The Yomiuri Indépendant closed its doors for the last time in 1963, after complaints and attempts to censor a number of the exhibits. But some of the artists who had met under its auspices went out far beyond the exhibition space to confront and discomfit people with a new quality of directness. The Neo-Dada Organizers sold tickets in 1962 for a banquet marking the end of the war and the fall of the Japanese empire. Guests turned up expecting to eat, but found themselves treated instead to a taste of colonial-style exploitation: watching, stomachs empty, while the artists gorged themselves at their expense.
Two years later, another set of guests arrived in a room in Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel to be fitted by members of the Hi-Red Center collective for their very own personalized atomic fall-out shelter. Body size was measured through immersion in a bath, the capacity of the mouth by seeing how much water it could hold. Photographs were taken from six angles, which were then turned into the six planes of what looked very much like a coffin. Few shelters were sold, but Hi-Red Center’s satirical commercial pitch – billed as ‘Shelter Plan’ – was scarcely less ridiculous, they thought, than a society whose service industries blossomed while nuclear holocaust beckoned.
In a similar vein, the angura – underground – playwright Kara Jūrō set out to place his audiences in ‘terrifying situations’, some of which took place in public toilets, abandoned buildings, railway stations and even lily ponds – with stage entrances and exits a matter of emergence and submergence. He eventually settled on the use of a large red touring tent, which he first set up in the grounds of a Shinto shrine in Tokyo. It was the ideal location for a troupe of players whom Kara proudly described as kawara kojiki (‘riverbed beggars’) – after an unflattering Tokugawa-era descriptor for kabuki performers. The term referred much further back, too, towards the role of riverbeds as an ancient site of cosmos-changing drama. Gods and goddesses had once gathered in the sunless gloom of a dry riverbed to try to coax the Sun Goddess Amaterasu out of a cave in which she had hidden herself. They tried everything: banging drums, crashing cymbals, playing music, even bringing along a crowing cock – an exercise, perhaps, in sympathetic magic: trying to force the dawn through its most recognizable sound. Nothing worked. Finally, Ama no Uzume, Goddess of Mirth and Dawn, jumped onto an upturned tub, half-naked, and performed a bawdy, ecstatic dance. Everyone collapsed into laughter, and when Amaterasu took a peek to see what was going on, the Strong-Armed Man of Heaven hauled her from her hideout.
These ways of dealing with the divine – song and dance; entertainment and ecstatic trance; play and humour – defined Japan’s performing arts ever after, from ancient court rituals to preserve the health of the Emperor (on which the Ama no Uzume story may have been based) through to kabuki theatre, whose disreputable first performers were so often involved in prostitution that women and children had to be banned from appearing on stage. Kara mourned the crushing of that spirit, first via Tokugawa clampdowns (the authorities uneasy about audiences having their passions inflamed by violent or romantic tales) and then by Meiji leaders reinventing kabuki for the purposes of cultural diplomacy: turning raucous all-day revelry into plush, gas-lit evening entertainment, to be enjoyed in elegant attire and complete silence. By the time kabuki had been made fit for Japan’s imperial couple, and for a performance to be offered at Buckingham Palace (around the turn of the twentieth century), there was little left any longer that would have tempted Amaterasu out of her cave.
Kara’s attempts to give theatre back its thrust and spontaneity must occasionally have had audiences missing their television screens. His restoration of the old kabuki walkways brought actors right out into the midst of people, performing plays that were centred on the actors’ raw physicality and confrontational energy. If those plays could feel intimidating, they were also notoriously hard to follow, veering from lavatory humour to esotericism and offering plots and metaphors out of which little narrative sense could be made. One of the more straightforward pieces was John Silver: The Beggar of Love, written at the end of the 1960s about pirates and their nostalgia for the destructive sexual adventures of their youth. The setting shifted between a toilet in contemporary Japan back across the seas to Japan’s wartime exploitation of Korea and Manchuria – in natural resources, money, conscript labour and organized prostitution. The ‘new Japan’, Kara wanted to remind people, has been built on the sins of the old one. And if we think that we cannot possibly become trapped and defeated by circumstance, in the way that our parents’ generation did, then we are deluding ourselves.
The playwright Terayama Shūji and choreographer Hijikata Tatsumi were likewise steeped in the war years and their aftermath. Both grew up amidst desperate poverty in wartime northern Japan, Terayama losing his father and Hijikata watching one sister sold into prostitution while another died. So Terayama was deadly serious when he had members of his troupe jump into the audience, insult them, refuse to let them see the end of a play, spread them out at different locations across a city (so that they would see different performances), trap them in the venue, or even set fire to parts of the stage. He wanted to upset people, and to make them see the forces at work in controlling ostensibly free societies. Subservience in contemporary Japan, he thought, was far more ephemeral, even game-like, than people realized. It drew its real power from a deeply human exuberance that comes with alternately obeying and disobeying rules. One of his plays, Nuhikun (‘Directions to Servants’), featured two contraptions on stage. A ‘Saint–Master machine’ was crafted to resemble the Meiji imperial throne, via which servants took it in turns to become the master – receiving the permission to discipline, punish and pleasure at will. A ‘self-spanking machine’ allowed the user to pull a string and receive a welcome wallop.
Hijikata rooted his Ankoku Butō – ‘dance of utter darkness’ – in the shamanic traditions of his part of Japan: blind female shamans called itako possessed the power to call up the spirits of the dead. Hijikata wanted people to encounter those spirits as real: in the slow, contorted movements of a semi-naked, white-painted body on a darkened stage; in fingers twitching and eyes rolling back in their sockets; and in a face grotesquely contorted, in possession and pain. Hijikata said he sometimes felt the spirit of his dead sister scratching around looking for him in the dark while he danced.
Hijikata Tatsumi on stage One of Hijikata’s greatest performances was Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese – Revolt of the Flesh, in 1968. It cast him as a virgin on her wedding day, garbed in a back-to-front white kimono. The clothes came off to reveal a scrawny, naked man wearing a golden phallus, entering the convulsions of an ancient fertility ritual that culminates in him throttling a live rooster. Eventually, he himself becomes the sacrifice, hauled upwards off the stage and into the darkness.
But if this was a ‘heretic ritual’ – as the novelist and Hijikata fan Mishima Yukio said of Ankoku Butō – were the post-war, high-growth faithful paying attention? What if the people Hijikata and other radical artists most needed to reach were those least likely to exchange the cheery pop and easy-going humour of Shabondama horidē for the chance to see and hear and smell a chicken meet its maker?
Avant-garde audiences were made up, in large part, of students and young people, some of whom were turning, by the end of the decade, from the fleshly and the primal towards outright violence. Tensions over study and work conditions at home and Japan’s support for its US ally abroad – despised military bases now being used as staging posts for a war in Vietnam – erupted into protests across more than one hundred university campuses in the late 1960s, paralleling student protests elsewhere in the world. One Japanese protestor described his school years as like ‘living in handcuffs’, all for the sake of getting into a university where classes were boring, overcrowded and increasingly expensive, and the curriculum revolved around the needs of the country’s employers.
Members of Hi-Red Center scrubbing the pavement with tiny toothbrushes, as part of a ‘Be Clean!’ event satirizing Tokyo’s Olymp
ic preparations (16 October 1964) Student activists on the ‘New Left’ during these years were clearer than ever about their most difficult challenge: the sheer intimacy of their enemy. University authorities could be barracked over miserably functional curricula, professors cornered in classrooms over their corrosive political or social views. But how was something as intangible yet pervasive as ‘everydayness’ – nichijōsei – to be tackled? The control of parents, the complacency of privilege, the failure of Anpo, the lure of affluence, the comforts of home, the opinions of others, the glow of the television: the combined power of all these things, as the dominating features of the day-to-day world, led some students to conclude that only behind barricades could they live true, honest lives – eating together, reading, talking and reflecting. Some of the student protestors in the late 1960s put on helmets and took up wooden staves against riot police who were made to stand in for all of society’s incorporeal wrongs.
Meanwhile, on both the left and right of politics there was desperate anger at the failings of comrades: on the left, an extreme political fastidiousness that contorted into paranoia; on the right, a display of romance and bloody patriotism choreographed to shame all those who witnessed it. Together, these impulses worked a turbulent era of protest to its savage climax.
In March 1970, nine members of a group called Sekigun-ha (the Red Army Faction) boarded Japan Airlines Flight 351 armed with samurai swords and dummy pipe bombs, concealed in the sorts of tubes used to transport fishing rods. They proceeded to hijack the plane somewhere above Mount Fuji, hoping to leave a country where political consciousness was low and police surveillance all too accomplished. They would train instead in Cuba, returning to Japan when they were ready to begin the revolution. Preparations had been extensive. The group had rented a hall, and arranged its folding seats according to the aircraft layout. They had brought along restraints for each passenger. What they hadn’t done was check whether an internal flight would have enough fuel aboard to leave the country.
It didn’t. Instead, an extraordinary series of events unfolded that began with the plane touching down in Japan’s southern city of Fukuoka, where fuel was taken on and some of the passengers were let off (including one who said he planned to recommend the hijackers to Japan Airlines as cabin crew: they had changed the ashtrays, and given him something to read). The plane took off again, landing next in what the group were led to believe was North Korea. In fact, they were in South Korea, where fake signage had been hurriedly put in place by the American and South Korean military in order to support the illusion.
The plane remained on the runway for three whole days, amidst hijacker threats to blow it up: thanks to physics and chemistry students in their ranks, Sekigun-ha possessed genuine grenades made of dynamite and small metallic balls taken from a pinball-like gambling game called pachinko. Finally, Japan’s Vice Transport Minister was swapped for the remaining hostages, and the plane made its way up to Pyongyang. The group still hoped to get to Cuba, but the North Korean regime had other plans for them, namely to assist their intelligence services, possibly with the notorious abductions of Japanese citizens that began later in the decade, many of them smuggled across the Sea of Japan aboard inflatables and ships. Nearly half a century later, some of the hijackers were still living in North Korea, in a dedicated ‘Japanese village’.
Later that year, one of Japan’s greatest and most self-consciously patriotic writers spat contempt for his countrymen:
Post-war Japanese have opportunistically welcomed economic prosperity, forgetting the principles of the nation, losing their native spirit, pursuing the trivial without correcting the essential … leading themselves into spiritual emptiness. We have stood by like helpless bystanders, biting our teeth hard, passively witnessing the sell-off of our national politics over the last 100 years, deceiving ourselves about the humiliation of defeat in the war rather than confronting it. The Japanese themselves have assaulted their own history and tradition.
No longer willing to remain amongst the ‘living dead’, and having remarked to a friend after completing his masterpiece tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, that there was little left for him to do, Mishima Yukio headed for the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of the Japan Self-Defence Forces. The feeble boy who had dodged physical exercise at school, the youth who had allowed a doctor’s error to excuse him from fighting in the Philippines had now become the muscle-bound fantasy figure of Seventeen’s rightist dreams.
Fifteen years before, Mishima had embarked on a body-building programme, regarding the classical Greek body as intimately bound up with the noble wisdom of that age: firm flesh, pure spirit (he kept a giant statue of Apollo in his garden). Mishima exchanged an interest in psychoanalysis – in the course of which he spent time with Kosawa Heisaku and published a novel on the subject (Ongaku, ‘Music’, 1965) – for SDF training, and then formed a small private army of his own, the tatenokai (Shield Society). Now, on 25 November 1970, with four members of that militia by his side, he entered the SDF barracks, grabbed the commandant (with whom he had done the courtesy of making an appointment) and bound him to a chair.
From the commandant’s balcony, Mishima roared a speech at the soldiers below, inciting them to rise up for the Emperor – ‘Is there no one who will hurl his body against the Constitution?’ Then, having met with little more than silence and derision – which in his own disillusionment with his compatriots, he may well have expected – Mishima retired to the commandant’s office, cut his stomach open with a sword, and had a man from his militia behead him. If the quisling so-called soldiery were immune to fine words, let them have a sacrament instead: seppuku, the classic samurai death, the ultimate selfless act.
Of the Sekigun-ha members who had stayed behind in Japan when Flight 351 took off, some left to form the globe-trotting and infamously violent ‘Japanese Red Army’. Its activities over the next few years included an airport massacre in Israel (twenty-six people killed), an attack on an oil refinery in Singapore, assaults on embassies around the world and the hijacking of three passenger planes. Other members helped to create a larger Japanese group called the United Red Army, taking to the mountains to avoid the authorities.
Moving from base to base, a willingness to die for their cause and a determination to avoid the lure of comfort began to morph into the use of beatings – given or received – as a means of confirming commitment and enhancing self-critique. The process claimed its first life in late December 1971. Another member of the group died a few weeks later, after her comrades stepped in to help when half an hour of punching herself in the face failed to yield the desired results. Eight more deaths and two executions left only five people trudging towards yet another new mountain hideout in late February 1972. Expecting trouble, they made a hostage of a man they discovered in the lodge. The authorities found them and cut the power to the accommodation – the television blinked off, but it left a single, terrible image seared into their minds. US President Richard Nixon had landed in China to make a peace of sorts: it seemed the end of all they had fought for. The police outside soon began bombarding them with surrender pleas from loved ones, broadcast from loudspeakers. They used baseball pitching machines to fire rocks onto the corrugated iron roof of the lodge, creating a constant rattling sound that was intended to deprive them of sleep.
At home, tens of millions of Japanese sat back in their living rooms and watched as riot police moved in with a wrecking ball and took out a chunk of the lodge wall. Jets of water and tear gas shells were fired through the void, from which gunfire escaped, killing two policemen. After an eight-hour gun battle, viewers sighed with relief as the hostage was at last rescued and the group members taken alive. Court proceedings traced in intimate detail a journey from concern for society to apparent hatred of it; from radical political analysis, through asceticism, to spectacular barbarity.
Mishima Yukio (1925–70) addressing SDF soldiers on the day of his death What sympathy had existed in wider society fo
r individuals of conscience who risked their own prospects to improve the lives of others was draining away fast. Students had tied up their teachers and donned improvised military uniforms. Distressed families had been seen hurrying down the stairs from a hijacked aircraft. Japan’s first Nobel Prize laureate for literature, Kawabata Yasunari, had been spotted wading through reporters to reach the site of his friend’s grizzly, puzzling final act. And young Japanese men and women had turned guerrilla, both in far-off countries and here at home, up in the mountains. If the search – the battle – for the soul of post-war Japan were to continue, other ways would have to be found of fighting it.
15
Pulling Strings
The Lucky Dragon 5 tuna panic of the mid-1950s had barely subsided when news came in of yet more potentially contaminated catches, this time at the southern end of Japan’s main islands. People living along the coast of the Shiranui Sea in Kyūshū reported seeing ‘dancing cats’ around their neighbourhoods: cats walking awkwardly, tripping, convulsing, running in circles and foaming at the mouth. Some of the cats threw themselves into the sea. Others were thrown in by locals – a combination of compassion and creeping anxiety. Meanwhile, birds were seen cruising into buildings, or falling out of the sky. Barnacles no longer clung to boats. Seaweed was losing its colour. Pine trees near the shore turned brown and died.
Then, in the last days of April 1956, children began to be hospitalized with symptoms ranging from speech difficulties and unusual shifts in voice pitch to numbness, loss of motor control, tunnel vision and trouble with hearing and swallowing. The human dimension of this bizarre, escalating crisis had so far been contained within family homes. Dying fishermen were roped to their beds to contain their thrashing. Now, at last, it was attracting clinical and public attention. By the end of the year, fifty-four people had been identified as sharing similar, unexplained symptoms. Seventeen of those had died.
Japan Story Page 32
