Theater of Cruelty (48 page)

Improvised street performances, later known as “happenings,” were not unique to Japan. They were part of a worldwide trend of spontaneity, of art that could not be bought and sold. But each place gave these events its own cultural twist. Japan has a long carnivalesque tradition of festivals and dances, mostly to do with Shinto rites of fertility, which can be wild, sexy, morbid, and often grotesque. Hijikata’s slow dances of decay and rebirth, wearing little but a strapped-on phallus, were very much in this line. So was much in the spirit of
ero, guro, nansensu
—erotic, grotesque, nonsense—that marked a previous period of Japanese artistic and political ferment in the 1920s. The jazz-inspired poetry of Shiraishi Kazuko, often expressed
in public happenings, was part of this tradition. And so were the “rituals” performed by the group Zero Jigen, from Nagoya—marching naked in the streets, or impaling themselves with pins. All this was designed to shock people out of their bourgeois complacency.

Carnival has often functioned as a form of political protest in Japanese history, a physical expression of revolt when other ways are blocked. Celebrations of sexual freedom sometimes took the place of political confrontation. This happened, for example, in the 1860s, just before the Meiji Restoration put an end to the old political order and modernized Japan along Western lines. A millenarian craze, called
eijanaika
, meaning “who cares”—“Who cares if we take our clothes off,” “Who cares if we have sex”—began in the Kansai region around the old capital Kyoto. Ordinary citizens took to the streets, cross-dressing or not dressed at all, dancing in a frenzy. The craze quickly spread to other parts of Japan, before ending in mob violence.

Something like this occurred in the
ero, guro, nansensu
1920s, and again in the early 1960s, in the narrower confines of the Japanese art scene. Much of what happened was born from political disillusion. Protests against the renewal of the US–Japan security treaty in 1960, bringing hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of Tokyo, snake-dancing, chanting, fighting the riot police, had failed. The treaty was rammed through the Diet by a prime minister, Kishi Nobusuke, who had been arrested in 1945 as a war criminal.
¹²

The art curator Alexandra Munroe, in an essay for a previous exhibition of Japanese avant-garde art, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1995, described how members of the Neo-Dada responded on the eve of the treaty’s renewal. They were in the studio of one of the artists, Yoshimura Masunobu:

Yoshimura Masunobu’s sculpture is on display at the current MoMA show, as are the works of other Neo-Dada artists. But the paintings and sculptures that emerged from the action of the late 1950s and early 1960s are perhaps the least interesting products of that fascinating period. Okamoto Taro, who studied in Paris in the 1930s and knew many of the Surrealists, was a hugely influential figure in the Japanese art world, not least because of his writings, but his paintings and sculptures, though distinctive, do not strike me as first-rate. Other oil paintings on show, by Shiraga Kazuo, Ay-O, Ishii Shigeo, Fukushima Hideko, or Kitadai Shozo, seem competent but are rarely outstanding. The various objects wrapped in thousand-yen notes by Akasegawa Genpei are of Japanese art-historical interest, because they provoked the authorities into suing the artist for years on the spurious grounds of counterfeiting. Also of historical interest is the installation piece by Kudo Tetsumi of penises hanging limply from the walls, showing the sense of impotence that followed the failed political protests of 1960.

But painting, derived from Western traditions of “fine art,” or indeed the modernist versions of that same tradition, was never the most interesting aspect of modern Japanese culture. And since so
much of the artistic revolt of the 1950s and 1960s was deliberately ephemeral, one can’t expect much of permanent or monumental importance. It is obviously impossible to recreate the excitement of the performances and happenings of the past in a museum show. All that is left are flickering images on video screens, a few blueprints, and some photographs. The catalog of the MoMA show, rather unattractively designed, doesn’t help much either. Who would wish to wade through prose such as this: “Within the discursive network on the art of a given sociohistorical context, it is not uncommon to encounter a set of concepts that provide a pivotal hinge for various artistic praxes, but are then …” and so on.

Fortunately, a festival of independent Japanese films screened at MoMA to coincide with the avant-garde exhibition allows us to see a great deal more, including some of Hijikata’s dance performances, Mishima’s
Patriotism
, Terayama’s excellent short films, and even a curious little movie, entitled
Cybele
, directed by the American critic Donald Richie, starring members of Zero Jigen being chastised by a dominatrix.
¹⁴
One of the most interesting movies, from a historical point of view, is Oshima Nagisa’s record of sexual rebellion, street theater, and political revolt in
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief
(1968), starring Yokoo Tadanori, whose poster art was as important in the 1960s as Hijikata’s Ankoku Butoh, Takemitsu’s music, and Isozaki’s architecture.

To me, the most fascinating thing about Japan at that time was the rediscovery of neglected aspects of Japanese culture, more in tune with the carnivalesque happenings: the subsoil, as it were, of Japanese tradition—the erotic side of Shintoism, the matriarchal cults of rural life, the low life of Japanese cities, the popular expressions of
sex and violence that once produced the Kabuki theater—in short, the very opposite of fine art and high culture, traditional or modernist. What emerged was a celebration of the “primitive,” what Japanese call
dorokusai
, reeking of mud.

Highly sophisticated artists, such as Okamoto Taro, or the architect Tange Kenzo, started digging for inspiration into the prehistoric Jomon period (5000–300 BC), before culture was tamed and refined by Buddhism, Confucianism, and the Sinified aristocracy. Okinawa, like the rural northeast, was thought to have retained some of the primitive energy of premodern Japanese culture. In 1961, Okamoto wrote a book about Okinawa entitled
The Forgotten Japan: Theory of Okinawan Culture
. The American sculptor Isamu Noguchi encouraged this tendency during his stays in Japan. He tried to convince the Japanese that their oldest arts and crafts were more interesting, more avant-garde in spirit, than the pale imitation of modernist international artistic trends. This was not always well received. Some Japanese artists and critics regarded Noguchi as a condescending foreigner, indulging in a new form of Japonaiserie with his Jomon-inspired sculptures and his paper lanterns. Perhaps
nostalgie de la boue
is more convincing when it springs from the native soil.

Filmmakers, such as Imamura Shohei, set their movies in rural locations in the northeast, or in Okinawa, or in the slums of Tokyo and Osaka, among peasants, petty gangsters, and cheap whores. Avant-garde theater groups, like Terayama’s Tenjo Sajiki, or Kara Juro’s Situation Theater, mixed up the rough vitality of strip shows and country fairs with ideas derived from Antonin Artaud and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Pitching their tents on riverbanks or next to Shinto shrines, they saw themselves as the spiritual heirs of the early Kabuki troupes, when theater was disreputable and associated with outcasts and prostitutes.

Moriyama Daido, Tomatsu Shomei, and other photographers stalked the red light districts around US military bases, or the burlesque theaters and bars in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, for images that reeked of mud. The now world-famous pictures of the sexual Tokyo underworld by Araki Nobuyoshi, many of them taken after 1970, are products of the same trend. Graphic artists, too, rebelled against high-minded modernism. One of the most prominent, Awazu Kiyoshi, like Hijikata a native of the northeast, described his role as a designer as that of a wandering outcast. The designer’s mission, in Awazu’s words, was “to extend the rural into the city, foreground the folklore, reawaken the past, summon back the outdated, and confront the most belated ‘rear-garde’ with the city.”

All this goes back, in spirit if not necessarily in form, to the merchant culture of the Edo period (1603–1868) when woodblock print artists, actors, courtesans, and prostitutes formed part of an interlocking world, raffish but artistically rich and alluring. The 1960s avant-garde was just as collaborative. Some of Takemitsu’s best music was written for movies by such directors as Oshima. The poet Shiraishi Kazuko was married to the filmmaker Shinoda Masahiro, whose scripts were written by Terayama, and posters designed by Yokoo. The photographer Hosoe Eikoh collaborated on extraordinary books with Mishima and Hijikata, picturing the latter as a kind of rural demon in the muddy rice paddies of his native region.

Some of this—Hosoe’s photographs, posters by Yokoo—can be seen at the MoMA show. But to my mind not nearly enough. For the exhibition demonstrates what exhibitions of Japanese modern art of the 1920s and 1930s also make clear: that the Japanese excel in graphic arts, photography, architecture, drama, cinema, dance. The unashamed use of popular art and entertainment, even the embrace of commercial art, seems to bring out the best in Japanese artists,
perhaps because of the long tradition of what might be called refined popular culture. Most painting looks rather wan in comparison.

When Yokoo, bored perhaps with his huge success as a poster artist celebrating underground theater, gangster movies, and scandalous dancers, reinvented himself as a fine artist of oil paintings in 1981, after seeing the Picasso show at MoMA, he lost much of his verve. Mishima was a great admirer of Yokoo’s graphic art. Yokoo, Mishima said, revealed the dark things that lurk inside the Japanese that people prefer not to see. This led to a very lively culture, and perhaps to Mishima’s death.

THE GREAT POET
Matsuo Basho, traveling in the northeast of Japan in 1689, was so overcome by the beauty of the island of Matsushima that he could only express his near speechlessness in what became one of his most famous haiku:

Matsushima, known since the seventeenth century as one of Japan’s “Three Great Views,” is actually an archipelago of more than 250 tiny islands sprouting fine pine trees, like elegant little rock gardens arranged pleasingly in a Pacific Ocean bay. Because these islands functioned as a barrier to the tsunami that hit the northeastern coast with such horrifying consequences on March 11, 2011, relatively little damage was done to this scenic spot. Just a few miles up or down the coast, however, entire towns and villages, with most of their inhabitants, were washed away into the sea; 2,800 people are still missing.