu Tōru, Mayuzumi Toshirō, et al. IBM: Dekigoto/hapuningu to myūjikku konkurēto (IBM: Happening and Music Concrète) is the first performed work deemed a “Happening” in Japan. At a year-end party, Kyūshū-ha disbands for the third time, Fukuoka. Kudō Tetsumi Exhibition, Hakuhō Gallery, Osaka. • Counterfeit 1000-yen bills are found at the Bank of Japan in Akita. (Chi-37 Incident) Nakanishi Natsuyuki Exhibition, Itō Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. New Image School of Tosa [Shinshō Tosa-ha] is formed in Kōchi.  Members include Hamaguchi Tomiji. The group also goes by the name “Group Zero.” • Japanese premiere of the film Westside Story, co-directed by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise. C  • hūō Kōronsha suspends sale of the January 1962 issue of Shisō no Kagaku, a special issue on the Emperor system, due to “business circumstances.” Arakawa Shūsaku arrives in New York.

1962 IN THIS YEAR

Creative Collective Gaga (Sōzō Shūdan Gaga) is formed, Tokyo.  Sawahata Kazuaki is the leading member. Gaga Art Institute is established later this year in Tokyo. VOL Art Collective (VOL Bijutsu Shūdan) is formed, Kyoto.  Members include Ōe Masanori, Katō Minosuke, and Manabe Sōhei; most of the members are graduates of Kyoto City University of Arts, except Ōe, who attended Kyoto Gakugei University (present-day Kyoto University of Education). Takeda Tsuneo, art historian of Osaka University, is a patron of the collective. Later Nakamura Keiji of Doshisha University is involved in its activities.

5641962

JANUARY

JANUARY JANUARY JANUARY JANUARY 1-11—1-15 1-11—1-15

1-14—1-21 1-22—1-28 1-23 1-27

1-30

1-30 1-31

FEBRUARY

FEBRUARY 2-1

Akiyama Yūtokutaishi works as Secretary General of the Elman branch of the Japan Metalworkers’ Unions, later becoming the Chairperson, Tokyo.  He also works as the Secretary General of the North Branch of the Federation of Socialist Youth. He joins the Federation of Marxist Youth Laborers under the false name of Okazaki Jirō. Shiomi Mieko returns to Okayama from Tokyo. • The Twist becomes a worldwide dance craze, including in Japan. “Reconstruction Plan” is discussed by Kyūshū-ha, Fukuoka.  This is mentioned in a notice for meeting by Sakurai Takami sent perhaps at the beginning of the year, in which Sakurai writes: “We form a Kyūshū-ha with clearer goals.” The plan includes a direction of clarified theory through reviewing the group’s history, an exhibition at a warehouse in Arae, and a proposal of Grand Assembly of Heroes. Asai Masuo leaves Teihen no Kai (Bottom Society) and forms Teiten no Kai (Bottom Zenith Society), Nagakute, Aichi Prefecture. Itoi Kanji creates rayographs, Nakatsu, Ōita.  The works are compiled in an album titled Hikari no hanga (Prints of light). Dance Action #1, Kōseinenkin Kaikan Small Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  The performers include Itō Mika. Yamaguchi Katsuhiro collaborates in a Fluxus event by Ono Yōko, Dick Higgins et al., Living Theater, New York. Shinohara Ushio presents action paintings, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. 6th Kyoto Independent Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  This marks Mizukami Jun’s first participation in the Kyoto Independent Exhibition with Bohyō no katachi suru jumon (The spell in the shape of a gravestone). Noda Michinori and Nakajima Yoshio Two Person Exhibition, Tokyo Electric Power Service Station, Meguro, Tokyo. Nakazawa Ushio Exhibition, Mudo Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. • The Marunouchi Subway Line begins operation between Ogikubo and Shinjuku. Meeting of Kyūshū-ha, Nōmin Kaikan, Fukuoka.  The theme of discussion is “Art of Ordering” and a 1963 grand assembly in New York. Asai Masuo publishes his essay “Rise up, Organizers of the Bottom Zenith!” Nagakute, Aichi.  The essay is written on November 20, 1961 and published in a mimeographed magazine of the same title. • Tokyo Metropolitan Government prohibits sporting activities on the streets. Kikuhata Mokuma writes a letter to Sakurai Takami, Fukuoka.  K ikuhata offers a few proposals for the reconstruction of Kyūshū-ha, which are published in the sixth issue of Kyūshū-ha. New Reality Group (Shin Genjitsu Shūdan) is formed, Fukuoka.  Members include Taniguchi Toshio, Minashima Mansaku and other Ōmutabased artists associated with Kyūshū-ha. Hariu Ichirō is expelled from the JCP. • The population of Tokyo residents is estimated to exceed 10 million.

1962565

2-1—2-14 2-2—2-8 2-3

2-7

2-13—2-18

2-24

2-27—2-28

MARCH MARCH 3-1 3-2—3-16

Hiraoka Hiroko Exhibition, Fūgetsu-dō, Shinjuku, Tokyo. Katō Yoshihiro and Hageshita Iwao Two Person Exhibition, Confection Center, Mainichi Building, Nagoya. Tone Yasunao Solo Exhibition of a Composer, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo.  Performances of Tone’s pieces include Drastic, Anagram for Strings, Anagram for Musique Concrète, Music by Hiraoka Hiroko’s Painting, Music for Stepping Organ, Lecture, Musique Concrète: Days, Musique Concrète: Number, Musique Concrète: Conversation, Instrumental Sound by Magnetic Tape: Door, Musique Concrète: Costume, Silly Symphony. Performances of pieces by other artists include Clarinet Music by Richard Maxfield, IBM by Ichiyanagi Toshi, and Mālikā by Kosugi Takehisa (along with Tone for the ‘dance’). Tone Yasunao, Kosugi Takehisa, Shiomi Mieko, Toshima Mikio, Mizuno Shūkō, Takahashi Yuji, Ichiyanagi Toshi, and Yamanaka Katsu participate in the performances. An Evening of Performance by Ichiyanagi Toshi + Group Ongaku, Fūgetsu-dō, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Held during the Hiraoka Hiroko exhibition (2-1–2-14). Performed are Work: Micro I by Kosugi Takehisa (premier), Ashifumi orugan no ongaku (Music by Harmoniums) by Tone Yasunao, and a piece by Shiomi Mieko (title unknown). Mizuno Shūkō participates in the performances. 2nd International Young Artists’ Exhibition (Pan-Pacific Exhibition), Matsuzakaya Hall, Ginza, Tokyo.  Organized by Japan Culture Forum. Kudō Tetsumi is awarded the Grand Prize and Sasaki Kōsei is awarded the International Young Artists’ Exhibition Award. • The Research Commission on the Constitution holds the first public hearing on constitutional amendment, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  At one of the public hearings later held in several cities across Japan, League of Criminals conducts Wataridori (Migrant bird) series, a struggle to prevent the constitutional public hearing. Sogetsu Contemporary Series 14: Théo Lesoualc’h Experimental Mime, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Music by Ichiyamagi Toshi. Katae Masatoshi, Kikuhata Mokuma, Taniguchi Toshiko, and Nakanishi Kazuko leave Kyūshū-ha, Fukuoka. Kosugi Takehisa graduates from the Department of Musicology, Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music. • People enrolled in a contract with NHK television exceed ten million (48.5% of households in Japan now own a television). 14th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.  Included are works by Ōguro Aiko, Ochi Osamu, Katae Masatoshi, Sakurai Takami, Taniguchi Toshio, Tabe Mitsuko, Chō Yoriko, and Yonekura Toku (Kyūshū-ha); Akasegawa Genpei, Ueda Jun, Shinohara Ushio, Kishimoto Sayako, Kinoshita Shin, Kazakura Shō, Tanaka Shintarō, Tanabe Santarō, Toyoshima Sōroku, Hiraoka Hiroko, Masuzawa Kinpei, Yoshino Tatsumi, and Yoshimura Masunobu from Neo Dada; Iwata Shin’ichi, Katō Yoshihiro, and K.T. (Zero Jigen); Tanaka Fuji, Nagano Shōzō, and Doi Junen from Jikan-ha;

5661962

3-3 3-25

SPRING APRIL

APRIL APRIL 4-1—4-2

4-8

4-16—4-26

4-17—4-22

Itoi Kanji (Jika Hatsuden [Self-Generated Energy], Trunk, Momohiki [Long Underpants], all works rejected for exhibition), Kudō Tetsumi (Distribution of Map of Impotence and Appearance of Protective Domes at the Points of Saturation), Kojima Nobuaki (Mibunka ni okeru kanōsei [Possibilities in the Undifferentiated], in which the artist stands in a drum), Tone Yasunao (Tape Recorder), Hamaguchi Tomiji (his work with a knife is rejected), Matsuzawa Yutaka, Mazura Ryūdan, Miki Tomio, and Minashima Mansaku. Members of Group Ongaku perform improvised music every day at the gallery. Ono Yōko (Yoko Ono) returns to Japan from the U.S. • S hinsei jutai (Divine Conception) by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko is published by Gendai Shichōsha.  Collects critical essays on diverse subjects such as Sade, Eroticism, film, literature, and theater. Book design by Kanō Mitsuo. Nihon University New Film Institute (with Adachi Masao, et al.) begins production of the film Sa’in (Closed Vagina), Tokyo. Ryokkōkai (Green Light Group) Exhibition with portable works by Neo Dada, Yonezawa, Yamagata.  Included are works by Neo Dada artists: Akasegawa Genpei, Shinohara Ushio, Kinoshita Shin, Tanaka Shintarō, Toyoshima Sōroku, Hiraoka Hiroko, Masuzawa Kinpei, Yoshino Tatsumi, and Yoshimura Masunobu. Also includes an exhibition of small works organized by Gotō Katsuyoshi, a roundtable discussion, and demonstration of action paintings. Tashiro Minoru enrolls in the Department of Sociology, Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo. •Concrete garbage boxes on streets are replaced by plastic poly pails; regular collection of garbage begins. Nakajima Yoshio Exhibition, Tokyo Electric Power Service Station, Meguro, Tokyo.  Itoi Kanji visits the exhibition from Nakatsu unannounced, which moves Nakajima to tears. April 8 Sunday, Morioka, by a Poet, Eight Painters, an Artist, and Dancers, Iwate Prefecture Jichi Kaikan, Morioka.  Included are works by Ōmiya Masao, Oikawa Setsuo, Sakuyama Ryūji, Sugimura Eiichi, Tamura Tomio, Hashimoto Tadashi, Fujisawa Tamio, and Murakami Yoshio (visual artists); Takahashi Shōhachirō and Itō Motoyuki (poets); Kamiisaka Kiyoko and others (dancers). This is the first exhibition by a group that will go on to form Shūdan N39 (Group N39). Kamiisaka dances with a dozen dancers and is joined by other members. Four Composers, Tokyo Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Included are works by Ichiyanagi Toshi, Takahashi Yūji, Takemitus Tōru, and Mayuzumi Toshirō. Ono Yōko joins the performance. 11th Gutai Art Exhibition, Takashimaya Third Floor Hall, Nanba, Osaka.  Murakami Saburō creates a display for the entrance with a paper screen for the exhibition title at the center. He tears the paper in both sides of the title to open the screen into the gallery. It could be at this exhibition that Kikuhata Mokuma (visiting to research Gutai as a representative of Kyūshū-ha, to

1962567

4-20 5-3—5-7

5-4 5-8 5-14—5-26 5-16—5-20

5-21—5-25 5-24

5-28—6-3

JUNE

6-1—6-5

explore the possibility of future collaborations between the two groups) meets Shiraga Kazuo and Motonaga Sadamasa. Following the advice of Shiraga, he does not meet Yoshihara Jirō. • A rt Theater Shinjuku Bunka opens, Tokyo. 5th Nakajima Yoshio Exhibition, Tokyo Electric Power Service Station, Meguro, Tokyo.  The flyer includes texts by Itoi Kanji and Tashiro Minoru. Kudō Tetsumi leaves Japan for Paris. Itoi Kanji moves from Nakatsu, Ōita, to Kagami Masayuki’s home in Ichikawa, Chiba. Imai Toshimitsu Exhibition, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Solo Exhibiiton (Mr. Anonymous), Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo  Solo exhibition of Ishibashi Betsujin. He closes the gallery space, where he sits on the floor with objects scattered around him. Sasaki Kōsei Exhibition, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Sogetsu Contemporary Series 15: Works of Yoko Ono, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Participating artists: Ono Yōko, Akasegawa Genpei, Akemoto Utako, Akiyama Kuniharu, Awazu Kiyoshi, L. C. Vinholes, Ōno Tadashi, Kanō Mitsuo, Kurokawa Yoshiteru, Kojima Nobuaki, Kosugi Takehisa, Kobayashi Kenji, Sugiura Kōhei, Takahashi Yūji, Tōno Yoshiaki, Tone Yasunao, Nakahara Yūsuke, Nonaka Yuri, Hashimoto Sōhei, Hijikata Tatsumi, Matsudaira Yoriaki, Mayuzumi Toshirō, Mizuno Shūkō, Minagawa Tatsuo, Yuasa Jōji, Yoshioka Yasuhiro, Yoshimura Masunobu, Théo Lesoualc’h, and Wakamatsu Miki. All artists participate in the final piece performed, Audience Piece. This is a landmark event in the history of performance art in Japan, involving cultural practitioners from diverse disciplines including visual art, music, poetry, pantomime, butoh dance, criticism, photography, and design. [pp. 134–5] The First Jikan-ha Exhibition, Satō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  The exhibition consists of anonymous collaborative works by Tanaka Fuji, Doi Junen, Nakazawa Ushio, and Nagano Shōzō. Jikan-ha announces its “Jikanha Manifesto” on NHK News. The concept of collaborative production is introduced on NHK Educational TV. Mizukami Jun enacts Seishin kaizō keikaku gi (Ritual plan for spiritual reform), French Cancan, Kyoto.  M izukami takes off his clothes and then he redresses in a white coat. French Cancan, a coffee shop with chanson music, provides a space for artists’ performances. Untitled event, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Included are Jiken teki hassei hō: 12345 genteiji hassei (Method to cause an incident: 12345 Occurrence is time-limed) by Kojima Nobuaki, Manodharma Concert by Kosugi Takehisa, Ryūsei (Flowing death) by Takeda Akimichi, Development of Objet Sonore by Toshima Mikio, Tone Work and Happening by Tone Yasunao, Invitation to a Safe Place by Hashimoto Sōhei. Kojima kneads mortar and distributes fragments of hardened mortar to visitors, and also places them in other locations, such as the foot of willow trees outside the gallery.

5681962

6-1—6-15 6-5

6-10

6-12—6-22

6-15

6-23

6-25

6-26—6-30 7-1

7-1

7-21—7-23 7-21—8-26

7-23

Yoshimura Masunobu Exhibition, Fūgetsu-dō, Shinjuku, Tokyo. Kuni Chiya Dance Performance: For a Landmark of the Dead at Endless Night, Kōsei Nenkin Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  The theme is Anpo Struggle. Kosugi Takehisa joins the performance. The First Secret Performance of Group Leda, Asbestos Hall, Meguro, Tokyo.  Three Aspects of Leda created and directed by Hijikata Tatsumi is performed. Kosugi Takehisa and Tone Yasunao are in charge of music. Kikuhata Mokuma Exhibition, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo.  Slave Genealogy (by Circle Mirrors) series is exhibited. Kikuhata leaves Kyūshūha before this exhibition. • Memorial Rally for Kanba Michiko, Kudan Hall (presumed), Tokyo.  Document 6.15, a film by VAN Film Science Institute, is screened a second time. Kitakōji Satoshi joins the arrangements of the screening. Ichiyanagi Toshi and Tone Yasunao are in charge of music. This may have been the event for which Kazakura Shō rents the balloon and air compressor, though Kazakura did not come to the event itself. 《太陽神への儀式》ほか Ritual for the Sun God and other programs, Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo.  Nakajima Yoshio participates. A lecture by Kijima Norio and a Happening by Art Club in which participants dance to the sounds of trumpets and drums are joined by an audience of 300. Unbeat is presumed to have formed at this event. Hataraki Tadashi enacts a Happening, Fukuoka.  He attempts to cross a street downtown while pulling wheeled boxes connected with his body with chains. [p. 150] Tanaka Fuji Exhibition, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Kappa Group, represented by Asai Masuo, publishes the first issue of Kappa Tsūshin (Kappa News), Nagakute, Aichi.  K appa Group (the “kappa” is a mythical water-dwelling creature) is “a cheerful gathering of Korean and Japanese children.” The magazine continues until March 1963, publishing three issues in total. •The 6th House of Councilors election.  Kuroda Kan’ichi (leftist activist, later leader of the Kakumaru Sect) runs. League of Criminals organizes a campaign with Anti-Parliamentarism Council. Kyūshū-ha Exhibition, Nakaya Department Store 3rd Floor Hall, Fukuoka.  This is the first group exhibition titled Kyūshū-ha in Fukuoka. Seminar of Movement and Film, Kuni Chiya Dance Institute, Komaba, Tokyo.  The event is organized by 20th Century Dance Group and the Kuni Chiya Dance Institute. Kosugi Takehisa and Tone Yasunao organize events every Saturday and Sunday; the two artists present on the theme of “Jikensei no vijon” (Vision of the incidental) on August 4 and 5. Zen’ei Tosa-ha (Avant-Garde Tosa School) is formed, Kōchi.  The group unites members from Group Zero (New Image Tosa-ha) and Modern Art Association.

1962569

AUGUST

AUGUST

AUGUST AUGUST

8-5

8-5

8- 8-13—8-14 8-13—8-18 8-13—8-18 8-14—8-19 8-15

8-25

Ritual at a tea house, the family home of Hayashi Ritsuko (who later becomes the wife of Katō Yoshihiro), Nagoya.  Itō Takao, Iwata Shin’ichi, Katō Yoshihiro, Koiwa Takayoshi, and Mizuno Mitsunori participate. This private ritual is one of the earliest performances by Zero Jigen. A series of twice-weekly recitals begins, Kuni Chiya Dance Institute, Komaba, Tokyo.  Kosugi Takehisa participates in sound performances. Asai Masuo conducts research on the children of Miike Coal Mine, Ōmuta, Fukuoka Prefecture. Obana Shigeharu Exhibiton: The Interior Exhibition for Tourists, held at the home of Obana Shigeharu, Ukiha, Fukuoka Prefecture.  A large scale installation in living spaces. This represents Kyūshū-ha’s tendencies toward kaijō geijutsu (“venue art,” installation) in this period. Katō Yoshihiro moves from Ōtsubashi to a studio in Kurokawa, Nagoya.  K atō enthusiastically works on lithographs and works with Japanese handmade paper. Asai Masuo publishes the Second Issue of Senteiten (Lowermost Apex), Nagakute, Aichi.  Speculating based on an article in another “Second Issue,” published January 15, 1963, this issue could in fact be the first. The magazine continues until its October 1963 sixth issue. Hiraoka Hiroko moves to the U.S. Nakajima Yoshio Exhibition of Drawings, Tokyo Electric Power Service Station, Meguro, Tokyo. Iwata Shin’ichi Exhibition, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Koiwa Takayoshi Exhibition, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. The First Exhibition of Zen’ei Tosa-ha, Daimaru Department Store, Kōchi. 敗戦記念晩餐会（芸術マイナス芸術〔敗戦を記念して〕） Banquet Commemorating the Defeat in the War (Art minus art: In Commemoration of the Defeat in the War), Kunitachi Community Center, Tokyo.  This is a landmark event in the history of performance art in Japan. Organized by Yoshida Yoshie. The artists’ eating of luxurious food is shown to the audience, while some of the artists individually enact performances. Participating artists: Akasegawa Genpei, Kazakura Shō (Sado no yuigon shikkōshiki [Execution Ceremony of Sade’s Testament], in which he presses a hot anchor to his chest; enacts a performance with a chair), Kosugi Takehisa (Anima 1), Shinohara Ushio, Tone Yasunao, Hijikata Tatsumi (performs butoh naked and assists Kazakura with the Execution Ceremony), Masuzawa Kinpei, Yoshino Tastumi, Yoshimura Masunobu (tooth brushing performance). Nakajima Yoshio and Tashiro Minoru, both from Unbeat, presumably participated. Itoi Kanji is among the audience. [pp. 155–7] Neo Dada + Tangee’s Team: Something Happens, house of Isozaki Arata, Kagomachi, Tokyo.  Held as a farewell party for Isozaki and Yoshimura Masunobu who are slated to leave for the U.S. (Isozaki’s trip is ultimately cancelled). Its approximately

5701962

eighty participants include Isozaki, Ichiyanagi Toshi, Iyama Takeshi (architect), Okamoto Tarō, Kaidō Hideo (Yomiuri Newspaper), Kazakura Shō (performance with a chair), Kosugi Takehisa, Shinohara Ushio, Takiguchi Shūzō, Tanabe Santarō, Tange Kenzō (architect), Tone Yasunao, Hijikata Tatsumi, Miki Tomio, Masuzawa Kinpei, Yoshino Tatsumi, and Yoshimura Masunobu (teeth brushing performance). Shinohara and Hijikata, both naked, go up to the roof, leading to neighbors calling the police. The “Happens” in the title is based on American usage of the term “Happening,” as the earliest use of the word to describe an event in Japan. SEPTEMBER Nakajima Yoshio established Zōkei bijutsu kenkyūjo (Institute of Plastic Art), Tokyo Electric Power Service Station, Meguro, Tokyo. SEPTEMBER Yoshimura Masunobu moves to U.S. 9-1—9-10 Gutai Pinacotheca Inaugural Exhibition, Nakanoshima, Osaka. 9-15 Inaugural Ceremony of Jiritsu Gakkō (School of Autonomy), Social Welfare Hall, Myōgadani, Tokyo.  The steering committee consists of Imaizumi Yoshihiko, Kawani Hiroshi, Kurita Uki, Hiraoka Masaaki, Yamaguchi Kenji, Matsuda Masao, Miyabara Yasuharu. Lecturers include Akiyama Kiyoshi, Kurita Isamu, Sano Mitsuo, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, Tanigawa Gan, Terada Tōru, Nakano Hideto, Nakamura Hiroshi, Haniya Yutaka, Hidaka Rokurō, Fujita Shōzō, Mori Hideto, Morimoto Kazuo, and Yoshimoto Takaaki. The secretariat is at Ishii Kyōji. Classes begin in October. When Yamaguchi as the emcee calls for irregular lecturers, Nakanishi Natsuyuki runs as a candidate for “temporary lecturer for a moment,” walking around while holding a smoke cannister and swinging around an egg-shaped object. This moment represents the intersection of the movement of intellectuals and Neo-Dadaistic Happenings in the post-Anpo period. 9-18—9-23 Hanaga Mitsutoshi Kōga (Photo-graphy) Exhibition, Shinjuku Daiichi Gallery, Tokyo. 9-29 The inauguration of Galerie 16, Shinkyōgoku, Kyoto. OCTOBER Knock K=4: Experiments and Discussion of Poetry and Jazz, Jazz and Tea Ceremony, Honryūji Temple, Ikebukuro, Tokyo.  Performances include Howl by Allen Ginsberg, introduced by Suwa Yū Makkusu Rōchi no tame no hōgenshi / Ryūboku (Poem in Dialect for Max Roach / Driftwood) by Kamada Tadayoshi (produced by Aomori Broadcasting); Vocalism / Ai (Love) by Tanikawa Shuntarō and Takemitsu Tōru (produced by Mainichi Broadcasting); Jazu no tame no kusabigatamoji / Kimitachi no riyū (Cuneiform for jazz / Your reason) by Terayama Shūji (produced by Radio Kantō); Sadō by jazz, performed by Gotō Noriko and Hachiya Nobuko in a mosquito-net-like tea house space with a nijiriguchi entrance designed by Kojima Nobuaki. OCTOBER I  • maizumi Yoshihiko, Kawani Hiroshi, and Hiraoka Masaaki resign from the Steering Committee of Jiritsu Gakkō, Tokyo. 10-1 Kyūshū-ha No. 6 is published, Fukuoka.  This special feature is the announcement of Grand Assembly of Heroes.

1962571

10-5

10-6—10-10

10-9—10-10

10-11 10-12 10-13

10-16—10-31

10-17 10-18

10-19—10-25

TV Recital: the 5th Night of Foreign Music Players in Japan is on air in NHK Educational.  The players are John Cage, David Tudor, Ichiyanagi Toshi, Ono Yōko, Kosugi Takehisa, and Mayuzumi Toshirō. Shinohara Ushio Exhibition, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Included are works Jigazō (Self-portrait), Bokushingu gahō no shūen (The End of Boxing Painting), Akai kuikorosareta beddo (Red eaten-to-death bed). Itoi Kanji and Nakajima Yoshio visit. Sogetsu Contemporary Series 17: Evening of John Cage, Evening of David Tudor, Tokyo Bunka Kaikan Small Hall, Ueno, Tokyo.  Performers include Ichiyanagi Toshi and Ono Yōko. •Tokyo Metropolitan Government promulgates Anti-nuisance Ordinance. Sogetsu Contemporary Series 18: Event by John Cage and D. Tudor, Kyoto Kaikan Second Hall. Symposium on Contemporary Arts, Nōmin Kaikan, Fukuoka.  Hataraki Tadashi of Kyūshū-ha gives a lecture titled “The Significance of the November Assembly.” Kotabe Yasuhisa, Shibata Zenzō (both artists in Fukuoka), Yonekura Toku (Kyūshū-ha), and Akanuma Akira (poet) also present. Exhibition of New Works by Shiga Kenzō, Fūgetsu-dō, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Shiga, dressed in white and with his face covered by violet wax paper, performs the act of lighting five objects hung from the ceiling. Tsuruoka Masao joins the performance, playing a bongo drum. A record of electric music by Lucian Berio was also played. Sogetsu Contemporary Series 18: Event by John Cage and D. Tudor, Midō Kaikan, Osaka. 山手線のフェスティバル（山手線事件） Yamanote Line Festival (Yamanote Line Incident), Yamanote Line (Inner Track) of National Railway, Tokyo.  Kubota Noboru (Urobon K), Takamatsu Jirō (J Takamatsu), Nakanishi Natsuyuki (N Nakanishi), and Murata Kiichi (K Murata) enact performances in the trains and on platforms. Nakanishi, with his face painted white, performs in the train and lick his Compact Object where Urobon K breaks an egg on the platform of Tokyo Station. Takamatsu spreads a rope-like object at the platform of Ueno Station. The artists planned to continue on to perform at Shinagawa, Yurakuchō, Tokyo, Ueno, Ikebukuro, and Shinjuku Stations, but they went out from the Park Exit of Ueno Station and finished the performance in front of Tokyo Bunka Kaikan. Apart from the group of these artists, Kosugi Takehisa and Tone Yasunao participate in the festival with actions making sound. [pp. 144–5] 3rd Zero Jigen Exhibition, Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum, Nagoya.  E xhibiting artists are Kawaguchi Kōtarō, Koiwa Takayoshi, and Iwata Shin’ichi. The group changes its name from Zero Ji Gen. Koiwa eats an apple in a wooden box as his work.

5721962

10-21

10-22 10-23—10-24

10-25 10-26 10-28

10-30?

NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER NOVEMBER

Symposium: Around Contemporary Art, Ishibashi Museum of Art, Kurume, Fukuoka Prefecture.  Sakurai Takami gives a talk titled “On the Significance of the November Assembly.” Ueno Masayuki and Obana Shigeharu also present. • The United States conducts a naval blockade of Cuba (The Cuban Missile Crisis). Sogetsu Contemporary Series 19: Event of John Cage and D. Tudor, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Ono Yōko appears on October 24. David Tudor roasts beans and spreads them on the floor in a performance of George Brecht’s Incidental Music. Itoi Kanji, in the audience, gathers the beans to bring home. He is stopped by Tudor, who takes a photograph of the beans in Itoi’s hand. Bijutsuka Kaikan (Artists Hall) is completed, Ginza, Tokyo. Sapporo Contemporary Music Festival, Sapporo Citizens’ Hall.  Performances by John Cage, David Tudor, and Ono Yoko. Symposium by Kyūshū-ha: Around Contemporary Art, Art and Craft Gallery, Yahata, Kitakyūshū.  Sakurai Takami speaks on “Consciousness of November Assembly.” Hataraki Tadashi and Funaki Yoshiharu also present. 第85回白金祭の白金祭の前夜祭で〈アンビート〉が発表 Unbeat presents Exhibitions and Performances at the Eve of the 85th Shirokane Festival (October 31 – November 5), Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo.  Included are Toporogīteki ryōrihō (Topological Cooking Method) by Unbeat (a urinal objet exhibited in the lobby of the Chemistry Department building), Erushinoa no satsujinsha (The murderer of Elsinore) by Claude Okamoto and Tashiro Minoru, Cuba 62 by Nakajima Yoshio. Scores of The Lecture and Let Him Sleep at Once by John Cage are reported to have been exhibited. A work by Unbeat is withdrawn by the demand of the Steering Committee, which is protested by the Art Club. Nakajima with Unbeat enact performances including Modern Ballet, Unbeat Organizers and the Avant-Garde Artists Perform a Scandal, and Unbeat Organizers Manifesto. グロテスク・フェスティバル Grotesque Festival, Nihon University College of Art, Ekoda, Tokyo.  Organized by Adachi Masao, Okishima Isao, et al. The festival consists of four parts: 1) Screening of films directed by Nakagawa Nobuo, Jigoku (Hell) and Tōkaidō Yotsuya kaidan (The Ghost of Yotsuya); 2) “Museum”; 3) “LSD Laboratory”; and 4) “Joint Review Meeting.” “Museum,” organized by Okishima is a large-scale ritual in Western esoteric style, which catches the attention of Terayama Shuji. “LSD Laboratory” is documented in an extant film by Jōnouchi Moroharu. [pp. 142–3] Roundtable Talk by Akasegawa Genpei, Kawani Hitoshi, Takamatsu Jirō, and Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Kawani Hiroshi’s house, Tokyo.  P ublished in the 7th Issue of Keishō. Kinoshita Shin attends, invited by Akasegawa. This meeting leads to the formation of Hi-Red Center. Itoi Kanji reads books on Zen by D. T. Suzuki, Nakatsu, Ōita Prefecture. Tsubaki Kindai Gallery opens, Shinjuku

1962573

11-2—11-11

11-3 11-6

11-10—11-20

11-12

11-12—11-18?

11-14?

11-15—11-16

Hosoe Eikō (Eikoh Hosoe) Exhibition of Photographs: Barakei (Ordeal by Roses), Fuji Photo Salon, Ginza, Tokyo.  M ishima Yukio appears among the subjects of the photographs. • Odakyū Department Store opens, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  It is the first large department store in West Entrance of Shinjuku Station. Daijōbu tsuki wa ochnai (Don’t Worry, the Moon Won’t Fall Down): Gutai and Morita Modern Dance Company, Sankei Kaikan Hall in Umeda (Osaka).  The first part of the event is by Gutai, the second by Morita Modern Dance Company, and the third by the two groups together. Music by Yoshihara Michio (first and third parts) and Ichiyanagi Toshi (second part). Performances by Gutai: Shiraga Kazuo (Red Sanbasō, dance by Morita Masahiro), Murakami Saburō (Tsūka [Passage]), Tanaka Atsuko (Pinku no maku no mae de [In front of a pink curtain]), Mukai Shūji (Kao to shingō [Face and Signs]), Yamazaki Tsuruko (Mawaru gin’iro no kabe [Rotating Silver Wall]), Yoshihara Michio (Rock around the Clock), Shimamoto Shōzō, Kanayama Akira, Yoshida Toshirō, and Motonaga Sadamasa (Shiroi kūkan [White Space]), Morita Masahiro (Split Sign B). John Cage visits during his stay in Japan. Exhibition of World Graphic Scores, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo.  Musical scores (graphic scores) including new pieces by more than forty international avant-garde composers are exhibited. John Cage performs with Ichiyanagi Toshi and Mayuzumi Toshirō on November 12. Itoi Kanji is among the attendees. Wedding Ceremony of Katō Yoshihiro and Ritsuko, venue unknown, Nagoya.  Participating artists: Itō Takao, Iwashita Yukiko, Kawaguchi Kōtarō, Koiwa Takayoshi, Kishimoto Sayako, K.T., Suzuki Takashi, Takahashi Kōko, Hageshita Iwao, Mizuno Mitsunori, and Watanabe Keiko, along with Katō. The performance is supposed to be a simultaneous progress of actions, objects, tea gathering, poetry reading, and jazz. Exhibitions of Works by Children and Artists, Tokyo Electric Power Service Station, Meguro, Tokyo.  Approximately thirty members of Institute of Plastic Art directed by Nakajima Yoshio participate. Kosugi Takehisa, Tone Yasunao, and Kazakura Shō visit Gutai Pinacotheca, Osaka.  On their way to Fukuoka to participate in Grand Assembly of Heroes, Tone proposes a performance of contemporary music but is refused, so he tears the map and score and throws them into a river. 英雄たちの大集会 Grand Assembly of Heroes, Momochi Beach, Fukuoka.  Participants: Ōyama Uichi, Obata Hidesuke, Sakurai Takami, Tabe Mitsuko, Chō Yoriko, Hataraki Tadashi, and Miyazaki Junnosuke from Kyūshūha, Kazakura Shō, Kosugi Takehisa, Tone Yasunao, Yoshida Yoshie, and Chiba Eisuke from Tokyo, Itoi Kanji from Chiba, Baba Takehisa (joins the performance by Sakura and Chō) from Fukuoka, and Mieno Ichirō (from Ōita). Kinoshita Shin and Tanaka Shintarō from Tokyo, Moriyama Yasuhide, Tazoe Masatake, and Tanaka Kōjin from Fukuoka attend as audience. The most important performance event organized by Kyūshū-ha. [pp. 157–60]

5741962

11-22

11-23

11-26—11-29

DECEMBER DECEMBER 12-2

12-4

12-5

12-24

犯罪者同盟公演 『黒くふちどられた薔薇の濡れたくしゃみ』

Performance by the League of Criminals: Wet Sneeze of a Black-rimmed Rose, Ōkuma Auditorium, Waseda University, Tokyo.  Created by Miyabara Yasuharu, with music by Kosugi Takehisa. The set is in the shape of a womb, made with vinyl sheets by Iyama Takeshi (architect). A man and a woman, representing a sperm and an ovum, converse; smoke comes out from a smoke pot; a group sex scene is performed. A rope-shaped object by Takamatsu Jirō is extended from the stage center to the audience space. Kobatake Hiroshi drops his Maisō chōkoku (Burial sculpture) to the audience’s floor. Nakanishi Natsuyuki paints red urinals in the toilet. Zero Jigen enacts Oto to danshoku to hanafubuki ni yoru “Shūdan kongō gishiki” (“Collective mixed ritual” with sound, sodomy, and falling cherry blossoms), a hut in a vacant lot, Sakae, Nagoya. Four Artist Exhibition by Itakura Yōzō, Hayashi Atsuo, Ayata Yūsaku, Katō Yumiko, Kyoto Shoin Gallery, Kyoto.  Hayashi Atsuo is the real name of Mizukami Jun, who performs Cell + Shiromisa (Cell + White Mass) in which he painted maggot-like images on plywood panels combined as a room. Theater Company Gendai Gekijō (Contemporary Theater) is formed, Kyoto.  Komatsu Tatsuo is the Director of the company • Smog becomes a problem in Tokyo. Performances by Unbeat, Shijō-kawara river and Kyoto Gakugei University campus, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, Maruyama Park, Kyoto.  Participating artists: Itoi Kanji, Kagami Masayuki, Kikukawa Yasuo, Tashiro Minoru, Nakajima Yoshio, Fujimura Tadayoshi, and Yamaguchi Katsumi. Iwai Noriko and Hasegawa Yoshiko, students of Kyoto Gakugei University, assist the group. The performances take place on the first day of the group’s three-day tour in Kyoto and Osaka. In the riverbed of Shijō-kawara, Unbeat members perform actions and sound, watched by many from the Shijo-ōhashi Bridge. At Kyoto Gakugei University, Itoi climbs up to the top of a pine tree in the yard fully naked, eats young leaves, and looks around. Performance by Unbeat, Saigoku Bridge, Nakanoshima, Osaka.  It is reported in a newspaper with a photograph. Unbeat members perform in strange attire, for instance covering their bodies in ropes. Itoi, standing on the parapet of the bridge in a derby hat and mini skirt, throws the hat toward Kagami. [plate 6, p. 6, and pp. 132–3] Performance by Unbeat, in front of a police box, Osaka Station.  Itoi Kanji and Tashiro Minoru wrestle each other. Later Tashiro licks Itoi’s shoes. Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum Outline of Regulations and Standards for Exhibited Works comes into effect.  Rules in this Outline prohibit the exhibition of various types of work: “Works issuing unpleasant or high-pitched noise”; “Works including materials that might smell or rot”; “Works which incorporate bladed instruments or other potentially injurious objects”; “Works which possibly contravene health laws including those which considerably offend viewers”; “Works with materials

1962-1963575

12-24 12-26

12-28

which soil the floor such as gravel, sand, etc. directly on the floor”; “Works which hang directly from the ceiling.” [The translation of these items is based on William Marotti, Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 193, modified by the author.] The inaugural issue of Shin-geijuitsu Shūdan Kaihō (New Reality Group Bulletin) is published, Ōmuta, Fukuoka Prefecture. Announcement of Manifesto by New Reality Group, Hakataya Gallery, Ōmuta, Fukuoka Prefecture.  The first public presentation of the group consists of two parts, exhibition and performance. In the performance part, a newly composed piece is played with a recorded tape; π, an 8mm film, is screened; Happening No. 1: A Happening Read and Imagined, is performed. 実験 《遺言執行展》 Experiment: Execution of Testament Exhibition, Jolies Chapeau Gallery, Fukuoka.  Shiga Kenzō, Shōji Chima, and Miki Tomio perform. The program of the event, based on the event announcement written by Shiga, consists of Action I: For the main guest proposed by Juliette; Coming-of-age Ceremony; Action II: Unconscious Creator/Prohibition of Cremation and Burial (Experiment by T/T/C); Action III: Adventure of Basic Body Temperature V-X. Kikuhata Mokuma helps the performers as a local coordinator. The title “Execution Ceremony” could derive from Execution of the Testament of Marquis de Sade enacted by Jean Benoît. Shiga performs the cutting of Shōji, a female dancer who lies on a table, with a kitchen knife; the two dance. Miki, in white stockings and his face painted white, cuts off the head of a chicken. This is a rare performance, notable as a recorded performance by Miki, and as a ritual action by nonKyūshū-ha artists in Fukuoka. Jolies Chapeau, where the event was held, is a hat shop in Tenjin downtown. [pp. 150–1]

1963 IN THIS YEAR

Performances by Unbeat et al. take place on the street outside Kunugi Gallery in Ginza, Tokyo.  Participating artists: Kagami Masayuki, Tashiro Minoru, and Nakajima Yoshio from Unbeat; Hamaguchi Tomiji; and Chiba Eisuke. On the street, they group moves a container filled with water, spilling it on the clothes of passersby, which prompts police to take Kagami in for questioning. Suzuki Akio carries out a performance throwing objects down a staircase at Nagoya Station.  This marks the start of the artistic activities of Suzuki, who becomes known as a pioneering figure in sound art. Moriyama Yasuhide distributes matchboxes with dirt and feces in Uomachi, Kokura, Kitakyūshū.  One is received by Matsushima Shō, who will later become a supporter of Shūdan Kumo (Collective Spider).

5761963

JANUARY JANUARY

JANUARY 1-1 1-1 1-1—1-6

1-6—1-10

1-26—1-29

FEBRUARY

Jikken Guraundo ∧ (Experimental Ground ∧ [ah]) is formed in Kyoto.  Founding members are Ishikawa Masaru, Ōe Masanori, Katō Minosuke, and Manabe Sōhei (all formerly of VOL). The anthology Mitsudomoe (Three Parties) is published in Oita.  It is produced by Kazakura Shō, Abe Moriyuki, and Yukino Yasuhiro. Kazakura publishes surrealistic poetry in this anthology. Akiyama Yūtokutaishi becomes an employee of the northern labor union central office of Sōhyō in Tokyo. Sasaki Kōsei becomes a contract employee at Toei Animation Co. in Tokyo. 8 Generation is founded in Tokyo.  It is started by Kawanaka Nobuhiro and Minato Yūichi. They later recruit other members, including Uehara Tsuyoshi, Kondō Akio, and Takashima Masako. Tachibana Yoshirō opens the flamenco-themed coffee shop Spain in Shinjuku, Tokyo.  It later hosts performances by Kurohata and Zero Jigen. Okayama Seinen Bijutsuka Shūdan (Okayama Young Artists Group) Founding Exhibition of Small Works, Mitsuya, Okayama. Akasegawa Genpei makes copies of a mokei sen’en satsu (model 1,000-yen note) and sends them out in money envelopes as invitations to his solo exhibition in February. Asai Masuo publishes the inaugural issue of Entotsu to mogura (Chimney and Mole) in Nagakute, Aichi. • Tetsuwan atomu (Mighty Atom, Astro Boy), the first full-length (thirty-minute) animated television series in Japan, begins broadcasting on Fuji TV. • Shūkan shōjo furendo (Weekly girls’ friend) begins publication by Kōdansha. 狂気的ナンセンス展 Insane Nonsense Exhibition, Aichi Prefectural Cultural Hall Art Museum and on the streets of the Sakae neighborhood of Nagoya.  On the first day, Zero Jigen—now led by Katō Yoshihiro, Iwata Shin’ichi, and Koiwa Takayoshi—carries out its first full public “ritual” (gishiki) event. Dozens of people form a line crawling along the ground from Sakae to the art museum. ’63 Newcomers Exhibition, Yamadaya Gallery, Maebashi, Gunma.  Included are works by Isahai Tomio, Tajima Hiroaki, Tanaka Yoshio, Tsunoda Jin’ichi, and Fujimori Katsuji. This is the first exhibition by NOMO, which later continues to hold group exhibitions at the same gallery. Sasaki Kōsei solo exhibition, sixth-floor hall of Tsuruya Department Store, Kumamoto.  It commemorates the International Young Artist Prize supported from the Kumamoto Nichinichi Shimbun. Keishō No. 7 is published.  Features a roundtable discussion, “Chokusetsu kōdō no kizashi I” (Signs of Direct Action I), in which Akasegawa Genpei, Takamatsu Jirō, and Nakanishi Natsuyuki discuss the Yamanote Line Festival. Beginning with this issue, Kawani Hiroshi is involved in editing the journal.

196357 7

FEBRUARY

FEBRUARY 2-4

2-5—2-10 2-10 2-15 2-18—2-24 MARCH MARCH MARCH MARCH MARCH 3-2—3-16

Shinohara Ushio appears in documentary film Nihon zankoku monogatari (Japanese Tales of Cruelty), shot at a studio in Yoyogi, Tokyo.  Shot in color, Shinohara uses paints in primary colors, applying them to a female model. Suenaga Tamio moves from Nagasaki to Tokyo. Hamaguchi Tomiji Moving objects touring exhibition, Minami Gallery, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and other venues in Tokyo.  It is subsequently held in Osaka and Kōchi. Akasegawa Genpei solo exhibition On the Ambiguous Ocean (Aimai na umi ni tsuite), Shinjuku Daiichi Gallery, Tokyo. • The city of Kitakyūshū in Fukuoka Prefecture is formed through the merger of five municipalities (Tobata, Kokura, Wakamatsu, Moji, and Yahata). Lunami Gallery opens in Ginza, Tokyo. Sasaki Kōsei solo exhibition, Mudo Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Kishimoto Sayako graduates from Tama Art University, Tokyo. Nakajima Yoshio graduates from the Department of Sociology, Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo. Matsue Kaku graduates from Musashino Art School, Tokyo. Matsue Kaku, Kaku-ten (Kaku Exhibition), the path to Hanazono Shrine, Shinjuku, Tokyo. Mizukami Jun graduates from the Faculty of Law, Kyoto University. 15th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.  Included are works by: Kyūshū-ha: Ueno Masayuki, Ōguro Aiko, Ōyama Uichi, Katae Masatoshi, Sakurai Takami, Taniguchi Toshio, Tabe Mitsuko (Ura to omote [Back and Front]), Chō Yoriko, and Yonekura Toku; Neo Dada: Akasegawa Genpei, Kazakura Shō (Augusuchinusu no dōgu no jikan [The time of Augustine’s tools] and Jibutsu wa doko kara kite doko e iku [Where do things come from and where do they go?]), Kinoshita Shin, Shinohara Ushio, Tanaka Shintarō, Tanabe Santarō, Toyoshima Sōroku, and Yoshino Tatsumi; Zero Jigen: Iwata Shin’ichi, Katō Yoshihiro (Aru nyūmetsushiki mandara (3/10 henkaku gishiki 1) [Mandala of a Nirvana-Entering Ritual (March 10 Revolutionary Ritual 1)], Kuro no eros (3/10 henkaku gishiki 2) [Black Eros (March 10 Revolutionary Ritual 2)], 3/10 henkaku gishiki shinkigu 1 [March 10 Revolutionary Ritual Divine Instruments 1], and 3/10 henkaku gishiki shinkigu 2 [March 10 Revolutionary Ritual Divine Instrument 2]), K.T., and Hageshita Iwao; Also featuring: Ishizaki Kōichirō, Itoi Kanji (Dada Kan no kaban [Dada Kan’s Bag] and 43-sai ni natta ippiki-ōkami [Forty-three-year-old lone wolf]), Kagami Masayuki, Kojima Nobuaki, Kosugi Takehisa (Micro 4/Instrument and Chironomy/Instrument), Tateishi Kōichi, Chiba Eisuke, Tone Yasunao (Something Happened [tape work]), Nakanishi Natsuyuki (Kurippu wa kakuhan-kōdō o shuchō suru [Clips Assert Agitation Action] and other works), Takamatsu Jirō (Kāten ni kan suru hanjitsuzaisei ni tsuite [On the Anti-Reality of the Curtain], Toranku ni kan suru hanjitsuzaisei ni tsuite [On the Anti-Reality of the Trunk] and Tēburu no hikidashi ni kan suru hanjitsuzaisei ni tsuite [On the Anti-Reality

5781963

3-6—3-11 3-6—3-12

3-12—3-15

3-20—3-24 3-22—3-27

3-24 APRIL

APRIL APRIL APRIL 4-1

4-22—5-10

of the Table Drawer], Matsue Kaku, Matsuzawa Yutaka, Mazura Ryūdan, Miki Tomio, Minashima Mansaku, and Yoshioka Yasuhiro. This is the final iteration of the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, and also the edition featuring the most performance works. Unbeat’s Nakajima Yoshio and Tashiro Minoru join Itoi Kanji in carrying out Damact on March 2 inside the gallery and at the museum entrance, resulting in the museum staff calling the police, who took all of the participants to the police station (according to the flyer, they had also planned to carry out Damact on March 10 and March 16). On March 10, Zero Jigen carry out a group ritual in which participants (including Kishimoto Sayako) lie on top of a “nipple futon.” While not included in the list of works, Akasegawa, Kazakura, Takamatsu, Nakanishi, et al. perform Minichua shokudō (Miniature restaurant). Sasaki Kōsei solo exhibition, Ogikubo Gallery, Ogikubo, Tokyo.  Held as the Gallery Award winner of the Ogikubo Gallery Competition. 7th Kyoto Independent Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  Included are works by Iwai Noriko, Iwahashi Atsuko, Ōe Masanori, Horiuchi Akiyo, Mizukami Jun with Koshiki kōnin sukocchi girei mata wa omeruta no shinwa § 1 (Old officially authorized Scottish rite, or the myth of Omertà § 1) and § 2, and Yoshida Minoru. Iwai is a local collaborator of Unbeat in Kyoto; Iwahashi and Horiuchi later become members of The Play. Ōyama Uichi solo exhibition, Kunugi Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  The theme of the exhibition is “Room of Desire.” Each of the three galleries is assigned a name: “Instructions by Color,” “Enshrined Deity of Alcohol,” and “Intruder of Desire.” Jikan-ha exhibition at Mi-me Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo. Group Sweet exhibition, Kawasumi Gallery, Kyōbashi, Tokyo.  Included are works by Akasegawa Genpei, Kinoshita Shin, Kojima Nobuaki, Shinohara Ushio, Miki Tomio, Kazakura Shō, and Tanaka Shintarō. Masuzawa Kinpei moves to the U.S. Itoi Kanji Collage Exhibition, Hitachi Family Center, Sendai.  The collages use color photographs from publications such as Asahi Camera. On the first day, the venue managers remove half of the exhibits on the pretext that they are lewd. Azuchi Shūzō (Gulliver) enrolls at Zeze High School in Shiga. Nakajima Yoshio enrolls at Tōhoku Bible School in Fukushima.  he Jiritsu Gakkō shirīzu (Autonomy School Series) pamphlet is published in •T Tokyo. K  • akukyōdō splits into Kakumeiteki Kyōsanshugisha Dōmei Zenkoku Iinkai (Chūkaku-ha [Central Core Faction]) and Nihon Kakumeiteki Kyōsanshugisha Dōmei Kakumeiteki Marukusushugi-ha (Kakumaru-ha [Revolutionary Marxists Faction]). Tanaka Atsuko solo exhibition, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo.

1963579

4-23—4-28

4-28—5-5 MAY MAY MAY

5-1

5-1—5-7 5-4 5-5 5-7—5-12 5-12 5-14—5-20 5-20

5-21

5-24

Group Sweet exhibition, Shinjuku Daiichi Gallery, Tokyo.  Included are works by Akasegawa Genpei, Ishizaki Kōichirō, Kojima Nobuaki, Shinohara Ushio, Tanaka Shintarō, Toyoshima Sōroku, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Miki Tomio, and Yoshino Tatsumi. Nakajima Yoshio solo exhibition, Tokyo Electric Power Service Station, Meguro, Tokyo. 1st Okayama Young Artists Collective Exhibition, Okayama Prefectural Culture Center, Okayama. Ōita Prefecture Art Exhibition in Spring, Tokiwa Culture Hall, Ōita.  Included is Kazakura Shō’s Meikingu obu terepashi (Making of Telepathy). • May Festival, University of Tokyo.  Kosugi Takehisa carries out a performance in which he slowly takes off his jacket. Dance Action 2, Toshi Center Hall, Hirakawachō, Tokyo.  Includes dance performances by Kuni Chiya Dance Institute and music by Group Ongaku: Tone Yasunao’s Kimigayo (11 no Kimigayo)] and Dictionary Music). Kazakura Shō solo exhibition, Kimuraya Gallery, Ōita. • The Sayama Incident takes place in Saitama. • Shūkan josei sebun (Weekly girls seven) begins publication by Shōgakkan. The 5th Mixer Plan (Daigoji mikisā keikaku), Shinjuku Daiichi Gallery, Tokyo.  This is the inaugural exhibition of Hi-Red Center. • S hūkan māgaretto (Weekly Margaret) begins publication by Shūeisha. Toyoshima Sōroku solo exhibition, Akiyama Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Avant-Garde Artists Outdoor Experimental Show, Gogatsubashi Park, Ōmuta, Fukuoka.  Participating artists: Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ōyama Uichi, Katae Masatoshi, Sakurai Takami, Hataraki Tadashi, and Yonekura Toku (Kyūshū-ha); Taniguchi Toshio, Tsutsui Yasuo, Nakamura Kuniyoshi, and Minashima Mansaku (Shingenjitsu Shūdan); and Kikuhata Mokuma as an attendee. A convertible decked out with a plaster bust that is painted with lipstick is driven by Nakamura, while Tsutsui beats a drum. A performance is held in which sculptural artworks are made using blocks, iron, and cement. • A nakizumu Kenkyū Kai (Anarchism Study Group) holds its first meeting in Tokyo.  Participants are Akiyama Kiyoshi, Ōsawa Masamichi, Ozaki Hideki, Kihara Minoru, Tada Michitarō, Tsurumi Shunsuke, Masaki Shigeyuki, and Yasuda Takeshi. The League of Criminals, Red Balloon Show (Akai fūsen shō), Small Ōkuma Auditorium, Waseda University, Tokyo.  The first part consists of Hiraoka Masaaki’s Harenchi kankan (Scandalous Cancan). The second part consists of Miyabara Yasuharu’s Higi No. 13: Ōtōkatsuki katsureishiki (Secret Ritual No. 13: Circumcision with Cherry Fruit). Hiraoka would later describe this event as a “clumsy failure.”

5801963

5-26

5-26—5-31

5-28—5-29

5-28—6-3 JUNE

JUNE JUNE

6-5—6-9 6-7—6-14 6-12 6-12—6-18 6-13—6-19

6-14

Sogetsu Contemporary Series 20: The first recital of Instrumentalists Collective New Directions, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  The performers include Ichiyanagi Toshi and Takahashi Yūji. Group Sweet exhibition, Lunami Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Included are works by Kojima Nobuaki, Shinohara Ushio, Tanaka Shintarō, and Yoshino Tatsumi. The 6th Mixer Plan: a presentation ceremony of objects (Dairokuji mikisā keikaku: Buppin zōteishiki), Miyata Internal Medicine Clinic (later becomes Naiqua Gallery) and the plaza outside Shinbashi Station, Tokyo.  Nakanishi Natsuyuki makes clothespins with a machine he brings into the gallery. In the station plaza, he puts on a sleep mask, attaches the clothespins to his face and clothing, and walks around with balloons. At the exhibition venue, Takamatsu Jirō covers his entire body in string. The next day, Akasegawa Genpei, Takamatsu, and Nakanishi present string, packages, and clothespins as “gifts” to Imaizumi Yoshihiko and Kawani Hiroshi. Though the date and time is unknown, at some point during the exhibition, Takamatsu rolls a tire in a westward direction from the clinic (and while blindfolded partway through) and then enters a neighboring building (location unknown). Shinohara Ushio solo exhibition, Akiyama Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Akasegawa Genpei presents a performance on a television show in Tokyo.  A kasegawa releases goldfish wrapped in bandages into a goldfish bowl, puts on packaged sunglasses, and makes tempura with an abacus and eyeglass. Though Akasegawa remembers the program being Young 720, it may have been a different show because Young 720 did not begin broadcasting until October 1966. Akasegawa Genpei, Event moving from Miyata Clinic to Naquia Gallery (Miyata Naika kara Naikagarō ni ikō suru ibento), Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. Keishō No. 8 is published.  The issue is a special feature, “Report on Direct Action Practitioners.” It includes roundtable discussion “Chokusetsu kōdōron no kizashi II” (Signs of Direct Action II), in which Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Takamatsu Jirō, Akasegawa Genpei, and Nagara Tō (Imaizumi Yoshihiko) discuss Yamanote Line Festival, “Chokusetsu kōdō no kizashi II” by Nagara Tō, and “Anima 1~2 sono ta sakuhin to kaidai” (Anima 1–2, etc.: Artworks and Annotations) by Kosugi Takehisa. Sawahata Kazuaki solo exhibition, Chūō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Shiga Kenzō solo exhibition, Lunami Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Shiga and dancer Shōji Chima present a dance during the exhibition. • Taiyō (Sun) begins publication by Heibonsha. Yamada Kaiya exhibition, Gallery and Coffee Shop Nelken, Kōenji, Tokyo Katō Yoshihiro Lithography Exhibition, Sakura Gallery, Nagoya.  Zero Jigen carries out Aka no gishiki (The Ritual of Red), a tea gathering with sounds and a sadō set. Gendai Gekijō (Modern Theater) stages its first production, Kokasshiki (Small kasshiki), at Gion Hall, Kyoto.  Written by Ōta Yoshirō and directed by Komatsu Tatsuo.

1963581

6-22

JULY JULY 7-5 7-7—7-13

7-13

7-15—7-27

AUGUST? 8-5

8-6—8-11

8-7—8-9

超前衛集団展

Super Avant-garde Group Exhibition, sixth-floor hall of Artists Hall, Ginza, Tokyo.  Though the organizer is officially listed as Chōzen’ei Shūdan (Super Avantgarde Group), it is actually Unbeat that is behind this group exhibition. Participants include Kagami Masayuki, Tashiro Minoru, Nakajima Yoshio, and Fujimura Tadayoshi (Unbeat); Itoi Kanji, Chiba Eisuke, and Hamaguchi Tomiji. Itoi gives visitors “peep gloss photos” in skim milk boxes. The exhibition descends into chaos; someone smashes up a piano; Chiba sprinkles formalin, resulting in the fire department being called, and a few artists are taken to the police station. [pp. 160–1] Jōkyō Gekijō (Situation Theater) stages its first production, Uyauyashiki shōfu (The Respectful Courtesan), Meiji University Hall, Tokyo. Mizukami Jun performs Gifts from Kick Agency II (Kick dairisha yori no okurimono II). • K akumaru-ha becomes the leading force at the twentieth congress of Zengakuren. Izumi Tatsu’s first solo exhibition, Events, at Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  This is the inaugural exhibition for Naiqua Gallery, by the fourth member of Hi-Red Center. There are no actual exhibits, and instead the exhibition consists of only the designations of the locations and fixtures written in English. Powdered juice and a cotton candy machine are also placed inside the venue. Akasegawa Genpei appears on Otona to kodomo no aida (Between grown-ups and kids), NET TV, Tokyo.  This is a talk show broadcast on Sunday mornings, hosted by Satō Tadao. The theme of the debate is “What Penalty Do You Demand for Murderers?” Nakanishi Natsuyuki is originally scheduled to appear but is replaced by Akasegawa at the last minute. On the show, Akasegawa burns a version of his “model” 1,000-yen bill, with his face painted with stage makeup. Room in Alibi Exhibition (Fuzai no heya-ten), Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  Curated by Nakahara Yūsuke. Included are works by Akasegawa Genpei, Ochi Osamu, and Tanaka Shintarō. Asai Masuo is introduced to Ohara Kaichi by Mori Hideto. Hi-Red Center carries out Ropurojī (Ropelogy) on the roof of Bijutsu Shuppansha in Jinbochō, Tokyo.  This work by Takamatsu Jirō is performed by Takamatsu, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, and Akasegawa Genpei. Wearing just a pair of underpants, they cover their eyes, tie together their feet with string, and then pull the string by the soles of their feet and move forward until they reach the next person’s feet. Hamaguchi Tomiji, Exhibition of Loquacity (Jōzetsu-ten).  The imaginary exhibition is planned by Āto Terepashī Kenkyūjō (Art Telepathy Institute), which Hamaguchi formed with poet Nojima Shin’ichirō, and held at SC Gallery, a venue that does not actually exist. 2nd VOL exhibition, Kyoto Prefectural Gallery.  Included is work by Katō Minosuke.

5821963

8-10

8-12—8-17 8-13

8-15

8-19—8-25

8-25

8-27—9-1

8-28 9-1—9-14 9-2—9-7 9-7—9-9

First Naiqua Cinémathèque: Iimura Takahiko, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.

 This is Iimura’s first solo exhibition. Kosugi Takehisa performs music for

Iimura’s film Kuzu (Junk). Miki Tomio solo exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. Publication party for Akai fūsen aruiwa mesu-ōkami no yoru (Red Baloons, or the Night of She-Wolf), Nice, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  Criminals’ Black Mass of Jazz and Adlibbed Poetry is performed. In addition to League of Criminals, Akasegawa Genpei, Takamatsu Jirō, Kawani Hiroshi, Imaizumi Yoshihiko, and Yoshioka Yasuhiro participate. Akai fūsen aruiwa mesu-ōkami no yoru is published.  This is a special issue of the League of Criminals publication Hanzaisha no akai fūsen (The Criminals’ Red Balloon). Edited by Miyabara Yasuharu. Includes Kosugi Takehisa’s Ear–Drum & Anima 1, Hiraoka Masaaki’s “Dattanjinfū” (Tartarian Style), pages by Akasegawa Genpei and Takamatsu Jirō, photographs by Yoshioka Yasuhiro, and self-portrait photographs by Itoi Kanji. Yoshioka’s photographs are subsequently seized by police as obscene. Katō Minosuke solo exhibition, Gallery 16, Kyoto.  This is Katō’s first solo exhibition, featuring an installation in which plywood arranged in yellow and black strips is fitted over the ceiling, walls, and floor of the gallery. The inaugural issue of 99 is published by Fūbaisha in Nagoya.  Includes Katō Yoshihiro’s Taizōkai mandara sono 1 (Mandala of the Womb World 1) and Itō Takao’s Isu (Chair). This work is indicative of Zero Jigen’s exchange with poets like Suzuki Takashi in its early period. Zero Jigen exhibition, Aichi Prefectural Cultural Hall Art Museum, and on the streets of Sakae-machi district, downtown Nagoya.  Participating artists: Itō Takao, Iwashita Yukiko, Iwata Shin’ichi, Katō Yoshihiro, Kawaguchi Kōtarō, Koiwa Takayoshi, Takahashi Kōko, Mizuno Mitsunori, and Hageshita Iwao. During the exhibition, Ritual to Taste a Female Body (Nyotai Shishoku Kai) is performed. A large table is put out on the street in front of the Maruei-Skyle Department Store in Sakae; food is placed on the table surrounding Takahashi, who is entirely wrapped up in bandages. The participants then unwrap the bandages and eat the food. Nishina Yoshio comes to see the exhibition. • The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, advocating for civil rights for African Americans, attracts some 200,000 people. Shinohara Ushio solo exhibition, Imitation Art, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. Taniguchi Toshio solo exhibition, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo.  Taniguchi presents his installation Q-shi no furanki (Mr. Q’s Incubator). 4th Himeji Independent Exhibition, the fifth floor of San’yō Department Store, Himeji.  The exhibition theme is “theme without a theme.” A festival is held at Himeji Chamber of Commerce and Industry Annex Hall the night before, as part of the exhibition.

1963583

9-10 9-10—9-15 9-13—9-18

9-15—9-21 9-23 9-24 OCTOBER

10-1?

10-3—10-8

10-4—10-7

10-7—10-13 10-8 10-10—10-16 10-12

10-13—10-15

Kyūshū-ha meeting and Hariu Ichirō lecture, Jolies Chapeau Gallery and Nōmin Kaikan, Fukuoka. Kyoto Young Artists Group Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  Included is work by Mizukami Jun. 7th Shell Art Award Exhibition, Shirokiya Department Store, Nihonbashi, Tokyo.  A kasegawa Genpei, Shinohara Ushio, and Yoshino Tatsumi receive honorable mentions. Matsuzawa Yutaka exhibition, Aoki Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. • Shūkan yangu redi (Weekly Young Lady) begins publication by Kōdansha. Rearisuto (Realists) is founded in Takasaki, Gunma. Mizukami Jun performs Jinbutsu go-hōtaishiki (Figure bandaging ritual) in Sakae, Nagoya.  At night, he wraps bandages around sculptures of human figures on the streets. Hataraki Tadashi carries out a performance on a train from Hakata to Tokyo.  The timing of this performance can be estimated based on when Hataraki traveled to Tokyo with Kikuhata Mokuma et al. for the Kyūshū-ha exhibition at Mi-me Gallery, beginning October 3. For the performance, Hataraki crawls along the aisle, in the direction opposite the train’s motion. Kyūshū-ha Exhibition, Mi-me Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Included are works by Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ōguro Aiko, Ōyama Uichi, Obata Hidesuke, Obana Shigeharu, Sakurai Takami, Taniguchi Toshio, Tabe Mitsuko, Chō Yoriko, Hataraki Tadashi, and Yonekura Toku. Seibi Exhibition (Kyoto Young Artists Group Exhibition), Kyoto Prefectural Gallery.  Included is work by Mizukami Jun. Kinoshita Shin solo exhibition: Cosmo Plastic Art, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. • The first meeting of the Conference on Mass Media and Youth by an advisory body to the Prime Minister’s Office is held in Tokyo. Group Doro 4th Outdoor Exhibition, Maebashi Park, Gunma. Sogetsu Contemporary Series 22: Third Recital of Ensōka Shūdan New Directions, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  The event is directed by Ichiyanagi Toshi. Includes performances of pieces by Pierre Boulez, Takemitsu Tōru, Earle Brown, Takahashi Yūji, and Kosugi Takehisa’s Organic Music. Akiyama Kuniharu, Ichiyanagi, Kazakura Shō, Kosugi, Kobayashi Kenji, Noguchi Ryū, and Masuda Mutsumi perform. Kazakura performs Kosugi’s piece with his body as an instrument, attaching a lip-shaped balloon to a pipe and inflating it. Art of Today Exhibition, Iwate Prefecture Jichi Kaikan, Morioka.  The exhibition is organized by the group subsequently known as Group N39. Asari Atsushi, Murakami Nobuo, and Segawa Masao join the exhibition with other members.

5841963

10-14—10-19

10-20—11-9

10-21—10-26

10-23

10-24

10-24—10-28

10-31

NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER 11-1

Naiqua Collection Exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  Included are works by Akasegawa Genpei, Izumi Tatsu, Kosugi Takehisa, Shinohara Ushio, Takamatsu Jirō, Tone Yasunao, Toyoshima Sōroku, and Miki Tomio. Zero Jigen holds Outdoor Exhibition Declaration of Bankruptcy and Objets through Self-destruction (Hasan senkoku, Jibaku ni yoru obuje) and the group ritual Anata wa mite wa ikenai (You Must Not Watch), Zero Jigen Commerce Garden, Asahi-chō (present-day Nishiki 3-chōme), Nagoya.  Participants are Itō Takao, Iwata Shin’ichi, Iwashita Yukiko, Katō Yoshihiro, Kawaguchi Kōtarō, Koiwa Takayoshi, Takahashi Kōko, Hageshita Iwao, and Mizuno Mitsunori. They burn works in vacant lots in the city center and Katō carries out a ritual while wearing a corset. Izumi Tatsu solo exhibition, Fingerprint Detection Exhibition (Shimon kenshutsu-ten), Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  The invitation includes a poem by Nam June Paik. Fingerprints of visitors are taken using glass sheets and plastic balls. Kyūshū-ha No. 7 is published in Fukuoka.  The issue includes a report by Sakurai Takami on Obana Shigeharu’s solo exhibition in his home and on the Grand Assembly of Heroes, as well as a critical essay by Hataraki Tadashi. Gigi (Ritual of Sacrifice), the third theatrical piece by Jikan-ha, Asahi Hall, Yūrakuchō, Tokyo.  Participants include Nakazawa Ushio, Tanaka Fuji, Doi Junen, and Nagano Shōzō (Jikan-ha); Domon, Ohno Kazuo, Kasai Akira and Watanabe Jō. The members of Jikan-ha provoke the audience, aiming to overturn the division between stage and audience, and between viewer and viewed. [pp. 143–4] 6th Gar Gar Contemporary Art Exhibition, Saitama Prefectural Art Museum, Urawa.  It was formerly held as Gendai kaiga-ten (Contemporary Art Exhibition). Features a critique and roundtable discussion with art critic Uemura Takachiyo. The League of Criminals carries out a national mass uprising in Tokyo.  It takes place on the House of Representatives election notification day. Members of the group lie down on the sidewalks in Shinjuku and Shinagawa and carry out a performance on a train with hats, eggs, powder, flashlights, and straw rope. Towards Cultural Revolution: The Collective Scream of the Young (Let’s get drunk on action painting and flamenco) (Geijutsu kakumei mezasu wakamono no gunkyō [Kore ga akushonpeintingu da, furamenko ni yō kai]), Hanazono Shrine, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  This performance event is the first “blast” (happō) fired by Kurohata. Asai Masuo publishes “Teiten no Kai e no shōtai” (Invitation to the Bottom Zenith Society) in the November issue of Shisō no Kagaku. • A new 1,000-yen note is issued to combat forgeries.

1963585

11-3

11-3 11-5

11-7—11-11

11-9 11-21

11-22

11-27

11-30 DECEMBER

DECEMBER

Māketto-ten (Market Exhibition) is performed on the NHK Educational TV show Warera 10-dai (Us teens) at NHK’s studio in Shibuya, Tokyo.  Performances by Izumi Tatsu, who submerges eyeglasses and shoes in water, and gives cotton candy to the studio audience to eat; Kazakura Shō. who inflates balloons; Kosugi Takehisa, who performs Anima 2, in which he puts himself in a cloth bag and shows his body parts through zipper holes; Takamatsu Jirō, who releases smoke out of a box; and Nakanishi Natsuyuki, who makes bubbles. Nihon University Arts Festival, Nihon University, Tokyo.  This is the first preview screening of Sa’in. Dance Experience no Kai (Dance Experience Society), Masseur: A story of theater that sustains desire (Anma: Aiyoku o sasaeru gekijō no hanashi), Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Written, directed, choreographed, and performed by Hijikata Tatsumi. The other performers include Ohno Kazuo and Ohno Yoshito. Akasegawa Genpei designs the set, creating a stage space laid out over tatami matting on the dirt floor at the hall entrance; Kazakura Shō appears as a performer, with his body entirely wrapped in paper and sitting on a beam in the theater; and Kosugi Takehisa gives a sound performance. Fukuda Katsuhiro solo exhibition, Chūō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Active in Gar Gar as Fukuda Katsubon, Fukuda here presents work under his real name. • A coal dust explosion occurs at Mitsui Miike Coal Mine in Ōmuta, Fukuoka.  This is the largest coal mine accident in postwar Japan. League of Criminals, Agitation of Criminals (Hanzaisha no ajitēshon), Law and Economics Classroom 8, Kyoto University.  Performed as part of a student festival at Kyoto University. Hiraoka Masaaki and Miyabara Yasuharu (both members of the League of Criminals), Nakanishi Hideyuki, Motoshio Kiki (Ankoku Butōh dancer), Mori Hideto, and Yamaguchi Kenji of Jiritsu Gakkō participate. [p. 140] • President John F. Kennedy is assassinated.  A round this time, Moriyama Yasuhide and Harumoto Shigeto reunite and together hear the news of the assassination. Morotomi Yōji is caught trying to shoplift at a bookstore in Takadanobaba and taken to Totsuka Police Station in Tokyo.  Morotomi attempts to steal the Japanese translation of the second part of Sade’s Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded, leading the police to search fellow League of Criminals member Miyabara Yasuharu’s home. T  • he Metropolitan Tram Suginami line is shut down. Kosugi Takehisa appears on the NHK TV show Gendai ongaku no nyū fēsu (New Faces of Contemporary Music) in Tokyo.  Kosugi’s Organic Music, originally performed at Sogetsu Art Center in October, is played on television. 4th Jikan-ha Exhibition, Shinjuku Art Theater, Tokyo.

5861963

DECEMBER

12-1—12-7 12-3—12-5

12-4

12-9 12-12

12-13—12-15

12-16—12-21 12-17—12-21 12-20—12-23

The inaugural issue of Andoromeda (Andromeda) is published in Nagakute, Aichi Prefecture.  This mimeograph-printed journal is produced by Asai Masuo, Ohara Kaichi, Naka Takehisa, et al. It runs until September 1965, publishing eleven issues. Kubota Shigeko solo exhibition, 1st Love, 2nd Love…, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. Sweet 16, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  This is a performance festival that features as many as forty performers, including Akasegawa Genpei (who appears in a work by Iimura Takahiko), Iimura (Sukurīn purei [Screen Play]), Kazakura Shō’s (Kabbala 11, 12, 15; also performs walking backward in Kosugi’s Theatre Music, and washes rope and then his face in a washbasin), Kubota Shigeko, Kosugi Takehisa (Mālika 5; also performs South with Koike Ryū), Shiomi Mieko (J. J. Ruberu-shi ni okuru Event: Be Absent [An event dedicated to J. J. Lebel: Be Absent]) Takamatsu Jirō, Tone Yasunao (Monotone), Hijikata Tatsumi, Kuni Chiya (Gonnosukezaka), and Mizuno Shūkō. [p. 155] Miyabara Yasuharu of the League of Criminals is arrested in Tokyo.  During the search of his home, police find Akasegawa Genpei’s 1,000-yen note “model” artwork, which sparks the Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident. Miyabara is released on December 10. • Third Ikeda Hayato Cabinet (until November 9, 1964) • Chokusetsu Kōdō Iinkai (Direct Action Committee) participates in labor activism by the Oku motive power depot branch of the National Railway Motive Power Union at Hiratsuka Shrine in Oku, Tokyo.  Matsuda Masao, Yamaguchi Kenji, and other members of Jiritsu Gakkō embark on this activity in support of a labor union strike. Kyūshū-ha Exhibition, Shinten Kaikan, Fukuoka.  Included are works by Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ueno Masayuki, Ōguro Aiko, Ōyama Uichi, Ochi Osamu, Obata Hidesuke, Obana Shigeharu, Owari Takeshi, Katae Masatoshi, Sakurai Takami, Taniguchi Toshio, Tabe Mitsuko, Chō Yoriko, Hataraki Tadashi, Funaki Yoshiharu, Minashima Mansaku, Miyazaki Junnosuke, and Yonekura Toku. Hataraki and Taniguchi wrap bandages around their entire bodies and sit on the floor. Sakurai walks around the city with sheets of paper with texts by Ōyama attached to his back. Miyazaki and Katae lay rope from the gallery to the street and attempt to lead visitors into the venue while walking over the rope. In the gallery, Obata and a friend use a charcoal grill to boil and eat the live pond loach from Ōyama’s work. Shinohara Ushio solo exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. Sawahata Kazuaki solo exhibition, Chūō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Naka Takehisa solo exhibition at Seto Municipal Hall, Aichi Prefecture.  Naka is a member of Asai Masuo’s group and later becomes a doll artist. In the gallery on the final day, Teiten no Kai holds a gathering with a discussion on “The Future Image of the Arts.”

1963-1964587

12-21

12-23—12-28

12-24—12-29

12-31

Zero Jigen interrupts a performance of The Flies by Seinen Geijutsuza (Youth Art Company) at an unknown venue in Tokyo.  The Flies is an existentialist play by Sartre. Seven male and female members of Zero Jigen, including Iwata Shin’ichi and Katō Yoshihiro, drag a futon onstage during a performance of the play and crawl along the floor. Dealer Naiqua Special Sale (Dealer Naiqua hanpukai), Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  Planned by Kawani Hiroshi, this exhibition is held to support the Taishō Coal Mine struggle. Thirty-nine artists participate. Exhibits include scissors and spoon wrapped with Akasegawa Genpei’s 1,000-yen “models,” which were confiscated by police. 2nd Okayama Young Artists Group Exhibition, Okayama Prefectural Culture Center, Okayama City.  The opening event features performances by some of the artists: Obata Hiroshi (Gishiki [Ritual]), Shiomi Mieko (Event for Dec 24), Tanaka Kiichi (Jest), Terada Takehiro (Shikeishikkōnin no yūga na seisō [Elegant garb of an executioner]), Hayashi Miyori (Rippōtai no muma [Incubus of Cube]), Hirashima Jirō (Shisha no kiroku [Record of the Dead]), and Yokota Kenzō (Kokugai dasshutsu keikaku [Fleeing abroad plan]). In an article in the Jōmō Shimbun, Kaneko Hidehiko issues a call to hold the first Gunma Independent Exhibition.

1964 IN THIS YEAR

Akiyama Yūtokutaishi becomes head of the strike department of a branch of labor union Sōhyō in Tokyo.  He adopts the nickname “Strikeman.” Kanesaka Kenji moves to the United States (he returns to Japan in 1966). JANUARY Cella Art Association disbands in Kyoto.  The root cause is the relocation of Iwata Shigeyoshi and Kusuda Shingo to the United States. 1-6—1-8 Ohara Kaichi visits Nagakute, Aichi Prefecture, and meets Asai Masuo 1-8 Akasegawa Genpei receives an order to report to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police for questioning.  This marks the start of the Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident. 1-12 The Yomiuri Shimbun issues notification of the discontinuation of the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition. 1-13—1-16 Insane Nonsense Exhibition, Aichi Prefectural Cultural Hall Art Museum and other locations in Nagoya.  Included are works by Itō Takao, Iwashita Yukiko, Iwata Shin’ichi, Katō Yoshihiro, Koiwa Takayoshi, Hageshita Iwao, and Mizuno Mitsunori. On January 15, Katō carries out a solo performance with an “automatic masturbation device.” On January 16, Katō, Iwata, and Koiwa dress up in different ways, wear objects, and walk around the streets and inside a department store.

5881964

1-15

1-21

1-24

1-26—1-27

1-27 1-30

1-30—2-15

FEBRUARY?

FEBRUARY 2-1

2-1—2-4

• The Building Standards Act is revised.  Restrictions on height are abolished and instead changed to limit on building coverage area, clearing the way for the age of skyscrapers. Zero Jigen shōkai jōriku (Zero Jigen Company Landing), Shimomeguro 3-Chōme, Tokyo.  K atō Yoshihiro moves from Nagoya to Tokyo and establishes Meisei Electric Co. • The revised Entertainment and Amusement Trades Control Act receives cabinet approval.  The legislation leads to the disappearance of late-night coffee shops and other establishments. Hi-Red Center, Shelter Plan, Room 304, Old Building of Imperial Hotel, Uchisaiwaichō, Tokyo.  V isitors are measured and photographed. The fifty-six participants measured include Adachi Masao, Ono Yōko, Kazakura Shō, Kawani Hiroshi, Kosugi Takehisa, Shinohara Ushio, Yokoo Tadanori, and Nam June Paik. Shinohara buys a can. Anyone who places a call on the telephone outside can hear music by Tone Yasunao (the sounds of a platform at Tokyo Station). The Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident is reported in the Asahi Shimbun. “‘Anti-Art,’ Yes, or No?” public debate, Bridgestone Museum of Art Hall, Kyōbashi, Tokyo.  Panelists are Ikeda Tatsuo, Isozaki Arata, Ichiyanagi Toshi, Sugiura Kōhei, Hariu Ichirō, and Miki Tomio. Tōno Yoshiaki moderates. The event attracts much interest from the public and is filled to capacity. Ikeda plays his speech on tape while carrying out a performance in which he threads needles and then sticks them into a giant piece of bread. The Anti-Art debates subsequently reignite. Young Seven Exhibition, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo.  Curated by Tōno Yoshiaki. Included are works by Arakawa Shūsaku, Okamoto Shinjirō, Kikuhata Mokuma, Kudō Tetsumi, Tateishi Kōichi, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, and Miki Tomio. The growing Pop Art trend is noticeable in the work at this exhibition. Hataraki Tadashi carries out a performance in the street at the crossing in front of Iwataya Department Store in Fukuoka.  The bandages piece previously performed at Shinten Kaikan Hall is reenacted outdoors at the request of NHK. Hataraki covers his entire body in bandages and lies down on the street. Everything right up until he is cautioned by police is filmed and televised. Manabe Sōhei drops out of Kyoto City University of Arts just before graduation. • Jiritsu Gakkō closes indefinitely in Tokyo.  The announcement is made in a circular by Yamaguchi Kenji and Matsuda Masao. Hi-Red Center holds a protest event against the Asahi Shimbun, related to its coverage of the Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident, at the Tearoom Tahitian in Tokyo.

1964589

2-3—2-9 2-5

2-5 2-7—2-12 2-10—2-15 2-17 2-17—2-22 2-18

2-18—3-1

2-23—2-29 MARCH

3-7—3-13

3-9—3-19 3-13 AND 4-2 3-16—3-21 3-23 3-23—3-28

Sasaki Kōsei solo exhibition, Triploid Contemporary Tool Exhibition (Sanbaitai no gengu tenjikai), Mudo Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. A rally protesting the discontinuation of the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition is held at Tokyo Kōsei Nenkin Kaikan Hall in Shinbashi.  A kasegawa Genpei, Kikuhata Mokuma, Shinohara Ushio, Takamatsu Jirō, and Hataraki Tadashi participate. Protest events are subsequently held on February 20 (at Tarōbō in Nihonbashi), on February 28, March 9, and March 21 (at Lunami Gallery, Ginza), on April 9 (at Artists Hall), and on May 19 (at Taishōkaku, Iidabashi). Theater company Hakken no Kai (Discovery Group) is founded in Tokyo. Mazura Ryūdan solo exhibition, Takegawa Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Tateishi Kōichi, Aggregative Civilization Exhibition, Satō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. • Odakyū’s Shinjuku Station is completed in Tokyo, spanning two large underground floors. Nakamura Hiroshi, Concept Painting Exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. Théo Lésoualc’h’s Mime Recital, Kyoto Kaikan Hall.  Gendai Gekijō participates. It is also performed at Asahi Hall in Osaka on February 22 and at Hokkoku Kōdō in Kanazawa on March 2. 17th Japan Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.  Included are works by Iwata Shin’ichi, Koiwa Takayoshi, Matsue Kaku, and Yagara Yutaka. Nakajima Yoshio Farewell Exhibition, Zensen Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Tateishi Kōichi and Nakamura Hiroshi form Kankō Geijutsu Kenkyūjo (Sightseeing Art Research Institute) in Tokyo and announce the birth of what they term “sightseeing art” (kankō geijutsu). 8th Kyoto Independent Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  Included are works by Ikemizu Keiichi (Ori [Cage]), Ishikawa Masaru, Iwata Shin’ichi, Ōe Masanori (A no B [A’s B], Hensokuteki hijittai kahen hakaido α no kinōteki jigen [Irregular Intangible Variable Destruction Level α Functional Time Limit] and 1964.2.7.PM10.00~PM17.00 no Kawaramachi kado [A Corner of Kawaramachi, February 7, 1964, 10PM–5PM]), Katō Minosuke, Koiwa Takayoshi, Manabe Sōhei, Mizukami Jun (Initia and SCAD (or SCAD chinretsutana gishiki [SCAD Display Shelf Ritual]), Mizuno Mitsunori, and Yoshida Minoru. On March 9, Ishikawa, Ōe, Katō, and Manabe of Jikken Ground ∧ remove their works. Kikuhata Mokuma solo exhibition, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo.  Included is Kikuhata’s Roulette Series. Ono Yōko, Touch Poem, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. Sakurai Takami solo exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. • The Kinokuniya Building is completed in Shinjuku, Tokyo.  K inokuniya Hall opens on the fourth floor. Yonekura Toku solo exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.

5901964

3-30

APRIL APRIL

APRIL 4-1

4-1

4-2 4-3—4-6

4-4 4-4—5-10

4-6—4-11

4-11

4-12

Sightseeing Art Research Institute outdoor exhibition, Tama Riverbed, Hino, Tokyo.  Tateishi Kōichi exhibits an incomplete neon Mount Fuji and star-shaped sculpture. Tōno Yoshiaki and Sam Francis come to see the exhibition. It is documented in Nakamura Hiroshi’s 8mm film Das Kapital. Unbeat’s first Misshitsu shirīzu (Secret Chamber Series), Yokoyama Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Street Walking Exhibition, around Tokyo Station.  Tateishi Kōichi and Nakamura Hiroshi walk around holding up their own paintings (Tateishi holds Akai kakusei [Red Awakening], Nakamura holds Ugoku kaiga [Moving Painting]). Itoi Kanji moves from Ichikawa to Sendai. • Japanese citizens are permitted to travel overseas.  Restrictions remain in place: trips are limited to once per year per person and the maximum amount of foreign currency that can be taken out of the country is $500. • The Kijima Norio Morning Show begins broadcasting on NET TV.  It is the first morning “wide show” in Japan. The show makes Kijima into a popular presenter. Yokohama Civic Art Gallery opens. 第1回縄文祭 1st Jōmon Festival, Seto Civic Center, on the streets and at the site of an old climbing kiln, Seto.  A sai Masuo, Ohara Kaichi, Takashima Kinki, Naka Takehisa, and Miyawaki Kōhei participate. The events include: on April 3, an art exhibition, presumably Yatsu o korose! (Kill That One!), in which participants wear white masks and ritualistically create a space with an altar; in the middle of the night on the same day, Chinmoku o fukameyo! (Deepen Silence!), a demonstration march; on April 4, Shigenteki kotoba ni yoru jamu sesshon (Jam Session in Primitive Words); and in the daytime on April 5, Kyōran shūkai “Jiritsu to rentai” (“Autonomy and Solidarity” Madness Rally). According to the invitation, other events include Uta to odori to sekkusu to (Song and Dance and Sex) on the evening before, the debate “The Future Image of the Arts,” and the boxing match Panchi dadadadadadada (Punch Dadadadadadada). [pp. 321–2] League of Criminals disbands in Tokyo. Trends in Contemporary Japanese Art: Painting and Sculpture, Annex Museum of the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.  Included are works by Arakawa Shūsaku, Kudō Tetsumi, Kikuhata Mokuma, Shiga Kenzō, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Mukai Shūji, and Yamazaki Tsuruko. Hataraki Tadashi solo exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  The exhibition is an installation featuring everyday objects wrapped in bandages. Jōkyō Gekijō, The service at 24 o’clock 53 minutes bound for Tōnoshita is waiting at the Takehayachō candy store, Hitachi Ladies Club Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  This is Kara Jūrō’s debut play. Hi-Red Center, What Is the Communication Satellite Being Used for?, Tokyo.

1964591

4-12 4-20—4-25 4-25 4-28 MAY 5-?

5-1

5-1—5-5

5-5—5-7

5-11

5-11

5-12—5-16 5-15—6-14

• Tokyo Channel 12 (present-day TV Tokyo) begins broadcasting. Tanabe Santarō solo exhibition Ingram Exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. Ono Yōko, Fly, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  Ono herself is absent and visitors perform. • Japan joins the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Jakku no Kai (Jack Society) holds a gathering of presenters in Tokyo.  K azakura Shō, Kawara Shinji, Sano Yoshiaki, and Matsuo Kiyoshi participate. Ōe Masanori and Manabe Sōhei start a food waste collection event in Kyoto.  This begins with Ritual of Sa’in at Gion Hall and then continues for around a year at Gallery 16, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and the Kyoto Independent Exhibition, and as an outdoor event on vacant land by the Sagano Line. May Day Outdoor Exhibition (14th Shigun Exhibition), Shiba Park, Tokyo.  Shigun invites avant-garde art groups in Tokyo to participate and Kurohata is one of the groups who answers the invitation and joins the event. Held also at Kōenji Gallery. Jikken Ground ∧ opens Art Experiment Plaza, Sagakariwakechō, Kyoto.  Ishikawa Masaru, Ōe Masanori, Katō Minosuke, and Manabe Sōhei participate. They subsequently work on their art publicly for five days at the start of each month. From July to October, each participant in turn presents experimental works. They plan public discussions for the first Sunday of each month. On May 1, the group carries out An Eventing of Avant-gardists in Everyday Life on the route from the plaza in front of Nijō Castle until Maruyama Park. 鎖陰の儀（または「『鎖陰』は映画である」） Ritual of Sa’in (Sa’in no gi), Maruyama Park Amphitheater and Gion Hall, Kyoto.  At a pre-event in the amphitheater on May 5 and May 6, Kosugi Takehisa performs Chironomy. Kazakura Shō whips a piano with a rope. Ōe Masanori and Manabe Sōhei scatter trash around the front of Gion Hall. During the screening of Sa’in at Gion Hall on May 7, the second half of the film reels are stolen. Akasegawa Genpei, Kazakura, and Kosugi perform. The organizers receive support from Komatsu Tasuo’s Gendai Gekijō. Happenings engender yet more happenings, and the event ultimately forms the culmination of the post-Anpo and post-Yomiuri Independent Exhibition period. [pp. 182–4] • Heibon panchi (Heibon Punch) begins publication by Heibon Shuppan.  W ith its mix of fashion, information, sexual content, and pinup photography, the magazine becomes very popular and reaches a circulation of a million copies in 1966. Kagami Masayuki and Nakajima Yoshio leave for France.  K agami and Nakajima travel on the French cargo-passenger ship, the Vietnam, departing Yokohama for France via Vietnam, Singapore, and India. Hi-Red Center, Great Panorama Exhibition, a closed-gallery event, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. Exhibition of Sasaki Kōsei’s Works, Fūgetsu-dō, Shinjuku, Tokyo.

5921964

5-19

Sa’in screening, West Auditorium, Kyoto University.  This is a rescreening of the film in full, after the previous screening on May 7 at the Gion Hall was interrupted. Assistance is provided by Komatsu Tatsuo. Koike Ryū, Kosugi Takehisa, and Kazakura Shō perform works by Kosugi. Akasegawa Genpei chews bread and then spits it out into a bucket. When a subsequent screening planned for Osaka on July 1–5 is canceled after the management of the prefectural hall refuses to let it take place, Adachi Masao et al. put the film reels in a coffin and walk around Osaka, holding a kind of funeral ritual. 5-20 Jikken Ground ∧ writes an open letter to the Asahi Shimbun in Kyoto.  The letter criticizes the Venus de Milo exhibition organized by the newspaper company. 5-20 • The Shinjuku Minshū Station Building is completed in Tokyo. 5-22—5-27 7th Gar Gar Contemporary Art Exhibition, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo.  This is the group’s first exhibition in Tokyo. A bulletin, Gar Gar, is also published. 5-23 Concert, Collective Music, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Collective Music is the name of a group formed for this concert by Ichiyanagi Toshi, Kosugi Takehisa, and Takemitsu Tōru. Akasegawa Genpei and Tōno Yoshiaki also perform at the event. Kosugi premieres W e (To W), in which things in the venue are moved toward walls. Ichiyanagi and Yuasa Jōji join this performance. 5-24 AND 5-31 Ono Yōko, From 9am to 11am, Naiqua Gallery and elsewhere in Tokyo.  On May 24, it is presented on the roof of the gallery; on May 30, at Ono’s apartment. The work is known as Morning Piece. 5-27—6-2 Sakurai Takami solo exhibition, Shinten Kaikan Hall and Shinten Gallery, Fukuoka. 5-28 • The Palestine Liberation Organization is founded. 5-28—12-29 An employee dispute at the Nishinippon Shimbun in Fukuoka results in a lockout.  Sakurai Takami participates. 5-29 Performance of Nam June Paik’s work, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Performances include A Tribute to John Cage, Étude for Pianoforte, Simple, and La Monte Young’s X ( for Henry Flynt). Originally planned for March 27, the event was postponed when Paik contracted acute pneumonia. During the performance, Paik breaks a piano, throws raw eggs at a wall, saws and planes a piano, and cuts the tie worn by Takiguchi Shūzō in the audience. Also participating are Akasegawa Genpei, Izumi Tatsu, Ichiyanagi Toshi, Yoko Ono, Jed Curtis, Kosugi Takehisa, Anthony Cox, Shiomi Mieko, Takamatsu Jirō, Takeda Akimichi, Tone Yasunao, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, and Hijikata Tatsumi. 5-29 Jikken Ground ∧ public debate, Seidō Gallery, Kyoto.  The debate’s theme is “What can non-tableau activities present in response to civilization?” 5-29 Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy is performed at Judson Memorial Church in New York.  This major early performance by Schneemann features semi-naked men and women, dead fish, chickens, paint, and scrap paper.

1964593

5-31

Matsue Kaku, Ill thoughts farewell service: From a Song of Heaven and Hell, Café Spain, Shinjuku, Tokyo. JUNE Unbeat’s second Secret Chamber Series, Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo. JUNE Iimura Takahiko’s experimental film Riripatto ōkoku butōkai (Dance Party in the Kingdom of Lilliput) is shot in an Ogikubo shopping street and at other locations in Tokyo, featuring Kazakura Shō. JUNE Andoromeda (Asai Masuo and the group behind the journal) is thrown out of a gallery in the Oiwakechō district and moves its venue for gatherings to an observation platform in a small hill in the Nakagirichō area, Seto City. JUNE Bijutsu Shūdan Zantō Kaigi (Art Group Remnants Council) is founded in Tokyo.  A kiyama Yūtokutaishi is among the group’s members. 6-1 Matsuzawa Yutaka hears a voice telling him to “Vanish objets,” his home, Suwa. 6-1—6-6 Kishimoto Sayako solo exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. 6-7, 6-14, AND 6-21 Ono Yōko, Three Old Paintings of Yoko Ono, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  Ono performs Sora o miru e/asa o uru (A Painting to See the Sky / Morning Piece) on June 7, Akushu suru e (Painting to Shake Hands) on June 14, and Kemuri-e, hihyōka, inu wa okotowari (Smoke Painting, No Art Critic or Dogs Allowed) on June 21. 6-9—6-16 Jack Society is founded and holds its first exhibition, Jack Exhibition, at Iwashima Gallery in Ogikubo, Tokyo.  In addition to Kazakura Shō, Kawara Shinji, Sano Yoshiaki, and Matsuo Kiyoshi, the group’s founders are Akasegawa Genpei, Karashima Yoshio, Sasaki Kōsei, Nakao Takashi, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Nakamura Masaharu, and Matsumoto Tetsu. There are thirty-one members. The first meeting of the group is held on the final day of the exhibition. 6-17—6-22 Off Museum, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  This exhibition is held in opposition to Independent ’64, which replaced the Yomiuri Independent. Included are works by Akasegawa Genpei, Ishizaki Kōichirō, Izumi Tatsu, Ochi Osamu, Kazakura Shō, Kishimoto Sayako, Kinoshita Shin, Kubota Shigeko, Kojima Nobuaki, Kosugi Takehisa (installation, Mālika for Object), Shinohara Ushio, Shimizu Akira, Shiraishi Kazuko, Takamatsu Jirō, Takiguchi Shūzō, Tanaka Shintarō, Tanabe Santarō, Doi Junen, Tone Yasunao, Toyoshima Sōroku, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Fukazawa Shichirō, Miki Tomio, Miyata Kunio, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, and Yoshino Tatsumi. There are discrepancies between the names printed in publicity materials and the actual exhibitors. Outdoor performances are filmed for the TV show Aru wakamonotachi (Some Young People). 6-20—6-25 5th Himeji Independent Exhibition, fifth floor of San’yō Department Store, Himeji.  At an event held the night before at Himeji Chamber of Commerce and Industry Annex Hall, a Happening takes place on the theme of the “1964 Himeji Olympics.” 6-20—7-3 Independent ’64 (Andepandan ’64), Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.  I ncluded are works by Ikemizu Keiichi (Ori [Cage]), Ōe Masanori, Okabe Michio, Ōyama Uichi, Koyama Tetsuo, Sasaki Kōsei, Tateishi Kōichi, Chiba Eisuke (Toilet and Shi rensaku (Iriguchi) [Death, Series (Entrance)]), Nakamura

5941964

6-22—6-27 6-27—7-2 6-29—7-4

JULY JULY JULY

JULY 7-1—7-31 7-2 7-3 7-4

Hiroshi, Hamaguchi Tomiji, Matsuzawa Yutaka, Manabe Sōhei (Manabe Sōhei (Meishi niyori daikō) [Manabe Sōhei (Acting by Business Card)]), and Makirō (Teruterubōzu ni okeru oyagokoro to yōji no kagyakusei tōsakuteki jitsuryoku [The Parental and Infant Sadistic-Perverted Ability in a Paper Doll for Good Weather]). One of the self-organized “independent” exhibitions that appeared after the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition was discontinued, Independent ’64 is hurriedly cobbled together in the gallery reserved by Avant-Garde Art Society, which was rented to the Independent ’64 organizers. It is nicknamed the Hariu (Ichirō) Independent. Coming from Kyoto to exhibit their work, Ōe and Manabe sprinkle formalin in the venue on June 21 and invite much displeasure. Chiba says he will exhibit “bacteria” and installs a toilet in the venue, encouraging visitors to use it. Chiba also placing writings around the venue in a guerrilla style. It is a major exhibition in the sense that it features performance-oriented artists who become active in the second half of the 1960s, appearing alongside the mainstream artists in Tokyo: Ikemizu of The Play; Jack Society members Koyama, Sasaki, and Chiba; and Makirō of Baramanji Kessha. Tanaka Fuji solo exhibition, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Gaga’s first exhibition, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo. Gaga (written in hiragana) is based in Tokyo, whereas Gar Gar (written in katakana) is based in Saitama. コレガゼロ次元だ!! ゼロ次元シリーズ 第1 週 岩田信市展 First week of This is Zero Jigen!!, Iwata Shin’ichi exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  The series continues for three weeks and is the first major exhibition by Zero Jigen in Tokyo, and is also important for its combination of performance in urban spaces within the framework of an exhibition. Giant bags hang created by Iwata hang in the gallery space, where on June 28 a ritual is carried out in which ten men lie down covered by a black carpet; Katō Yoshihiro, wearing a black corset and baggage tags all over his body, attached to his body hair, lies on top of the carpet attempts to elicit erections from the men from both above and below the carpet. Still wearing the tags, Katō later carries out a ritual on the stage in a plaza in front of the Shinbashi horse betting office, though his performance is halted when he is pulled off the stage by yakuza. Zero Jigen places an advertisement for Japan Super-Art Trade Fair and its Naiqua Gallery exhibition in the July issue of Bijutsu techō. Mizukami Jun, Rojō no fūsōshiki (Wind funeral on the street), Nagoya.  M izukami lies on the street in the city center, with his head facing west. The inaugural issue of Doramukan (Drum Can) by Asai Masuo and Gendai Kodomo Kenkyūkai (Contemporary Child Research Society) published in Nagakute, Aichi.  The journal runs until November 1965, publishing three issues. Asai Masuo et al. parade around the streets of Gifu, fully nude. Jack Society Small Works Exhibition, Kiyomizuya restaurant, Ogikubo, Tokyo. Shiomi Mieko and Kubota Shigeko leave for the United States. Ono Yōko, Jōryū Ibento (Distillation Event), Tokyo. Ono Yōko publishes Gurēpufurūtsu (Grapefruit) from Wunternaum Press in Tokyo.  A publication launch event is held.

1964595

7-6—7-11

7-6—7-12

7-13—7-18

7-13—7-19

7-18—7-28

7-19—7-23 7-20

7-20 7-20—7-25 7-21

コレガゼロ次元だ!! ゼロ次元シリーズ 第2週 加藤好弘展

Second week of This is Zero Jigen!!, Katō Yoshihiro exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  This is the second part of the Zero Jigen exhibition series. The exhibition consists of an installation with an electric “automatic masturbation device.” On July 6, Katō performs five-minute rituals in the gallery and fifteen places around Ginza. On July 9, in a ritual at Café Spain, Katō and K.T. are covered in sawdust. They meet members of the League of Criminals and Kurohata’s Matsue Kaku during the ritual at Café Spain. L’exposition de M. Kato, K. Ikemizu et M. Tashiro organizée par Keiji Nakamura (Anti-Art: Three Artists Exhibition, in Japanese title), Gallery 16, Kyoto.  Three person exhibition of Katō Minosuke, Ikemizu Keiiji and Tashiro Masayoshi. Ikemizu exhibits a cage work, while Katō presents an installation in which he carries out a funeral ceremony for himself. This is an early example of Anti-Art in Kyoto. Due to this exhibition, Katō is thrown out of Jikken Ground ∧. コレガゼロ次元だ!! ゼロ次元シリーズ 第3週 小岩高義展 Third week of This is Zero Jigen!!, Koiwa Takayoshi exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  This is the third part of a Zero Jigen exhibition series. A nude Koiwa gets into a wooden box. On July 13, Koiwa carries out a ritual at Café Spain, in which he gradually takes off his clothes. Katō Minosuke solo exhibition, Gallery 16, Kyoto.  It features “artworks created after death.” From the ceiling hangs numerous pieces of see-through plastic bags, which have been stuffed full with everyday items, including trash. Ōe Masanori and Manabe Sōhei participate in collecting the trash for the exhibition. There is an interaction with Ono Yōko, who was passing by. 1st All-Japan Independent Exhibition (Zen-nihon Andependan-ten), Yokohama Civic Art Gallery.  Included are Itoi Kanji’s Posutā (Poster) and Gachō (Picture Album), and a work by Hamaguchi Tomiji. Nishina Yoshio solo exhibition, Chūō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Ono Yōko, Contemporary American Avant-Garde Music Concert: Insound and Instructure, Yamaichi Hall, Kyoto.  A nthony Cox and Al Wonderlick participate and assist. Production assistance is provided by Komatsu Tatsuo et al. from Gendai Gekijō. Someone attempts to place junk in the audience seating without Ono’s permission and it is removed at her request. • Tokyo Metropolitan Police determines that topless swimwear can be prosecuted under the Minor Offenses Act. Shinohara Ushio solo exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. Ono Yōko, Evening till Dawn, Nanzen-ji temple, Kyoto.  A nthony Cox and Al Wonderlick participate.

5961964

7-22

7-24 7-26

7-27

AUGUST AUGUST AUGUST?

8-2

8-3—8-9 8-7—8-15 8-9

8-10—8-15

8-11

8-11—8-16 8-12

Ono Yōko, Symposium!, French Cancan Coffee House, Kyoto.  This is a discussion about “flying.” Around twenty people participate, including Anthony Cox, Al Wonderlick, Komatsu Tatsuo, theater people, painters, and students. M  • onthly manga magazine Garo begins publication by Seirindō. Location shoot for Nonfikushon gekijō—aru wakamonotachi (Nonfiction Theater: Some Young People) (NTV), in front of Shinjuku Koma Theater, Tokyo.  This is the first day of a location shoot for the director Nagano Chiaki’s TV show. Zero Jigen performs a crawling ritual. • Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly passes the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance Regarding the Healthy Development of Youth.  This ordinance introduces a system defining certain publications as harmful, set to come into force on October 1. Magazines Heibon Punchi and Shūkan Jitsuwa are designated as harmful. Asai Masuo et al. hold 24-Jikan Danjo Kanzume Seishin Nikutai Gekitotsu-kai (24Hour Coed Sleep-in for the Collision of Spirit and Flesh) in Gifu. Iwata Shin’ichi returns from Tokyo to his hometown of Nagoya. Location shoot for Aru wakamonotachi, Komazawa Olympic Park, Setagaya, Tokyo.  Tateishi Kōichi and Nakamura Hiroshi of Sightseeing Art Research Institute arrange five 30 cm doughnuts on a table in the shape of the Olympic rings, and then eat them with knives and forks. Location shoot for Aru wakamonotachi, Tama River, Tokyo.  Zero Jigen et al. hang a large net from the railings of a bridge and clamber up, naked. Shinohara Ushio, Kojima Nobuaki, Kinoshita Shin, et al. create and then burn artworks. Tabe Mitsuko solo exhibition, Mudo Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Hayashi Miyori solo exhibition, Surugadai Gallery, Jinbōchō, Tokyo. Red and Blue Experiment Exhibition, Miyamae Plaza, Seto.  This is a ritual by Asai Masuo et al. They occupy the plaza, line up toys, and make strange cries. A young boy in white clothing dances around a totem pole. On Seto Memorial Bridge, a man sits in a cage and scrutinizes passersby. They set fire to the toys. Kai Tetsuyoshi exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  K ai presents the body painting of a woman. The police are informed and, when it is implied that he may be arrested or the gallery shut down, he voluntarily stops. 小野洋子さよなら演奏会「ストリップ・ショー」 Ono Yōko “Farewell Concert” Strip Show, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Ono performs Cut Piece and other works. Anthony Cox and Jeff Perkins join the performances. 2nd Jack Society exhibition, Iwashima Gallery, Ogikubo, Tokyo. Symposium about Time and Space, waiting room of Hakata Station, Fukuoka.  Organized by Kyūshū-ha.

1964597

8-13

8-18 8-18—8-24 8-24—8-29 8-26

8-30—9-5

SEPTEMBER?

Hari no Kai August Monthly Meeting, Artists Hall, Ginza, Tokyo.  Hari no Kai (Hari Society) is a discussion group organized by Hariu Ichirō. Sasaki Kōsei presents on “self-publicity PR media theory based on the freedom of expression,” and Tateishi Kōichi gives a presentation on kankō geijutsu-ron (sightseeing art theory). Ono Yōko returns to New York. Yamaguchi Katsuhiro exhibition, Akiyama Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. 4th Sightseeing Art Research Institute exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. 3rd Jack Society meeting, Iogi Hall, Ogikubo, Tokyo.  The organization and board members are decided: Nakao Takashi is Chair; Matsuo Kiyoshi is Vice Chair; Sasaki Kōsei is head of planning (and moderator); Matsuo Kiyoshi is “living consultant”; Kazakura Shō is “person in charge of leisure”; Takahashi Yasuko is planning administrator; and Hanaga Mitsutoshi is public relations manager. Others are assigned to accounting, liaising, exhibition layout, and administration. 日本超芸術見本市 Japan Super-Art Trade Fair, Aichi Prefectural Cultural Hall Art Museum, Peace Park, and other locations in Nagoya.  articipants include Andoromeda (Asai Masuo et al.), Unbeat (Tashiro Minoru), P Itoi Kanji (who sends an artwork), Umehara Itsuo, Ōe Masanori, Kanai Kumiko, tanka poet Kasugai Ken, poet Kanie Masato, Kyūshū-ha (Sakurai Takami, Yonekura Toku), Kurohata, Zero Jigen (Iwata Shin’ichi, Katō Yoshihiro, Kawaguchi Kōtarō, Koiwa Takayoshi, K.T., Takahashi Kōko, Hageshita Iwao, Mizuno Mitsunori, et al.), Tsuzaki Masatsugu (Kumamaru Michio), composer Nakagawa Kōichirō, Manabe Sōhei, Mizukami Jun, Yano Kazuo, and Yamazaki Yasuko. In the art museum meeting room, Zero Jigen carries out a ritual with vinyl tubes. At a symposium, Takahashi massages the shoulders of the speakers. Asai, Katō, Sakurai, and Tashiro give lectures while lying down on a bunk-like table. Outside, several people parade like a train holding a string around them, while others move from the art museum to the park by following a map. In the Peace Park at night, a ritual is carried out where performers walk up the stone steps while taking off their clothes. Niku-buton no gishiki (Flesh Futon Ritual) is also performed. Mizukami presents Hoshi no Uwasa (Star Rumor), a “round tape poem” (a chance operations artwork in which a tape-like cloth inscribed with words is rotated around several seated people, who then simultaneously read out the words). Yonekura participates in an event where he follows instructions to call the museum from a payphone. This is an important event in the history of performance art as a gathering of artists from across Japan, including those from Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto and Fukuoka, and also because it featured simultaneous and multiple-group rituals. Kawaguchi Kōtarō leaves Zero Jigen in Nagoya.  K awaguchi is a founding member and gives the group its original name. His departure is seemingly due to differences with Katō Yoshihiro over the direction of the group, which became apparent during Japan Super-Art Trade Fair.

5981964

SEPTEMBER

9-1—12

9-4

9-4—9-9

9-7

9-8—10-18

9-10

9-21—9-26

9-27—10-8

9-28—10-3

9-29—10-11

Film Independent is founded in Tokyo.  Iimura Takahiko, Ishizaki Kōichirō, Ōbayashi Nobuhiko, Kanesaka Kenji, Satō Shigechika, and Donald Richie publish a manifesto in the September 14 issue of Nihon Dokusho Shinbun (Japan Readers Newspaper). Fuji Bank Small Works Exhibition by Jack Society, Nishi-ogikubo branch of Fuji Bank, Tokyo.  This is a collaboration with the bank with the aim of generating publicity, but the bank fails to send direct mails to customers and the term is shortened by three days. Nonfiction Theater: Some Young People is broadcast on NTV.  Performers include Ono Yōko and Anthony Cox, Sightseeing Art Research Institute, Shinohara Ushio, Zero Jigen, and Tanaka Shintarō. 7th Shell Art Award Exhibition, Grand Hall, seventh floor, Shirokiya department store, Nihonbashi, Tokyo.  Included are works by Kaneko Hidehiko (First Prize), Shinohara Ushio (Honorable Mention), and Takamatsu Jirō. Kaneko later becomes a member of NOMO. Jack Society begins a permanent exhibition at the gallery and coffee shop Alps in Kōenji, Tokyo.  The exhibition is overseen by Hanaga Mitsutoshi. Salvador Dalí exhibition, Tokyo Prince Hotel, Shiba Park.  Makirō carries out a performance with numerous pieces of bread tied to his body. Jack Society’s regulations come into effect in Tokyo.  A rticle 2 states that “the aim of this group is to be a movement that sells avantgarde art and to make a clear distinction from the fine arts movement,” and as part of that movement, “To aim to have an enlightened character and to socially rationalize the artist’s lifestyle and establish art as a vocation.” 15th Shigun Exhibition, Ginpōdō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Kurohata (as Geijutsu Shūdan Kuroi Me, Art Group Black Bud) gives the first public performance of its “creative art gymnastics.” On September 27, Matsue Kaku is arrested during a happening. 3rd Jack Society exhibition, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  The thirty exhibitors include Kazakura Shō, K.T., Sasaki Kōsei, Hanaga Mitsutoshi, Matsuo Kiyoshi, and Yoshida Hisao. The exhibition features a roundtable discussion, newspaper advertising, and visitor questionnaires. The opening is attended by 500 people and there are around 2,000 visitors on the first day, and then an average of 1,200 people per day thereafter. The exhibition receives offers of sponsorship from corporations and other forms of support from art magazines. Kinoshita Shin and Shinohara Ushio exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  This joint exhibition is held to celebrate their departure for New York. Kinoshita leaves in November, though Shinohara does not go until 1969. ’64 Sendai Independent Exhibition, Mitsukoshi Department Store, Sendai.

1964599

 Included are works by Ikeda Tatsuo, Ishikawa Shun, Itoi Kanji, Okamoto

OCTOBER 10-1

10-1 10-4

10-7

10-10

Shinjirō, Kamijō Junjirō, Suzuki Kōichi, Suzuki Seiichi, Chiba Eisuke, Toyoshima Hironao, Hamaguchi Tomiji, Hariu Shizuo, Matsuzawa Yutaka, and Murakami Yoshio. This is another “Independent” exhibition, planned by the Sendai-based painter Miyagi Teruo and organized in cooperation with Satō Gallery in Tokyo. Almost all of the exhibits are paintings. Itoi shows Herumetto (Helmet) (a motorcycle helmet with a collage of pornographic photographs) and the installation Zero no otoko (Zero Man). He stands in the middle of the work. He also takes off his clothes except loincloth and crawls around outside the gallery. Magnetized by Itoi in his sunglasses, Kamijō Junjirō (a member of the Bund student activist group at Tōhoku University and later a core member of Zero Jigen), Suzuki Kōichi, and Suzuki Seiichi take part in the performance with Itoi. Riot police are mobilized and the performing artists are taken to the police station. Chiba’s Iriguchi shirīzu (Entrance Series) is an unauthorized installation with strings stretched across various locations within the exhibition space, but it is not recognized as an artwork and is not exhibited in its complete form. Disgruntled by the numerous rules, Itoi leaves for Tokyo partway through the exhibition and runs in Ginza. Ishikawa realizes the limitations of the Independent exhibition series, as it is organized through Miyagi’s connections, and goes on to plan the Sendai West Park Art Festival in 1967. Kurohata holds a night of silence to protest the Olympics at Café Spain in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Part one of the 7th Jack Society meeting, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  The group cancels its exhibition at Lunami Gallery planned for October 15–20. The venue fee is covered by the group. • The Tōkaidō Shinkansen begins operation. Itoi Kanji runs down the Ginza-dōri boulevard in Tokyo.  Itoi’s action is inspired by the Tokyo Olympic torch relay runners. Starting at the shop Hattori’s Watches, he covers his face in white bandages and holds up a red loincloth wrapped with a rolled newspaper, made to look like the Olympic Flame. While running toward Kyōbashi, he deliberately takes off his white loincloth and is then completely naked. He is arrested upon his return to the watch shop and becomes the first person taken into custody under for crimes related to the Tokyo Olympics. Itoi Kanji is involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital in Nerima, Tokyo.  Itoi remains institutionalized until September 30, 1965. He becomes “overwhelmed by the divinity of madness.” While committed, he writes and keeps a diary in his album Hikari no hanga (Prints of Light). Hi-Red Center, Dropping Show, roof of the Ikenobō Kaikan Hall in KandaSurugadai, Tokyo.  A kasegawa Genpei, Izumi Tatsu, Kazakura Shō, Takamatsu Jirō, and Nakanishi Natsuyuki participate. They begin by dropping everyday items down to the street, but then switch to dropping things from the top of the machinery penthouse down onto the roof.

6001964

10-10—10-24 10-11

10-12—10-17

10-16

10-18

10-26—11-1 10-26—11-1 10-30—11-2

10-31

NOVEMBER

• The Tokyo Olympics. Tokyo “No-Olympic” (Sports Competition/Arts Competition), Asbestos-kan, Meguro, Tokyo.  K atō Ikuya, Tateishi Kōichi, Hijikata Tatsumi, Masaki Shigeyuki, and Matsuda Masao participate. The “arts competition” includes martial arts, learning, film, painting, and poetry. Tone Yasunao solo exhibition Investigation Event, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  The exhibition is treated as a submission period for the Tone Prize. On the last day, the winning artwork is announced. Participating as both judge and performer are Akasegawa Genpei, Ishizaki Kōichirō, Ichiyanagi Toshi, Okuyama Junnosuke, Ono Yōko, Kazakura Shō, Kosugi Takehisa, Shinohara Ushio, Takiguchi Shūzō, Takeda Akimichi, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, and Hijikata Tatsumi. Hi-Red Center’s Seisō ivento (Cleaning Event) is submitted. 首都圏清掃整理促進運動 Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropolitan Area (Be Clean!), Ginza Namiki-dōri Avenue, Tokyo.  In this historic performance, participants in rented white coats set up a “BE CLEAN!” sign and clean the streets. Akasegawa Genpei, Izumi Tatsu, Takamatsu Jirō and Nakanishi Natsuyuki participate for Hi-Red Center, along with Kawani Hiroshi and Tanigawa Kōichi. They are assisted by Kazakura Shō, Tone Yasunao, and two others. The first part is performed in white robes from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., and the second part in regular clothing from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. According to Tone, the event was carried out by Hi Group, a collaboration of Hi-Red Center and Group Ongaku. Part two of the 7th Jack Society meeting, Iogi Hall, Ogikubo, Tokyo.  Participants discuss continuing attractions during exhibition periods, setting up a “fan club” in order to conduct audience surveys, deciding on a trademark, and reorganizing the PR department. “Instead of exhibitions in galleries, we plan to exhibit in venues open to the general public.” 1st Gurūpu Shikaku (Group Sight) exhibition, Mudo Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  The exhibitors include Suenaga Tamio. Fukunaga Toyoko manga exhibition, Mudo Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. 8th Gar Gar Contemporary Art Exhibition, Saitama Bank Ōmiya Branch Grand Hall, Saitama.  Gar Gar subsequently aims to expand its activities into Tokyo. Ōe Masanori, Slow Speed Personal Space-Time “The Most Slow Olympics”, Kyoto.  W ith this event, Ōe Masanori begins writing his name in hiragana. The flyer gives the following instructions: “Measure the absolute distance between Sanjō and Shijō Avenue according to your own criteria. / Perform the act of running between Sanjō and Shijō Avenue as slowly as you can.” Flamenco Festival with a rally opposing the abolition of the Musashino Art School night school, Shinjuku Kaikan Hall, Tokyo.  A s “artistic attempts according to three core themes,” Kurohata’s Suzuki Shirō presents Kūkan gekijō (Spatial Theater), Takahara Yūji shows Supein no hiru (Spanish Daytime), and Matsue Kaku presents Bijutsu taisō (Art Gymnastics). Miyabara Yasuharu also participates.

1964601

11-1 11-6

11-7

11-7 11-9 11-9—11-14

11-10—11-11

11-12 11-12—11-14

11-16—11-21

11-20

• Keio Shinjuku Station Building is completed, and Keio Department Store opens in Tokyo. Merce Cunningham Dance Company open rehearsal, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Music by John Cage, and costumes and props by Robert Rauschenberg. • The Museifu Kyōsantō (Anarcho-Communist Party) is founded in Tokyo  Members are Sasamoto Masahiro, Matsuda Masao, Yamaguchi Kenji, and two others. Kinoshita Shin moves to the United States. • Prime Minister Satō Eisaku forms his first cabinet (continues the caibinet until the third, July 7, 1972). Eros Museum (Museum Plan No. 1 Preview Exhibition /Sweet Home Exhibition: Katō Yoshihiro Solo Exhibition), Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  This is the first part of a two-week Zero Jigen exhibition. On the walls are exhibited paintings by Iwata Shin’ichi, while on the floor is placed a kotatsu table and, near the ceiling, a mannequin. Kamijō Junjirō is introduced to Katō Yoshihiro by Iwata. Merce Cunningham Dance Company performances, Sankei Hall (Tokyo).  Music performances include John Cage and Ichiyanagi Toshi. Piano by David Tudor. As the production designer, Robert Rauschenberg also visits Japan. The company holds performances at Kobe International House on November 12, at Osaka Festival Hall on November 16, and then again at Sankei Hall (Tokyo) on November 24 and November 25.  he Japan Confederation of Labour (Zennihon Rōdō Sōdōmei, Dōmei) is founded. •T  Founded in opposition to the left-leaning Sōhyō. • The US Seadragon, a nuclear-powered submarine, docks at Sasebo, Nagasaki.  Moriyama Yasuhide participates in protests but does so alone following other protesters, unable to feel comfortable among the various New Left groups participate. Eros Museum (Museum Plan No. 1 Preview Exhibition / Sweet Home Exhibition: Iwata Shin’ichi Solo Exhibition), Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  This is the second part of the Zero Jigen exhibition. Iwata comes from Nagoya to participate. Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Modern Dance Workshop, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  This is an exchange event to mark the company’s tour to Japan. Performing are Atsugi Bonjin, Kimura Yuriko, Kuni Chiya, Kosugi Takehisa, Sanjō Mariko, Takahashi Hyō, 20 Seiki Buyō no Kai (20th Century Dance Group), Hijikata Tatsumi, Wakamatsu Miki, Steve Paxton, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Robert Rauschenberg, and Barbara Lloyd. Features a collective performance of Kosugi’s work Anima 7, in which everyday acts that would ordinarily take a very short amount of time are performed an incredibly time-consuming manner. The performance consists of: Izumi Tatsu slowly opening an umbrella; Kosugi himself putting a jacket on Kazakura Shō that has lots of strings attached to it, like a marionette, and then feeding the strings through the stage rigging above; Kawani Hiroshi pulling on the strings until the jacket comes off, and also slowly plays a wind-up recording of a voice saying “south”; and Takamatsu Jirō slowly drinking something.

6021964

11-20—11-24

11-20—11-27

11-26—11-30

11-26—12-1

11-27 11-28

DECEMBER

DECEMBER DECEMBER 12-1—12-27

12-3—12-9

12-12—12-13

12-14—12-19

Seibi Exhibition (Kyoto Young Artists Association Exhibition), seventh-floor hall of Fujii Daimaru Department Store, Kyoto.  Included are Mizukami Jun’s Céremonie pour Larva, Arugosu dewa hanayome wa kekkon no yoru no tame ni tsukemage o tsukeru (In Argos, a bride puts on a hairpiece for her wedding night) and Koshiki kōnin sukocchi gireisho Sexuelle (Old officially authorized Scottish rite text Sexuelle). 3rd International Young Artists’ Exhibition, Seibu Department Store, Ikebukuro, Tokyo.  Included is work by Kikuhata Mokuma, who wins the Stralem Award (second place). 7th Saitama Avant-Garde Art Exhibition: Killers, Saitama Prefectural Art Museum, Urawa.  A s one of the exhibits, Moriya Naoyuki lies on the floor with his entire body covered in cloth. Dancer Fujii Kō comes to view the exhibition and performs. Left Hook, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Included are works by Shinohara Ushio, Tanaka Shintarō, and Yoshino Tatsumi. John Cage and David Tudor concert, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Ichiyanagi Toshi appears as an assistant performer. Twenty Questions to Bob Rauschenberg, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  A longside Robert Rauschenberg, Shinohara Ushio, Kojima Nobuaki, Tōno Yoshiaki, et al. appear in the event. Takashina Shūji interprets for Rauschenberg for the event. Zero Jigen, Seisōfuku no mama nyūyoku gishiki (Formalwear Bathing Ritual), a bathhouse in Meguro, Tokyo.  Iwata Shin’ichi, Katō Yoshihiro, Koiwa Takayoshi, K.T., and Nagata Satoshi participate. Zero Jigen, Ginza panti kōshin (Ginza Panty Parade), Tokyo.  Six men wearing panties over their clothes walk around Ginza. • Shirato Senpei’s Kamui-den (The Legend of Kamui) begins serialization in Garo (continues until July 1971). 1st Nagaoka Contemporary Art Museum Prize Exhibition, Nagaoka Contemporary Art Museum, Niigata.  Included is work by Nakanishi Natsuyuki. Independent ’64 in the Wilderness, Tundra Field, Nanashima Yashima Highland, Nagano Prefecture.  This is a fictitious kannen tenrankai (concept exhibition) by Matsuzawa Yutaka. Its “exhibitors” include Ikeda Tatsuo with Jūnigatsu kokonoka yoru jūniji ni okeru Orionza no α-sei Beterugyūsu (Betelgeuse, the Alpha Star of Orion, at 12am on the Night of December 9), and Takiguchi Shūzō. Untitled December Dance Recital, Kuni Chiya Dance Institute, Komaba, Tokyo.  Participants include Iimura Takahiko, Ikemiya Nobuo, Ichikawa Miyabi, Itō Mika, Kuni Chiya, Takemura Rui, Tone Yasunao, Nakahara Isako, and Hijikata Tatsumi. Hayashi Miyori solo exhibition Box Maker Exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.

1964-1965603

12-15

12-16—12-17

12-16—12-21 12-21—12-26 12-23

Jack Society public debate, Bridgestone Museum of Art Hall, Kyōbashi, Tokyo.  The themes are: “Is avant-garde art a commercial goods?” and “Is it possible to rationalize the lifestyle of the artist?” There are 268 participants. The chairs are Yoshida Yoshie and Nakao Takashi. Film Independent, Kinokuniya Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Screenings include Akasegawa Genpei’s Homology, Kazakura Shō’s Untitled, a film by Takamatsu Jirō, and Tone Yasunao’s 2880K=120”. Shinohara Ushio solo exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. Matsuzawa Yutaka solo exhibition Ah, Nil, Ah, A Ceremony of Psi’s Secret Embodiment Drowning in the Wilderness, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. People’s Oral Epic Poetry Storytelling Succession Meet, Kinokuniya Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Planned by Ichiryūsai Teijō no Kai (Ichiryūsai Teijō Society); Kurohata participates.

1965 IN THIS YEAR

JANUARY JANUARY

JANUARY? 1-10—1-15 1-13—1-18

1-20 1-21—1-31

2-1—2-14 2-6 2-7

Akiyama Yūtokutaishi joins Nanao Radio Co. (present-day Toshiba Audio Industry), Tokyo. Ōe Masanori moves to the United States. Hataraki Tadashi moves to Ōmuta from Kitakyūshū and succeeds Seibu Bijutsu Gakuen (Western Art School) run by Taniguchi Toshio, who moved to Fukuoka City, Fukuoka. Iwata Shin’ichi runs jazz cafe Goodman, Fushimi, Nagoya. Free Art Festival, Doreme Hall, Aoyama, Tokyo.  K aku Flamenco Company (Matsue Kaku et al.) participates. Gendai Bijutsu (Contemporary art) magazine begins publication by Sun Production.  Ōta Sankichi is Editor-in-Chief. The journal publishes 10 issues in total. Sakurai Takami retires from Nishinippon Newspaper, Fukuoka. Art of Today Exhibition by Group N39, Morioka Gallery, Morioka, Iwate. Mazura Ryūdan: Fantasy World, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  The exhibition is also held at Ranzan, a café in Shinjuku (January 13–18) and Takano Grill, Sakai’ya, Saginomiya, Tokyo (January 15–24). • Japan Airlines releases JALpak. The popularization of overseas travel begins. Jack Show, Iwashima Gallery, Ogikubo, Tokyo.  This exhibition is organized with the cooperation of Iwashima Gallery and Musashino Art Supplies Shop. 46 members of Jack Society participate. Shinohara Ushio Haribote (Papier-mâché) Boxing Exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. Jōkyō Gekijō performs Farewell of a Sewing Machine and the Umbrella, as street theater in Sukiyabashi Park, Tokyo. • U.S. military aircrafts bomb Dong Hoi, marking the beginning of the bombing of North Vietnam.  The Vietnam War expands from a civil war in South Vietnam to an all-out war.

6041965

2-16 2-18—3-2 2-19—2-21

2-27—2-28

MARCH? MARCH 3-1 3-5—3-11

3-6

3-9—3-14 3-10

3-14—3-19 3-20—3-25

3-20—3-26 3-20—5-20 3-21

3-22—4-3

Second panel discussion by Jack Society, Iwashima Gallery, Ogikubo, Tokyo.

 The theme is TV communication and other contemporary mass media.

18th Japan Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.  Included are works by Shigun, Matsue Kaku, and Yagara Yutaka. Asai Masuo 2nd Painting Exhibition, Seto Civic Center, Seto, Aichi.  On the last day, Teiten no Kai organizes a panel discussion in the gallery on issues in contemporary art with the theme “On signs, ciphers, and spells.” Miyawaki Kōhei Painting Exhibition, Seto Civic Center, Seto, Aichi.  E xhibition by a member of Asai Masuo’s group. On the last day in the gallery, Teiten no Kai organizes a panel discussion on issues in contemporary art with the theme “What is The Capital in Art?” Chida Ui leaves high school, Tokyo. Koyama Tetsuo graduates from Taiheiyō Art School, Tokyo. • Shibusawa Tatsuhiko publishes Kairakushugi no tetsugaku (The Philosophy of Epicureanism), from Kōbunsha, Tokyo. 9th Kyoto Independent Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  Included are works by Ikemizu Keiichi, Iwata Shin’ichi, Iwahashi Atsuko, Ōe Masanori, Koiwa Takayoshi, Fukunaga Toyoko, Manabe, Sōhei, and Mizukami Jun (Missō keikaku [Plan for Secret Burial]). • San’yō Special Steel goes bankrupt, Himeji.  Small and medium size subcontractors experience a chain of bankruptcies, marking the end of high economic growth. 24th Hokkaidō Independent Exhibition, Marui-Imai Department Store, Asahikawa. Sakurai Takami leaves for the United States.  The day prior, a farewell party is held at Katō Yoshihiro’s, which is joined by Akiyama Yūtokutaishi. Sasaki Kōsei Exhibition: Perfect, Iwashima Gallery, Ogikubo, Tokyo. Big Fight Exhibition, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Included are works by Akasegawa Genpei, Izumi Tatsu, Okabe Michio, Kishimoto Sayako, Kojima Nobuaki, Kosugi Takehisa, Shinohara Ushio, Takamatsu Jirō, Tanaka Shintarō, Tanabe Santarō, Tanikawa Kōichi, Tone Yasunao, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Hayashi Miyori, Miki Tomio, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, and Yoshino Tatsumi. Yonekura Toku Exhibition, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo. Challenge the Sun! Modern Sculpture Exhibition by Okayama Young Artists Group, Ujō Park, Okayama. Lectures and a panel discussion on art, Fukuoka Civic Center.  Organized by Yamauchi Jutarō et al. The lecturer and panelists are Kishida Tsutomu, Sasaki Yūnoshin (Fukuma Mental Hospital), Tōno Yoshiaki, Nishijima Isao (designer), Hariu Ichirō, MC by Aoki Shigeru (Department of Culture, Nishinippon Newspaper). Matsuzawa Yutaka Exhibition: Ah, Nil, Ah, A Ceremony of Psi’s Secret Embodiment Drowning in the Wilderness, Naiqua Gallery, Shimbashi, Tokyo.

1965605

3-31 APRIL APRIL 4-1—4-30

4-5 4-7

4-10

4-24

4-29—5-4 MAY

5-1

5-8—5-13

5-10—5-22 5-12—5-16

5-18—5-31

• Yodobashi Water Purification Plant is closed in Shinjuku for the construction of a subcenter, moves to Higashi-murayama, Tokyo. • A iwa releases Japan’s first compact cassette recorder. • The percentage of Japanese students entering high school surpasses a national average of 70%. Jack Brain Show, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Carioca, and Iwashima Gallery, Tokyo.  Jack Society’s fifth exhibition. The first venue, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, is April 7–12; the second venue, Carioca (café and confectionery shop), Ginza, April 1–30; the third venue, Iwashima Gallery, Ogikubo, is April 5–14. The first and third venues include an all-1,000-yen Exhibition where 156 works are sold for ¥1,000 each. •Right Now at Noon: Afternoon Show (NET TV, present TV Asahi) begins broadcasting. Ketsuzōkai (ass world) Ritual at Iwata Shin’ichi’s Wedding Ceremony, International Hotel, Nishiki, Nagoya.  Three male members of Zero Jigen enact a ceremony in which they smoke with their anuses on a large pink futon bed. The first general preparatory meeting for Gifu Independent Exhibition, Gifu Municipal Library Hall, Gifu.  Participants include Akane Kazuo, Ikeda Tatsuo, Ikemizu Keiichi, Terada Takehiro, Nakahara Yūsuke, Nomura Tarō, Hariu Ichirō, Mizutani Isao, Yoshida Yoshie. The chairperson is Gotō Akio from Vava. • League of Citizen’s Cultural Groups for Peace in Vietnam (Beheiren) is established in Tokyo.  At the urging of Oda Makoto et al., 1,500 people participate in a demonstration from Shimizudani Park to Dobashi, Shinbashi. The group, renamed Citizens’ League for Peace in Vietnam in October 1966, later becomes a major current within the citizen’s movement. Fukuda Katsubon Exhibition: The Sun, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo. • Fuji Photo Film releases 8mm film camera Fujica Single 8.  The convenience of shooting with film cartridges facilitates the popularization of home movies. May Day Outdoor Exhibition (The 16th Shigun Exhibition), vicinity of Yoyogi National Gymnasium, Tokyo.  Shigun conducts collective creation in public. Forgotten Room: Zero Jigen Exhibition, Sakura Gallery, Nagoya.  This is a three-person show by Iwata Shin’ichi, Koiwa Takayoshi, and Takahashi Kōko. Arakawa Shūsaku Exhibition, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Hull House International Experimental Film Festival, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago.  K anesaka Kenji wins Fred A. Niles Award with Moeyasui Mimi (The Easily Burning Ears). All-Japan Independent Exhibition, Yokohama Civic Art Gallery, Yokohama.  At the exhibitors’ meeting on the first day, The Liaison Council is established.

6061965

5-23—5-28

9th Gar Gar Contemporary Art Exhibition, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo.

 The group holds a review meeting and a panel discussion, inviting Yoshida

Yoshie to take part. A debate on the pros and cons of submitting work to the Gifu Independent Exhibition happens and leads to the departure of five members who cannot “move away from hobby and the regional mindset.” 5-25 Zero Jigen Concert, Yamaha Hall, Nagoya.  Included are pieces by Iwata Shin’ichi (Concerto for Four Speakers, Piano, and Drum; Wind Quintet; Duet with Two Saxes; Violin Concerto with the Orchestra of Four Speakers; Piano Solo for Self-intoxication), Koiwa Takayoshi (Action by Sound: Music Action No. 1), Haga Nobuyoshi (Work), and Tsuzaki Masaji (piano performance). Mizukami Jun’s performance of Sexophonic: Sound may have taken place at this event. 5-28—5-30 Gegege: Manga Exhibition, Seto Civic Center, Seto, Aichi.  Organized by Avant-Garde Manga Artists Group Gegege (Asai Masuo et al.) which pursues “the Neo-Dadaism in manga.” The participants sing a chorus of “gegege…” the audience scribbles, boxing matches are held, and screaming fills the space. 5-31—6-5 Shinohara Ushio Exhibition: Singing Early Summer, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. JUNE Event Grassland by Azuchi Shūzō, Zeze High School, Ōtsu, Shiga.  Nine squares of grass (each 3x3 meters) are removed from the school’s lawns. JUNE Film Independent by Three, Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka, Tokyo.  Iimura Takahiko’s Riripatto ōkoku butōkai II (A Dance Party in the Kingdom of Lilliput II), featuring Kazakura Shō, is screened. 6-1—6-25 Jasper Johns Exhibition, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. 6-6 • The percentage of homes with in-house baths reaches 67.8% nationwide, to the detriment of the public bathhouse business. 6-6—6-12 Akiyama Yūtokutaishi Exhibition, Kinokuniya Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo. 6-11—6-13 Group I Exhibition, Gallery on the fifth floor, International House, Kobe. 6-11—6-24 Shiga Kenzō Exhibition: Jewel, Tokyo Hilton Hotels, Room 215, Shinjuku, Tokyo. 6-15 Ogikubo Gallery begins publication of a monthly review magazine Me (Eye), Tokyo.  The magazine runs until November 1968, publishing 34 issues in total. 6-15 • Tokyo Kōdō Sensen (Tokyo Action Front) begins publication, Tokyo.  Members are Ishii Kyōji, Kawani Hiroshi, Sasamoto Masataka, Matsuda Masao, and Yamaguchi Kenji. Contributors include Ishii, Kawani (under the pseudonym Anaki Teruo), and Hiraoka Masaaki. 6-16 • Tokyo Metropolitan Police confiscate uncensored film reels of Nikkatsu movie Kuroi Yuki (Black Snow), directed by Takechi Tetsuji, Tokyo.  The film is suspected of violating the Act against the public display of obscene matter. 6-18—7-25 Trends in Contemporary Japanese Art, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.  Included are works by Arakawa Shūsaku, Kudō Tetsumi, Shinohara Ushio, and Miki Tomio.

1965607

6-19

6-22

6-22—6-27

6-29 JULY 7-1—7-5

7-4 7-4—7-9 7-10—7-20 7-23

7-23—7-25

7-31—8-3

AUGUST AUGUST?

Street theater by Jōkyō Gekijō, Sukiyabashi Park, Tokyo.  Seven men in jute sackcloth, cutoff shirts and white robes, holding props such as a skeleton model and bone umbrellas in their hands, perform zazen meditation, scream up to the sky, swim in a pond, and writhe around. The performance is watched by approximately 500 people. • Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea is signed.  Zengakuren students against the treaty and police troops clash in Hibiya. On the same day, Shimane Prefecture Assembly issues a resolution declaring Takeshima Island (Dok-do in South Korea) to be a territory of Japan. The first Gunma Independent Exhibition, Gunma Prefectural Sports Center, Maebashi.  Included are works by NOMO, Group Doro, and The Realist. A panel discussion with Nakahara Yūsuke and Yoshida Yoshie is held. Yamadaya Gallery works as the secretariat. • Massive outbreak of flies occurs in the garbage dump on Yume-no-shima (Dream Island) and the extermination begins, Tokyo. Shiomi Mieko returns to Japan from the U.S. The First Wave of the Pan-Materialism Manifesto, Nishimura Gallery, Kyōbashi, Tokyo.  By art group Zantō Kaigi (Akiyama Yūtokutaishi et al.). Perpetual Fluxfest, Cinematheque, New York.  Kubota Shigeko presents Vagina Painting. Kurohata Exhibition, Kondō Gallery, Kayabachō, Tokyo.  A Happening is enacted. Kaku Exhibition: Art Gymnastics Contemporary, Kondō Gallery, Kayabachō, Tokyo. Asai Masuo sends an invitation for the 2nd Jōmon Festival to Matsuzawa Yutaka.  He asks Matsuzawa to give a presentation during the panel discussion on “Art and Eros.” Art Rally Awa-katsuyama Beach, Chiba.  Co-organized by Kuroi Me no Kai (Black Sprout Society, which could be an alternative name for Kurohata), Gaga, and Kōkeisha-tachi (The Successors). Sawahata Kazuaki of Gaga heads the event. Takayanagi Shitsuo, Matsue Kaku, Ishimoto Shūhei, Sawahata, and Yoshida Yoshie are scheduled to participate in the panel discussion on July 24. A Happening is enacted at the beach on July 25. 第2回縄文祭 The 2nd Jōmon Festival, Kasai Gallery, Kamisuwa Station, Suwa.  Jōmon People Group by Asai Masuo organizes this festival, which features a manga exhibition, Imagined Gegege; a panel discussion on “Art and Eros”; a poetry play, Sexual Lake; a jam session, Blue; and a street march, Black Prisoners. Ohara Kaichi leaves the group after this festival. [pp. 322–3] Kosugi Takehisa travels to the U.S. for the first time. Kanayama Akira and Tanaka Atsuko left Gutai.

6081965

8-1—8-10

8-2—8-31

8-3—8-8

8-3—8-8 8-9—8-19

Theater performance Don’t Recall by Kiri no Kai (Haze Group) of Seinen Geijutsuza (Youth Art Theater), Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka, Tokyo.  Written by Fukuda Yoshiyuki; directed by Kanze Hideo. The play conveys an anti-Vietnam War message. Kikuhata Mokuma creates the stage set, at the request of Yonekura Masakane, who is a member of Seinen Geijutsuza and a childhood friend of Kikuhata. Asai Masuo’s group goes down the Nagara River, Gifu.  A sai and two others go down the river from Gujō Hachiman on a raft made of truck tire tubes. Kyūshū-ha Exhibition, Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall, Fukuoka.  Included are works by Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ōguro Aiko, Ōyama Uichi, Ochi Osamu, Obata Hidesuke, Obana Shigeharu, Owari Takeshi, Taniguchi Toshio, Chō Yoriko, Tabe Mitsuko, Miyazaki Junnosuke, and Yonekura Toku. As specified on the invitation, “10th Anniversary Exhibition of Kyūshū-ha: 50 paintings worth 6,000 yen for you,” the members plan to sell Ochi’s paintings cheaply. The exhibits include a number of large works that make full use of the large exhibition space. This is the only Kyūshū-ha Exhibition for which Sakurai is absent, and virtually the last Kyūshū-ha Exhibition. On the proposal by Owari, who leads the group in place of Sakurai, the group decides to officially disband during the exhibition, but the group remains active until 1968. 4th Exhibition of Avant-Garde Tosa-ha, Daimaru, Kōchi.  From this point on, Hamaguchi Tomiji takes over leadership of the group. アンデパンダン・アート・フェスティバル（岐阜アンデパンダン展） Independents Art Festival (Gifu Independent Exhibition), Gifu Civic Center, Kogane Park, the right bank of Nagaragawa River upper reach of Nagara Bridge, City Library Hall, Gifu.  Included are works by: At Venue 1, the Civic Center and Kogane Park: Akiyama Yūtokutaishi (H-shi no yūga na seikatsu [The Elegant Life of Mr. H]), Iwata Shin’ichi, Osaka Group (Ōta Ryūzō et al.), Ōyama Uichi, Okayama Young Artists Group, Gar Gar, Vava (Gotō Akio and Komoto Akira), Jack Society (Kaneda Norifumi, Kimura Kyūzō, Koyama Tetsuo, Sasaki Kōsei, Satō Kiyoto, Satō Mitsuyoshi, Chiba Eisuke, Nagao Takaaki, Nakamura Masaharu, Matsuo Kiyoshi, and Watanabe Masao), Takasaki Motonao, Terada Takehiro, Naka Takehisa, NOMO, Fukunaga Toyoko, and Matsuzawa Yutaka. At Venue 2, Nagara Riverbank: Ikeda Tatsuo, Ikemizu Keiichi (The Man or Homo Sapiens), Iwata Shin’ichi, Group I, (Ana [Hole]), Zero Jigen (Sakuhin [Work]), Saitama Avant-Garde Artists Group, Anti-Civilization School (including Matsuzawa Yutaka). Zero Jigen builds a tent in the style of popular theater on the riverbed, in which it enacts a ritual, Ass World Mandala Festival. Saitama Avant-Garde Artists Group conducts Ishitsu monogatari (Lost and Found Story) in several venues in the city beyond the riverbank. Jack Society performs a “jacking” by walking around the city, including Yanagase Shopping Street, and some of the members are arrested by the police. In addition, Matsue Kaku and other members of Kurohata, whose names are not on the list of participating artists, hold their Vietcong Ritual with Zero Jigen at the riverbank. Mizukami Jun, also not listed

1965609

as an official participant, performs Kigōgaku (Semantics), in which he puts signs on stones at the riverbank, and Kuchibiru no tame no Bubble (Bubble for Lips), in which he appears unexpectedly, trembling his lips. On August 15, a symposium is held at the large hall of the Gifu Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The theme is “Is art possible in the present age?” and speakers include Akane Kazuo, Ikeda Tatsuo, Kitayama Hideo, Sasaki Kōsei, Sugiura Kōhei, Tōno Yoshiaki, Nakahara Yūsuke, Nomura Tarō, Hariu Ichirō, Matsuzawa Yutaka, Matsumoto Toshio, and Yoshida Yoshie. This is the most important event in the post-Yomiuri Independent period, and a watershed moment in the art of the 1960s, in terms of its large-scale organization with the cooperation of governmental sectors and corporations, its outdoor earthworks and conceptual experiments, the way performances permeated into urban spaces, and its role as a meeting place for performative artists from all over Japan. [pp. 175–9] 8-17—8-22 Kishimoto Sayako Exhibition, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo. 8-26—8-31 Zantō Kaigi Council: The Second Wave of the Pan-Materialism Manifesto, Nishimura Gallery, Kyōbashi, Tokyo.  Included is work by Akiyama Yūtokutaishi. 8-28—9-2 Kobayashi Tomi Exhibition, Takegawa Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Kobayashi is a leading member of Koe-naki-koe no Kai (Voiceless Voices Society). The recommendation messages on the invitation are written by Tsurumi Shunsuke and Okamoto Tarō. 8-30—9-4 Tanaka Fuji Exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. AUTUMN Ikeda Shōichi forms Theater Planning Group Bara (Rose), Kyoto. SEPTEMBER Andoromeda No. 11 is published, Nagakute, Aichi  This is the final issue of Andoromeda. SEPTEMBER Mizukami Jun enacts a Happening Exhibition of Fluorescent Objects: On the desire for womb, Maruyama Park Amphitheater, Kyoto. 9-1 Itoi Kanji is discharged from the psychiatric hospital, Nerima, Tokyo. 9-1—9-5 The 100 Desires of Today Exhibition, Modern Art Center of Japan, Mejiro, Tokyo.  This is an exhibition commemorating the inauguration of the Modern Art Center of Japan (MAC-J), curated by Yoshida Yoshie. Included are works by Ikeda Tatsuo, Kaneko Hidehiko, Sasaki Kōsei, Shiga Kenzō, Shinohara Ushio, Takiguchi Shūzō, Tanaka Fuji, Tsuruoka Masao, Doi Junen, Nakazawa Ushio, Nakamura Hiroshi, Nishio Kazumi, Hamaguchi Tomiji, Matsuzawa Yutaka, and Yoshioka Yasuhiro. 9-6—9-11 ∧×2 Exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  This is the last exhibition of Experimental Ground ∧ by Katō Minosuke and Manabe Sōhei. 9-6—9-12 17th Shigun Exhibition, Ginpōdō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. 9-6—9-14 フルックス週間 Flux Week, Gallery Crystal, Ginza, Tokyo.  Planned by Akiyama Kuniharu, Ichiyanagi Toshi and Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, who also participate as artists. Kobayashi Kenji, Shiomi Mieko, Takeda Akimichi, Takemitsu Tōru, Tone Yasunao, and Hayashi Miyori also participate. Schedule of Events:

6101965

9-8—9-13 9-10

9-10—9-15

9-10—9-25

9-13 9-16—9-20

9-16—9-21

9-18

9-19

9-28—10-3

September 8: Shiomi Mieko Day, Water Music and Piece for Two Performers (with Yamaguchi) September 9: Flux Short Film Day September 11: Night Concert (Akiyama, Ichiyanagi, Kobayashi, Takeda, Takemitsu, Shiomi, Tone, et al.), Tone’s Prohibition of Ready Made (with Akiyama, Ichiyanagi, and Takeda) September 14: Swimsuit Show by Miyuki Minako’s mannequins; Yamaguchi’s Rainbow Operation, performed with words and light in a transparent plastic mosquito net that fills the gallery; Nam June Paik’s Serenade for Allison is performed by Nakahara Isako. [pp. 186–8] Sunohara Toshiyuki Exhibition, Ogikubo Gallery, Tokyo. Liaison Council’s meeting for the All-Japan Independent Exhibition, Carioca, Ginza, Tokyo.  The council is renamed Contemporary Art Practitioners Assembly. Inspired by Today Exhibition, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Co-organized with Kuroi Me no Kai. Work by Sawahata Kazuaki is exhibited. “Happening and Ritual: Orgy on Japan’s shortest night” is held on the night of September 10; during this event, Kurohata performs Ritual Dedicated to the Shooting of a Viet Cong Boy (which may have appeared as Prayer for Ceasefire in the Indo-Pakistani War on September 13). 9th Shell Art Award Exhibition, Shirakiya and Itō Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo.  Included are works by Kishimoto Sayako, Shinohara Ushio (3rd Prize), and Takamatsu Jirō. • The International Bureau of Expositions in Paris decides the 1970 World Exposition is to be held in Osaka. 10th Gar Gar Contemporary Art Exhibition: Four Coelacanths, Saitama Prefectural Art Museum, Urawa.  Included are works by Uchida Yoshirō, Saitō Takao, Harada Eiji, and Fukuda Katsubon. 18th Shigun Exhibition, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  At the opening party on September 18, “Avant-Garde Art Debate, Actions, etc.” is held, with a Happening by Kurohata, featuring Matsue Kaku and the jazz performance of Shimada Kōichi and the Scarlet Four. Ohara Kaichi embarks on a wandering journey across Japan, pulling a handcart.  Departing from Tokyo, Ohara passes through Takasaki, Nao’etsu, Toyama, Kanazawa, Fukui, Tottori, Matsue, Hagi, Fukuoka, Kumamoto, Kagoshima, Miyazaki, Ōita, Hiroshima, Okayama, Kobe, Osaka, Nara, Nagoya, and then Hamamatsu. The journey lasts until June 1966. “Kangaroo Court” for the Inspired by Today Exhibition, Modern Art Center of Japan, Mejiro, Tokyo.  The joint review meeting of Gaga members, represented by Sawahata Kazuaki, emceed by Yoshida Yoshie. Kuroi Me (the former name of Kurohata), as a supporter of the exhibition, enacts a Happening on the street in front of Mejiro Station. 4th Okayama City Art Exhibition, Okayama Prefectural Cultural Center.  Okayama Young Artists Group presents collaborative work Our Struggle.

1965611

OCTOBER

10-1 10-4—10-9 10-4—10-9

10-9—10-12

10-18—10-30 10-25—10-31 10-25—11-7

10-27—11-2 11-1

11-1

11-1—11-6

11-2 11-4—11-8

Zero Jigen enacts Ritual of Transporting a Wrapped Woman’s Body, Yamanote Line between Shinjuku and Yūrakuchō Station, Tokyo.  Performed by Katō Yoshihiro, Kamijō Junjirō, K.T., Nagata Satoshi, and Matsuba Masao. Dressed in morning coats, they carry a naked woman wrapped in a transparent plastic sheet onto the train. Reported by the station staff, a police car and ambulances arrive to stop the performance. This is one of the five or so rituals in which a naked woman or man is transported by train. • Monthly magazine Hōseki (Jewelry) begins publication by Kōbunsha. Shinohara Ushio Exhibition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo. Signposts in Modern Age: The everyday and non-artistic nature, Yamadaya Gallery, Maebashi, Gunma.  Included are works by NOMO members Isahai Tomio, Katō Akira, Kaneko Hidehiko, Tajima Hiroaki, Tsutsumi Yukio, and Fujimori Katsuji. Seibi Exhibition, Kyoto Prefecture Gallery.  Included is Mizukami Jun’s Teisō-tai ni taisuru fukugō sareta osutorashizumu, fetishizumu matawa uragaesareta kaigara Rea (Compounded ostracism or fetishism to a chastity belt, or reversed shell Rea: Chastity Belt’s prophesy ’s prophesy). Miki Tomio Exhibition, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Group Shikaku Exhibition, Mudo Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  E xhibiting artists are Sano Yūji, Tanabe Tei, Suenaga Tamio, and H. K. Seibi Exhibition, Kiyamachi Gallery, Kyoto.  Included is Mizukami Jun’s Teisōo-tai ni taisuru juso matawa musubi (Curse against Chastity Belt or Knots). Terada Takehiro Sculpture Exhibition, Akiyama Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Akasegawa Genpei is prosecuted by the Tokyo Public Prosecutor’s Office.  A kasegawa is charged on suspicion of violating the Act on Control of the Imitation of Currency and Securities. In response, Akasegawa visits the Modern Art Center of Japan with Jōnouchi Motoharu and asks Yoshida Yoshie to work as the secretariat for his upcoming 1,000-yen bill trial. • Tōkaidō Shinkansen Hikari cuts travel time between Tokyo and Osaka to three hours and ten minutes.  The number of daily operations increases to 55 services. 20th Century Museum Ass World Ritual Exposition, Naiqua Gallery, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  Zero Jigen members participate: Iwata Shin’ichi, Katō Yoshihiro, K.T., Nagata Satoshi, and Matsuba Masao. Inside an installation with an iron bed, molds of buttocks, etc., Ass World Mysterious Ritual Demonstration is performed from 5 to 7 p.m. each day. Rituals are also enacted on the streets of Shinbashi and Ginza for the full seven-day duration. Itoi Kanji visits the exhibition. Kurohata conducts “Swimming in the cold” as an “event,” a pond in Inokashira Park, Kichijōji, Tokyo. Sa-i-n (new edition of Sa’in) is screened in the late show, Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka, Tokyo.  Mobilizes 3,000 people in 5 days.

6121965

11-4—11-8

11-5—11-15

11-6 11-8 11-8—11-14 11-10

11-11

11-13

11-19—11-29

11-26—11-28 11-26—12-1 11-27—11-28

11-29

11-30 DECEMBER

Homo Ludens: Sawahata Kazuaki’s Playing Room, Modern Art Center of Japan, Mejiro, Tokyo.  Matsue Kaku et al. from Kurohata enact a Happening by hanging up condoms filled with water inside of Sawahata’s work. Artists To-day Exhibition 1965, Yokohama Civic Art Gallery.  Included are works by Arakawa Shūsaku, Kikuhata Mokuma, and Shiraga Kazuo. • Weekly F6 Seven begins publication by Kōbunsha. • 11PM (NTV) begins broadcasting. Impersonal Exhibition by Group I, Daiwa Gallery, Kobe. Zenra ketsuzō-kai gishiki (Buck-naked Ass World Ritual) by Zero Jigen, Kashima Shrine, Tokyo.  Iwata Shin’ichi, Katō Yoshihiro, and Kamijō Junjirō, et al. perform imomushi korokoro, lying on the stairs, and “Gosho guruma no gishiki” (Ritual of Oxcar’s Wheel) or “Shibari to burasagari no gi” (Binding and Hanging Ritual). Imomushi korokoro is a children’s game that involves people squatting and holding onto the waist or shoulders of the person to the front, move like a caterpillar as a group. Katō Yoshihiro walks with a candle on his head, Ginza, Tokyo.  K atō walks with a candle on a bald spot from alopecia areata, caused by the anxiety of his hard work since around June. Festival ’65 by Group N39, Iwate Prefectural Education Center Large Hall, Morioka.  Sakuyama Ryūji and Murakami Yoshio give lectures. Butoh Chain ’65 participates as a guest. In Parody: 20 Years of Postwar Art (written by Takahashi Shōhachirō, performed by Group N39), the artists move around with photo panels of postwar art during the lecture. Signposts in Modern Age: The everyday and non-artistic nature (Tokyo Exhibition), Modern Art Center of Japan, Mejiro, Tokyo.  Included are works by members of NOMO: Isahai Tomio, Katō Akira, Kaneko Hidehiko, Tajima Hiroaki, Tsutsumi Yukio, Tsunoda Jin’ichi, Fujimori Katsuji. Spell 9: Guerrilla Exhibition by Asai Masuo, Seto Civic Center, Aichi. Koyama Tetsuo Exhibition, Iwashima Gallery, Ogikubo, Tokyo. Rose Dance: À la Maison de M. Civeçawa (Towards Mr Shibusawa’s House) by Dance Experience Group, Sennichidani Temple Hall, Shinanomachi, Tokyo.  Directed, choreographed and performed by Hijikata Tatsumi. Stage design by Nakanishi Natsuyuki. Music by Kosugi Takehisa and Tone Yasunao. Kazakura Shō enacts a Happening with Jōnouchi Motoharu in which he cuts off half his hair. Akasegawa Genpei participates as a staff member. Ikemizu Keiichi enacts Happening: Homo Sapiens, Osaka.  He enters the cage at Tennōji Zoo from 2 to 3 p.m. and at Shinsaibashi-suji from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. • Tokyo issues its first smog alert. “Meeting Group for the 1,000-Yen Note Incident” is established, Modern Art Center of Japan, Mejiro, Tokyo.  Participants are Akasegawa Genpei, Imaizumi Akihiko, Kawani Hiroshi (Secretary General), Takamatsu Jirō, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, and Yoshida Yoshie.

1965613

12-1—12-27

12-3—12-8 12-5

12-11 12-16—12-22

12-21—12-27

12-22—12-24

12-24

2nd Nagaoka Contemporary’s Award Exhibition, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Nagaoka, Niigata.  Included are works by Kikuhata Mokuma, Shinohara Ushio, Shiraga Kazuo, Takamatsu Jirō, and Miki Tomio. Tanaka Shintarō Exhibition, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo. Asai Masuo presents actions for articles in Hōseki, Seto, Aichi.  A sai and his group enact the following events: sitting around a table in the ruins of a kiln wearing white coats; dragging a white cloth and objects between the quarry and the town; and “The Last Supper,” in which they eat a meal around a table set up on the bridge. Asai stands on his head, alone atop the mountain. •Forced passage of the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea at the plenary session of the House of Councilors. ミューズ週間 A Week for Muse (Muse Week), Modern Art Center of Japan, Mejiro, Tokyo.  Curated by Yoshida Yoshie, who also presents a performance piece. Approximately forty artists participate, including Akasegawa Genpei, Akiyama Yūtokutashi (an action with a toy gun?), Adachi Masao (screening of Sa’in), Ikeda Tatsuo, Kazakura Shō (emerges from a suitcase brought by Akasegawa, wearing an aqualung), Kuni Chiya Dance Institute, Kurohata (Preview of Tsuina), Jikan-ha (rubber cords stretched between the walls, floor and ceiling, as in “the 5th Jikan-ha Exhibition”), Jōnouchi Motoharu, Tsujimura Kazuko, Niijima Toshio, and Zero Jigen. On December 18, Zero Jigen members march from the streets of Shinjuku to MAC-J, where they enact rituals, hanging up banners with the texts, “Zero Jigen sōkekki taikai” (Zero Jigen general buttock rise-up rally), “Auga wakare no saigo kapaccho saikai” (Meeting is the first parting – kapaccho reunion), “Makura koroge no monogatari” (A tale of rolling pillows), and “Shichū-jin no seiseikatsu zukai shiki” (Illustration of sex life by four pillar people). This is an important event in the history of the performance art, because it was organized at a kind of alternative space, was a gathering of artists from many different disciplines, and due to Yoshida’s involvement as a curator, creating an event format that enabled the performers and the audience to swap roles with each other. [pp. 188–90] Okamoto Shin’ya: Vmpanyoo Exhibition, Sakura Gallery, Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum, Nagoya; streets in front of Kyoto Station.  W ith this exhibition, Okamoto becomes acquainted with Asai Masuo and they begin to work together. 5th Performance of Jōkyō Gekijō, Porn Theater John Silver, Maison francojaponaise Hall, Ochanomizu, Tokyo.  Suzuki Shirō from Kurohata participates in lighting. • Pit Inn opens, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Initially the establishment is a coffee shop that sells car accessories. In March 1966, it begins to host regular jazz concerts. Later, it becomes one of the centers of underground culture for theaters and Happenings.

6141965-1966

12-29

Asai Masuo enacts actions in a plastic bag, Seto, Aichi.  Starting from the Miyamae Bridge, Asai goes into the muddy Seto River, and connects his body and the bridge with a rope. It becomes such a large disturbance that the police are called.

1966 IN THIS YEAR:

1-3

1-9

1-10—1-16 1-15

1-16

1-18

1-21—2-27 1-24—1-29 1-24—1-30

Matsue Kaku enacts anti-Vietnam War rituals, Tokyo.  Matsue conducts Happenings in various venues around Tokyo, using Café Spain in Shinjuku as the main stage. Nakata Kazunari Exhibition, Kokusai Gallery, Osaka.  Nakata performs Happening Show in which he inflates condoms on the street. 8 Generation is joined by Gun Masaaki, Nakao Kanji, and Yokota Gen’ichirō of Nihon University College of Art, Tokyo. Itō Mika forms Bizarre Ballet Group, Tokyo. Alain Kaprow’s Assemblage, Environments & Happenings is published by Harry N. Abrams, New York.  The author includes an analysis of Gutai in this work. Asai Masuo enacts Burial Ceremony on a sidewalk in Sakaemachi, Nagoya.  A sai lies down on the ground with a white cloth over his body. This ceremony might be viewed as a confirmation of the death of the Andoromeda group. Asai Masuo performs a poetic drama, January 9, on a sidewalk in front of a police box, Sakae, Nagoya.  A sai and his group tell each other’s fortunes with playing cards at a table on the sidewalk. E. Jari Exhibition by Group I, Noonu Gallery, Shinsaibashi, Osaka. Opening Party of Jack Art Museum, Jack Art Museum (Iwashima Gallery), Ogikubo, Tokyo.  Iwashima Gallery changes its name to Jack Art Museum. Grand Assembly of Contemporary Art Practitioners Meeting for All-Japan Independent Exhibition, Kōsei Nenkin Kaikan Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  The Meeting group is dissolved and the Liaison Council is established. Kurohata fires a “blast,” which potentially refers to the enactment of a performance. • Indefinite strike begins at Waseda University. opposing the increase in tuition fees and demanding student participation in the operation of the Student Hall, Tokyo. New Generation of Contemporary Art, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.  Included are works by Shinohara Ushio and Takamatsu Jirō. Art Fair by NOMO, Yamadaya Gallery, Maebashi, Gunma. Mizukami Jun Exhibition, Toga Gallery, Kyoto.  M izukami presents Teisōtai ni taisuru fukugō sareta osutorashizumu, matawa uragaeshi no nantairui (Compounded Ostracism and Fetishism to a Chastity Belt, or Reversed Mollusks) and his language-based expression, Hangi repōto (Pan-ritual Report). Iwata Shin’ichi, Katō Yumiko, Fujita Nishihiro, and Je pe. Kazan also participates.

1966615

1-28

1-31

1-31

2-1—2-6

2-4—2-15 2-7—2-13 2-9

2-18—3-2

2-10

2-28—3-19 MARCH

Matsuzawa Yutaka enacts Busshitsu shōmetsu shiki 1966 (Material Extinction Ritual 1966), Modern Art Center of Japan, Mejiro, Tokyo.  A presentation of Shin-kyūseishu kōtan kokuchi 1966 (Announcement of New Messiah’s Nativity 1966) and Material Extinction Ritual. In Material Extinction Ritual, Matsuzawa sits on a chair that faces a canvas hanging on the wall of the gallery terrace. He watches the large canvas, which becomes small each time the piece is performed, until finally it disappears. The performance is scheduled to be repeated 12 times, once per month. • Katsura Kokinji Afternoon Show begins broadcasting on NET TV.  The title was changed from Afternoon Show. The program is hosted by “The Angry Kokinji,” and becomes quite popular. Kikan 10 is published, Tokyo.  This is the final issue of Kikan, a special feature on the Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident. This Is Jack: Jack Fair Exhibition, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Included are works by Jack Society members: Itō Eiji, Ōkubo Fumio, Kaneda Noribumi, Kimura Kyūzō, Kobayashi Shichirō, Koyama Tetsuo, Sasaki Kōsei, Satō Kiyoto, Satō Mitsusuke, Chino Takemi, Nagao Takaaki, Nakamura Masaji, Hashimoto Aiko, Fukui Shin, Matsuo Kiyoshi, Yoshida Sadaichi, Yoshida Hisao (Chairman), Watanabe Masao. This Is Jack, a document recording the group’s activities and members’ works, is published. Perfect: Art Fair, Exhibition of Explanation of Physical Civilization by Sasaki Kōsei, Jack Art Museum, Ogikubo, Tokyo. Hirata Yōichi and Nishiwaki Hisae Exhibition, Shinanobashi Gallery, Osaka.  M izukami Jun performs Teisō-tai rei II (Chastity Belt Ceremony Ⅱ). Art Gymnastics Escalation Battle is performed in a plaza in front of Shinjuku Koma Theater, Tokyo.  Performed by Matsue Kaku; directed by Suzuki Shirō. The performance is a reenactment of a street battle between American troops and Viet Cong guerrillas. 19th Japan Independents Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.  Included are Matsue Kaku’s Tsuina gishiki emaki (Scroll Picture of Tsuina Ritual) and Yagara Yutaka’s Amerika wa Nihon kara Betonamu kara deteike (America Must Leave Japan and Vietnam). N  • egotiations between Waseda University’s All-Campus Joint Struggle Council and the university authorities break down; the students occupy the university administration buildings, Tokyo.  On February 21, the police remove the students and block the campus for entrance examinations. • Shinohara Ushio Exhibition, Tokyo Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Ritual of Oxcar’s Wheel by Human Body by Zero Jigen, Kashima Shrine, Tokyo.  “A nude woman is hanging in the center, wrapped in strings. At her feet, men, nude as well, are tied up, with their feet all tied to the woman. They spin like a roulette wheel. Blood flows from the men as they spin on the floor. The woman makes a strange groan.”

6161966

MARCH MARCH MARCH MARCH MARCH MARCH MARCH?

MARCH? 3-2

3-5—3-11

3-6 3-10

3-13—3-18 3-15 3-19 3-22—3-27

SPRING APRIL

APRIL APRIL APRIL

Ritual of Lined-up Asses: Ikebukuro Special Bargain Action by Zero Jigen, Modern Art Center of Japan, Mejiro, Tokyo. Yoshida Sadaichi and Itō Eiji are appointed President and Vice President, respectively, of Jack Society, Tokyo. Satō Shigechika becomes Editor-in-Chief of Eiga hyōron (Film Critique), starting from the March issue. Eiju Hirō graduates from the Faculty of Agriculture, Tohoku University, Sendai. Katō Isao graduates from Kanazawa College of Art. Muta Kunihiro graduates from Nagasaki Nishi High School and moves to Tokyo. Modern Art Center of Japan is closed, Mejiro, Tokyo.  For the final event, Yoshida Yoshie and a female painter stretch strings around the gallery like a spider’s web and play soccer while cutting the strings with razor blades. Matsue Kaku performs art gymnastics, Elementary School in Ōta Ward, Tokyo. Asai Masuo publishes the second issue of Gege, Nagakute, Aichi.  K atō Yoshihiro’s “Collection of Translated Words from the Sutra of Ass World Mandala by Zero Jigen’s Guru Vol. 2” is included in this issue. 10th Kyoto Independent Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  Included are works by Ikemizu Keiichi (Cage), Iwata Shin’ichi, Koiwa Takayoshi, Fukunaga Toyoko, Mizukami Jun (FCFS [Figuring Chart for Sexophone]). • Nippon Television begins broadcasting the world’s first color spot commercials. A meeting of the Liaison Council for All-Japan Independent Exhibition decides to establish the All-Japan Contemporary Artists Council, Hanazono, Ueno, Tokyo.  Participants are Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Kaneda Noribumi, Saotome Yukio, Sasaki Kōsei, Satō Kiyoto, Shibata Shōichi, Chiba Eisuke, Nakamura Masaji, Miyamoto Kōji, Miyamoto Yasuhiro, and Matsumoto Momoji. Kishimoto Sayako Exhibition: Tombstone of Narcissus, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo. • Shibusawa Tatsuhiko’s Himitsu kessha no techō (Handbook of the Secret Society) is published by Hayakawa Shobō. Nakajima Yoshio enters Sweden. ’66 Hokkaido Independent Exhibition in commemoration of the 20th Anniversary, Marui-Imai Department Store, Asahikawa, Hokkaidō.  The last edition of the Hokkaidō Independent Exhibition. Kanesaka Kenji returns from the U.S. Seibi Exhibition, Kiyamachi Gallery, Kyoto.  Included are works by Mizukami Jun (Pot Bottomless and other works) and Miki Tetsuo, who enacts a performance whilst in a plastic bag. Both of them are members of Group U. Azuchi Shūzō enrolls in the Philosophy Course, Department of Literature, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. Kanesaka Kenji travels to India. Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music (present-day Aichi University of the Arts) opens in Nagakute, Aichi.

1966617

APRIL APRIL 4-1 4-10

4-10 4-11—4-16 4-12 4-15—4-29

4-16

4-18—4-23

4-20—4-30 4-25—5-1 4-26 4-29 MAY

MAY MAY MAY

MAY?

Tokyo Zokei University opens in Hachiōji, Tokyo. • Enrollment at four-year universities exceeds a million students. Kyushu Sangyo University establishes its Faculty of Arts (with Departments of Fine Arts, Design, and Photography), Fukuoka. Asai Masuo performs a street poetic drama Gege, in front of the Oriental Nakamura Department Store, Sakae, Nagoya.  A sai brings out a futon mat and a “naughty bag” on the sidewalk. Men and women lie down together, reading manga, screaming, and wrapping strings around themselves. Ochi Osamu leaves Japan to move to the U.S. 11th Gar Gar Contemporary Art Exhibition, Ginza Gallery, Tokyo.  A “Touch Exhibition,” featuring works that the audience can touch.  ūkoku (Patriotism), directed by Mishima Yukio, is released, Art Theater •Y Shinjuku Bunka, Tokyo. Fashionable 15 Days, Jack Art Museum (Iwashima Gallery), Ogikubo, Tokyo.  This is the first exhibition of the Jack Art Museum organized by programs chosen from open-call proposals. Members of Jack Society and Kurohata participate. The exhibition consists of an Instant Costume Contest on April 15; a dance party organized by a rock band Highwaymen (with a special feature, [Matsue] “Kaku Solo” performance of art gymnastics) on April 16; Mystery Zone by Chiba Eisuke on April 24; Fashionable Show organized by Pola and Beauty Yokota and a sword show on April 25; and finally, a closing party and discussion on April 29. Koshimaki Osen no hyakko no chikyū (One Hundred Montes Veneris of Loincloth Osen) by Jōkyō Gekijō, Haikagura Theater (vacant lot of a pool in front of Toyama Bathhouse, Toyama Heights), Shin-ōkubo, Tokyo. Ishikawa Shun Exhibition, Satō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Ishikawa is a Sendai-based artist who organized West Park Art Festival in November 1967. Tanaka Fuji Exhibition, Gallery Crystal, Ginza, Tokyo. Parasite Exhibition by Group I, Shinanobashi Gallery, Osaka. The First General Meeting of 8 Generation, Carioca, 2F, Ginza, Tokyo. • Sony Building is completed, Ginza, Tokyo. Kyodai Raruva ohikizuri shiki (Giant Larva Dragging Ritual) by Mizukami Jun, between Kyoto and Osaka.  On the train, Tanaka Kiyoshi plays the guitar and Mizukami drags an object made of cloth and rope. Azuchi Shūzō joins the theater company Bara, Kyoto. • Waseda Shō-gekijō (Waseda Little Theater Company) is formed, Tokyo. • Kyojin no hoshi (The Star of the Giants), written by Kajiwara Ikki and drawn by Kawasaki Noboru, begins serialization in Shūkan Shōnen Magajin and continues until January 1971. Art group Genshoku (tactile hallucination) is formed, Shizuoka.

6181966

5-1

5-7—5-12 5-9—5-15 5-10—5-30

5-10—6-5

5-11 5-11 5-16

5-20—5-22

5-21

全国狂気見本市（‘66ヨヨアンデパンダン前衛芸術家亜苦庶ん大会） All-Japan Insanity Trade Fair (’66 Yoyo Independent Avant-Garde Artists’ Action Assembly), May Day venue (temporary stage in a lot of the former Washington Heights), Yoyogi, Tokyo.  Participating artists: Itoi Kanji, 8 Generation, Sawahata Kazuaki Faction Gaga Remnants, Kaku Flamenco Company, Kurohata, Remnants Council, Shikaku, Shigun, Jack Society, The Three-finger Action Squad (Daisanbonyuni no Kōdōtai) of the Subversive Maneuver Team (Hakai Kōsakutai) of the Late Night Alliance Violence Committee, Zero Jigen, Art Workshop School, Stage Workshop Company. Zero Jigen marches with eight men in morning suits who carry on their backs life-sized dolls and two women in black dresses holding pillows. At the May Day venue, men get down on all fours with fireworks on their buttocks. Matsue sets fire to a flag. Itoi participates in the street march wearing a penis-shaped kantōi tunic (a simple type of clothing comprised of a large piece of cloth with a hole cut out of the middle for the head). Members of 8 Generation walk around with cigarette butts and matchboxes affixed to their clothes. Members of Jack Society, including a man (Sasaki Kōsei) in tights with finger cots covering his entire body and another member in a sculpture with protruding eyeballs (breasts?), hold up a banner that read “Jack reforms thoughts.” Exhibitions of Kojima Nobuaki, Tanaka Shintarō, Tanigawa Kōichi, and Yoshino Tatsumi, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Yoshioka Shigeo Exhibition, Noonu Gallery, Shinsaibashi, Osaka. 7th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.  Included are works by Arakawa Shūsaku (Ohara Museum of Art Prize), Koyama Tetsuo, Shinohara Ushio, Shiraga Kazuo, Tanaka Shintarō, Miki Tomio, Motonaga Sadamasa, and Yoshida Minoru (Competition Prize). Trends in Contemporary Japanese Art, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.  Included are works by Kishimoto Sayako, Takamatsu Jirō, Tanaka Shintarō, and Yamaguchi Katsuhiro. Parade with a two-wheeled cart of naked dolls by Zero Jigen, Shinjuku, Tokyo. Ohara Kaichi, wandering with his two-wheeled handcart, reunites with Asai Masuo, Nagakute, Aichi. •The Communist Party of China announces the establishment of the Subcommittee for Cultural Revolution, marking the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Gege Asai Masuo + Environmental Condition Exhibition, Seto Civic Center, Aichi.  A lternative title is Gege Manga Exhibition. Asai hangs cloth bags from the ceiling and lies on a futon mat on the floor. Okamoto Shin’ya, invited by Asai, pastes 100 fragments of paper with texts in the hall. Jack Society conducts a “jacking” on Saturday Show (NET TV), sidewalk in front of Iwashima Gallery, Ogikubo, Tokyo.  Koyama Tetsuo, Sasaki Kōsei, Chida Ui, and Chiba Eisuke participate. Chiba sits on a stepladder with a fishing rod and drops a line. Sasaki is in a bag. An unknown member crawls carrying a doll on his back, and another smokes lying down. A fire truck is dispatched and police officers intervene, taking

1966619

5-22

5-24

JUNE JUNE 6-5—6-10 6-17

6-23—6-28 6-26

6-28

6-29—7-2

6-30—7-2 JULY JULY JULY

several members to the police station. The scene is recorded on film and sound by hidden equipment the day before it is aired. The commentators on the program are Takashima Tadao and Togawa Masako. Asai Masuo and Okamoto Shin’ya perform poetic drama Doro! (Mud!), riverside of Seto River, Seto, Aichi.  Performed on the last day of Gege Asai Masuo + Environmental Condition Exhibition. They perform the action of disassembling a clock. Zero Jigen Demonstration of All Catalogued Repertoires, Geijutsuza Theater and streets with movie theaters, Yūrakuchō, Tokyo.  This is a street advertisement for the Toho film Kurēji da yo Kisōtengai (It’s a Strange Heaven) which opens on May 28. 15 men and women participate. On the stage of Geijutsuza, a man rides a “group masturbation machine” and breathes into a huge hose connected to the crotch of a woman who is wrapped in bandages. Yoshimura Masunobu returns from the U.S. • Comic Magazine begins publication from Hōbunsha.  This is Japan’s first gekiga (story comic) magazine for young adults. Ikemizu Keiichi Exhibition, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo. Jack Society conducts a “jacking” on the Katsura Kokinji Afternoon Show (NET TV), Tokyo.  Participating artists include Kaneda Noribumi; Kimura Kyūzō, who attaches packing tags all over his body; Koyama Tetsuo, who bites a cabbage; Sasaki Kōsei as “an existence commentator” who explains the group to Katsura Kokinji; Satō Kiyoto, who measures packed items with a measuring tape; Chida Ui; and Chiba Eisuke. Ōgi Hiroko and Tanaka Kinuyo participate as guests. Shinohara Ushio Exhibition, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo. Happenings on Tune, French Cancan, Kyoto.  Seto Kazan, Tanaka Kiyoshi, Miki Tetsuo, and Mizukami Jun participate. The artists perform music while wearing masks. •Sanrizuka-Shibayama Rengō Kūkō Hantai Dōmei (Sanrizuka-Shibayama Farmers’ League Against the New Tokyo International Airport) is formed, Chiba.  Tomura Issaku is Chair. Sogetsu Cinematheque: Underground Cinema, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Screenings include Iimura Takahiko’s Riripatto ōkoku butōkai (A Dance Party in the Kingdom of Lilliput) and Ai (Love), Kanesaka Kenji’s America America and Hopscotch. This screening event is also held at Yamaichi Hall, Kyoto (organized by Shi Documentary Film) on July 5; Science and Technology Center Hall, Osaka, on July 6; and again at Sogetsu Art Center on July 11 and 12. The Beatles Japan tour, Nippon Budōkan, Tokyo. • Yoshida Hisao and Kaneda Noribumi are appointed President and Vice President, respectively, of Jack Society, Tokyo. • Hitachi Maxell releases Japan’s first cassette tape. • Mike Maki’s song Bara ga saita (Roses in Bloom) becomes a big hit.  This is the first Japanese-produced folk song and triggers a folk music boom.

6201966

7-1—7-10

7-1—7-31 7-4 7-12—7-22 7-13—7-20

7-15—7-21 7-16—7-18

7-16—8-7

7-25—7-28

7-30

7-31 AUGUST AUGUST 8-1 8-6

Genshoku Exhibition, Gallery Sōen, Ginza.

 Maeda Morikazu hands out hanafuda (Japanese playing cards) to passersby at

the entrance continually throughout the exhibition. Kobayashi Shichirō: Existence Design Exhibition, Iwashima Gallery, Ogikubo, Tokyo. • A Cabinet meeting decides on the construction of the New Tokyo International Airport in Sanrizuka Town, Narita City, Chiba. Contemporary Art Exhibition of Small Works for On-site Sale in support of the 1,000-yen Note Trial, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo. “Signpost Painting” Exhibition by NOMO, Sidewalk of Maebashi Building Shopping Street, Gunma.  Sponsored by the organizers of the Tanabata matsuri (Star Festival). Koyama Tetsuo Exhibition, Iwashima Gallery, Ogikubo, Tokyo. Instructional Illustrations for the Study of Divine Favor in Sexual Love: Tomato, in commemoration of the dissolution of the unified Ankoku Butoh school, Kinokuniya Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Organized by Dance Experience Group. Directed, choreographed, and performed by Hijikata Tatsumi. Co-starring Ishii Mitsutaka, Ohno Kazuo, Ohno Yoshito, and Kasai Akira, et al. Music by Tone Yasunao. Poster and invitation card design by Nonaka Yuri. Kazakura Shō hangs a chair above the audience seats like a pendulum. Akasegawa Genpei participates as a member of staff. An exhibition and on-site sale of Hijikata Tatsumi’s collection is held. Inaugural performance of Tenjōkan in support of 1,000-yen Note Trial, Tenjōkan (Ogikubo Gallery), Tokyo.  Film screening organized by VAN Film Science Institute, Ogikubo Gallery, and 1,000-yen Note Case Meeting. Planned by Kawani Hiroshi. Zero Jigen Exhibition, Art Museum and Meeting Room of Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall, Nagoya.  Included are works by Asai Masuo, Iwata Shin’ichi, Koiwa Takayoshi, Mizukami Jun, and Miyata Harumi. Mori Hideto camping retreat, Shōmyō-in Temple, Yawatano Beach, Shizuoka.  The group is assembled by critic Mori Hideto. 12 artists participate, including students from Nagoya University of Arts. Asai Masuo joins immediately after the closing of the Zero Jigen Exhibition. Asai Masuo dies at Yawatano Beach, Shizuoka. Mizukami Jun enacts A Gift from Kick Agency III. August issue of Eiga hyōron features underground films for the first time. All-Japan Contemporary Artists Council publishes the first issue of Art 21, Tokyo. ベトナム反戦録亜苦庶んパレード（Happenings） Anti-Vietnam War Action Parade (Happenings), Shinjuku Station South and East Entrance, Tokyo.  Participating artists from 8 Generation, Gaga Remnants, Kurohata (Vietnam Will Be a Huge Cemetery, a sound and saimon-gatari performance), Group Shikaku, Zero Jigen (a procession in white cloth cloaks with two female bodies), Group Mizunoki, Stage Workshop Company.

1966621

8-7

8-10

8-20—8-28

8-21 8-26—8-31

15 Painters Painting on Shutters, Maebashi Building Shopping Street, Gunma.  Participating artists: Koyama Tetsuo, Sasaki Kōsei, Satō Mitsusuke, and Chiba Eisuke (Jack Society); Isahai Tomio, Katō Akira, Kaneko Hidehiko, Tajima Hiroaki, Tsutsumi Yukio, Tsunoda Jin’ichi, and Fujimori Katsuji (NOMO); Kishine Mitsutaka and Matsumoto Momoji (Rozo-gun); Ihara Chizuko, and Chida Ui. Members of Jack Society conduct a “jacking” on the streets between Maebashi Station and the Bank of Japan. The first hearing of the 1,000-yen Note Trial (an exhibition event in the courtroom), Courtroom 701, Tokyo District Court.  A kasegawa Genpei, Itō Shizuka, Takiguchi Shūzō, Nakahara Yūsuke, and Yasumasa Shigeru give statements. Along with the display of works by Akasegwa and Hi-Red Center, Takamatsu Jirō and Nakanishi Natsuyuki make presentations using strings, clothepins and human bodies, respectively, and in the process turn the courtroom into a Happening stage. 現代美術の祭典（堺アンデパンダン展） Festival of Contemporary Art (Sakai Independent), Kanaoka Park and its Gymnasium, Sakai, Osaka.  Included are works by Ikemizu Keiichi (planning, indoor and outdoor exhibition, presentation in the portfolio), Abe Kōshi (indoor and outdoor exhibition), Group I (indoor exhibition, portfolio, Happening), Itoi Kanji (Dada no keiken [Dada Experience], indoor exhibition), Iwakura Masahito (Jōkisha [Steam Engine], outdoor exhibition), Ōyama Uichi (indoor exhibition), Gar Gar (indoor exhibition, Happening; this is considered their 12th Exhibition), Sasaki Kōsei (indoor exhibition), Jack Society (This is Jack: Jack Society Action Policy, indoor exhibition), All-Japan Contemporary Artists Council (portfolio), Chida Uiko [Chida Ui] (indoor exhibition, Happening), Nakata Kazunari (indoor exhibition), NOMO (outdoor exhibition, Happening), Fukunaga Toyoko (indoor and outdoor exhibition, portfolio), Matsue Kaku and Kurohata (Bijutsu taisō no tame no oto to shi no gishiki [Ritual of Sound and Poetry for Art Gymnastics], Happening; Matsue also participates in the portfolio), Matsuzawa Yutaka (Jinrui yo shōmetsu shiyō ikō ikō (gyatei gyatei) [Humans, Let’s Vanish, Let’s Go, Go (gyatei, gyatei)], indoor exhibition and portfolio; Abe Beat and Mizukami Jun read Matsuzawa’s message on the first day, on his behalf), Ishida Hiroshi, Tamura Kin’ya, Miki Tetsuo, and Murata Keiichi (outdoor exhibition). Other participants in the Happening section are Katō Yoshinobu, Kanemitsu Tama, Sangō Kindergarten Art Class, Sudō Mitsuru, Terada Takashi, Tonomoto Hiroshi, and Yoshida Hidetomo. Along with the indoor and outdoor exhibitions, this exhibition includes a Happening section and also an “Shijō-ten (In-magazine exhibition),” which consists of individual presentations of artists in a printed portfolio, including those listed above as “portfolio” works. Chida Ui enacts a “jacking” in front of the Daimaru Department Store, Shinsaibashi, Osaka. 10th Shell Art Award Exhibition, Shirokiya Department Store, Nihonbashi, Tokyo.  Included are works by Shinohara Ushio, Takamatsu Jirō, and Yoshida Minoru.

6221966

SEPTEMBER

SEPTEMBER

SEPTEMBER SEPTEMBER

9-5 9-9

9-11

9-13—9-22 9-14 9-15—9-18

9-18—10-16 9-21 9-21—9-26 9-23

Gege No. 3 is published.  Special feature on the Memorial Service for Asai Masuo. Texts by Itoi Kanji and Katō Yoshihiro are included. Itoi’s text, titled Dada Kan (View of Dada / View of the fallen) is plagiarized from a text by D. T. Daisetsu. Azuchi Shūzō publishes a collection of poems, Kanojo no tōmei na seiki: kōryoku o ushinatta aoi suicchi (Her Transparent Genitalia: The Blue Switch That Lost Its Effect), Kyoto. Takasaki Motonao joins Gutai.  Takasaki joins after leaving Avant-Garde Tosa School the year prior. The First Festival of Bum Academy, Green House in front of Shinjuku Station East Entrance, Tokyo.  More than 20 people, including Yamada Kaiya (Pon), conduct Jinrui no shimetsu o yokoku suru kōshin (March to announce the extinction of humanity). Bum Academy, named by Sakaki Nanao, is a group consisting of Akiba Kenji (Nanda), Sakaki, Nagasawa Tetsuo (Nāga), and Yamada. Sogetsu Cinematheque: Underground Cinema, Hokkaidō Newspaper Hall, Sapporo.  K anesaka Kenji gives a lecture. Shutter Art Roundtable Talk: New Communication, Maebashi Community Center, Gunma.  Participating artists: Koyama Tetsuo and Satō Mitsusuke (Jack Society); Katō Akira, Kaneko Hidehiko, Tajima Hiroaki, and Tsunoda Jin’ichi (NOMO); Kishine Mitsutaka and Matsumoto Momoji (Rozo-gun); Ihara Chizuko; Chida Ui; also with Ōi Kenjirō, chair of the Store Union, and three others from the Union. Sasaki Kōsei of Jack Society moderates. The transcript of the event is published in Art 21, No. 2. Dance Party with Two Titles, Tokyo Training School of Education (present Tokyo Specialist School of Education), Mejiro, Tokyo.  Dance Happenings by Kuni Chiya Dance Institute, the 20th Century Dance Group, Tone Yasunao, Niijima Toshio, et al. Kishimoto Sayako Exhibition, Sakura Gallery, Nagoya. Third hearing of the 1,000-yen Note Trial, Tokyo District Court.  Nakanishi Natsuyuki and Nakahara Yūsuke testify. Seibi Exhibition, Kyoto Prefectural Gallery.  Included is Mizukami Jun’s Ten to chi no aida matawa poketto to te no aida ni okeru hōkō shiji sōchi (Direction Indicator between Heaven and Earth or between Pocket and Hand). •Sartre and Beauvoir visit Japan.  They give lectures in Tokyo and Kyoto. Fourth hearing of the 1,000-yen Note Trial, Tokyo District Court.  Nakanishi Natsuyuki and Takamatsu Jirō testify. 20th Shigun Exhibition, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  A show and a party are held on September 24. 13th Gar Gar Contemporary Art Exhibition: Walking Painting Exhibition Vol.1, Ueno Park, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Matsuzakaya Department Store, Ameyoko Shopping Street, and Ueno Station, Tokyo.  Members wearing bright red shirts and signs of the group’s name walk with paintings hanging from balance sticks.

1966623

9-24—9-27

9-26—10-13

9-28

OCTOBER

10-1

10-3

10-8

10-8—10-9

10-12

10-14—10-26

Memorial Service for Asai Masuo (Ritual Seto Rally), Seto, Aichi.  Ohara Kaichi, Zero Jigen, and Nishina Yoshio participate. Katō Yoshihiro, who pastes poultices on his naked torso, pulls a two-wheeled cart carrying naked men and women in their underwear. Ohara, in a loincloth, leads the way. Color and Space, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo.  Curated by Tōno Yoshiaki. Included are works by Isozaki Arata, Tanaka Shintarō, Miki Tomio, and Yamaguchi Katsuhiro. Fifth hearing of the 1,000-yen Note Trial, Tokyo District Court.  Shinohara Ushio, Tone Yasunao, and Hariu Ichirō testify. Tone plays Kimigayo (11 Kimigayos). • A record number of 820,138 passengers make Tokyo’s Japan Railways Shinjuku Station the most used station in the nation.  The previous year’s record-holder was Ikebukuro Station. Art 21 No. 2 is published, Tokyo.  Includes texts by Koyama Tetsuo, Sasaki Kōsei, and Chiba Eisuke from Jack Society. Presentation of Group ∞, Ikeda Branch School of Osaka Kyoiku University.  The group includes Nakata Kazunari, who later participates in Remandaran and The Play. Group members sprinkle lime, pile up stones, affix sheets of paper to the ground on which the audience is asked to draw letters and pictures, and write the infinity mark (∞). Sixth hearing of the 1,000-yen Note Trial, Tokyo District Court.  Testimony is given by Aikō Kenji (editor of Bijutsu techō), Ōshima Tatsuo (art critic), Suzuki Yoshinori (artist from Genshoku), Fukuzawa Ichirō (painter), and Yamamoto Takashi (Tokyo Gallery). 真夜中のバラエティーハプニング 婆羅門 Midnight Variety Happening: Brahman, Chiyoda Salon Small Theater, Tokyo.  Organized by Sawahata Kazuaki from Gaga. Directed by Suzuki Shirō. Performers (“frontline troops”) include Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Akanuma Yasuaki and Sanmonza Theater, 8 Generation, Kaku Flamenco Company, Kizaki Shin’ya, Kurohata (Baramon no Yakkyō [Brahmin’s Shell Casings]), Shikaku, Shigun, Jō Shirō (Suzuki Shirō), Suenaga Tamio, Takahara Yūji, Tachibana Yoshirō, Don Kodama, Hara Nobuo, Art Gymnastics Attack Team, Fuma Motohiko, Minamisako Haruhito, and Watanabe Chihiro. Special speeches by Hattori Shin and Matsue Kaku. This event is organized with the aim of increasing visitors to the theater. Flamenco and Kōdan storytelling are performed, and Tsuina, a film by 8 Generation, is presumed to have been screened. The event scares the neighborhood in the middle of the night, leading to the salon’s closure two months later. Seventh hearing of the 1,000-yen Note Trial, Tokyo District Court.  Awazu Kiyoshi, Ikeda Tatsuo, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, and Nakamura Hiroshi testify. Artists Today Exhibition 1966, Yokohama Civic Art Gallery.  Included are works by Kojima Nobuaki, Takamatsu Jirō, Tanaka Fuji, Yoshida Minoru.

6241966

10-16 10-18—10-24

10-19

10-21

10-30

10-31

NOVEMBER NOVEMBER 11-1—11-6

11-11—11-16

11-12 11-14

• Citizen’s Cultural Groups’ League of for Peace in Vietnam! changes its name to Citizen’s League for Peace in Vietnam! (later known as Beheiren). 45. Mosa Exhibition, Sakura Gallery, Nagoya.  Include are works by Muramatsu Kunikazu, Yamada Hiroko, and Iwata Shin’ichi. •Nittokukin Incident, Tanashi, Tokyo.  The incident is known as the first postwar “direct action” by anarchists. Members of the Anti-Vietnam War Direct Action Committee raid Japan Special Metals (Nittokukin) to demand the halt of the production of weapons; three members were arrested. • General Council of Trade Unions (Sōhyō) et al. conduct a united strike against the Vietnam War, Tokyo.  Police clash with Zengakuren. Event Festival (OOO Plan), Tama Art University, Tokyo.  Kobayashi Hakudō, Saitō Yoshishige, Sekine Nobuo, and Takamatsu Jirō participate. The event is held as part of the university’s art festival. • Young 720 (Seven Two O) (TBS TV) begins broadcasting.  The program introduces the youth cultures of the time and runs until April 3, 1971. Isahai Tomio (NOMO) moves from Maebashi to Osaka. • Dezain hihyō (Design review) begins publication by Fūdosha.  The journal runs until November 1970, publishing 12 issues. The 1st Pan-Setouchi Contemporary Art Exhibition: Encounters in Contemporary Art, Okayama Prefectural Culture Center Art Museum.  The 20 exhibiting artists include Ikemizu Keiichi, Kawaguchi Tatsuo, Takasaki Motonao, Hamaguchi Tomiji, Hirata Yōichi, and Matsutani Takesada. The exhibition stimulates Hamaguchi, leading him to hold the South Japan Contemporary Art Exhibition the following year. From Space to Environment: Painting + Sculpture + Photography + Design + Architecture + Music (Kūkan kara kankyō e), Matsuya Department Store, 8F, Ginza, Tokyo.  The 38 participants include Ay-O, Akiyama Kuniharu, Izumi Shin’ya, Isozaki Arata, Ichiyanagi Toshi, Imai Norio, Takamatsu Jirō, Takiguchi Shūzō, Tanaka Shintarō, Tanaka Fuji, Tōmatsu Shōmei, Nakazawa Ushio, Nakahara Yūsuke, Miki Tomio, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, Yokoo Tadanori, and Yoshimura Masunobu. This is the last appearance of Jikan-ha (Tanaka Fuji and Nakazawa). Eighth hearing of the 1,000-yen Note Trial, Tokyo District Court.  A kiyama Kuniharu, Kawani Hiroshi, and Yamada Munemitsu testify. 「空間から環境へ」展のハプニング From Space to Environment: Happening, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Performances by the Environment Group: Akiyama Kuniharu, Awazu Kiyoshi, Ichiyanagi Toshi, Tōno Yoshiaki, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, Katsui Mitsuo, Tanaka Ikkōn, Nagai Kazumasa, Fukuda Shigeo, Yokoo Tadanori; and also by Izumi Shin’ya, Shiomi Mieko, and Takamatsu Jirō. Special appearances by Ay-O, Jasper Johns, and Takemitsu Tōru, who are not members of the Environment Group.

1966625

Izumi and Takamatsu, with Ay-O, Tōno, and Fukuda, participate in Ichiyanagi’s Environmental Music, a work in which performers sit on chairs and lean their bodies to the right and left. Ay-O, Akiyama, and Yamaguchi, along with Shiomi, participate in Shiomi’s Compound View No.1. Ay-O, Akiyama, Ichiyanagi, Shiomi, Johns, Tōno, and Yamaguchi, along with Takemitsu, participate in Takemitsu’s Nanatsu no oka no monogatari (Story of Seven Hills). In Yamaguchi’s Signal, Akiyama and Yokoo, fixing red revolving lights above their heads, hand the ends of five-colored tapes attached to their necks from the center of the stage to the audience, who then pass the tape along to other audience members behind them. 11-15 • Shūkan Pureibōi (Weekly Playboy) begins publication by Shūeisha. 11-20 • Kuro no techō (Notebook of Black) begins publication by Kuro-no-techōsha.  By Ōsawa Masamichi, researcher of Anarchism. 11-21 • Ninth hearing of the 1,000-yen Note Trial (the prosecutor’s closing statements and sentencing recommendation), Tokyo District Court. 11-23 第1回デーティング・ショー The 1st Dating Show, in front of Shinjuku Koma Theater, Tokyo.  This is a performance by Koyama Tetsuo and Chida Ui that features the participation of others, including Sasaki Kōsei. Koyama and Chida do each other’s makeup, assisted by Sasaki wearing a mask with finger cots. Koyama puts many mannequin heads on his body and bites the neck of a chicken to suck its fresh blood. Chida saws off the chicken’s head. [plate 11, p. 8 and pp. 210–1, and pp. 366–7] 11-25 •The world’s first three-dimensional plaza is completed at the west entrance of Shinjuku Station, beginning operation on September 26, Tokyo. 11-26 14th Gar Gar Contemporary Art Exhibition: Street Demonstration Show, (Walking Painting Exhibition Vol. 2), Sukiyabashi Park, Tokyo.  This is a public painting demonstration. 11-27 第2回デーティング・ショー The 2nd Dating Show, Sukiyabashi Park, Tokyo.  Koyama Tetsuo and Chida Ui, with the participation of other Jack Society members: Ihara Chizuko, Kobayashi Shichirō, Sasaki Kōsei, and Chiba Eisuke. [pp. 210–1, 366–7] 11-28—12-10 Ay-O Exhibition, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. 11-28—67-1-30 3rd Nagaoka Contemporary Art Museum Award Exhibition, Nagaoka Contemporary Art Museum, Niigata.  Included are works by Arakawa Shūsaku, Kojima Nobuaki, Yoshida Minoru, and Yoshimura Masunobu. 12-4—12-12 Negative Exhibition, Konnyaku Private Art Museum, San Francisco.  The first exhibition of the San Francisco Kyūshū-ha. 12-5—12-10 Miyazaki Junnosuke Exhibition, Surugadai Gallery, Jinbōchō, Tokyo.  This is Miyazaki’s first exhibition of wooden sculptures. 12-5—12-10 Mazura Ryūdan Exhibition, Gallery Sōen, Ginza, Tokyo.  The exhibition is also held at the same gallery from December 29–31, and January 7–14 of the following year.

6261966

12-14—12-15

12-17

12-18

12-19—12-25

12-19—12-28

12-22

12-24 12-27—12-28

バイオゴード・プロセス（電子計算機構成による多体系空間の表現） Biogode Process (Expression of multi-system spaces by computer composition), Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Organized and directed by Team Random (Satō Nobuhiro, Tsukio Yoshio, and Tone Yasunao). Participating artists: Ōtsuji Kiyoji, Kanda Akio, Takada Shūya, Tada Minami, Tone Yasunao (Theater Piece for Computer, Signal) with Akasegawa Genpei performing, Makitani Takanori, Masuda Keiji, Mizuno Shūkō. Stage design by Yamaguchi Katsuhiro. • Zengakuren Rally for Reconstruction, Ōta Ward Hall, Tokyo.  Sanpa (three faction) Zengakuren is formed by the unified coalition of the Marxist Student League Central Core Faction, Socialist Student League, and Socialist Youth Union Liberation Faction. Happening for Sightseeing Bus Trip in Tokyo, Shinagawa Pier, Meiji-jingū Shrine, Gokokuji Temple, Sengakuji Temple, Tokyo.  Starting from Tokyo Station, Fluxus works are performed in various places by artists who move around by bus. Participants include Ay-O (Chair), Akiyama Kuniharu and Yamaguchi Katsuhiro (Vice Chairs), Isozaki Arata, Kubo Sadajirō, Shiomi Mieko, Tōno Yoshiaki, Tone Yasunao, Tomura Hiroshi, and Nishiyama Teruo. Arrow Line Exhibition, Shinanobashi Gallery, Osaka.  Included are works by Iwakura Masahito, Hirata Yōichi, and Osame Ken. Nakata Kazunari inflates balloons. Monomania Exhibition, Gallery Sōen, Ginza, Tokyo.  Curated by Ishiko Junzō. Included are works by Ihara Chizuko, Kobayashi Shichirō, Koyama Tetsuo, Sasaki Kōsei, Chida Ui, and Matsuo Kiyoshi (above, Jack Society), Akasegawa Genpei, Kishimoto Sayako, Suzuki Yoshinori, Takamatsu Jirō, Tateishi Kōichi, Tone Yasunao, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, and Miyazaki Junnosuke. Shiki Group conducts Year-end Ceremony on 11PM (Yomiuri TV), Osaka.  The Shiki (Ceremony) group, which includes Nakata Kazunari, performs One Minute Sleep, in which members in morning suits meditate lying flat on the floor. • Shūkan Shōnen magajin (Weekly Boys Magazine) by Kōdansha publishes its millionth copy. 新宿アート・フェスティバル Shinjuku Art Festival, Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka, Tokyo.  Participants include Yamashita Yōsuke Quartet (Yamashita, Takeda Kazunori, Takimoto Kunio, Toyozumi Yoshisaburō), Ichikawa Hideo Quintet, and other jazz musicians; dancers including Takemura Rui and Wakabayashi Mihiro; poets including Shiraishi Kazuko, players of tsuzumi drum, koto, and pantomime. In the Part 1: Prologue Event on December 28, a performance of ritual Tsuina, written and directed by Suzuki Shirō. Participating in Tsuina are Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Ishiguro Sanae, Kasumi Sadao, Kurohata (Kojima Masayoshi, Shiina Takashi, Suzuki Shirō, Takamagahara Yūjiro [Takahara Yūji], Matsue Kaku, Matsushita Ippei), Gekidan Henshin (Theater Metamorphosis [Yagisawa

1966-1967627

12-31

Motoko]), Gaga Sawahata Faction (Sawahata Kazuaki, Minamisako Haruhito, Ueda Seiichi), Shikaku (Suenaga Tamio, Watanabe Chihiro), Shigun (Satō Takashi, Suzuki Tōru, Nishioka Hiroshi, Hasegawa Takumi, Hirayama Katsu, Maeda Yoshitaka, Miyataki Tsuneo), Late Night Alliance Violence Committee (Fuma Motohiko, Yoshida Tsukasa), Tachibanan Yoshirō and Flamencacters, Stage Workshop Company (Akanuma Yasuaki, Kizaki Shin), Honda Shigeharu and Modern Dance Tokyo, 8 Generation (Kawanaka Nobihiro et al., filming the ritual). • The number of traffic accident deaths reaches 13,904 annually, a historical worst.

1967 IN THIS YEAR

JANUARY 1-1

1-11—1-15

1-13—1-14

1-17 1-19

1-30 1-30—2-5

Sweet Home Exhibition, Hitachi Family Center, Sendai.  Included is Ishikawa Shun’s Ana-aki Curtain. Moriyama Yasuhide moves from Mt. Adachi to Tobata and lives with Harumoto Shigeto, Kitakyūshū. • A ngura Pop opens, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  This is Japan’s first psychedelic go-go club. All-Japan Contemporary Artists Council establishes Debate Department, Tokyo. Art 21 No. 3 is published, Tokyo.  A long with “Dating Theory” by Chida Ui and Koyama Tetsuo, includes texts by Katō Yoshihiro, Sasaki Kōsei, Remnants Council, Chiba Eisuke, and Yoshida Yoshie. Saitama Contemporary Art Exhibition, Saitama Kaikan, Urawa.  Included are works by Gar Gar (Misshū no bigaku: Anata no shiawase ni apurōchi suru Gaga [Aesthetics of Density: Gar Gar Approaching Your Happiness]) and Saitama Avant-Garde Artists Group. 1st Lunami Film Gallery, Lunami Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  A n event curated by Satō Shigechika. Along with Ōbayashi Nobuhiko’s Complex and Kanesaka Kenji’s America, America, America, underground films including Yves Klein: Le Monochrome (organized by Segi Shin’ichi and edited by Noda Shinkichi) are screened. Ritual by Zero Jigen (Iwata Shin’ichi et al. in Nagoya), 19 (Jūku) Box, Nagoya. Happening of the sound recording for Hopscotch, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  A public recording of sound to be used in Kanesaka Kenji’s new film. Conducted by Tone Yasunao. Aikura Hisato, Ōbayashi Nobuhiko, Satō Shigechika, Takamatsu Jirō, Miyai Rikurō, Tone Yasunao, Morita Ichirō, Yamashita Yōsuke, and Yoshizawa Motoharu participate. • Indefinite strike begins at Meiji University, Kanda-surugadai, Tokyo. Matsuzawa Yutaka Exhibition: V1010 with Nine Canvases of Nothingness, Nine Chairs of Psi, and Ninety-nine Ultra-futuristic Methods, Azuma Gallery, Kyoto.  The concept for this exhibition is to have the audience sit in a chair placed in front of nine white canvases and confront the whiteness, creating paintings in the mind by the nine methods presented by Matsuzawa. A symposium hosted

6281967

FEBRUARY

2-2

2-8—2-14

2-11

2-11

2-13—2-15

2-13—2-19 2-16—2-21

2-17 2-18

by Inui Yoshiaki is held. Abe Beat reads improvised poems to the biwa lute, played by Mizukami Jun. Abe introduces Mizukami to Matsuzawa. • Ōta Ryū, Kawani Hiroshi, Yamaguchi Kenji, et al. form Revolt Company, Tokyo.  The group begins publication of World Revolutionary Movement Information, with cover design by Akasegawa Genpei. Screening of documentary films by 8 Generation, Inari Kiō Shrine Office, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  A film recording of Kurohata’s Ritual of Resurrection is screened. Ikebukuro ’67 Exhibition, Tokyo Electric Power Service Center, Ikebukuro, Tokyo.  A group exhibition mainly consisting of members of the Toshima Art Institute, presided over by Shimaki Ritsu. Includes work by Suenaga Tamio. Kenkoku kinenbi; kamen no kōshin (Masked March on National Foundation Day) by Zero Jigen, Ginza, Nijūbashi Bridge, and Hibiya Park, Tokyo.  On the first National Foundation Day, organizations including Sōhyō hold rallies against the revival of Kigensetsu (Empire Day), which represented prewar nationalism. In the heavy snow, Zero Jigen enacts the ritual “After a long interval.” A total of 11 members participate, including Katō Yoshihiro, Kamijō Junjirō, Nagata Satoshi, Matsuba Masao, and others from Sendai. Three members are in morning suits, and the others wear business suits. Donning masks and clutching Hinomaru flags, they move to Shinbashi by bus and Yamanote Line train, walk through Ginza (including through Matsuzakaya Department Store), the Sony Building, in front of the Imperial Palace, and then close out the ritual by posing for photographers at Hibiya Park, which is deserted due to the snow. 9th performance of Jōkyō Gekijō: Night Time No Silver Hair Wind Man (John Silver), Pit Inn, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Performed with Yamashita Yōsuke Trio. Tone Yasunao participates in the performance by rolling apples on the piano, but Kara Jūrō finds this annoying and tramples them. 2nd Lunami Film Gallery, Lunami Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Screening includes Jōnouchi Masaharu’s VAN Document, Donald Richie’s Atami Blues. All Kansai Selection Exhibition, Shinanobashi Gallery, Osaka.  Included are works by Iwakura Masahito and Okamoto Hajime. Contemporary Art Spot Sale, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Organized by the All-Japan Contemporary Artists Council to raise funds for the operation of the Council. The event tagline is “Romantic and humorous contemporary art in your hands with one to five thousand yen.” Chida Ui puts up her bromide portraits (celebrity photos) and objet works and they sell out. Gar Gar participates. • Second Satō Eisaku Cabinet (until January 14, 1970) First Public Discussion organized by All-Japan Contemporary Artists Council: Art and Crime, Artists Hall, Ginza, Tokyo.  L ecturers are Sugimoto Masazumi (lawyer for the Model 1,000-Yen Note Trial) and Ishiko Junzō. Zero Jigen enacts a ritual wearing masks.

1967629

2-18—3-2

2-19 2-19—3-5

2-21—2-26

2-27—3-18 MARCH

MARCH?

3-1 3-8—3-14

20th Japan Independent Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo.  Included are works by Kurohata (Brahman) and Yagara Yutaka. On the final day, Kurohata enacts Baramon Gishiki・Betonamu Hansen Hapuningu (Brahman Ritual: Anti-Vietnam War Happening), consisting of Part 1: Ritual Dedicated to Spirits, Part 2: Playful Ritual of Unveiling the Sexual Body, and Part 3: Funeral. The members burn a sculpture of a Buddhist altar. [pp. 359–60] 16th Gar Gar Contemporary Art Exhibition: Happening in the Wilderness, Yume-no-shima, Tokyo. Kishimoto Sayako Exhibition: Offer to Kennedy, Sakura Gallery, Nagoya.  K ishimoto exhibits Five-part Work Dedicated to Kennedy, which consists of I Dawn: Jesus Christ, II Morning: King David, III Noon: Alexander the Great, IV Twilight: Brutus, and V Night: Dante. Mozart’s Requiem, played at J. F. Kennedy’s funeral, is played in the gallery. After the go-go party on the final day, the artist sprays white paint onto the paintings with an airbrush to erase them, writes the word mu (nothing) on the floor, sprays the white paint onto herself, and slashes the paintings with a knife. Kishimoto gives the exhibition another title: Look Left!! Offer to John Kennedy. 1st Trends of Contemporary Art Kyūshū Exhibition, Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall, Fukuoka.  Included are works by Ōyama Uichi, Taniguchi Toshio, Terada Ken’ichiro, Hataraki Tadashi, Funaki Yoshiharu, Miyazaki Junnosuke, Yagara Yutaka, Yamauchi Jūtarō, and Yonekura Toku. Twenty artists are selected by Kikuhata Mokuma, Taniguchi Harumichi (Nishinippon Shimbun), and Fukano Osamu (Fukunichi [newspaper]). The organization system is changed every year thereafter and the exhibition series continues until the 5th exhibition. Former Kyūshū-ha members participate each time. Yoshimura Masunobu Exhibition, Tokyo Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Kuro aka kintama bukuro (Black red gold ball bag) is published, Tokyo.  Edited by Katō Yoshihiro. Includes texts by Katō and Itoi Kanji, and pages by Zero Jigen members, Itoi, and Matsue Kaku. Remandaran is formed, Kyoto.  Members are Azuchi Shūzō, Iwakura Masahito, Nakata Kazunari, and Mizukami Jun. • The Expo ’70 theme song Hello from the Countries of the World is released. 第11回京都アンデパンダン展 11th Kyoto Independent Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, Kyoto.  Included are works by Azuchi Shūzō (Tometewa ikenai tomatte shimaukara [Don’t Stop Because You Will Stop], Ekusutashī no nichijōteki jōken [Daily Conditions for Ecstasy], and 402), Ikemizu Keiichi, Iwakura Masahito (Jōkisha ningen kaifukuki [Steam Car Human Recovery Machine]), Iwata Shin’ichi, Katō Isao, Fukunaga Toyoko, Mizukami Jun ([As You Like] Snake (Hangi Report 3), or [As You Like] Snake kangi [Coffin Ritual]). Azuchi plays the violin in front of Daily Conditions for Ecstasy and enacts a Happening (Sokutei keikaku [Measurement Plan]) in the front yard with Mizukami and Iwakura. This exhibition leads to the formation of the Remandaran group.

6301967

3-8—3-14

Underground Film Festival, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  The screening includes films by Ōbayashi Nobuhiko and Kanesaka Kenji (Hopscotch). 3-21 ゼロ次元『巨大布団運搬儀式』『都電首つり蒲団チンチン送儀』 Metropolitan Chinchin Streetcar Funeral with Hanging Nooses and Futon by Zero Jigen, Metropolitan streetcar between Meguro and Eitaibashi Bridge, Tokyo.  Men carry a futon mat in street. In the streetcar, masked men sit in seats and tie their necks to the handhold straps. Women lie on the floor on the futon. This is one of the most important rituals of Zero Jigen. 3-23 ハプニング・ショー（スインガー・パーティー） Happening Show (Swinger Party), Dance Hall in the 4th floor of Shinjuku Milano, Tokyo.  P romotional event for the Paramount movie The Swinger. Koyama Tetsuo, Mazura Ryūdan, et al. participate (Chida Ui is scheduled to star but does not appear, as she arrives late). Two women paint the floor with their naked bodies, representing a scene in which Ann-Margret moves on the floor with paint on her naked body. Mazura sprays paint on himself and the women. Koyama, in an impromptu appearance, joins with Vitamin Happening. Tsuruoka Masao, in another unscheduled appearance, joins the body painting. SPRING James Lee Buyers leaves Japan and moves to Los Angeles. APRIL Katate-age Ritual (standing with one hand raised) by Zero Jigen, Shinjuku Station East Exit, Tokyo.  K atō Yoshihiro and Eiju Hirō perform. APRIL Chida Ui and Zero Jigen appear on Katsura Kokinji Afternoon Show (NET TV), Tokyo. APRIL Monohoshi Densha (Clothes Drying Train), Event Festival: 000 Plan, Metropolitan streetcar between Shinjuku and Tsukiji, Tokyo.  Itahashi Akira, Ōkubo Tatsuo, Kutsumi Hiroshi, Satō Yoshiko, Shimizu Hayumi, and Nishihara Kazuko participate. The artists hang clothes to dry in a streetcar they have rented. APRIL Gutai Art for the Space Age, Hanshin Amusement Park, Nishinomiya, Kobe.  Included are works by Shiraga Kazuo, Motonaga Sadamasa, and Yoshida Minoru. The exhibition is a part of the 21st Century Festival. APRIL Hikosaka Naoyoshi and Hori Kōsai enroll at Tama Art University, Department of Painting, majoring in Oil Painting, Tokyo. Both drop out in 1970. APRIL Ionesco’s The Chairs, a performance by Theater Company Bara (Rose), Kyoto University West Auditorium.  A zuchi Shūzō appears. APRIL • 391 stations by 43 commercial broadcasters colorize TV programs (colorization rate reaches 90%). APRIL? Kokuin is formed, Tokyo.  Members are Suenaga Tamio, H. K., Muta Kunihiro, and Yokota Gen’ichirō. 4-1—4-14 Nakanishi Natsuyuki Exhibition, Minami Gallery, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. 4-3 • Beheiren publishes a full-page advertisement “Korosuna / Don’t kill” in Washington Post.  Okamoto Tarō contributes his calligraphy for the message.

1967631

4-3—4-9 4-9

4-10—4-16 4-15

4-16—4-17

4-18—4-20

4-20 4-29

MAY

MAY 5-1

Katō Isao and Mita Shōichirō Exhibition, Azuma Gallery, Kyoto. Mostly in the Underground Malls: Kyoto Two-person Remandaran, Remandaran Office, Shijō-kawaramachi Underpass, Maruyama Park, Kyoto.  Performances by Azuchi Shūzō (Sokutei keikaku # 2 [Measurement Plan # 2]) and Mizukami Jun. Ishida Hiroshi Exhibition, Kiyamachi Gallery, Kyoto.  M izukami Jun joins with a performance. • The 6th Unified Local Elections are held. Minobe Ryōkichi, recommended by the JSP and the JCP, is elected as the Governor of Tokyo (the first reformist governor). 〈バム・アカデミー〉、第2回フェスティバル Bum Academy Second Festival: Rally and Parade by Free Language that Predicts the End of the World, streets and Yasuda Seimei Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Participating artists: Katō Yoshihiro, Jack Society (Koyama Tetsuo, Sasaki Kōsei, Chida Ui, and Chiba Eisuke), Gary Snyder, Bum Academy, Matsue Kaku. Katō and Matsue run around on stage naked. Koyama attempts to slaughter a chicken but is stopped by Snyder. Koyama, with Chida, enacts Dating Show outside the hall. This event triggers the establishment of Buzoku. [pp. 233–4] The first performance of Tenjō Sajiki: Aomoriken no semushi otoko (The Hunchback in Aomori Prefecture), Sōgetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Stage art by Yokoo Tadanori. The play is also performed at Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka from May 13 to 15. Chida Ui appears on Red and White Whatever Competition (NTV), Tokyo.  A n article in Dokusho shinbun on May 8 criticizes the program as “stripping at 17?” Ritual on the Emperor’s Birthday: Osaka Castle Remandaran, Osaka Castle Park.  Iwakura Masahito, Azuchi Shūzō, Nakata Kazunari, and Mizukami Jun participate. Buzoku (The Tribe) is formed, Kokubunji, Tokyo.  Members include Katō Mamoru, Sakaki Nanao, Yamao Sansei, and Yamada Kaiya. The group is formed by a union of Bum Academy in Shinjuku and the Kokubunji group. Katō names the group. Construction of the Kaminari Akagarasu-zoku (Thunder Red Crow Tribe) commune begins, Fujimi Kōgen Heights, Nagano. 奇脳舌（きのした）サーカス小屋見世物大会 Ki-no-shita Circus Hut Freak Show, May Day site, Yoyogi, Tokyo.  Participating artist groups: 8 Generation, Kokuin (Suenaga Tamio, H. K., Muta Kunihiro, Yokota Gen’ichirō, et al.), Kurohata (Matsue Kaku et al.), and Zero Jigen (Katō Yoshihiro, Kamijō Junjirō, Nagata Satoshi, and Matsuba Masao). In this event, Kokuin’s debut, members distribute flyers of the Kokuin Manifesto. Suenaga and Muta, after painting their whole bodies bright red, hold each other on the lawn. Zero Jigen performs Shussan bamen gi (Childbirth Scene Ritual). Wearing a kimono and hakama with a boater hat, Katō exposes his buttocks. Nagata hits Matsuba’s head with a round tray. Kamijō lies with a woman who has a candle attached to her pregnant belly (Ritual of Giving Birth). Matsue binds a chain around his black costume and loudly yells saimon. They are stopped by members of the May Day Organizing Committee.

6321967

5-1

バイオゴード・プロセス京都

Biogode Process Kyoto, Hall 2, Kyoto Kaikan.  Organized and curated by Team Random, like Biogode Process at Sogetsu Art Center in December of the previous year. Produced by Yamamoto Hisako in collaboration with theater company Gendai Gekijō. The production staff consists of Ōtsuji Kiyoji (photography), Kanda Akio (design), Komatsu Tatsuo (Gendai Gekijō), Takada Shūya (design), Tada Minami, Tone Yasunao, Makitani Takanori (design), Mizuno Shukō, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, and Yoshida Minoru. The program is comprised of Process Music by Tsukio Yoshio; an animation film by Kanda Akio and Takada Shūya; Wrinkled Wonder Window by Tada Minami; Kine Calligraphy and Ginza 1966: 1204PM by Ōtsuji Kiyoji; Theatre Piece No.9 by Tone Yasunao, featuring Akasegawa Genpei, Kazakura Shō, Kawani Hiroshi, Shimizu Akira, Tanikawa Kōichi, Shiomi Mieko, and Nakanishi Natsuyuki as performers (one document also lists Takamatsu Jirō and Matsuoka Shunsuke as performers); Orchestra 1966 by Mizuno Shūkō (performed by the Kyoto University Orchestra); Signal (or Space by Signal) by Yamaguchi Katsuhiro; and Just Curve 1967 by Yoshida Minoru. In Tone’s Theatre Piece No. 9, Tanikawa puts water in a tank with a carp wrapped in newspaper, and Nakanishi puts baby powder on the nape of Tanikawa’s neck, as they both follow randomly blinking signals. Akasegawa irons a cut of beef. Kawani and Shimizu mop the floor with Kazakura’s head as a floorcloth. Mizukami Jun and Azuchi Shūzō, both making an unscheduled appearance, enact Amagasa ni yoru kengaku ohappu (Viewing Happening with Umbrellas) by closing and opening the umbrellas in the audience seats. 5-2 “Computopia” is aired on 11PM (Yomiuri TV).  A rtists from Biogode Process Kyoto appear: Akasegawa Genpei, Kazakura Shō, Kawani Hiroshi, Shimizu Akira, Takamatsu Jirō, Tanikawa Kōichi, Tone Yasunao, and Nakanishi Natsuyuki. 5-10—5-30 9th Japan International Art Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo.  Included are works by Arakawa Shūsaku (National Museum of Modern Art Award), Shinohara Ushio, Yoshida Minoru (Ohara Museum of Art Award), and Yoshimura Masunobu. 5-14 Group I performs Hininshō ningen (Impersonal Men) at the 1st Kobe Carnival, streets of Sannomiya, Kobe.  In order to celebrate the Kobe Port 100th Anniversary Festival, the Port Festival is moved up to May from its usual annual timing of October; the Kobe Carnival is held on the eve of the Port Festival. Thereafter, the Carnival is held for two days, a holiday in May and the day before. Approximately 30 people, including members of Group I, participate in a parade around Sannomiya Flower Road, all of their bodies completely covered by white cloth costumes with pointed tops. A mural is exhibited that depicts the very costume worn during this parade. The performance receives the “Humor Award” from the Centennial Festival Association. 5-16 Tenth hearing of the 1,000-yen Note Trial, Tokyo District Court, Tokyo.  Closing arguments by Sugimoto Masazumi, Takiguchi Shūzō, Nakahara Yūsuke, and Hariu Ichirō, and closing statements by Akasegawa Genpei, Itō Shizuka, and Yasumasa Shigeru.

1967633

5-17—5-22 5-21

5-22—5-25

5-23—5-28

5-23—5-28

JUNE

JUNE 6-4 6-4—6-9 6-5 6-5—6-16

ShiGekiSO5 Exhibition, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Included is work by Makirō. 000 Plan: Eight Events for AM0:00, Pit Inn, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  The participants are mainly from students of Tama Art University including Kutsumi Hiroshi, Kobayashi Hakudō, Satō Yoshiko, Suga Kishio, Sekine Nobuo, and Nishihara Kazuko. 9th and Apology performance by Jōkyō Gekijō: Jon Sirubā Shinjuku koishiya yonaki-hen (John Silver, I Love Shinjuku, Weeping at Night), Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Yotsuya Simon debuts as actor. Intermedia, Lunami Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Participating artists: In the “Art” category: Ōnishi Seiji, Okabe Michio, Saitō Shirō, Sano Masayoshi, Tada Keisuke, and Tsubouchi Kazutada; In the “Happening” category, Akasegawa Genpei, Kazakura Shō, Kanesaka Kenji, Tone Yasunao, and Miyuki Minako; In the “Expanded Cinema” category, Adachi Masao, Ōbayashi Nobuhiko, Katō Mamoru, Jōnouchi Motoharu, Suzuki Yoshinori, Tomita Katsuhiro, and Miyai Rikurō; In the “Film” category, Iimura Takahiko, Ōbayashi Nobuhiko, Okabe Michio, Sakurabayashi Hiroshi, Takabayashi Yōichi, Aldo Tambellini, Nagano Chiaki, Noda Naokichi, Stan Brakhage, Donald Richie, and Yokoo Tadanori. On the night of May 26, Kanesaka et al. enact a Happening in which they smear ice cream onto a woman in a bikini (Hijiri Chiko) and lick it (this may be the performance of a piece by Benjamin Patterson). Kazakura inflates a large balloon to fill the gallery during the screening. Hakushika Masaru, Tone, and Akasegawa also enact Happenings. A symposium is held at Artists Hall on May 29. 17th Gar Gar Contemporary Art Exhibition: Moving Art, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  A ll of the exhibits are moving: examples include a live chicken, rotating objects, and a television set. Dating Show at the Seashore, Enoshima Coast, Kanagawa.  K atō Yoshihiro, Shinohara Ushio, and Chida Ui participate. They run with mannequins on their back. Avant-Garde Night: Viva Kyoto, French Cancan, Kyoto.  A zuchi Shūzō and Mizukami Jun participate. Yoshioka Shigeo presents work on Cavity Prevention Day, in front of Mitsukoshi Department Store, Ginza, Tokyo. 000 Plan Exhibition, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Included are works by Kobayashi Hakudō and Sekine Nobuo. • Outbreak of the Third Arab–Israeli Conflict. Underground in June, Jiyū Gekijō (Freedom Theater), Azabu-kasumichō, Tokyo.  A kiyama Yūtokutaishi, Kazakura Shō, and Hakushika Masaru perform. Screened films are Itsuka mita dorakyura (Dracula I Saw Someday) by Ōbayashi Nobuhiko, Chisui (Blood Sucking) by Toyama Tara, and Taiji ga

6341967

6-5—6-18

6-6 6-17

6-19—7-22

6-20

6-22—6-27 6-24

JULY JULY JULY JULY

JULY?

7-1

7-2—7-30

mitsuryō suru toki (When the Embryo Poaches) by Wakamatsu Kōji. With this event, the regular screening of underground films begins at Jiyū Gekijō. ? % Sausage Exhibition, Galerie 16, Kyoto.  Included are works by Fujita Seiyō and Kinoshita Shigemori. Mizukami Jun joins with Kannen ten’i kūki saishū (Idea Transfer Air Collection), a performance using a syringe. • Weekly magazine Vitally Mate begins publication by Eikō Shuppan. Foot-mark Revolution, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto.  A zuchi Shūzō, Ishida Hiroshi, Ueta Koji, Nitta Masao, Miki Tetsuo, and Mizukami Jun participate. Kyūshū-ha Exhibition, Tokyo Gallery, San Francisco.  The second exhibition of San Francisco Kyūshū-ha. Included are works by Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Urata Muneo, Ōyama Uichi, Ochi Osamu, Sakurai Takami, Sekiguchi Yoshiki, Owari Takeshi, Taniguchi Toshio, and Tabe Mitsuko. Sasori-za (Theater Scorpio) opens, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  L ocated in the basement of Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka. Named by Mishima Yukio after Kenneth Anger’s film Scorpio Rising. The first programming at the theater is flamenco dance. Jack Seven-person Exhibition, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo. The first ruling is issued in the 1,000-yen Note Trial during its eleventh hearing, Tokyo District Court.  A kasegawa Genpei is sentenced to 3 months in prison, with a suspended sentence of 1 year. The accused later appeals, with a Supreme Court decision following in April 1970. Kurohata performs a Happening, Baramonkyō (Brahman Sutra), in the court. Chida Ui enacts Dating Show as special guest during Angura Sexy Contest, Tokyo. Okamoto Tarō assumes the role of producer for the thematic exhibition of Expo ’70. Bum Academy asks Gotō Akira to construct the Suwanosejima Bamboo House. • The new religion Divine Principle Movement spreads among students via the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles (Genri Kenkyūkai, CARP).  Many students who participate in the movement abandon their studies or run away from home. Kishimoto Sayako, Chida Ui, and Miyata Harumi enact a Happening, Komazawa Olympic Park, Tokyo.  The Happening is reported on in an article by an unidentified weekly magazine. • The Merger Treaty (also known as the Treaty of Brussels), signed April 8, 1965, comes into force. The treaty establishes the European Communities (EC) and is often regarded as the beginning of the European Union. 5th Asunaro Art Salon, Forming Coffee Bags: Painting? Sculpture? Design?, Classical Music Teahouse Asunaro, Takasaki, Gunma.  Included are works by NOMO.

1967635

7-3

7-4

7-7—7-9 7-8—8-13

7-10

7-10—7-16 7-15 7-19 7-23

7-29 7-30

7-30—8-4 7-30—8-6

Takai Tomiko Butoh Performance produced by Garumera Company, Kinokuniya Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  H ijikata Tatsumi directs and performs in Keiji-jō gaku (Emotional Metaphysics). Co-starring Ishii Mitsutaka, Ohno Kazuo, Kasai Akira, et al. Stage art by Shimizu Akira, Tanikawa Kōichi, and Nakanishi Natsuyuki. Tsui ni pinku no ame (Finally Pink Rain), in front of Kyoto City Hall.  A zuchi Shūzō, Ishida Hiroshi, Ueta Koji, Miki Tetsuo, and Mizukami Jun participate. Performance of Kurita Isamu’s Aido (Beloved Slave), Haiyūza Theater, Roppongi, Tokyo. Trends in Contemporary Japanese Art, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.  Included are works by Yoshida Minoru and Yoshimura Masunobu. Jack Society appears on Katsura Kokinji Afternoon Show (NET TV), Tokyo.  The group titles this event The Third TV Media Show. Another title listed on the leaflet is The Fashion. Koyama Tetsuo, Sasaki Kōsei, Chida Ui, and Chiba Eisuke appear on the show. Iwata Shin’ichi Exhibition: Cool Punch, Azuma Gallery, Kyoto. The first regular meeting of Suginami Cine Club, Kugayama Kaikan, Suginami, Tokyo. • In the trial on Takechi Tetsuji’s film Kuroi yuki (Black Snow), the director is ruled not guilty by the Tokyo District Court. • The Detroit Riot of 1967, also known as the 12th Street Riot or the Detroit Rebellion.  The bloodiest of the urban riots that occurred during the United States’ “Long, hot summer of 1967.” Snack BOBO opens, Fukuoka.  The owner is Obana Shigeharu’s younger brother Obana Arao. 儀式屋顔見世大会（第1回ジャックス・ショウ） Ritualists Debut Assembly (First Jacks Show), Hitachi Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  R ituals are performed during the intermission of a concert by The Jacks. Performing artists: Kawanaka Nobuhiro, Zero Jigen (Katō Yoshihiro, Nagata Satoshi, Kamjō Junjirō, Matsuba Masao), Chida Ui and Miyata Harumi (Zenra kamen to awa no Miyata to kōmori no Chida Ui to no dekigoto [Events of Naked Masked Men, Miyata in Bubble, and Chida Ui with an Umbrella]), Baramanji Kessha (Taiji kuyō gishiki [Fetal Memorial Service] by Ōe Chōjirō, Makirō, et al.) and Matsue Kaku from Kurohata. Shinohara Ushio Exhibition, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. PAPA Exhibition of Poems and Paintings, BOBO, Fukuoka.  A n event is held on the first day, featuring Kon Shirō’s Electronic Music by 12 Players (musique concrète played from tape); Yasei no sakebi (Call of the Wild), a film produced by Kondō Genzō and Yanagihara Nobushige (The film is a collection of couples’ petting scenes. A man wraps toilet paper around his body during the screening); an improvisational poetry reading (Fukumori Takashi, who is supposed to perform, disappears, and a woman who happens to be there reads articles from Weekly F6 Seven, which she randomly opens).

6361967

AUGUST AUGUST AUGUST AUGUST 8-1 8-1 8-1

8-3 8-5—8-6

8-5—9-30

8-6

8-8 8-8

8-8

Tabe Mitsuko covers a nude female model with foam from a fire extinguisher, and is joined by Obana Shigeharu in an unscheduled appearance, who paints the woman pink with a lacquer sprayer. This is a rare multimedia event by the Kyūshū-ha artists. The exhibition is a combination of paintings by Ōguro Aiko and Tabe, with poems by Kondō and Fukumori. Viva Ōtsu, Zeze Park, Ōtsu, Shiga.  A zuchi Shūzō participates. Mō hitotsu no sekai e iku hōhō II (How to Go to Another World II) by Mizukami Jun, Honjima Island, Kagawa. Azuchi Shūzō hitchhikes to Tokyo and meets hippies and fūten youth in Shinjuku. • Disco LSD opens, Shinjuku, Tokyo. Ritual by Zero Jigen, Keio Department Store, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Three masked, naked men and women participate. Kokuin publishes mini-komi zine Koebukuro No. 1, Tokyo. Chida Ui puts an advertisment in Tenjō Sajiki (the Tenjō Saijiki Theater newspaper) No. 3, Tokyo.  It reads: “Finally born! The most beautiful and youngest artist in the world, Chida Ui (18 years old)” and is published under the name “Chida Ui Dating Office.” T  • he Basic Law for Environmental Pollution Control is promulgated. Event (Gendai no Kai [Modern Age Group] August Special Meeting), uninhabited island, Wakayama.  Participants: credited as “Happener” are Ikemizu Keiichi, Nakata Kazunari, Mizukami Jun; credited as “painter” are Iwahashi Atsuko, Okamoto Hajime, Hirata Yōichi, Fukunaga Toyoko, Horiuchi Akiyo, Yamazaki Ran. The event also includes many other practitioners in architecture and design. In the chronology by The Play, Azuchi Shūzō and Ueta Koji are also listed as participants. A costume party and Happening are held on August 5, and a swimsuit show and Happening on August 6. Tsukifue Osen: Giri ninjō irohani hoheto (Moon flute Osen: The ABCs of obligation and humanity) by Jōkyō Gekijō, Hanazono Shrine, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  This is the first tent performance by Jōkyō Gekijō. Symposium: What is the modern voice?, Toshima Institute of Art, Ikebukuro, Tokyo.  Members of Kokuin participate.  he Fūten-zoku (“idler tribe”) appears around Shinjuku Station East Exit Plaza, •T Tokyo. • A U.S. military freight train carrying fuel collides with another freight train and explodes into flames, Shinjuku Station, Tokyo.  This accident leads to the Shinjuku U.S. Tank Struggle. • A ssociation of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is formed.

1967637

8-12—9-5 8-13—8-20

8-17—8-22

8-20

8-20

8-21

8-24—8-29

8-26

Gingakei (Galaxy), a film by Adachi Masao, is screened, Theater Scorpio, Shinjuku, Tokyo. South Japan Contemporary Art Exhibition, Kōchi Prefectural Education Hall.  The exhibition’s 41 participants include future The Play members Ikemizu Keiichi (Meimei-ten, rojō hakushi o kubaru [Naming Exhibition: Handing out Blank Paper on the Street]), Iwakura Masahito, Okamoto Hajime (Nichijō-sei no kotei [Fixing the Everyday]), Azuchi Shūzō, Nakata Kazunari (Nyūyoku [Bathing]), Fukunaga Toyoko (Jintai konpō [Azuchi Shūzō] [Human Body Packing [Azuchi Shūzō]]), Mizukami Jun (Territory), Yoshioka Shigeo (Ha [Tooth]); Kyūshū-ha members Taniguchi Toshio, Hataraki Tadashi, and Funaki Yoshiharu; Kawaguchi Tatsuo; Terada Takehiro; and Horio Sadaharu. Nakata bathes in a basin and presents a work with a smoke bomb. Ikemizu, Mizukami et al. also present performances. Planning by Zen’ei Tosa-ha, in collaboration with art critic Akane Kazuo. Taniguchi Harumichi (Nishinippon Newspaper) and Kikuhata Mokuma from Fukuoka also lend their support. Due to operational troubles at this time, Zen’ei Tosa-ha virtually collapses following this exhibition. Non-freedom of Expression Exhibition, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  This is an exhibition of documents from the 1,000-yen Note Trial, organized as a spot sale for the purpose of fundraising. ゼロ次元　超音波作戦「第1回超音波風呂集儀」 Zero Jigen, Ultrasonic Wave Operation: Bathhouse Meeting, Japan Ultrasonic Spa, Shibuya, Tokyo.  Participating artists: Katō Yoshihiro, Kamijō Junjirō, K.T., S.K., Suzuki Seiichi, Nagata Satoshi, Matsuba Masao, and Miyata Harumi. Advertised as a “Zero Jigen Complete Cast National Meet,” this is one of the most important performances by Zero Jigen. [pp. 336–9] • “Fūten Green House” is aired on Keizo Visits (TBS TV).  Takahashi Keizō interviews fūten youth on the lawn at the East Exit of Shinjuku Station. • “These young people of this summer” is aired on 11PM (NTV).  Features interviews with young people who participate in Zengakuren, Beheiren, Divine Principle Movement, and Angura (underground culture). Ōshima Nagisa, film director, gets angry at the youth he converses with during the program. 11th Shell Art Award Exhibition, Shirokiya Department Store, Nihonbashi, Tokyo.  Included are works by Katō Isao (Honorable Mention). チャンポンめえを待ちながらの夜 A Night of Waiting for Chanpon Mee, Sennichidani Temple Hall, Shinanomachi, Tokyo.  A long with Hakken no Kai (Discovery Group), participating artists include Ishii Maki (composer), Ishiko Junzō, Kazakura Shō, Kokuin, Satō Shigechika, Zero Jigen, Takechi Tetsuji, and Tone Yasunao. All-star Happening by Hakken no Kai, curated by Ishiko and Tone. [pp. 237–8]

6381967

8-27 8-27—8-29

8-28

AUTUMN SEPTEMBER

SEPTEMBER

SEPTEMBER SEPTEMBER? SEPTEMBER?

9-1

16th Gar Gar Contemporary Art Exhibition: Sea Happening Sound, Waves, and Body, Zaimokuza Beach, Kanagawa. 第1回PLAY展 1st The Play Exhibition, Higashi Yuenchi Park, Sannomiya, Kobe.  The inaugural event of The Play, bringing together performers from across the Kansai region (Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Shiga, and Nara). Performers include Azuchi Shūzō, Abe Kōshi, Ikemizu Keiichi, Iwakura Masahito, Iwahashi Atsuko, Okamoto Hajime (Jōhō no konpō I [Information Packing I]), Nakata Kazunari (Hatsuentō shōshin jisatsu [Self-immolation by smoke marker]), Fukunaga Toyoko (Shūzō Azuchi [Human Body Packing]), Horiuchi Akiyo, Mizukami Jun (Amefuri mon gishiki [Raining gate ritual], in which water is poured from above a gate made of wood), Suzukida Asako, and Yoshioka Shigeo; with Sasaki Kōsei, who makes an unscheduled appearance. “Happenings” are enacted every day of the exhibition from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. On the first day, all of the members enact a joint performance wearing eyepatches. Although their names appear on the poster, Sugimoto Katsusaburō, Nishiwaki Hisae, Hirata Yōichi, and Yamazaki Ran do not actually participate. [pp. 227–32] “I want to be something” is aired on Masukomi Q (TBS TV).  Masukomi Q, which has started this year, is called a “Happening program” because it is a live broadcast project in which passersby are asked to speak into a microphone. In this edition, four people, including Chida Ui and film actress Sakurai Keiko, perform an “Advertisement for Yourself” for five minutes each. With commentary by photographer Ōtake Shōzō and film director Onchi Hideo. • Apparel company Renown airs color TV commercial “Yeye,” which features animation with a “Pop” sensibility. Happening by The Play, Sannomiya Station, Kobe.  Participating artists: Okamoto Hajime (Kage no bigaku [Shadow Aesthetics]), Fukunaga Toyoko (Mebaeru ito [Sprouting Thread]), Mizukami Jun (Hannō-gi [Reaction Ritual]), and Yoshioka Shigeo. “Crow or Hornworm Dance” by Itoi Kanji, Fūten Plaza, Shinjuku Station East Entrance, Tokyo.  Itoi uses a costume made of a transparent plastic sheet and black cotton cloth which reveals the naked body from only one side. He is detained at the police station for two days. Miyata Kunio announces the closure of Naiqua Gallery and opening of a psychiatric clinic in the September issue of Bijutsu jānaru. Bum Academy Third Festival by Bum Academy, Miyazaki Shrine, Prefectural Office, and Hitotsuba Beach, Miyazaki. Chiba Eisuke Exhibition, Misumi Gallery, Kōenji, Tokyo.  Chiba performs “Endless Working System” by continually creating works in the gallery space, but stops before the exhibition ends. • Nine Yokkaichi asthma patients file suit against six industrial oil companies, Mie Prefecture.  This is the first air pollution lawsuit.

1967639

9-1—9-7

La Marie-Vison (Marie in Fur), 3rd performance by Tenjō Sajiki, Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka, Tokyo. 9-11—9-16 Kyūshū-ha Woman Group Exhibition, Kunugi Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Included are works by Ōguro Aiko, Tabe Mitsuko, Chō Yoriko, and Noda Kimiko. 9-14 “Cool Tokyo ’67 Autumn” is aired on The Lead Today (TBS TV).  Directed by Muraki Yoshihiko; assisted by Miyai Rikurō. Featuring Zero Jigen and Chida Ui, et al. 9-16 Back Naked Ritual by Zero Jigen, TBS Lobby, streets of Ginza, Gallery Crystal, Tokyo.  Conducted in the middle of the night with 200 fūten and a chindon-ya band. Zero Jigen enacts katate-age in Ginza. 9-18 Shoku-gi oyobi bijutsukai sōgi no tame no renzoku gishiki (Ritual Series for the Rite of Food and the Funeral of the Art World) by Kokuin, Akane Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Kokuin has increased its membership to fifteen. A woman in underwear lies on the table, and the people around the table eat food that is placed on and around her body. 9-24 Zero Jigen enacts performances on Keizō Visits (TBS TV), Dōgenzaka, Japan Ultrasonic Spa, Shibuya, Tokyo.  Nuno hiki gishiki (Cloth-dragging Ritual) and Chō-onpa onsen kyōki sakusen (Ultrasonic Spa Insanity Operation). Six men and three women participate, including Katō Yoshihiro, Kamijō Junjirō, Nagata Satoshi, and Matsuba Masao. 9-26—10-1 2nd Peace Should Come to Vietnam Exhibition, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Organized by Shigun. Included are works by members of Shigun and Inoue Chōzaburō. A presentation of Betonamu ōenka (Vietnam Cheering Song) occurs on September 30. OCTOBER Kosugi Takehisa travels to European cities and meets Fluxus artists. OCTOBER Futeikei bijutsuron (On Informal Art) by Yamaguchi Katsuhiro is published by Gakugei Shorin. OCTOBER Kawani Hiroshi joins publisher Gendai Shichōsha as Deputy Director of the Planning Department (Editor-in-Chief), Tokyo. OCTOBER? Happening by Yamada Kaiya (who later becomes a member of Buzoku) et al., Green House, Shinjuku Station East Exit, Tokyo. 10-1—10-10 Donarudo Richī no karei na sukyandaru (Splendid scandal of Donald Richie/4 Films by Donald Richie), Theater Scorpio, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Screenings of Five Philosophical Fables, Atami Burūzu (Atami Blues), Shinda Seinen (A dead youth), Nozoki Monogatari (Peep Story), and Senzuri Yaro (Masturbating guy). 10-2 “Irebun Geijutsusai” (Eleven Art Festival) is aired on 11PM (NTV).  Awazu Kiyoshi, Ōbayashi Nobuhiko, Terayama Shūji, Hijikata Tatsumi, and Li Reisen participate. 10-6 Niigata Contemporary Artist Group GUN is formed, Nagaoka, Niigata.

6401967

10-8

10-11 10-12—10-19

10-14—10-16

10-16

10-18 10-21

10-25 10-26

10-30 10-30

10-30 AND 31

NOVEMBER

• First Haneda Incident, around Haneda Airport, Tokyo  Students aiming to prevent Prime Minister Satō Eisaku from visiting Southeast Asia and South Vietnam clash with riot police. For the first time, the students arm themselves with helmets and geba-bō (wooden sticks). Yamazaki Hiroaki, a student at Kyoto University, dies in the clash. Sakurai Takami returns from the United States. Dimension ’67 Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  Included are works by Ueta Koji, Okamoto Hajime, Kawaguchi Tatsuo, and Yoshioka Shigeo. ゼロ次元　超音波作戦（花電車防毒面作戦第一） Zero Jigen, Ultrasonic Wave Operation (Flower Train Gas Mask Operation No. 1), Club Hana-densha (Flower Train), Asakusa, Tokyo.  A long with Zero Jigen, participating artists include Aome Umi, Gulliver (Azuchi Shūzō), Sakurai Takami, Chida Ui, Matsue Kaku, and Muta Kunihiro. Live music accompanies the ritual. The event is extremely well-received, but the Second Operation at Club Shōchiku, scheduled for October 17, is canceled as a result of the performance. Evening of 8mm Film and Ritual, Mudo Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  A n event held on the first day of the Shikaku Exhibition (October 16–22). Along with the exhibition of “Proliferation Composition by Objects,” 8mm films Kyōsōkyoku: de formēzu (Frenzy Rhapsody: De Formez), and Shokugi (Eating Ritual) are screened, and a black mass ritual is enacted. This is the first screening of Kokuin’s films. Gulliver enacts Measure Plan. • Twiggy, “The Queen of the Miniskirt,” visits Japan. • Sōhyō holds Vietnam Antiwar 10.21 Rally, Tokyo etc.  This is part of an international unified action in protest of the Vietnam War. A rally of 100,000 people is held in Washington, D.C. on the same day. Happening Show by Maeyama Tadashi, Ōshima Gallery, Takada, Niigata.  Maeyama performs a Happening, Amai hōtai (Sweet Bandage). Boots Gogo Meeting, Doshisha University Student Hall, Kyoto.  A zuchi Shūzō, Ishihara Kaoru, Okamoto Hajime, and Mizukami Jun participate. Invitation to the Butoh Dance by Kasai Akira, Dai-ichi Seimei Hall, Hibiya, Tokyo.  Poster by Akasegawa Genpei.  ocumentary Hanoi: Den Hideo’s Testimony (TBS TV) is aired. •D  This program, the first coverage of North Vietnam issued by a Japanese broadcasting station, attracts much attention, but the Liberal Democratic Party calls it into a question and Den eventually leaves the world of television. Histoire d’O (History of O), 1st performance by Itō Mika Bizarre Ballet Company, Tokyo Kosei Nenkin Kaikan Small Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  The scene in which Ishii Mitsutaka sprays foam from a fire extinguisher, which looks like semen, onto a naked Itō becomes a hot topic in weekly magazines. The performance is repeated at the same venue on December 26 and 31. West Park Art Festival, West Park, Sendai.  Participating artists include Ishikawa Shun (who exhibits “five useful objets,” which include Kuzukago [Wastebasket]), Itoi Kanji, and Toyoshima Shigeyuki.

1967641

NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER NOVEMBER? 11-7—11-22

11-10

11-11

11-11

11-12

11-13

The exhibition is planned by Ishikawa and other artists who are dissatisfied with the Sendai Independent Exhibition, which featured mainly the work of modernist artists such as Miyagi Teruo. This exhibition was thus an attempt to gather more avant-garde works by limiting submissions to artists born in the Shōwa period. Itoi, who makes an unscheduled appearance at the event, puts on a mortarboard and half-transparent black kantōi tunic and stands up a penis-shaped object given by Katō Yoshihiro inside a round detergent can. Ishikawa later moves Itoi’s work to the bottom of a hole dug out to collect trash as his own artwork. On a different day, Itoi wraps toilet paper around trees across the park. Five Packages of Human-beings, Sanjō Keihan Station Platform, Kyoto.  A zuchi Shūzō, Ueta Koji, Miki Tetsuo, et al. package themselves into transparent plastic bags. Waiting for Godot by Theater Company Bara (Rose), Kyoto University West Auditorium.  A zuchi Shūzō participates. • The number of color TVs in use in Japan exceeds a million. Azuchi Shūzō moves from Kyoto to Tokyo and lives in an apartment in Kōenji. The 1st Sōgetsu Experimental Film Festival, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Screening includes Okabe Michio’s Tenchi Sōzō-setsu (Theory of Creation, Encouragement Award). In this film, Ishizaki Kōichirō performs a Happening using a zuta bag (a kind of tote bag). Kokoka kanataka, hatamata dokoka? (Here or there, or where?), underground parking lot of Sennichidani Temple Hall, Shinanomachi, Tokyo.  Theatrical performance by Magical Mystery Children Sect, a group of research students within Hakken no Kai. Ishiko Junzō gives his highest praise to the performance. It is performed again at the 17th performance of Hakken no Kai, March–May 1968. [p. 237] Film ’67, Kinrō Kaikan, Kyoto.  Screening includes Kansoku no jikan (15 byō) (Observation Time (15 Seconds)) by Group I and films by Manabe Sōhei and Mizukami Jun. Organized by Cine TIMMM (Imai Norio, Terao Kōji, Matsumoto Shoji, Manabe, Mizukami, et al.) Y  • ui Chūnoshin immolates himself in front of the Prime Minister’s Office in protest of Prime Minister Satō Eisaku’s support for the bombing in North Vietnam, Nagatachō, Tokyo.  Kurohata conducts a ritual to commemorate Yui in December. • The Second Haneda Incident, near Haneda Airport, Tokyo.  Sanpa Zengakuren, aiming to prevent Prime Minister Satō Eisaku from visiting the United States, collides with riot police armed with duralumin shields. Kokuin visits for coverage and reports on the scene of the “Bloody Street Battle” in Koebukuro. This incident politicizes Kokuin, which begins producing documentary films thereafter. Crosstalk 1, Asahi Auditorium, Yūrakuchō, Tokyo.  Planning Committee consists of Akiyama Kuniharu, Roger Reynolds, Karen Reynolds, and Yuasa Jōji. American and Japanese experimental music is performed.

6421967

• Beheiren releases a press statement on the escape of four U.S. military deserters from the U.S. aircraft carrier Intrepid, Gakushi Kaikan, Hitotsubashi, Tokyo. 11-13—11-19 Mizukami Jun Exhibition: How to Get Thru Reaction, Azuma Gallery, Kyoto.  M izukami creates a gate through which the audience can pass. Other exhibiting artists include Ikemizu Keiichi and Fukunaga Toyoko (Zōshoku suru remon [Proliferating Lemon]), Okamoto Hajime (Package of Information II, III), and Miki Tetsuo (Free Words). 11-24 Hijikata Tatsumi appears in “Fierce! This is the Improvisational Dance” on Untitled Concert (NET TV), Tokyo.  H ijikata conducts the orchestra and dances, improvising with Ohno Kazuo and Kasai Akira. Tsukada Shigeru and Matsuyama Mikiko also appear. DECEMBER Happening Viva Kyoto #2 by Azuchi Shūzō, in front of Takashimaya Department Store, Shijō-kawaramachi, Kyoto.  Performed with Abe Maria (saxophonist). DECEMBER Akasegawa Genpei prints and issues Dainippon rei-yen satsu (Great Japan Zeroyen Note), Tokyo.  Begins exchanging with Japanese currency at a rate of 300 yen per note (later increasing to 500 yen). DECEMBER Kosugi Takehisa returns from Europe. DECEMBER Emerald Colored Breeze Tribe issues Buzoku (The Tribe) Vol.2, No. 1, Kokubunji, Tokyo. 12-1 故由比忠之進追悼国民儀 National Memorial Ritual for Yui Chūnoshin, street in front of Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, temporary stage behind Yasuda Life Insurance Company near Shinjuku Station West Exit, etc., Tokyo.  A long with Kurohata (Suzuki Shirō, Takahara Yūji, Matsue Kaku, Matsushita Ippei, and Tachibana Yoshirō), Itoi Kanji, Kokuin, Zero Jigen, and Makirō from Baramanji Kessha participate. The banner reads “Vietnam Antiwar Document.” The ritual consists of Part 1: Yui Chūnoshin Funeral Ritual, Part 2: Self-immolation Ritual, and Part 3: Ritual You Do. Matsue and Takahara burn dolls in the shape of themselves. Zero Jigen, wearing gas masks, and Itoi with a cross shaved into the back of his head join the march. Yoshida Yoshie and Itoi are questioned by the police. [plate 14 and 15, p. 10 and p. 360] 12-1 Body Painting Show by Makirō, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  This is the inaugural event for the club that opens in front of Shinjuku Gyoen. Between performances, Makirō participates in Kurohata’s “Vietnam Antiwar Document.” 12-1 Art 21 No. 4 is issued, Tokyo.  This is the final issue of Art 21. Contributors include Katō Yoshihiro, Sasaki Kōsei, Zantō Kaigi (Akiyama Yūtokutaishi et al.), Chida Ui (“Avant-garde celebrity business through the practice of proactive opportunism: A situational treatise”), Chiba Eisuke, and Yoshida Yoshie. 12-4 Jiko maisō gishiki (Self-burial ritual), from Tokyo Station to Ginza, Tokyo.  Hori Kōsai, Hikosaka Naoyoshi and about ten other members of Tama Art University’s theater company parade as if in a funeral march, wearing mourning badges and hanging a headless female doll in white costume. 11-13

196764 3

12-8

12-9

12-9

12-9—12-10

12-11—12-16

12-15

Hoashi Mariko Concert: With Mariko, Tokyo Sankei Hall, Ōtemachi, Tokyo.  The following performance by Chiba Eisuke may have occurred at this event: when asked to express “the modern,” Chiba cover himself with a white cloth, screams loudly, and runs and rolls around. ゼロ次元　全裸防毒面歩行儀式 Zero Jigen, Buck-naked Gas-masked Walking Ritual, underground shopping mall in Shinjuku Station, Kinokuniya Building, Tokyo.  At 9 p.m., after a ritual with Katō Yoshihiro’s son in the underground shopping mall, three members (including Katō) put on gas masks and stripped down to their gaiters on the first floor of the Kinokuniya Building. They walk through the passage with one hand raised in the air (katate-age). This is one of the most important rituals of Zero Jigen and is recorded in Miyai Rikurō’s film, Phenomenology of Zeitgeist. [plate 21, p. 13]. Afterwards, Matsue Kaku plans to enact Ritual Tsuina in front of the garage of the Tokyo Metropolitan Line (Toden) at 2 am This is meant to be Matsue’s final ritual, but Katō and the others stop him from performing the ritual act, which would have entailed Matsue and his daughter committing a double suicide by immolating themselves with oil. • Nine routes of the Tokyo Metropolitan Line are shut down, Tokyo.  The Meguro–Eitaibashi Line, which Zero Jigen used in their ritual, runs its final service; the Arakawa Line is the last remaining Toden line. GUN Exhibition, Nagaoka Cultural Center, Niigata.  Included are works by Iida Haruyuki, Ichihashi Tetsuo, Oguri Kōji, Onogawa Mitsuo, Kuwano Yasuko, Komatsu Hirotada, Kondō Naoyuki, Sagō Atsushi, Shirai Kazuo, Suzuki Tsuyoshi, Hasebe Noboru, Horikawa Michio, Maeyama Tadashi, and Miyamura Yasuo. This is the founding exhibition of GUN (Group Ultra Niigata). Along with the exhibition, the group enacts a Happening on the sidewalk in front of Daiwa Department Store. The members, hanging gloves from their bodies and wearing sunglasses, tie both their hands and feet with rope and lie down on the sidewalk. A symposium is held on December 10. The group publishes the first issue of the journal GUN. The Joint Exhibition of Young Artist Groups, Central Information Hall, Seoul.  A joint exhibition of three groups: Origin, Mu (Nothing), and Shinjeon (New Exhibition). A demonstration parade with members holding artworks and placards on the streets of central Seoul from the plaza in front of the City Hall takes place on December 11. On December 14, The Encounter of a Plastic Umbrella and Candles is performed in the gallery, which is the first performance in Korean art history. Great Ramble Operation, sidewalk in theater street, Hibiya, Tokyo.  P roduced by Zero Jigen (Katō Yoshihiro). Performed by Chida Ui, Koyama Tetsuo and other women. Women march in custom-made costumes, in a ritual to promote the release of the French film La Grande Vadrouille (directed by Gerard Oury). Koyama participates wearing an outfit that features a mannequin head on his crotch.

64 41967-1968

12-15—12-17 12-17

12-19

12-21—12-28 12-25

12-28

12-31

Exptance with Film, screening of Gulliver’s films, LSD, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Box (starring Miki Tetsuo), Film, Screen, and Switch are screened. Lecture and Underground Cinema, presumably Shibuya Art Institute, Tokyo.  Organized by S.A.I. A lecture on Giacometti and screening of a documentary film of the Haneda Struggle, as well as documentary films of rituals by Kurohata, Zero Jigen, and Kokuin. • Economic Planning Agency announces that Japan’s Gross National Product is predicted to become the third largest in the world outside of the communist bloc, after the United States and West Germany. GUN Exhibition, Gallery Shinjuku, Tokyo. • The Folk Crusaders release Kaettekita yopparai (The Drunkard Returns).  The song becomes a huge hit, selling 800,000 copies in a month. Its official English title is “I Only Live Twice,” a riff on the James Bond film. A film of the same name, based on the song, is released in March 1968; the Folk Crusaders make an appearance in the film. Mosaic: Collection of Short Short Happenings for the Charity of the Physically Disabled, Tōyoko Theater, Shibuya, Tokyo.  Stage design by Tanaka Ikkō. Music direction by Akiyama Kuniharu and Ichiyanagi Toshi. The event’s 40 participants include Awazu Kiyoshi, Isaka Yoshitarō, Uno Akira, Kimura Tsunehisa, Tanaka Ikkō, Nagai Kazumasa, Fukuda Shigeo, Yokoo Tadanori with Ishioka Eiko (design); Ishimoto Yasuhiro, Ōtsuji Kiyoji, Shinoyama Kishin, Takanashi Yutaka, Tachiki Yoshihiro, Hosoe Eikō (photography); and Itō Takamichi (art). Each participant is given three minutes to freely perform within one of the six boxes on stage. • A n NHK survey shows that the diffusion rate of television has reached 83.1%.

1968 IN THIS YEAR

Baramanji Kessha appears in Katsura Kokinji Afternoon Show (NET TV), Tokyo.  Ōe Chojirō and Makirō perform, with Kawanaka Nobuhiro as a guest. Chiba Eisuke puts up a horizontal banner stating “I will kidnap Prime Minister Satō Eisaku,” Suginami Public Hall, Tokyo.  Chiba performs this action at a film screening event. He removes the banner after he is threatened by a yakuza member. image, image project, Lake Biwa, Shiga.  Fukunaga Toyoko et al. move a wooden slide, approximately six meters-high, that floats on the water. The same event is later enacted at Awaji Island and Tottori Sand Dunes. Akiyama Yūtokutaishi forms Shinjuku Boy Troop as its sole member, Tokyo. Ikeda Shōichi moves to Tokyo and forms En Gekijō (Circle Theater).  The theater company is a “multi-play” group that combines visual art and theater. Happening by Makita Yoshiaki, Shinjuku Station West Exit Plaza, Tokyo.  Makita performs naked, carrying on his back a papier-mâché object with “Bomb” written on it in large print. • Ikebukuro Art Theater opens, Tokyo.

196864 5

 Sengyōji Temple near the east exit of Ikebukuro Station provides a venue for

JANUARY

JANUARY

1-1

1-1

1-6 1-15

1-15

1-16—1-17

1-18

1-20

1-25

theatrical performances.  T • he popularization of cassette tape recorders.  R adio cassette players also come onto the market. 1st Contemporary Poetry Recital: Beat Generation in Japan, LSD, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Gulliver and two other men read Shi/C/4. The concept of the piece is this: the men respectively read the hiragana syllabary, English alphabets, and Arabic numerals. They all urinate simultaneously when they reach し, C, and 4 (all pronounced “shi” in Japanese). Yamaguchi Katsuhiro establishes Environmental Plan Co. with Isozaki Arata to receive orders from Mitsui Group Pavilion and other clients of Expo ’70, assuming the position of Representative Director, Tokyo. Vitamin Show by Koyama Tetsuo, Sukiyabashi Park, Tokyo.  Koyama performs with mannequins and a sprayer. Two women join the performance. [plate 12, p. 9, and p. 368] • Ashita no Jō (Tomorrow’s Joe), written by Kajiwara Ikki, drawn by Chiba Tetsuya, starts serialization from the January 1 issue of Shūkan Shōnen Magajin, published by Kōdansha. The series continues until May 1973. Suenaga Tamio appears on Wakai sedai (Young Generation, NHK TV), Tokyo.  The theme is “Let’s Talk about Utopia,” featuring Okamoto Tarō. Street Happening by GUN, Furumachi Arcade, Niigata.  Ichihashi Tetsuo, Oguri Tsuyoshi, Onogawa Mitsuo, Horikawa Michio, and Maeyama Tadashi participate. These men, wearing sunglasses and cloaks with the logo of GUN, tie their bodies to the pillars of the arcade. •Struggle for the prevention of nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise’s port call at Sasebo, Nagasaki.  Moriyama Yasuhide participates. The USS Enterprise enters Sasebo Port on January 19. Hoi hoi odori engi, Seisō isu gishiki (Hoi-hoi dance performance ritual and Fulldress chair ritual) by Zero Jigen, Imaike Angura Theater and Sakaemachi Bus Terminal Square, Nagoya.  On January 16 at the theater, the performers sit silently in front of desks on the stage. On January 17 at the bus terminal square, 10 performers in morning suits sit in a row on chairs spaced 2 meters apart. GUN presents Happening Show in a TV program of BSN (Broadcasting System of Niigata), Niigata.  Ōike Kōichirō, Oguri Tsuyoshi, Onogawa Mitsuo, Horikawa Michio, and Maeyama Tadashi particpate. Hasebe Noboru and the manager of Kojima Bookstore provide commentary. Horikawa breaks statues of Venus and Agrippa. Maeyama wraps the bodies of female students who volunteered to participate. Ritual with a car and masks by Kokuin, Bikkuri Guard, Ikebukuro, Tokyo.  Bikkuri Guard refers to the underpass beneath the national railway tracks (present-day Japan Railway). Rituals by Zero Jigen and Kokuin, Angura Pop, Shinjuku, Tokyo.

6461968

1-28 1-28

1-29 1-29

FEBRUARY

FEBRUARY 2-4—2-9 2-11

2-13—2-14

2-18

2-20 2-24

2-27—3-3

Whipping ritual and filming by Kokuin, Meiji Jingū, Tokyo. Bōdokumen kōshin (Gas Mask March) by Katō Yoshihiro, Meguro Fudōson, Tokyo.  Wearing a gas mask, Katō visits the temple festival with his son. “New faces of Shinjuku” aired on 11PM (NTV).  Written by Sekine Hiroshi. One Minute T.V. by Gulliver airs. • The University of Tokyo Conflict begins, Hongō, Tokyo.  The Students’ Union of Faculty of Medicine opposes the registered doctor system, which replaces the internship system, and goes on strike indefinitely. Dinner, Shinjuku Station West Exit Square, Tokyo.  At 6 pm, ten people, including Gulliver, Chida Ui, and Miyai Rikurō, set up chairs and a desk and eat spaghetti at the West Exit Square. • Fashion Village The Apple opens, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  P roduced by Hamano Yasuhiro. Closes in September. Touch-touch Rozo-gun Exhibition (19th Rozo-gun Exhibition), Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo. Demonstration for the Rejection of National Foundation Day by Kakumeiteki dezainā dōmei (Revolutionary Designers Alliance), Musashino Art University, Tokyo. サイコデリシャス#1 インターメディア・ピース Psycho-delicious #1: Intermedia Piece, Angura Pop, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Directed by Kazumata Kōichi and Kanesaka Kenji. Participating artists include Itō Mika, Uekusa Jin’ichi, Gulliver, Gomigawa Junko, Shinohara Ushio, Chida Ui, Nakamura Hiroshi, Hanaga Mitsutoshi, Miyai Rikurō, and Yoshihara Norio. This is considered to be the earliest psychedelic show in Japan. “Kyūshū Rediscovery: Avant-Garde Art in Kyūshū” (RKB TV) airs, Fukuoka.  Kyūshū-ha members Sakurai Takami, Taniguchi Kazuko, Taniguchi Toshio, Tabe Mitsuko, Yonekura Toku appear along with Kotani Shūichi for a performance. Kishida Tsutomu provides commentary. Sakurai smashes a Venus statue with a mallet, and Taniguchi Kazuko wears tights and combs her hair at the RKB Mainichi Broadcasting Studio. • K im Hiro barricades himself in a hotel room at Sumatakyō Onsen and is arrested on February 24, Shizuoka. 1st Film Ceremony, Theater Scorpio, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Screenings include a new multi-vision by 8 Generation and 11.12 Haneda tōsō: de formēzu (11.12 Haneda Struggle: De-Formers) by Kokuin. 2nd Trends of Contemporary Art Kyūshū Exhibition, Fukuoka Prefectural Cultural Hall.  Included are works by Kyūshū-ha members: Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ōguro Aiko, Ōyama Uichi, Owari Takeshi, Obata Hidesuke, Kikuhata Mokuma, Sakurai Takami, Taniguchi Toshio, Tabe Mitsuko, Terada Ken’ichirō, Hirayama Toshiko, Funaki Yoshiharu, Miyazaki Junnosuke, Chō Yoriko; Also included are works by Moriyama Yasuhide (frames made of plaster), Harumoto Shigeto (a minute drawing of the foam of detergent in the washing

1968647

machine), Katō Isao, Kyōya (with Yonekura Toku, formerly of Kyūshū-ha), and Fujino Tadatoshi of Gutai. MARCH 19th Gar Gar Contemporary Art Exhibition (3rd Walking Painting Exhibition), Hibiya Park, Tokyo.  The group moves a huge sculpture. MARCH Japan Filmmakers Cooperative is established, opening Japan Underground Center, Shinbashi, Tokyo.  Satō Shigechika works as the director of the Center, and Kawanaka Nobuhiro becomes the secretariat. MARCH • Theater 36 (saburoku) opens, Nagoya. 3-2—6-29 Yui Shōsetsu by Jōkyō Gekijō, Hanazono Shrine, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  This performance occurs every Saturday night in the tent throughout this period. 3-6—3-15 12th Kyoto Independent Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  Included are works by The Play members Ikemizu Keiichi (Tunnel), Iwakura Masahito (Human Recovery Machine), Fukunaga Toyoko (Entrance), Mizukami Jun (On Feet Gauge), Yoshioka Shigeo (Furasuko no naka no ha [Tooth in Flask]); Zero Jigen members Iwata Shin’ichi (Running Art and other works) and Koiwa Takayoshi (Zero Jigen Company). Mizukami and Zero Jigen’s Nagoya members jointly perform. 3-7 Psycho-delicious #2: Intermedia Piece, Angura Pop, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Participating artists: Itō Mika, Uekusa Jin’ichi, Kanesaka Kenji, Gulliver, Shinohara Ushio, Tone Yasunao, Miyai Rikurō, and Hanaga Mitsutoshi. 3-8 • Zengakuren conducts the struggle against the establishment of Ōji Field Hospital, Ōji, Tokyo.  L ocal residents join the struggle by throwing stones. Kokuin visits to report. 3-9—3-20 Underground in March, Jiyū Gekijō, Azabu Kasumichō, Tokyo.  Screenings include Phenomenology of Zeitgeist by Miyai Rikuō, in which Zero Jigen appears. 3-13 狂気見本市 Insanity Trade Fair, Honmoku-tei, Ueno, Tokyo.  Kurohata, Kokuin, Zero Jigen, and Vitamin Art (including Koyama Tetsuo) participate. This is one of the events that is emblematic of the Ritualists at their peak. [pp. 219–21] 3-17 Kuroi shinkū (Black Vacuum), a mysterious drama by Zero Jigen, Goshiki-en, Aichi.  Zero Jigen performs as the first Ningyō-geki engi (doll play) in masked formal wear featuring Morikawa Riko. 3-20 Happening Shinjuku In, LSD, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Kokuin, Gulliver (Hallucination #1, #2), and Chida Ui participate. Aome Umi assists. [pp. 375–6] 3-20—3-31 Iwata Shin’ichi Solo Exhibition, Tōseifū sōkō geijutsu: Junsui momoiro geijutsu (Modern Style Running Art: Pure Pink Art), Tanka Hall, Nagoya. 3-23 Zero Jigen ritual airs on Gendai no me (Modern Eyes, Tokai TV), Nagoya. 3-25 Maki and Car Happening by Kokuin, Kyoto.

6481968

3-25—3-31

3-28

3-28 APRIL? 4-1 4-4

4-4

4-4 4-5

4-5—5-5 4-8—4-14 4-10

4-10

4-13—4-14

Pink Four Exhibition, Galerie 16, Kyoto.  Ayata Yūsaku, Itakura Yōzō, Ueta Koji, Katō Yumiko, and Mizukami Jun participate. T  • ōdai zengaku tōsō iinkai (All-campus Struggle Committee, University of Tokyo, Zentōi) occupies Yasuda Auditorium, and the university cancels its graduation ceremony, Hongō, Tokyo. • “ Angura Hot News” airs on 11PM (NTV). The police search the house of Emerald Colored Breeze on suspicion that they have violated the Cannabis Control Law, Kokubunji, Tokyo. • Shinjuku Central Park opens, Tokyo. Ritual by Kokuin, in front of Ikebukuro Station and underpass, inside Seibu train, Tokyo.  Suenaga Tamio and Muta Kunihiro participate. Around this time, Kokuin shoots the film Cyberne-sex Song. Meeting of Katō Isao, Harumoto Shigeto, Moriyama Yasuhide, and Tōya Masami, Kitakyūshū Municipal Yahata Museum of Art.  At Tōya’s suggestion, they decide on the group name Zelle. • A ssassination of Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. • The Czech Communist Party Central Commission General Assembly attempts to institute liberal reform through Alexander Dubček’s “Action Programme,” which included freedoms of press and speech, as well as the possibility of a multi-party system of government (The Prague Spring).  Beginning August 20, Czechoslovakia is suppressed by the invasion of five countries, led by the Soviet Union. New Art Group Show: Kyūshū-ha Exhibition, San Francisco.  Two-person exhibition by Urata Muneo and Ochi Osamu. Katō Isao Exhibition by Numbers and Picasso, Azuma Gallery, Kyoto. EX・POSE 1968「なにかいってくれ、いま、さがす」 第1回「変わった？ 何が （現代の変身）」 EX·POSE ’68: Say something, now, I’m searching, 1st Day, Changed? What has? (Contemporary Metamorphosis), Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  he event consists of Happening Blue Box (produced and directed by Joffrey T Hendrix; performers are Hendrix, Shiomi Mieko, Takamatsu Jirō, and Tone Yasunao), psychedelic show Psycho-delicious (produced by Ichiyanagi Toshi, Kurokawa Kishō, Yokoo Tadanori; performers include The Happening Four, Naitō Mako, Hamano Yasuhiro), a discussion (Ichiyanagi, Kurokawa, Nakahara Yūsuke, and Yokoo), and a poetry reading (Iijima Kōichi). [pp. 199–201] • C .C.C. opens, Ikebukuro, Tokyo.  A disco, produced by Kazumata Kōichi. The name is an acronym for “computer, control, and communication.” 2nd GUN Exhibition, Ōshima Gallery, Takada, Niigata.  Participating artists: Iida Haruyuki, Ichihashi Tetsuo, Onogawa Mitsuo, Shirai Kazuo, Suzuki Tsuyoshi, Horikawa Michio, and Maeyama Tadashi. During the exhibition, the members, with faces wrapped with bandages, carry the bandaged body of a woman on a stretcher to the park at the former Takada

1968649

4-15

4-15?

4-15—4-20 4-18

4-18 4-20

4-23

Castle, where many people gather to view cherry blossoms. There they perform a ritual. EX・POSE 1968「なにかいってくれ、いま、さがす」 第2回「俺たちはみんな気 狂いピエロだ（衝突とは）」 EX·POSE ’68: Say something, now, I’m searching, 2nd Day, All of Us Are Pierrot the Fool (What is a clash?), Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  The event consists of the screening of the film Tsuburekakatta Migime no tame ni (For My Crushed Right Eye, directed by Matsumoto Toshio, shot by Suzuki Tatsuo, sound by Akiyama Kuniharu, produced by Kudō Mitsuru), a discussion (Akiyama, Awazu Kiyoshi, Konno Tsutomu, Hara Hiroshi, and Matsumoto) and a poetry reading (Hasegawa Ryūsei). Zelle is formed, Fukuoka.  Members are Katō Isao, Tashiro Tsuneo, Tōya Masami, Tomiura Shizuo, Harumoto Shigeto, Matsumoto Hōnen, Moriyama Yasuhide and Yamaguchi Seinosuke. “Zelle” means “cell” in German. The name comes “from the idea that cells act as unicellular organs, but become new organisms by uniting each other.” The group later evolves into Collective Kumo. ST Pro (Shinohara Ushio and Tamai Shiho) Psychedelic Illustration Exhibition, Miyuki Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. A Hundred Selection of Cultural Classes: Body Art Festival, Kinokuniya Building 9th Floor, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  This could be considered a public production of body painting. • K asumigaseki Building is completed, Tokyo.  It is Japan’s first skyscraper at a height of thirty-six floors, 147m. EX・POSE 1968「なにかいってくれ、いま、さがす」 第3回「暴力と恍惚（行動 の所有）」 EX·POSE ’68: Say something, now, I’m searching, 3rd Day, Violence and Ecstasy (Possession of Action), Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  The event consists of Gentō kitan: ā mujō, yoarashi Ohyaku (Strange Tale: Les Miserables, O-hyaku of the stormy night, a mysterious magic lantern story written by Hariu Ichirō and narrated by Makiguchi Motomi), an adlibbed music performance (Nagai Seiji and Hasegawa Tokio), improvisational painting (Inayama Kiichi, Kojima Nobuaki, Takamatsu Jirō, and Joffrey Hendrix), a discussion (Ishidō Yoshirō, Shinohara Ushio, Takahashi Mutsuo, and Hariu), and a poetry reading (Tomioka Taeko). Overarching event structure by Uryū Ryōsuke. Shinohara enacts a Happening in which he lifts himself between two stepladders and lights a sparkler on the tip of his penis. Kokuin appears in Katsura Kokinji Afternoon Show (NET TV), Tokyo.  Participating artists: Suenaga Tamio, Muta Kunihiro, I. S., H. K., Ishibashi Hatsuko, Ueshima Chizuko, Takamori Maki, and Aome Umi. A half nude woman (Ueshima) bites a sausage hanging from the crotch of a man (Muta), who is sitting on a table. This event sparks “fierce arguments in several fields.”

6501968

4-23 4-25

4-30

4-30—5-18

MAY

MAY

MAY?

MAY? 5-2 5-4—5-5

Happening by Mazura Ryūdan Shikyū ningen sai (Womb Human Festival), Asakusaza Theater, Tokyo. EX・POSE 1968「なにかいってくれ、いま、さがす」 第4回「蒸発のすすめ（虚 像と実像）」 EX·POSE ’68: Say something, now, I’m searching, 4th Day, In favor of Disappearance (Virtual and Real Images), Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  The event consists of the screening of films Isu o sagasu otoko (Man looking for chair, directed by Kuroki Kazuo), Sound display (written by Satō Keijirō), and Sirukusukurīn ni yoru kumogakure no jutsu (The art of disappearance by silkscreen, performed by Jōkyō Gekijō with Kara Jurō, Ōkubo Taka, et al.), a discussion (Kara, Takamatsu Jirō, Tōno Yoshiaki, and Hani Susumu), and a poetry reading (Shiraishi Kazuko). Overarching event structure by Yamaguchi Katsuhiro. EX・POSE 1968「なにかいってくれ、いま、さがす」 第5回「あすはあさっての日 が昇る（未来の構想力）」 EX·POSE ’68: Say something, now, I’m searching, 5th Day, Tomorrow, the Sun of the Day after Tomorrow Will Rises (Future Imagination), Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  The event consists of a lecture (Kawazoe Noboru), discussion (Awazu Kiyoshi, Isozaki Arata, and Komatsu Sakyō), films via multi-screen projection, and a poetry reading (Ōoka Makoto). Tricks and Vision: Stolen Eyes, Tokyo Gallery and Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  The Muramatsu Gallery venue is open until May 11. Event Festival Kyūshi Hinoeuma: Face to Face, Shinkō Kaikan, Yokohama.  A nother title for the event is May 26 kyūshi tomobiki hinoesaru we begin today at the end of history and does in the gap: face to face. The 30 participants include Kōmura Masao, Koshimizu Susumu, Kobayashi Hakudō, Saitō Yoshishige, Sekine Nobuo, Takahashi Shirō, Yoshida Katsurō, Yoshiya Haruki, and a group from B Seminar. • Demonstration against the Yamada Ammunition Depot, Kitakyushu.  There is a surge in the movement to refuse the unloading and transport of ammunition, which lasts until July. Koyama Tetsuo’s show, Olympic, Yokohama.  This show, held at a cabaret, is a part of the Meiji Centennial Yokohama Port Festival. Koyama and three other men with faces painted in white perform on the stage with a black mannequin, and Koyama defecates [plate 13, p. 9]. Chida Ui walks around wearing the logo of Hi-lite cigarettes, Shinjuku Station West Exit Square, Tokyo. Spring Mini Festival by Group N39, Café Montand, Morioka. Happening at the 2nd Kobe Carnival, in front of Flower Clock in Higashi Yuenchi Park, Sannomiya, Kobe.  Participating artists include The Play members Ikemizu Keiichi (Kūkan no kakudai: hi to kōri I (Expansion of Space: Fire and Ice I), Iwakura Masahito, Ueta Koji and Miki Tetsuo, Okamoto Hajime (Nichijōsei no shukushō to kakudai matawa okintama bukuro [Reduction and Expansion of Everyday or the Bag of

1968651

5-5

5-6—5-18 5-7

5-7—5-12

5-7—5-12 5-9 5-10

5-10

Golden Balls]), Shibata Michiko, Suzukida Asako, Nakata Kazunari (Kemuri no dokkingu [Docking of Smoke]), Fukunaga Toyoko (Kūkan no kakudai: hi to kōri [Expansion of Space: Fire and Ice]), Mizukami Jun (Cloth Roll); Group I (Aoi hako to akai hako no ibento [Event of Blue Box and Red Box], and a parade by all members in a cloth with many faces painted); and Hirata Yōichi. Other free participants include Kiya Shigeki, Higenishimoto, Mukai Shūji, Yamazaki Ran, Yoshioka Shigeo, and Yoshida Minoru. Fashion Happening, in front of Hachikō statue at Shibuya Station to Harajuku, Tokyo.  P roduced by Satō Yoshiaki. Nearly 40 people wearing their favorite fashion items roam the streets. Kanesaka Kenji Photo Exhibition: U.S.A. the Third World, Nikon Salon, Ginza, Tokyo. Kyūshū-ha No. 8 is published, Fukuoka.  Edited by Ishibashi Yasuyuki, this final issue of Kyūshū-ha is a special feature on the San Francisco Kyūshū-ha. The issue lists as Kyūshū-ha members Ishibashi, Ōyama Uichi, Ōguro Aiko, Obata Hidesuke, Owari Takeshi, Sakurai Takami, Tabe Mitsuko, Chō Yoriko, Miyazaki Junnosuke, and Elisa Layers; from San Francisco Kyūshū-ha, Urata Muneo, Inoue Kunio, Ochi Osamu, Sawamura Masatoshi, and Sekiguchi Yoshiki; and from New York, Katae Masatoshi. Possibilities of Art through Artist Collectives, Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall.  Participating artist groups: Kyūshū-ha (Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ōguro Aiko, Ōyama Uichi, Owari Takeshi, Obata Hidesuke, Sakurai Takami, Tabe Mitsuko, Chō Yoriko, and Miyazaki Junnosuke), Yakuin Art Village (Taniguchi Toshio, Terada Ken’ichiro, Funaki Yoshiharu, et al.), Group 2 (Obana Shigeharu, et al.), Japan Art Society (Yagara Yutaka, et al.), Zelle (Moriyama Yasuhide, Harumoto Shigeto, Katō Isao et al.). Organized by Fukano Osamu (writer, Fukunichi). This is the last exhibition in which Kyūshū-ha participates under its group name. At the suggestion of Obata, the leader at the time, the members present works created according to the theme of “Sex Museum.” Miyazaki’s works, as collective production, are modified by other members. Tabe and Ōguro present a performance in which they sew a long penis-shaped object with a sewing machine. Moriyama from Zelle exhibits the same frames as he did in Trends of Contemporary Art Kyūshū in February for only three days. After the exhibition, Tōya Masami is expelled from Zelle, and Yamaguchi Seinosuke withdraws. Sakurai Takami Exhibition, Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall. Gotō Akira commits suicide, Kinchaku Island, Miyazaki.  Gotō is a painter and a member of Bum Academy. • Theater Pit Inn opens, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  The coffee shop on the 2nd floor is changed into a Tea Room, and the club on the 1st floor is changed into a Theater. The theater is rented and assigned to different theater companies on four days of the week, which includes Tenjō Sajiki on Thursdays. However, it does not draw the expected audience, so the theater venue is turned back into a coffee shop. M  • ugen (from the Chinese character meaning “Dream Phantom”) opens, Akasaka, Tokyo.

6521968

 A go-go club, produced by Hamano Yasuhiro. 5-12

Rolling March by Zero Jigen, Shinjuku, Tokyo. Street Haircut and Kiss Kiss Kiss by Maki and Makao from Kokuin, Sukiyabashi Park, in front of the Nichigeki (Nihon Gekijō) Theater, Yūrakuchō, Tokyo.  Takamori Maki cuts the hair of Muta Kunihiro (Makao) at the park and then they kiss continuously for twenty minutes in front of Nichigeki. 5-16 • “Fashion Show for Manifesto of Popular Culture Revolution” airs on Young 720 (TBS TV).  P roduced by Satō Yoshiaki. 5-18 • The first edition of the Kijima Norio Happening Show (NTV), “Is there anything interesting?” airs live in front of Shinjuku Koma Theater and Tōhō Parlor, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  The filming devolves into chaos and riot police are dispatched. [pp. 204–5] 5-18—? Ōbayashi Nobuhiko Retrospective Exhibition: His Love and Prayer for Film, Theater Scorpio, Shinjuku, Tokyo. 5-18—5-19 Open Experiment: Situation by Kokuin, C.C.C., Ikebukuro, Tokyo.  Part 1: Silence (Yoshihara Norio, Silvano Belardinelli), Part 2: Cybane-shock Part 2 is the 2nd entry in the Cybane series, experiments with light and sound, in particular environmental compositions and actions that feature the use of multi-screen projection). 5-21 • May Revolution, Paris. 5-22—5-27 20th Gar Gar Contemporary Art Exhibition: 10000 Topology, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  A n alternate title for the exhibition is “Infinite proliferation of sound and object X.” Sound, light and transparent materials are employed. 100 yen is collected for an admission fee. 5-23 • National Tax Agency announces two billion yen in unaccounted expenditures at Nihon University, Tokyo.  This marks the beginning of the Nihon University conflict. 5-26 Okabe Michio shoots scenes for the film Crazy Love in front of Shinjuku Koma Theater, Stadium and Katō Yoshihiro’s in Sendagaya, Tokyo.  Zero Jigen (Onbu kōshin gishiki [Piggyback March Ritual]) and Koyama Tetsuo perform. Hanaichimonme is played in front of Kato’s apartment (Hanaichimonme is a children’s game in which two sides trade members to each other while singing, similar to the Western game “red rover”). 5-27 A  • ll-Campus Joint-Struggle Council (Zenkyōtō) of Nihon University is formed and Akita Akehiro is elected as chairman, Tokyo. 5-30 Performance Transparent Baloons and Nude, C’est Ci Bon Music Appreciation Room, Seoul.  K ang Kukjin, Jung Kanja, and Jung Chanseung participate. JUNE Zen’ei no michi (The path of the avant-garde) by Shinohara Ushio is published by Bijutsu Shuppansha. 5-14

1968653

6-?—6-10

6-1

6-2 6-3—7-20

6-5

6-7—6-12

6-10 6-11 6-15

6-15

6-15

Tactile Film Meet, Konishi Living, Sendai.  Included are works by Ishikawa Shun (Gentō obuje: Kuroi hana no yumi [Magic lantern object: Dream of Black Flowers]), Saitō Yoshiaki, and Toyoshima Shigeyuki. Itoi Kanji visits every day and performs on the white cloth of Saitō’s work. He puts an artificial penis on his forehead and lays his face in the crotch of an inflatable pair of woman’s legs. • Shinjuku Central Park opens, Metropolitan Subcenter, Shinjuku Station West Exit, Tokyo.  The park is a redevelopment of Yodobashi Water Purification Plant and its surroundings. A U.S. Air Force F-4 Phantom jet crashes into the Computer Center, Kyushu University, Fukuoka. Serial Solo Exhibitions of Strange Guys from Gunma NOMO Group, Surugadai Gallery, Jinbōchō, Tokyo.  A seven-week series of solo exhibitions by NOMO members: Katō Akira, Kaneko Hidehiko, Serizawa Eizō, Tsunoda Jin’ichi, Fujimori Katsuji, Miyoshi Hidetoshi, and Mori Yasuo. The title of the Miyoshi’s exhibition “Placard Performance” on June 10–15 is the earliest known use of the word “performance” (pafōmansu) in Japanese art. Orchestral Space ’68: Chamber Pieces, Nikkei Hall, Ōtemachi, Tokyo.  Kosugi Takehisa performs his Catch Wave (Mano–Dharma Electronic). Shiomi Mieko and Tone Yasunao participate in the performance with Kosugi. Modern Space ’68: Light and Environment, Sogō department store, Sannomiya, Kobe.  Included are works by Shinohara Ushio, Yoshida Minoru, and Yoshimura Masunobu. • The Air Pollution Control Law and Noise Control Law are promulgated. • Students demonstrate to prevent the transport of ammunition to the U.S. military’s Yamada Ammunition Depot, Minami-kokura Station, Kitakyushu. • Members of the Faculty of Medicine, All-campus Struggle Committee, University of Tokyo (Zentōi) occupies Yasuda Auditorium and barricades, Hongō, Tokyo.  On June 17, Ōkōchi Kazuo, the President of the University of Tokyo, mobilizes the police and the students are driven out. On the same day, the All-campus Struggle Alliance (Zentōren) is formed. On July 2nd, Zentōren and other factions barricade the campus again. • Hibiya Struggle, Tokyo.  On this date, the “Anti-Vietnam War Youth General Rise-up Rally” is held at Hibiya Open-air Concert Hall. Kokuin participates and documents the struggle on film. June 15 Ikebukuro Teach-in: What is ’70 for You, Toshima Art Institute, Ikebukuro, Tokyo.  Organized by the Research and Discussion Team of Kokuin.

6541968

• Demonstration by Revolutionary Designers Alliance, including Andō Norio, Tokyo.  The group issues an anti-Expo statement: “Creative proletariats of the Japanese archipelago, erect!” 6-16 Okabe Michio shoots scenes for the film Crazy Love, Shinjuku Station East Exit, Tokyo.  Zero Jigen (Makura katusgi hoihoi gishiki [Hoi Hoi Ritual Carrying a Pillow on Shoulders]) and Koyama Tetsuo perform. 6-20 Happening of Beatology by Kokuin, Ginza, Tokyo.  Kokuin and Aome Umi perform. 6-21 Kanda Quartier Latin Struggle, Surugadai, Tokyo.  Shagakudō places barricades on the street, which are quickly removed by armed police. 6-22—10-20 34th Venice Biennale  Hariu Ichirō is appointed commissioner of the Japan Pavilion. Included are works by Sugai Kumi, Takamatsu Jirō, Miki Tomio, and Yamaguchi Katsuhiro. 6-24 Viet Cong Ritual, in front of Seibu Department Store, Ikebukuro, Tokyo.  Maki from Kokuin performs. 6-24 • Happening Contest, Tokyo.  Ōhashi Kyosen emcees. Planning by Kazumata Kōichi. Satō Yoshiaki gives a talk on Happenings. 6-26 • Action to Block Transport of U.S. Military Fuel (U.S. Tank Struggle), Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Kokuin visits to report. 6-28 Kokuin reenacts Eating Ritual, Kokuin Center, Ikebukuro, Tokyo. 6-29 The final day of the performance Yui Shōsetsu by Jōkyō Gekijō, Hanazono Shrine, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  In response to the Hanazono Shrine Council decision to disallow the use of the shrine grounds after Yui Shōsetsu, Kara Jūrō hands out flyers while in costume as Shōsetsu and leaves a final message: “If you want to see Shinjuku, do it now, as it will soon become a desert field.” Later, Kara joins the fūten rally “Sudden Summer in Hanazonochō” and sings as the fūten continue protesting, throwing stones near the East Exit of Shinjuku Station until dawn. JULY The first issue of Ng is published, Kyoto.  The Editorial Committee consists of members of Azuma Gallery. Features texts by Miki Tetsuo, Mizukami Jun, et al. JULY? Tanaka Yukito participates in Collective Kumo and names the group, Kitakyūshū.  Tanaka is a staff writer for Mainichi Shimbun. JULY? Emerald Colored Breeze disbands, Kokubunji, Tokyo. JULY–AUGUST Performances of the experimental drama Nihon sokai-ha seishin-shi, kōishō: 11–2 sai no orea mada gakidatta (Spiritual History of Japan Evacuation School, Aftereffect-chapter: I was yet an 11–12-year-old kid), Honmoku-tei, Ueno, Tokyo.  Written by Suzuki Shirō. Directed by Ōta Shōgō. Calligraphic art by Matsue Kaku. 6-15

1968655

7-1 7-3

7-5 7-7

7-12—8-1

7-13—7-21

7-15—8-8 7-17—7-19

7-19—7-30

7-20 7-24

Mono Sex Contest Show, Nakagawa Saburō Discotheque, Ikebukuro, Tokyo.  Organized by Chida Ui. Tone Yasunao participates as a judge. Discussion and film screening of Kokuin’s movements, Shisō no Kagaku-sha, Tokyo.  Organized by Shisō no Kagaku Utopia Group. • The All-campus Joint-struggle Council for the Struggle of the University of Tokyo (Tōdai Zenkyōtō) is formed. First shoot for the film Nippon ’69 Sex Bizarre Zone, directed by Nakajima Sadao, Ginza, Tokyo.  Zero Jigen performs Ginza futon katsugi gishiki (Ritual Carrying a Futon on Shoulders in Ginza). Two Men Falling Love with Andy Warhol: Underground Cinema Shinjuku A Go! Go! Go!, Noa-noa, Nishi-ōkubo, Tokyo.  Gulliver performs/screens Box, Camera, Film, Screen and With Door. Sponsored by Japan Underground Center. Kumo Collective Art Fair (Contemporary Art Spot Sale), Sekor Eyeglasses 2F, Kokura, Kitakyūshū.  Included are works by Abe Fukuichi, Katō Isao, Satō Akemi, Tashiro Tsuneo, Tomiura Shizuo, Harumoto Shigeto, Matsumoto Hōnen, and Moriyama Yasuhide with Sarutoru (Tanaka Yukito) as an assisting member. Matsumoto blindfolds himself and performs action painting in the shopping arcade in front of an eyeglasses shop. Harumoto erases the painting with a cloth soaked in paint thinner. Tashiro spreads the paint on the street with a stick and rag. The clothes of the audience get dirty when the paint splashes on them, causing a disagreement among the members over whether or not they should pay the cleaning fees. Underground Cinema Shinjuku A Go! Go! Go!, Theater Pit Inn, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  A screening of Miyai Rikurō’s films. EX·POSE 1968: Metamorphosis, or a Splendid Adventure through Contemporary Art, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Participating artists: Awazu Kiyoshi (8 projection designs, Holiday in Print), Oikawa Hironobu (Maimu X kōsen: jintai kigō tōshijutsu [mime x-ray, Human Body Sign Fluoroscopy]), Hariu Ichirō (strange tale by electric slides, Ah Miserable, Night Storm Ohyaku), Miyai Rikurō (cine-happening through a projection of film, neon, and light, Bibun genshōgaku [Phenomenology of Differentiation]), Yokoo Tadanori and Ichiyanagi Toshi (film collage on television, Onshū [Grudge and Revenge]). The event also includes a screening of films by Matsumoto Toshio, and poetry readings by Tomioka Taeko, Hasegawa Ryūsei, and Tanikawa Shuntarō. Anti-war and Liberation, Muramatsu Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  This exhibition also takes place subsequently at Chikyūdō Gallery (July 25– August 5) and Nihon Gallery (August 5–17). Sponsored by Beheiren. The sales from the artworks are donated for medical equipment in Vietnam. “Image Maker Chida Ui” airs on Punch Report (NTV). Second Jacks Show, Maison Franco-Japonaise, Ochanomizu, Tokyo.  The Jacks, Susie Q, and Baramanji Kessha perform. Baramanji Kessha appears in concert with The Jacks a total of four times.

6561968

7-26

7-29—8-4 AUGUST 8-1

8-2—8-8 8-3 8-7

8-8 8-8—8-11

8-10

8-10

8-11

8-13

Far Away from Art, Tokyo Kosei Nenkin Kaikan Small Hall, Shinjuku.  Organized by the Executive Committee of Anti-war and Liberation as an event connected to the July 19 exhibition. The event includes Shinohara Ushio’s Buta no wakusei: Chō shokkaku taiken (Mashīningu shō) (Planet of Pigs: Super Tactile Experience [Machining Show]), slide shows by Akabane Kōichi (the trio of Akasegawa Genpei, Hanaga Mistutoshi, and Tanikawa Kōichi), performances by Kimura Tsunehisa, Yoshimura Masunobu, and Yokoo Tadanori, and screenings of films by Inoue Yōsuke and Miyai Rikurō. Iwata Shin’ichi Exhibition, Azuma Gallery, Kyoto. Happening by GUN and Maeda Jōsaku, Ito’o Beach, Niigata. Voyage and the eve ritual by The Play, offshore of Kushimoto and Shionomisaki, Wakayama.  Participating artists: Ikemizu Keiichi, Okamoto Hajime, Suzukida Asako, Nakata Kazunari, Fukunaga Toyoko, Mizukami Jun, and Yoshioka Shigeo. A resin egg with a 3.3m diameter is floated away into the sea. Shikine Underground Kinema Festival, Shikinejima Island, Tokyo.  A screening of films by Gulliver et al. Kokuin appears in You at 3 O’clock (Fuji TV), Tokyo. • K inetic Inn Groovy opens, Shibuya, Tokyo.  “Fourth dimension go-go hall.” Programming and direction by Kanesaka Kenji. Ōbayashi Nobuhiko and Gulliver collaborate on the project. • Shūkan Shōnen Janpu (Weekly Shōnen Jump) begins publication by Shūeisha. Thoughts on Existence, Nagaoka Cultural Center, Niigata.  GUN et al. enact Happenings. On August 10, screenings of films including Kanesaka Kenji’s Hopscotch and Miyai Rikurō’s Phenomenology of Zeitgeist; on August 11, a symposium is held. Akasegawa Genpei, Kojima Nobuaki, Sekine Nobuo, Tanaka Shintarō, and Nonaka Yuri are announced as exhibiting artists, but Akasegawa does not exhibit. Screening of Kokuin’s films, Kokuraya Gallery, Nagasaki.  Haneda Struggle, 6.15 Struggle, Cyberne-sex Song, and two other films are screened. Harenchi Fashion Happening, Akasaka Prince Hotel, Tokyo.  Co-organized by Akasaka Prince Hotel, King Record, and Satō Yoshiaki Fashion Institute. Chida Ui performs. Discussion Group for Studies of Contemporary Fashion: Psychedelic and Contemporary Youth, Gin’ya-machi Church, Nagasaki.  The event consists of screenings of Kokuin’s films, a talk by Suenaga Tamio, and a discussion. The Play appears in “This is Happening!” on 11PM (Yomiuri TV), Osaka.  Members of The Play perform: Ikemizu Keiichi (Kūkan no kakudai [Expansion of Space]), Okamoto Hajime (Kakuri sareta sekai [Isolated World]), Nakata Kazunari (Hatsuentō otoko [Smoke Marker Man]), Fukunaga Toyoko (Mizu no toki [Time of Water]), Miki Tetsuo (Rōsoku no otoko [Candle Man]), and Mizukami Jun (Polimage Reaction). Also performing are Kitani Shigeki (poetry), Fujii Emiko and Yamaguchi Osamu (pantomime), Yamazaki Ran (Oran kyōran [Frenzied Oran]), and Mikawa Yuki (Genkei no onna [Prototype

1968657

Woman]). Along with the artists, appearances by Andō Takako, Kamoi Yōko, Fujimoto Giichi, and Wada Akiko. 8-13—8-18 F.A.A. Wave Nippon Kamaitachi Exhibition, Yokohama Civic Gallery.  Organized by Fujimi-chō Atelier A-Seminar and Nippon Kamaitachi Company. The exhibition features events by Hakudō Company, Murata Takashi, and Yokohama Poetic Crazy Group. The dozens of participants include Anzai Shigeo, Kawasumi Kazuo, Koshimizu Susumu, Kobayashi Hakudō, Shinohara Ushio, Suga Kishio, Haraguchi Noriyuki, Maita Masafumi, and Yoshida Katsurō. 8-15 815 Church Passage: Intermedia Piece, Yamate Church, Shibuya, Tokyo.  I kemiya Nobuo, Gulliver, Kuni Chiya group, Tone Yasunao, and Miyai Rikurō participate. Gulliver participates in Tone’s and Kuni’s works. 8-25 Film shoot for Cybele by Donald Richie, Yanaka Cemetery, Tokyo.  Zero Jigen performs with Ichimura Toko, Iwata Shin’ichi, Kamijō Junjirō, Nagata Satoshi, Matsuba Masao, Katō Yoshihiro, and Suzuki Seiichi. The performance is directed by Katō. 8-26 “I want to strip a woman naked, but I suddenly changed my mind” airs on 11PM (NTV).  Uno Akira performs a body painting. 8-28 Reaction in Summer: Evening of Art Collectives for Impact, SAB Hall (basement of Shin-Asahi Building), Osaka.  A joint project by visual artists (including The Play), poets, filmmakers, and light artists. Expressions through light, sound, and film on stage that attempt to go beyond conventional genres. Programming by Anzai Kiyohisa. Participating from The Play are Ikemizu Keiichi and Fukunaga Toyoko (The Other), Ueta Koji (Zange [Confessions]), Okamoto Hajime (In Out), Gulliver (Measurement Ritual and Hair), Nakata Kazunari (Ecchi banzai [Hurray for the Erotic]), Miki Tetsuo (5.5cm), Mizukami Jun and Suzukida Asako (Hannō [Reaction] or Kubuntai sekisan hannō 19 shu no 2 funkan to 600 byō [Divisional Area Integration Reaction: 19 kinds of 2 minutes and 600 seconds]), Yoshioka Shigeo (Your Hidden World). Other performers include Kitani Shigeki (Dramatic Poesy: Zō no mori [Elephant Forest]), Hatta Toshio (Monologue), and Yamazaki Ran (Dasshutsu [Escape] or Kuikui). 9-7—9-12 GUN Exhibition, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo. 9-8—12-? Kanesaka Kenji travels to the U.S. 9-13—9-15, AND 9-18 Oh! Yellow Submarine by Theater Company Komaba, Sennichidani Temple Hall, Shinanomachi, Tokyo.  Written and directed by Akuta Masahiko, in collaboration with Gulliver. It is performed at the Contemporary Avant-Garde Theater Festival, which is organized by the Foreign Correspondents Club, along with another performance by Hakken no Kai. 9-15—9-30 Kokuin Grand Exposition, Gallery Café Shabon, Ikebukuro, Tokyo. 9-16—9-22 Mizumachi Yukio (Riryō) Manga Exhibition, Gallery Café Shabon, Ikebukuro, Tokyo.  A n exhibition by Kokuin member I. S.

6581968

9-17 9-21—9-28

9-21—11-30

9-22 9-28

9-29 9-29—10-19

OCTOBER OCTOBER?

“Chinese Medicine” airs on 11PM (NTV).

 Body painting is performed by unknown performers.

2nd Exhibition Spider Uprising: Exhibition, Art fair, Happening, and Symposium by Collective Kumo, Kitakyūshū Municipal Yahata Art Museum.  Included are works by Katō Isao, Satō Akemi, Tashiro Tsuneo, Tanaka Yonekichi, Tomiura Shizuo, Harumoto Shigeto, Matsumoto Hōnen, and Moriyama Yasuhide. With this exhibition, Abe Fukuichi leaves Collective Kumo, and Tanaka Yonekichi joins on the introduction of Tanaka Yukito. At the gallery entrance, Harumoto and Moriyama display a framed flyer with the silkscreened words “No Art No35” and a poster that states “Is contemporary art a flower without fruits?” in large lettering. Moriyama’s three pencil drawings of enlarged Shunga (pornography) are removed from the venue following a complaint from the museum when they are being installed. During the exhibition, Matsumoto and Tomiura remove their works and bring them to the 1st Asahi West-Japan Art Exhibition, so Moriyama hangs up a sheet of paper that explains the reason for their absence and expulsion from the group. Tashiro, Satō, and Tanaka Yukito also leave because they cannot adhere to Moriyama’s directions. The announced art fair, Happenings, and symposium on September 28 are not held. John Silver Continued performed by Jōkyō Gekijō, Theater Pit Inn, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Performance are also held on the riverbank of Kamogawa, Kyoto, October 24–27. Futonzume gishiki (Futon Packing Ritual) by Zero Jigen, Goshiki-en, Aichi. • A stro-Mechanicool opens, Umeda, Osaka.  A go-go club, produced by Hamano Yasuhiro. Machine sculptures are installed in the interior, which is covered with stainless steel. Second film shoot for Nippon ’69 Sex Bizarre Zone, Tōei Studio, Kyoto.  Zero Jigen performs Birth Ritual. Okabe Michio’s Camp Mischief, Theater Scorpio, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  A screening of Theory of Creation and Crazy Love. The credits for Crazy Love are as follows: Produced, directed, written, edited, and performed by Okabe Michio. Performers include Ishii Mitsutaka, Kanesaka Kenji, Kokuin (Ishibashi Hatsuko, I. S., Suenaga Tamio, and Muta Kunihiro), Gulliver, Saitō Shirō, Satō Shigechika, Zero Jigen (Piggyback March Ritual and Tea Room Ritual), Tone Yasunao, Miyai Rikurō, and Watanabe Hitomi. Guest performers include Aome Umi, Koyama Tetsuo, Chida Ui, Maro Akaji. Art by Saitō Shirō. Artwork provided by Akasegawa Genpei and Tanikawa Kōichi. Antiwar Culture Festival, Shokuin Kaikan, Osaka.  Organized by the South Osaka Beheiren. Nakagawa Gorō performs. Kurohata Group Exhibition, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  May have occurred in late October; the exhibition title and venue are unknown. Included are works by Suzuki Shirō, Takahara Yūji, Matsue Kaku, and Matsushita Ippei. Suzuki may have exhibited his poetry. Cotton candy and grilled squids are sold. Matsue et al. burn a flowerbed. Akiyama Yūtokutaishi performs “Dalico” (changing G of Glico to Da).

1968659

• Space Capsule opens, Akasaka, Tokyo.  A disco, produced by Yamana Masayuki (Yamana Yoshimitsu). Architecture by Kurokawa Kishō, interior design by Awazu Kiyoshi, and programming by Ichiyanagi Toshi. Tenjō Sajiki performs regularly at the venue. 10-1 “Harenchi [shameless] Art Festival” airs on 11PM (Yomiuri TV).  A group of female students from Kyoto City University of Arts perform body painting. 10-1—10-13 1st Asahi West-Japan Art Exhibition, Kitakyūshū Municipal Yahata Art Museum.  Included are works by Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Tanaka Yonekichi, and Tōya Masami. This competition is developed from the Asahi Award (All Kyūshū and Yamaguchi region) Oil Painting Contest after its conclusion. Tanaka from Collective Kumo wins the Asahi Newspaper Award and receives a prize of 300,000 yen. Moriyama Yasuhide et al. demand that Tanaka donate the prize money; Tanaka refuses and withdraws from the group. 10-1—11-10 1st Kobe Suma Rikyū Park Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, Kobe Suma Rikyū Park.  Included are works by Tanaka Shintarō (Hyōgo Governor Award), The Play (Ao no gishiki [Blue Ritual] by Ikemizu Keiichi, Fukunaga Toyoko, and Yoshioka Shigeo), Sekine Nobuo (Isō–Daichi [Phase–Mother Earth]), Yoshida Minoru, and Yoshimura Masunobu. 10-9—10-10 Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese: Revolt of the Body, Nippon Seinenkan, Jingūgaien, Tokyo.  Directed, choreographed, and performed by Hijikata Tatsumi. Stage art by Nakanishi Natsuyuki. Held in commemoration of the 11th Anniversary of Ankoku Butoh-ha. This prominent performance is recognized as Hijikata’s magnum opus. 10-11—10-14 Seibi Exhibition, Kyoto Prefecture Gallery.  Included is Mizukami Jun’s The Last Tour. 10-12—10-20 Dimension ’68 Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  Included is work by Ueta Koji. 10-13—10-19 Black Festival, Angura Pop, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Directed by Kokuin. Participating artists: Kokuin (Suenaga Tamio, Ishibashi Hatsuko, I. S., H. K.), Shinjuku Boy Troop (Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Tekichū ōdan fundoshi-ri [Crossing into enemy territory in a loincloth]), Happening Group in Ichikawa (unidentified), Aome Umi and The Blue Eyes, Zero Jigen, Nakamura Masaharu, Hanaga Mitsutoshi, Vitamin Art (Koyama Tetsuo), Poster Demonstration Group (Watanabe Chihiro, putting up posters [an upskirt photograph of a woman] on the street), Eārisuto. Akiyama and Suenaga put a cage on a pushcart, and Akiyama roams the city with Suenaga in the cage. The event is held ahead of International Anti-War Day (October 21) and Documented in Kokuin’s film, Black Festival in Phantom: Shinjuku without an Address. 10-17 Performance Killing at Hangang Riverside, Seoul.  Performed by Kang Kukjin, Jung Kanja, and Jung Chanseung. 10-1

6601968

• E xperimental Small Theater Modern Art opens, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Holds striptease, popular theater and avant-garde drama performances. The venue contains a theater with 50 seats, a restaurant, and a Modern Film corner. LATE OCTOBER? A performance by Makirō, sidewalk in front of Isetan Department Store, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  erforms Nichijō kankyō ni okeru igaisei no bi (Unexpected Beauty in an P Everyday Environment) by flirting with a dancer from Modern Art Theater on top of a futon. Thereafter, he presents a performance in which he sips instant noodles from a pot on a shichirin (portable clay grill) wearing the Japanese national flag in Sankōchō, Shinjuku. When Makirō encounters Matsue Kaku, Matsue also joins in the performance. LATE OCTOBER? Show by Baramanji Kessha, Modern Art, Shinjuku, Tokyo 10-20 Ritual by Kokuin, Head Power, Shinjuku, Tokyo. 10-21 • The Anti-riot Law is invoked at a rally on International Anti-War Day, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Kokuin documents the scene on film. 10-22—11-5 Hoshi no ōji sama (Prince of the Stars), 8th performance by Tenjō Sajiki, Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka, Tokyo. 10-29—11-3 2nd Pan-Setouchi Contemporary Art Exhibition, Okayama Prefectural Culture Center Art Museum.  Included are works by Ikemizu Keiichi and Zen’ei Tosa-ha. NOVEMBER Kawanaka Nobuhiro, New Multi-Vision Screening, Theater Scorpio, Shinjuku, Tokyo. NOVEMBER? A leaflet is issued with the Kumo Manifesto, Kitakyūshū.  A n essay titled “Can art be a weapon for reforming the situation?” is published as a leaflet, becoming the manifesto of Collective Kumo. At this time, the group consists only of Katō Isao, Harumoto Shigeto, and Moriyama Yasuhide. The essay is a collaboration written by Moriyama and Katō. NOVEMBER? Happening by Collective Kumo, in front of Kokura Station, Kitakyūshū.  Newspaper clippings are pasted on the glass windows of a bank, and signboards printed with texts that include lines of dialogue from yakuza films are installed. Sakurai Takami participates and crawls along the main street. This Happening is enacted for three consecutive days. 11-1 Publication of the inaugural issue of quarterly photo magazine Provoke: Provocative Material for Thought.  P ublished by Okada Takahiko, Takanashi Yutaka, Taki Kōji, Nakahira Takuma, et al. 11-1—11-11 Artists Today ’68 Exhibition, Yokohama Civic Art Gallery.  Included are works by Shinohara Ushio, Maeyama Tadashi, and Yoshimura Masunobu. 11-3 Art Now, Tama Art University, Tokyo.  Screening includes Gulliver’s Switch. 11-4—11-7 Contemporary Art Exhibition at Night Only, Miyazaki Kankō Hotel courtyard.  Included are works by Gutai members including Fujino Tadatoshi in Miyazaki and Ishibashi Yasuyuki from Kyūshū-ha. 10-18

1968661

Zone こゝにたっている―そして？ Zone: Standing Here—Then?, Mainichi Newspaper Kyoto Branch 3rd Floor Hall.  Organized by Azuma Gallery and artists in Kyoto. Programming by Komatsu Tatsuo, Yanagisawa Masashi, and Mizukami Jun. Tone Yasunao, Nakahara Yūsuke, Fukushima Noriyasu, Matsuzawa Yutaka, Yamazaki Masakazu, et al. participate in the symposium on the November 8. From November 14 onward, works of contemporary art, film, and electronic music are presented. Imai Norio, Gulliver (Switch), Kawaguchi Tatsuo, Matsumoto Shōji, Miyai Rikurō (above, film screenings), Takemura Rui (butoh), et al. participate. At the stage event on November 19, Zero Jigen and The Play (Ikemizu Keiichi, Ueta Koji, Okamoto Hajime, Nakata Kazunari, Fukunaga Toyoko, Miki Tetsuo, Mizukami Jun, and Yoshioka Shigeo) appear and enact Happenings. Matsuzawa presents Psi Art Assembly Manifesto (date and time unknown). [p. 201] 11-11—11-14 This Is 8 Generation, Screening Program A, Theater Pit Inn, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Screenings of 8 Generation’s Shiteki keijijōgaku o itsudatsu shita megami (Goddess Deviating from Poetic Metaphysics), Shinkoku na uchū (Serious Universe), and Yokokuhen: Naja senningiri (Trailer: Sword for a Thousand Nadjas). Each day, Zero Jigen (Iwata Shin’ichi, Katō Yoshihiro, Kamijō Junjirō, Nagata Satoshi, and Matsuba Masao) perform rituals. On November 12 and 13, Kokuin performs Chi to kamen no gishiki (Ritual of Blood and Mask). Matsue Kaku makes an unscheduled appearance. 11-12 • Special Rules for Security Inspection in the Expo ’70 site are enacted. 11-16 Satō Yoshiaki 69 Avant-Garde Collection: Picnic for Discussion on 1969 (Between the last train to first train), Killer Joe’s, Ginza, Tokyo.  Organized by Satō Fashion Institute. Gulliver appears as a model. Miyai Rikurō supports with lighting and film. Shinohara Ushio does action painting by spraying paint onto a nude performer. Other programming includes a Happening by Samon Shirō. 11-17 Smash the Expo! All Architects Rise Up Rally, Tokyo Women and Children Hall, Shiba, Tokyo.  The rally marks the formation of Architects ’70 Action Committee. Ono Yūichi (Wakō University, Revolutionary Designers Alliance) and Miyauchi Yoshihisa (Architectural Journalism Institute) participate as panelists. The manifesto against the Expo is announced. After the rally, participants demonstrate in Ginza. 11-18—11-21 This Is 8 Generation, Screening Program B, Theater Pit Inn, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Screenings of 8 Generation’s Goddess Deviating from Poetic Metaphysics Continued, Zoku ōkoku no hana (Flowers of the Royal Family Continued), and Monosekkusu Ginza rojō monogatari (Monosex Ginza Street Story). Zero Jigen performs rituals each day. LATE NOVEMBER? Collective Kumo issues the Kumo Manifesto card, Kitakyūshū.  A card titled “November 18, 1968, Seeking for Something” printed with text that mixes the Kumo Manifesto and an excerpt from a November 18 Asahi Shimbun article. The cards are distributed at the Collective Kumo performance in December. 11-8—11-19

6621968

11-21—11-27

11-22

11-24 11-30

DECEMBER

DECEMBER DECEMBER DECEMBER

9th Doro Outdoor Art Exhibition: Art and Scarecrow Exhibition, Maebashi Park, Gunma.  This is the last outdoor exhibition of Group Doro. Discussion: “We Challenge the Impossible,” Dezain hihyō (Design Critique), Zasshi Kaikan, Ochanomizu, Tokyo.  Participants: Arimura Keiko (Architecture Journalism Institute, Architects ’70 Action Committee), Oyobe Katsuhito (graphic design, Musashino Art University), Katō Yoshihiro (Zero Jigen), Shiga Mikio (architecture), Narita Katsuhiko (art, Tama Art University), Hattori Mineki (architecture, University of Tokyo), and Hayata Yasuhiro (architecture). Moderated by Hara Hiroshi (architecture). Katō likely develops the idea to form Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group through this contact with the architects’ anti-Expo movement. The discussion is published in the January 1969 issue of Dezain hihyō. • Smash Sanrizuka Airport: Nationwide Uprising Rally for the Physical Prevention of Boring, Chiba. 狂気見本市大会 年忘れアングラまつり Grand Insanity Trade Fair: Year-end Angura Festival, Iino Hall, Toranomon, Tokyo.  P roduced by Satō Shigechika. Performing artists: Kurohata (without Matsue Kaku), Kokuin (Suenaga Tamio, H. K., Ishibashi Hatsuko, I. S., et al., Shinkyoku: yōki kikagaku no tasogare [The Divine Comedy: Ghost Geometry in the Twilight]), Zero Jigen, Baramanji Kessha (Makirō et al., Tsuyuharai no gi [Opening Ritual] and Chizome no aibiki [Blood-dyed Rendezvous]), and Vitamin Art (Koyama Tetsuo et al.). Shinjuku Boy Troop (Akiyama Yūtokutaishi) guest performs. With technical assistance by Nakamura Masaharu. This is an important event for the Ritualists, as well as their final joint event. [pp. 222–7] The publication of Violet Mail, Kyoto.  A zine published by a group of members of The Play. Texts include Miki Tetsuo’s “Violet Mail from Champignon Mushroom Factory,” Ueta Koji’s (untitled), Ikemizu Keiichi’s “Documentary: Happening in an Egg Voyage,” and Mizukami Jun’s “A Partial Theory on Mushroom Factory with an Advertisement of Cemetery Reform.” Cine Reaction, Kyoto University of Education, Kyoto.  M izukami Jun participates. Gary Snyder returns to the United States from Japan. • Sato Yoshiaki Fashion Show, Groovy and in front of Hachiko statue, Shibuya, Tokyo.  The modes for the fashion show wear monster masks borrowed from Tsuburaya Productions. Introduced as “Mysterious Fashion Show” on Young 720 (TBS TV) when it is aired on January 16 of the following year.

1968663

• Invader opens, Shinagawa, Tokyo.  A discotheque, produced by Kazumata Kōichi. Satō Yoshiaki, Shinohara Ushio, Hara Eizaburō, Miyai Rikurō, Yoshida Minoru, et al. assist. It is closed down in under a week due to legal restrictions in the school district. DECEMBER?—FEBRUARY 1969 Takamatsu Jirō performs Stones and Numbers, Akigawa Valley and Tama Riverside, Koremasa, Fuchū, Tokyo.  Takamatsu writes numbers from 0.1 to 0.9, and from 0.01 onward onto stones. There is no audience for this performance. 12-6 Festival Now and Here, not Later, Theater 36, Nagoya.  Iwata Shin’ichi, Hakken no Kai (Verse Drama Poipoi), and Mizutani Isao participate. A symposium is held “On the Impossibility of Contemporary Arts.” 12-6—12-8 Street Exhibition and Happening by Collective Kumo: No Art Festival, in front of Kokura Station, Kitakyūshū.  Collective Kumo distributes envelopes containing the Kumo Manifesto cards and flyers printed with “No Art No 35.” Moriyama Yasuhide lays down on the street covering his body with the flyers, and Harumoto Shigeto sits down in a chair at a table, which are all placed sideways on the street. Katō Isao lays down, his entire body bound with strings. [pp. 424–5] 12-8 • Unnoticed Attack on Pearl Harbor 27th Mourning Anniversary Antiwar Impact Field, Central Labor Administration Hall Auditorium, Suidōbashi, Tokyo.  Directed by Suzuki Shirō. Kokuin presents Nihon kaihō tōsō-shi (History of the Liberation Struggle in Japan, with screenings of the documentary films Haneda, 6. 15 Hibiya, and 6. 29 Shinjuku). 12-10 • Three-hundred-million-yen robbery, Fuchū, Tokyo. 12-15 • 200 Days Trip Shop Gin (Silver) opens, Aoyama, Tokyo.  P roduced by Hamano Yasuhiro. The flyer reads: “a store of used clothes in modern fashion and world folk crafts.” A Happening is enacted on the first day. The shop closes down on July 2 the following year. 12-16 Angura Film 8mm Theater, Modern Art, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Screenings include works by Gulliver. 12-16—12-22 Hosono Takemi Exhibition: Metaphysics of Poaching, Far East Excommunication Feeling, Galerie 16, Kyoto.  M izukami Jun performs Dai rōsoku gishiki (Big Candle Ritual). 12-18—12-19 Multiplay No.1: Planet of Shoes by En Gekijō, Yotsuya Public Hall, Tokyo.  Two plays proceed independently in two spaces separated by a wall with a door and window in between them. The two plays ultimately blend together. 12-24—12-30 Kishimoto Mari (Kishimoto Sayako) Exhibition: Romantic Structure, Project for the Collapse, Ginpōdō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. 12-31 Street Exhibition and Happening by Collective Kumo: No Art Festival, in front of Kokura North Ward Office, Kitakyūshū.  This event consists of the same installation and performances as the December 6–8 event. DECEMBER

6641969

1969 IN THIS YEAR

JANUARY?

JANUARY JANUARY

1-1?

1-1

1-1—1-2

Ōe Masanori returns from the U.S. Kagami Masayuki returns from France. Kishimoto Sayako discontinues artistic activities (until 1975). Hikosaka Naoyoshi becomes acquainted with Tone Yasunao. Collective Kumo joins the demonstration against Yamada Ammunition Depot, Kitakyūshū.  The collective uses its flag for the first time. The members sit on the rails and try to appear in the front row of demonstrations of radical sects such as Kakumaru and Chūkaku but fail, and the police order them to go to the back row. They are eventually removed by riot police. • Tama Art University is completely barricaded, Tokyo. Dezain hihyō (Design criticism) No. 8 is published.  Included in the issue is Alain Jouffroy’s “Abolition of Art,” translated by Minemura Toshiaki. Kumo Hatsumōde by Collective Kumo, Yasaka Shrine, Kokura, Kitakyūshū.  Hatsumōde is the Japanese custom of the first visit to a shrine to pray happiness in the New Year. Four members, with their bodies wrapped in bandages and plates printed with the words “Tenka taihei” (Peaceful world) hung around their necks, carry the female clerk of a jazz café on a door. Snow Painting and Happening, Sugadaira, Nagano.  Beginning at 6 a.m., Sunohara Toshiyuki (organizer), Ōtake Shigeo, Kosakai Ryōichi, Sugimura Toshiaki, Takeda Kiyoshi, and Mori Hitoshi draw a picture of a chicken, the zodiac sign for the year, on the snow with a sprayer. Later, a box containing a dog’s skull, a whiskey bottle, a national flag, a mask, a mirror, and other items are placed on a table in the snow, in front of the information kiosk. The artists sit around the table silently, telepathically communicating with each other. Sugimura shows the dog’s skull to the audience, puts it back in the box, buries it in the snow, and covers it with a white cloth. Kosakai, who wears a mask and sits in the snow, confronts Sugimura. Ōtake prays silently. Finally, they lie on the snow. The scene airs on the SBC Shin’etsu Broadcasting news that day, and a photograph of the painting on snow appears in the January 26 issue of Mainichi Gurafu. Performance presentations organized by Saitō Yoshiaki, Fujiya Gallery, Sendai.  Saitō lets visitors drink Coca-Cola that he has bought from a vending machine, which he sets in the gallery. Itoi Kanji performs on both days: he opens a can of detergent, takes out a furoshiki wrapping cloth, strips, and stands on his head with his legs open; he dances with a sausage hanging out of his briefs, as if swinging his penis; he enacts “taking a piss” by pouring water from a plastic container; he somersaults and rolls an egg from his mouth. Igarashi Jirō also participates. On the second day, participants are caught in a spider web in a Happening by a female student at Mishima Gakuen High School.

1969665

1-3

1-4

1-10 1-12—1-19

1-12—1-19

1-18 1-18

1-18

1-18—1-19

Koshimaki Osen / Furisode Kaji (Loincloth Osen / Kimono Conflagration), theater performance by Jōkyō Gekijō, causes the Shinjuku West Exit Central Park Incident, Shinjuku Central Park, Tokyo.  Because the Jōkyō Gekijō members do not receive permission from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government to use the central park for their performance, they outwit the city officers with a diversionary tactic, setting up a tent and pressing on with the performance. The riot police are dispatched, and Kara Jūrō and other members are arrested for violating the City Park Law. The performance run continues until April 26 at the truck theater in Sankō Park, at the West Exit of Shinjuku Station. Office relocation party of Zero Jigen & Co. and the Insanity Trade Fair Association, Tokyo.  The office of Meisei Electric is relocated from Nakachō, Meguro Ward, to an apartment in Ōhashi in the same ward. Drawing Institute Zero forms, Kobe.  Members include Kamoi Rei and Enoki Chū. The Image Can Speak!, Galerie 16, Kyoto.  Organized by Art Film Association, with Imai Norio, Kawaguchi Tatsuo, Matsumoto Shōji, et al. An event that explores possibilities of new expressions through image media such as films and slides. Fashion in Moving Images is screened via projection onto a 3D dome as an “all-sky movie,” the first attempt of its kind in Kyoto. Inui Yoshiaki (lecture), Gulliver and Matsumoto (lecture with screening of images shot and composed by themselves), and Miyai Rikurō (film screening) participate. The event is also held at Shinanobashi Gallery, Osaka, from February 3–8. Egg Miniature Exhibition, Azuma Gallery, Kyoto.  Included are works by Akasegawa Genpei, Ikemizu Keiichi, Fukunaga Toyoko, and Mizukami Jun. Nakajima Sadao’s film Nippon ’69 Sex Bizarre Zone is released.  Jōkyō Gekijō and Zero Jigen appear in the film. Sogetsu Cinematheque January Meet: Donald Richie Solo Exhibition with New Films, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Cybele, starring Zero Jigen, is screened. • Student Sects of the Anti-Communist Party, who support the struggle at University of Tokyo, block the streets near Ochanomizu Station, Meiji University, and Chūō University by barricade, Kanda, Tokyo.  The area is known as “Kanda Quartier Latin.” The next day, riot police remove the barricades. インターメディア・アート・フェスティバル Intermedia Art Festival, Killer Joe’s, Ginza, Tokyo.  The first and second days of the three-day event are organized by Kosugi Takehisa, Shiomi Mieko, and Tone Yasunao. With event support by Awazu Kiyoshi, Iyama Takeshi, 8 Generation, Sakumoto Kuniharu, Sōgōsha, Tokyo Institute of Theater and Sound, Miyai Rikurō, Yamagata Masaaki, Sugiura Kōhei, and Nakagaki Nobuo.

6661969

Participating performers: Akasegawa Genpei, Asazuma Akitoshi, Ishii Mitsutaka, Ishiko Junzō, Ishizaki Kōichirō, Okabe Michio, Eric Olesen, Kirsten Olesen, Kazakura Shō, Gulliver, Kuni Chiya Dance Institute, Koike Ryū, Kosugi Takehisa, Shiomi Mieko, Takeda Akimichi, Tanigawa Kōichi, Tsuchiya Yukio, Tone Yasunao, Tōno Yoshiaki, Mizuno Shūkō, Fukamachi Jun, and Li-lan. Works by Ben Votier, Jackson Mac Low, Juan Hidalgo, Nam June Paik, Gulliver (Cinematic Illumination), T. Schmidt, John Cage (From 45 Minutes for One Speaker, performed by Gulliver) are performed. 1-19 • R iot police remove the barricades at Yasuda Auditorium, University of Tokyo, Hongō, Tokyo. 1-21 Intermedia Art Festival, Nikkei Hall, Ōtemachi, Tokyo.  The last day of the three-day event. Performances by Ichiyanagi Toshi (Activities), E. Williams, P. Kirkaby (Dinoceras, performed by Kazakura Shō, jumping from the top of the step), Gulliver (Stretch), Kosugi Takehisa (Catch-Wave ’69 No.1), Shiomi Mieko (Amplified Dream ’68 No.1, starring Ishii Mitsutaka), Tone Yasunao (Terebi wa me de kamu chūingu gamu de aru [TV is chewing gum you chew with your eyes]), Dick Higgins, George Brecht, and La Monte Young. 1-29 Supreme Court Appeal of the 1,000-Yen Note Trial, Tokyo. FEBRUARY Kokuin Film Black Festival, inside the barricade at Okayama University. FEBRUARY • Self-management struggle begins at Aoyama Design Academy, Tokyo. FEBRUARY Gendai Shichōsha establishes alternative art school Bigakkō (School of Beauty), Kanda-Jinbōchō, Tokyo.  Ishii Kyōji is the school’s founder, which begins with workshops by Nakamura Hiroshi and Nakanishi Natsuyuki, who are joined by other lecturers in April. FEBRUARY Takeda Fusaaki et al. form TR Alliance.  A group consisting of graduates from Fukuoka University of Arts and Sciences (present-day University of Teacher Education Fukuoka) which conducts anonymous interventions in public spaces. It continues its activities—group performances, writing group names with paint in venues downtown, hanging banners with political appeals, and mailing illustrations—until 1971. FEBRUARY—MARCH Kyūshū Sangyō University Faculty of Arts is barricaded by students, Fukuoka. 2-1 Iwata Shin’ichi publishes Angura tsūshin (Underground Newsletter) No. 1, Nagoya. 2-3—2-22 Takamatsu Jirō Exhibition, Tokyo Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  Takamatsu presents Stones and Numbers. The work is also exhibited at the base of the trees lined in front of the gallery. 2-5—2-7 日米複合芸術祭 クロス・トーク／インターメディア Japan–U.S. Joint Art Festival: Cross Talk/Intermedia, Second Gymnasium, Yoyogi National Stadium, Tokyo.  Organized by the American Cultural Center. The planning committee consists of Akiyama Kuniharu, Roger Reynolds, Karen Reynolds, and Yuasa Jōji. Participating artists include Group Ongaku members Kosugi Takehisa (Catch Wave: Mano–Dharma Electronic), Shiomi Mieko (Amplification of Dreams), and Mizuno Shūkō (Crosstalk 1969); Matsumoto Toshio (Projection for Icon, in which plastic balloons are produced by Shinohara Ushio and Misawa Kenji);

1969667

2-10—2-11

2-15

2-17—3-2

2-18

2-22—2-23

2-25

Stan Vanderbeek; Roger Reynolds and Salvatore Martirano. Music pieces by Ichiyanagi Toshi, Takemitsu Tōru, Matsudaira Yoriaki, and John Cage are performed. Yamaguchi Katsuhiro joins with sculptures and Okuyama Shigeyuki as a sound technology director. Hijikata Tatsumi suddenly cancels his performance. [p. 250] Filming for The Deserted Archipelago, directed by Kanai Katsu, in front of the Diet Building, etc., Tokyo.  Zero Jigen (Iwata Shin’ichi, Katō Yoshihiro, Kamijō Junjirō, Nagata Satoshi, Matsuba Masao) appear, performing Birth Ritual on February 10 and Ritual in front of Diet Building on February 11. Satō Shigechika performs in Birth Ritual. Ōshima Nagisa’s film Shinjuku dorobō nikki (Diary of a Shinjuku Thief) is released, Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka, Tokyo.  Starring Yokoo Tadanori. A street theater performance by Jōkyō Gekijō at the East Exit of Shinjuku Station appears at the beginning of the film. Kara Jūrō also appears in the film. Kikuhata Mokuma Exhibition, Mudo Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  M y Album, a series of prints depicting the artist’s wedding ceremony, is exhibited. Collective Kumo reproduces pirated prints by ordering reprints from the printing company without Kikuhata’s permission and signing them. • R iot police are dispatched and remove the barricades at the College of Arts and Sciences, Nihon University, Setagaya, Tokyo.  This is the collapse of the last remaining base of Nihon University Zenkyōtō. Thereafter, riot police are dispatched to many other universities. エイト・ジェネレーション＋ゼロ次元（万博破壊ゼロ次元名古屋大会） 8 Generation + Zero Jigen (Expo Destruction Zero Jigen Nagoya Rally), Theater 36, Nagoya.  Participating artists: 8 Generation, Okamoto Hajime, Zero Jigen, Mizukami Jun (Hakushoku-gi [White Ritual]), and Yoshida Minoru. This is the first event proclaiming “Expo destruction.” The exact title is unknown, but Kawanaka Nobuhiro writes that the event was titled Anti-Expo 8 Generation + Zero Jigen Show. [p. 258] 1st All-Kyūshū Outdoor Art Show: Eyes on One World, Parking lot in front of Yahata Civic Center, Kitakyūshū.  Planned by Tōya Masami and produced by Ide Hidemi of Group No. 1. Participating groups include practitioners of butoh, photography, Ikebana, kite flying, Ashiya Art Group, Ashiya Self-Defense Force Art Group, and students of Kyushu Sangyo University (Ōtsuka Shūzō, Takamuku Kazunari, et al.). A largescale event using six truck-mounted cranes, sound, and lighting. Ishiko Junzō, Nakahara Yūsuke, and Vlasta Chihakova participate in the 1st All Kyūshū Contemporary Art Symposium during the exhibition. The event was originally planned to take place at Suzaki Park, in front of Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall. [pp. 263–4]

6681969

2-25—3-2

2-26—3-10

2-27 MARCH

MARCH

3-1 3-5 3-11 3-23

3rd Trends of Contemporary Art Kyūshū Exhibition: Another World, Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall, Fukuoka.  Included are works by former Kyūshū-ha members Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ōguro Aiko, Obata Hidesuke, Obana Shigeharu, Kikuhata Mokuma, Saitō Hidesaburō, Sakurai Takami, Taniguchi Toshio, Tabe Mitsuko, Hataraki Tadashi, Funaki Yoshiharu, Yonekura Toku, Miyazaki Junnosuke; Collective Kumo (silkscreen prints of life-sized photographs of members Katō Isao, Harumoto Shigeto, and Moriyama Yasuhide); and Collective He (Iguchi Masao, Ōtsubo Hidehiro, Kitajima Tadashi, Kuroda Junko, Koiso Tōru, Sakamoto Hiroshi, Sasaki Masumi, Shingai Kazuyoshi, Takahira Takichi, Nanba Tsuyoshi, Mori Yasuaki, Yanagi Kazunobu, and Yokoo Kunihiko). On February 25, a parade of artists processes through a series of TV stations (NHK, RKB, KBC). Tabe joins the parade with a doll on her back. Students from the Seika Girls High School art club also participate in sailor uniforms with miniskirts and lie on the streets in Tenjin and other venues, including in front of the Fukunichi Newspaper Co. At the final venue, KBC studio, Moriyama strips off the sailor uniform of Collective Kumo member U.S. and shaves Harumoto’s hair. The scene is aired live on TeaTime Show from 2:30 pm. [p. 425] On February 26, a public discussion, “Open Letter from the Younger Generation,” is held at Fukuoka Civic Center, where Hariu Ichirō and Kikuhata give lectures. During Kikuhata’s lecture, Members of Collective Kumo strip nude and stand on the stage. On the same day, TR Alliance conducts “Masked Happening.” 13th Kyoto Independent Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  Included are works by Iwata Shin’ichi, Ikemizu Keiichi, Collective Kumo (Geijutsu ni okeru seishin gōkan teki oyobi hanzaiteki hōkoku [Spiritual Rape and Criminal Report in Art], the prints exhibited at 3rd Trends of Contemporary Art Kyūshū), Fukunaga Toyoko (Entrance), Mizukami Jun (SA/P or It Happens with Reactions). • Street Demonstration by Young Beheiren, marking the beginning of the “Folk Guerrilla,” from Shinanomachi to Shinjuku, Tokyo. Mizukami Jun publishes “Partial report of remarks by an unidentified speaker at a small rally on the Emperor’s Birthday” in the magazine Kyoto Shoin (published by the Kyoto Shoin Bookshop), Kyoto. Film Art Festival, Okayama Prefectural Culture Center, Okayama.  Organized by Mitsugetsu Art Center, Okayama Prefectural Culture Center, and Gege (which is written with kanji 怪化, meaning “becoming mysterious”). Films including Nose Isao’s Mokujiroku (Apocalypse) are screened. • R iot police suppress the campus of Kyoto University. • Beheiren and other groups form June Action Committee for anti-Vietnam War and anti-Anpo action, Tokyo. • A kita Akehiro, Chairman of the Nihon University Zenkyōtō, is arrested, which leads to the collapse of the Nihon University Zenkyōtō, Tokyo. Netai Ritual of Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-struggle Group (Expo Destruction Group), Shinjuku, Tokyo.

1969669

3-24

3-25

3-29—3-30

3-31 3-31—4-5 APRIL 4-1

4-1 4-2

4-7

4-9

4-10

4-12

4-13

Film shoot for Funeral Parade of Roses, directed by Matsumoto Toshio, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Zero Jigen performs the funeral ritual. On the same day, they perform Kamen kōshin (Mask March), which does not appear in the film. Iwata Shin’ichi publishes Angura tsūshin No. 2, Nagoya.  “Expo Destruction Action Manifesto No. 1” and “Expo Destruction Action Manifesto No. 2” are included in the issue. 万博反（アンチ）狂気見本市（または反万博狂気者大会ショー） Anti-Expo Insanity Trade Fair (or Anti-Expo Lunatic Rally Show), 4th Floor, Danshaku (restaurant), Kyoto.  Participating artists: 8 Generation, Kanesaka Kenji, Kokuin, Komatsu Tatsuo, Shinjuku Boy Troop (Akiyama Yūtokutaishi), Zero Jigen, Vitamin Art (Koyama Tetsuo et al.), The Play (Ikemizu Keiichi et al.), Mizukami Jun, and Yoshida Minoru. This is a joint event by anti-Expo artists from both Tokyo and Kansai. Netai Ritual by Expo Destruction Group, ten venues in Osaka. Protest ’69 (or Anti-Expo Insanity Trade Fair), Akao Gallery, Osaka.  Zero Jigen and The Play participate. Projection and Screen, Modern Art, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Screenings of works by Gulliver et al. April Fool Happenings: Hospital, former Morinomiya Hospital, Osaka.  A n event by The Play, held at an abandoned hospital. Participating artists: Ikemizu Keiichi, Ueta Koji, Okamoto Hajime, Suzuki Yoshinobu, Suzukida Asako, Nakajima Miho, Nakata Kazunari, Fukunaga Toyoko, Miki Tetsuo, Mizukami Jun, Mizuno Tatsuo, and Yoshioka Shigeo. Along with the individual actions, a ritual Happening is conducted by all participants. Suginami Cine Club publishes the first issue of its bulletin Me (Eye), Tokyo. Group Genshoku sends “Prospectus for open judging in the Mainichi Contemporary Art Exhibition” to the Mainichi Newspaper Company, requesting that the judging for the Competition Section of the 9th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan be made open to the public. • Nagayama Norio is arrested for a series of gun murders, Tokyo.  Nagayama writes numerous novels in prison and becomes a public figure before being executed on August 1, 1997, at the age of 48. GUN sends a letter of “Appeal” to the Mainichi Newspaper Company and the exhibition staff and jury, requesting open judging for the Competition Section of the 9th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan. The Play vol. 1 is published.  Edited by Mizukami Jun. The Play members who contribute to the issue are Ikemizu Keiichi, Okamoto Hajime, Nakata Kazunari, Fukunaga Toyoko, Miki Tetsuo, Mizukami Jun, and Yoshioka Shigeo. Barisai (Barricade Festival): Barricade a Go Go, basement of Bldg. A, Kyoto University.  L es Rallizes Dénudés performs. Kyūshū Art Research Meeting, Cafe Elm, Fukuoka.

6701969

 Obana Shigeharu, Sakurai Takami, Hataraki Tadashi, and Fukano Osamu

4-19 4-20

4-25—5-6 4-26

4-26—5-1

4-26—5-25

4-27

4-27—4-30

participate. The invitation reads “At the request of volunteers from Kyūshū-ha, Collective Kumo, and Collective He, as well as volunteers from the Trends of Contemporary Art Kyūshū.” Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally is mentioned as the first project of the group. Japan Film Coop Cinematheque opens, Sanyo Showroom, Shinjuku, Tokyo. Hara Eizaburō photographs rituals by Zero Jigen and Kokuin, Roppongi Studio, Tokyo.  The shoot is for Kyozō mirai zukan (Virtual image future picture book), to be published by Bronze Co. The performance by members of Zero Jigen and Kokuin consists of gestures and settings unusual for Zero Jigen. Blindfolded men and women wearing surgical masks and haramaki (belly bands) are wrapped in a white cloth and sit in a circle; they pull their legs with red and white ropes, and carry a woman in a transparent tube. Screening of The Deserted Archipelago, directed by Kanai Katsu, Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka, Tokyo. Honmokutei buyō rokkasen (Six Selections of Dance at Honmokutei), a performance by Kuni Chiya Dance Institute, Honmokutei, Ueno, Tokyo.  K azakura Shō (playing an “instrument” with a string attached to an empty can), Kosugi Takehisa (music), and Sekido Rui (Intermedia Study) participate. Film Black Festival: ’69 Spring Battle (Expo Smashing), Japan Film Corp Cinematheque, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Screenings include Phantom Black Festival, Song of Cybane-Sex, Haneda 11. 12, October 21 Night Shinjuku by Kokuin Film Team, and Gomi-chan’s World by Kuroki Naoya. Electromagica: International Psytech Art Exhibition, 8th Floor, Sony Building, Ginza, Tokyo.  Organized by JEAA (Japan Electric Art Association) and Sony. Included are works by Yamaguchi Katsuhiro and Yoshida Minoru. [p. 250] Campaign for Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally, Fukuoka.  Early in the morning, Collective Kumo and Collective He perform a Happening on the streets of Tenjin. Members of Collective Kumo wearing summer kimono walk around carrying a woman on their heads. Marshmallows & Hot Air, Gallery Iteza, Kyoto.  Members of The Play participate: Ikemizu Keiichi, Ueta Koji, Okamoto Hajime, Nakata Kazunari, Fukunaga Toyoko, Miki Tetsuo, Mizukami Jun, and Yoshioka Shigeo. According to the event flyer, the “Delmonte Black Magic Troupe” performs the following from April 27–30: on April 27, “The first day of the sun year in Copt calculation method 1”; on April 28, “Monday of His Eminence Pau Bi,” “16 days of His Eminence Pau Bi 2,” “Smoke 3”; on April 29, “Celebration of the Emperor’s Birthday: Funeral procession on Tuesday for confession,” “Insanity Trade Fair: Funeral procession of Zero Jigen for confession”; on April 30, “Holy Ash Wednesday 4 or Death of the doll of His Eminence Pau Bi in Resoda.” Another source describes “Smoke Happenings and Sound Happenings” and “Eight Presentations (bread, grass, light, teeth, balloon, box,

1969671

4-29

MAY 5-1 5-1—5-3

5-3

5-4

smoke, sweet one). Sound and a film of everyday scenes by Ueta, Miki, and Mizukami are presented. Miki enacts a performance with wooden wings on the riverbank. Nakata unfolds a plastic bag and inflates it with smoke; he then takes the bag outdoors, marches, and drains it into the Kamogawa River. Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally Symposium, Nōmin Kaikan, Fukuoka.  By the participants of Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally, which begins on May 3. Kikuhata Mokuma questions Zero Jigen’s commitment to the anti-Expo movement. Shinohara Ushio travels to the U.S. on a fellowship from the John D. Rockefeller III Fund. • Fundraising, teach-ins, and choral singing are prohibited at Shinjuku Station West Exit Square, Tokyo. For You and For Your Family, Gallery Iteza, Kyoto.  Included are works by members of The Play: Ikemizu Keiichi, Ueta Koji, Okamoto Hajime, Nakata Kazunari, Fukunaga Toyoko, Miki Tetsuo, Mizukami Jun, and Yoshioka Shigeo. A continuation of Marshmallows & Hot Air the previous month. Each artist places objects in one of sections of the floor, which is divided in eight. 万博破壊九州大会 アングラ映画とハプニングの夜（第1日） Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally: A Night of Underground Film and Happening (Day 1), Tobata Culture Hall, Kitakyūshū.  Participants from Fukuoka: Obana Shigeharu, Kondō Genzō (film critic), Sakurai Takami, Collective Kumo, Collective He (Shingai Kazuyoshi, Koga Masato, Katagawa Noriaki), Tabe Mitsuko (film recording), Hataraki Tadashi, Fukano Osamu (“General Director”), Fukumori Takashi (poet); also participating are Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, 8 Generation (Kawanaka Nobuhiro), Kanesaka Kenji, Zero Jigen (Katō Yoshihiro and Iwata Shin’ichi), Kokuin (Suenaga Tamio, Ishibashi Hatsuko), Satō Shigechika, and The Play (Okamoto Hajime, Miki Tetsuo, and Mizukami Jun). The first day of a three-day event. Collective Kumo, wearing shirts and ties with their lower bodies exposed, strips a woman naked; they also distribute a flyer that states “We demand bloodstained eroticism!” All members of The Play perform Himo rikigaku shikō-gi (Rope Mechanics Orientation Ritual), in which they stretch a 100m-long braid, play the shakuhachi and yokobue flute, and make sound by hitting stones. In Namida-rō (Tear Wax), Okamoto drips melted wax onto Miki’s face. Films by Miki and Mizukami are screened. Shirakawa Yoshio (later Masao) visits. [pp. 258–60] 万博破壊九州大会 アングラ映画とハプニングの夜（第2日） Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally: A Night of Underground Film and Happening (Day 2), Nōmin Kaikan, Fukuoka.  See May 3 for participants. Collective Kumo only participates in the collective Happenings on May 4 and 5, without conducting their own individual performances. The Play members with Mizukami Jun present the same performances and films as on May 3 and participate in Zero Jigen’s rituals.

6721969

5-5

5-7

5-9—5-13 5-10—5-30

5-17 (OR 25)

5-17 5-17—5-23

5-18—5-22

万博破壊九州大会 アングラ映画とハプニングの夜（第3日）

Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally: A Night of Underground Film and Happening (Day 3), Meiji Seimei Hall, Fukuoka.  See May 3 for participants. Screenings include Suga Kikuo’s Chijō kensui (Ground suspension), Kanesaka Kenji’s Hopscotch, Roland Lethem’s Les Souffrances d’un Œuf Meurtri (Suffering of a Wounded Eye), Kanai Katsu’s The Deserted Archipelago. ビタミン・ショー Vitamin Show by Koyama Tetsuo, Toshiba Hall, Ginza, Tokyo.  The ultimate and final performance of Koyama killing a calf on the stage, performed alone during the anti-Expo movements. Kawanaka Nobuhiro projects Tony Conrad’s film Flicker for lighting. [pp. 369–70] Screening of The Deserted Archipelago directed by Kanai Katsu, Gallery Iteza, Kyoto. 9th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo.  Included are works by Arakawa Shūsaku (Best Award), Ikemizu Keiichi (Frontier Award for Breakfast for Mr. Egg in Orange Play, a collaboration with The Play), Katō Akira, Kawaguchi Tatsuo, Kudō Tetsumi, Kojima Nobuaki, Shiga Kenzō, Shinohara Ushio, Shiraga Kazuo, Suzuki Yoshinori, Takamatsu Jirō, Tanaka Shintarō, Tanigawa Koichi, Matsuzawa Yutaka, Miki Tomio, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, Yoshida Minoru, Yoshino Tatsumi, and Yoshimura Masunobu. Exhibiting artists in the Competition Section include Ueta Koji, Saotome Yukio, Shimamoto Shōzō, Tashiro Tsuneo, Hori Kōsai, Maeyama Tadashi, and Lee Ufan. On May 10 and 11, The Play conducts a Happening in which the members have breakfast in the space of Ikemizu’s work, joined by Matsuzawa Yutaka. Mizukami Jun and Suzukida Asako conduct their own Happening. Saotome becomes a hot topic by exhibiting living human bodies (one of which is Itō Mika) in Commodity/1969/5A and Commodity/1969/5B. Teach-In for the 9th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan, Artists’ Center Building, Ginza, Tokyo.  Participating artists: Okada Takahiko (moderator), Katō Yoshihiro, Kanesaka Kenji, Saitō Shirō, Suenaga Tamio, Tone Yasunao. Ishiko Junzō, Tōno Yoshiaki, Nakahara Yūsuke, Miki Tamon, Hariu Ichirō serve as exhibition judges. Before the event, Okada and Tanikawa Kōichi submit a letter requesting open judging for the exhibition to the Mainichi Newspaper Planning Division. T  • he “folk guerrilla” are ejected by the police, Shinjuku Station West Exit Underground Plaza, Tokyo. Masanori Ōe’s Ecstatic Aesthetics, Japan Coop Cinematheque, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Screenings of Pentagon Demonstration: No Game, Ippy Festival: Head Game, Salome Child and five other films. Collectives of Today Exhibition, Miyagi Prefectural Hall, Sendai.  Organized by Toshima Shigeyuki and students from the Art Club of Tohoku Gakuin University. Sunkist Delegation Ball is held on the final day. Toshima Kazuko, Shigeyuki’s elder sister, participates in the butoh performance

1969673

LATE MAY

LATE MAY?

5-24 5-24—5-30

5-26 5-29

5-30—6-1

JUNE

JUNE 6-2—6-7

Kishibojin Ibun (Strange story of mother goddess of demon). Itoi Kanji, wearing a pot as a helmet, hanging the words “Don’t kill” on his body. Itoi Kanji goes to see the Anti-Anpo street demonstration, Ichibanchō, Sendai.  He observes the monthly procession for peace by citizens, wearing sunglasses and a waistcoat with an egg pendant, holding a poster for Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally. Segawa Mitsuo participates. Itoi Kanji’s performance, Sendai City Hall Plaza.  Toshima Shigeyuki names this performance “Guevara-style thigh slashing ritual: Don’t kill.” The performance is held in the plaza with a fountain in front of the City Hall, on Itoi’s way back from Miyagi Prefectural Hall. He thrusts his face into the crotch of an inflatable pair of female legs; when he pulls his face away, it is bright red, covered with tomato ketchup. He later slashes up the balloon legs. Folk Guerrilla Grand Rally, Shinjuku Station West Exit Underground Plaza, Tokyo. Ono Yōko Love-In, Japan Coop Film Cinematheque, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Screenings of Hip Cinema, Nude Happening at Imperial Hotel and a documentary of The Beatles. • The Tōmei Expressway (between Tokyo and Nagoya) is completed. Harumoto Shigeto asks Moriyama Yasuhide to allow him to withdraw from Collective Kumo in a letter to Moriyama, Fukuoka.  The reason for Harumoto’s departure is that he could not agree with Moriyama and Katō Isao’s decision to strip an audience member naked at Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally on May 4. He is convinced that he cannot follow them down the path they are headed and withdraws in June. Gewalt Special Feature, Japan Coop Film Cinematheque (Hanazono Ping-pong Court), Shinjuku, Tokyo.  The first screening of Japan Coop Film Cinematheque after its move from the Sanyo showroom to Hanazono Ping-pong Court. Screened works include Jōnouchi Motoharu’s Gewaltopia, NDU’s (Nihon Documentarist Union) Onikko: Documents of Young Laborers in Struggle (Devil’s Children: Documents of Young Laborers in Struggle), documentary films Nichidai tōsō to jinmin saiban (Nihon University Struggle and People’s Trial) and 1968 nen Osaka Hansen no kao (1968 Osaka Antiwar Faces). Hijikata Tatsumi’s butoh performance is filmed for Tanjō: Asutorama no tame ni (Birth: For Astrama), Iō-yama, Hokkaido.  P roduced by Gakken, directed by Akiyama Tomohiro, screenplay by Tanikawa Shuntarō, with music by Mayuzumi Toshirō. The film is screened in Astrama (all-sky screen) at the Midorikan Pavilion of Expo ’70 the following year. Shinjuku Play Map begins publication by New City Center Shinjuku Advertising Committee, Tokyo. Plastic Artists Alliance Exhibition, inside the barricade, Tama Art University, Tokyo.  Included are works by Hikosaka Naoyoshi and Hori Kōsai.

6741969

6-5—8-31 6-8

6-9

6-10

6-10 6-11

6-11

6-12

6-15

• Security Department of Tokyo Metropolitan Police implements “Operation Sunflower” to clean up Shinjuku, Tokyo. 万博粉砕ブラック・フェスティバル Smash the Expo Black Festival, Ikebukuro Art Theater, Tokyo.  Participants: Ōe Masanori (film screening), Osaka Young Beheiren, Okayama Rose News Sect, Okayama Film Art, Kanesaka Kenji, Kyoto University Zenkyōtō Barricade Festival Committee, Kokuin, Komatsu Tatsuo, Sai no Kai, Satō Shigechika, Shinjuku Boy Troop (Akiyama Yūtokutaishi), Sugaya Kikuo’s Barricade Theater Company, Zero Jigen, Criminal Studies Course Group, Expo Destruction Action Kyūshū Team, Vitamin Art (Koyama Tetsuo), Poster Demonstration Group (Watanabe Chihiro), and Mizukami Jun. Collective Kumo and Collective He are listed on the flyer but do not participate. Whom of those listed above actually participate is unknown, but the participation of Akiyama, Kokuin, Zero Jigen and Koyama in rituals is confirmed. This event represents the pinnacle for Expo Destruction Group. [pp. 260–1] The Anti-Expo Caravan begins.  Departing Shibuya by minibus, it heads for Kyoto and Osaka via Hamamatsu and Nagoya. 万博粉砕ブラック・フェスティバル Smash the Expo Black Festival, Kyoto University Liberal Arts Department, etc., Kyoto.  Participating artists: Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Ueta Koji, Kokuin, Suzukida Asako, Zero Jigen, Mizukami Jun, and Miki Tetsuo. Kanesaka Kenji assists. After getting off the caravan bus in front of the Kyoto University entrance barricade to perform netai, the plan to go to Maruyama Park is changed to perform the Zenra katate-age (Fully nude one-hand raise) ritual on the balcony of the Liberal Arts Department building. Mizukami performs Rope Mechanics Orientation Ritual with Suzukida, Ueta, and Miki, but mistakenly falls and is injured while moving from the roof to the ground. [p. 253] • Japan’s Gross National Product (GNP) surpasses West Germany to become the second largest in the world, excluding the communist bloc. Expo Destruction Group conducts Harenchi Demo (Shameless Demonstration), Kawaramachi, Yasaka Shrine, Kyoto.  Sakurai Takami and Shingai Kazuyoshi participate. Expo Destruction Group holds Anti-Expo Osaka Rally, in front of Expo Headquarters, Expo Observatory, Osaka.  Netai is performed in front of the Expo Headquarters. At the Expo observation tower, they are allowed to perform katate-age inside the guard barrier on the condition that they do not become naked. Expo Destruction Group holds Anti-Expo Nagoya Rally, Nagoya University.  Before or after the rally, a public discussion is held at the family home of Katō Yoshihiro. A  • ntiwar, Anti-Anpo, Okinawa Struggle Victory June 15 Unity Rally by Beheiren, New Left factions, and Zenkyōtō, Tokyo.  Kokuin participates in the street demonstration. Andō Norio of the Revolutionary Designers Alliance is arrested.

1969675

6-15 6-16—6-30

6-18—7-6

6-20

6-28

6-29

6-30 JULY JULY 7-4

7-5

Itoi Kanji walks following a students’ demonstration, Sendai.  Itoi wears a pot as a helmet and a semi-transparent costume over his naked body. Matsuzawa Yutaka Exhibition: Psi Box, Aoki Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  A long with performance Kiri no pusai hako no naka de “Sekai kaizō ni kansuru pusai hon” o hiraku higi, Mu e (The Mysterious Ritual of Opening “Psi Book on World Remodeling” (Toward the Nothingness) in a Foggy Psi Box), Matsuzawa performs a Happening, Pusai no 3 hanayome (Psi’s Three Brides), with Shiomi Mieko, Nonaka Yuri, and Miyawaki Aiko. 9th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan, Kyoto Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  On tour from Tokyo. The Play (Ikemizu Keiichi, Ueta Koji, Okamoto Hajime, Nakata Kazunari, Fukunaga Toyoko, Miki Kumiko, Miki Tetsuo, Miki Toshiro, Mizukami Jun, Murata Keiichi) conducts a Happening, Bijutsukan no saibai keikaku aruiwa Purei shi tachi no zōshoku (Plan for Art Museum Cultivation, or the Proliferation of Messrs Play) Japan Coop Film Cinematheque closes, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  A fter moving to Hanazono Ping-pong Court, three programs close after three weeks. The screenings of Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally, Vitamin Show, and Cybele, scheduled to occur on this day for “Special Feature: Ritualists of Japan on Parade” may have been cancelled. F  • olk Music Rally, Shinjuku Station West Exit Plaza, Tokyo.  A record 7,000 people are mobilized, and 64 people are arrested in a clash with riot police. An article on Smash the Expo Black Festival in Ikebukuro is published in Shūkan Myōjō by Shūeisha.  The article becomes evidence leading to the arrest of Expo Destruction Group members by the Mejiro Police. The Play No. 2 is published. Bijutsuka Kyōtō Kaigi (Bikyōtō, Artists Joint-Struggle Council) is formed, Tokyo.  Members include Hori Kōsai (Chair) and Hikosaka Naoyoshi. Garakuta Market by The Play (Mizukami Jun), Maruyama Park, Kyoto. An article on Smash the Expo Black Festival in Kyoto is published in Asahi Gurafu (Asahi Picture News) by Asahi Shimbunsha.  Text and photos by Kanesaka Kenji. 畸形三派狂乱大集会 Crazy Grand Rally of the Three Deformed Sects, Kokura Labor Hall, Kitakyūshū.  Participating artists: Obana Shigeharu, Kondō Genzō, Sakurai Takami, Collective Kumo, Collective He, Tabe Mitsuko, Kitakyūshū University Malformed Group 0, and Hataraki Tadashi. Zero Jigen, Kokuin, and League of Criminals are announced as participants, but none of them actually come. The Embryo Hunts In Secret, directed by Wakamatsu Kōji, is screened. Sakurai, Moriyama Yasuhide, Shingai Kazuyoshi, et al. throw flowers covered with feces into the audience. Collective Kumo distributes the flyer “To Our Zero Jigen!” criticizing Zero Jigen. [p. 428]

6761969

7-6—7-7

7-8 7-9—8-7

7-12

7-12

7-14 7-15

7-16 7-18 7-19

7-19 7-20

7-20 7-21 7-23—8-29

Suenaga Tamio, Ishibashi Hatsuko, and H. K. from Kokuin are arrested by the Mejiro Police, Tokyo.  They are arrested on suspicion of public display of obscene material. The first arrest of the anti-Expo movement. Nakamura Masaharu of Kokuin is taken to the police as a witness, Tokyo. Multi-Play No.2: Usetsu kinchi no handorukokku, Eikyū ressha no KL sharyō (Noright-turn Handlecock: Regarding the KL Car of the Eternal Engine) performed by En Gekijō, Restaurant Chatelet 4th floor, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Written by Ikeda Shōichi, directed by Kagebi Gorō, produced by Tanabe Yoshiko and Nakamura Midori. 1st Pre-Anti-Expo, Yamate Church Hall, Shibuya, Tokyo.  K atō Yoshihiro protests the arrest of Suenaga Tamio et al. Expo Destruction Group also demonstrates protests at Shinjuku Station West Exit Plaza. A meeting for action against the arrest of Kokuin members, Matsue Kaku’s studio, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Iwabuchi Hideki, Kawanaka Nobuhiro, Matsue Kaku, Yoshida Yoshie, and Watanabe Chihiro participate. Katō Yoshihiro and Akiyama Yūtokutaishi are arrested by the Mejiro Police, Tokyo. • Ishihara Seiichirō (aka Katsumi), the boss of the fūten at Shinjuku Station, is arrested on suspicion of violating the Minor Crimes Act, Tokyo.  Ishihara is arrested as part of the forced investigation by the “Headquarters for Environmental Purification Measures in Shinjuku District,” conducted by the Crime Prevention Division of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. Itoi Kanji sends a letter of encouragement to Suenaga Tamio and others in custody. • The information sign at Shinjuku Station West Exit Plaza is changed to say “Passage” instead of “Plaza,” Tokyo. • Folk Song Rally at Shinjuku Station West Exit is shut down by riot police, Tokyo.  The Folk Guerrillas disappear. Associates of Miyai Rikurō’s Unit Pro, who are found to be in possession of hashish, are arrested, Tokyo. Current of Contemporary Art, Uji River (Tōnoshima, Kyoto), Yodo River, Dōjima River (east end of Nakanoshima, Osaka).  Participating artists: Ikemizu Keiichi, Okamoto Hajime, Suzuki Yoshinobu, Nakata Kazunari, Fukunaga Toyoko, Miki Tetsuo, Miki Toshirō, Mizukami Jun, Mizuno Tatsuo, and Murata Keiichi. This travel down river from Kyoto to Osaka on an 8-meter-long styrofoam raft is a landmark project by The Play. • U.S. Spacecraft Apollo 11 lands on the moon. The trial of Buzoku (Katō Mamoru et al.) over their use of marijuana, Tokyo. Koshimaki Osen: Giri Ninjō Irohani Hoheto, Southward Tour of Japan by Jōkyō Gekijō.  Jōkyō Gekijō performs in Tokyo, Hamamatsu, Nagoya, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, and Naha.

196967 7

7-25 7-25—7-26 7-31—8-2

AUGUST

8-1—11-30

8-2

8-3

8-6

8-7—8-11

Japan Coop Film Cinematheque is relocated to Create Taka in Sankōchō and resumes its activities, Shinjuku, Tokyo. Koyama Tetsuo and I. S. of Kokuin are arrested, Tokyo. Cross–Meetin’: Another Trip by Mr. Play, at the foot of Mt. Aso, Kumamoto.  Participating artists: The Play (Ikemizu Keiichi, Okamoto Hajime, Suzuki Yoshinobu, Nakata Kazunari, Fukunaga Toyoko, Miki Tetsuo, Mizuno Tatsuo, and Mizukami Jun) and Sakurai Takami. Non–Horizontal Line by Ikeda Shōichi, Usami Beach, Izu, Shizuoka.  I keda creates a line with a 200-meter-long plastic balloon on the surface of the sea. 1st International Exhibition of Modern Sculpture, The Hakone Open Air Museum, Kanagawa.  Included are works by Ikemizu Keiichi (The Egg: What will happen on August 10, 1969), Tanaka Shintarō, Toyoshima Sōroku, Maeyama Tadashi, Miki Tomio, and Yonekura Toku. Movement to Smash the 19th Japan Advertising Artists Club (Nissenbi) Exhibition, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  37 students and young people from Bikyōtō and the Smash the Nissenbi Joint-Struggle Group rush into the judging meeting at Sogetsu Art Center, pressing the 14 judges to inspect themselves and demanding they impose five requirements. The Central Committee of Nissenbi decides to provisionally cancel the exhibition as well as the judging. The national general meeting on the August 5 resolves that Nissenbi will not be disbanded, and on August 19 the judging is held in secret at Shibuya Girls’ High School, despite the cancellation of the exhibition. • Temporary Measures Law Regarding University Management (University Temporary Measures Law) is railroaded through in the Diet, Tokyo.  Enforcement of the law begins on August 17, which stipulates urgent measures to be taken in university disputes. Newsreel No. 1 is published, Tokyo.  “ The truth of the unjust arrest of the naked ritual of the Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group” is included in the issue. 反戦のための万国博（ハンパク） Antiwar Expo (Hanpaku), “Expo against the War,” Osaka Castle Park, Osaka.  Organized by the Expo Site Anti-Expo Association (with Yamada Munemutsu as its leader), mainly led by the Kansai Beheiren. More than 200 groups participate, including Expo Destruction Group, Beheiren, the Zengakuren sects of the anti-Japanese Communist Party, and folk music groups. Individual participants include Iida Momo, Iwakura Masahito, Ōe Masanori, Okabayashi Nobuyasu, Oda Makoto, Konaka Yōtarō, Takaishi Tomoya, Nakagawa Gorō, and Hani Gorō. On August 10, Expo Destruction Group performs a Katate-age ritual while wearing loincloths that read “waisetsubutsu” (obscene material) as they hold their hands aloft. They also perform the netai ritual, and conduct marches on Midōsuji Boulevard on August 11. Iwakura runs Zero Mogira, a steam car, but it breaks down. On August 7 and 8, Ōe’s film Great Society is screened in a

6781969

8-8—8-14

8-9—8-11

8-10

8-10

8-13

8-15 8-15—8-30

8-16 8-18

8-19—9-23

8-22

multi-projection onto six screens. A panel of an enlarged business card by TR Alliance is displayed next to the U.S. Phantom fighter jet that crashed at Kyūshū University. [p. 254] The End of the Illusion We Call Art, Nagano Prefectural Shinano Art Museum, Nagano.  Sunohara Toshiyuki, Maeyama Tadashi, Matsuzawa Yutaka, and Mizukami Jun participate. Mizukami crawls while he traces his figure on the floor. A symposium is held at the 2nd floor hall of Nagano Meiten Department Store, attended by Nakahara Yūsuke and Minemura Toshiaki. Untitled Exhibition: In Play, Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum, Nagoya.  A rtists of Group Ranran, Group A-un, et al. fill the gallery with 30,000 balloons, adding 10,000 more each day, totaling 60,000 on the final day of the exhibition. On August 12, the groups scatter hundreds of balloons in the Sakae Underground Mall and at the foot of the TV tower. Production Ga‘s forms thereafter, with members Itō Shin’ya, Katō Hisakatsu, Katō Yasuo, Kawai Eiji, Kawai Kazu, Koide Katsuichi, Tomita Hidekazu, and Hioki Takashi. Fear of “Quiet Sea”, Space Capsule, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Created, directed, and costume design by Itō Mika. Music by Ichiyanagi Toshi. Art by Gar Gar. Costume production by Yamamoto Kansai and Iso Kazuyoshi. Advertising art by Uno Akira. Produced by Itō Bungaku. The performance continues every Friday. F-Dimensional Play, Usami Beach, Izu.  I keda Shōichi et al. perform Float, moving a gigantic plastic tube along the beach. The performance event continues on September 15. 1st Roadwork by TR Alliance, streets in Tenjin, Fukuoka.  The collective writes “TR Dō (Alliance)” in red enamel paint on ten pedestrian crossings. The same action is taken at public restrooms on August 20 (Tenjin), September 15 (Tenjin and Hakata Station), and February 15, 1970 (Kokura Uomachi). To Sakae Plaza! by Ga‘s (Sakae Park Toilet Paper Operation), Sakae Park, Nagoya. Night Exhibition, BOBO, Fukuoka.  A n event to protest the arrests of Expo Destruction Group and fundraise in support. Tōkai Anti-Expo Council, inside the barricade, Nagoya University. Funeral of Cultural People, performance by The 4th Group, Sajik Park, Seoul.  K im Kulim, Song Ilkwang, Jung Kanja, Jung Chanseung and three others participate. Trends in Contemporary Japanese Art, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.  Included are works by The Play (7 Dimensions: harogen ka suru Purei shi no shokubai chōgō aruiwa 12090tai deno tsuiseki keikaku (Halogenating Mr Play’s Catalyst Concoction, or Tracking Plan in the 12090-band) and Matsuzawa Yutaka. Students from Anti-Japanese Communist Party sects intrude to criticize The Play. S  • hūkan Posuto (Weekly Post) begins publication by Shōgakkan.

1969679

8-28

8-30 9-3 9-5

9-6 9-6 9-7 9-8 9-10 9-11—9-28 9-13

9-15 9-15

9-16

9-20—9-21 9-22

9-22 9-27

• Communist League Red Army Faction forms, Jōgashima, Kanagawa.  Shiomi Takaya is appointed Chair and Tamiya Takamaro as Chair of the Military Committee. Kokuin participates in the Hanpaku roundup assembly by Koe-naki-koe no Kai (Voiceless Voices Society), Tokyo. • R iot police are dispatched to Waseda University and remove the barricades, Tokyo. • National Zenkyōtō Union Formation Rally, Hibiya Open Air Concert Hall, Tokyo.  Yamamoto Yoshitaka, chair of the University of Tokyo Zenkyōtō, is arrested. Kyūmin pourts paint on the intersection of Ginza 4-chome, Tokyo.  Cars driving through the intersection paint their tracks onto nearby streets. Kokuin participates in Anti-Fascist Cultural People Conference, Tokyo. Kokuin participates in Rally to Indict Our Cultural Conditions and the Smash the Expo Tōkai District Committee, Seto. • R iot police are dispatched to Keio University and remove the barricades, Tokyo. Kudō Tetsumi One-day Exhibition, Ichibankan Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo. Koshimaki Osen: Furisode Fire, Southward Tour of Japan by Jōkyō Gekijō, Kyoto, Nagoya, Tokyo. Funeral Parade of Roses directed by Matsumoto Toshio is released, Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka, Tokyo.  Zero Jigen and Ikeda Tatsuo appear in the film. Bikyōtō 9.15 Rally, Hanazono Shrine Underground Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo. F-Dimensional Play, Naoetsu, Niigata.  A continuation of the August 10 performance. At Naoetsu, Murata Takashi performs Flash, causing an explosion, and Akashi Susumu performs Flow, burning oil and producing smoke on the beach. Collective Kumo forcibly intrudes into the 2nd Asahi West-Japan Art Exhibition, Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall.  The collective tries to “carry in” themselves as artwork, but they are rejected. Collective He, Sakurai Takami, et al. work with Kumo. Elemental Kamaitachi: New-Out Zap-In, Shirota Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  I keda Shōichi and Kyūmin participate. Anti-Expo Teach-In, Yamate Church Hall, Shibuya, Tokyo.  E xpo Destruction Group, Bikyōtō, Smash the Nissenbi Joint-Struggle Group, and Architects ’70 Action Committee participate. Expo Destruction Group conducts a ritual with a banner depicting life-sized members as a background. Katō Yoshihiro agitates on stage. Watanabe Chihiro posters all over the hall. [pp. 254–5] • The clocktower stronghold at Kyoto University falls, Kyoto. “Smash Statement” ( funsai seimei) for the 1969 Asahi West-Japan Art Exhibition, Suzaki Park, Fukuoka.  The statement is filed under names of Collective Kumo, Collective He, and Kyūshū-ha. At Suzaki Park in front of the Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall,

6801969

9-27

9-27—9-28 9-27—9-30

9-27—12-14 OCTOBER

10-5 10-6—10-9

10-10

10-10

10-10 10-11—10-14

10-12

the artists stage a protest against the judges (Kawakita Michiaki, Saitō Yoshishige, Hamada Chimei, and Hariu Ichirō). Protest Rally against Asahi West-Japan Art Exhibition, Café Elm 2nd Floor, Fukuoka.  Kyūshū-ha (Sakurai Takami), Tabe Mitsuko, Tanaka Yukito, Collective Kumo, Collective He, and Fukano Osamu participate. The artists aim to smash the Asahi West-Japan Art Exhibition and to “question the true intentions” of exhibition judge Hariu Ichirō. Japan Advertising Artists Club (Nissenbi) resolves dissolution at its national general meeting, Gotenba, Shizuoka. Cultural Destruction Conference at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (Ueno Hanpaku), Ueno, Tokyo.  Participants include Art Village, Angura tsūshin (the group associated with Iwata Shin’ichi’s mini-komi zines), Eiga hyōron (Film Criticism) Cinematheque, Okayama Film Art Center, Ogawa Production, Geidai Liberation Joint Struggle, Architects ’70 Action Committee, Koebukuro Union (Koebukuro is the minikomi zine published by Kokuin), Kokuin Film Team, Kokugakuin University Film Club, Shingeki Antiwar, Sogetsu Film Festival Rebellion Struggle, Smash the Nissenbi Joint-Struggle Group, Nihon University Art Struggle Committee, Japan Underground Center, Newsreel, Antiwar Artists Committee, Expo Destruction Group, Bikyōtō, Provoke, Poster Demonstration Group, and Rebellion Faction against the Mainichi Contemporary Art Exhibition. 10th Sao Paulo Biennale  Included are works by Miki Tomio. Happu Plaza Manifesto by Itoi Kanji, Sendai City Hall Fountain Plaza, Sendai.  Itoi boils water on a gas stove and drinks coffee. The “Happu Plaza Manifesto” is named by Saitō Yoshiaki. Teach-In, Nagoya Zōkei Junior College of Art and Design.  Iwata Shin’ichi, Katō Yoshihiro, and Hariu Ichirō participate. Rebellion Art Festival, Kyoto City University of Arts.  The “Liberated Zone” within the university is selected as the venue. Architects ’70 Action Committee, Komatsu Tatsuo, Les Rallizes Dénudés, Hariu Ichirō, and Bikyōtō participate. Films by Kanesaka Kenji are screened. Iwata Shin’ichi, Katō Yoshihiro, et al. participate in the teach-in on October 6. Expo Destruction Group Ritual, Kyoto University West Auditorium.  Zero Jigen participates. A film recording of this ritual is used in Zero Jigen’s Baramon. • Nationwide Unified Action at fifty-three locations for smashing the Anpo.  Zengakuren Kakumaru Sect, National Zenkyōtō Union, and Beheiren participate. Ochi Osamu returns from U.S., Fukuoka. Smash Sogetsu Film Festival Rally by Suginami Cine Club, Tokyo.  A n executive committee meeting is held on October 11, a general rise-up rally on October 13, and a summary meeting on October 14. Discussion meeting on the 2nd Asahi West-Japan Art Exhibition, in front of Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall, Fukuoka.

1969681

10-14

Protest demonstration against Film Art Festival Tokyo 1969 by Smash Sogetsu Film Festival Joint-Struggle Council, Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Suginami Cine Club (Mori Kōtarō), Nihon University Zenkyōtō Film Team, Newsreel (Ōe Masanori, Kanesaka Kenji, and Hara Masato), and Expo Destruction Group participate. This protest leads to the cancellation of the festival, which is scheduled to be held from October 14–30, on October 15. 10-15 • A nti-Vietnam War demonstrations take place across the United States. 10-18 • Self-Defense Forces Sergeant Konishi Makoto refuses security operations training (the Sergeant Konishi Incident), Sado Radar Base of Air Self-Defense Force, Niigata.  Konishi distributes antiwar flyers in the base. On November 1, he is arrested by the Self-Defense Forces Police, and on November 22, he is indicted by the Niigata District Court for violating the Self-Defense Forces Act. 10-18 Expo Destruction Group is reported in an article titled “Harenchi” by Michael Berger in Rolling Stone, with photos by Hirata Minoru. 10-19 • R iot Police remove the barricades at Tama Art University, Tokyo.  Hori Kōsai et al. are arrested. 10-20—11-20 Outdoor Plastic Art ’69, Kamogawa Park, Marutamachi Ōhashi, and west bank of Kōjin Bridge, Kyoto.  Included are works by Ga‘s, Kawaguchi Tatsuo, Matsuzawa Yutaka, Mizukami Jun, and Yoshioka Shigeo. 10-21 • Students and the Antiwar Youth Committee clash with riot police on International Anti-War Day, Shinjuku and other locations, Tokyo. 10-21—10-26 2nd Asahi West-Japan Art Exhibition, Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall.  Ishibashi Yasuyuki’s work is selected, but he removes his work from the exhibition as Saitō Yoshishige and Hariu Ichirō decline to resign from the jury. At Suzaki Park in front of the Hall, Kyūshū-ha (Ochi Osamu and Sakurai Takami), Collective Kumo, and Collective He issue a “smash statement” ( funsai seimei) in objection to the jury. 10-23 Sokutei keisū (Riakushon no sōkatsu) (Measurement Coefficient [Summary of Reaction]) by Mizukami Jun, Large Gallery, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  This may have been an exhibition of documents of the actions Mizukami performed in Mt. Aso, Nagano, and Kyoto. 10-26—11-9 Outdoor Independent Exhibition, Shirakawa Park, Nagoya.  Hara Tomohiko (who later participates in Iwata Shin’ichi’s Super Ichiza) and 30 other Nagoya artists participate. 10-29 • Sony and Matsushita Electric both announce the release of a video recorder for home use. 10-31 Edogawa Ranpo zenshū: Kyōfu kikei ningen (Complete Works of Edogawa Ranpo: Horrors of Malformed Men), directed by Ishii Teruo, is released.  H ijikata Tatsumi appears in the film. NOVEMBER Ōe Masanori’s film and lecture “Commune in Fantasy,” Nagoya University.  Head Game and five other films are screened. 11-1 Smash Nitten (Japan Fine Arts Exhibition) Action by Bikyōtō et al., Ueno, Tokyo.

6821969

• Tokyo Metropolitan Police arrest 53 members of Red Army factions during their armed training camp at Daibosatsu Pass, seizing their weapons, Yamanashi. 11-7—11-18 Artists Today ’69, Yokohama Civic Art Gallery.  Included are works by Ikemizu Keiichi and Kudō Tetsumi. 11-9 Enlivening Objects: Company of Fire and Water, Kujūkuri Beach, Chiba.  Gar Gar participates: Uchida Yoshio, Saitō Takao, Suzuki Hirohiko, Toshima Tadashi, Harada Eiji, and Fukuda Katsubon. Along with a dance by Itō Mika musical performance by a band, the members ignite a 200-meter-long fire. 11-13—11-17 Nomo Group Exhibition: Two-plan Experiments, Kankodō 3rd floor hall, Maebashi.  Included are works by Katō Akira (Plan 1: Disappearing Process, melting ice with a burner while playing the sound of the recorded time signal), Kaneko Hidehiko, Shimada Takeyoshi (Plan 2: Loss of Balancing Sense), Tsunoda Jin’ichi, and Mori Yasuo. 11-18 “Amazing Artist” airs on 11PM (NTV).  Suzuki Yoshinori from Genshoku et al. appear on the program. 11-30 In-Out: Environmental Creator’s Movements, Shukugawa Community Center, Osaka.  Participants include Group ∞ (Nakata Kazunari et al.), Ueta Koji, and others from art, fashion, theater, film, and music. DECEMBER Shōmetsu no nobori (Flag of Disappearance), performance by Matsuzawa Yutaka, Sannōdai, Suwa. DECEMBER Meeting for Discussion on Expo Issues, Hanazono Shrine Underground Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Organized by Yoshida Yoshie. Ikeda Tatsuo, Ōe Masanori, Katō Yoshihiro, and Kanesaka Kenji participate. DECEMBER Taj Mahal Travellers forms, Tokyo.  Members are Kimura Michihiro, Koike Ryū, Kosugi Takehisa, Tsuchiya Yukio, Nagai Seiji, Hasegawa Tokio, and Hayashi Kinji. DECEMBER • Station ’70 opens, Shibuya, Tokyo.  A music club with a focus on new jazz. The store design is attention-grabbing: the ceiling is mirrored, the walls are made of CRT screens, and the furniture is made of acrylic and glass. Taj Mahal Travellers begin weekly concerts at the club. DECEMBER Rock band Zunō Keisatsu (Brain Police) forms, Tokyo. DECEMBER Film A.K.A. Serial Killer is completed, Tokyo.  Co-produced by Adachi Masao, Iwabuchi Susumu, Sasaki Mamoru, Nonomura Masayuki, Matsuda Masao, and Yamazaki Yutaka. The film consists only of scenery (“landscapes”) that Nagayama Norio (the “serial killer”) is purported to have seen. DECEMBER 5th Tottori Young Artist Group Exhibition, Tottori Civic Center, Tottori.  Funai Takehiko from Space Plan conducts Happenings in front of the Hall, City Office, and Desert. 11-5

1969683

12-? 12-3—12-4 12-5

12-5

12-8—12-11

12-12

12-12 12-15—12-25

12-20 12-22

12-24

12-27—12-29 12-31—70-1-1

Group N39 announces its disbanding, Morioka. Hair Marathon: 3 Days in Tobacco Road by Gulliver, Station ’70, Shibuya, Tokyo.  Nam June Paik visits. Entsensuberugā seiji to hanzai yori no gensō (An illusion from Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Poesie und Politik), theater performance by Hakken no Kai, Nagoya CBC Hall.  Broadcast by CBC (Chubu Nippon Broadcasting). The performance is a part of Theater Center 68 programming. As soon as the performance begins, about 20 Nagoya members of Zero Jigen, including Iwata Shin’ichi, surround the stage on the floor in a large circle and slowly rotate silently. The Happening group Plus Alpha starts boxing while blowing a whistle in the aisles. The interventions cause a big scuffle with the theater performers. Rock Musical Hair debuts, Tōyoko Theater, Shibuya, Tokyo.  The musical runs until February 25 the following year. Its 87 performances up to January 31 attract 75,000 attendees. Film Violane 12, Nikkei Small Hall, Ōtemachi, Tokyo.  Screening of films by 27 volunteers from the canceled Sogetsu Film Festival applicants. Play No. 3 is published.  This is the final issue of Play. The Editor changes from Mizukami Jun to Miki Tetsuo. Brawl Case between Jōkyō Gekijō and Tenjō Sajiki, Tenjō Sajikikan, Shibuya, Tokyo. LSD (Lucky Strike for Dinner): Plastic Hair by Gulliver, Theater Scorpio, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  I keda Shōichi, Kawasumi Kazuo, Hagiwara Toshifumi, and Yanagisawa Masashi participate. M  • inistry of Health and Welfare designates six locations including Minamata, Yokkaichi, and Kawasaki as polluted areas. Garigari hakase no hanzai (Dr. Garigari’s Crime), 10th theater performance by Tenjō Sajiki begins, Tenjō Sajikikan, Shibuya, Tokyo.  Takamatsu Jirō is in charge of art. John + Yoko Lennon Call for Christmas Party of Love and Peace: “War is over … if you want it!”, Hibiya Open Air Concert Hall, Tokyo.  A demonstration is held on Ginza Street after a party that features a concert. Along with John Lennon and Ono Yōko, Oda Makoto and Konaka Yōtarō from Beheiren, Yokoo Tadanori, et al. participate. The supporters listed on the poster designed by Yokoo include people from music, theater, and design, as well as Ikeda Tatsuo, Segi Shin’ichi, Takiguchi Shūzō, and Hariu Ichirō from the field of art. Extrasensory Community: Underground Film Be-In, Space Laboratory Hair, Shibuya, Tokyo. Hakuchū no penisu ma (Penis Devil in Broad Daytime), Happening by Kudō Tetsumi, Station ’70, Shibuya, Tokyo.  Planned by Tone Yasunao. Kudō burns a penis-shaped candle in a birdcage.

6841970

1970 IN THIS YEAR

JANUARY 1-11 1-14

1-14 1-17—1-21 1-18

1-20 FEBRUARY

FEBRUARY

2-5 2-9 2-11 AND 2-15

Ima watashi wa otomonaku furishkiru yuki no naka de (Now I’m in the snow that falls silently), a performance by Matsuzawa Yutaka, Lake Suwa, Nagano.  Matsuzawa shows a blank sheet of paper to the lake. Enoki Chū et al. form Group Zero, Kobe. Kara Jūro wins the 15th Kishida Prize for Drama for Shōjo Kamen (Masked Girl). Itō Mika dies in an accident at home, Shimokitazawa, Tokyo. Itoi Kanji performs “Donto Festival Naked Fire March,” Ōsaki Hachimangū, Sendai.  Itoi reenacts his naked torchbearer performance from 1964 at the Matsutaki Festival, a New Year’s ceremony to pray for family safety and freedom from disease by burning New Year’s decorations and old charms. Itoi is taken in by the police but released soon after. T  • hird Satō Eisaku Cabinet (until July 7, 1972) Iwata Shin’ichi and Sakuma Mariko Two-person Exhibition, Sakura Gallery, Nagoya. Grand Discussion for Kyūshū Renaissance, Nōmin Kaikan, Fukuoka.  Topics are “The Grand Festival of Heroes,” “Trends of Contemporary Art Exhibition,” and “The submission of motions on whether to smash the Yahata Art Museum Exhibition and report on the movement to smash Asahi WestJapan Exhibition.” Sakurai Takami, Shingai Kazuyoshi, Tabe Mitsuko, and Moriyama Yasuhide are scheduled to report. The secretariat is Tabe’s home. On the same day, Collective Kumo releases a “smash statement” through a leaflet titled “What is the Kyūshū Renaissance?” announcing their intentions for the “Trends of Contemporary Art Exhibition” and the “1970 Kyūshū: Will to Possibility Exhibition” • Suehiro-tei Theater is closed due to financial difficulties, Ningyōchō, Tokyo.  This was the last remaining tatami-matted yose theater in Tokyo. Collective Kumo, Collective He, et al. issue leaflet “Chōshi yosugiruze! (Don’t get carried away!)”, Fukuoka.  This text is a critique of the artists who submit work to the 1970 Kyūshū: Will to Possibility Exhibition despite having participated in smashing the Asahi WestJapan Exhibition. “Rokutobi Island Orientation Ritual Report” is published, Osaka.  This is a report on a fictitious project carried out from December 31, 1969 to January 2, 1970 on an uninhabited island in the Seto Inland Sea. The report is issued under the name of Miki Tetsuo, based on a concept by ​​Mizukami Jun. Along with Mizukami and Miki, Ueta Koji, Okamoto Hajime, Suzuki Yoshinobu, Hiraki Hisahiro, Miki Toshirō, Mizuno Tatsuo, and Murata Keiichi participate. Yoshida Minoru moves to the U.S. (returns to Japan on February 5, 1977). • Ministry of Health designates LSD as a narcotic. GUN conducts “Event to Changes the Image of Snow,” riverbed of Shinano River, Tōkamachi, Niigata.  Planned with Hanaga Mitsutoshi. On February 11, Ichihashi Tetsuo, Imai Kiyohide, Takahashi Jun’ichi, and Horikawa Michio spray pigment on

1970685

2-22

2-26 2-26—2-27

2-26—3-18

2-28

a snowfield with a pesticide sprayer. On February 15, Onogawa Mitsuo, Maeyama Tadashi, and Ōkubo Junji draw red and green lines on the snowfield. Multi-Play Flowing Event: Soft and Soft Life by Ikeda Shōichi and En Gekijō, Mitsukoshi Department Store, Ginza; Spinnaker, Toranomon, Tokyo; Kobama Beach, Kanagawa.  In “Shopping in Department,” roughly fifty people gather at Mitsukoshi Department Store at 3 p.m. and ascend the floors of the department store with artificial flowers in their hands, shopping or doing whatever they would like, until they ultimately gather on the rooftop at 5 p.m. In “Being in Party,” they move to Spinnaker (a snack bar) for a party, and then travel to the beach by minibus for “Playing over Sea.” Haraguchi Noriyuki and Maita Masafumi from Yokosuka participate with the group. [p. 271] • The producer and actors of the musical Hair are arrested on suspicion of violating the Cannabis Control Law, Tokyo. 九州ルネッサンス・英雄たちの大祭典 Kyūshū Renaissance: Grand Festival of Heroes, Hakata Playland, Way-In BOBO, Fukuoka.  Directed by Obana Arao and Fukano Osamu. Music by Kon Shirō. Space design by Izumi Takayoshi. Art by Ochi Osamu and Shingai Kazuyoshi. Promotional art by Murasaki Ranshirō. Emceed by Mitsuyuki Hitoshi and Honda Keishi. Lighting by Suzuki Shōhei. Costumes by Imamura Takeshi, Kawasaki Mitsuru, and Murakami Kiyoshi. Screening by Moriyama Shōzō. Poetry by Kondō Genzō. Publicity by Sakurai Takami. Planning by Jiyū Gakkō (Free School). Organized by Kyūshū Renaissance. Obana Arao is the lead organizer. Participating artists include Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Kanesaka Kenji, Collective He, Zero Jigen (Katō Yoshihiro, Iwata Shin’ichi, and Kamijō Junjirō), Machida Kusumi, Matono Mitsuo, Murakami Kiyoshi, Obana Arao, and Fukuoka Cinematheque (Kondō Genzō). The event is mainly planned by designer Izumi Takayoshi et al. It consists of twenty fashion items by Koshino Junko et al., thirty films including Donald Richie’s Five Philosophy Fables, poetry readings, slideshows of paintings, an exhibition of Kanesaka Kenji’s photographs, a go-go dance, etc. On February 27, a wedding party for Ochi Osamu is held at Hakata Playland. As a criticism to Sakurai Takami and others who use the name of Collective Kumo without permission, Moriyama Yasuhide and U.S., a female member of the Collective Kumo, perform a Happening attempting sexual intercourse at the Tenjin intersection, joined by Shingai Kazuyoshi of Collective He. At Hakata Playland and BOBO, Zero Jigen performs rituals with Akiyama, Ochi, Sakurai, Yanagi Kazunobu, et al. and the film documents of these rituals are used in Zero Jigen’s film Inaba no Shiro Usagi (White Hare of Inaba). [pp. 264–5] 1970 Kyūshū: Will to Possibility, Kitakyūshū Municipal Yahata Art Museum.  rganized by Kitakyūshū City Board of Education. Exhibiting artists include O Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Obana Shigeharu, Kikuhata Mokuma, Sakurai Takami, Taniguchi Toshio, Tabe Mitsuko, Miyazaki Junnosuke (above, former Kyūshū-ha). First concert by Taj Mahal Travellers at Pit Inn (New Jazz Hall), Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Thereafter the group begins weekly concerts at the venue, which continue until May 1971.

6861970

2-28 2-28—3-2 MARCH?

MARCH 3-2—3-16

3-3 3-5

3-8

3-10—3-15

3-14—9-13

3-15

3-15

3-15—9-13

Too Much, Kyoto Kaikan Hall 2.  Gulliver participates. Departure from Convention by Ga‘s, Kawai Eiji’s house, Nagoya. Running Man by Iwata Shin’ichi, Aichi.  Iwata runs in the shallow waters of the Nagara River in a loincloth, from the government office district to Wakamiya Shrine wearing a black suit, and then through Goshiki-en Park with his lower body naked. The performance is covered by Kanesaka Kenji in the March 20 issue of Asahi Gurafu. Street Fighting Rock, Shimizudani Park, Kioichō, Tokyo.  Organized by Peak (Suenaga Tamio et al.). 14th Kyoto Independent Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  Included are works by Ikemizu Keiichi (Cage of 1965), Iwakura Masahito (Messiah), Fukunaga Toyoko (See-Saw), and Mizukami Jun (Chōjō kankaku kunrenjō: sokutei keisū 4 [Toward a paranormal sense: training field measurement coefficient 4]).  agazine an–an begins publication by Heibon Publishing (present-day •M Magazine House). Notice of Katō Isao’s (Collective Kumo) dismissal from the high school attached to Yahata University (present-day Kyūshū International University), Kitakyūshū. Saitō Yoshiaki performs by going up to the arcade of the shopping street, Higashi Ichibanchō, Sendai.  Saitō notifies Itoi Kanji. 4th Trends of Contemporary Art Kyūshū Exhibition: Questioning Communication, Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall, Fukuoka.  K atō Isao of Collective Kumo exhibits Message, the process of his dismissal from his employment as a teacher. Former Kyūshū-ha members exhibit. • The Japan World Exposition (Expo ’70), Osaka opens.  Kosugi Takehisa and Ichiyanagi Toshi perform their music for Robot Event during the opening ceremony at the Festival Plaza. Kosugi’s Plaza Fantasy, Rainbow Music, and Constellation Music are played at the Festival Plaza during the Expo. Film shoot for Inaba no Shiro Usagi by Zero Jigen, Kujūkuri Beach, Chiba.  Zero Jigen and Akiyama Yūtokutaishi perform (which is also the case for the shoots on March 28 and 29, May 3, June 29, July 19 and September hereafter). [p. 512] Demonstrators of Smash Anpo and Expo Joint-struggle Council try to enter the Expo site but are blocked by the armed troops of Osaka Prefectural Police, sixtyseven people are arrested, Expo Central Entrance Station, Osaka.  Hori Kōsai publishes a report on these events in Kyoto University Newspaper under the pseudonym Kuroki Shinzō. World Expo Art Exhibition: Discovery of Harmony V “Contemporary Trends”, EXPO Museum of Fine Arts (later National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka).  Included are works by Ay-O, Arakawa Shūsaku, Takamatsu Jirō, Tanaka Shintarō, Miki Tomio, Motonaga Sadamasa, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, Yoshihara Jirō, and Yoshimura Masunobu.

1970687

3-21—3-22

3-24

3-28

3-29 3-29—3-30

3-31

APRIL

APRIL APRIL APRIL

Gutai exhibits Garden on Garden (co-created by Imai Norio, Imanaka Kumiko, Kawamura Sadayuki, Kikunami Jōji, Shimamoto Shōzō, Takasaki Motonao, Nasaka Senkichirō, Nasaka Yūko, Horio Sadaharu, Matsuda Yutaka, Mukai Shūji, Yoshida Toshirō, Yoshida Minoru, and Yoshihara Michio) and Home My Home (co-created by Ōnishi Kiyoji, Kojima Nobuaki, Kobayashi Hakudō, Suga Kei, Nagamatsu Yūzō, Hamada Gō, Bando Masaomi, Higuchi Shōichirō, and Yamashita Hiroshi, curated by Tōno Yoshiaki). Miki also creates a sculpture for Friday Plaza. Expanded Art Festival, Kishi Gymnasium, Shibuya, Tokyo.  Curated by Ichikawa Miyabi. Participating artists: Atsugi Bonjin, Iimura Takahiko, Ishii Mitsutaka, Ishizaki Kōichirō, Ichikawa Miyabi, Kuni Chiya and Circus Komaba (Sekido Rui, Tsujimura Kazuko, et al.), Taj Mahal Travellers, modern ballet and “Expanded Cinema” (Tone Yasunao et al.). Ōnishi and Maeda Tetsuhiko participate with artworks. • Farewell Ceremony for Rikiishi Tōru of Ashita no Joe (Joe for Tomorrow), Kōdansha Auditorium, Otowa, Tokyo.  P roduced by Tenjō Sajiki. Appearances by the “Syndicate Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Kid Brothers Company” units of the theater company. Film shoot for Inaba no Shiro Usagi by Zero Jigen, Katō Yoshihiro’s home, Meguro, Tokyo.  The exchange between Katō and Sudama of Hare Krishna begins hereafter. Film shoot for Inaba no Shiro Usagi by Zero Jigen, Tama River, Tokyo.  This scene is used in the last part of the film. White Cross: As a matter of sight and thought by The Play, Mt. Kinchō mountainside, Kobe.  Participating artists: Ikemizu Keiichi, Ishimoto Fumio, Okamoto Hajime, Gotō Toshiyuki, Suzuki Yoshinobu, Nakata Kazunari, Fukunaga Toyoko, Fukunaga Hiroshi, Funai Yasuo, Christian Blackwood, Miki Tetsuo, Mizuno Tatsuo, Mōri Takayuki, and Yoshioka Shigeo. After this project, Mizukami Jun leaves The Play. • Hijacking of the Yodo-gō, Japan Airlines, by Red Army Sect.  Yodo-gō (Japan Airlines Flight 351) is hijacked by nine Red Army students and lands at Gimpo Airport in South Korea. On April 3, the plane flies to North Korea, after 103 people are released. This is the first hijacking incident in Japanese history. Autonomous Entrance Ceremony, Station ’70, Shibuya, Tokyo.  P roduced and emceed by Hori Kōsai. This “entrance ceremony” (nyūgakushiki) is held for Hori and Hikosaka Naoyoshi, who are not allowed to enter the campus of Tama Art University because of the lockout. The event consists of the agitation, a symposium, dance, etc. Plaza for Mirror Men and Light, Festival Plaza, Expo, Osaka.  P roduced and directed by Motonaga Sadamasa. Music by Kosugi Takehisa. Akasegawa Genpei and Mizukami Jun become lecturers at Bigakkō, Tokyo. Hijikata Tatsumi performance, Pepsi Pavilion, Expo ’70, Osaka.  H ijikata’s performance leads to the cancellation of the live programs scheduled by E.A.T.

688

4-1 4-1—5-31

4-12—4-15

4-16

4-18

4-20

4-20

4-20 4-24

4-24

4-26

4-27

1970

1st Head Rock Concert by Brain Police, Kyōritsu Auditorium, Kanda, Tokyo. The Open-Air Festival of Contemporary Art , Kodomo-no-kuni (Children’s Country), Yokohama.  More than 150 artists participate, including Gar Gar, Ga‘s, GUN (Horikawa Michio and Maeyama Tadashi), Katō Akira, Saotome Yukio, Terada Takehiro, Hara Tomohiko, and Murata Takashi. This is the largest independent exhibition organized by artists in this period. As the subtitle “1 Million Square Meters of Sun and Green” indicates, diverse experimental works are installed within a vast outdoor space. Works by fifteen artists are removed or destroyed for various reasons, which sparks a controversy about censorship and the self-regulation of expression. Komuro Itaru enacts Komuro Family Funeral, and Gar Gar conducts Gar Gar Buys You, inviting the audience to perform and paying them for their performance. The Last Exhibition at the Gutai Pinacotheca, Nakanoshima, Osaka.  A fter this exhibition, the Pinacotheca is demolished for the construction of an entrance to Hanshin Highway. E.A.T. withdraws from Expo Pepsi Hall, Osaka.  Kosugi Takehisa was scheduled to participate in E.A.T.’s project. Symposium ’70, Shinanobashi Gallery, Osaka.  Roughly a hundred people participate, including Ikemizu Keiichi, Iwakura Masahito, Okamoto Hajime, Kawaguchi Tatsuo, Mizukami Jun, and leftist students. The theme is art and politics. This is the first in a three-part series. Peak No. 1 is published from Community Peak, Tokyo.  Suenaga Tamio’s home is the “editorial department,” and Iwabuchi Hideki’s is the “intelligence bureau.” Hariu Ichirō gives a lecture for an autonomous learning course “What can art do?: Engagement in art,” Aichi University of the Arts, Nagakute, Aichi. • Tokyo’s consumer prices become the highest in the world. Symposium for the Open-Air Festival of Contemporary Art, Artists Hall, Ginza, Tokyo.  Following the symposium, a protest rally is held at Kodomonokuni (the exhibition venue) on April 29, Yokohama The 1,000-yen Note Trial concludes with the Supreme Court’s dismissal of the appeal, Tokyo.  A kasegawa Genpei’s guilty verdict is final, and he is sentenced to three months in prison with a one-year probation. • Satō Hideo with Red Army helmet occupies an eye of Tower of the Sun, Expo, Osaka.  Satō is ultimately arrested on the morning of May 3, after occupying the tower for 159 hours. Itoi Kanji streaks through Festival Plaza, Expo, Osaka.  On the way back to Sendai from Nakatsu, Oita, Itoi reads a newspaper article about the man who occupies the eye of Tower of the Sun, gets off the train in Osaka, streaks about fifteen meters in the Festival Plaza, and is caught by police officers. [pp. 408–9]

1970

4-28

MAY

MAY

MAY

MAY

MAY

5-1 5-2

5-2—5-3

5-3 5-7

5-10 5-10—5-30

5-16—5-21

5-21—5-26

5-23

689

Street Fighting Rock, Meiji Park, Yoyogi, Tokyo.  Organized by Peak. Demonstrations co-organized by the Zenkyōtō and National Antiwar June Action Committee are also held at the venue. Moving Art and Light Art, Festival Plaza, Expo, Osaka.  Created and directed by Shimamoto Shōzō. Music by Kosugi Takehisa. Akasegawa Genpei publishes his first book Obuje o motta musansha (Proletariat with Objects) with Gendai Shichōsha, Tokyo. Akiyama Yūtokutaishi commutes to work in the attire of the runner image from a Glico advertisement, Tokyo. Gulliver, with Kimura Hideki, publishes Too Much No.1 with Space Marathon, Tokyo. • Space Laboratory Hair opens with new management, Shibuya, Tokyo.  Itō Tetsuo takes over the space from Tokyo Kid Brothers. • U.S. resumes bombing in North Vietnam, begins its invasion of Cambodia. Kara Jūrō’s Love Recital, Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka, Tokyo.  H ijikata Tatsumi makes an appearance in a show of friendship to Kara. 4th Kobe Carnival, former foreign settlements area around Higashi Yuenchi Park, Flower Road, and Kyōmachi-suji, Sannomiya, Kobe.  A rt Plaza opens at the Children’s Park. Shooting of Inaba no Shiro Usagi by Zero Jigen, Ōdaru Hot Springs, Izu. Panta of Brain Police masturbates during a performance at Nichigeki Western Carnival, Yūrakuchō, Tokyo. Horikawa Michio mails a stone to Prime Minister Satō Eisaku’s house, Tokyo. 10th Japan International Art Exhibition (Tokyo Biennale): Between Man and Matter, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Ueno, Tokyo.  Curated by Nakahara Yūsuke. Included are works by Kawaguchi Tatsuo, Takamatsu Jirō, Tanaka Shintarō, Horikawa Michio, and Matsuzawa Yutaka. This is an important exhibition that introduces Japanese artists alongside the leading edge of art trends around the world, such as Arte Povera, Minimal Art, and Conceptual Art. Marina & Ulay Abramović present a performance. Matsuzawa performs “Watashi no shi” to (With “My Death”) with Tsujimura Kazuko, accompanied by Yamaguchi Katsuhiro as a witness. Contemporary Art: Hands and Esprit, Tosa Electric Railway Hall, Kōchi.  The relaunch of Zen’ei Tosa-ha. An exhibition by artists chosen by open call, organized by Kōchi Prefecture Artist Group Tosa-ha. Fantasia of Sound and Light, Festival Plaza, Expo, Osaka.  P roduced by Mayuzumi Toshirō, who also composes the music. The show consists of spatial art with spotlights, searchlights, strobe lights, etc. and electronic music. It includes “Surreal Show,” in which sounds of musical instruments are processed and varied through the technology of electronic music, and a three-dimensional display with the amplified sound of an orchestra and chorus, with sound and light controlled by computer. Street Fighting Rock, Hibiya Park, Tokyo.  Organized by Peak.

690

5-25—7-10

JUNE

JUNE

1970

Yes, 11th performance of Tenjō Sajiki, Tenjō Sajiki Theater, Shibuya, and other venues in Tokyo.  Written and directed by Takenaga Shigeo. A Happening-like performance that moves by bus, beginning at the Tenjō Sajiki Theater. Flowing Event: Shinjuku Turbulence by En Gekijō, Toden-dōri Street, Shinjuku, and other venues in Tokyo.  The performers, carrying a massive, balloon-like tube made of plastic, move from Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, where the Nakazawa Ushio Exhibition is held from June 22–27, to Yasukuni-dōri Street. [pp. 272–3] Running Man by Iwata Shin’ichi, Nagoya.

BETWEEN JUNE AND EARLY AUGUST). 6-6

6-7

6-12

Ga‘s releases a record, Ga‘s Disk, Nagoya. • Fukuoka Prefecture Board of Education disciplines and dismisses three teachers from Prefectural Denshūkan High School, Yanagawa, Fukuoka.  The Board deems that the teaching of Kayashima Hirokazu, Handa Takao, and Yamaguchi Shigeto has a leftist bias. The Supreme Court ultimately confirms the Board’s measure in January 1990. Film shoot for Inaba no Shiro Usagi by Zero Jigen, Sebastian, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Uoda Moto’o Exhibition is held at the venue (bar) on May 16–June 6. Zero Jigen, Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Itoi Kanji appear in the scenes filmed. Brain Police performs at a political rally of the Revolutionary Communist Alliance [Kakukyōdō], Hibiya Open Air Concert Hall, Tokyo.

6-13, 6-20, AND 6-27

6-23 6-24—10-25

6-27

6-28

6-28—7-3 6-30 JULY

JULY JULY

Cine Happening Festival, Ikebukuro Art Theater, Tokyo.  Shinjuku Boy Troop (Akiyama Yūtokutaishi), Taj Mahal Travellers, Baramanji Kessha, and The Vagina (Fujii Seiichi) perform. • Automatic extension of the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty. The 35th Venice Biennale.  Tōno Yoshiaki is appointed Commissioner of the Japan Pavilion. Included are works by Arakawa Shūsaku and Sekine Nobuo. Film Shoot for Inaba no Shiro Usagi by Zero Jigen, Japan Ultrasonic Spa, Shibuya, Tokyo. Flying Focus: Intermedia Piece by Gulliver, Rekisen Park, Kasuga, Tokyo.  Gulliver projects a film onto a giant balloon. En Gekijō (Ikeda Shōichi et al.), Ōnishi Kiyoji, Chida Ui, Hamada Gōji, Miyai Rikurō, and Yanagisawa Masashi collaborate on the performance. Mazura Ryūdan Exhibition, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo. Dissolution Ceremony of Japan Advertising Artists Club (Nissenbi). Flowing Event: Fly to Heaven by En Gekijō, Kawaguchi Lake, Yamanashi.  Performed on a driving track. Ikeda Shōichi directs Fire!, Fuji-Q Highland, Yamanashi. • Trial of Konishi Makoto, airman of Self-Defense Forces who conducts AntiMilitary Struggle, begins, Niigata.  Maeyama Tadashi of GUN gets involved with politics after this trial.

1970

7-3—7-11

7-7

7-7—8-9

7-11—7-12

7-12—7-19

7-19 7-19

7-25 7-25—7-27

7-28—7-30

8-2

691

Multi-Play No.3: Kashō / Satsujin Gēmu (Transient Image—Murder Game) by En Gekijō, Yotsuya Public Hall, Tokyo.  “Independent spaces interact, the site boils, and the play develops into a parade in the city involving the audience.” (Ikeda Shōichi). Taj Mahal Travellers join with a musical performance. [p. 271] • K aseitō’s Accusation, Hibiya Open Air Concert Hall, Tokyo.  At “the 33rd Anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident: People’s Rally to Prevent the Re-invasion of Asia by the Empire of Japan,” the Overseas Chinese Youth Struggle Committee (Kaseitō) raises the issue of oppressed peoples in Japan and criticizes New Left movements. Trends in Contemporary Japanese Art, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.  The last of the series. Included is Mizukami Jun’s Chōjō kankaku kunren no ni (Super Sense Training No. 2). Rock Festival: Too Much, Jindaiji Castle Ruins, Kanagawa.  Gulliver assists. Beam Penetration: Minimal Sound of Rider, Festival Plaza, Expo, Osaka.  A n event directed by Yoshimura Masunobu. Flower Travelling Band and members of the Kansai Motorcycle Club perform. Yoshimura criticizes the pressure created by the manager and by journalistic coverage of the event in an article in Asahi Shimbun on August 11. Film shoot for Inaba no Shiro Usagi by Zero Jigen, Goshiki-en, Aichi. Happening of Collective Kumo and Collective He, Fukuoka Prefectural Denshūkan High School, Yanagawa, Fukuoka.  A s a part of the protest against the dismissal of three teachers, Moriyama Yasuhide and Shingai Kazuyoshi bare their lower bodies while standing on the roof of the school spreading a picture of a fist. [fig. 214, pp. 430–1] Peak No. 2 is published, Tokyo. • Sunagawa Cultural Revolution Antiwar Festival, Sunagawa Antiwar Trench and Antiwar Plaza (near the Tachikawa U.S. Army Base), Tokyo. At the N.A.G. Exhibition, works of garbage are removed by the museum, Small Gallery B, Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum, Nagoya  N.A.G. (New Art Group) exhibits garbage collected from the trash cans downtown around the museum, and displays flyers “N.A.G. Garbage Manifesto” and “Where Concept Art Is Headed.” The rotten garbage emits a foul odor and the museum orders the artists to remove it on July 28, but the artists refuse and continue to bring in more garbage. The museum tries to remove it and clean the gallery, but the exhibiting artists interfere. On the July 29, the museum issues a rescission of the gallery use permit to Okada Hiroshi, who is the representative of the group responsible for the rent. The museum removes the artwork (garbage) to the unloading dock and disposes of it. Enoki Chū enacts a Happening in the Pedestrian Paradise, Ginza, Tokyo.  On the day when the first “Pedestrian Paradise” (automobile-free area) is held in Ginza, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, and Asakusa, Enoki walks around in Ginza with an Expo ’70 mark on his stomach that he has made by sunburn. He enacts the same Happening at the Expo in Osaka.

6921970

8-12—8-14

8-23—8-26 8-31—9-2

SEPTEMBER SEPTEMBER SEPTEMBER SEPTEMBER? 9-3

Nirvana: For the Final Art, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  The approximately 86 exhibiting artists include Kawaguchi Tatsuo, Kawatsu Hiroshi, On Kawara, Sunohara Toshiyuki, Takiguchi Shūzō, Tanaka Takamichi, Jan Dibbets, Robert Barry, John Baldessari, Horikawa Michio, Mizukami Jun, Maeyama Tadashi, and Matsuzawa Yutaka. An exhibition of international conceptual art organized by Matsuzawa, Mizukami, et al. Mizukami begins his activities in the 1970s starting with this exhibition. Sheep by The Play, from Kyoto to Osaka and Kobe.  The members walk with a flock of sheep. [plate 16, p.11] Gutai Art Festival: Drama of Man and Matter, Festival Plaza, Expo, Osaka.  P roduced by Yoshihara Jirō. Scenario by Shiraga Kazuo. Directed by Motonaga Sadamasa. Assistant director by Shimamoto Shōzō and Murakami Saburō. Music composed by Yoshihara Michio. Audio design by Yoshida Etsuzō. Lighting design by Yanagida Toshikazu. Art design by Yoshida Toshirō. Art assistant by Horio Sadaharu and Gotō Hajime. Pieces performed include Fly, Lighting, White Object, Sequin Human, Yarn Human, Red Human, 101 Dogs, Parent-Child Robot and Plastic Car, and Inflating. [pp. 498–9] Film Shoot for Inaba no Shiro Usagi by Zero Jigen, Fukiage, Saitama.  Zero Jigen performs in a wheat field near Kamijō Junjirō’s house. Event for the Constellation, Festival Plaza, Expo, Osaka.  Music by Ichiyanagi Toshi and Kosugi Takehisa. • Sangha for the Killing of the Owners of Polluting Corporations begins activity, Yokkaichi, Mie. Bikyōtō Revolution Committee is formed, Tokyo. Misayama Okusha Secret Ritual, performance by Matsuzawa Yutaka, Misayama Okusha (main shrine), Suwa.  Installing a 2,222 cm pink banner, “Nobori of Extinction,” Matsuzawa calls for the extinction of humankind and plays a bamboo whistle surrounded by nine giant trees. Hanaga Mitsutoshi serves as the designated witness.

9-5—9-6, AND 9-19—9-20

9-8—9-11

9-20

Film Screening by Ga‘s, plaza in front of Flower Clock, Sakae, and fountain in Sakae Park, Mataho Housing Complex, Nagoya; Kamogawa Park, Kyoto.  The film is projected onto human bodies in white clothes. In Commemoration of Santica Great Drawing Exhibition: Proposal for the Japanese Archipelago, Santica Square, Santica Boulevard, Sannomiya, Kobe.  This is the first exhibition of Group 0 (Zero). In the same period as the drawing exhibition, the group conducts a Happening, Funeral of the Japanese Archipelago, hanging a map of the Japanese archipelago made of white cloth. On Santica Boulevard, they install a blue sheet depicting the station names and railroads from Aomori to Shimonoseki. Enoki Chū enacts a Happening holding a placard that reads “Play Station.” Performance by Itoi Kanji, Taishidō, Sendai.  For an article by Yoshida Yoshie and Hanaga Mitsutoshi for Bijutsu techō, Itoi runs through his neighborhood while holding up the words “Don’t kill.” [p. 408]

1970

9-30—10-2

OCTOBER

OCTOBER

10-1 10-2—10-4

10-9—9-12

10-10

10-10 10-11

10-11—11-3

10-12

693

• 1st Compulsory Survey, Sanrizuka, Chiba.  Opposition Alliance and its student supporters clash with the team of the New Tokyo International Airport Corporation. Ikeda Shōichi creates and directs Gurīn kappu ni bi shōshō (A Spoonful of Beauty in the Green Cup), Space Capsule, Akasaka, Tokyo. • Canon releases the first domestically produced plain paper copier (PPC) photocopying machine that uses plain paper. • Japan National Railway launches its “Discover Japan” tourism campaign. • Festival in the Era of the Sea of ​​Japan (1st edition), Sado Island, Niigata.  This summer festival begins as a free gathering of people who have doubts about Expo ’70. The festival has continued even in recent years. Kiraiya War Batsugun Festival, Suzaki Park, Maizuru Park, Fukuoka  Inspired by the Woodstock concerts in the U.S., Kitajima Tadashi and Shingai Kazuyoshi from Collective He organize concerts and flea markets along with students. Floor Event No.1 by Hikosaka Naoyoshi, the artist’s house, Setagaya, Tokyo.  H ikosaka pours latex on the floor to harden it. A private event with no audience, except for a photographer. Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art opens, Kobe. MAD/MAP, various venues in Sendai.  M AD/MAP (Mutual Art Damage of Multiple Actionist Project) is an event for performances conducted simultaneously in various venues, including HigashiIchibanchō, Nakakechō, Kokubunchō, the Auditorium of Tohoku University School of Medicine, West Park, Cultural Center, and streetcars. Participating performers include Gotō Hiroko (who becomes naked while riding a streetcar), Satō Masao (who walks with the soil dug from West Park stuffed in a straw bag on his back), Toshima Shigeyuki (who blow on toy whistles on the street at Nakakechō Arcade) et al. After Itoi Kanji visits Tohoku University, he runs in a red penis-shaped costume in Higashi-Ichibanchō Arcade, and strips naked. [plate 28, p. 17] Scatology+Pleasure by Otto Muehl and Christian Boltanski, Underground Tenjō Sajiki Theater, Shibuya, Tokyo.  Co-organized by Tenjō Sajiki and Japan Underground Center. Attracts a record number of visitors. TV Jack by Shingai Kazuyoshi et al., KBC (Kyūshū Asahi Broadcasting) Studio, Fukuoka.  The theme of the program is “Rock and Youth.” The “local hippies,” including Shingai of Collective He, read a message and raise the volume of their performance, but protest when the network staff interrupt the performance with a commercial. Their behavior grows out of control: they spark internal conflict, bring their faces close to the camera, hug each other in a blanket, get drunk and stagger—causing the program to end ten minutes earlier than scheduled. The youth seem to be protesting the regulation of the concerts in Batsugun Festival in the previous day by the Noise Prevention Ordinance.

694

10-13—10-18

10-19

10-19—10-25

10-21

NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER

11-3

11-11—11-15

11-14

11-19—11-24

11-20

11-20—11-24

1970

Sakurai Takami Exhibition and Ochi Osamu Exhibition, Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall, Fukuoka.  Sakurai exhibits documents of Kyūshū-ha’s activities and works from its heyday under the title “Is avant-garde art possible?” marking the first retrospective in the group’s history. A symposium is held in the gallery on the final day. N.A.G. sues Aichi Prefecture for the garbage case, Nagoya.  Five people, excluding the person responsible for the gallery rent, demand the reversal of the rescission of their gallery use permit, as well as the publication of an apology and the cancellation notice in newspaper. One of the plaintiffs is Kawai Eiji of Ga‘s. “Ma” Exhibition, Toda Books Gallery, Shizuoka.  Maeda Morikazu of Genshoku enacts a performance by lying wrapped in a transparent plastic sheet (a work by Suzuki Yoshinori). • First Women’s Lib (Women’s Liberation) Demonstration on International AntiWar Day, Tokyo.  Approximately 200 female members of Group Fighting Women and Women’s Liberation Movement Preparatory Group demonstrate in Ginza and hold a rally “No Men Allowed” at Mizutanibashi Park, Kyōbashi, Tokyo. Film Form ’70, Kyoto Newspaper Hall.  Included is work by Mizukami Jun. Hangi Daitō-kan (Lexicon of Great Dance for Ritual Sacrifice), Hijikata Tatsumi’s 1st Performance in Kyoto, Kyoto University West Auditorium.  H ijikata creates, directs and choreographs Gibasa. Nakahira Takuma publishes Kitarubeki kotoba no tameni (For the words to come), a collection of his essays, from Fūdosha, Tokyo. • First “Pedestrian Paradise” in Kyoto, Shijō-dōri Street (between Karasuma and Kawaramachi). Shizuoka Prefecture Art Festival Exhibition, Shizuoka Prefectural Civic Center and Industrial Hall.  Sugiyama Kunihiko’s Shibō todoke (Death Report) is selected for the print section, but the Prefectural Board of Education refuses to exhibit the work. Sugiyama issues a protest statement. • First General Rally by Women’s Lib, Shibuya, Tokyo.  The slogan is “Accusation of Sexism.” Sacred Celebration (continued): Flowers, The Beatles, and Buddha, Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  This is the solo exhibition of Vitamin Art (Koyama Tetsuo). It is publicized with a picture of girl’s manga and the Beatles in the title, but the works exhibited are paintings with pubic hairs pasted onto them. Japan Film Underground Cinematheque opens, New Jazz Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Operates until May 1971. Shigaigeki: Jinriki hikōki Soromon (Theater in City: Man-powered Airplane Solomon), 12th performance by Tenjō Sajiki, Shinjuku area, Waseda University, Tokyo.  Written and directed by Takenaga Shigeo.

1970695

11-24

11-25

11-29

DECEMBER

DECEMBER

DECEMBER DECEMBER? 12-14 12-17

12-18 12-19

12-20

1st hearing of the Garbage Trial, Nagoya.

 The trial is held over the course of twenty-four hearings, lasting until February

24, 1975.  M • ishima Yukio occupies the room of the superintendant-general of the SelfDefense Forces Headquarters with four members of Tate no Kai and commits hara-kiri suicide, Ichigaya, Tokyo. Moriyama Yasuhide is arrested during Rally for Formation of Denshūkan Relief Group, Yanagawa, Fukuoka.  Moriyama marches in Yanagawa Honmachi with a straw-mat flag on which Collective He has drawn a picture of a penis. [pp. 430–1] Moriyama is arrested for the public display of obscene images and detained for twelve days. Itoi Kanji appears in Kōya Hijiri (Saint in the wilderness), a film directed by Toshima Shigeyuki, Sendai.  The film is shot at Itoi’s house and Tohoku University, but the shooting is canceled when Toshima is injured. Distribution of a leaflet by Moriyama Yasuhide of Collective Kumo, “Appeal for the request of legal trial on the unjust arrest of demonstrators at Denshūkan High School,” Fukuoka etc.  The distribution of another flyer “Approach to Moriyama Trial: Report at the start of the movement” by the Moriyama Trial Executive Committee may have occurred around the same time. The conflict at Kyoto City University of Arts begins. Sakurai Takami pays his second visit to U.S. and establishes Konnyaku Commune, San Francisco. “A man matches… with his body?” is aired on 11PM (NTV).  A kiyama Yūtokutaishi et al. appear. Screening of Inaba no Shiro Usagi, film of Zero Jigen’s rituals, Haiyūza Theater, Roppongi, Tokyo.  Directed by Katō Yoshihiro, with Assistant Directors Eiju Shin’ichi (Hirō) and Fūran Minoru. Starring Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, Ishikawa Hajime, Electric Shock (Takei Emi), Miyagi Otatsu, Katō Yoshihiro, Kamijō Junjirō, Koga Masato, and Moriyama Yoshirō. Guest performances by Itoi Kanji, Iwata Shin’ichi, Ochi Osamu, Kanesaka Kenji, Sakurai Takami, Suzuki Kōichi, Machida Kusumi, and Mizuno Takashi. Camera work by Ōe Masanori. Edited by Yamada Yōko. Still photography by Kitade Tonbo (Yukio). Recording by Nakamura Msaharu. Produced by Zero Jigen & Co. The program includes a screening of Cybele and live performances by Brain Police et al. Kanesaka, Banzai-tō, Matsue Kaku, and Miyai Rikurō also appear at the event. • Three members of the Keihin Anpo Joint-Struggle Group attack a police box in Kami-akatsuka and one is shot dead by a police officer, Itabashi, Tokyo. Performance to announce the formation of Parinirvana Paliyaya Body, Nitto Boxing Gym, Uguisu-dani, Tokyo.  The members are Sekido Rui, Tsujimura Kazuko, and Matsuzawa Yutaka. • Koza Riot, Koza (present-day Okinawa City).  Five thousand citizens, angry at the U.S. Military Police, turn into a mob after an Okinawan is hit by a car that is driven by an American soldier.

696

12-27

12-27

12-31

1970-1971

Shūsoku-gi (Convergence Ritual) by Mizukami Jun, Kamigamo Shrine, Kyoto.  At sunrise, Mizukami performs misogi naked (purifies himself), “sits in front of the Hōnō-den [offering hall] and offers a ryūteki [dragon flute].” After this ritual, he ceases all performance of action-expressions (“reactions”). Picnic Concert: From Dawn to Sunset by Taj Mahal Travellers, Ōiso Beach (sand beach near the mouth of Hanamizu River), Hiratsuka, Kanagawa. New Year’s Eve Overnight Concert, Kyoto University West Auditorium, Kyoto.  Theater company Gendai Gekijō assists with planning and production. Thereafter, the concert becomes an annual event.

1971 IN THIS YEAR

JANUARY

1-7

1-8—1-17

1-9

1-11—

Gar Gar presents a Happening Fire, Bird and Venus in TV Night Show (Fuji TV), Tokyo.  This presumably takes place between January and March. Uchida Yoshirō, Toshima Tadashi, Harada Eiji, Fukuda Katsubon, Suzuki Hirohiko, and Wakino Akira appear. Katsura Sanshi, Maeda Takehiko, and Yoshimura Mari emcee. This is Gar Gar’s final act as a group. Kama (Sickle), produced and directed by Kawanaka Nobuhiro, is filmed, National Tuberculosis Hospital, Nakano, etc., Tokyo.  Baramanji Kessha appears in the film. Moriyama Trial Preparatory Committee Report and Appeal to Request Special Counsel are issued on behalf of Moriyama Yasuhide, Fukuoka.  The addressees are Akasegawa Genpei, Katō Yoshihiro, Suenaga Tamio (Peak), members of Mumei Tsūshin (Unnamed News: Ueno Eishin, Kōno Nobuko, and Morisaki Kazue), and Hariu Ichirō. Ryō Shinzō o tobasu (Flying Both Hearts), performance by Matsuzawa Yutaka, Kirigamine, Nagano.  Matsuzawa sends the color photographs he takes on this occasion time to New York and exhibits them beside his work Watashi no shi ( jikan no nakani nomi sonzai suru kaiga) (My Death (a painting that exists only in time)) at the Guggenheim Museum. Invitation to Final Art, Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum, etc., Nagasaki.  Participating artists: Kakita Hisayoshi, Kaneko Shōzō, Kawatsu Hiroshi, Tanaka Takamichi, Sunohara Toshiyuki, Matsuzawa Yutaka, Mizukami Jun, and Yonezu Hideshige. For the duration of the exhibition period, the time that the gallery is lit is gradually shortened each day. On January 17, the artists load “their own concepts, or all of the exhibits” onto a shōrōbune (spirit boat) and they drift out to sea from Iō Island. Tenro henreki no shinwa (Myth of Heavenly Pilgrimage) is released, a film directed by Ōe Masanori, Yar, Shibuya, Tokyo. “Acts” by Naka Takehisa.  Naka is a former member of Asai Masuo’s commune. The acts consist of: “Chasing one’s shadow all day with the sun behind in a plaza” (January 17), “Measuring weight of the earth with a balance using a rope tied to the ground” (January 28), “Sowing flower seeds while walking at the Pedestrian Paradise in

1971697

1-15 1-17 1-29 FEBRUARY FEBRUARY 2-6

2-12

2-16—2-21

2-22—3-6

2-25 2-26

MARCH

3-3—3-16 3-10 3-26

Sakae, Nagoya” (September 12), “Eating soil at the potter’s clay mountain in Seto City, the town of pottery” (October 8), and so on. It is unconfirmed whether these acts were actually performed of if they are simply artwork as instructions. Moriyama Yasuhide issues a leaflet, “The Authority is the Defendant,” Fukuoka. Public hearing for Moriyama Yasuhide’s Trial with the appointed attorney, Nōmin Kaikan, Fukuoka. Support group for Moriyama Yasuhide receives a donation from Zero Jigen, Peak, et al. for the trial, Fukuoka. Out-Door Play by Ikeda Shōichi, around the U.S. Army Base, Yokosuka, Kanagawa. • Shigenobu Fusako and Okudaira Tsuyoshi of the Red Army visit Palestine and to work in league with PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). Tōmatsu Shōmei shoots series of photographs No.541, Tokyo.  The series is published in the quarterly magazine Shashin Eizō (Photographic Images) by Shashin Hyōronsha. Katō Yoshihiro, Kamijō Junjirō, Chida Ui et al. are Tōmatsu’s models. Suwako hyōjō ni yokotawatte (Lying on the Ice of Lake Suwa), performance by Matsuzawa Yutaka, Lake Suwa, Nagano.  Matsuzawa lies on the ice for the entire day while holding a scythe. Denpō-tai teiji, kannnen no gaien (Presentation of the Telegrammed Objects, Extension of Ideas), Galerie 16, Kyoto.  A n exhibition of works sent by telegram. Included are works by Ikeda Tatsuo, Ishida Hiroshi, Kawaguchi Tatsuo, Kawatsu Hiroshi, Sekido Rui, Horikawa Michio, Matsuzawa Yutaka, Mizukami Jun, Murakami Yoshio, and Yamauchi Jūtarō. • First forced expropriation of sites for the construction of the new airport by agents of Kukō Kōdan (New Tokyo International Airport Corporation), Sanrizuka, Chiba.  The Opposition Alliance clashes with riot police. Hataraki Tadashi accepts the role of special counsel for Moriyama Yasuhide’s trial, Fukuoka. • A n amendment to the Road Traffic Law strengthens protections for pedestrians by establishing pedestrian-only paths and increasing penalties for offenders. Okayama Prefecture Contemporary Art Exhibition, Okayama Prefectural Culture Center.  Nose Iseo and Hayashi Miyori set fire to a truck suspended by crane. 15th Kyoto Independent Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  Included are works by Ueta Koji and Mizukami Jun. Niigata Contemporary Artist Group GUN renames Niigata GUN, publishes the first issue of the bulletin GUN, Niigata. 1st hearing of Moriyama Yasuhide, Yanagawa District Court, Fukuoka.  Moriyama reads from a leaflet “A private ‘Discover Japan’ that antagonizes authority, or an invitation to ‘Tourism.’”

6981971

3-30—4-4

APRIL 4-7 4-7—4-10

4-9 4-11

4-18

MAY

5-9

5-10—5-30

5-12 5-16

5-28—5-30

From Image to Message, Galerie 16, Kyoto.  Included are works by Kawaguchi Tatsuo, Kawatsu Hiroshi, Mizukami Jun, and Yamauchi Jūtarō. The dissolution of Sogetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo. Hataraki Tadashi publishes “Directness in Artistic Expression” in Fukunichi (newspaper) to support Moriyama Yasuhide in his trial, Fukuoka. On the Way, 4th performance by En Gekijō, Akasaka International Artist Center, Yotsuya Public Hall, Tokyo.  Written and directed by Ikeda Shōichi. Hataraki Tadashi states his opinion as special counsel at the second hearing of Moriyama Yasuhide’s trial, Yanagawa District Court, Fukuoka. • Reformist candidate Minobe Ryōkichi wins a landslide victory in the Tokyo Governor’s election, and Kuroda Ryōichi, another reformist, wins the Osaka Prefecture Governor’s election. Saotome Yukio Exhibition, The Body: Human Commodity, Space Laboratory Hair, Shibuya, Tokyo.  A naked woman painted completely white is exhibited inside a display case. The audience, model, artist, and organizers are all taken to the Shibuya Police Station on suspicion of displaying obscene objects; the five participants who participated as objet works are detained for twelve days. Adachi Masao and Wakamatsu Kōji film Sekigun: PFLP sekai kakumei sengen (The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War) in Palestine on their way back from the Cannes Film Festival. Diplopia Arrival, Tohoku University School of Medicine Lecture Hall, Toshi Center Hotel, Fountain Plaza in front of Sendai City Hall, Sepia Gallery Underground Hall, etc., Sendai.  Toshima Shigeyuki, Satō Masao, and Sekido Rui participate. The event is titled by Toshima, who organizes it jointly with Parinirvana Paliyaya Body. 10th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Ueno, Tokyo.  Included are works by Arakawa Shūsaku, Kazakura Shō, Kawaguchi Tatsuo, Kudō Tetsumi, Takamatsu Jirō, Tanaka Shintarō, The Play, Maeyama Tadashi, Matsuzawa Yutaka, Mizukami Jun, and Yoshimura Masunobu. Ga‘s begins publication of Weekly Weekly Magazine, Nagoya.  The magazine runs until its final October 20 issue. 1st Kobe Festival, Motomachi Shopping Mall etc., Kobe.  The first Kobe Festival develops out of the Port Festival and Kobe Carnival. The theme is “Festival of Flower, Sea, and Sun.” Group Zero presents Niji no kakumei (The Revolution of the Rainbow), a story in which 150 “Rainbow People” perform various Happenings as they try to live to the fullest for one whole day, but in the evening they all vanish, having exhausted their energy. [pp. 272–3] Onkyō sokutei (Acoustic Measurement) by Fujiwara Kazumichi, in front of Tamura Gallery, Kanda, Tokyo.  In this work, the audience rubs the thick shaft of a huge cylinder, 6 meters long and weighing 3.5 tons, in order to make sounds.

1971699

6-5 6-17 6-19 6-25—6-27

JULY

JULY 7-10—7-11

7-15 7-18 7-25 7-29

7-30? AUGUST 8-13? 8-14—8-16

• Keio Plaza Hotel opens, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  This is the first skyscraper in the Shinjuku subcenter. • The Okinawa Reversion Agreement is signed. Utopias and Visions: Let’s Send Taj Mahal Travellers to Taj Mahal, Kōrakuen Ice Palace, Tokyo. Yamanaka Nobuo Art Exhibition: Projecting a film of the river on the river, Tama Riverside (near Futako-tamagawa), Tokyo.  P roduced by Bikyōtō Revolution Committee, directed by Yamanaka Nobuo. Gallery event: Oto-gi-ba-na-shi (Fairy tale/Sound-play-silent-phrase), between Muramatsu Gallery and Miyama Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  I keda Shōichi and En Gekijō participate. The performers move between the galleries with the audience while collectively playing bamboo instruments. • Gay magazine Barazoku (Rose Tribe) begins publication by Daini Shobō. On-e (Sound Meet), Sensui-iri Meditation Platform, Shimosuwa, Nagano.  Participating artists: Matsuzawa Yutaka (lead organizer), Tanaka Takamichi (planner and coordinator), Iimura Takahiko, Ikeda Tatsuo, Kawatsu Hiroshi, Kawanaka Nobuhiro, Sunohara Toshiyuki, Sekido Rui, Tanaka Sanzō, Hanaga Mitsutoshi, Fujiwara Kazumichi, Furusawa Taku, Maeda Jōsaku, Mizukami Jun, and Yoshida Yoshie. This is an event held in a treehouse named “Meditation Platform” that is completed on July 10. Kazakura Shō participates with the installation of an instrument made of cat skin that creates sound when the wind blows through it, and plays the piano wires that are stretched between the trees. • The Unified Red Army (later, the United Red Army) forms via the merger of the Communist League Red Army Faction and the Revolutionary Left Faction. Performance by Parinirvana Paliyaya Body, Sebastian, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  This is a send-off party for Matsuzawa Yutaka, before he departs for Europe. • Nudist Village opens, Shirahama, Wakayama.  The village shuts down on August 22, 1972, due to police surveillance. Matsuzawa Yutaka leaves Niigata Port with Mizukami Jun’s red string flag and travels to Europe.  M izukami sees off him with Hangi (pan-ritual). Matsuzawa performs with Taj Mahal Travellers at the Utopia & Vision exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. He returns to Japan on August 31. Mizukami Jun visits Itoi Kanji in Sendai on the way home after seeing off Matsuzawa Yutaka. Itoi Kanji sends an artistic fan letter to the radio program Good Evening Ochiai Keiko (Nippon Cultural Broadcasting). Great Barbarian Rally, Mt. Amagi, Izu.  Ishikawa Shun and Zero Jigen participate. Saitō Yoshiaki attends. Japan Phantom Field Festival: Celebrate in Sanrizuka (Nippon Gen’ya sai: Sanrizuka de matsure), Sanrizuka (Komaino, adjacent to Tenjingamine), Chiba.  Zero Jigen performs on August 16.

7001971-1972

• U.S. Government announces New Economic Policy in a speech by Richard Nixon.  The floating exchange rate system with the U.S. dollar begins on August 28; this becomes the first blow to Japan’s high economic growth. 8-21—8-24 • 1st Women’s Lib (Liberation) Camp, Hütte Suzu-sō, Shinano-taira, Nagano.  Roughly 300 people participate in response to a call by the Lib Camp Executive Committee, consisting of S-E-X, Group Fighting Women, et al. The program consists of teach-ins and autonomous learning courses, etc. 8-28—8-29 Festival of Human and the Earth, Yoyogi Park, Tokyo.  Organized by Ozaki Masanori and Yoshida Yoshie. Participating artists include: Ikeda Shōichi, Ikeda Tatsuo, Komoto Akira, Brain Police, Sekido Rui, Zero Jigen, Theatrical Company Déraciné, Hare Krishna, Banzai-tō, Peak, Matsuzawa Yutaka, Yoko no Kai (Horizon Group), and Light Show Company. [p. 278] 9-2—9-31 Underground Film Demonstration, Onan, Osaka.  The screenings include films by Adachi Masao, Iwata Shin’ichi, and Okuyama Jun’ichirō. 9-7 Tenjō Sajiki participates in Belgrade International Theater Festival, Yugoslavia.  W ins the Grand Prix by Jashūmon. 9-9 Ritual by Zero Jigen, Hosei University, Tokyo. 9-16—9-20 • Second forced expropriation by agents of Kukō Kōdan, Sanrizuka, Chiba.  On September 16, the Opposition Alliance clashes with riot police, resulting in the death of three riot police officers. 10-3? Ritual by Zero Jigen, Ōdaru Hot Springs, Izu.  Members of Hare Krishna participate. 10-5 Ritual by Zero Jigen, Keio University, Tokyo. 10-26—10-30 Pop Happening: Akiyama Yūtokutaishi Sings Military Songs, Space Laboratory Hair, Shibuya, Tokyo.  This is a solo Happening that includes a film screening. 11-3—12-17 Tōkaidō Bus Theater: Run! Monsoon, 5th performance of En Gekijō, between Tokyo and Himeji.  Written by Ikeda Shōichi. Beginning with rock festival Right On! at the Hibiya Open Air Concert Hall, the performance creates a “moving community,” providing roundtrip travel by bus from Tokyo and Himeji, which people were free to use over its forty-five-day span. 11-25 Iwabuchi Hideki of Peak is arrested in connection with the attempted bombing of the home of the Superintendent-General of the Metropolitan Police, Tokyo.  Iwabuchi’s innocence is confirmed in 1983. BY DECEMBER Yotsuya Simon and Maro Akaji leave Jōkyō Gekijō, Tokyo. 8-15

1972 1-3—1-4 1-21—1-24

Garbage Pilgrimages by Zero Jigen et al., Shinjuku and Yume-no-shima, Tokyo.

 The film documents are used in Zero Jigen’s film Baramon.

Hangi Daitō-kan, 2nd performance by Hijikata Tatsumi in Kyoto, Kyoto University West Auditorium, Kyoto.  H ijikata creates, directs, and choreographs Uri rabu (Love on Sale), Gibasa, Susametama, and Zannenki (Regret Story).

1972701

1-25 FEBRUARY

FEBRUARY FEBRUARY

2-3—2-13 2-10 2-10

2-11—2-15

2-13

2-17 2-19—2-28

2-21 2-24—3-7 MARCH

Group Zero is renamed Japan Kobe Zero, Kobe. Performance by Zero Jigen, Sepia Art House, Sendai.  Saitō Yoshiaki et al. assist. Itoi Kanji is not involved. The ritual may have also been held at Tohoku University. Itoi Kanji registers as an antiwar stockholder of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Sendai. Video Plaza is formed, Tokyo.  Members include Kawanaka Nobuhiro, Kobayashi Hakudō, Nakaya Fujiko, Hagiwara Sakumi, Matsumoto Toshio, Miyai Rikurō, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, and Wada Morihiro. Named by Tōno Yoshiaki. T  • he Winter Olympic Games, Sapporo. Yoshihara Jirō dies, Ashiya, Hyogo. Eve Festival for Survival ’72: Open Free Seminar, Toshima Public Hall, Ikebukuro, Tokyo.  The festival is held with the aim of inviting participation in Survival ’72, and to raise funds. Organized by Harenchi Gakuen (Shameless School). Ōe Masanori, Suenaga Tamio, Brain Police, Suwa Yū, and Lost Alaf participate. Survival ’72: Open Free Seminar, Kanto Gakuin University Dormitory, Hayama, Kanagawa.  This is a gathering of “roughly two hundred Japanese hippies.” On the first day, Kanesaka Kenji provides commentary on films and Suenaga Tamio holds a demonstration of psychotherapy using Asari’s Atsushi method of color diagnosis. On the second day, a discussion on “sex and childcare” is held by Children’s Citadel. On the third day, a symposium on “Ginsburg, poetry, and antiwar” is held by Suwa Yū et al., as well as a screening of Lingaraja, a film by Ōe Masanori (Aum Ashram). Other participants include Zero Jigen, Tanaka Mitsu from Group Fighting Women, Tōgō Ken, and Hare Krishna. Film documents from Zero Jigen’s ritual during this event are used for the film Baramon. Yamashiki Yukinokaiza (Mountain Style: Snow Meet), Sensui-iri Meditation Platform, Shimosuwa, Nagano.  Matsuzawa Yutaka and Kazakura Shō participate. Kazakura packs snow and ships it to “next year” as an event piece. The event is broadcast in “Winter 1972: Sensui-iri Meditation Platform” on SBC (Shin’etsu Broadcasting) TV. • Mori Tsuneo and Nagata Hiroko, the top executives of the United Red Army, are arrested at their hideout on Mt. Myōgi, Gunma. • A sama-sansō Incident, Karuizawa, Nagano.  At Asama-sansō (a mountain villa), members of the United Red Army take the manager hostage and a siege occurs. On February 28, the riot police arrest all Red Army members and releases the hostage. • R ichard Nixon visits China for the first time as U.S. President. 1972 Kyoto Biennale, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  Included are works by Ikemizu Keiichi and Mizukami Jun. Itoi Kanji moves from Sendai to Kyoto.  Itoi does this in order to care for his mother, who is transferred from Yufu’in, Ōita to a hospital in Uji. Itoi lives in Kyoto until May 1979.

7021972

3-7 3-11

3-15 3-23

3-31 4-10

4-23

4-24

MAY

5-5—5-7

5-15 5-21

5-30 JUNE

6-4

• The murdered bodies of 12 lynched United Red Army members are found at the hideout on Mt. Myōgi, Gunma. Tenshi no kōkotsu (Ecstasy of Angels) is released, a film directed by Wakamatsu Kōji, Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka, Tokyo.  The film is screened amidst the tense situation immediately following the Asama-sansō Incident. Public criticism of radicals has increased due to the bombing that occurred in Shinjuku on December 24 of the previous year. • The San’yō Shinkansen (bullet train) begins operation between Shin-Osaka and Okayama. Yōsei no omoide: 50 bun no 1 byō no ivento (Fairy Memories: 1/50 Second Event), Nakano Public Hall, Tokyo.  K azakura Shō and Furusawa Taku participate. Kazakura jumps from the lighting platform to a balloon and is injured. Gutai Art Association is disbanded, Osaka. Ken Togo for Love and Peace, Asahi Seimei Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Organized by Tōgō Ken Production. Tōgo Ken, Harenchi Gakuen, Marijuana Liberation Front, and Suenaga Tamio participate. Hare Krishna Great Festival, Mt. Takao, Tokyo.  Bhaktivedanta, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness who is visiting Japan, participates. • Promulgation of the Act punishing the use of Molotov cocktails and other such explosive devices, as a countermeasure against radicals. The law is enforced starting May 14. • Berusaiyu no bara (The Rose of Versailles) by Ikeda Riyoko begins serialization in Margaret by Shūeisha.  It runs until December 1973. Earth Day ’72: The Day of Earth Regeneration, Kinuta Family Park, Setagaya, Tokyo.  Suenaga Tamio, Zero Jigen, and the Japan Branch of Hare Krishna participate. The film document is used in the Zero Jigen film Baramon. • Okinawa Prefecture is established. 2nd Kobe Carnival, Higashi Yuenchi Park, etc., Sannomiya, Kobe. 2  Japan Kobe Zero presents White Cloth: 400m . Roughly 40 people in red shirts participate in moving a huge cloth on the street, and end by covering the fountain in the Park with the cloth. • Okamoto Kōzō and other Japanese guerrillas open fire with automatic rifles, killing twenty-six people, Tel Aviv Airport, Israel. Ransei Mujin Kō (Unmanned thought in a turbulent age), 6th performance by En Gekijō, Meiji University Izumi Campus, Tokyo.  Written by Ikeda Shōichi. Free Party to welcome Nakajima Yoshio on his return to Japan, Sebastian, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  A long with Nakajima, Kagami Masayuki and other members of Unbeat, participants include Ozaki Masanori, Takiguchi Shūzō, Honme Yūichi, Matsuzawa Yutaka, and Yoshida Yoshie.

1972703

6-10—6-11

6-11

6-11 6-12—6-14 7-1—7-2 7-7 7-9

7-10 7-15

7-23 8-14 8-22—8-27

8-24—8-27

8-27

9-5

9-15

Grand Concert: White Anthology, Lunami Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  K azakura Shō, Kuni Chiya, Tone Yasunao, and Hikosaka Naoyoshi participate. Kazakura inflates a balloon. Ai no Asama-sansō (Asama Mountain Villa in Love), Rock Opera by Zero Jigen, Nagoya University Toyoda Auditorium, etc., Nagoya.  Direcred by Iwata Shin’ichi. Katō Yoshihiro attends but does not participate. Roughly 30 people perform, including Hara Tomohiko and members of his group Zunō Sensen (Brain Front). • Tanaka Kakuei, Minister of Industry, publishes Nihon rettō kaizō ron (Remodeling the Japanese Islands) from Nikkan Kōgyō Shinbunsha. Nakajima Yoshio Exhibition: Ecology in Tokyo, Satō Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo.  K atō Yoshihiro assists with the exhibition. Nakajima Yoshio Exposition, Meguro Sports Hall 2nd Floor, Tokyo. • First Tanaka Kakuei Cabinet (until December 22, 1972) Zunō sensen kōkotsu gasshuku (Brain Front Ecstatic Camp), Yamagishi Kai Headquarters, Kasugayama, Mie.  K ick, Gomikandan (Garbage Sex Brigade, led by Iwata Shin’ichi), and Suenaga Tamio participate. • Information magazine Pia begins publication, Tokyo. Taj Mahal Travellers Concert, Sōgetsu Art Center, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Members of the Taj Mahal Travellers perform: Kimura Michihiro, Koike Ryū, Kosugi Takehisa, Tsuchiya Yukio, Hasegawa Tokio, Hayashi Kinji, and Nagai Seiji. Collaboration by Awazu Kiyoshi, Ichiyanagi Toshi, Takiguchi Shūzō, and Teshigahara Hiroshi. Produced by Hamada Gō. A live recording is released by CBS Sony. Inokashira Be In, Inokashira Park, Kichijōji, Tokyo.  Peak participates. Yamato Takeru, a musical opera by Banzai-tō, Kōrakuen Hall, Tokyo. Meta Art Project ’72, Galerie 16, Kyoto.  Matsuzawa Yutaka and Koshiki han-girei-Ha (Classical Style Pan-ritual School, Mizukami Jun) participate. Mizukami’s home in Nagoya serves as the main office. Festival of the Sea of Japan (3rd): Thinking about the region, Fujimi-machi, Nagano.  Suenaga Tamio participates. Festival of Human and Universe, Magame Beach (Kujūkuri Beach), Chiba.  Itō Harue of Shintaidō Group is the principal advocate. Suenaga Tamio participates. P  • alestinian guerrillas attack Israeli athletes’ dormitory at the Munich Olympics.  A fter killing a coach and a player from the Israeli team, the guerrillas seize nine hostages. The rescue fails, resulting in the deaths of all hostages, five guerrillas, and a police officer, following a shootout. Ritual by Zero Jigen, Katō Yoshihiro’s house, Tokyo.  This is the final time Kitade Yukio photographs the rituals of Zero Jigen. Iwata Shin’ichi does not participate.

7041972-1973

9-15—9-18

9-25 SEPTEMBER?

OCTOBER 10-5—10-26

10-25—11-20

11-4—11-13

DECEMBER

12-18—73-1-13 12-22

’72 Shura Festival, Ukishima, Chiba.  This event, produced by Ikeda Shōichi, is held on an uninhabited island off the coast of Kyonan-machi. Its 25 participants include Iso Shun’ichi, Velo, En Gekijō (who perform an outdoor play, Kingdom), Gulliver (photography), Group Aleph, Shintaidō Group, Soejima Teruto (jazz critic), and Fujieda Shizuki (film). Due to the ongoing typhoon, others including Taj Mahal Travellers are unable to participate. T  • anaka Kakuei visits China and restores diplomatic relations between Japan and China through the Japan-China Joint Communiqué. Ai no orinpikku (Olympics in Love) by Zero Jigen, Nagoya University.  P roduced by Iwata Shin’ichi. Katō Yoshihiro does not participate. The performance must have happened after the terrorist acts of the Munich Olympics, which inspire Iwata to create this performance. • The Japan Foundation is established. Komaba Anthology ’72, Kuni Chiya Dance Institute, Komaba, Tokyo.  K azakura Shō, Kuni Chiya, Goyakō, Hatta Jun, and Hikosaka Naoyoshi perform. Uchida Junko appears as a guest performer. Shiki no tame no 27 ban (Twenty-seven Nights for the Four Seasons), a performance in commemoration of the second unification of the Ankoku Butohha by Hangi Daitōkan, Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka, Tokyo.  Written, directed, choreographed, performed by Hijikata Tatsumi. A commemorative performance referred to as “Tōhoku [Northeast Japan] Kabuki.” Catastrophe Art Exhibition, Pinar Gallery, Aoyama, Tokyo.  Included are works by Ikeda Tatsuo, Kazakura Shō, Kawaguchi Tatsuo, Kawatsu Hiroshi, Kawanaka Nobuhiro, Sunohara Toshiyuki, Sekido Rui, Takamatsu Jirō, Hikosaka Naoyoshi, Fujiwara Kazumichi, Matsuzawa Yutaka, and Mizukami Jun. Yokoku 2000 nen (Notice 2000), 7th performance by En Gekijō, Kinokuniya Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  Written by Ikeda Shōichi. Katō Yoshihiro produces “India Animism Travel Group” and travels to India and Nepal. • Second Tanaka Kakuei Cabinet (until December 9, 1974).

1973 1-7 1-27

4-22

Ikeda Tatsuo begins performance Bonten no tō (Tower of Brahma), Kasu Sanpei Office Task, Shinjuku, Tokyo. • The Paris Peace Accord is signed, ending the Vietnam War.  The withdrawal of United States combat units from Vietnam is completed on March 29. Iwata Shin’ichi runs for mayor of Nagoya as a national representative of the hippies, and loses, Nagoya.

1973-1974705

5-20

6-3

6-21

8-10—8-19 8-31 9-14

NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER 11-11

1974 1-25 4-25—4-28

6-24 8-30 8-30—9-1 11-6—11-10

12-9

3rd Kobe Festival, Sannomiya, Kobe.  Japan Kobe Zero presents Image Box. 23 people participate and move a box covered in a white cloth through the city, from which balloons, objects, smells, smoke, etc. emerge. Scala Theater Doll Installation by Ga‘s, Scala Theater, Nagoya.  The group installs hundreds of plastic balloon dolls to sit in the audience seating of a movie theater. Komaba Anthology ’73, Kuni Chiya Dance Institute, Komaba, Tokyo.  Uchida Junko, Kazakura Shō, Kuni Chiya, Suzuki Yūko, Sunnata Anupasana Cycle, and Tsujimura Kazuko perform. 1973 Kyoto Biennale: Art by Collectives, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  Included are works by Japan Kobe Zero, Nirvana, and The Play. • Fūgetsu-dō closes, Shinjuku, Tokyo. The ruling is issued in the Moriyama Yasuhide Trial, Fukuoka.  A fine of 30,000 yen is assessed for public indecency and the public display of obscene material. Kumo tsūshin No. 15 is published, Fukuoka.  This is a special issue on the Moriyama Trial, containing the text of the final judgment. Kazakura Shō moves to Abashiri, Hokkaidō to shoot a film. Komaba Anthology ’73, Kuni Chiya Dance Institute, Komaba, Tokyo.  Uchida Junko, Kazakura Shō, Kuni Chiya, Kubota Shigeko, Suzuki Yūko, Sunnata Anupasana Cycle, Taj Mahal Travellers, and Tsujimura Kazuko perform.

• Beheiren Dissolution Rally “Restarting in a Crisis,” Kyōritsu Auditorium, Kanda, Tokyo. Up Art Total Communication ’74: Open Presentation and Foresight of Conceptual Art, Goethe Institute, Akasaka, Tokyo.  Participating artists include Matsuzawa Yutaka and other members of Nirvana. Ikeda Tatsuo performs Tower of Brahma. House of Councilors Election for Dolls, Ga‘s, Shirakawa Park, Nagoya. • East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front bombs a corporate office of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Marunouchi, Tokyo. Festival of Human and Universe, Mt. Nyūkasa, Fujimi, Nagano.  K atō Yoshihiro participates. Signifying: Languages and Things, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.  Included are works by Kawaguchi Tatsuo, Matsuzawa Yutaka, and Mizukami Jun. Organized by Signifying Executive Committee (Mizukami Jun). • Miki Takeo Cabinet (until December 24, 1976)

706

1975-1980

1975 JANUARY

3-10 4-13

4-19—4-20

4-30

6-25

Mikaku kakumeiron josetsu (Introduction to the Taste Revolution) by Uryū Ryōsuke is filmed, Noto Peninsula, Ishikawa.  P roduced, directed, and screenplay by Creative Action Hakken no Kai. The film, completed in June, consists of scenes of dining in various outdoor locations. • The San’yō Shinkansen line between Shin-Osaka and Hakata is completed. Akiyama Yūtokutaishi runs in the Tokyo Governor’s election and loses.  A kiyama’s election campaign is created as a performance. He also runs for election in 1979 and again loses. Thirty-hour Street Drama Knock by Tenjō Sajiki, various locations in Asagaya, Suginami, Tokyo.  For this performance, the audience is able to follow a map and walk around freely, observing events happening simultaneously in eighteen different locations. T  • he National Liberation Front of South Vietnam liberates Saigon, present-day Ho Chi Minh City (The Fall of Saigon). Monthly Zero Jigen is published, Tokyo.

1976 1-7—1-25

Artist Union Symposium ’76, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo.

 Screenings of White Hare of Inaba and Baramon-zoku (Brahman Tribe). Iwata

Shin’ichi’s rock opera Nehan Monogatari (Nirvana Story) is performed. Other film screenings, concerts, free talks, and symposiums are also held.

1978 10-14—10-15

1st Ōsu Street Townsman Festival, Ōsu Kannon Niōmon, Nagoya.  Super Ichiza (Iwata Shin’ichi, Hara Tomohiko, et al.) performs the rock kabuki Sanmon gosan no kiri. Super Ichiza operates as a group until December 2008.

1980 9-26

Tantora no gyakushū: Tantora gishiki jitsuen (Tantra Counterattacks: Tantra Ritual Demonstration), Maison Franco-Japonaise, Ochanomizu, Tokyo.  Commemorating the launch of Katō Yoshihiro’s book Yume no shinpi to tantora no nazo (Mystery of Dreams and Enigma of Tantra) from Nihon Bungeisha. Organized by Dream Tantra Institute, Tao Funk Station, and Zero Jigen Ritual School.

1984-2021

707

1984-2021 1984-8-30 1988-2-27 1988-8-21 1988-12-1 1997-3-9 1999-7-2 2001-12 2007-11-13 2009-7-9 2010-9-1 2014-10-26 2016-2-15 2017-8-6 2018-2-9 2018-4-11 2018-10-12 2020-4-3 2021-12-19

Matsue Kaku (Kurohata) dies, Tokyo. Satō Shigechika (film critic) dies. Shingai Kazuyoshi (Collective He) dies, Fukuoka. Kishimoto Sayako (Neo Dada) dies, Nagoya. Suzuki Shirō (Korohata) dies. Kanesaka Kenji (filmmaker, photographer, and critic) dies. Takahara Yūji (Korohata) dies. Kazakura Shō (Neo Dada) dies, Ōita. Hiraoka Masaaki (League of Criminals, critic) dies, Yokohama. Koyama Tetsuo (Jack Society, Vitamin Art) dies, Saitama. Akasegawa Genpei (Neo Dada, Hi-Red Center) dies, Tokyo. Sakurai Takami (Kyūshū-ha) dies, Fukuoka. Iwata Shin’ichi (Zero Jigen) dies, Nagoya. Katō Yoshihiro (Zero Jigen) dies, Tokyo. Sasaki Kōsei (Jack Society) dies, Gunma. Kosugi Takehisa (Group Ongaku) dies, Hyōgo. Akiyama Yūtokutaishi dies, Tokyo. Itoi Kanji dies, Sendai.

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Illustration credits

PLATES pp. 3-18 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Kikuhata Mokuma Photographer: Ishimatsu Takeo • Negatives: Collection of Photo Archives Japan Photographer: Hirata Minoru • Courtesy of Hirata Minoru •© HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Hashimoto Toshiko Photographer unknown • Source: Asahi Shimbun, Osaka Edition (December 4, 1962, evening edition) Photographer unknown • Source: Yoshio Nakajima. Test Kultur (München, 1978). Photographer: Yoshioka Yasuhiro • Courtesy of Yoshioka Kumiko Photographer: Yoshioka Yasuhiro • Courtesy of Yoshioka Kumiko Photographer unknown • Sasaki Kōsei’s album • Collection of Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer unknown • Sasaki Kōsei’s album • Collection of Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Koyama Takeshi Photographer unknown • Courtesy Koyama Takeshi Photographer: Hirata Minoru © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP Photographer: Ikemizu Keiichi • Courtesy of Ikemizu Keiichi Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Ikemizu Keiichi Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer: Yoshioka Yasuhiro • Courtesy of Yoshioka Kumiko Photographer: Kitade Yukio • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photogapher: Hanaga Mitsutoshi • Mitsutoshi Hanaga Project Committee Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Suenaga Tamio Photographer unknown • Source: Asahi Gurafu (March 29, 1969): 96–97. Photograher: Kitade Yukio • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP Photographer: Obana Shigeharu • Courtesy of Obana Motoi • Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Itoi Yoshirō, Postwar Art Documents Conservation Inc. Photographer: Hanaga Mitsutoshi • Source: Bijutsu techō, no. 335 (December 1970): 41 • Courtesy of Mitsutoshi Hanaga Project Committee

FIGURES IN CHAPTERS 1-23 1. 2. 3. 4.

Photographer unknown • Source: Omuka Toshiharu. Taishō-ki Shinkō Bijutsu Undō no Kenkyū [Study of New Art Movements in the Taishō Period] (Skydoor, 1988): 519 Photographer unknown • Source: Omuka Toshiharu. Taishō-ki Shinkō Bijutsu Undō no Kenkyū [Study of New Art Movements in the Taishō Period] (Skydoor, 1988): 574 Photographer unknown • Source: Gutai shiryōshū: Dokyumento gutai 1954–1972 [Document Gutai, 1954–1972] (Ashiya City Cultural Foundation, 1993): 97 Photographer unknown • Source: Gutai shiryōshū: Dokyumento gutai 1954–1972 [Document Gutai, 1954–1972] (Ashiya City Cultural Foundation, 1993): 79

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Illustration credits

Photographer unknown • Source: Gutai shiryōshū: Dokyumento gutai 1954–1972 [Document Gutai, 1954–1972] (Ashiya City Cultural Foundation, 1993): 119 Photographer unknown • Source: Gutai shiryōshū: Dokyumento gutai 1954–1972 [Document Gutai, 1954–1972] (Ashiya City Cultural Foundation, 1993): 117 Photographer: Kyōdo News • Source: Shōwa nimanbi no zenkiroku daijūikkan [Shōwa 20,000 days total record, volume 11] (Kodansha, 1990): 157 Photographer unknown • Source: Shūkan Sankei (April 17, 1958): 39–41 Photographer unknown • Source: Doryun Chong (ed.), Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis, (Walker Art Center, 2008): 203 Photographer: Kyōdo News • Source: Kudō Tetsumi kaikoten: Igi to sōzō [Tetsumi Kudo: Contestation/­ Création], exh. cat. (National Museum of Art, Osaka, 1994): 160 Photographer unknown • Source: Kim Mikyung. Hanguk ui silhommisul [Experimental Art in Korea] (Shigongsa, 2003): 48 Photographer: Asahi Shimbun • Source: Shōwa nimanbi no zenkiroku daijūunikan [Shōwa 20,000 days total record, volume 12] (Kodansha, 1990): 71 Photographer: Mainichi Shimbun • Source: Shirīzu 20 seiki no kioku: Rokujūnen anpo, miike tōsō, Ishihara Yūjirō no jidai 1957–1960 [Series Memories of the 20th century: 1960 Anpo, Miike Struggle – the era of Ishihara Yūjirō 1957–1960] (Mainichi Shimbunsha, 2000): 191. Photographer: Kobayashi Masanori • Source: Neo Dada Witnessed, exh. cat. (Fukuoka Art Museum, 1993): 19. Photographer: Jacqueline Paul • Source: Neo Dada Witnessed, exh. cat. (Fukuoka Art Museum, 1993): 23 Photographer: Kobayashi Masanori • Source: Neo Dada Witnessed, exh. cat. (Fukuoka Art Museum, 1993): 55 Photographer: Ishiguro Kenji • Source: Neo Dada Witnessed, exh. cat. (Fukuoka Art Museum, 1993): 45 • ©Kenji Ishiguro, courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery Photographer: Ishimatsu Takeo • Source: Neo Dada Witnessed, exh. cat. (Fukuoka Art Museum, 1993): 40 • Negatives: Collection of Photo Archives Japan Photographer: Kobayashi Masanori • Source: Neo Dada Witnessed, exh. cat. (Fukuoka Art Museum, 1993): 57 Photographer unknown • Source: Yoshio Nakajima: Visual Life Show 1957–1982, exh. cat. (International Communication Centre, Åstop, Sweden, 1982). Photographer unknown • Source: Yoshio Nakajima: Visual Life Show 1957–1982, exh. cat. (International Communication Centre, Åstop, Sweden, 1982): 3. Photographer: Yoshioka Yasuhiro • Source: Yes: Ono Yoko, exh. cat. (Asahi Shimbunsha, 2003): 103 Photographer: Yoshioka Yasuhiro • Source: Yes: Ono Yoko, exh. cat. (Asahi Shimbunsha, 2003): 105. Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP Photographer: Yoshioka Yasuhiro • Source: Kawasaki City Taro Okamoto Museum of Art/Keio University Art Center (ed.), Hijikata Tatsumi no butō [Hijikata Tatsumi’s Butoh], (Keio University Press, 2004): 47. Photographer unknown •© The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu /Yumiko Chiba Associates Photographer unknown • Source: Bijutsu techō, no. 227 (October 1963 special issue): 40 Photographer unknown • Source: Bijutsu techō, no. 227 (October 1963 special issue): 35 Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer: Hidaka Katsuhiko • Source: Sansai, no. 164 (July 1963): 61 Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer unknown• Courtesy of Itoi Yoshirō, Postwar Art Documents Conservation Inc. Photographer unknown • Source: Kyūshū-ha ten [Kyūshū-ha exhibition], exh. cat. (Fukuoka Art Museum, 1988): 90

Illustration credits729

36. Photographer unknown • Source: Förlag. Wamer, Yoshio Nakajima: A Japanese Giant, (Sävadalen, Sweden, 2000): 270–71 37. Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 38. Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 39. Photographer unknown • Source: Hirai Shoichi and Okamoto Koki (ed.), Group ‘I’, exh. cat. (Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Art, 2004), 14. 40. Photographer unknown • Sasaki Kōsei’s album • Collection of Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art 41. Photographer: Hirata Minoru • Source: Suiri (March 1965) • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP 42. Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP 43. Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 44. Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP 45. Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 46. Photographer: Nishiyama Teruo • Courtesy of Nishiyama Teruo 47. Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP 48. Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP 49. Photographer: Yoshioka Yasuhiro • Source: Hōseki (March 1965) 50. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Ikemizu Keiichi 51. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Ikemizu Keiichi 52. Photographer: Hanaga Mitsutoshi • Source: Eiga hyōron, no. 24 (August 1967): 10. • Courtesy of Mitsutoshi Hanaga Project Committee 53. Photographer unknown • Source: Fukasaku Mitsusada. Shinjuku kōgengaku (Kadokawa shoten, 1968): 173 54. Photographer: unknown • Source: Kinema junpō (August 1968, supplementary issue): 8 55. Photographer unknown • Source: Fukasaku Mitsusada. Shinjuku kōgengaku (Kadokawa shoten, 1968): 191 56. Photographer: Photography department, Shūkan Shinchō • Source: Shūkan Shinchō (April 8, 1967): 142–43 57. Photographer: Nakahara Jun • Source: Mainichi Gurafu (May 26, 1968): 16 58. Photographer unknown • Sasaki Kōsei’s album • Collection of Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art 59. Photographer unknown • Sasaki Kōsei’s album • Collection of Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art 60. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Koyama Takeshi 61. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Koyama Takeshi 62. Photographer unknown • Sasaki Kōsei’s album • Collection of Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art 63. Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 64. Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 65. Photography department of Kawabe Shuppan • Source: Sandē Mainichi (May 29, 1966): 64–5 66. Photographer unknown •© Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 67. Photographer: Photography department of Kawabe Shuppan • Source: Sandē Mainichi (May 29, 1966): 63 68. Photographer Unknown • Source: Makirō. Zusetsu muyū-yūran: B-kyū geijutsuka no yasegaman: Shaba asobi gurafiti [Illustrated fantasy sightseeing by B-level artist’s stubborn pride: Grafitti of earthly dalliances] (Jiyū kokumin-sha, 1994): 81 69. Photographer: unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 70. Photographer: Kitade Yukio • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art

730

Illustration credits

71. Photographer: Watanabe Hitomi • Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 72. © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 73. Photographer unknown • Source: Makirō. Zusetsu muyū-yūran: B-kyū geijutsuka no yasegaman: Shaba asobi gurafiti [Illustrated fantasy sightseeing by B-level artist’s stubborn pride: Grafitti of earthly dalliances] (Jiyū kokumin-sha, 1994): 125 74. Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP 75. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Suenaga Tamio 76. Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP 77. Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP 78. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Koyama Takeshi 79. Photographer unknown • ©SAGYO, Tokyo 80. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Mizukami Jun 81. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Ikemizu Keiichi 82. Photographer unknown • Source: Asahi Gurafu, (October 6, 1967): 19 83. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Ikemizu Keiichi 84. Photographer unknown • Source: Asahi Gurafu, (October 6, 1967): 21 85. Photographer unknown • Source: Asahi Gurafu, (October 6, 1967): 21–2 86. Photographer unknown • Source: Asahi Gurafu, (October 6, 1967): 18 87. Photographer unknown • Source: Asahi Gurafu, (October 6, 1967): 20 88. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Ikemizu Keiichi 89. Photographer unknown • Source: Shoichi Hirai and Okamoto Koki (ed.), Group I, exh. cat. (Hyōgo Prefectural Art Museum, 2004): 34. 90. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of the artist and Mizuma Art Gallery • ©HORI Kosai 91. Photographer unknown • Source: Shirīzu nijusseiki no kioku: Rengōsekigun ‘ōkami’ tachi no ­jidai,Nagori yuki no kisetsu 1969–1975 [Series memories of the 20th century: Red Army, the era of the “wolves,” the season of lingering snow] (Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1999): 10 92. Photographer unknown • Source: Tōkyōjin (Toshi shuppan, July 2005): 37 93. Photographer unknown • Source: Sengo gojūnen [50 years after the war] (Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1995): 218 94. Photographer: Kitade Yukio •© Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 95. Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP 96. Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP 97. Photographer: Kitade Yukio • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 98. Photographer: Obana Shigeharu • Courtesy of Obana Motoi • Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum 99. Photographer: Obana Shigeharu • Courtesy of Obana Motoi • Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum 100. Photographer: Matsushima Minoru • Courtesy of Matsushima Minoru • Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum 101. Photographer: Obana Shigeharu • Courtesy of Obana Motoi • Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum 102. Photographer: Kitade Yukio • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 103. Photographer: Hanaga Mitsutoshi • Courtesy of Mitsutoshi Hanaga Project Committee 104. Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP 105. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Ikemizu Keiichi 106. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Ikemizu Keiichi 107. Photographer: Suzuki Kazunari • Courtesy of Ikeda Ichi 108. Photographer unknown • Source: Everyday Life/Art: Enoki Chu (Nomart Editions, 2006): 21 109. Photographer unknown • Source: Everyday Life/Art: Enoki Chu (Nomart Editions, 2006): 28 110. Photographer: Nishida Keisuke • Courtesy of Ikeda Ichi 111. Photographer unknown • Source: Chūnichi Shimbun (June 3, 1973) 112. Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP 113. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Fukuda Katsuhiro

Illustration credits

114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149.

Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Fukuda Katsuhiro Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Fukuda Katsuhiro Photographer: Hanaga Mitsutoshi • Courtesy of Mitsutoshi Hanaga Project Committee Photographer: Kitade Yukio • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Courtesy of Obana Motoi • Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum Photographer: Taniguchi Toshio • Source: Kyūshū-ha ten: Anti-Art Project, exh. cat. (Fukuoka Art Museum, 1988): 95 Photographer: Yoshioka Yasuhiro • Courtesy of Yoshioka Kumiko Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Okamoto Yasuko Courtesy of Okamoto Yasuko Photographer unknown • Source: Nanshin Nichi-nichi Shimbun (August 3, 1965) Photographer: Yoshioka Yasuhiro • Courtesy of Yoshioka Kumiko Photographer: Yoshioka Yasuhiro • Courtesy of Yoshioka Kumiko Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer: Yoshioka Yasuhiro • Courtesy of Yoshioka Kumiko Photographer: Kitade Yukio • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer: Kitade Yukio • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer: Kitade Yukio • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer unknown • Source: Shūkan Shinchō (June 11, 1966) Photographer: Kitade Yukio • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer: Kitade Yukio • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer: Kitade Yukio • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer: Kitade Yukio • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP

731

732

Illustration credits

150. Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 151. Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 152. Photographer: Yoshioka Yasuhiro • Source: Hōseki (April 1966) 153. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Sawahata Kazuaki and Imaizumi Yū 154. Photographer: Yoshioka Yasuhiro • Source: Hōseki (April 1966) 155. Photographer: Wakana Tsuka • Source: Shūkan Asahi Geinō (March 19, 1966) 156. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Koyama Takeshi 157. Photographer unknown • Sasaki Kōsei’s album • Collection of Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art 158. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Koyama Takeshi 159. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Koyama Takeshi 160. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Koyama Takeshi 161. Photographer: Kitade Yukio • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 162. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Koyama Takeshi 163. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Suenaga Tamio 164. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Suenaga Tamio 165. Photographer: Nakahara Jun • Source: Mainichi Gurafu (May 26, 1968): 13 166. Courtesy of Takahashi Michiko 167. Courtesy of Takahashi Michiko 168. Courtesy of Takahashi Michiko 169. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Mizukami Jun 170. Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP 171. Photographer: Hirata Minoru • Source: Shūkan Taishū (September 10, 1964) • Data contributed by Hori Mikihiko • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP 172. Photographer unknown • Source: Sengo Okayama no bijutsu: Zen’eitachi no sugata [Postwar Okayama Art: Forms of the avant-gardes], exh. cat. (Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, 2002): 65 173. Photographer unknown • Source: Kokatsu Reiko and Yoshimoto Midori (ed. ), Zen’ei no josei 1950– 1975 [Japanese women artists in avant-garde movements, 1950–1975] (Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, 2005): 82 174. Photographer unknown • Sasaki Kōsei’s album • Collection of Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art 175. Photographer unknown • Source: Shūkan Asahi Geinō (July 9, 1967) 176. Photographer unknown • Source: Gurūpu rengō ni yoru geijutsu no kanōsei ten sakuhin no kiroku [Possibility of Art through Artist Collectives exhibition documents,], (Hihyō society, 1968): 6 177. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Zaiki Kōta 178. Courtesy of Itoi Yoshirō, Postwar Art Documents Conservation Inc. 179. Courtesy of Itoi Yoshirō, Postwar Art Documents Conservation Inc. 180. Courtesy of Itoi Yoshirō, Postwar Art Documents Conservation Inc. 181. Photographer: Tōmatsu Shōmei • Source: Neo-Dada Witnessed: Photo Documents, exh. cat. (Fukuoka Art Museum, 1993), 58 182. Courtesy of Itoi Yoshirō, Postwar Art Documents Conservation Inc. 183. Photographer: Yoshioka Yasuhiro • Courtesy of Yoshioka Kumiko 184. Courtesy of Itoi Yoshirō, Postwar Art Documents Conservation Inc. 185. Courtesy of Uehara Seiichirō 186. Source: Miyabara Yasuhara (ed.), Red Balloon, or the Night of She-Wolf (Tokyo: Akai Fūsen, 1963), 64 187. Courtesy of Okabe Aomi 188. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Okabe Aomi 189. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Okabe Aomi 190. Photographer unknown • Source: Bijutsu techō, no. 173 (May 1960): 41 191. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Nakajima Art Center 192. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Okabe Aomi 193. Photographer: Yoshioka Yasuhiro • Courtesy of Yoshioka Kumiko 194. Photographer: Uehara Seiichirō • Courtesy of Uehara Seiichirō

Illustration credits

195. 196. 197. 198.

Photographer: Uehara Seiichirō • Courtesy of Uehara Seiichirō Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Uehara Seiichirō Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Itoi Yoshirō, Postwar Art Documents Conservation Inc. Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 199. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Uehara Seiichirō 200. Photographer: Hanaga Mitsutoshi • Source: Shūkan Shōnen Sandē (March 31, 1971): 9 • Courtesy of Mitsutoshi Hanaga Project Committee 201. Photographer unknown • Source: Shirīzu nijusseiki no kioku: Rengōsekigun ‘ōkami’ tachi no jidai, Nagori yuki no kisetsu 1969–1975 [Series memories of the 20th century: Red Army, the era of the “wolves,” the season of lingering snow] (Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1999): 100. 202. Source: Still from Moriyama: Collective Kumo/Moriyama Yasuhide Interview, dir. Miyagawa Keiichi (Soapland Records, 2006) 203. Photographer: Tanaka Yukito (presumed) • Source: Mainichi Shimbun (July 22, 1968) 204. Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum 205. Photographer unknown • Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum 206. Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Fukano Osamu 207. Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum 208. Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum 209. Photographer: Matsushima Minoru • Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum 210. Photographer: Matsushima Minoru • Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum 211. Photographer unknown • Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum 212. Photographer unknown • Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum 213. Photographer unknown • Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum 214. Photographer unknown • Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum 215. Photographer unknown • Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum 216. Collection of Fukuoka Art Museum 217. Source: Comic Magazine (July 16, 1970) • Collection of KuroDalaiJee 218. Source: Comic Magazine (July 16, 1970): 35. 219. Source: Comic Magazine (July 16, 1970): 87. 220. Photographer unknown • Source: Ashiya City Museum of Art and History (ed. ), Gutai shiryōshū: Dokyumento Gutai 1954–1972 [Gutai Source Book: Document Gutai 1954–1972] (Ashiya: Ashiya City Cultural Foundation, 1993), 229

OTHER PLATES IN THIS VOLUME p. 21 • Photographer unknown • © Zero Jigen Kato Yoshihiro Archive / Collection of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art p. 34 • Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Koyama Takeshi p. 90 • Photographer unknown • Courtesy of Suenaga Tamio p. 298 • Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP p. 440 • Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP p. 508 • Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP p. 512 • Photographer: Hirata Minoru • © HM Archive / Courtesy of amanaTIGP

733

Index of Subjects

11PM, 455 15 Painters Painting on Shutters, 207 18 Artists of Group Q, 118, 303 1955 system, 93 1970 Kyūshū: Will to Possibility (exhibition), 429, 432–3, 438 20th Century Exposition of Ass World Ritual Objects, 181 24-Hour Coed Sleep-in for the Collision of Spirit and Flesh, 322 Act on Control of Imitation of Currency and Securities, 484 Act on Temporary Measures concerning University Management, 248, 281 action (akushon), 62, 65, 241, 322; action painting, 63, 65–6, 76, 101, 111, 113, 124–5, 131, 184, 190–1, 289, 355, 396, 422; action sculpture (akushon chōkoku), 74 “After Happenings” (Hapuningu igo) (essay), 79–80 “‘After Happenings,’ revisited” (Sairon Hapuningu igo) (essay), 79–80 “After Informel” (Anforumeru igo) (essay), 79 agitation, 140, 142, 308, 320, 332, 377, 452 Ai no Asama sansō (Asama Mountain Villa of Love), 279, 344 Ai no orinpikku (Olympics of Love), 279, 344 Aichi Prefectural Culture Hall Art Museum, 148, 185, 267, 272, 324, 332–3, 351, 463 Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, 509 Aka no gishiki (Ritual of Red), 449 Akahata (Red Flag, the Japanese Communist Party newspaper), 215 Akai fūsen aruiwa mesu-ōkami no yoru (Red Balloon, or Night of the She-Wolf), 139, 398 Akebono mura monogatari (Tale of Akebono Village), 42, 502 All-Japan Independent (Exhibition), 173–4, 193 All-Japan Insanity Trade Fair, 213, 220, 405 All-Kyūshū Outdoor Art Show: Gazing at One World, 263 altar, 31, 143, 159, 216, 222, 305, 321, 326, 358–60, 455 alternative, 188; art events, 293; art school, 496; commune, 61; experiment, 447; lifestyle, 276, 279; means of artistic expression, 38; space, 40, 59, 188, 446 amateur, 45, 46, 89, 116, 210, 225, 302, 309, 402, 438, 444, 468, 470, 472, 475–6, 479; perfect amateur, 322, 468–9

American Culture Center, 250 anarchism, 98, 139, 141, 274, 297, 304, 309–10, 318, 452, 472, 489, 495, 497; anarchist, 33, 50, 105, 215, 362, 413, 417, 451, 460, 465, 478, 484, 487, 496, 500; anarchy, 123, 142, 161, 162, 451, 494 Andoromeda (Andromeda) (magazine), 193, 317, 320, 322–3, 327, 330 angura (underground), 96, 128, 183, 217, 238, 249, 266, 278, 316, 340, 432, 457, 492; culture, 182, 197–206, 220, 236, 248, 265, 272, 274, 276, 293–5, 297, 361, 474; film, 212, 222; groups, 247, 256, 378, 389; theater, 162, 261, 389, 445, 467, 474 Angura Pop (discotheque), 203–4, 206, 213, 251, 340, 447 Angura tsūshin (Underground News), 253, 379 Anima 1, 137, 139, 157, 159 Anima 2, 152 Ankoku Butoh (Dance of Darkness), 140, 443, 467 Anma (The Masseur), 237 Anpo, 48, 124, 248, 255, 310, 320, 327, 360, 479, 491–2, 496; Anpo protests, 309, 317, 399, 482, 485; Anpo renewal, 249, 255–6, 265; Anpo Struggle, 49, 123– 4, 142, 182, 294, 310, 470–2, 480, 482–3, 486–9, 498–9; Anti-Anpo demonstration, 124; Anti-Anpo movement, 93, 124, 142, 146, 263; anti-Anpo rallies, 378, 487; post-Anpo, 124, 137, 139, 142, 147, 162, 267, 294, 318, 470, 472–3, 489, 495, 506 Anti-Art, 37–9, 49, 64, 69, 73–7, 82, 84, 86–7, 89, 94, 98, 101, 104, 113–4, 118, 124, 128, 138, 151, 185, 191, 197, 232, 273, 286, 292, 296, 301–2, 322, 327, 350, 365, 391, 396, 410, 443, 448, 459, 463, 471–2, 475, 480, 484, 486, 491, 496; and angura, 198–9, 272; and Art, 84, 87, 433, 435; and Happenings, 80, 112, 236; and marginal art, 475; and Non-Art, 78; artists, 49, 75, 87, 95, 116, 197–8, 203, 207, 235, 266, 278–9, 290, 292, 294–5, 361, 476, 492, 501; debate, 43, 73–81, 84, 85, 87, 171, 391, 473, 475, 490, 498; groups, 95–6; junk, 73–4; movement, 73, 171, 278–9, 296, 494; performance, 33, 37–8, 49–51, 62–9, 79, 84–5, 89, 93–6, 98–102, 118, 148, 185, 218, 253, 272, 275, 289, 295–6, 297, 301, 310, 315, 331–2, 370, 391, 415, 429, 443, 445, 447–8, 454, 457–9, 462, 467–9, 474, 476, 480, 487–8, 490–1, 494, 496–7, 500, 506, 509, 510; performers, 32, 33, 37, 49, 81, 96, 97, 99, 174, 191, 231, 251, 262, 280, 340, 359, 365, 371, 392, 444–5, 452, 469, 479–80, 483, 487–9, 491, 494, 498; post-, 232, 274; practice, 43; symposium, 77–8, 87–8;

Index of Subjects735

Anti-Art: Three Artists Exhibition, 172 ‘Anti-Art’: Yes, or No?, 73, 76, 124, 171 anti-Expo, 40, 43, 95, 201, 247–81, 252–6, 269, 287, 293–4, 342–4, 379, 419, 430, 433–4, 436, 461, 464, 470, 484, 487, 491 Anti-Expo Insanity Trade Fair, 252–3, 258, 282 Anti-Expo Teach-in, 254, 343 Anti-Form, 83 anti-Vietnam War, 192, 197, 215, 226, 234, 294, 357–8, 360, 380 Anti-Vietnam War Action Parade, 203, 213, 217, 241, 363 Antiwar; front, 357; ideology, 497; messages, 216, 406–7, 485, 496; movements, 101; sects, 256; sentiments, 392, 487; songs, 248; works, 178 Antiwar Expo (Hanpaku), 254, 256, 269, 343, 461, 470, 501 Antiwar Folk Guerrilla, 461 April Fool Happenings, 268 Art 21 (magazine), 210, 292, 366, 490 art education, 315, 373, 469 art gymnastics, 191, 241, 291, 355, 357–8, 362 Art Informel, 74, 79, 85, 94, 109, 112, 114, 116, 120, 301, 303, 475, 490; post-Art Informel, 490 art of gesture (shigusa), 83 Art of Today’s World, 94, 119, 303 Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka, 182, 202, 204, 213, 359, 460, 465 Artists Hall (Bijutsuka Kaikan), 133, 160 artmaking demonstration, 59, 63, 68, 77, 94, 103, 109, 111, 114, 116, 120, 124, 126: public painting demonstration, 94, 112, 214, 289 Aru wakamono-tachi (Some Young People), 57, 180, 389 Asahi Geinō (Asahi Entertainment) (weekly magazine), 94 Asahi Shimbun (newspaper), 76, 171 Asahi West-Japan Art Exhibition, 266, 423, 429, 434 Asama Mountain Villa Incident, 352 Asobi (magazine), 116, 392, 395, 415 asphalt, 76, 86, 303–5, 311, 462, 498–500 Assemblage, Environments & Happenings, 100 audience participation, 143, 149, 151, 176, 277, 280–1, 338 Audience Piece, 134, 144, 162 balloons, 73, 115, 128, 144, 159, 166, 229, 238–9, 258, 270, 272, 275, 282 Banpaku hakai katsudō dai 1–4 sengen (Expo Destruction Action Manifesto No. 1–4), 256 Banpaku kaijō bakuha keikaku (Plan to blow up the Expo venue), 492–3 Banquet Commemorating the Defeat in the War, 77, 115, 130, 169, 155, 161, 290–1, 402, 449 Bara no Sōretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses), 341

Baramon (Brahman); Kurohat’s ritual, 241, 267, 358; Zero Jigen’s film, 279 Barisai (Barricaded Festival), 247 barricades, 32, 248, 253, 267, 282, 332, 377, 417 Be Clean! Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropolitan Area, 78, 144, 146, 172, 181, 291, 462 Beach Show, 126, 128, 386 Beat poetry, 147, 233 Beatniks, 163, 233, 447 Bigakkō, 472, 496 Bijutsu kyōiku tsūshin (Art Education Newsletter), 317 Bijutsu techō, 49, 55–6, 59, 61–2, 75–6, 80–1, 157, 181, 205, 250, 263, 403, 408 Biogode Process, 57, 197, 227, 282 Black Festival, 204, 213, 284 black magic, 141, 451 black mass, 140, 143 Blanche Gallery, 112 Blue House (Ao no Ie), 302–3 body art, 151, 178, 232, 239, 385, 387 body painting, 203, 239, 289, 410 bottom-rung samurai ( jige-zamurai), 47–8, 83–4, 200, 320, 467, 498–9 Boxing Painting, 101, 125–6, 128, 163 Brahman, 279, 343–4, 358–9; Brahmanism, 355; mantra, 219; monk, 216, 358–9 Buck-naked Gas-masked Walking Ritual, 213, 235, 339, 340–1, 360 Buck-naked Hot Bath at the Bathing Tent Ritual, 260 bulletin, 210, 319–20, 344, 362, 366, 413, 490 Bum Academy Festival; Second, 211, 225, 234, 367; Third, 234 Bunshun (weekly magazine), 94 cabaret, 219, 258, 332, 368–9, 447, 464 Café French Can-Can, 147 Café Nice, 140 Café Spain, 147, 180, 202, 355 Café Tabiji, 113 calf, 103, 284, 369–70, 452 capital art, 474 Centre Pompidou, 39, 53, 120 chance operation, 87, 156 chicken, 31, 140, 143, 151, 156, 159, 225, 226, 233, 351, 366–7, 386, 406, 450, 452 Chikuhō, 315, 317, 436 childbirth ritual, 218, 341, 346, 448, 463 chindon-ya (street marching band), 218, 221, 226, 258, 338, 453 Chiyoda Salon Small Theater, 213, 243, 358, 381 Chūkaku (Central Core Faction), 430 chūkan bunka (middle culture), 48, 472 Circle Village (Sākuru mura), 309, 471, 485

736

citizen’s movements, 379 City Park Act, 249 class, 47–9, 310, 320, 460, 470, 492; system, 48; classless society, 321; farming class, 347; high class, 376, 447, 458, 479; lower class, 147, 305, 317, 357, 453, 467, 469, 472–3, 495; middle class, 50; of political actors, 471; underclass, 50; upper class, 383, 451, 469; working class, 48, 309, 318, 322, 493 Cleaning Event. See Be Clean! Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropolitan Area Club Hana-densha, 213, 216, 218–9, 340 Collectives of Today Exhibition, 406 color psychology, 373–4, 379 Comic Magazine, 493, 503 commanding art, 306 commune, 61, 193, 233–4, 244, 262, 265, 276, 291, 296–7, 315–6, 318, 320, 324, 326–7, 380, 490, 495–7, 499 Communist Party. See Japanese Communist Party competition, 46, 56, 208, 265, 289, 294, 302, 393, 423, 429, 446, 492, 498; anti-competition action, 429 conceptual art, 61, 62, 80, 95, 147, 262, 280–1, 288, 434, 473, 475 Concert of Improvisational Music and Acoustic Objects, 134, 136 concrete music, 133 consumer culture, 42, 67–8, 82, 84–5, 247 Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan, 492 counterculture, 41, 46, 81, 197, 278, 316, 326, 352, 391, 432, 443, 453 crawling, 118, 148, 180, 184, 199, 333, 345, 367, 424, 459 Crazy Grand Rally of the Three Deformed Sects, 424, 428, 433 Crazy Love, 168, 239, 339, 341 Criminals’ Black Mass of Jazz and Adlibbed Poetry, 140, 449 Cross Talk/Intermedia, 82, 89, 191, 250–1, 282 cultural; capital, 390, 484; movement, 163, 193, 260, 302, 309–10, 356, 380, 491, 506; revolution, 199, 255, 295; studies, 41, 47–8, 474, 506 Current of Contemporary Art, 227, 269, 291 Cut Piece, 103, 384–5 Cybele, 213, 258, 341–2, 346–7, 445 Dada, 40, 65, 74, 75, 77–8, 81, 85, 97–8, 100–1, 105, 116– 7, 124, 133, 211–2, 263, 391, 394, 396–7, 403, 410–1, 494, 497; Neo Dada, 40, 45, 48–9, 55, 57, 59, 60, 65, 77–8, 81, 88, 94, 98, 101, 109, 113, 116–8, 122, 124–31, 133, 135, 137, 141, 144, 150, 156–7, 161–4, 174, 179, 183–4, 191, 195, 203, 208, 262, 289, 291, 296, 302, 318, 322, 333, 383–4, 386, 392, 396, 399, 421, 443, 446–9, 462, 463, 476, 480, 482–7, 492, 496 Dada Kan no Kaban (Dada Kan’s Bag), 401, 411

Index of Subjects

Dada Kan Sengen (Dada Kan’s Manifesto), 133, 410 Dadaism. See Dada Dai-ichi Seimei Hall, 99, 151 damact, 131, 154 Danshaku, 253 dating (dating show), 210, 211, 233, 366, 368, 386, 447 demonstration, 94, 98, 100, 103, 111–3, 118, 120, 163, 168, 177, 200, 217, 233, 249, 257, 266–7, 284, 306, 323, 328, 355, 357, 361, 365, 379, 430, 483, 486–7, 491, 502; Anpo protest, 485; Anti-Anpo, 124; artmaking, 59, 63, 65, 68, 77, 94, 103, 109, 111–4, 116, 120, 124, 126, 214, 276, 289, 490; political, 33, 68, 119, 265, 377; street, 97–8, 118, 208, 251, 293, 322, 408, 486 Denshūkan (High School), 262, 429–31, 491 department store, 69, 82, 84, 94, 98, 109, 113, 120, 140, 174–5, 185, 197, 203, 217, 245, 271, 308, 333, 338, 417, 460, 464, 483, 490 descent into the everyday, 76, 78, 89, 295, 477 descent into the vulgar everyday, 73, 78, 82, 84–5, 87, 301, 310, 327, 350, 443, 473, 499 Dezain hihyō (Design Critique) (magazine), 199 direct action, 61, 64, 123–4, 181, 295, 479, 486, 488–9, 494–7 disco, 32, 89, 203, 251, 272, 375, 447, 491 Document 6.15, 142, 162, 472, 485 Dokuritsu (Exhibition), 208, 302 Doro! Shigeki (Mud! A Poetic Drama), 324 Doshisha University, 183 Doyō shō (Saturday show), 208 drugs, 199, 233, 238 Earth Day, 297, 344 East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, 417, 497 educational background, 484 Eejanaika, 252 Eiga hyōron (Film criticism) (magazine), 56, 204–5, 222, 256 Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, 62 Electric Dress, 103-4 Electromagica: International Psytech Art Exhibition, 250 electronic music (denshi ongaku), 136 End of the Illusion We Call Art, The, 280 Enlivening Objects: Company of Fire and Water, 277 Environment Art (kankyō geijutsu), 46, 133 environmental; experiments, 133; installation, 268; measures, 287; projects, 56; spaces, 80, 237 eros, 321, 327, 343, 349, 352; erotic, 61, 215, 321–2, 324, 326, 402, 423, 432, 434, 464; eroticism, 49, 103, 128, 219, 343, 345, 371, 391, 399, 487 ethnographic, 132, 147, 451, 467; ethnography, 38, 147 EX∙POSE·1968, 239 Execution Ceremony of Sade’s Testament, 156, 168, 449–50

Index of Subjects737

Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade, 450 Experiment: Execution of Testament Exhibition, 150 Experimental Small Theater Modern Art, 202, 447, 460 Experiments in Contemporary Art, 305 Expo ’70, 82, 93, 95, 99, 101, 191, 200–1, 233, 247, 250–2, 254, 256–8, 261, 265–6, 276–7, 279–80, 292–3, 342, 408–9, 412, 427, 447, 462–4, 470, 486–7, 491–3, 498–9; Expo art, 46 Expo Destruction Kyūshū Rally (Banpaku hakai kyūshū taikai), 195, 285 extremists, 464 Eyeball Man, 408, 412 fashion show, 103, 200, 210, 272, 293 Fear of the “Quiet Sea”, 276 feminism, 42, 47, 65; feminist, 41, 103, 279, 305, 383–4 Festival of Contemporary Art. See Sakai Independent (Festival of Contemporary Art) Festival of the Human and the Earth, 461 Festival Plaza, 279, 491, 499 fieldwork, 146–7, 318 Film Art Festival Tokyo. See Sogetsu Film Festival (Film Art Festival Tokyo) Film Independent, 173, 176 flamenco, 213, 355–6, 358–9, 362–3 Flux Week, 172, 182, 186, 191, 197, 290, 385 folk; art (traditional), 44, 243, 267, 358, 361, 363, 453; culture (traditional), 136, 218, 219, 237, 239, 297, 305, 307, 355, 448, 451, 473–4; guerrilla, 248, 256, 459, 461, 485; rally, 360; songs, 201, 219, 239, 248, 461 formalin, 103, 159, 161, 174, 183, 212 From Space to Environment (Kūkan kara kankyō e), 82, 191, 197 Fūgetsu-dō (coffee shop), 168, 202, 460, 464 Fukunichi (newspaper), 431 Fukuoka Art Museum, 122, 301, 303, 419, 435 Fukuoka Prefectural Culture Hall, 263, 307, 421, 424, 429 Fukuoka Prefecture Art Exhibition, 119, 302, 304 fūten-zoku, 201–2, 239, 405, 460 futon, 31, 129, 152, 176, 201, 226, 243, 260, 324, 334–5, 338–9, 346, 351, 463 Futon-Filling Ritual (Futon-zume Gishiki), 342 gainen geijutsu (concept art), 95 gaiters, 335, 340, 346 Gallery Crystal, 186 Gar Gar Buys You, 277, 280 Garo (magazine), 493 gas masks, 32, 155, 219, 339–40, 346, 360, 445 geba-bō (wooden sticks), 256, 377, 489 GeGe, 317, 323, 325, 327–8, 411

GeGeGe, 319, 322–3 Geijutsu shinchō (magazine), 450 Geijutsu-za, 121, 348 geinō (performing arts), 467 Gekijō no Sanka (Sanka in the Theater), 50, 97, 98 Gekkan Teihein (magazine), 319 Gekkan Zero Jigen (Zero Jigen Monthly), 352 Gendai (Modern Times) (weekly magazine), 94 Gendai o miru me (Eye on the Present), 317 Gendai Shichōsha, 139, 471, 478, 496 gender, 47, 48, 98, 107, 287, 379, 383, 387–9 Gifts from KICK Agency, 147 Gifu Independent Exhibition, 160, 171–6, 178–9, 185, 193–4, 208–9, 212, 232, 290–2, 306, 312, 336, 340, 351, 358, 362, 365, 393, 405 Gigi (Ritual of sacrifice), 143, 162 Ginpō-dō Gallery, 191, 357, 358 Ginza Gallery, 126, 305, 312, 363 Ginza Panty Parade, 180 Ginza Sony Building, 250 Gion Hall, 182–3, 195 gishiki (ritual), 148, 278, 350, 448–50, 454, 456, 462 Glico (confectionary), 224-5, 243, 258, 281, 363 go-go, 199, 247, 263–4, 271, 375–6 Gomi Kanpō (magazine), 344 Gomi saiban (Garbage Trial), 255, 267 Goshiki-en Park, 275, 342, 347–8 Grand Assembly of Heroes, 60, 78, 105, 119, 149, 150, 155, 157–8, 160–1, 176, 264, 290, 306, 310, 387–8, 391, 403–4, 411 Grand Insanity Trade Fair: Year-end Angura Festival, 214, 219, 222, 261, 361, 369, 375–6 Grapefruit, 60 Great Ramble Operation, 211, 235, 367 Green House, 201, 249, 282, 460 Grotesque Festival, 142, 449, 452 guerrilla, 249, 256, 280, 293, 304, 384, 460, 502 Guggenheim Museum, 39, 53 Gunma Independent, 173 Gutai Art Festival, 251 Gutai Art on Stage, 94, 103 Gutai Pinacotheca, 96 haiku, 392, 476 Hanazono Shrine, 191, 203, 249, 355, 459–60, 465 Haneda Airport, 221, 380; Incident, 378, 380, 485; Struggle, 215 Hanpaku. See Antiwar Expo Happenings, 43, 49–50, 52, 55–6, 62–6, 69, 76, 79– 84, 88–9, 97, 112–3, 115, 117–8, 121, 123, 125, 130–2, 134–6, 139, 142–3, 149, 156, 160, 164, 166–7, 172, 176, 182–4, 189–90, 192–3, 197–201, 203–7, 210–2, 216, 226–8, 230, 233–40, 245, 247, 262, 265, 268, 273, 281, 290, 293, 301, 306–7, 332, 357–8, 362–3, 375–6, 388, 408–9, 420, 424, 426–7, 429–30, 432,

738

445, 447–8, 454, 472, 487, 491–2; Happeners, 60, 63, 70, 476; Happenist, 63 Happening at Tenjin intersection, 118, 150, 261, 303, 427, 429–30, 459 Happening for Sightseeing Bus Trip in Tokyo, 56, 66, 197 Happening in the Wilderness, 277 hapuningu, 43, 62–7, 112, 134, 164, 176, 193, 199, 20–5, 270, 273, 278, 290, 293, 420 Hare Krishna, 279, 297, 344, 352 Hariu Independent. See Independent ’64 Heibon (weekly magazine), 94, 472 Heibon Punch (weekly magazine), 171, 243 Here or There, or Where?, 237 Hibiya Gallery, 116–7, 463 Hibiya Struggle, 378 hierarchy, 48, 85, 88, 99, 124, 140, 173–4, 267, 271, 301, 309, 320, 327, 454, 459, 495 Higashi Yuenchi Park, 228 high art (kōkyū geijutsu), 48, 63, 99, 123, 136, 138, 155, 191, 200–1, 214, 227, 237, 267, 445, 447–8, 467, 473 Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese: Revolt of the Body, 226, 236 Himeji Independent, 173 Himitsu kessha no techō (Secret Society Notebook), 451 hippies, 32, 201–2, 205–6, 219, 233–4, 250, 265, 276, 282, 290, 294, 316–7, 326–7, 408, 410, 447, 459–60, 464–5, 484 History of Magic, 451 Hitachi Hall, 213–4, 218 hoi hoi odori, 444 Hokkaidō Independent, 173 Hole, 232 hole-digging, 159–60, 176–7, 306, 412 Honmoku-tei Theater, 213, 219–20, 222, 226, 237, 242–3, 258, 340, 361, 368, 375 Hosei University, 344 Hōseki (magazine), 323, 451 humor, 63, 153, 190, 216, 233, 242, 274, 371, 386, 400, 406–7, 422, 453–4 IBM: Happening and Music Concrète, 76, 134, 448 ibento (event), 62, 65–7, 250, 263, 265, 292–3, 470 ideological pervert, 464, 488–9, 491 Iino Hall, 214, 216, 219–20, 222, 226, 237, 252, 261, 341, 353, 361, 369, 376 Ikebukuro Art Theater, 260, 281, 342 Imaya akushon aru nomi! (Now we have no choice but action!) (book), 64, 156 Imperial Hotel, 145, 463 Impersonal Men, 232–3 Inaba no Shiro Usagi (The White Hare of Inaba), 96, 255, 264, 275, 281, 308, 334, 343, 348–9, 361, 409, 412, 456

Index of Subjects

Independent ’64, 81, 173–5, 183, 193, 195, 239, 362, 365, 415 Independent ’64 in the Wilderness, 173 Independent Art Festival. See Gifu Independent Exhibition Independent exhibition, 73, 110, 172–6, 205, 210, 306, 310, 393, 415, 446, 501 Informel painting, 75–6, 86, 116–7, 119–20, 122, 304; post-Informel painting, 76 Informel whirlwind, 94, 289, 303, 396 Insane Nonsense Exhibition, 148, 180, 333 Insanity Trade Fair, 213, 219–20, 238, 252, 292, 361, 368 instruction, 44, 49, 60, 66, 134, 139, 145, 155, 159, 194, 238, 292 interactive art, 143, 155 intermedia, 65–6, 80, 82–3, 89, 97, 99, 125, 197–9, 250, 258, 283, 293, 470, 473, 494, art, 46, 65–6; events, 56, 99, 104, 148, 172, 188, 191, 197, 198–9, 214, 227, 238, 252, 261–2, 388 Intermedia (event), 198–9, 201, 292 Intermedia Art Festival, 89 Intermedia Manifesto, 99 International Anti-War Day, 204, 378, 500 International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai, 94 International Contemporary Art Exhibition—Informel: Genesis of an Other Art, 94 International Exhibition of Surrealism, 450 Invitation to JASA, 141, 156, 162 Ishikeri (Hopscotch), 198 Ishitsu monogatari (Lost and Found Story), 176, 178 Isō—Daichi (Phase—Mother Earth), 178 Iwashima Gallery, 208–9 Iwataya Department Store, 308, 483 Jack Art Museum, 208 jacking, 208, 366, 447 Japan Independent Exhibition, 76, 484, 501 Japan Phantom Field Festival (Nihon gen’ya-sai), 279, 344, 461 Japan Socialist Party, 93 Japan Super-Art Trade Fair, 164, 171–2, 181–2, 185, 191–2, 196, 220, 290–1, 322, 334, 340 Japan Trotskyist League, 93, 105 Japan Underground Center, 222, 455 Japanese Communist Party, 49, 93, 142, 215, 268, 294, 318, 355–6, 362, 421, 470–2, 480, 483–4, 487, 498, 502 Japan–U.S. Security Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, 48, 64, 93, 95, 124, 309, 408, 448–9, 451–2, 480, 483. See also Anpo jazz, 111, 134, 136, 140, 148, 164, 198, 217, 333, 348; café, 192, 351; club, 202; modern jazz, 110 JCP. See Japanese Communist Party

Index of Subjects739

Jinkō taiban (Artificial Placenta), 305, 312, 387 Jiritsu Gakkō (School of Autonomy), 124, 137–9, 147, 162, 290, 470–2, 475, 477–8, 491, 495 Jitsuwa (True Story) (weekly magazine), 94 Jitsuwa Tokuhō (True Story Special Report) (magazine), 94 Jōmon Festival, 193, 320–2, 324–6, 450 Josei (Woman) (weekly magazine), 94 Juliette or the Prosperity of Vice, 139 Kabara (Kabbalah), 129, 451 kabuki, 44, 103, 114, 200, 216, 344, 347, 362, 444–5, 453–4, 468; actors, 132, 361 kaijō geijutsu (venue art), 149, 306 Kaitaigeki no maku orite: Rokujū nendai zen’ei bijutsushi (The curtain falls on deconstruction theater: A history of 1960s avant-garde art, 1982), 39–40, 43, 55, 59 Kakumaru (Revolutionary Marxist Faction), 430 Kamogawa (river), 131–2 kanteiryū (exaggerated kabuki-style handwriting), 216, 357, 361–2 kantōi (tunic), 214, 405 katate-age (one-hand raise), 253, 257, 260, 265, 492 Katsura Kokinji Afternoon Show, 208, 211, 217, 366, 375, 389, 455 kawara kojiki (riverbank beggars), 132, 213, 445, 453 KBC (Kyushu Asahi Broadcasting), 426 Keio Department Store, 203, 460, 464 Keio University, 57, 248, 279 Keishō (magazine), 139, 496 ketsuzōkai (ass world), 177, 336, 338, 345, 347, 351 Kijima Norio Happening Show, 62, 204 Kikan (magazine), 139, 419, 426, 435, 496 kinetic art, 76, 473 Kinokuniya Building, 203, 340, 460 Ki-no-shita Circus Hut Freak Show, 213–4 Kinpyō Struggle, 483 Kiō Shrine, 203, 460 Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, 420, 437 Kitakyūshū Municipal Yahata Art Museum, 421, 429, 432 kitsch, 81, 82, 84, 89, 275, 454, 468, 472–5; theory on kitsch, 80, 88, 237, 467, 473–4 Kobe Carnival, 232–3, 274, 286, 293, 461, 465, 491 Kobe Festival, 232, 272, 286 Koebukuro (Bag of Voices) (magazine), 374, 378 Kokuin Manifesto, 214, 374, 376 Kokuin tsūshin (Kokuin Newsletter), 378–9 Kokura Happening, 424 Kokura Labor Hall, 424 Koma Theater, 210, 217, 366, 367, 459, 461 Komazawa Olympic Park, 185 Konkyochi no shisō (Philosophy of Base), 251 Korosuna (Do not kill), 406–7

Koshimaki Osen (Loincloth osen), 249 Kujūkuri Beach, 275, 277 Kumo Collective Art Fair, 421–2 Kumo tsūshin, 430–1 Kuni Chiya Dance Institute, 137, 188–90, 243 Kunitachi Community Center, 77, 155, 160 Kurohata (bulletin), 362 Kuromajutsu no techō (Notebook of Black Magic), 143, 451 Kyoto City Hall, 227 Kyoto Independent Exhibition, 173, 227, 351, 449 Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, 132, 280 Kyoto Shoin Gallery, 147 Kyoto University, 131, 140, 147, 183–4, 248, 253, 260, 265, 282, 284, 342, 344, 377, 492, 503; Kyoto University Barricade Festival Executive Committee, 492; Kyoto University’s West Auditorium, 184 Kyūryūdō Gallery, 116, 394–5, 402 Kyūshū Independent Exhibition, 119, 304, 306 Kyūshū Renaissance: Grand Festival of Heroes, 96, 263–5, 308, 430 labor dispute, 124, 307–9 labor union, 281, 294, 302, 470, 485, 491 L’Aventure Dada, 397, 410 leftism / leftist / left-leaning / left-wing, 49, 76, 115, 214, 292, 294, 309, 355–6, 430, 486, 488, 495, 497, 491, 500–1; movement(s), 297, 352, 356, 490–1, 492, 494, 498; parties, 471, 490, 494, 501; teaching 262, 491; ultra-leftist, 352; Old Left, 294, 320, 356, 361, 495; New Left, 195, 294, 309, 356, 379, 471–2, 488–9, 492, 495, 498 Liberal Democratic Party, 93 Light Up 1953 (exhibition). See Shedding Light on Art in Japan, 1953 List of standards and criteria for exhibited works for the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 151 little theater, 61, 358, 465, 469; little theater movement, 204 live street performance, 409 living people (seikatsu-sha), 467, 474 loincloth, 31–2, 63, 148, 174, 182, 194, 219–20, 223, 225, 283, 287, 322, 369, 375–6, 391, 404, 406, 409 lower ranks, 49, 469, 472–3, 486; lower strata of society, 451; lower-class laborers, 305, 317, 471, 495; lower-middle-class nationalism, 50 LSD (discotheque), 203, 245, 375 LSD Laboratory, 142 Lunami Gallery, 168, 198, 201, 213, 351 MAD/MAP, 278–9, 409 madang theater, 361 mail art, 280, 292, 391, 401, 403, 409, 411, 413, 415, 469, 476, 490, 497 Mainichi Shimbun, 157, 266, 417, 419, 422

740

Man, The (Homo Sapiens/Man ♂), 178 Manga Taimuzu (Manga Times Weekly) (weekly magazine), 79, 94 mannequin, 31–2, 156, 159, 178, 210, 220, 225, 305, 366–70, 376, 387–8, 406 marginal art (genkai geijutsu), 47–8, 80, 83, 89, 267, 309, 377, 465, 467–77 Maruyama Park, 182–3, 227 masochism, 75, 223, 311, 346 mass media, 43, 48, 51, 60, 62, 81–2, 94, 99, 101–2, 109–10, 124, 126, 128, 162, 205, 207, 210–1, 239, 267, 281, 292–3, 306, 316, 332, 386, 389, 410, 420, 432, 443, 447–8, 454, 458, 470, 472, 485, 490, 493–4, 499 Masukomi Q (Mass Media Q), 204 Matsuya Department Store, 82, 197 May 68 revolution, 500 May Day, 209, 212–7, 220, 241, 290, 340, 346, 357–8, 361, 363, 373–4, 405, 415, 470, 484, 487, 491 mayor of Nagoya (candidacy), 344, 484 Meiji Gakuin University, 117, 130–1, 164 Meiji Park, 279, 379 Meiji Seimei Hall, 258, 424 Meisei Electric Co, 335 Memorial Service for Asai Masuo, 325 Metropolitan Chinchin Streetcar Funeral with Hanging Nooses and Futon, 213, 336 Midnight Variety Happening: Brahmin, 213, 243, 359 Midori Pavilion, 251 Miike, 303, 310, 312, 317–8, 472, 485, 498; Mitsui Miike Coal Mine, 124, 302, 309, 327, 471 militarism, 281, 346, 349, 389, 413, 444, 480, 491 Mimatsu Shobō Gallery, 112, 120 mimeograph, 434, 489, 497; mimeographed magazines, 193, 315–6, 319–20, 490, 502 Minamata Disease, 485 Minami Gallery, 48, 77, 306 Miniature Restaurant, 154 Mitsukoshi Department Store, 271, 464 Mixer Plan (Hi-Red Center), 68, 78, 144, 146, 167 Miyata Naika Clinic, 144, 146. See also Naiqua Gallery Mizue (magazine), 321, 450 Model 1,000-Yen Note; Incident, 139, 171, 191, 472, 495–6; Trial, 40, 60, 66, 79, 96, 167, 470–1, 484 Modern Art Center of Japan (MAC-J), 59, 61, 173, 182, 188–9, 191–2, 213 Mohawk hairdo, 97, 110–3, 126, 203, 289, 402, 405–6 mohaya sengo dewa nai (Japan is no longer in the postwar era), 93 Momochi Beach, 157–8, 304, 306, 403 mono-sexualism, 387 Morning Show, 204 Motomachi Shopping Arcade, 272

Index of Subjects

Mudo Gallery, 373, 380, 427 Mugen (go-go club), 251 Mujin Rettō (The Deserted Archipelago), 341, 346 Multi-Play, 237, 270–1, 497 multi-projection, 142, 200, 258 Munich Olympic Games, 344 Muramatsu Gallery, 111, 116, 120, 128–9, 136, 396 Musashino Art College, 208, 483 Musashino Art School, 111, 355 Musashino Art University, 208, 362 Muse Week (A Week for Muse), 59, 115, 158, 171, 173, 180, 182, 188–9, 191, 197, 199, 291–2 Museum of Modern Art Oxford (present-day Modern Art Oxford), 39 Myōjō (Rising Star) (weekly magazine), 94, 254 Naburi (Tantalization), 178 Nagaragawa River, 175–6, 179, 194 Nagoya University, 253, 344 Nagoya Young Artists Exhibition, 333, 351 Naiqua Gallery, 172, 180–1, 306, 334–5, 346, 496 Namida rō (Tear Wax), 259 Nana (flamenco pub), 356, 363 nanba, 217, 347, 444 Narita Airport, 279 National Assembly (to stop the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty), 482 National Council Against the Amendment of the Police Duties Execution Act, 93 National Memorial Ritual for Yui Chūnoshin, 234, 360, 412, 461 National Museum of Art, Osaka, 39, 53, 112 National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, 55, 255, 268, 487 National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 39, 55, 305 National Sports Festival, 56, 393 nationalism, 42, 50, 244, 258, 260, 281, 346, 413, 491 Neo Pop, 473–4 NET (Nippon Educational Television), 137, 204–5, 208, 241, 455 netai (lying body), 140, 186, 253, 261, 333, 345 nether regions, 73, 84–5, 310, 457, 476, 505; of art, 37, 476; of the body, 73, 85, 443–5, 454, 457, 463, 491; of the city, 73, 84, 454, 457, 462; of culture, 73, 84, 454, 467, 499, 506; of politics, 73, 84, 454, 479 New Directions, 155 New York Times, 100 Newsreel (newspaper), 266 NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai), 94, 241, 455 Night of Waiting for Chanpon Mee, 237 Nihon Jidō-ga Kenkyū-kai (Japan Children’s Picture Research Association), 318 Nihon Seinenkan (Japan Youth Hall), 226 Nihon Senden Kaigi (Nissenbi, Japan Advertising Artists Club), 266, 294

Index of Subjects741

Nihon University (Nichidai), 141, 156, 182, 234, 244, 449 Nihon University Zenkyōtō, 248 Nihon University College of Art Festival, 449 Nihon Zankoku monogatari (Atrocious Tales of Japan), 126, 128 Nika (exhibition), 97, 118, 122, 302, 304 Nine Fundamental Declarations of Happening, 235 Nippon ’69: Bizarre Sex Zones, 339, 341, 346 Nippon Exhibition, 42 Nirvana, 95, 280, 287–8, 292 Nishinippon Art Exhibition, 302 Nishinippon Shimbun, 307–8, 483 Nitten (Japan Fine Arts Exhibition), 266–7, 302, 316, 329, 432, 438 No Art Festival, 424–5 noh, 44, 224, 468; noh pon, 224, 281, 359 Nōmin Kaikan (Farmers’ Hall), 304, 424 NTV (Nippon Television), 69, 455 obscene, 139, 151, 169, 217, 332, 401, 445, 469; obscenity, 233, 247, 278, 419, 423, 431 Ochanomizu Station, 117–8, 154 Ōdaru Hot Springs, 275, 344 odori nenbutsu, 453–4, 456, 476 Off Museum (exhibition), 156, 171, 184, 195, 446 Ohara Hall, 101, 103 Ōji Field Hospital Struggle, 378, 380 Olympic (cabaret), 368–9 Ōmori Gallery, 116, 395, 411 Omote to Ura (Front and Back), 169 Ōmuta, 124, 168, 309, 318, 485 Open-Air Festival of Contemporary Art, 277 open-call exhibition, 46, 208, 304, 429 organizers (kōsakusha), 320, 468 Orgies Mysteries Theater, 452 Osaka Castle Park, 227, 254, 343, 461, 470 Oshare na 15 nichikan (Fashionable 15 Days), 208, 210 Ōsu Incident, 484 Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, 55, 65 overseas travel, 93, 172 pantomime, 44–5, 117, 217 parade, 118–9, 122, 163, 168, 179, 193, 217, 233, 242, 303, 306, 333, 388, 489 Peace Park, 185, 186, 196, 322, 343 Peak (magazine), 278 Pedestrian Paradise, 233, 249, 280, 287, 389, 461, 462, 465, 499 People’s Art (Minjung Misul), 485, 502 perfect amateur, 322, 468–9 performers, 451 Persona (exhibition), 302 Phenomenology of the Zeitgeist, 340–1 photogram, 397–8 Pit Inn, 341, 460

Police Duties Execution Act, 486; Struggle, 483 Pop Art, 43, 77–8, 81, 87, 122, 171, 307, 474 Pop Happening: Akiyama Yūtokutaishi Singing Military Songs, 281 popular; art, 47–8, 79–80, 89, 99–100, 267, 306, 467–8, 474, 476; culture, 48, 62, 82, 84–5, 131, 138, 379, 433, 447, 450, 453, 467, 470, 472–5, 485, 487, 491, 498; entertainment, 59, 99, 138, 237, 242, 377, 445, 453, 479 Possibilities of Art through Artist Collectives (exhibition), 105, 307, 421–2 PR, 210 prefectural exhibition, 46, 267, 446, 498 Privileged Body / Theory of the Privileged Body, 272, 295, 443 proactive opportunism, 211, 387 procession, 97, 190, 252, 338–9; funeral, 360; memorial, 412; street, 322, 326 Proposal for the Japanese Archipelago, 272 psychedelic, 203, 206, 236, 343; show, 199–200, 240, 251, 375, 447 psychiatric hospital, 404, 413, 416 Psycho-delicious, 199, 206 public bathhouse (sentō), 180, 444, 474–5, 478 Radio Kantō, 489 Ragan (magazine), 332 Rainbow Revolution, 272 Rally and Parade by Free Language that Predicts the End of the World, 233 Rally of Musicians to Protect Democracy, 486 Reaction in Summer, 230, 245 Red Army, 408, 464 Red Tent, 272, 465 Rekisen Park, 275 rental gallery, 46 reportage, 319, 485 reportage painting, 42, 101, 498; movement, 49 right-wing, 50, 489, 491 riot police, 195, 204–5, 221, 248, 266, 360, 404, 461 Ritual by Sound (Collective Mixed Ritual), 147, 347, 449 Ritual Dedicated to the Shooting of Viet Cong Boy, 192 Ritual of Transporting a Wrapped Woman’s Body, 181 Ritual to Taste a Female Body, 148, 156, 333 Ritualists, 80, 142, 147, 197, 204, 212–4, 216–20, 222, 234–5, 238, 241, 243, 252, 258, 260, 262, 272–3, 278, 282, 290, 295, 297, 340, 355–7, 361, 373, 485, 496 Ritualists Debut Assembly, 212–3, 218 Road Traffic Law, 459 rock (music /rock ‘n roll) 110, 206, 242, 271, 344; band, 88, 208, 278; concert, 287, 379; festival, 272, 293; opera, 279 rockabilly, 468; artist, 110, 125; -like fever, 475; songs, 110

742

Ropelogy, 144, 146 Rose-colored Dance, at the House of Mr. Shibusawa, 138 running man, 226 sabato (Witches’ Sabbath), 451 Sade Revival, 450 sadō, 136, 148, 333, 346, 348, 453, 476, See also tea saimon, 216, 218, 357–9; saimon-gatari, 214, 242, 445, 453 Sa’in (Closed Vagina), 188, 195, 244, 472; Sa’in no gi (Ritual of the Closed Vagina), 152, 171–2, 181–4, 190, 195, 201, 290, 449, 462 Sakai Independent (Festival of Contemporary Art), 62, 69, 176, 205, 210, 228, 290–2, 358, 362, 415 Sakura Gallery, 148, 333, 386, 449 Sankei (Weekly Sankei) (weekly magazine), 109 Sankei Hall (Tokyo), 212, 235, 241, 245 Sankei Kaikan Hall (Osaka), 104 Sanrizuka, 344, 461, 484; Struggle, 279, 487 Sanson Kōsaku Tai (Mountain Village Organizing Corps), 485 Satō Gallery, 143, 174 Sazae-san, 463 Scala Theater Doll Installation, 274 scandal, 75, 86, 99, 127, 128, 150, 410, 489; scandalism, 123; scandalous, 51, 183, 235, 332, 388, 443, 476 Sebastian (bar), 409 secret societies, 141, 143, 451 seikatsu-ha (lived life school), 326 seikatsu-sha (living people), 467 Self-Burial Ritual, 234, 449 Sendai Independent, 151, 173–5, 182, 393, 402, 404–5 Sennichidani Temple Hall, 88, 237 Senteiten (Lowermost Apex) (magazine), 317, 320 Seto, 60, 185, 193, 196, 317–7, 329–30, 450, 496 Seto Civic Center, 320, 324, 329 settlement movement, 318 Sex Museum, 307 Shedding Light on Art in Japan, 1953, 42 Sheep, 227, 269, 291 Shell Art Award, 386 Shelter Plan, 145 Shibuya Station, 338, 351 Shika (magazine), 119 Shika (Poetry Section), 118 Shinano Art Museum, 280 Shinbashi Station, 144, 146; Plaza, 144 Shinchō (weekly magazine), 94, 419 shingeki, 445, 454, 465, 469 Shinjuku Art Festival, 204, 213, 217, 359, 373 Shinjuku Central Park, 249, 460 Shinjuku Daiichi Gallery, 144, 203 Shinjuku dorobō nikki (Diary of a Shinjuku Thief ), 203, 459

Index of Subjects

Shinjuku Golden Street, 356 Shinjuku Hall, 356 Shinjuku In, 375 Shinjuku Koma Theater, 210, 217, 358, 366, 459, 461 Shinjuku Milano-za, 203–4 Shinjuku Pedestrian Paradise, 461 Shinjuku Pit Inn, 341, 245 Shinjuku Riot / Turbulence, 272, 290, 378 Shinjuku Station, 203, 316, 339, 360, 405–6, 412, 459, 460; Plaza, 465; East Exit, 201, 203, 233, 282, 459–60; West Exit, 360; West Exit Plaza, 32, 248, 459, 460–1, 499 Shinsei jutai (Immaculate conception) (book), 451 Shirokane Festival, 117, 131, 164 Shirokiya Department Store, 94, 109, 120 Shisō no Kagaku (Science of Thought), 139, 453, 467, 471–2, 475–6 Shōhei High School, 116–8, 121, 130, 164, 396 Shokkankaku Eizō Taikai (Tactile Film Meet), 406 Shōnen Magajin (Boy’s Magazine) (weekly magazine), 105 Shōnen Sandē (Boy’s Sunday) (weekly magazine), 105 Shōwa no ekin chinkon (Requiem for a Shōwa Ekin), 355 Smash the Expo, 408; manifesto, 254 Smash the Expo Black Festival, 253, 260, 342, 374, 381 Smash the Expo! All Architects Rise Up Rally, 251 socialism, 471; Socialist Realism, 49, 303, 490 Society for the Study of Ghosts, 241 Sogetsu Art Center, 46, 48–9, 76, 78, 99, 102, 125, 130–1, 134–6, 138, 155, 157, 162, 176, 191, 197–200, 213, 227, 237, 250, 266, 292, 384, 443, 446, 448, 469, 486 Sogetsu Film Festival (Film Art Festival Tokyo), 255, 265–6, 294, 432 Sōkō Zero (Zero for Conduct), 166 Something Happens, 130, 164 spectacle, 113, 217, 250, 258, 289, 322, 443, 453; absurd, 348; angura, 433; collective, 66; misemono, 445; vulgar, 100 Spider Declaration, 425 Spider Uprising, 421, 423, 429 Stage Clothes, 103, 104 Station ’70, 251, 282 street advertisement, 211 street exhibition, 118 Street Fighting Rock, 279 street performance / performer, 44, 155, 208, 212, 239, 265, 296, 343, 361, 363, 365, 367–8, 390, 424, 446 street theater, 203, 237, 297, 492 streetcar, 242, 336, 458 strip club, 332, 340, 447, 491

Index of Subjects74 3

strip show, 103; stripper, 31, 143, 183, 358; striptease act, 355 Strip Show, 385 student activists, 254, 261, 268, 342, 377, 485, 500 student movement, 197, 236, 240, 247–8, 260, 263, 281, 297, 361, 475. See also Zengakuren, Zenkyōtō subculture, 47, 48, 80, 84, 332, 341, 373, 432, 474, 494 Suiri (magazine), 340 Sukiyabashi, 366, 368, 370–1; Bridge, 93; Park, 210, 276, 366, 459 Sunagawa Struggle, 93, 482–3, 486, 503 Super Avant-Garde Group Exhibition, 121, 133, 155, 157, 160–1, 404 surrealism, 488, 498 Survival ’72: Open Free Seminar, 279, 297, 379 Suwa, 60, 193, 322 Sweet 16, 78, 155 Swinger Party, 204 Tadaima shōgo afutānūn shō (It’s Noon: Afternoon Show), 455 Taishō New Art Movement, 97 Taishū (Populace) (weekly magazine), 94 Tama Art University, 42, 234, 248, 267, 333 Tama River, 184–5, 190, 343 TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System) Television, 120, 164, 204, 351, 455 tea, 136, 148, 333. See also sadō Teatime Show, 426 Teiten (Bottom Zenith, magazine), 317 Teiten no Kai e no Shōtai (Invitation to the Teiten no Kai), 319 tenjō-bito (upper echelon courtiers), 106, 135 TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) Service Center, 395 Terebi Jidai (TV Times) (weekly magazine), 94 terrorism / terrorist, 50, 123, 261, 344, 472, 493; art, 487 Theater 36, 252, 282 Theater Scorpio (Sasori-za), 202–3, 460, 465 Tobata Culture Hall, 261, 284, 424, 427, 433 Tobata Happening, 428 Tōei Dōga (Tōei Animation) / Tōei film studio, 208, 346 Tohoku University, 287, 335, 404 Tokyo Biennale: Between Man and Matter, 95, 280 Tokyo gubernatorial election, 281, 292 Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 39, 42, 97, 151–2, 154, 157, 195, 266, 268, 352, 359, 399 Tōkyō mikisā keikaku (Tokyo Mixer Plan), 165 Tokyo Olympics, 78, 93, 171, 172, 249, 332, 404, 413, 457, 462–3 Tokyo Station, 144, 185, 234 Tokyo Tower, 93

Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music (present-day Tokyo University of the Arts), 46, 111 Toshiba Hall, 367, 369, 371, 390 Toshima Art Institute, 373–4, 379 total capital versus total labor, 124, 309 Towards Cultural Revolution: The Collective Scream of the Young, 355 Tower of the Sun (Taiyō no Tō), 408–9, 412, 464, 487 traditional; aesthetics, 235; art world, 207; body culture, 346, 452; entertainment, 59, 450; festivals, 335; performance culture, 506; performing arts, 358–9, 361, 453, 463; physical culture, 454; rituals, 148, 452; theater, 44, 100, 214, 454 Trends in Contemporary Japanese Art (Kyoto), 268 Trends of Contemporary Art Kyūshū, 263, 388, 424, 426–7, 432, 436 Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, 156, 192, 195, 203, 240, 357, 360, 371 Tsuina (ritual), 217, 359, 373, 501 Tsuitō-gi (Mourning Ritual), 448 TV Media Show, 211–2 TV program / show, 51, 69, 120, 137, 164, 167, 182, 185, 205, 208, 211–2, 239, 308, 387, 420, 447–8 uchigeba (violent internal conflict), 256, 492 Ueno Park, 97, 144, 154 Ultramodern Sanbasō, 100, 103 Ultrasonic Wave Operation, 213, 218, 336–7, 339, 350 underclass, 50 underground cinema / films, 66, , 203, 249, 454 Underground Cinema: Sogetsu Cinematheque, 198 United Red Army, 352 University of Tokyo, 130, 240, 248; Zenkyōto, 380 USS Enterprise, 487 Vagina Painting, 388 Vietnam, 171, 178, 322, 358–9, 412, 496, 501, 506; Vietnam War, 32, 177, 216–7, 280, 358, 360–1, 373, 380, 408, 413, 437; anti-Vietnam War, 192, 197, 215, 217, 226, 234, 294, 357–8, 360, 380 Vitamin Art, 204, 208, 212–4, 219, 221, 225, 365–6, 368–9; Vitamin Show, 282, 368–70 Waseda University, 138–40, 165, 250, 477 Washington Post, 405 West Park Art Festival, 405, 412 Wet Sneeze of a Black-rimmed Rose, 139 White House, 94, 127, 129–30, 137, 483 women’s liberation, 295, 377, 379, 386 workshops, 255, 279, 292, 294, 324, 379 Yamada Ammunition Depot protests, 424–5, 437, 487 Yamanote Line, 145, 180 Yamanote Line Festival (Incident), 66, 79, 140, 144–6, 162, 167 Yamate Church (Hall), 254–6, 343 Yanaka Cemetery, 342, 347

74 4

Yes, 237 Yodobashi Water Treatment Plant, 460 Yodo-gō, 95 Yokohama Port Festival, 368 Yomiuri Independent (Exhibition), 39–40, 52, 60, 64, 73–5, 77–8, 81–2, 86–7, 98, 110, 112–3, 117, 123–5, 136, 148, 151, 154, 156, 161–2, 171–6, 178, 193, 195, 198, 240, 279, 290–1, 295, 301–2, 304–6, 311–2, 333, 355–6, 365, 386, 388, 391, 393–9, 401, 410–1, 432, 443, 446, 449, 455, 462, 468, 470, 472, 475–6, 483, 490, 494, 498–9, 501 Yomiuri Shimbun, 73–5, 86, 110, 130, 152, 174, 446, 490 Yotsuya Public Hall, 271 Young 720, 165, 455 Young Seven (exhibition), 77, 87 Yoyogi National Stadium, 82, 250

Index of Subjects

Yoyogi Park, 278, 379, 405, 415, 461 Yume-no-shima, 276, 344 Zainichi Koreans, 310, 317–8, 320, 378, 495 Zen, 350, 394, 396–7, 410–1, 497 Zen’ei no michi (The path of the avant-garde) (book), 111 Zengakuren (All-Japan Federation of Students’ Self-Governing Associations), 142, 215, 240, 247, 252, 257, 284, 318, 380, 451, 483, 488–9, 496 Zenkyōtō (All-Campus Joint-Struggle Committees), 266, 297, 361, 378, 494 Zenra gaitō kōshin (Nude Street Procession), 322 Zero Jigen gishiki seiron monogatari (The true story of the rituals of Zero Jigen), 121, 205 Zone: Standing here—Then?, 201, 238

Index of Names

8 Generation, 125, 199, 203, 212–3, 216–8, 234, 242, 252, 258, 340, 342, 357, 360, 375, 405, 482, 491, 496 Abe Kenji, 329 Abe Kōshi, 229 Adachi Masao, 48, 57, 59, 81, 138, 141, 182, 188–9, 198, 244, 449, 471–2, 482, 496 Aikura Hisato, 198 Akasegawa Genpei, 39–40, 45, 51, 56–7, 59–61, 64, 66, 68–9, 79, 81, 86, 96, 136, 139, 144, 152, 155–6, 171, 183, 189, 197, 205, 208, 290, 294, 296, 386, 399, 415, 448–9, 464, 468, 470–2, 479, 482, 484, 486, 488, 490, 495–6, 501 Akashi Susumu, 270 Akiba Toshio, 60 Akita Akehiro, 248, 482 Akiyama Kiyoshi, 471 Akiyama Kuniharu, 56, 80, 135, 186, 191, 197, 250–1, 480 Akiyama Yūtokutaishi, 60, 63, 65, 178, 204, 210, 212–4, 224, 241, 243, 253–4, 257–8, 260, 262, 264, 280–1, 284, 292, 294, 296, 340, 342–3, 355, 359, 361, 365, 369, 371, 378, 389, 409, 427, 445, 448, 453–4, 469, 476, 481, 483–4, 491, 510 Akuta Masahiko, 60, 271 Alchemist, 111 All Japan, 193, 213, 396 All-Japan Contemporary Artists Council (AJCAC, Zen-Nihon Gendai Geijutsuka Kyōgikai), 210, 229, 292, 362, 366, 490 Amino Yoshihiko, 444 Anderson, Laurie, 68 Aome Umi, 213, 219, 375 Arakawa Shūsaku, 86, 126, 129, 141, 208, 386, 448–9, 455, 481, 483–4, 501 Araki Ichirō, 247 Architects ’70 Action Committee, 251–2, 255–6, 486 Arimura Keiko, 252 Artaud, Antonin, 51, 80 Asaba Michiaki, 451, 452 Asai Masuo, 60, 185, 191, 193, 196, 292, 296, 315, 317, 325, 411, 450, 469–70, 482, 490, 497 Asanuma Naoya, 141 Asari Atsushi, 318, 373–4, 380 Asari Keita, 503 Avant-Garde Art Study Group, 49 Awazu Kiyoshi, 197, 199, 251, 285 Ay-O, 56, 66, 70, 186, 197

Azuchi Shūzō (Gulliver), 167, 196, 201, 206, 265, 352, See also Gulliver Baba Takehisa, 157–9, 306 Balázs, Béla, 49 Banpaku Hakai Kyōtō-ha. See Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group Banzai-tō (Banzai Party), 278, 287 Baramanji Kessha (Rosicrucian Society), 57, 203, 218–9, 222, 226, 283, 290, 360, 451, 453, 482, 485 Bataille, George, 451 Beatles, 237, 247, 352, 370 Beauvoir, Simone de, 244 Beheiren (Citizen’s League for Peace in Vietnam), 171, 247–8, 254, 283, 405, 408, 413, 416, 486, 491 Benjamin, Walter, 49, 82 Benoit, Jean, 170, 450 Beuys, Joseph, 68, 389 Bijutsuka Heiwa Kaigi (Peace Council of Artists), 486 Bijutsuka Kyōtō Kaigi (Bikyōtō, Artists’ Joint-Struggle Council), 40, 52, 234-5, 266, 449, 482, 486 Bikyōtō Revolution Committee, 267 Bizāru no Kai (Bizarre Society), 126 Brecht, George, 187 Brus, Günter, 452 Bum Academy, 211, 225, 233–4, 367 Bund (Communist League), 93, 142, 451, 471, 484, 488–9, 495–6 Buzoku (The Tribe), 61, 233–4, 244, 247, 276, 290, 496–7 Cage, John, 56, 62, 87, 89, 131, 135, 160, 164–5, 384 Carlson, Marvin, 67 Chiba Eisuke, 60, 121, 157, 159–61, 170, 174, 179, 193, 208–12, 233–5, 241, 245, 367, 371, 453, 482, 501 Chiba Shigeo, 38, 40–1, 77, 84–6 Chida Ui, 31, 60, 205–8, 210–3, 218–9, 233–5, 240, 289, 340, 352, 365–8, 371, 375, 384, 386–7, 389, 447, 480, 482, 485 Chihakova, Vlasta, 263 Chō Yoriko, 157, 159, 303, 306 Citizen’s League for Peace in Vietnam. See Beheiren Collective He, 253, 260, 262, 265–6, 275, 285, 426, 428–9, 437, 448, 491 Collective Kumo, 32, 96, 151, 253, 257–8, 261–3, 265–6, 278, 294, 296–7, 419–35, 443, 448, 480–1, 487, 491, 492, 505, 509 Cox, Tony, 184 Dada Kan, 154, 159, 403–4, 410.See also Itoi Kanji

746

Demokrato (Artists Association), 94 Doi Junen, 143 Dōkutsu-ha (Cave School), 304 Dōmoto Masaki, 136 Duchamp, Marcel, 79, 131 Ebara Jun, 75, 86, 397, 455 Emerarudo iro no soyokaze (Emerald Colored Breeze), 234 En Gekijō (Circle Theater), 96, 236, 270 Enoki Chū, 232, 267, 272, 286–7, 465, 482 Etō Jun, 457, 458, 462, 464, 503 Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), 80 Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group, 32, 59, 95, 198, 204, 212, 215, 217, 226, 238, 249, 250–8, 260–1, 266, 268–9, 279–83, 285, 292, 294, 296–7, 340, 342, 359, 361, 369, 371, 373–4, 376–7, 379, 409, 432, 484, 486–7, 491–3, 503, 509 Fluxus, 46, 56, 66, 89, 172, 186, 191, 197, 199, 213, 238, 292 Fujimura Tadayoshi, 131–3, 154, 160 Fukano Osamu, 431 Fukasaku Mitsusada, 375, 459–60 Fukuda Katsuhiro (Katsubon), 276–7 Fukuda Shigeo, 197 Fukuda Takeo, 282 Fukunaga Toyoko, 229, 268 Fukuzumi Haruo, 280 Fukuzumi Ren, 474 Fuma Motohiko, 285, 359 Ga‘s. See Production Ga‘s Gaga, 213, 241, 287, 359, 362 Gajumaru no yume zoku (Indian Laurel Dream Tribe), 234 Gar Gar (Contemporary Art Society), 175, 276–7, 289–90, 383 Genshoku, 53 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 33 Ginsberg, Allen, 136 Gomikandan (Garbage Sex Brigade), 267, 344, 463 Gotō Akio, 175 Gotō Akira, 234 Greenberg, Clement, 473 Group Ei, 112, 117 Group I, 40, 53, 160, 175–8, 232, 233, 267, 291, 306, 312, 362, 383, 450, 465, 482, 491 Group Nishi-nihon, 305 Group No. 1, 263 Group Ongaku, 46, 52, 56–7, 78, 81, 118, 125, 130, 133–6, 156, 160, 162, 191, 197, 202, 250, 290–1, 384–5, 476, 480–3, 496 Group Q. See Kyūshū-ha Group Shikaku, 204, 213, 374, 380 Group Zero. See Zen’ei Tosa-ha

Index of Names

Gulliver, 60–1, 142, 196, 201, 206, 213, 219, 227, 229, 230, 235, 250, 265, 275, 286, 297, 352, 375, 447–8, 480, 482, See also Azuchi Shūzō GUN (Group Ultra Niigata), 39, 60, 119, 205, 235, 276, 383, 447–8 Gutai Art Association (Gutai), 39–41, 43, 49, 52, 60, 63, 65, 77, 93–4, 96–7, 99–4, 109–10, 114, 124, 128, 233, 251, 301–2, 383–4, 443, 446, 450, 470, 476, 483, 491, 494, 498, 509 Hadaka-no-rarīzu (Les Rallizes Dénudés), 247 Hakken no Kai (Discovery Society), 46, 80, 88, 121, 237, 245 Hamaguchi Tomiji, 151, 154, 160, 193, 289, 392–3, 480 Hamano Yasuhiro, 200, 251 Hanada Kiyoteru, 49, 488 Hanada Shin’ichi, 420 Hanaga Mitsutoshi, 57, 206, 213, 220, 263, 288, 355–7, 408, 453, 481, 496, 507, 509, 511 Haniya Yutaka, 237, 471 Hanzai Himitsukessha Burakku-dan (Criminal Secret Society Black Corps), 280 Hanzaisha Dōmei (League of Criminals), 125, 138 Hara Hiroshi, 252 Hara Masato, 266 Hariu Ichirō, 38, 40, 42, 73, 75, 127, 128, 141, 174–5, 194, 199–200, 301–2, 309, 390, 427, 480, 500 Harumoto Shigeto, 265, 422–9, 436–7 Hasebe Akiyoshi, 405 Hasegawa Machiko, 463 Hasegawa Tokio, 200, 239 Hataraki Tadashi, 57, 149–51, 157, 159, 262, 305–8, 310, 312, 419, 429, 431–3, 438, 481 Havens, Thomas R. H., 39 Hayakawa Yoshio, 218, 242 Hayashi Hikaru, 502 Hayashi Miyori, 151, 162, 187, 384–5, 481 Hendricks Geoffrey, 56, 199–200 Hijikata Tatsumi, 45, 52, 59–60, 80–1, 111, 130, 136, 138, 155–6, 163, 168, 226, 236, 282, 443–6, 449–50, 452, 480 Hikosaka Naoyoshi, 267, 449 Hirai Gen, 49–50 Hiraoka Hiroko, 135 Hiraoka Masaaki, 57, 138–40, 165, 449, 466, 471, 478, 482, 495 Hirata Minoru, 190, 195, 332, 340, 360, 419, 430, 436, 481, 507, 509, 511 Hi-Red Center, 39–40, 43, 60, 68, 78–9, 80, 116, 118, 124–5, 136–7, 144–6, 149, 150, 162, 172, 181, 186, 191, 235, 278, 290–1, 296, 302, 315, 462, 470–2, 476, 480–3, 495–6, 509 Hirokawa Haruji, 151, 156 Honda Hiromichi, 461

Index of Names747

Hori Kōsai, 234, 257, 267, 449, 482 Horikawa Michio, 62, 280 Hugnet, Georges, 397, 410 Ichiyanagi Toshi, 56, 76–7, 81, 87–8, 130, 134–5, 165–6, 186–7, 191, 197, 199–200, 240, 251, 276, 448 Ihara Chizuko, 207, 209–10, 367 Iida Gakurō, 116, 392, 410 Iimura Takahiko, 138, 142, 155, 188, 198, 285 Ikeda Hayato, 171 Ikeda Shōichi (Ichi), 60, 167, 236, 238, 270, 272, 274, 278, 286, 297, 482, 497 Ikeda Tatsuo, 42, 59, 176, 194, 196, 288, 480 Ikemizu Keiichi, 64, 172, 178, 191, 193–4, 205, 210, 227, 229–30, 232, 236, 268, 270, 312, 362, 482, 497 Image, Image, 276, 287 Imai Norio, 201 Imaizumi Yoshihiko, 139–40, 145, 152–4, 169, 471–2, 478, 481, 495 Ippen, 453–4 Irokawa Daikichi, 458, 462, 464 Ishibashi Betsujin, 127 Ishibashi Hatsuko, 374 Ishibashi Yasuyuki, 86, 122, 302, 304, 313, 462, 483 Ishihara Shintarō, 163, 488, 503 Ishii Kyōji, 139, 478, 495–6 Ishii Maki, 237 Ishii Mitsutaka, 60, 79, 81 Ishikawa Shun, 405, 412, 416 Ishiko Junzō, 37, 76, 78–84, 89, 198, 236–7, 250, 453, 473–5, 480 Ishizaki Kōichirō, 56, 164, 198 Isozaki Arata, 130, 164, 251, 501 Itahashi Kenkichi, 119 Itō Masuomi, 321 Itō Mika, 206, 276, 447 Itō Takao, 148, 185 Itoi Kanji, 31, 40, 56, 60, 63, 65, 69, 73–5, 95, 97, 116, 130, 13–3, 139, 151, 153–4, 156–7, 159–60, 164, 172, 174–5, 182, 185, 191, 193, 202, 213–4, 234, 243, 278–80, 292, 295–7, 317, 328, 332, 335, 337, 340, 357, 360, 391–418, 421, 443–4, 453–4, 462–4, 469, 476, 480, 487, 490, 496–7, 510 Iwabuchi Hideki, 379 Iwakura Masahito, 227–8, 230, 244, 265, 269, 501 Iwata Shin’ichi, 45, 52, 60, 121, 148–9, 153, 169, 172, 180–1, 185, 190, 192, 226, 253, 255, 264–5, 267, 279, 288, 331–5, 344–5, 347, 350–1, 379, 386, 390, 445, 448, 450, 453, 463, 481, 484, 487, 490, 501, 509–10 Iyama Takeshi, 130, 140 Izumi Takayoshi, 264 Jack Society (Jakku no Kai), 110, 121, 157, 175–6, 178–9, 205, 207–8, 210, 212–3, 229, 233–4, 262,

278, 289, 325, 365–7, 384, 386, 389, 391, 447–8, 450, 453, 476, 480, 482, 485, 490, 496 Jacks, The, 214, 216, 218, 242 Japan Art Society (Nihon Bijutsu Kai), 76, 173, 356, 485–6 Japan Filmmakers Cooperative (Japan Coop), 255, 283 Japan Kobe Zero, 96, 272 Jikan-ha (School of Time), 40, 59, 141, 143–4, 151, 154, 155, 169, 189–90 Jikken Ground ∧ (ah), 171, 496 Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop), 45, 49, 94, 99–101, 172, 186, 197, 202, 227, 443, 476, 480, 494 Johns, Jasper, 77, 197 Jōkyō Gekijō (Situation Theater), 200, 203, 249, 274, 443, 445, 459–60, 465, 482 Jōnouchi Motoharu, 59, 138, 141, 183, 189, 198 Jouffroy, Alain, 438 Kagami Masayuki, 116–8, 121, 130, 132–3, 154, 160–1, 164, 172, 196, 396, 402, 404, 409, 482, 485 Kaidō Hideo, 130 Kamijō Junjirō, 167, 174, 215, 264, 335, 337, 392, 404, 484 Kaminari akagarasu zoku (Thunder Red Crow Tribe), 234 Kan Itoi. See Itoi Kanji Kan Takayuki, 469, 488, 494 Kanai Katsu, 341 Kanai Kumiko, 185 Kanayama Akira, 100, 107 Kanba Michiko, 142, 146–7, 166, 482–3, 485, 487 Kanbara Hiroshi, 141 Kanbara Tai, 65 Kanesaka Kenji, 56–7, 198, 203, 205–6, 212, 253, 255, 264–6, 297, 340, 379, 381, 427, 447, 481 Kaprow, Allan, 51, 56, 62–4, 66, 70, 79, 97, 100, 197 Kara Jūrō, 45, 52, 79–81, 200, 203, 236, 249, 272, 282, 295, 340, 361, 443, 445, 447, 459–60, 474, 482 Karōji Kentarō, 482, 488 Katae Masatoshi, 150 Katō Hidetoshi, 48, 472–73, 475 Katō Isao, 265, 422–9, 436 Katō Mamoru, 198, 234, 244 Katō Minosuke, 172, 463 Katō Mizuho, 103–4 Katō Yasuhiko, 416 Katō Yoshihiro, 46, 52, 116, 120, 123, 147–9, 153, 162, 172, 177, 180–1, 185–6, 190, 199, 205, 215, 218–20, 222, 225–7, 233–4, 243, 252–8, 260–1, 264–5, 267, 279, 281–4, 291, 325–6, 328, 331–40, 342–46, 348–49, 351–2, 361, 371, 377, 409, 432, 448–50, 453–4, 456, 459, 481, 484, 487, 491, 509–10

748

Katsuragawa Hiroshi, 488, 502 Kawaguchi Kōtarō, 185, 332–3, 350, 501 Kawaguchi Tatsuo, 201, 312, 482 Kawanaka Nobuhiro, 142, 198, 203, 212–3, 216–8, 239, 249, 254–6, 266, 283, 288, 337, 359, 370, 482 Kawani Hiroshi, 197, 466, 471, 478, 481, 495–6, 500 Kayashima Hirokazu, 430 Kazakura Shō, 31, 46, 57, 59–60, 63, 78, 94, 97, 100, 105, 109, 114–6, 118, 120–1, 126–30, 137–8, 149–69, 158, 183–4, 189–90, 197–8, 237, 239, 243, 250, 258, 280, 282, 288, 290–1, 294–6, 443, 449–51, 481–3, 491, 501, 510 Kijima Norio, 62, 204, 205 Kikuhata Mokuma, 77, 107, 125, 149–51, 168, 262–3, 302–9, 312, 402, 419–21, 426–7, 432, 435, 437, 450, 481, 492, 496 Kinoshita Shin, 157–9, 172, 184, 302 Kinoshita Shūichirō, 98 Kirby, Michael, 63, 100–1, 115, 240 Kishi Nobusuke, 124, 486 Kishi Tetsuo, 69 Kishida Tsutomu, 308 Kishimoto Sayako, 126, 128, 384, 386, 389–90, 482, 484 Kitadai Shōzō, 99 Klee, Paul, 317–8 Klein, William, 126 Klein, Yves, 126 Kobatake Hiroshi, 140 Kobayashi Hakudō, 245, 485 Kobayashi Shichirō, 208, 210, 367 Kobayashi Tomi, 485–6 Koe-naki-koe no Kai (Voiceless Voices Society), 486 Koike Ryū, 183, 244 Koiwa Takayoshi, 57, 149, 180, 185, 332–5, 351, 386 Kojima Nobuaki, 98, 136, 151, 178, 184, 193, 200 Kokuin, 32, 60, 65, 96, 115, 193, 199, 204–5, 212–6, 219–4, 234, 253–7, 262, 274, 278–9, 291–2, 294, 296–7, 316, 326, 340, 342, 352, 355, 357, 361, 373–80, 384, 389, 391, 427, 432–3, 438, 443, 448, 482, 485, 487, 490–1, 496–7 Komatsu Tatsuo, 183, 201, 247, 482 Kon Wajirō, 47 Kosugi Takehisa, 46, 57, 60, 78, 89, 130, 134, 136–7, 139–40, 145, 149, 150–60, 165, 169, 172, 183–4, 190–1, 244, 250, 290, 292, 295, 448–9, 482 Koyama Tetsuo, 31–2, 79, 103, 204, 208–21, 225, 233, 235, 253–7, 282, 284, 290, 292, 295–7, 325, 340, 342, 352, 365–71, 386, 432, 443, 445, 447, 452–4, 462–3, 469, 476, 482, 485, 510 Kubota Shigeko, 172, 186, 388, 390 Kudō Tetsumi (Tetsumi Kudo), 56, 60–1, 64–5, 73–5, 85-6, 94, 109, 112–4, 117, 120, 125, 443, 481, 486–7, 496, 501

Index of Names

Kuni Chiya, 59–60, 137, 155, 188–90, 243, 390 Kurita Isamu, 139, 471, 478 Kurohata, 32, 56–7, 60, 65, 79, 114, 125, 176–8, 182, 185, 191, 202–4, 212–7, 220, 225–6, 233–4, 242, 278, 283, 290–7, 325, 340, 355–63, 373, 377, 381, 383, 389–91, 405, 412, 417, 432, 443, 449, 453, 461, 470, 480–1, 485, 487, 491, 496–7 Kurokawa Kishō, 199, 200, 251 Kuroki Yōji, 119, 122, 302, 483 Kusama Yayoi, 388 Kyūmin, 60, 270 Kyūshū-ha, 40, 48–9, 53, 55, 57, 59–60, 69, 75–6, 78, 89, 94–6, 100, 105, 107, 118–20, 122, 124–6, 149–51, 157–8, 160, 163, 168, 172, 175, 179, 183, 185, 191, 194–5, 208, 219, 253, 262, 264–7, 285, 289, 295–6, 301–13, 316, 327, 383–4, 388, 390, 392, 403, 419, 421, 424, 427, 433, 436, 446–7, 462–3, 468, 471, 475–6, 480–1, 483, 485, 491–2, 495–500, 505 Leary, Timothy, 199 Lee Ufan, 83 Lichtenstein, Roy, 77 Mac Low, Jackson, 187 Machida Kusumi, 264–5 Maciunas, George, 186 Maeyama Tadashi, 280 Maita Masafumi, 271 Makirō, 57, 203, 218, 222–3, 239, 283, 360, 447, 453, 463, 482, 485 Man Ray, 397 Manabe Sōhei, 171, 174, 181, 183, 185, 190, 193, 462–3 Maro Akaji, 213, 243, 443, 445, 482 Maruyama (Miwa) Akihiro, 355 Masaki Motoi, 266 Masuzawa Kinpei, 31, 129–30, 156, 164, 463, 482, 501 Matano Mamoru, 302–4, 308, 311–2, 483, 500 Mathieu, Georges, 94, 109, 112, 116, 120, 289, 490 Matsuba Masao, 335, 337 Matsuda Masao, 471, 478, 481, 495 Matsue Kaku, 79, 97, 203, 210, 213–9, 225–6, 233–4, 291, 294, 355–61, 412, 445, 449, 453, 476, 481, 485, 487 Matsumoto Hōnen, 422–3, 436 Matsumoto Shōji, 201 Matsumoto Toshio, 200, 282, 285, 341 Matsuo Kiyoshi, 207–8, 241 Matsushita Ippei, 360 Matsuzawa Yutaka, 39, 57, 60–1, 67, 95, 167, 176, 188, 193–4, 265, 280, 287–8, 329–30, 362, 392, 393, 480, 490, 496, 497 MAVO, 50, 65, 97–8, 118 Maya Etsuko, 217 Mayama Miho, 355, 362 Mazura Ryūdan, 97, 203, 240, 447, 481 McLuhan, Marshall, 199

Index of Names749

Mendieta, Ana, 383 Michiko, Princess, 82, 468, 472, 477 Mieno Ichirō, 157, 159 Mihashi Michiya, 468, 477 Miki Tetsuo, 234, 258, 260, 268–9 Miki Tomio, 75–6, 86, 130, 151, 168, 184, 450, 452 Minemura Toshiaki, 42, 99 Minobe Ryōkichi, 278, 461 Miró, Joan, 318 Mishima Yukio, 95, 387, 480 Miyabara Yasuharu, 138–40, 471 Miyagawa Keiichi, 420 Miyagi Teruo, 174, 392–3, 405, 412 Miyai Rikurō, 198, 201, 206, 340, 447 Miyakawa Atsushi, 73, 76–81, 84, 86–7, 109, 295, 327 Miyata Harumi, 218–9, 337–9, 386, 389 Miyata Kunio, 481, 496 Miyauchi Yoshihisa, 252 Miyazaki Junnosuke, 31, 57, 150, 157, 159–60, 305–7, 313, 481 Miyazawa Kenji, 470, 477 Miyuki Minako, 188 Mizukami Jun, 46, 52, 60, 64–5, 67, 95, 101, 146–7, 172, 176, 179, 182, 185, 191–3, 196, 201, 212, 215, 227, 230–1, 235–6, 253, 255, 257–8, 268–70, 280–1, 284, 286–8, 296, 312, 342, 383, 427, 448–51, 454, 469, 482, 485, 487, 490, 496–7 Mizuki Shigeru, 315, 318–9 Mizumachi Riryō, 374, 378, 380 Mizuno Mitsunori, 185 Mizuno Shūkō, 134, 135, 197, 481 Mizutani Isao, 194 Mizutani Takashi, 332 Mono-ha, 40–1, 67, 83, 95, 177, 245, 252, 267, 295, 473, 475, 509 Mops, The, 271 Mori Hideto, 139, 319–20, 322, 324–5, 329, 468–72, 481 Morisaki Kazue, 309 Moriyama Riko, 389 Moriyama Yasuhide, 157, 261–2, 265, 278, 419–35, 438, 481, 487, 491–2 Morotomi Yōji, 138–9, 183 Motoshio Kiki, 140 Muehl, Otto, 61, 452, 455 Mukai Shūji, 107 Mukai Takashi, 413, 417 Murakami Saburō, 100, 102, 106, 480 Murakami Takashi, 473–4 Murata Takashi, 270 Murayama Tomoyoshi, 55, 97–8 Muta Kunihiro, 375, 377, 380 Nagano Chiaki, 57, 184, 196, 389 Nagano Shōzō, 143

Nagasawa Tetsuo (Naga), 233 Nagata Hiroko, 482 Nagata Satoshi, 219, 335, 337–9, 351 Naka Takehisa, 321, 325, 329 Nakagawa Kōichirō, 185 Nakagawa Nobuo, 126, 142 Nakahara Yūsuke, 52, 56, 70, 75–7, 80, 87, 95, 156, 160, 175, 194, 198, 201, 251, 280, 285, 481 Nakajima Sadao, 339 Nakajima Yoshio, 60–1, 97, 106, 109, 114, 116–8, 121–2, 130–3, 152, 154, 156, 160–1, 164, 167, 172, 196, 401, 404, 443, 482, 485 Nakamura Hiroshi, 156, 184–5, 195, 471, 474 Nakamura Keiji, 172 Nakamura Masaharu, 375, 380 Nakanishi Natsuyuki, 45, 66, 77, 86, 137, 140, 144–6, 152, 154, 165, 167, 169, 197, 295, 481, 483, 495 Nakasone Yasuhiro, 413, 417 Nakata Kazunari, 227, 229, 268, 448–9 Nakaya Fujiko, 485 Nakazawa Ushio, 143, 161, 166 Narita Katsuhiko, 252 Negishi Kazuhiro, 60 New Art Group (N.A.G.), 267, 463 Nihon University New Film Study Group, 142, 182, 234, 244 Nihon University Zenkyōtō Film Section (Nichidai Zenkyōtō Eiga-han), 248, 266 Nishibe Susumu, 489 Nishidō Kōjin, 389 Nishio Kazumi, 175 Nitsch, Hermann, 103, 452 NOMO, 70, 207, 383 Obana Arao, 264 Obana Shigeharu, 149, 168, 264, 303, 306, 308, 311–2, 388 Obata Hidesuke, 150, 157-8, 159–60, 303, 306–7, 452 Ōbayashi Nobuhiko, 198, 203, 340 Ochi Osamu, 96, 149, 264–5, 302–5, 308–9, 311–2, 462, 481 Oda Masanori, 498 Ōe Kenzaburō, 488 Ōe Masanori, 171, 172, 174, 181, 183, 190, 193, 255, 266, 297, 462–3, 482 Oguma Eiji, 470, 489 Ōguro Aiko, 305 Ohara Kaichi, 320–1, 323, 325, 329 Ohno Kazuo, 143 Okabayashi Nobuyasu, 201, 485 Okabe Aomi, 55 Okabe Michio, 198, 239, 255, 339 Okada Takahiko, 266 Okada Tatsuo, 97 Okamoto Hajime, 258, 268–9

750

Okamoto Shin’ya, 324 Okamoto Tarō, 42, 49, 130, 211, 321, 392, 405, 413, 450–1, 488, 490, 509 Okayama Young Artists Group, 151, 162, 175, 178, 187, 312, 384–5, 481 Okishima Isao, 31, 142, 183 Okuyama Shigeyuki, 250 Omuka Toshiharu, 97 Ono Yōko (Yoko Ono), 46, 56–7, 60, 66, 84, 87, 103, 125, 134–5, 144, 160, 162, 164, 166, 167, 172, 184, 190, 384–5, 388 Ōshima Nagisa, 203, 459 Ōsugi Sakae, 98, 105, 280, 495, 497, 506 Ōtsuji Kiyoji, 197 Owari Takeshi, 303, 313 Ōyama Uichi, 57, 150, 157–60, 175–6, 194, 305–6, 312 Paik, Nam June, 56–7, 68, 135–6, 186, 188 Paul, Jacqueline, 127, 163 Peak, 255, 278–9, 293, 379 Pirandello, Luigi, 115 Pissarro, Camille, 495 Play, The, 39, 55, 60–1, 65, 96, 102, 172, 193, 201, 205, 210, 227, 230–6, 247, 253, 255–8, 265, 268, 269, 271, 273, 276–8, 286–7, 290–1, 295–6, 312, 383, 427, 448–50, 465, 480, 482, 487, 491, 496–7, 501 Pollock, Jackson, 87, 383 Poster Demonstration Group (Posutā demo no Kai), 213, 254, 378, 381 Production Ga‘s, 96, 272–5, 286 Read, Herbert, 495 Remandaran, 196, 227, 235 Reynolds, Karen, 250 Reynolds, Roger, 250 Richie, Donald, 135, 166, 203, 213, 258, 264, 341, 445 Rimbaud, Arthur, 237 Rozo-gun, 207, 267, 285 Sade, Marquis de, 139, 141, 151, 451 Saitama Avant-Garde Artists Group, 151, 175–6, 178 Saitō Hidesaburō, 305, 312–3 Saitō Yoshiaki, 279, 406, 412, 416 Sakaki Nanao, 233 Sakurai Takami, 96, 149–51, 157–60, 172, 185, 208, 213, 219, 253, 257, 260, 264–6, 294, 302–4, 306–8, 310, 327, 403, 424, 427, 430, 480, 483, 510 Sakurai Tetsuo, 457–8, 462 Saotome Yukio, 151, 168 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 121, 244, 422 Sarutoru, 422. See also Tanaka Yukito Sasaki Kōsei, 179, 202, 207–12, 229, 233–4, 241, 366–7, 480, 485, 510 Satō Akemi, 422–3 Satō Eisaku, 171, 212, 238, 380, 496 Satō Hideo, 417 Satō Mitsusuke, 209

Index of Names

Satō Shigechika, 56–7, 198, 205, 212, 222, 226, 237, 239, 255, 283, 481 Satō Shirō, 114 Sawahata Kazuaki, 213, 241, 359 Sawaragi Noi, 38, 40, 50, 332, 391, 411, 413, 415, 417, 498 Schechner, Richard, 67 Schneemann, Carolee, 56, 383 Segi Shin’ichi, 75 Seishin Seirigaku Kenkyūjo (Psychophysiology Research Institute), 60 Sekine Nobuo, 56, 83, 178, 245 Seligmann, Kurt, 451 Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, 123, 139, 141, 143, 150–1, 168, 450–2, 455, 472, 480 Shiga Kenzō, 151, 168, 450 Shigun, 191, 204, 213–4, 356–9, 362 Shiki Group, 448–9 Shima Shigeo, 481, 488, 496 Shimada Sumiya, 502 Shimaki Ritsu, 373, 379 Shimamoto Shōzō, 100 Shingai Kazuyoshi, 253, 260, 262, 265, 285, 428, 430, 433, 437 Shinjuku Shōnen-dan (Shinjuku Boy Troop), 214, 243, See also Akiyama Yūtokutaishi Shinohara Ushio, 48, 73–5, 77, 85, 94, 97, 100–1, 106, 109–14, 120, 125–31, 135, 137, 152–4, 156, 160, 163, 169, 184, 200, 203, 206, 208, 239–40, 262, 282, 289, 295–6, 320, 386, 396, 415–6, 443, 447–8, 450, 474, 476, 481, 483, 487, 490, 500, 503 Shinseiki-gun (New Century Group), 122, 446, 501 Shiomi Mieko (Chieko), 60, 66, 89, 134, 155, 162, 172, 186–7, 191, 197, 199, 250, 292, 384–5, 388, 482 Shiraga Kazuo, 56, 100–2, 107, 480 Shōji Chima, 151 Sightseeing Art Research Institute, 184–5, 190, 289 Smash Sōgetsu Film Festival, 255 Snyder, Gary, 233–4 Society for the Criticism of the Anpo (Anpo Hihan no Kai), 486 Sontag, Susan, 63, 79–80, 445 Suenaga Tamio, 193, 204, 212–3, 215, 220, 254–6, 261, 278–9, 283, 292–3, 297, 317–8, 342, 359, 371, 373–81, 482 Suginami Cine Club, 266, 285 Sumi Yasuo, 100 Sunohara Toshiyuki, 60, 280, 288 Super Ichiza, 344, 450 Surusumi Seiryō, 305, 311 Suzuki Akio, 162 Suzuki D.T. (Daisetsu), 397, 410 Suzuki Heki, 418 Suzuki Seiichi, 337, 405 Suzuki Shirō, 56–7, 216, 242, 291, 355–6, 358–9, 362

Index of Names751

Suzukida Asako, 230, 253, 268, 383 Tabe Mitsuko, 151, 157–9, 169, 303, 305–8, 312, 384, 386–8, 390, 481, 491, 501, 503 Tachibana Yoshirō, 359, 363 Taj Mahal Travellers, 60–1, 183, 239, 244, 250, 271, 276, 287, 290, 482 Takahara Yūji, 57, 216, 355, 359–62 Takahashi Ayako, 175, 274 Takahashi Kōko, 168, 185, 333, 389 Takahashi Manzaburō, 418 Takaishi Tomoya, 201 Takamatsu Jirō, 56, 61, 139, 140, 144–6, 152–5, 167, 197–200, 211, 251, 295, 464, 481, 483 Takashima Naoyuki, 55, 97 Takashina Shūji, 77 Takechi Tetsuji, 237, 347, 352, 444 Takeda Akimichi, 136, 187, 188 Takekuma Kentarō, 391, 412–3, 417 Takemitsu Tōru, 197, 285, 503 Takemura Rui, 201, 217 Takenaka Rō, 243, 249 Taki Kōji, 201 Takiguchi Shūzō, 48–9, 74–5, 85, 99, 130, 136, 168, 380, 450 Tamiya Takamaro, 482 Tanaami Keiichi, 111 Tanabe Santarō, 483 Tanaka Atsuko, 100, 101, 103–4, 106–7, 384–5, 481 Tanaka Fuji, 143 Tanaka Kōdō, 60, 288 Tanaka Mitsu, 297 Tanaka Sanzō, 288 Tanaka Shintarō, 86, 157, 184, 197 Tanaka Yonekichi, 423, 434 Tanaka Yukito, 157, 422–3, 436 Tanigawa Gan, 147, 302, 309–11, 315, 320, 327, 468, 471, 475, 478, 485, 495, 500, 504 Taniguchi Toshio, 168, 305–7, 312 Tanikawa Kōichi, 89, 266 Tanikawa Shuntarō, 136, 503 Tapié, Michel, 94 Tashiro Masayoshi, 172 Tashiro Minoru, 116–8, 121, 130–3, 154, 156, 160–1, 164, 167, 172, 185, 396, 404 Tashiro Tsuneo, 422–3, 436 Tatehata Akira, 100 Tateishi Kōichi, 77, 156, 174, 184–5, 474 Team Random, 197 Teihen no Kai, 319–20, 329 Teiten no Kai, 319, 325 Tenjō Sajiki, 69, 237, 251, 375, 455, 481 Terada Ken’ichirō, 122, 302, 304, 313 Terada Takehiro, 162, 194, 312 Terayama Shūji, 45, 143, 163, 282, 474, 481, 503

Tinguely, Jean, 76 Tōgō Ken, 297, 379 Tōgō Seiji, 122 Tojima Mikio, 136 Tokyo Action Front, 466, 471, 495, 504 Tōmatsu Shōmei, 127, 396, 402 Tomii Reiko (Reiko Tomii), 39, 78, 86, 470, 477 Tomita Eizō, 128, 163 Tomiura Shizuo, 422–3, 434, 436 Tone Yasunao, 46, 51, 56, 64–6, 76, 78–9, 81–4, 89, 106, 130, 134, 136, 137, 145, 149, 150, 156–60, 166–7, 187, 191, 197–9, 237, 245, 250, 290, 352, 377, 380, 481, 490, 495 Tōno Yoshiaki, 48, 69, 73–7, 84, 86–7, 100, 124, 141, 199–200, 232, 251, 322, 391, 481 Torii Ryōzen, 111 Toshima Kazuko, 287, 407 Toshima Shigeyuki, 60, 280, 287, 405–6, 409, 412, 416 Tōya Masami, 263, 421–2, 436 Toyoshima Sōroku, 163 Tsuboshima Takashi, 340 Tsubouchi Naoki, 60 Tsuji Jun, 98, 105 Tsujimura Kazuko, 189, 287 Tsukio Yoshio, 197 Tsurumi Shunsuke, 47, 80, 116, 467–75, 480 Tsuruoka Masao, 100 Tudor, David, 56, 135 Uchida Yoshirō, 287 Uehara Seiichirō, 391 Ueno Eishin, 309 Ueno Kōshi, 458 Ueno Norizō, 127 Unbeat, 55, 65, 77, 100–1, 106, 116–8, 121, 125, 130–3, 138, 144, 154, 156, 160–4, 172, 185, 196, 235, 278, 290–1, 296, 355, 391, 396, 404, 443, 482, 485 Uryū Ryōsuke, 46, 200, 238, 245, 481 VAN Film Science Research Institute (VAN), 40, 138, 141–3, 166, 183, 191, 198, 244, 294, 485, 496 Vava, 175 Viennese Actionism (Wiener Aktionismus), 56, 61, 65, 69, 218, 452 Wakabayashi Mihiro, 217 Wakai Nihon no Kai (Young Japan Society), 486 Wakamatsu Kōji, 81 Warhol, Andy, 77 Watanabe Chihiro, 213, 254, 359, 378, 380 Watanabe Seiichi, 285 Weisenfeld, Gennifer, 98 Wilke, Hannah, 383 Yagara Yutaka, 303, 308, 483, 501 Yagi no Kai (Goat Society), 486, 502 Yamada Kaiya (Pon), 233–4 Yamada Kyōichi, 267, 285

752

Yamada Satoshi, 55 Yamaga Taiji, 413, 497 Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, 186–8, 191, 197, 200, 251, 282, 480 Yamaguchi Katsumi, 131, 154, 161 Yamaguchi Kenji, 478, 495, 500 Yamaguchi Seinosuke, 436 Yamaguchi Yōzō, 122 Yamamoto Hirotaka, 420 Yamamoto Yoshitaka, 482 Yamaoka Reiji, 493 Yamashita Chieko, 324–5 Yamashita Kikuji, 42, 485, 488, 502 Yamashita Yōsuke, 198, 217 Yamauchi Jūtarō, 118, 303-4, 311-12, 462, 483, 501 Yamaya Hatsuo, 217 Yamazaki Hideto, 280 Yamazaki Masakazu, 201 Yanagi Muneyoshi, 47 Yanagisawa Masashi, 201 Yazaki Kōhei, 111 Yokoo Tadanori, 46, 81, 197, 199–200, 240, 251, 340, 474, 481 Yokota Gen’ichirō, 374–5 Yonekura Toku, 122, 185, 302, 307 Yoshida Minoru, 197, 253, 258, 282 Yoshida Yoshie, 39, 40, 43, 55, 59–62, 69, 78, 82, 117, 130, 154–60, 173–4, 182, 188–90, 194, 204, 245, 254–6, 271–2, 278, 288, 293, 317, 357, 361, 408, 443, 448, 452–3, 461, 480, 490, 496, 497 Yoshihara Jirō, 49, 100–7, 251, 450

Index of Names

Yoshihara Michio, 107 Yoshihara Norio, 213 Yoshimoto Midori (Midori Yoshimoto), 66, 191, 389 Yoshimoto Takaaki, 471 Yoshimura Masunobu, 56, 94, 125, 127–30, 137, 156, 163–4, 169, 197, 202–3, 208, 251, 396, 465, 481, 483, 484, 501 Yoshino Tatsumi, 156, 483 Yoshioka Shigeo, 229 Yoshioka Yasuhiro, 57, 139, 151, 153, 316, 323–4, 402, 481, 496, 507 Yotsuya Simon, 217, 443 Young, La Monte, 187 Yuasa Jōji, 57, 250, 282 Yui Chūnoshin, 32, 360, 412, 496, 504 Zantō Kaigi, 213, 241 Zelle, 262–3, 421, 422 Zen’ei Tosa-ha, 96, 119, 163, 179, 232, 267, 270, 272–3, 275, 286, 290–1, 294, 312, 450, 480, 482 Zenkoku Bijutsuka Kyōgikai (National Committee of Artists), 486 Zero Jigen, 31, 32, 40, 46, 48–50, 52, 55, 57, 59–65, 69, 77, 79–80, 95–6, 100, 110, 114–27, 137, 140, 144, 147–56, 162, 167, 169, 172, 174–86, 189–92, 195, 199–205, 210–21, 226, 233–9, 244, 247, 252–68, 274–5, 278–9, 284, 288–97, 308, 315–7, 322–8, 331–51, 355–61, 365–70, 375–9, 384, 386, 389–92, 405, 408–12, 415, 420–1, 427–30, 432–3, 438, 443–54, 459–63, 469–70, 476, 480–1, 484–7, 490–1, 496, 501, 505, 509 Zunō Keisatsu (Brain Police), 278