DECEMBER 2011 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY 1

Expo ’70 and Japanese Art: Dissonant Voices An Introduction and CommentaryMidori Yoshimoto

The 1970 World Exposition in Osaka (Nihon bankoku hakurankai; referred to as Expo ’70 hereafter) was the first world exposition hosted by an Asian country and, until recently, the largest and best attended exposition in history. Expo ’70 sprawled over three-hundred-thirty hectares of newly developed land in Suita City, a northern suburb of Osaka, with seventy-seven nations participating in the event. During its six-month run from March 15 through September 13, the number of visitors reached 64,218,770, more than half of Japan’s population at the time.1 Although the impact of Expo ’70 was immediately felt on Japanese society and culture, it took more than three decades for scholars to historically assess the monumental event. Since the millennium, Expo ’70 has become one of the most frequently discussed topics in the Japanese art world, but little has been published on the topic outside Japan.

The purpose of this special volume, “Expo ’70 and Japanese Art: Dissonant Voices,” is to present Expo ’70 as a cacophony of dissonant voices rather than a harmonious chorus orchestrated by one ideology. By featuring wide-ranging attitudes and strategies of artists who participated in Expo ’70 as well as those who opposed it, the volume seeks to reclaim the richness of Expo ’70, which has been overlooked. Serving as the first English-language resource on Expo ’70 for artists, scholars, and writers worldwide, this volume not only features current research on Expo ’70 by international scholars, but also English translations of contemporary writings and visual statements by Japanese artists and writers. By interweaving contemporary statements from ca. 1970 with present-day academic analyses instead of separating them, this volume contextualizes the past within the present. This new organization should also help readers discover less apparent connections among individual articles. While the majority of contributors are art historians or curators, the entire volume addresses Japanese social contexts ca. 1970 and will be useful to the broader discipline of social

Midori Yoshimoto

2 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY DECEMBER 2011

studies. Furthermore, the inclusion of two fictional writings from the time of Expo ’70, translated by Kyoko Selden and Alisa Freedman, paints a fuller picture of the era and makes this issue relevant in the field of literature as well. Finally, Hyunjung Cho’s select annotated bibliography of Expo ’70 is the first of its kind in English and will provide a starting point for scholars interested in this relatively new topic.

Expo ’70: A Turning Point and Polarized Discourse As this volume demonstrates, Expo ’70 marked a major turning point not only in Japanese art, architecture, and design, but also in the history of world expositions as a whole. The first essay featured in this volume, “Japan World Exposition – Reconsidering Expo Art” by the curator Nakai Yasuyuki, translated by Mika Yoshitake, traces Japan’s participation in world expositions dating back to 1873 and examines how the nature of the expo and Japanese art displayed at expos have changed over the course of the twentieth century. Expo ’70 was a major benchmark in Japanese history as well, commemorating twenty-five years after World War Two by realizing Japan’s long-held dream of hosting a world exposition since 1940. Following the success of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, it was regarded as the best opportunity to establish Japan as one of the world powers, equal to European countries and the United States. In his book Expo Syndrome: Postwar Politics and Cultural Struggle in Postwar Japan (Banpaku gens∂: sengo seiji no jubaku, 2005), the sociologist Yoshimi Shunya has argued that world expositions have functioned as a kind of syndrome, namely, a system that enables a collusion between the populist desire for wealth and national development policy.2 For many Japanese artists, Expo ’70 provided unprecedented opportunities to realize ambitious and big-budget projects that would otherwise never have been conceived and sponsorship by the Japanese government and corporations made the previously impossible, possible.

Due to national backing and the political context of Japan at the time, however, art created for Expo ’70 (Expo Art hereafter) was widely criticized for its inherent propagandistic nature by artists, architects, designers, and critics, even before it opened. A group of photographers, including Taki K∂ji, issued the photo magazine Provoke in 1968 not only to attack conventional photography, but also to critique the nationalistic phase of the country in anticipation of Expo ’70.3 The same year, a number of artists and critics participated in the five-day symposium “Exposé 1968: Say Something Now, I Am Looking for Something to Say” (Exposé 1968: nanika ittekure, ima, sagasu) held at the S∂getsu Art Center in Tokyo, to probe the state of contemporary art in advance of Expo ’70. The organizers and participants of this symposium included those who had already committed to producing pavilions at the expo and expressed their visions and concerns of the expo through performance art and mixed media presentations rather than direct discussions.4 In the meantime, the 1968 May Revolution in Paris intensified university upheavals and the anti-Vietnam War movement in Japan, which had begun in the mid-1960s, and fueled artists’ opposition to Expo ’70.

Midori Yoshimoto

DECEMBER 2011 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY 3

Soon, the anti-expo sentiment among artists was crystallized into the analogy of Expo ’70 participants to war propaganda painters during World War Two. In its July 1969 statement, “Appeal to Artists,” Biky∂t∂ (short for Bijutsuka Ky∂t∂ Kaigi, or Artists Joint-Struggle Council) advocated the destruction of every artistic institution that they considered a part of “modern rationalism,” including Expo ’70 and Tokyo Biennale. Critical of artists’ political complacency, Biky∂t∂ claimed, “At a certain critical point, apathy tends to make us stampede with the majority, like war painters did.”5 As Reiko Tomii has pointed out, “The university conflicts of 1968-69 incited art students’ radicalism” and these artist activists brought “issues surrounding the institution of Art/art” to “both militant and theoretical extremes.”6 Biky∂t∂’s highly politicized rhetoric was echoed by other anti-expo coalitions, such as Architects ’70 Action Committee,7 and Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group (Banpaku Hakai Ky∂t∂-ha).8 In addition, Japan’s anti-Vietnam War movement, Beheiren (short for Betonamu ni heiwa o! Shimin reng∂, or Japan “Peace for Vietnam!” Committee), joined forces with the anti-expo groups in 1969.9 By then, prominent critics Haryº Ichir∂ and Taki K∂ji had intensified their criticism of Expo’ 70 for what they felt was a hidden government agenda “to distract the nation from the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty” and to “establish domination through technology and communication” while “incorporating intellectual elites within the institution.”10

To these artists and critics who allied with the New Left, Expo ’70 symbolized the end of art in which art was co-opted by commercialism and technology and lost its autonomy. The success of the expo meant their defeat and the nullification of their struggle; their top concern, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, was automatically renewed. It was amid this mood of disillusionment and desperation that the writer Mishima Yukio resorted to his public death by ritual suicide at the Ichigaya self-defense forces base on November 25, 1970, in his failed attempt to incite a coup d’état to restore imperial sover-eignty. Even though Mishima believed in his own sect of ultra-nationalism, he shared in the acute criticism of the Japanese government by the dissident students of the New Left.11

The mood of disillusionment and insecurity overturned the dreamy era of progress leading up to Expo ’70 and prevailed throughout the 1970s, beginning with the ominous incident of the Yodog∂ Hijacking (March 31, 1970) during the expo and the rise of pollution issues and the oil shock of 1973 and 1979. In his book World Fairs and World Wars (Sens∂ to banpaku, 2005), the art critic Sawaragi Noi argues that these depressing events contributed to the propagation of the Armageddon fantasy in 1970s Japan and produced such best sellers as Japan Sinks (Nihon chinbotsu, 1973) by the science fiction author Komatsu Saky∂, who was involved in the planning of Expo ’70.12 Sawaragi further argues that Komatsu’s eschatological vision was shared by other planners of the expo and their anticipation for a dystopia might have translated into a darker undercurrent within the expo.13 Sawaragi’s fatalistic narrative was partly informed by artists of his generation, including Yanobe Kenji, whose adolescence was affected by

Midori Yoshimoto

4 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY DECEMBER 2011

the pessimistic mood of the 1970s and subsequently produced artworks harking back to Expo ’70.14 Their nostalgia for the bright utopian future presented at the expo was mixed with disillusionment that such a future would never arrive, producing complex feelings toward Expo ’70. The artist Murakami Takashi has addressed the prevailing impact of Expo ’70 on contemporary subculture including the animation with which his generation grew up in his exhibition Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (2005).15

Within this fatalistic perspective from the twenty-first century Sawaragi tactically revived the analogy of Expo ’70 artists as war painters that was used in the pre-1970 anti-expo discourse.16 Although he takes a sympathetic stance toward some of the expo participants, such as the architect Isozaki Arata, he uses their episodes merely as a backdrop to reinforce the earlier comparison of Expo ’70 to World War Two.17 While Sawaragi’s polemical approach has been widely circulated, this kind of political rhetoric polarizes the issues surrounding Expo ’70, creating a superficial categorization of winners and losers, of heroes and villains, and denies a more nuanced and sensitive interpretation of the event. This issue proposes instead a revisionist approach that takes into account the varied gradations between black and white. By reevaluating the multiplicity of positions surrounding the expo, the issue seeks to paint a picture of the complex manifold realities of Expo ’70 and its milieu in order to reconsider the previously polarized critical discourse.

Intermedia/Environment ArtDespite the long shadow cast from the past, some scholars have finally begun to reassess the actual contents of Expo ’70 and the development of intermedia art, which had its origins in the late 1950s and culminated in Expo ’70.18 Japanese art history tended to regard intermedia art superfluous and insignificant compared to Mono-ha (School of Things), which emerged partly in reaction to the political upheaval in the late 1960s and has received considerable attention in recent scholarship for its refusal of West-centric modernism.19 In Japan, “intermedia art” was synonymous with Environment Art (Kanky∂ geijutsu) and both terms are the key to understanding the artistic and conceptual underpinning of Expo ’70. In fact, the Expo Event Research Committee (Bankokuhaku Ibento Ch∂sa Iinkai), formed in early 1967 to undertake preparatory research for Expo ’70, examined varied topics such as festivals (matsuri), music, space, and Environment Art, which was assigned to the art critic T∂no Yoshiaki.20 In addition to T∂no, the core members of this research committee included the architect Isozaki Arata, the music critic and composer Akiyama Kuniharu, and the artist Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, who had participated in a groundbreaking interdisciplinary art exhibition and event held in Tokyo in 1966 titled From Space to Environment (Kºkan kara kanky∂ e). The Environment Society (Kanky∂ no kai), which included the aforementioned avant-garde luminaries, publicly heralded the term “environment” (kanky∂) to mean an “actually occurring dynamic relationship between a human and his or her surroundings,” as opposed to its

Midori Yoshimoto

DECEMBER 2011 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY 5

counterpart, “space” (kºkan), which implied a relatively fixed harmonious relationship. By presenting many interactive and kinetic works and generating dynamism among those works, the exhibition proposed environment/kanky∂ as a socially relevant concept, promoting a new relationship between the spectator and artwork and interaction among separate genres such as visual art, music, design, and architecture.

As I have elsewhere demonstrated, although “environment/kanky∂” was a precursor to the later term “intermedia,” which originally referred to the indefinable area that exists among different media, these terms were almost interchangeable by the time of Expo ’70, in which the major players of From Space to Environment participated.21 Although Sawaragi has emphasized the nationalist concept of architecture during World War Two as the origin of “kanky∂,”22 I would argue that it is the outgrowth of the close synergy between the postwar Japanese and Euro-American avant-garde art movements, which derived the new concept of “environment” from cybernetic and communication theories and urban design, and was popularized in art and architecture. After Expo ’70, however, both “intermedia” and “environment/kanky∂” took on strong technological connotations in Japan, and Environment Art was reduced to technological art.23 Because of the continued misunderstanding of these terms and the overall negative reception of them by Japanese critics, the majority of Expo Art has been dismissed as unimportant and marginalized in Japanese art history.

Multitude of Attitudes It goes without saying that there was a wide spectrum in artists’ attitudes toward taking part in Expo ’70: Some were optimistic and positive while others became critical as the projects developed. The Osaka-based members of the Gutai Art Association were perhaps situated toward the top of this spectrum, devoting themselves almost whole-heartedly to orchestrating multivalent projects. Included within these were a collective sculpture display, Garden on Garden, part of the Expo Art Outdoor Exhibition, the Gutai Group Exhibition at the entrance of the Midori Pavilion, and the three-day multimedia extravaganza Gutai Art Festival at the Festival Plaza. Most of the existing Gutai scholarship considers these works a mere rehashing of Gutai’s past works, dismissing them in favor of Gutai’s early performances, installations, and paintings. According to the art historian Ming Tiampo, whose book on Gutai was recently published, “Gutai did not see Expo ’70 as a nationalist stage, but rather as an opportunity to engage with interlocutors from around the world.” For Gutai and particularly its leader Yoshihara Jir∂, “Expo ’70 provided a large-scale embodiment of the ‘international common ground’ that Gutai had been building for itself” since 1955 and it was a perfect occasion to showcase both historic and new works to stress its “international contemporaneity.”24 Having built on their international standing since the 1950s, it was natural for Gutai to represent the Kansai region and take these important commissions at Expo ’70. There was even a sense of pride in their participation as they had been at the forefront in presenting

Midori Yoshimoto

6 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY DECEMBER 2011

interactive and performance art to the general public and their work was not limited to fine art connoisseurs.

Situated at the other end of the spectrum and expressing overt criticism of Expo ’70 was, surprisingly, its theme producer, Okamoto Tar∂. As early as 1968, Okamoto openly stated that he envisioned his Tower of the Sun as an anti-expo monument. As discussed in Bert Winther-Tamaki’s essay in this volume, “To Put on a Big Face: The Globalist Stance of Okamoto Tar∂’s Tower of the Sun for the Japan World Exposition,” Okamoto’s defensive stance may have been a reaction to critics of the expo such as Haryº Ichir∂. Instead of fulfilling the expectation of the expo organizers, Okamoto decided to disrupt the order by creating something in opposition to what he considered the products of “modernist machines.” Inspired by prehistoric J∂mon and ancient Mayan art, which he discusses at length in his Magic Power of Beauty (Bi no jyuryoku, 1971), translated by Reiko Tomii for this volume,25 Tower of the Sun was conceived as a giant personification of the sun and an anti-modern symbol. Okamoto writes: “While Tange Kenz∂’s Grand Roof was mechanistic, I created something totally primitive and let it break through the roof…. I think ‘anti-harmony’ is real harmony.”26 The project architect of the Festival Plaza, Isozaki Arata, recalled later that he felt stupefied when he learned that Tange’s Grand Roof, the zenith of the latest architectural technology, would be penetrated by Okamoto’s “giant phallic tower,” or “primitive folk art.” Isozaki’s Counter Recollection (Han kais∂, 2001), his critical memoir on his involvement in Expo ’70, which includes the preceding statement has been translated for this volume by Machida Gen.27 Isozaki’s assessment of Okamoto’s overpowering tower has proved to be prophetic as the Tower of the Sun is one of the few remaining monuments at Expo Park today.28

It is ironic that the anti-expo movement considered Okamoto’s Tower of the Sun to be the ultimate symbol of the modernist expo and did not recognize his anti-modernist intentions.29 KuroDalaiJee’s essay in this volume, “Performance Art and/as Activism: Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group,” discusses how anti-expo artist groups, such as Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension) and Kokuin (Heralding Shadow), employed “ritualist”-style performances that are “inherently oppositional” to Expo ’70 in their attempt to attack the modern with pre-modern Japanese elements. Similarly, the artists who produced the Textiles Pavilion at Expo ’70 intentionally used anti-modern elements in their design to subvert the expo’s ultra-modernism, as examined in my essay, “Textiles Pavilion: An Anomaly and Critique of Expo ‘70,” in this volume. The clash of the pre-modern and modern was one of the most debated issues of Expo ’70 and is addressed across the various essays in this volume.

What made Okamoto’s position confusing was that he did not view the avant-garde as a part of modernism, but rather, as a counter force. His assessment was not consistent with the generally accepted view of modernism and caused some misunderstanding and confusion. The anthropologist Umehara Takeshi, for example, found Okamoto’s art to be inconsistent in that it relied on the modern ego while still maintaining its ties to J∂mon

Midori Yoshimoto

DECEMBER 2011 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY 7

art.30 In fact, the difficulty in categorizing Okamoto as either modern or anti-modern may have affected the way his art has been received. While Okamoto became a celebrity after the expo, his art has remained relatively unappreciated until recently.31 The art critic Kurabayashi Yasushi has pointed out that Okamoto was aware of this ambivalence, but sought to reconcile these paradoxes by often juxtaposing the modern and the pre-modern in his “bipolar oppositionalism” (taikyokushugi).32

Considering himself one of Okamoto’s “demon children” (onigo), Isozaki sought to counter Okamoto’s “primitive folk art” with his cybernetic environment designed for the Festival Plaza. However, as Isozaki admits in his retrospective statement featured in this volume, artistic intentions behind the Tower of the Sun and the Festival Plaza were both subverted by the appearance of the emperor and prince at the opening ceremony. Their presence co-opted what Okamoto and Isozaki thought of as “avant-garde,” swallowing them up into the national monuments.33 Compared to the members of Gutai and Okamoto, Isozaki was located somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, one of the most conflicted individuals due to his ambivalent position as an architect who has worked closely with avant-garde artists. Yet, Isozaki found Expo ’70 an “irresistible temptation” making a long-held dream come true. His ambition was to realize architecture on a city-like scale, something which the world had never seen before. Even though he was well aware of the criticism surrounding Expo ’70 and was even sympathetic to some of it, he found himself emotionally immersed in the expo; as if he were “seized by a fever.”34 In fact, it was Isozaki himself who retrospectively admitted that “I felt as though I had participated in executing a war.”35

Dissonant VoicesThe artists, curators, and writers discussed in this volume can be situated in the wide spectrum of attitudes toward Expo ’70 as mentioned above. The second essay in the volume, “The 1970 Osaka Expo and/as Science Fiction” by William O. Gardner, highlights the rather unknown role of the “Thinking the Expo” study group at Kyoto University in conceptualizing Expo ’70 as the city of the future (mirai no toshi) and its overarching theme of “Progress and Harmony for Mankind.” The group, which included the science fiction author Komatsu Saky∂ and the anthropologist Umesao Tadao, was prescient in addressing the dystopic dangers of nuclear apocalypse, problems of over-population, social inequality, and pollution, but such concerns were not well addressed at the expo grounds and pavilions due to many political factors. It is evident that Komatsu and the “Thinking the Expo” study group did not necessarily believe in the rose-colored future suggested by Expo ’70 and sought to incorporate critical issues in the planning.

The art critic Haryº Ichir∂, who recently passed away in 2010, was consistently critical of Expo ’70 and published several articles critiquing it, including the essay “Expo ’70 as the Ruins of Culture,” translated by Ignacio Adriasola for this volume. Written shortly after the opening of Expo ’70, this article is more grounded in Haryº’s personal

Midori Yoshimoto

8 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY DECEMBER 2011

observations and reveals his deeper reflections on the issues surrounding Expo ’70 and concerns for the future. Reflective of Haryº’s socialist orientation, the harshest criticism in his article exposes how the intended protagonists of the Festival Plaza, regular citizens, succumbed to the position of the spectator, passively receiving a festival (matsuri) bestowed on them by their master (okami). Even though Haryº understands the complex positions of the artists who participated in Expo ’70 and acknowledges their artistic aspirations and intentions, he points out their contradictions and failures. For example, while praising Isozaki’s concept of the Festival Plaza as an “environment for an interactive site” and its underlying philosophy of an “invisible monument,” Haryº charges that the actual plaza became a plaza imposed upon people by the authorities in power. The third section of the essay constitutes Haryº’s detailed accounts of his personal and candid responses to his experience of a myriad of pavilion presentations and is also useful to our study. Commenting on the problem of the image-overload at Expo ’70, Haryº presciently concludes that information and images are today’s mononoke (sprits of things), which lure humans and control them.

Tange Kenz∂, Isozaki Arata, and Kurokawa Kish∂—the three key participating architects in Expo ’70—are the subject of Hyunjung Cho’s essay, “Expo ’70: A Model City of an Information Society.” Through close examination of works by these architects, Cho delves deeper into the futuristic vision behind Expo ’70. Although these architects’ Expo ’70 projects were received negatively as a “symptom of the breakdown of modernism” and degraded as the precursor of commercialized postmodernism, Cho recontextualizes them in the new paradigm of architecture and urbanism in a postindustrial information society. Varied positions and visions that the three architects held in relation to Expo ’70 are articulated in detail.

This volume is greatly enriched by the full-page reproductions of photographs and visual statements by artists who were clearly opposed to participating in the expo. Yasufumi Nakamori’s essay, “Criticism of Expo ’70 in Print: Journals Ken, Bijutsu tech∂, and Dezain hihy∂,” examines in detail the photographer T∂matsu Sh∂mei and the artists Akasegawa Genpei, Matsuzawa Yutaka, and Senda Mitsuru, all of whom published their visual and conceptual reactions to Expo ’70 in art journals such as KEN and Bijutsu tech∂. The accompanying texts by Akasegawa and Matsuzawa have been translated by Reiko Tomii. Nakamori also discusses the June 1968 issue of Dezain hihy∂, which covered the aforementioned symposium, Exposé 1968, as a pretext of the expo criticism in printed media. These contemporary publications offered an invaluable space for artists and writers to express their opposition to the mainstream.

The final section of this volume on Expo ’70 reveals two different aspects of internationalization in contemporary art circa 1970. Hiroko Ikegami’s essay, “‘World Without Boundary’?: E.A.T and the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ‘70, Osaka,” analyzes how the American collective Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T. hereafter) realized their most complex interactive environment to date through international collaborations.

Midori Yoshimoto

DECEMBER 2011 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY 9

E.A.T.’s experimentalism, however, could not be compromised even with the demands of their sponsor, PepsiCo, and they were forced to leave the expo only after a short period. E.A.T.’s radical ideas questioned the simplistic utopianism and commercialism behind PepsiCo’s theme, “World Without Boundary” and critiqued Expo ’70 as a whole by extension. The Pepsi Pavilion presented yet another dissonant voice within Expo ’70.

While E.A.T.’s participation in Expo ’70 marked the height of internationalization in intermedia art, Reiko Tomii’s essay, “Toward Tokyo Biennale 1970: Shapes of the International in the Age of ‘International Contemporaneity,’” illuminates a decisively critical approach to the rapidly internationalizing field of contemporary art. Organized simultaneously with Expo ’70, Tokyo Biennale can be seen as a dissonance that countered Expo ’70 in several ways. By intentionally presenting the phenomenon of ephemeral art through site-specific installations and conceptually oriented works, the commissioner of the biennale, Nahakara Yºsuke, contrasted such “non-art” direction of contemporary art with the high-budget intermedia art presented at Expo ’70. Tokyo Biennale’s innovative curatorial strategy of theme-based as opposed to nation-based representation set a precedent for numerous biennales and triennales that take place worldwide today. In this regard, Tokyo Biennale can be seen as a counterpoint to Expo ’70 and Tomii’s close examination of the former sheds light onto two different shapes of the international.

As these essays demonstrate, Expo ’70 was a remarkable turning point not only in Japanese art and architecture, but also in the broader currents of contemporary art. In a macro view, Expo ’70 symbolized the end of modernism and the rise of post-modernism. Intermedia art that flourished at the expo became eclipsed by the conceptual and self-critical tendency known as Non-Art, which reverberated with the international phenomenon of institutional critique. We hope that this volume will serve as groundwork for future studies circa 1970 and further promote the inclusion of Japanese contemporary art in global art history.

EpilogueThese dissonant voices surrounding Expo ’70 have particular resonance today as we have recently witnessed the Fukushima nuclear disaster that followed the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011. Little did we know until this disaster that Japan had developed into one of the most nuclear-powered and dependent nations in the world and that the electricity needed for Expo ’70 had been provided by the then brand-new Tsuruga Nuclear Plant.36 In this volume, Winther-Tamaki articulates how Okamoto expressed his concern of nuclear apocalypse through the Black Sun in the Tower of the Sun and his mural Tomorrow’s Myth (1968-69). The latter was executed simultaneously with Okamoto’s expo projects in Mexico City and has recently been restored and relocated to a covered passageway leading to Shibuya station, Tokyo. The strong anti-nuclear message that Okamoto expressed in Tomorrow’s Myth has become ever more relevant

Midori Yoshimoto

10 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY DECEMBER 2011

today in light of the disaster. Tellingly, the collective of young artists Chim↑Pom added their painting of the Fukushima nuclear plant to fit the originally indented lower-right corner of Okamoto’s mural, in order to express that “now is a product of the past,” referring to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented in Okamoto’s work.37 The group sought to pay homage to Okamoto by borrowing his caricaturist style and vivid colors. Although their addition to the mural was promptly removed by the police, their guerrilla actions were videotaped and broadcast on the internet. While they were heavily criticized by some, their subsequent exhibition in Tokyo drew thousands of visitors in a week. Would Okamoto have approved of their audacious undertaking? Perhaps he would have encouraged younger artists to speak out against the government’s inability to protect its people. Through their respective creative output, the artists and writers featured in this volume provide insight into how we can find and express our critical voices while facing a volatile turning point in history.

Notes1. Japan Association for the 1970 World Exposition, Nihon banpakuhaku k∂shiki kiroku [Japan World Exposi-tion, Official Report], vol. 2 (Suita: Commemorative Association for the Japan World Exposition, 1972), 374. The record number of visitors was recently surpassed by that of the Shanghai World Exposition in 2010.2. Yoshimi Shunya, Banpaku gens∂: sen-go seiji no jubaku [Expo Syndrome: Postwar Politics and Cultural Struggle in Postwar Japan] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shob∂, 2005). This book has been recently reprinted as Banpaku to sengo Nihon [Expo and Postwar Japan] (K∂dansha Gakujutsu Shinsho, 2011) with a new introduction reflecting on the Fukushima nuclear plant crisis and Japan’s postwar development of nuclear plants. 3. Charles Merewether, “Disjunctive Modernity: The Practice of Artistic Experimentation in Postwar Japan,” in Charles Merewether and Rika Izumi Hiro, eds., Art Anti-Art Non-Art: Experimentation in Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950-70 (Los Ange-les: Getty Publications, 2007), 26-27.

4. S∂getsu Art Center, “Exposé 1968: nanika ittekure, ima, sagasu,” invita-tions and programs, 1968. [Courtesy of the Research Center for the Arts and Arts Administration, Keio University.] 5. Biky∂t∂, “Bijutsuka e no teisho” [An Appeal to Artists], mimeographed flier (5 July 1969), reprinted in “Concerning the Institution of Art: Conceptualism in Japan,” in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950-80s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 156. I thank Reiko Tomii for pointing me to this reproduction.6. Reiko Tomii, “Concerning the Institu-tion of Art: Conceptualism in Japan,” in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950-80s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 23. 7. Kenchikuka ’70 K∂d∂ Iinkai [Archi-tects ’70 Action Committee] sought to “rally with anti-war/anti-Anpo joint-struggle of revolutionary work-ers, farmers, students, and citizens, reject and destroy Expo ’70 and its authority, in order to explore a per-spective for a new architectural move-

ment.” Miyauchi Yoshihisa, “Mujun o ∂itsukusu itsuwari no saiten” [Fake Festival that Conceals Contradic-tions], Kenchiku j∏naru, no. 1066 (June 2004): 43. 8. Regarding Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group, see KuroDalai-jee’s article in this volume.9. Beheiren was begun by the political scientist Takahata Michitoshi, the philosopher Tsurumi Shunsuke, and the writer Oda Makoto in April 1965. It became internationally known through an anti-war advertisement written by the writer Kaik∂ Takeshi and printed in The New York Times in November 1965. Another English ad in The Washington Post (April 1967) included the message “Korosuna” (Do not kill) calligraphically drawn by the artist Okamoto Tar∂. 10. Taki K∂ichi, “Banpaku hantai-ron” [Anti-Expo Discourse], Tenb∂ (January 1969), reprinted in Haryº Ichir∂, ed., Wareware ni totte ban-paku towa nanika (1969). Quoted in Kurabayashi Yasushi, Okamoto Tar∂ to Yokoo Tadanori (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 1996), 12.

Midori Yoshimoto

DECEMBER 2011 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY 11

11. Hisaaki Yamanouchi, “Mishima Yukio and His Suicide,” Modern Asian Studies 6, 1 (1972): 1. Also see Mishima Yukio and T∂dai Zenky∂t∂, Bi to Ky∂d∂tai to T∂dai t∂s∂ [Beauty, Community, and The University of Tokyo Struggle], originally printed in 1969 (Tokyo: Kadokawa Bunko, 2002). 12. For the English translation, see Komatsu Saky∂, Japan Sinks: A Novel about Earthquakes, trans. Michael Gallaher (New York: Kodansha International, 1995). 13. Sawaragi Noi, Sens∂ to banpaku/World Fairs and World Wars (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 2005), 34-37.14. Sawaragi discusses at length how Yanobe, among others, grew up as Armageddon children with an obsession for ruins of the future. Ibid., 152-64. See also: Gunhild Borggreen, “Ruins of the Future: Yanobe Kenji Revisits Expo ’70,” Performance Paradigm 2 (March 2006): 119-31. 15. The image of the Tower of the Sun by Okamoto Tar∂ loomed large in the beginning of the exhibition at Japan Society Gallery and its entry was the first in the eponymous exhibition catalogue. Murakami discusses the complex feeling his generation has toward Expo ’70 in his essay. Murakami Takashi, ed., Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Sub-culture (New York: Japan Society, 2005), 2-5, 118-21. 16. Sawaragi, Sens∂ to banpaku, Chap-ter 8.17. In a recent lecture, Isozaki pointed out that Sawaragi’s equating of Expo Art to war propaganda painting is too simplistic and that he only examines the surface of the issues concern-

ing the expo and art. Isozaki Arata, “T∏ningupointo: Kºkan kara kanky∂ e/Banpaku/Posutomodan” (Turning Point: From Space to Environment/Expo ’70/ Postmodern), a transcrip-tion of a lecture given in conjunction with the Yamaguchi Katsuhiro exhi-bition at the Museum of Modern Art, Kanagawa on 5 March 2006, available in PDF format through Christophe Charles’ page on Musashino Art University’s website (http://ias-server.musabi.ac.jp/mov/charles/ATT00015.pdf), 48-55. 18. Ibid. The same PDF document contains not only transcriptions of important lectures by creators such as Isozaki and Matsumoto Toshio and the curator Jasia Reichardt, but also critical essays on art and technology by Christophe Charles and Iguchi Toshino among others. See also, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro ten: media ∏to no senkusha/ Yamaguchi Katsuhiro: Pioneer of Media Art, exh. cat. (Kamakura: Museum of Modern Art, Kanagawa, 2006).19. For example, see Chiba Shigeo, Gendai bijutsu itsudatsu-shi, 1945-1985 [History of Deviation of Contemporary Art, 1945-1985] (Tokyo: Sh∂bunsha, 1986). More recent scholarship on Mono-ha includes: Alexandra Munroe, Lee Ufan: Making Infinity (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2011). 20. Bankokuhaku Ibento Ch∂sa Iinkai (Expo Event Research Committee), “Shºkei ch∂sa” [Research on Land-scaping], unpublished document, 20 February 1967; Bankokuhaku Ibento Ch∂sa Iinkai, “Omatsuri hiroba o chºshin toshita gaibu kºkan ni okeru, mizu, oto, hikari nado o riy∂ shita s∂g∂teki enshutsu kik∂ no kenkyº” [Research on the Total Presentation System Using Water, Sound, Light, etc. in Outdoor Spaces, Centering on the Festival Plaza], undated unpub-

lished document (I date the latter as having been written circa late 1967). The author obtained access to these documents at the Akiyama Kuniharu Archive housed at Tama Art Univer-sity. I thank Professor Ebizuka K∂ji of Tama Art University for granting me access to the archive.21. The term “intermedia” was popular-ized internationally in the late 1960s and introduced to Japan circa 1969 when two events—Intermedia Arts Festival and Cross Talk Intermedia—were held at such major locations as the Yoyogi National Stadium. The latter was sponsored by American institutions and corporations such as the American Cultural Center in Tokyo and Pepsi Co. For more detailed examination of kanky∂ and early intermedia art in Japan, see Midori Yoshimoto, “From Space to Environment: The Origins of Kanky∂ and the Emergence of Intermedia Art in Japan,” Art Journal, vol. 67, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 24-45.22. Sawaragi, Sens∂ to banpaku/World Fairs and World Wars, 265-65.23. Chiba, Gendai bijutsu itsudatsu-shi, 103-106. 24. Ming Tiampo, Gutai: Decentering Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 167.25. For Okamoto’s interest in J∂mon art, see Okamoto Tar∂, “On J∂mon Ceramics,” trans. Jonathan M. Reyn-olds, Art in Translation, vol. 1, no. 1 (March 2009): 49-60.26. Umesao Tadao, conversation with Okamoto Tar∂. Umesao Tadao, ed., Minpaku tanj∂, kanch∂ taidan (Birth of the Ethnographic Museum, Conversation among the Directors), Chºo K∂ronsha, 1978.27. Isozaki Arata, Han kais∂ [Coun-

Midori Yoshimoto

12 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY DECEMBER 2011

ter Recollection] (Tokyo: A.D.A. EDITA, 2001), 192.28. The Steel Pavilion (Tekk∂-kan) is the only other major structure remain-ing there today. See the website of Nihon Bankoku Hakurankai Kinen Kik∂ (Commemorative Organization for the Japan World Exposition ’70) http://park.expo70.or.jp/29. There was a week-long protest staged in the Tower of the Sun by one of the student activists. See Angus Lockyer, “The Logic of Spectacle c. 1970,” Art History 30.4

(September 2007): 571-89.30. Kurabayashi Yasushi, Okamoto Tar∂ to Yokoo Tadanori (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 1996), 19.31. Ibid., 213.32. Ibid., 213, 247.33. Isozaki, Han kais∂, 216.34. Ibid, 205.35. Ibid. Isozaki mentioned that he was derided for the statement by his peers,

including the art critic T∂no Yoshiaki. See Isozaki Arata, “T∏ningu pointo: Kºkan kara Kanky∂ e/Banpaku/Posutomodan,” 52. 36. Yoshimi Shunya, “Introduction” in Banpaku to sengo Nihon [World Expositions and Postwar Japan] (Tokyo: K∂dansha, 2011). 37. Sophie Knight, “Fukushima Crisis Prods Controversial Art Group into Action,” Asahi Shimbun (3 June 2011), accessed through http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201106020209.html