The Struggle For Space
I. When "the underground" is not underground
In Metabolism 1960,
the fundamental document of the avant-garde Japanese Metabolism architecture
group, architect Kiyonori Kikutake complains that "the Japanese still live
in an age when 'the buildings stand lower than the trees…it is time to separate
from the horizontal city.'"[i] His advice
has obviously been taken to heart, as plans for the vertical city are still
proceeding. This is especially evident if we look not only skyward but also
beneath the ground, where Japan hosts perhaps the most elaborate system of
subterranean habitation and commercial space on the planet.
In the popular imagination, images of literal subterranean
space often resonate with images of those resistance groups who, because of
their one-time association with seeking refuge in the space of this
underground, became known themselves as "the underground." The term
has always connoted a kind of social invisibility and incommensurability with
the larger society, a condition that could be either voluntary (i.e. a
'lifestyle choice') or a condition that was forced upon subcultural elements by
that larger society. However, the history of modern insurgencies, particularly
those that are based in the urban areas of industrially developed nations, reveals
that the concept of 'basement agitators' is questionable at best. As with most
world cultures, the Japanese language is rich with idiomatic phrases
associating "darkness" with criminality - the argot relating to the
black market is, on its own, an inventive code laden with references to
"fog" or "moonlit nights" [i.e. items available at black
market prices.]
In the case of Tokyo, subterranean space can be as highly
developed as overground space, and is not seen merely as a sort of transitional
or inerstitial space without social or commercial functions. Given that this
space is expected to be used rather than merely passed through, plenty of
thought is given to crime prevention here, and the ubiquitous police
sub-stations or kouban [交番、colloquially refered to as "police boxes"] are
well represented along with regular foot patrols. Nevertheless, owing to the
acts of the Aum Shinrikyo sect, specifically their 1995 sarin gas attack on the
Tokyo subway system that killed twelve individuals and injured over five
thousand, the underground remains a place of potential insurrection and
catastrophe within the public mind. Most forms of mass transit have, of course,
been conceived of as ideal for staging acts of terror and political violence,
given the ease with which exit points can be choked and the large number of
human captives that can be used as negotiating chips or - for the more
fanatical groups - as sacrifices for 'the cause.' The concept of the 'captive
audience' has also been put into play for some of the groups mentioned in this
paper: the Zero Dimension group was known to perform 'sleeping' actions in
which they would lie atop futon
mattresses spread out on the floor of train carriages (a gesture also repeated
within galleries, but probably made more notorious on the public transportation
system, and more effective in conveying their intended criticism of Japanese
society's endemic passivity.)
It would seem that an urbanization of subterranean space
was inevitable in Tokyo: boasting over 270 individual subway stations and some
300 kilometers of covered ground, the Tokyo subway already represented a
remarkable move into the earth, and plans gradually appeared which would
further colonise the space beneath the surface with station-linking corridors
of commerce. It is somewhat
interesting to note the name that, in the early 1990s, was proposed for these
underground complexes by the civil engineering and construction specialists at
the Taisei Corporation: "Alice Cities," refering to the titular
heroine in Lewis Carroll's Alice In
Wonderland that falls down the rabbit hole and encounters a fantastic world
there. Such a name would seem to suggest a chaotic experience rather than a
mirror of the overground order, which may have also figured into the less
fanciful name given by the Shimizu Corporation to its similar project- the
"Urban Geo Grid." Though an article that appeared during the larval
stages of these projects warned that "Japan's densely populated
lowlands are mostly founded on loose geologic strata, making underground
construction particularly difficult,"[ii]
such undertakings now appear to have been massively successful. As Peter Schöller relates:
The Japanese underground centres are counted among the best
and most rationally laid-out retail and restaurant facilities on earth. They
are, however, purely commercial, offering neither cultural or social facilities
nor any starting point for communication and urban identification.[iii]
If this on its own does not provide a convincing idea as to the
commercialization of subterranean space in Tokyo, Schöller gives a fairly exhaustive inventory of uses
for the underground (keep in mind that this inventory has only expanded since
the 1976 publication of his report):
Here you will find all convenient facilities, tended to by a
day-labor force of thousands: restaurants, coffee and tea houses, refreshments,
bars, barber shops, kiosks […] of every type and price range, discount shops,
travel bureaus, counseling offices, postal agents, bank branches, the
occasional arcade with gaming machines, and theaters. Systems of escalators and
elevators connect the underground floors with the office levels rapidly, for
those who aren't permitted much time to run their errands.[iv]
Schöller also points
out some particular overground locations that had their distinctive features of
grandeur and luxury 'mirrored' by underground development, e.g. Frank Lloyd
Wright's now-demolished Imperial Hotel (1923-1968), which was linked to an
extensive series of underground shopping arcades.[v]
Other accclaimed subterranean systems of pedestrian transit, such as
those built around Montreal's Place Bonaventure, Central Station and Place
Ville Marie, have claimed
inspiration from such developments (though the first recorded
"underground commerce street," the chika shoutengai [地下商店街] built in
Nagoya in 1957, was developed almost concurrently with the Canadian
developments.)
The degree to
which subterranean space is intended to duplicate over-ground activity can be
seen in the clusters of specialized or themed commercial zoning,
quaintly refered to as "towns" in spite of these zones' relative
smallness (perhaps as large as a couple of city blocks, but hardly equal in
scale to any conventional estimation of a 'town.') Amusing names such as
"sweets town," "fancy town" and "high mode town"
(generally rendered in katakana text
and spoken as slight phonetical variants on the original English words)
designate 'functional clusters' given over to shops for pastries and ice cream,
formal wear, and couture fashion,
respectively. The underground centers tend not to even be accessible after
shopping hours, as the various means of accessing them - stairway entrances
leading down from the sidewalk, or elevators situated within the more heavily
trafficked office buildings - become
shuttered or unusable after the nightly termination of underground train
service. This sealing off of the underground makes it inconvenient to use this
space for the type of events that the cultural underground enjoys, such as the
all-night concerts meant to last from the time of the "last train's"
departure until the time when trains resume service around 5 a.m. For this reason, venues such as "live
houses" and live theaters are practically nonexistent in subterranean
Japan, and any intrepid attempt to open such a venue would likely not be
officially approved, given that these venues are difficult to integrate into
the "functional clusters" mentioned above. Schöller's lament from the mid-1970s, i.e.
"these systems do not offer the opportunity to stop and rest [...] there
are almost no cultural facilities, and no approaches that suggest an
identification of the citizen with his city, history and culture,"[vi]
still holds very much true because of this.
This has meant that any type of non-sanctioned
performance happening within this space is necessarily going to have the flavor
of a confrontation or protest to it, an activity that is seen in Keiya
Ouchida's 1970 documentary film Chikatetsu
Hiroba [地下鉄広場]. Peter Eckersall recalls
how, in February of 1969, an ever-expanding band of "folk guerrillas"
conspired to turn the subterranean space by the West exit of Shinjuku Station
into a performance space, wherein
…revolutionary dictums were combined with performative modes
of resistance such as protest actions, mass singalongs, chants, and sit-ins
that blocked the main pathways through the station. There were also regular
clashes with riot police that bled out from the station, so that nearby roads
and neighbourhoods were also included in the scene of activity.[vii]
Just as the 1960s were an exceptional era for protest within
Japan, though, these events at Shinjuku remain an atypical moment within the
larger history of Japan's subterranean spaces. Interestingly, the candid events
portrayed in Chikatetsu Hiroba also
show how this type of "subterranean" activism was already cresting at
that point (i.e. the film sequences showing numerous commuters and passerby who
either scold the protestors or explain why their loyalties lie elsewhere.)[viii]
Peter Eckersall, upon viewing this film, notes the degree
to which authorities went in order to maintain that the underground was a place
to replicate the business activity of the overground, and not an 'alternative'
space to be used at the whim of society's discontents: "the sign for the
underground plaza – using the word hiroba
– is hastily covered over by a hand-drawn sign reading tsuuro [通路] or passage. The name
‘underground passage’, a term stressing the functional linking of the two sides
of the station and not a place for lingering, comes to replace the more utopian
ideal of the plaza, and is still used today."[ix]
Thus, any possible emotional attachment to the place was neutered, since - as
Eckersall is suggesting - "passages" are places of continual movement
rather than of thoughtful pauses. In both the underground plaza areas of modern
Tokyo, and also its major above-ground agora
like the Hachiko Square attached to Shibuya Station, other modes of behavioral
modification are now being put in place, such as the strategic placement of
video screens in those areas where one can stop for a moment without impeding
the flow of pedestrian traffic. The famous building-height video projections at
Hachiko Square, for example, present a particular sonic and visual distraction
that seems to discourage using the square for anything but its prescribed
purpose as a meeting space (as most
locals do refer to it.) The video screens' rapid 'zapping' from one short audio-visual
segment to the next, which are predominantly advertisements, produces a
situation in which "the behavioral cognition of the urban becomes
drastically differentiated from the traditional modes of physical
community."[x] This is not to say that the square is
not utilized by several variations on the "man with a megaphone"
theme (politicians, religious groups, and the occasional social activist), but
in most cases their efforts are Quixotic attempts to draw listeners in a
chaotic, transitional sort of urban launch pad.
II. Spatial
re-evaluation: erasing 'enclosures,' smoothing space
The explosion
in digital, broadband communication has had a profound effect on perceptions of
urban space and on the means of interacting with it. Not the least among these
has been the devaluation of physical space relative to its 'digital virtual'
counterpart, with the use of interactive AJAX[xi] maps
and Google Earth™ streetscapes preceding first-hand "immersive"
experience in the urban environment (or, at least creating a situation where
the authenticity of the latter must be judged on its resemblance to its
'digital virtual' counterpart.)
Meanwhile, in
the last few years, the phenomenon of 'flash mobs' organized via text-messaging
has already shown one example of 'mono-functional' spaces being appropriated
for quirky perfomances, e.g. sudden outbreaks of synchronized singing or
dancing in the food court areas of American shopping malls (violent 'flash
mobs' have also been formed for the express purpose of overwhelming security
and police in commercial areas as well, but this is a discussion for another day.)
In the more unorthodox manifestations of this phenomenon - e.g. humans
gathering together as living sculptures with coordinated frozen gestures - we can see a mass urban movement that,
while generally not identifying as intermedia artists, nonetheless shares many
of the same attitudes towards the social use of urban space. In all cases, what
Jonathan Raban called the „hard city“ (its built / material fabric) runs up
against the „soft city“ or the individualized interpretation of surroundings
that exists within the experience of each urban dweller.
We have not
had to wait for the rise of the 'virtual city' to re-envision 'assigned' spaces
as having different functions, though, as the story of Chikatetsu Hiroba attests to. Noriyuki Tajima notes that
'hybrid structures' in Tokyo can arise from appropriations as simple as "skate-boarders
us[ing] handrails for their special boarding techniques, while homeless people
regularly occupy entrance canopies as sleeping spots…alternatively, a young
group of teenagers uses the mirrored glass façade of high tech buildings for
their dance practice."[xii] This
inventory is not exhaustive by any means, and does show that willfully
'radical' culture has not cornered the market on personalizing urban space. Students
of Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari’s spatial theories might refer to this
as "deterritorialization," a process of moving between contexts in
which the ‘territories’ in question “do not refer only to geographical or
physical entities, but also to mental, psychical and cultural territories
(ecologies in later Guattarian vocabulary.”)[xiii]This
process is often seen by the academically-minded as a quest for Deleuze's
"pure affect," though again it must be stressed that activities like
those mentioned above are done as much out of practical concerns (e.g. the lack
of alternate spaces in which to practice coordinated dance routines) as they
are done to communicate a desire for social change.
Zero Dimension demonstration
Yet while the project of deterritorializating space may
be unwittingly carried out by groups of teenage skateboarders and pop dancers,
the various agitational performance troupes like Hi Red Center, Zero Dimension
and the Situation Theatre have gone one step further by 'deterritorializing'
some other aspect of performance or social exchange and then grafting that on
to the 'deterritorialized' urban space. We can return again to the Cleaning Action of the Hi Red Center for
an example of this, as the content of this performance removed the events
contained therein from their utilitarian origins. Or we could see the Situation
Theatre’s nomadic red tent also as a deterritorialization of its traditional
association with (in the case of Japan) non-urban modes of performance.
This
deterritorializing habit was not entirely absent during modern Japan's most
heavily-policed years in the 1930s-1940s, though it had to be limited to
artwork of a non-performance nature: one of the most popular sites of
resistance during that period was the public toilet, whose walls would be
turned into makeshift galleries and - more commonly - as "sites of
exchange for subversive information" (Detlev Schauwecker notes that
"one graffito in a factory loo read 'this toilet is our propaganda board
[for preparation for a strike]...use it effectively!'"),[xiv]
while there were still more provocative calls to "kill" the
"crazy emperor" or to "overthrow the emperor."[xv] Whether knowingly or unwittingly, this
practice was echoed by John Duncan when he pasted collaged A4 posters of
alternatingly pornographic and banal imagery in public toilets central to
Tokyo's hubs of fashion (Shibuya), finance (Hibiya), government
(KokkaiGijidomae), and entertainment (Shinjunku).
It would be
disingeneous to suggest that, for all the radical strategies they have used to
ensure their survival, the anguro
culture has not embraced the concept of "hangouts," or fixed
gathering places. David Novak notes, for example, the underground influence of music-themed
tea / coffeehouses or kissaten [喫茶店]
that were originally intended as listening rooms (an idea that persists in
Japan today in the form of "record bars," where sizable libraries of
recorded music are on hand for patrons to request as they drink.) Novak claims
that it was the jazz-oriented "kissa"
which, though they "shared with earlier music cafés a refined
salon-like atmosphere of intellectual connoisseurship," were also "less
public, and encouraged a more particular clientele drawn by the slightly hedonistic
insularity of its dimly-lit, contemplative ambience."[xvi]
What Novak mentions next is of particular interest for determining what made
these environments more unique:
In the bohemian counterculture of the 1960s, the jazu-kissa
became a symbolic meeting ground for the student [underground], much like Greenwich Village folkhouses in NewYork
City during the same period, where progressive politics and music tastes were
interwoven. Kissa became crucibles for radical student life, hosting
film screenings, lectures and meetings.[xvii]
It is easy for us,
surveying this scene from a culture that is saturated with music, to not see
the radical implications of using these spaces in such a manner. In effect, by
using spaces explicitly intended for listening
as "crucibles for radical student life" (from which we can easily
infer that this listening was supplemented by other behaviors), the students
were again re-purposing the space to meet other ends besides those originally
intended. Musician Otomo Yoshihide recalls his own youth spent in these spaces
and mentions the "notebooks filled with the opinions of young
leftists" that could be found there, strongly suggesting that the spaces
served as information exchanges even under the strict set of rules that
governed them (particularly the insistence that customers treat the spaces like
libraries, remaining as silent as possible while music is playing.) This state of affairs shows that the "chikatetsu hiroba" syndrome
was not all-pervasive - i.e., the mere authoritative naming of a space did not
have the binding power of a magic spell - and that less heavily-trafficked
forms of public space could still be redefined. Spaces such as the kissa had many strategic advantages for hosting underground
activities: for one, the average smallness of these spaces meant that there was hardly ever room
to fit more than a couple dozen patrons, ensuring that they would be
"occupied space" for the underground and less easy for agent
provocateurs or outsiders to infiltrate.
Ideally, the
underground’s smoothing of space would work in such a way that their
modifications would seem natural to outside observers. In this sense,
deterritorialization could be seen as a preliminary step to a kind of urban
camouflaging and an eventual dissolution of contextual boundaries. Such a
camouflaging or blending technique is evident in the placement of the Off Site [2000-2005]
club (which, in the words of its former proprietor, was already meant to be
multi-use in nature, acting as both music club, coffeehouse and art gallery.)[xviii]
The club was situated within a quiet residential neighborhood, where the
outdoor sounds of tofu vendors and the neighborhood fire brigade (who announced
their presence with wooden handclappers) often leaked through the venue's open
door and intertwined with the sounds of the nightly performances. The onkyo style of music that was associated
with this space - notable for its use of lengthy silences, and deliberately
limited tonal vocabulary - was
partially formed by the need to perform in a way that would be suitably
challenging to audiences, yet not disruptive of the surrounding community. As
such, it is interesting to consider that the performers in the underground do
not merely port their current activities to a new environment or impose these
activities on it regardless of environmental pecularities, but develop new forms as a response to the rules already
encoded within these surroundings. In a way, this is similar to the activities
of banned performance groups like Hungary's Squat Theatre, who eventually
transfered their plays to their personal apartments (at some points even
building full stage sets within the available space) and in turn rewrote the rules
for audience interaction.
III. Intra-city
nomadism and "the ephemeral"
All of the
above concepts of deterritorialization and dissolution, given that they imply a
constant revisability of the city, lend credence to much post-War urban
planning and its utopian fascination with ephemerality. British architect
Cedric Price was one early and notable proponent of a city of impermanence, a
theory which he expounded on in the proposal for his Fun Palace:
The increasingly obvious reduction of the permanence of many
institutions […] allied with the mass availability of all means of
com-munication, have demanded an almost sub-conscious awareness of the vast
range of influences and experiences open to all at all times. This dimension of
awareness enables a questioning by all of existing facilities available in,
say, a metropolis- not merely an assessment of physical or measurable
limitations. The city today works in a constipated way, in spite of its
physical and architectural limitations. The legacy of re-dundant buildings and
the resultant use patterns acts as a straitjacket to total use and enjoyment.[xix]
Price's collaborator
Joan Littlewood also proposed, of urban spaces meant for theatrical display and
creative use, that they not be "segregated enclosures" limited to
these uses. In Littlewood's Laboratory of Fun, there was also to be "no
rigid division between performers and audience."[xx]
Though it is unlikely that Littlewood knew of the actions of groups like Zero
Dimension and the Hi Red Center, it is interesting how close her ideal cleaves
to the actions of that group. As a side note, though, we have to wonder what
she would have thought of the urban demolition rituals of Hanatarash or
Hijokaidan, or of any other underground events in which the free-spirited “no
rigid division” has nonetheless not erased the division between perpetrator /
attacker and victim.
Whether they
were familiar with urban planning theories or not, the idea of "the
ephemeral" is one that has always been close at hand by both criminals and
artists who must, by dint of their work's heretical content, be prepared for it
to not last long before it is unceremoniously destroyed or removed by the
authorities. We have already seen this come into play with the toilet
"exhibitions" of wartime artists, and countless other underground
forms exist that have had a built-in sense of their own temporary nature- thus
opting for an unequivocal strength of 'message' over aesthetic refinement.
Physical mobility
is also a necessary function of any fringe group that finds the power of the
establishment arrayed against it. While being ambushed by superior forces in
one's base of operations may provide a segment of the viewing public with some
sympathy for the besieged (as in the American cases of Ruby Ridge and Waco),
few would want things to ever come to this, as it almost always means the
defeat or destruction of the resisting group. So, for groups within Japan who
are cognizant of the threat they pose to the established authorities, the
better strategy seems to be one of - if not 'constant movement' - then settling
in one space or district with the advance understanding that it will not be a
permanent residence. This was a strategy adopted early on by the United Red
Army (e.g. "a new hideout was always rented well in advance in a different
prefecture from the robbery site, with another alternative if they could not
escape a prefecture-wide blockade.")[xxi]
A similar
expectation of displacement has to be applied to any underground performers who
want to stay busy - if not because their activity is seen as outright criminal,
then certainly because the utilitarian structure of Tokyo can never seem to
accommodate "alternative" spaces long enough for them to become the
kind of fixtures that last over multiple generations of cultural development
(e.g. Amsterdam's Paradiso club, or Chicago's Cabaret Metro.) The
"functional clusters" mentioned earlier are very much a feature of
the whole urban territory, not just its subterranean space, and as such it is
awkward for the proprietors of performance spaces to set up shop in areas where
they 'stick out like a sore thumb' in the surrounding community or seem to
invite activity that is a nuisance to their neighbors.
We have already seen, with the example of Ise Shrine,
that built-in impermanence in architecture is something of a special pre-modern
innovation within Japan. The pre-planned
impermanence of personal habitations, if not entire cities, was also a regular
theme of post-War architectural theory, with Kiyonori Kikutake designing his
Marine City and Cell City projects along the organic / cellular concept of a
"move-net," "in which fixed structures allow building
units to 'grow and die and grow again'"[xxii]. Elsewhere, the reassessment of urban
space a la Cedric Price -
particularly the view of architecture as a self-regulating, mutable
"ecology" - closely binds the previous practice of continual
reassessment with one of resisting the concept of "fixed" locations
for activities. Since at least the 1960s, a movement within 'radical'
architecture and architectural criticism has called for (in Price's words)
"a constructive use of [...] mobility" while consequently questioning
"the sociological meaning of the permanent character of the constructions
and cities of the past."[xxiii] Among
members of the Parisian Utopie
movement of urbanists, this mobility - tied in as it was with
"adaptibility, variability [and] growth"[xxiv]-
was tied in with ephemerality as well. Utopie
was fond of noting, in early issues of their eponymous magazine, that the
construction of houses lagged severely behind that of other modern products:
this durability of construction was in fact a drawback since it made for lived
environments that did not truly reflect human advancement in other areas (thus
their half-serious, half-parodic proposals for habitations gonflables or inflatable / pneumatic architecture.)
Given that
this preceding list of characteristics was seen as positive and / or
progressive, much discussion began around the virtues of constructing
deliberately ephemeral structures and spaces in Tokyo proper. In many cases,
such as Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower (completed 1972) and spin-offs like Peter Cook's Plug-in
City (Cook's Archigram group was partially inspired by Kurokawa's Metabolist
group), this wedding of ephemerality to mobility and variability was embodied
in "cellular" structures, e.g. housing complexes in which individual
"capsule" units could be "plugged-in" and removed by tower
cranes. With the firmly established affinity of avant-garde figures like
Mishima and Tange for Ise Shrine, it seemed like there was already a kind of
historical justification in place for the recycled building and less of an
anxiety over the „copy / original“ distinction than there would be in most
Western nations. This could then be applied, ideally, to the totality of urban
space rather than just isolated structures.
Here, then, we
come back to this nagging question of whether such ideas were radical for the
Japanese or part of a long-standing and accepted tradition. In his discussion
of the mono no aware phenomenon, De
Mente is just one of many scholars to underscore how "one of the most
conspicuous facets of life in early Japan was an appreciation for the ephemeral
nature of man...his struggles in the face of great odds and the inevitability
of his downfall and disappearance."[xxv]
Ephemerality within Japanese cities, and the whole Japanese landscape, is
deeply ingrained partially because of the concept's resonances with Buddhist
teachings (such as the seiseiruten [生々流転、"vicissitudes of life"]) and partially because of the types of threatening
contingencies that have historically made it difficult to escape this concept.
In his postscript to a sizable collection of Metabolist documents, whose
general thrust is of adventurous futurism and defiant waltzes with
impossibility, Toyo Ito arrives at the site of 2011's catastrophic Tohoku
earthquake where he wonders "what Japan's 60 years of modernization since
the war was all about...back in the Edo period [a.k.a. Tokugawa period,
1603-1868], fishing villages disappeared in tsunamis; now it has happened
again."[xxvi]
Though this could be a somber and contradictory ending to an otherwise
optimistic volume, Ito concedes that the deliberately ephemeral construction of
the Metabolists was a step in the right direction towards "questioning the
way we relate to nature...the people or community we always argue for in our
architecture - aren't they just an abstracted scheme?"[xxvii]
As Wigley
notes of the various "network"-oriented architectural think tanks
(Archigram, Metabolism, Constant, etc.) their works were "polemical
images" despite their grounding in "the pragmatics of
construction,"[xxviii] and
therefore it seems they would have some kinship with other artistic groups
re-imagining the lived environment in their own right. However, apart
from obvious precedents such as Isozaki, who was as much a part of the
"post-War" wave of radical arts as anyone, the level of sympathy that
urban planners in Japan had for the new wave performing arts is certainly not
uniformly distributed (this is to say nothing of them even being aware of the
performing arts culture in the first place.) One planner who explicitly stated
an inspiration from the counter-culture was Tadao Ando, who expressed an
admiration for Juurou Kara and his joukyou
gekijou in particular. Ando's design for the kara-za (a movable theater acknowledging the impact of Kara's
"red tent" performances by adopting his surname) takes its
inspiration from the Metabolists’ ephemerality / mobillity dynamic, yet is
clearly constructed with the present in mind. Ando’s design, based on the same
audience / performer dissolutions as the original “red tent,” was seen as a
necessary remedy for a Japanese populace that was becoming disengaged from
their own bodies.
Ando’s efforts aside, it is safe to say that very few urban
design projects were initiated with the arts underground specifically in mind.
The Nakagin Capsule Tower, for example, was essentially the realization of the
"space age bachelor pad" - ensconced within the bustling nightlife
district of Ginza, it was conceived of as being used by "homo moven bachelors / commuters,"
and its tenants mostly did conform to this mold. 30 percent of the individual
units went "to out-of-town companies looking for a cheap alternative to
hotels for their salarymen," another "30 percent to families seeking
auxiliary studies or playrooms," and another 20 percent each for
"bachelors" and "miscellaneous uses."[xxix]
One form of mobility or 'nomadism' that often goes
unnoticed in surveys of such artwork is that which is enabled by car travel-
perhaps because this is too associated with the romantic "Americana"
image of endless highways, and considered an exclusive artifact of that country's
motorized rebel cultures who are always ready to quickly decamp to a new
location when the "heat" of the law becomes too oppressive. However,
much subcultural activity in modern Tokyo (and urban Japan in general) is based
around fashioning motor vehicles into expressive and exhbitionist shapers of
urban space. Some of this activity is purely narcissistic, like the parking of
neon-colored vans outside of major urban shopping centers and the blasting of hyperactive
techno music from them. Other activities in this vein seem flatly idiotic, like
the gathering together of mini-bike 'gangs' that drive down major thoroughfares
at exagerratedly slow speeds while revving their engines as one. However,
similar activities have been utilized by members of the more
"serious" underground, as when the cleaning van of Yasunao Tone's
family business was borrowed by his improv music group and was driven across
Tokyo with the back doors open, leaving the instrumentalists visible (but not
necessarily audible, as the van lacked amplification.) While Tone himself
admits it was not as effective as other acts of the "agitational"
underground, William Marotti nevertheless defends the act in that it aspired
"to fulfill a political legacy inherited from the historical avant-garde,"
and was a necessarily unorthodox attempt to re-inject art into "the city's
expanding arteries - where economic change was bringing about massive
transformations in life and work patterns."[xxx]
By this reckoning, a solution had already been found - in
the 1960s - to Noriyuki Tajima's contemporary complaint about the lack of a
real agora within the physical space
of Tokyo. If one so desired, the very defining feature of the city - that is,
its near-biological transmission of countless individual human 'cells' through
a circulatory system of transportation tunnels and roadways - could be
subverted with fairly harmless performances of Tone's variety (which, again,
though it contained 'musical' content, was more of a theatrical or mimed
performance due to the acoustic sounds' inaudibility on the highways and
station-front parking areas.) One wouldn’t be amiss in wondering how such a
performance can possibly be any more meaningful than the busking done by
acoustic guitar duos all up and down the main pedestrian thoroughfares in
Shibuya - yet the odd combination of performance and non-performance does put
it into a category of its own. Such actions have shown that the underground
does not need to resort to ‘experimental crime’ in its efforts to heighten urban
residents’ awareness of ontological and phenomenological concerns.
Conclusion
It is difficult to say with any certainty what the future
of Tokyo’s performance or “intermedia”-inspired subcultures will bring, and
whether future manifestations will concern themselves more with kakuhan or with other more personalized
concerns. But herein lies the problem- the municipal authorities in Tokyo
(which is yet again a metonym for “urban Japan” at this late stage in the game)
continue to foolishly trust in certain inevitabilities, relying on the so-called
hara gei [腹芸、
“intuitive / gut feelings”] about the motivations of cultural dissidents. A
popular criticism is that these dissidents are just socially awkward
spoilsports who look to disrupt Japanese harmony - ‘dragging the rest of us
down with them’, as it were - as a
means of covering up their personal inadequacies. This criticism, which stems
from a view of independent action or individualism as a sort of pathological
condition, ironically saw even the pro-Japanese Communist protestors of yore
not as being guilty of “individualism” rather than being guilty of group
conformity to a rival ideology.[xxxi]
This has resulted in a foolish, if not dangerous,
underestimation of any potential threat to stability, which downplays the
activity of legitimate resistance movements as the work of self-isolating and
narcissistic lone wolves. The performing arts underground may be numerically
insignificant, and the extremity of some of their actions may repel much of the
populace, but - as the recent Russian example of “Pussy Riot” shows - even they
cannot be ruled out as a force to sway public opinion or generate dialogue on
issues that the nation’s ruling class would prefer to leave buried (more
interesting is that said Russian group appears to be part of a U.S.-led “psy-ops”
campaign, with “methods […] straight out of Gene Sharp's CIA playbook for
regime change,”[xxxii] but,
again, this is a story for another day.)
Of course, all this bears out whatever claims the
counter-culture may make about the inflexibility of Japanese post-industrial
bureaucracy, which combines all the drawbacks of other bureacratic cultures
with an extreme reluctance to admit to mistakes or miscalculations. The hara gei of all the authorities that
count - from the Diet to the National Police Agency - do not take into account
the guiding irrationality of this culture; expecting it to behave much in the
same way as the more well-assimilated citizenry. This overconfidence in the
predictability of events will prove to be more of an asset to the underground
than any unique feature(s) of Tokyo’s urban terrain, simply because the former
allows for the continued exploitation of the latter and for the ability to
devise new “work-arounds.” As seen in the “Off Site” example above, performers
in the underground are not so hopelessly bound to the formal aspects of their
work that they cannot apply their fundamental ideals to forms more suited to
new environments. In fact, many seem to enjoy the challenge of proving the
ductility of their ideals by continually investing them into different forms.
Meanwhile, as the Miyazaki affair attests to, there is no
shortage of resources in Tokyo to deal with and eliminate a perceived threat or
public nuisance. Yet the success of such clampdowns has, in the past, been contingent
upon other alliances that the authorities cannot afford to lose: a compliant
and non-investigative media, an organized criminal underground that has been
more sympathetic to State aims than to those of other subcultures, and - last
but hardly least - the consensus of the public that any punishment received is
punishment well-deserved. The severing of any one leg in this tripod means the
vast expansion of safe havens in which the performance underground can take
refuge, which in turn means policing bodies will have to contest with whole new
infestations of space at a time when it has not yet fully come to grips with
the underground’s present strategy (i.e., that of “deterritorializing” the
mono-functional or even non-functional spaces within the city.) The battle that
is unfolding is, in effect, not one of regaining control over the meanings
inscribed into physical space - I believe the underground has already won this
battle. The battle being fought now is the same conflict over psychological and
ideological territory that characterizes State conflicts against far more
dangerous insurgencies.
[i] Kiyonori
Kikutake quoted in Kayoko Ota & James Westcott (ed).,Project Japan: Metabolism Talks, p. 366. Taschen, Köln, 2011.
[ii] Author
uncredited, "Underground Cities: Japan's Answer to Overcrowding." The Futurist, 24.4 (July-August 1990),
p. 29.
[iii] Peter Schöller, "Zentrenausbau in
japanischen Städten (Construction of Subterranean Centresin Japanese Cities)."
Erdkunde, Bd. 30, H. 2 (Jun., 1976),
pp. 108-125 (p. 108.)
[iv] Ibid., p. 109. In the original: "
Hier finden sich alle Einrichtungen, die zur Bequemlichkeit und zum
Arbeitsausgleich fiir eine Tagesbelegschaft von mehreren tausend Personen dienen:
Restaurants, Kaffee- und Teestuben, Erfrischungsraume, Bars, Friseurladen,
Kioske, Ladengeschafte jeder Art und Preislage, Billigmarkte, oft Reisebüros, Beratungsstellen,
Postagenturen und Bankfilialen, zuweilen Spielsäle, Spielautomatenraume, Kinos.
Systeme von Rolltreppen und pfeilschnellen Aufzügen verbinden die Tiefgeschosse
mit den Büro etagen, so dafür sich auch wahrend des Dienstes ohne viel
Zeitaufwand Besorgungen erledigen lassen."
[v] Ibid., p. 112. In the original: "Zu
denken ist hier in erster Linie an Frank Loyd Wrights inzwischen abgerissenes
berühmtes Imperial Hotel, das führende Großhotel Tokyos, mit seinem verzweigten
System unterirdischer Arkadengange."
[vi] Ibid., p. 124. In the original: "Die
Anlagen bieten keine Gelegenheit zum Aufenthalt und zum Ausruhen, die nicht mit
Geldausgaben verbunden wäre. Alle Einrichtungen dienen dem Anreiz zum Konsum,
sind dem Profit zugeordnet. Soziale Kontakte und Kommunikations-Bedürfnisse
haben sich den vorgegebenen Bedingungen einzupassen. Junge Leute treffen sich
vor allem in Kaffee-und Teeräumen. Erst in den allerletzten Jahren sind in
einigen Anlagen einige Sitzgelegenheiten aufgestellt und Ruheecken eingerichtet
worden. Es gibt fast keine kulturellen Einrichtungen und gar keine Ansatze und
Anregungen zur Identification des Bürgers mit seiner Stadt, seiner Geschichte
und Kultur."
[viii] See Ibid, p. 337: "While there was
considerable sympathy for New Left actions in the 1960s, support among the
public had diminished by 1969 and passers-by were more likely to scorn the
students. In the film, people taunt the students by telling them to get jobs
and become productive members of society. Even when a sympathiser is found
among the gathering crowd, he rejects the protestors’ calls to join the
counterculture movement, saying that such ideas are unreasonable and that he
has responsibilities to his family and work colleagues that take precedence
over politics. In these intimate scenes, recording the conversations between
the people who face off in the station, Chikatetsu
Hiroba deflates the heroic myth of protestors. Commuters often reject calls
to join the protest movement with recourse to the domestic rubric of work and
family."
[xi] Here
refering to the "asynchronous JavaScript and XML" technology.
[xiii] Jussi
Parikka, Digital Contagions: A Media
Archaeology Of Computer Viruses, p. 104n. Peter Lang, New York, 2007.
[xiv] Detlev
Schauwecker, "Verbal Subversion and Satire in Japan, 1937-1945, as
Documented by the Special High Police." Japan Review, No. 15
(2003), pp. 127-151 (p. 131.)
[xvi] Novak
(2008), p. 17.
[xix] Cedric
Price & Joan Littlewood, "The Fun Palace." The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Spring, 1968), pp.127-134
(p. 129.)
[xxvi] Toyo Ito
qouted in Ota & Westcott, p. 697.
[xxix] Ota &
Westcott, p. 365.
[xxx] William A.
Marotti quoted in Tone, pp. 31-32.
[xxxi] As Sharon
Kinsella suggests, “Youth culture, symbolizing the threat of individualism, has
provoked approximately the same degree of condescension and loathing among
sections of the Japanese intelligentsia as far-left political parties and
factions, symbolizing the threat of communism, have provoked in the United
States and the United Kingdom.” Kinsella, p. 291.
[xxxii] See http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/118503.html.
Retrieved November 7, 2012.