(...Here, as promised, is the second part of my survey of the Japanese underground arts scene over the past 60+ years.)
legendary live performance by Hanatarash
"Threat level" of the underground- how dangerous is
it?
The degree to which the arts underground is
"threatening" to the Japanese authorities is hard to fully gauge,
considering that one apparent strategy for its containment is based on outright
ignoring it rather than publicly denouncing or misrepresenting it (more on this
in a moment.) Before discussing any authoritative action to contain it or
eliminate it from public life, though, it is worth approaching the 'threat
level' from multiple angles for any response to it to be fully understood. Or,
more accurately, it would be best to approach the overall situation by
developing more of a typology of threats: the kinds of threats associated with
live performances can be made against the dominant social order (e.g. spurring
audiences to insurrectionary activity), against the public's psychological well-being
(e.g. the showcasing of traumatizing contents), against personal property and
infrastructure, against the smooth running of commercial enterprises, and
against the natural living environment or ecology. Within all the works
surveyed here, there are few acts that have touched on all of these particular
bases, but most manage to check off at least two items on the list.
I. The diminished role of political violence…
Some journalist accused me for producing a record that was
influenced by leftism. But I never intended producing [sic] such a kind of record nor expressing an idea of it in that
record.
- Juntaro Yamanouchi[i]
If it is the job of local criminal investigators to
determine who is a threat and to what, then they do not have a particularly
easy job with the current performance underground in Japan. Unlike the New
Left-affiliated groups of the 1960s, the membership of the underground from
roughly the 1980s to the present is more atomized, less likely to provide
audiences with clear explanations as to their motives (whether insurrectionary
or no), and occasionally seems to be carrying out its more destructive rituals
merely as an extreme form of catharsis rather than as a means of providing
running commentary on socio-political matters. Because the common modes of
performance also involve creators with dissimilar intentions (regardless of
their close associations), the attribution of criminal motives to any one unit
within the underground is difficult.
Politically oriented violence within the underground has
diminished over the last few decades for numerous reasons, and mainstream
consensus about the troubled future of Japan (once the sole provenance of
"refuseniks" and the counter-establishment) should not be discounted
as one of them. Whereas, in the mid-1980s, it could be said that the dominance
of Japanese imported cars and the cornering of the computer chip market made
“the United States […] more afraid of Japan than it had been since Pearl
Harbor,”[ii],
the “bubble crash” of the 1990s ensured that Japan would not become the world’s
foremost economic power after all. Owing to a confluence of factors like aggressive
speculation, the inflation of real estate and stock prices over the preceding
decade, and a practically ‘no-questions-asked’ access to credit, Japan entered
a still-unbroken era of economic stagnation - a secondary effect of which was
an almost masochistic self-accounting that tied economical decline in with the
declining Japanese birth rate, going so far as to prophecize the extinction of
the Japanese race.
For young people just graduating from university, the
1990s represented the first period of full-spectrum uncertainty since the war
years. Though it could be happily proclaimed in 1986 that "full-time,
lifetime, large-organization employment, has become the workplace norm,"[iii]
such "job for life" guarantees no longer exist, with higher and
higher percentages of fresh university graduates taking on unstable employment
as furiita [フリータ、a
quirky, polyglot portmanteau of the English “freelance” and German “arbeit,” or
“work.] Unemployment in some cities, such as Osaka, stands at 7%, which is
comparable to the national U.S. average during the most recent recession - one
of many salient facts that call Japanese exceptionalism into question.
Consider: it seems scarcely believable that, in the
mid-1980s, someone with the clout of outgoing Tokyo prefectural governor
Shintaro Ishihara could question the materialism of his people- one of his many
controversial pronouncements was delivered in the wake of the 2011 Tohoku
earthquake catastrophe, with a condemning tone more suited to the likes of
Jerry Falwell: “America's identity is freedom. France's identity is freedom,
equality and fraternity. Japan has no sense of that. Only greed. Materiality
greed, monetary greed.”[iv] This is
particularly scathing coming from a man who has built his identity upon
propping up Japan’s virtues relative to these other countries (Ishihara
co-authored, with Sony co-founder Akio Morita, the defining text on Japanese
economic independence from the U.S., The
Japan That Can Say No.)
Such governmental representatives would not be the only
ones doing the criticism, though. Suspicion of the Japanese government's
benevolence has also eroded considerably over the past twenty years, with the
exposition of corruption at the highest levels (e.g. former prime minster
Yoshiro Mori's receiving pre-listed shares of the company Recruit and then
re-selling them upon the commencement of public trading for a million-dollar
profit.) The government's incompetence in the face of disasters - again, the
2011 Tohoku earthquake, and Fukushima nuclear reactor crisis - seems to be
building this resentment further.
Finally, the attitude voiced during the 1960s and 1970s
with regards to Japan-U.S. relations has been 'brought home' by numerous local
scandals. The collision of the fishery training ship Ehime Maru with the USS Greenville in 2001, resulting in the deaths
of nine Japanese crewmembers, stoked a considerable amount of local anger about
the overreach and recklessness of U.S. military presence. The backlash against
the 1995 rape of a 6th-grade girl by several U.S. Marines stationed
at Okinawa was also not a peripheral news story, but a major event with lasting
policy implications: Nicholas Kristof insists that "it helped end the
taboo in Japan against discussing security issues and provoked a far-reaching
debate about military ties with the United States," and, moreover
"forced the United States to announce the consolidation and closure of
some of its facilities on Okinawa, and it led the Japanese government to
explore ways to treat Okinawa more equitably."[v]
Such a success via protest was at least equal to anything the Anpo generation had achieved, making one
wonder how much "agitation art" was really necessary to
"awaken" the Japanese public in certain scenarios. This restlessness
is, as of this writing, about to repeat itself owing to the local test-flying
of MV-22 Osprey aircraft (a unique four-rotor VTOL vehicle that Okinawa
residents believe is too crash-prone and thus likely to damage local property
or cause fatalities.)[vi]
In all these cases, we see a Japanese populace that has
not been unquestioning, since at least the late 1980s, of "Japan
Inc."'s tendency to conflate the roles of government and corporations, a
situation whose symptoms include increased militarism even in the face of
international censure, and a painfully familiar authoritarian demand for public
sacrifice of individual gains.
II. …but not violence, full-stop
Very much an obscene reflection of mainstream Japan's
directionlessness, the 'scene' now has more of a reputation than ever for
unpredictable acts of wildcat violence, whose roots lie less in political
agit-prop than in personal existential disgust or simple thrill-seeking. It is
intriguing that certain performances from the 1980s and onward were more
destructive than much of what preceded them in the 1960s and 1970s, while having
no discernible motive beyond acting as an extreme form of self-expression. This seems to be the case with Eye Yamatsuka's
infamous mid-80s Tokyo performances as Hanatarash, "consisting entirely of
on-stage destruction and utter disregard for anyone's safety," with the
"most notorious incident [involving] Yamatsuka throwing junk around with a
backhoe inside a venue."[vii] Another
performance is worth mentioning for its "enter at your own risk"
nature, which nonetheless did not prevent retaliatory action being taken
against the group for their transgressions:
At a 1985 gig in Tokyo's Superloft, Hanatarash had the
audience fill out forms relieving the band of responsibility for any possible
bodily harm caused by the performance. The show stopped just as Yamatsuka was
about to throw a lit molotov cocktail onto the stage, which was gasoline-drenched
from a barrel. The performance cost the venue ¥600,000 ($6000) in repair costs.[viii]
One piece of black humor resulting from these demolition
events was that, in spite of his role in one of the most popular Japanese
musical exports (Boredoms), Hanatarash was even placed on the persona non grata list of the Osaka club
Nanba Bears, which is now owned by Boredoms bandmate Seiichi Yamamoto.[ix]
There is, amazingly, no mention of any arrest record for Yamatsuka to be found,
though all of the accounts of his performance activity nonetheless note his
permanent ban on further live activity as Hanatarash. One Hanatarash
performance, which was stopped immediately before Yamatsuka attempted to throw
a molotov cocktail onto a gasoline-doused stage, could have otherwise resulted
in its initiator being punished for arson- a crime that, under Article 108 of
the Japanese Penal Code, can be punished as follows: "a person
who sets fire to and burns a building, train, tram, vessel or mine actually used as a dwelling, or in which a person is actually present, shall be punished by the death penalty or
imprisonment with work for life
or for a definite term of not less
than 5 years."[x]
Merzbow anti-KFC demo
The Hanatarash affair is remarkable not just for its
epitomizing a-political violence in the performance sphere, but also because
Yamatsuka has since evolved into a considerably more peaceful proponent of a
somewhat incoherent mysticism,[xi]
characterizing yet another stage of the "post-political" underground.
Though groups like the Zengakuren
still exist as a potential agitational force within Japan, they can no longer be
said they have any authoritative "voice" within the cultural
underground, or at least not one comparable to what they might have marshalled
in the 1960s. The loosely defined performance non-genre of "noise" -
locally known as noizu-kei - comes out of an international
post-industrial music scene that, as can be surmised by "zines" and
other documentation from the pre-Internet 1980s, is far more introspective than
the 1960s New Left, and less likely to think in a systemic manner that
attributes all social ills to a single force (e.g. capitalism.) However, their
actions do largely affirm Tarou Amano's suggestion of the previous Japanese
underground that "they more often express in their work a personal
critique of the rampant materialism in contemporary Japanese society."[xii]
Otherwise, protests might not be holistic affairs directed at overcoming an
entire political or economic system, but rather whatever the artist interprets
as the most damaging effect of that system: this is the case when noizu-kei champion Merzbow (a.k.a.
Masami Akita) holds low-key street protests not against "rampant
materialism" but against the junk food restaurants that engage in cruel
practices for the sake of increased productivity (Masami Akita is a committed
vegan who has, among other things, assisted with the 'Kentucky Fried Cruelty' protest
campaign in Tokyo.)
One of the primary external influences on this noizu-kei scene, William Bennett of the
'power electronics' group Whitehouse, might have inadvertently pinpointed the
ideological coordinates of this culture with his claim that "I don't like
censorship of absolutely anything, I take libertarianism to an extreme."[xiii]
Elsewhere, the anarcho-libertarian influence William Burroughs, with his
revulsion for any form of coercive behavior and his perception of 'Control' as
a kind of a parasitic alien lifeform, meshes comfortably with local hero Genpei
Akasegawa's feeling of 'Power' as some sort of living entity acting apart from
human agency. Even some of the performance actions of the most politically
active years from 1960-1970 can have their polemical content shorn from them,
if one so chooses: for example, despite the Left orientation of the Zero
Dimension performance group, their motto of 人間の行為をゼロに導 ["nothing / zero follows from
human action"] speaks to a far more nihilist and less utopian impulse than
what has typically been associated with radical protest art. Likewise, the
Happenings of Yayoi Kusama that Alexandra Munroe speaks of (which were against
"capitalist materialism, political imperialism, patriarchy, and 'uptight'
sexual morality"[xiv]) were also
refered to as "Self-Obliteration" festivals, a title that could apply
to the destruction of virtually any unwanted psycho-spiritual baggage.
As can be expected, the shift away from political
agitation and towards seemingly misdirected violence was met with disapproval
by those artists who see their artwork as an outgrowth of their politics. Some
of the loudest voices here are (again, not unexpectedly) expatriates living in
Japan and particularly within the Tokyo metropolitan area. Terre Thaemlitz, a
transgendered electronica producer, performer and leftist firebrand, notes how
In Japan, where Leftism is traditionally unidirectional and
still associated with antiquated images of extremists or terrorist
organisations such as the Nihon Sekigun (Japanese Red Army), many
Left-ish Japanese producers prefer political expression through the
omni-directional momentum of […] artistic strategies. In other words, allowing
their actions to be perceived as ‘artistic expressions’ subject to the
ambiguities of art discourse makes it difficult to identify a coherent social
agenda. Unfortunately, this clouding of thematic intent often results in a
conflict of interest between a producer’s desire for cultural change, and a
refusal to be seen as taking sides (let alone define what those various sides
maybe).[xv]
Thaemlitz' exasperated protest, though it is directed
primarily at the music-based portion of Japanese subculture and not the
entirety of the 'underground,' is not that far off-base as a criticism for the
underground en toto: though we can
wonder if there's really anything wrong with using the former as a metonym for
the latter. After all, the ecumenical nature of live music performances in the Japanese
underground frequently allows for theatrical events to be incorporated into the
musical performance, or to be featured as another "act" on the
night's show bill (e.g. mergers of butoh
dance and various forms of extreme music are not uncommon.) The 'live houses'
intended for musical performance are also one of the few 'official' venues that
can accommodate all types of underground activity, given the decline in
popularity of the indie theaters or 'ciné-clubs' that occurred in tandem with
the swell of pre-recorded home viewing media. As Chris Fujiwara reports,
"the vibrant ciné-club movement that Tokyo enjoyed during the 1960s,
1970s, and 1980s has largely vanished, its supporters having succumbed to the
pressures of jobs and families and the convenience of DVDs."[xvi]
Another point that is missed by Thaemlitz in her critique
is that members of the 'new' underground are better assimilated into mainstream
Japanese institutions than their forebears. By this I do not mean that their
performance activities are accepted
by those institutions, but that many of these individuals have found ways to
successfully lead "double lives": the noise performer Toshiji Mikawa,
for example, is a section chief at a major Tokyo bank, while his Kansai-area
counterpart Jojo Hiroshige (of Hijokaidan) funds the losses of his eclectic
record label and shop ['Alchemy'] with a successful trading card operation. As
of conversations I had with his colleagues circa 2005, Masami Akita of Merzbow reputedly
worked as a landlord for a number of apartment properties in the greater Tokyo
region.
Perhaps the local press blackout on these groups (more on
this momentarily) has had the silver lining of enabling these "double
lives" by not bringing undue attention to them- by all accounts,
performances of "noise"-affiliated groups took great liberties with
acceptable norms of Japanese public decency, particularly the 1980s wave of
performances that occurred before the surge in international, ethnographic
interest generated something of a taming effect. As the multi-disciplinary
artist and former Tokyo resident John Duncan relates in a radio introduction of
the group Hijokaidan,
Hijokaidan is known for their performances, where one of the women who
does vocals will also do actions like pissing on stage, or shitting on stage,
and the rest of the members will sort of move around on the stage after this…in this…and play homemade electronics,
and in the process destroy these homemade electronics […] as I said before,
when I introduce Hijokaidan, people who are not familiar with their gigs when
they first see them are rather skeptical that these people are office workers
that they’re looking at on the stage. But then when they start playing, they
shut up, and listen, and, well…change their minds, I hope.[xvii]
Duncan, perhaps the most controversial of the small
number of expatriates that joined Tokyo's performing arts underground in the
1980s, was himself no stranger to performances of a deliberately jarring
nature- his 1984 performance Move Forward
featured about 20 minutes of roaring sound output within the darkened,
concrete-walled ‘Plan B’ space in Tokyo, accompanied with film collage - of war
atrocities, S+M ritual etc. - being projected onto a paper screen that covered
the entire visual space of the forward-facing audience (the projection screen
stretched from ceiling to floor and from the left wall to the right.) In an
unmistakably climactic moment, this screen would be set ablaze by
Duncan at the end of the film portion, its fire-consumed remnants then
sprayed into the audience with a fire extinguisher.
So, it should come as no surprise that some threats
manage to check off more than one (and sometimes all) of the aforementioned
"threat type" boxes. It is also unsurprising that performances with
such destructive potential would put performers themselves at risk. Zero
Dimension is yet again worth naming here, as their bluntly self-abasing act of inserted
lit firecrackers in their asses (in full public view, of course) certainly put
them at greater physical risk than any bystanders or onlookers. It is difficult
to find commentary on these actions that comes from the police perspective,
though it is easy to imagine the dilemma they faced when confronting such
performances- they could step in and disrupt the performances for the immediate
good of the public health, or just step aside and let them burn themselves out
on self-directed violence (thus guaranteeing a lower rate of recidivism.)
The author has personally witnessed a number of music
performances, in both Tokyo and Osaka live spaces, that saw musicians whipping
themselves into such a frenzy that a complete disregard for their safety, or
maybe just an adrenalized sense of imperviousness to danger, could be assumed. This
could also be coupled with a compulsion to see things through to their logical conclusion,
lest the performers risk being seen as "inauthentic". Maso
"Masonna" Yamazaki, famous within the underground for destructive
10-minute live sets that consist mainly of non-verbal howls and contact
microphone feedback, hurls his body about on stage with an amusing recklessness
(though he is still probably outdone by the 80s antics of Hanatarash, e.g. an
occasion on which "[Yamatsuka] inflicted a deep wound on his leg with an
electrical saw, but carried on with the show."[xviii]
More amusingly are those events in which - like the nearly private
'psycho-motorik training tests' of the Viennese Aktionists - the potential for
self-harm exists without the reward of having these acts witnessed by a full audience.
Hide Fujiwara of the seminal absurdist punk act Ultra Bide mentions one such
incident at the Kyoto Drugstore, a tiny 'record bar' whose maximum capacity was
around twenty persons:
One night we came in and wired up our nabe pot to some
synthesizers, so when you touched anything in the pot, it would set off sounds.
Like, contact mics were put inside, just at the edge of feedback, so when you
touched the food inside the pot –Whaaaaaaaa!!! There were all these sounds
going off all the time from the synthesizers as people added things to the nabe.
Actually, thinking back on it now, it was pretty dangerous![xix]
Nevertheless, the main concern here remains the
underground's treatment of its audiences and the question of whether or not any
maltreatment is intentional in their performances. Though performers like
Merzbow have been known to perform with sound volumes and sustained frequencies
that can cause not only hearing impairment but also nausea and other negative
metabolic effects, these performances are rarely attacks on
"unsuspecting" or even unwilling audiences. Concert listings for such
performances, while available in major weekly cultural guides like Pia, are generally inconspicuous and
rarely ever featured as a "critic's pick" as they might be in
American urban weekly papers, while promotion for these shows (flyering, etc.)
is typically limited to the closed circuit of friendly specialty shops and
eating / drinking establishments. Attendees at concerts of Merzbow, Hijokaidan etc.
are, more often than not, already participating in the underground as
consumers, fellow producers or both.
(part three coming soon.)
[i] See http://www.artnotart.com/gero/info-int.rrr.html.
Retrieved October 31, 2012.
[ii] See http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/10/11/lie_of_the_tiger.
Retrieved November 7, 2012.
[iii] William W.
Kelley, "Rationalization and Nostalgia: Cultural Dynamics of New
Middle-Class Japan."
American Ethnologist, Vol. 13, No. 4
(Nov., 1986), pp. 603-618 (p. 604.)
[iv] In the
original: “アメリカのアイデンティティーは自由。フランスは自由と博愛と平等。日本はそんなものはない。我欲だよ。物欲、金銭欲.” Asahi Shinbun, March 14.
[v] Nicholas D.
Kristof, review of "Altered States: The United States and Japan since the
Occupation" by Michael Schaller. Foreign
Affairs, Vol. 76, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 1997), pp.
140-145 (p. 144.)
[vi] See http://original.antiwar.com/smurphy/2012/11/04/osprey-outrage-on-okinawa.
Retrieved November 4, 2012.
[vii] See http://www.discogs.com/artist/Hanatarash.
Retrieved October 14, 2012.
[ix] In the
original: "ボアダムスとして長年活動を共にする山本精一が店長を務めていたライブハウス、難波ベアーズでさえもハナタラシのライブは禁止されていた。See: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ハナタラシ。”Retrieved October 18, 2012.
[x] See http://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/law/detail/?id=1960&vm=04&re=02.
Retrieved October 14, 2012.
[xi] The
incoherence of which is too complex, and therefore distracting, to be broken
down in this paper. A fairly good overview is, however, available in
"Boredoms" by Hisham Akira Bharoocha, Bomb No. 104 (Summer 2008), pp. 53-58.
[xii] Tarou
Amano quoted in Munroe, p. 72.
[xiii] William
Bennett quoted in "Whitehouse" (various authors). Unsound Vol. 1 No. 5 (1984), p. 28.
[xv] Terre
Thaemlitz, "GLOBULE of NONSTANDARD: An Attempted Clarification of Globular
Identity Politics in Japanese Electronic ‘Sightseeing Music.’" Organised Sound, Vol. 8 No. 1 (April 2003), pp. 97- 107 (p. 99.)
[xvi] Chris
Fujiwara, "Places and Other Fictions: Film Culture in Tokyo." Film Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Summer 2008), pp. 42-47
(p. 45.)
[xvii] John
Duncan, Toshiji Mikawa- Radio Code cassette side A, AQM, Amsterdam,
1989.
[xviii] See http://www.discogs.com/artist/Hanatarash.
Retrieved October 14, 2012.
[xix] David
Novak, "2.5 x 6 Metres of Space:
Japanese Music Coffeehouses and Experimental Practices of Listening." Popular Music Vol. 7, No. 1 (January
2008), pp. 15-34 (p. 26.)