Organizer and Chair: William A. Marotti, University of Chicago
Discussant: Brett de Bary, Cornell University
The failure of the demonstrations against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) in 1960 was but the last in a series of setbacks for those objecting to the form and content of the evolving Japanese superstate and the declared "end of the postwar era." Faced with the failures of postwar minshushugi and previous oppositional movements, the looming menace of the State, and an influx of mass culture, some began to turn to concrete activity and engagement with a repoliticized daily life as an alternative means for articulating their dissatisfactions. Varied, complex attempts to find new forms of critical thought and praxis emerged as "cultural" or "artistic" phenomena as often as they assumed shapes more readily recognizable as "political activism." Interwoven with the political activity whose mass manifestations so punctuate the period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, others—artists, performers, youths, musicians—began to articulate culturally the ground for a new imagining of a critical, transformative project that might adequately address the times in which they lived.
In this panel we will address some of these new forms of artistic and cultural productivity, to bring them out of their isolation as curiosities, or mere moments within artistic genres, and to begin to look at the significance of their forms of political expression and action. Through papers on art, film, literature, and New Left politics, we hope in turn to stimulate discussion on the cultural phenomena of the 1960s in Japan generally, and their transformations throughout the decade.
Re-presenting the Trauma of Defeat: Nosaka Akiyuki, Mishima Yukio, and Late 1960s Japan
Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University
This paper discusses two Japanese writers’ attempts to represent their memories of war within postwar Japanese society. At the height of its high growth economy in the late 1960s, Japan’s struggle to deal with its war memories came to temporary resolution. This timing coincided with the height of the Cold War: by embracing U.S. hegemony in East Asia, Japanese society managed to insulate itself from its haunting memories of the war. A quarter century after its defeat in the Asia Pacific War, the memories of the loss were being lost.
Within a society which was eager to leave the memories of war behind, Nosaka Akiyuki and Mishima Yukio struggled to articulate the meaning of Japan’s loss in 1945 through bodily images. The body for them returns as the locus of conflicting desires: a nostalgia for and a simultaneous revulsion from the past. Their bodies were caught between these contradictory desires and oscillated between the past and the present, repeating that which they simultaneously yearned for and dreaded—the bodily memories of the past. Although the protagonist in Nosaka’s story persistently returns to his teenage years seeking release from memories of this loss, they invariably end up re-presenting the loss through their bodily acts. Similarly Mishima attempted to re-present the loss in the postwar Japanese society through symbolically dismembering his own body; yet, his death ironically demonstrated the extent to which forgetting the loss was naturalized in postwar Japan. Through Nosaka’s and Mishima’s late 1960s writings, I consider postwar Japan’s contradictory relations to its past.
Simulation and Subversion in the Everyday: Akasegawa Genpei and the Model 1000-yen Note
William A. Marotti, University of Chicago
In his happenings-style art as a member of the avant-garde groups "Neo-Dada" and "Hi Red Center" and in his solo projects, Akasegawa Genpei’s works in the early 1960s came to focus increasingly upon the everyday world. As part of these activities, in 1963 Akasegawa produced a series of works based upon what he called "model 1000-yen"—monochromatic duplicates of the obverse of the old series 1000-yen note. When these works eventually came to the attention of the police, it inaugurated a long process which ultimately ended in his famous prosecution by the State.
Although a fair amount of attention has been paid to the details of these events and Akasegawa’s works in general (in part through Akasegawa’s own writings), two key questions have yet to be satisfactorily answered: first, why did Akasegawa print the 1000-yen copies, and second, why did the State prosecute him? What particular threat did his works pose?
In this paper, I seek to locate the works historically both within Akasegawa’s production and contemporaneous tendencies within the avant-garde in general. I argue that the impetus for Akasegawa’s project arises out of the artist’s complicated and evolving notion of simulation in the everyday, and somewhat paradoxically, a concern with the body. Further, his work provides a particularly rich example of the battleground between activists and the state within the realm of culture—one so provocative it had to be prosecuted, for reasons fundamental to the structure of the postwar state.
"Night and Fog in Japan": Oshima, Anpo, and the Nouvelle Vague
Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, University of Utah
Oshima Nagisa wrote and released a series of three films during the 1960 demonstrations against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo)—Cruel Story of Youth, The Sun’s Burial, and Night and Fog in Japan. The first especially was hailed as cutting edge Japanese New Wave cinema, both in terms of technique and content. Typical of the genre, it featured alienated, amoral, apolitical youth, portrayals that he amplified in the second film on young gangsters in Osaka. Night and Fog in Japan appears to be the polar opposite of this, focused claustrophobically on the student movement in the Anpo protests. Moreover, in the wake of JSP leader Asanuma Inejiro’s assassination, this last film was suppressed by its distributor, Shochiku.
In all three films, however, Oshima attempted to depict—and induce in his audience—the appearance of subjective consciousness, something he claimed that the Anpo protests generated for the first time. The films constituted critiques of old social and political orders and were intended to have a real-time "super-reality" that matched the audience’s reflections on the events. Oshima also wanted to break down artificial separations between art and politics, claiming that his creative endeavors were a form of activism. He blended footage taken of actual demonstrations into these films, and in Night and Fog in Japan, he employed protesters as writers, advisors, and extras. He tried to accomplish through film what the political movement could not—overcome pseudo-subjectivities and find ways to regroup them into a truly transformative movement.
What Was the "Situation" in the Late-Sixties Mass Consumer Society?: Revolution, Liberation, and Utopia in the Quotidian
Kentaro Tomio, Southern Methodist University
When Postwar Democracy was declared bankrupt by the New Left in the wake of the failed Anpo movement, it signaled something more than an indictment against a political institution narrowly defined. That rejection of the institution in fact opened new possibilities for different kinds of liberatory practices, in which the primacy as well as the very notion of the political were redefined. The consequence was the proliferation of heterogeneous spaces in the postwar edifice of the state and civil society, leading to a zenith of cultural effervescence that subsequently petered out, in the early seventies, in the pervasive sense of the "fun being spoiled" (shirake). The state then breathed a sigh of relief and the civil society rushed blindly into the "spectacular" wasteland of mass consumption.
This paper deals with that "situation" in history in the late-sixties when the hippies, vanguards, and avant-gardes all mingled to become a cultural cum political force to counter the "spectacle" of the politico-economic state. Specifically, the paper examines the relationship between the practices of the political New Left, which defined the commanding heights of the movement, and the multitudes of other spatial practices on campuses, parks, and streets that easily washed over those heights. It attempts to outline the limits of the efficacy of the critical political theory in relation to the spatial cultural practices that it spawned, but was ultimately unable to conceptualize, as those practices rapidly transformed into the mundane "spectacles" dotting the landscape of everyday life in the mass consumer society.