The Lunatics Have (Not Quite) Taken Over the Asylum

For a long time it's been said that internationalization is nothing more than a buzzword here in Japan. But with the opening of Yokohama 2001: International Triennale of Contemporary Art this month, that could be about to change. The event will be the first large scale international art show to be held in Japan on a regular basis, with works by over 100 artists, mostly from overseas.

Its basic mission, explains Fumio Nanjo, one of the artistic directors, is for the Japanese people to know what contemporary art is. To do this the organizers, like Nanjo, a free-lance curator whom I caught up with at Narita airport, have taken it upon themselves to directly visit the different regions of the World to observe and select the most outstanding artists. So what were they looking for?
"The two keywords when we were selecting were collaboration and interdisciplinary," Nanjo explains. "Many artists were chosen because they work with other people from other fields, not just other artists."

This all sounds good and proper, but as Nanjo admits the personal taste of each of the four artistic directors was a very important factor. The question, then, is how much can we trust their judgment?

Among those invited are Zhang Huan (pictured), a Chinese artist, who has built his reputation doing self-torturing performances; Marina Abramovic, a Yugoslavian artist who wowed the 1997 Venice Biennale with her performance scrubbing animal bones; and Joelle Ciona, a Canadian artist renowned for making and living in a giant insect-like nest made from paper and her own saliva!

By calling such people artists, their psychopathies, which would be quite capable of getting the rest of us safely locked away, are transformed into 'genius.' Indeed, it’s not surprising that some of the artists here have actual histories of mental illness and institutionalization. Perhaps the most famous in this respect is Yayoi Kusama, a top Japanese artist who has lived in a psychiatric hospital since the 1970s and whose dot-covered works exist, on one level, as a kind of therapy for her.

What is the value of such insane artists?
“Sometimes it just looks stupid,” Nanjo concedes. “But it tells people that there is another way of looking at things.”

Indeed, in a society obsessed with the superficial and with its nose buried in trivia of everyday life, real lunacy can prove very valuable. Using the behaviour of insects as a metaphor for human behaviour, as Ciona does, is not as absurd as it may at first seem. It could be argued that through her madness she arrives at a true perspective of humanity’s place in the Universe as a race of small, inward-looking creatures more dependent on their fragile environment than they are capable of knowing. While Kusama’s uncontrollable urge to cover everything with dots, might be nothing more than an instinctive realization of the atomic nature of matter.

The problem faced by contemporary art is not the presence of a few bona fide lunatics or cherished eccentrics within its ranks, but the fact that many people see it as something removed from any kind of external standard moral, social, national, or commonsensical, and with little relevance for their lives. Its values also seem arbitrarily determined by a self-serving coterie of cognoscenti who favour talentless novelty because it provides the greatest scope for spin and hype. Networking, cronyism, political correctness, and the lukewarm water mentality generated by artistic committees are often perceived as the dominant forces.

Yokohama 2001 may also fall foul of such negative perceptions and the realities which often underlie them, but the organizers have made an effort to take the event beyond the art world.

“We have invited not only artists but creators from other fields, including architects, fashion designers, musicians, composers, and philosophers,” Nanjo explains. “These people also participated in making art. In this way we have made more links between art and our reality, or daily life. We are not trying to say that art is for art's sake. Our attitude is that art is completely different from that.”

But connecting art to everyday reality implies that it should be judged by the standards of that reality. What then are we to make of the Spaniard Alicia Framis? In her former Dreamkeeper project, she visited the homes of lonely city dwellers and stayed at their side as a ‘dream keeper’ for twelve hours while they slept. Maybe she just had insomnia and found this a novel way to get an arts grant!

On a similar level of mind-numbing dullness is MANUS-CURE, a recent work by another participating artist, Emiko Kasahara from Japan, who has arranged and labelled 1,050 shades of nail polish on 30 pages of paper. Nor must we forget Korean artist, Joeng-a Koo, who adds anonymous objects, like a baseboard, to the walls of exhibition rooms, so that the spectators don’t even realize that they are looking at an artwork. Well, that’s probably because they aren’t!
All this makes as much sense as reconstructing your entire New York apartment, fully functional and down to the smallest detail in a German gallery, an entirely pointless act, which, of course, adorns the resume of one of the other participating artists.

A major problem with contemporary art is that interpretation and labelling are often of vital importance. Toshikatsu Endo’s installation for Yokohama 2001 is a room surrounded by high walls with water springing out in the centre of the space.
"The circular outlet of water is dark," the pre-exhibition publicity informs us. "It is an ominous spring that connects our time to the darkness of ancient times."
How profound! If you hadn’t read that, you might have thought it was merely a case of bad plumbing.

The essence of much contemporary art has been reduced to the words and meanings we impose on it. Tatsumi Orimoto’s recent work Art Mama has documented his daily life spent with his Alzheimer-afflicted parent. Bearing in mind the relationship between the artist and the subject, we are perhaps inclined to be generous, and conclude that this is a work of strong compassion and humour. But photographing a poor old woman with various props, including a tire around her neck, is closer to degradation than art informed with love. How you see the art depends on which label you accept or reject.

If you accept the pre-exhibition publicity that the Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are dealing with fundamental issues such as life and death and body and spirit, then their project for the Triennale of applying human body grease to 100 sheets of paper and then binding them into a huge book might seem profound. But if you don’t, all you will be aware of is a big greasy book, and wonder what you’ve been paying your money for.

Nanjo makes a good case for this work by referring to the way human DNA is able to store vast amounts of information, underlining once again how important labelling and interpretation are in the success of artworks. Without the correct formula of words to unlock the objects’ secrets, it remains mute.

“This is because contemporary art is a form of thinking,” he explains. “If you don’t think, it’s not interesting at all. I want people to ask why, and to start talking about it with their friends. Japanese society doesn’t have a tradition of arguing or discussing. Everybody shuts their mouth, which has caused a lot of problems now for democracy, big organizations, and venture businesses. Young people cannot argue, they cannot explain, and just because they are young they are not being listened to. Our society needs to start thinking and asking why.”

To get the best out of the Triennale, go there with an open and active mind, allow yourself to be surprised, amused, bored, confused, enraged, or even inspired by the exhibits on display. And remember, if someone comes up and starts arguing with you, they’re doing you a favour.

Tokyo Journal
September 2001

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Butoh: taking a cross-eyed, bow-legged bow

When the young dancer Yoshito Ohno simulated sex with a live chicken by breaking its neck between his thighs on stage on the evening of May 4th, 1959, one of Japan's most unique forms of cultural expression was born. This is Butoh, a form of dancing developed by Yoshito's father, Kazuo, and Tatsumi Hijikata that has continued to shock, baffle, disgust, confuse and delight audiences since that first night at the Tokyo Dance Festival over 4 decades ago.

One of the acknowledged greats of contemporary Butoh is 58-year old Akaji Maro, who developed his art under the tutelage of the legendary Hijikata before starting his own company, Dairakudakan (literally Great Camel Battleship), in 1972. With a major new show, Rivers Edge, due to open in January, I spoke with the distinguished dancer and choreographer just after a stunning performance at his dance studio in Kichijoji.

“Butoh is a native Japanese product that developed in the Japanese soil, like the Japanese mountain potato,” Maro tells me as he orders a coffee at a nearby coffee shop. “But like the yamaimo, you can now find this product all over the World.”

What I’m trying to find out is the essence of Butoh, its dark secret. Like any journalist I want to find an easy way to explain it, to pack this monster comfortably away inside a neat box, but maybe its not ready to lie in its box just yet.

“There are many kinds of Butoh,” Maro says, lighting up a cigarette, presumably to relax after his tense, taut performance of only a few minutes before. Although reluctant to define his art too clearly, he does his best to explain by contrasting Butoh with Western dancing. Whereas Western dance seeks to go up, to elevate and beautify the human form, Butoh goes in the opposite direction. Hijikata once said, ‘I would never jump or leave the ground; it is on the ground that I dance.’

Butoh allows gravity and muscle to tie the body in what may seem like ugly knots of twisted feet and bodies, accentuated with cross-eyed grimaces reminiscent of the mie pose often seen in old ukiyo-e prints of kabuki actors.

“The first and basic form of Butoh is a kind of bow-leggedness,” Maro gets up to demonstrate, assuming a look of comical world-weariness. “This is the traditional form of the Japanese peasant, although life may have changed now. But this is not exclusive to Japan. There are such peasants in other countries, and also old men stand like this in England. For Western dance, God exists in the sky, but for Butoh, God exists down here in these bow legs.”

This down-to-earth quality, this recognition of the natural and the real makes other forms of dance seem pretentious by comparison.

Butoh is also a form of dance that is instantly accessible. When Maro, at the show earlier that evening, pretended to hear a phone ringing in his foot and hilariously attempted to answer it, the mainly young, mobile-phone-obsessed audience, instantly understood.

“I hope that people will come to see Butoh without preconceptions. When foreigners come to see Noh or Kabuki, they have often read up on it and have preconceptions about it. But with Butoh it’s not necessary to know any history.”

For Maro, everyday actions and gestures are very important.
“Butoh is a gathering of daily activities,” he mentions. But the focus seems to be somewhere beneath the surface in the tension that exists between a creature whose evolution lags several tens of thousands of years behind its environment. Maro is interested in the way our behaviour is filtered and funneled by the objects and routines of life, and in the rediscovery of subconscious and natural movements.

“Our actions depend on objects. If we pick up a stone, the action is limited by the stone to throwing or banging it. It is the same with more complex objects like a typewriter. In developing our functional movements, we have discarded and forgot other movements, but functional and non-functional movements need each other.”

Rediscovering the full range of human movement provides Dairakudakan with a rich palette to dance from, but the difficulty is how to access this subterranean world of primal, subconscious movement.

“If someone tries to prepare food and cuts his finger, or makes a mistake writing kanji, this moment of surprise is the first door of Butoh. Time is stopped by the event and in this moment he enters the black world. In such moments humans can find forgotten movements. My Butoh is the gathering of such moments to express forgotten unconscious movements.”

What will most strike the visitor to a Butoh performance, however, is the sheer, surreal spectacle it presents with its ghostly, shaven-headed, white-painted naked dancers. Earlier I had been privileged to watch one of the Dairakudakan dancers dressed back to front in a kimono, bow, drink tea, and crawl forward, using his back as his front. Such impressive inversions and illusions are as much part of Butoh as digging beneath the surface to rediscover the instincts civilized man has discarded.

“When I first became a dancer, I wanted to stand on stage without any movement,” Maro tells me with a mischievous glint in his eye. “I wanted to create movement without movement. Isn’t this difficult using only your body? No, it's very easy, like a magician, to create an illusion.”

Tokyo Journal
February 2002

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I, Kitty

Isaac Asimov in his classic Science Fiction story, “I, Robot”, created the 3 rules of robotics, the most important being: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” Luckily, this was not a major consideration, when I recently had the pleasure of meeting Japan’s most famous celebrity – in robot form! Yes, meet ROBO-Kitty, programmed for 21st century cuteness.

Co-developed by Business Design Laboratory and NEC System Technologies, “Hello Kitty ROBO,” to use her official name, has advanced voice recognition and voice synthesizer features, enabling her to talk, using 20,000 pre-programmed conversation patterns. She can recognize words and questions, and respond appropriately. In addition, as the robot accumulates conversation history with partners and becomes more intimate, it changes speech patterns and shows a wider variation in conversation. Also, with an onboard CCD camera and an advanced face authentication feature, she is able to register and recognize the faces of up to 10 people, and call their names as well as talk to them while looking at their faces. This gives ROBO-Kitty the ability to at least simulate artificial intelligence in at least 90% of social situations.

Unlike, the Terminator, or other advanced assassination droids from the movies, ROBO-Kitty has a lot less sheer killing power. While she can nod and shake her immense, largely hollow, plastic head and move her arms a little to show emotion, her legs are immobile, being used instead to house speakers. So, even if she turned nasty, like robots inevitably do in SF stories, the chances are you could still outrun her. Kitty, however, is programmed to never act out of character, as Aiko Miyama, a representative of one of the companies that created ROBO-Kitty informs us.

“We are licensed by the Sanrio Company,” she says, “so we are not allowed to change her official character. Kitty is always supposed to be pretty, pure, good, and have good manners. She never says anything upsetting.”

I decided to put her good nature to the test by running the first ever real interview with a robot in the history of Mankind. As this was also the first time Kitty Chan herself had been interviewed, this was a doubly historic moment. Here, word for word, full and unexpurgated, is the complete interview.

CBL: Hello Kitty.

HK: What you just said are words Kitty doesn’t know…Today is a relaxing day. Please speak in a big voice.

CBL: Hello Kitty… Hi.

HK: Goodbye!

CBL: You’re a terribly rude cat.

HK: Kitty can’t hear well. Speak up, please.

CBL: What day is today?

HK: It’s fun. Kitty likes having fun. It’s fun to play with one’s friends. When do you feel happy? …Oh, isn’t it?

CBL: Please listen.

HK: It’s nice that you can feel happy everyday, isn’t it?

CBL: Yes, when I’m happy I sing. Can you sing for me?

HK: Kitty can’t catch your words. Please speak up.

CBL: Please sing a song.

HK: Let’s speak up just a little louder.

CBL: Please sing a song.

HK: A song, eh? Which do you want to hear, a spring song, a Japanese song, a foreign song, a dance song, a hit song?

CBL: A foreign song.

HK: This is “Yama no Ongakuka” [sings a traditional German song in Japanese] Shall Kitty sing another song?

CBL: Yes please.

HK: Let me see, Kitty will choose it, OK? [sings a Japanese pop song]

CBL: That was very good.

HK: Did you hear Kitty’s song?

CBL: That was enjoyable. Thank you.

HK: Kitty doesn’t understand. Your voice is so loud that it’s difficult to hear.

CBL: I said thanks for the song.

HK: Please use words that Kitty can understand.

CBL: Kitty, may I ask a question.

HK: Yes … the end.

CBL: Kitty.

HK: Please speak up a little.

CBL: Good morning. Good morning. Good morning.

HK: Hello. Now it’s the afternoon, so you should say hello.

CBL: What is Kitty’s favorite food?

HK: Kitty loves apple pie made by Mama. Do you like apple pie? Oh you like apple pie, don’t you?

CBL: Where is Mimi Chan [Kitty’s sister]?

HK: The subjects Kitty is good at are English and music.

CBL: Where is Mimi Chan?

HK: Do you like music?

CBL: Yes, I love it.

HK: Goody, that’s like Kitty. Kitty is very happy.

CBL: I’m also very happy.

HK: What?

CBL: I’m also very happy. Kitty, do you like chocolate?

HK: Kitty’s so happy to stay with you…Do you like carrots?

CBL: So-so.

HK: Mmmm. Next time, please eat Mother’s homemade carrot glace. It’s very delicious.

CBL: What is your dream?

HK: Kitty’s dream is traveling around the World making many friends. Kitty has many dreams. My Father told Kitty it’s important to have dreams. Please have dreams.

CBL: My dream is to live in London [Kitty’s hometown apparently].

HK: Kitty doesn’t understand.

CBL: You stupid cat!

HK: Please speak a little quieter. We’ll talk later.

CBL: London.

HK: London has got so many beautiful parks. There are many people exercising in them in the morning. Do you jog?

CBL: Sometimes.

HK: Mmmm. Is that so? London Town is very beautiful. It would be very nice if we can go there together sometime.

CBL: Kitty, bye-bye.

HK: What happened? Are you OK?

CBL: Have a rest.

HK: Kitty loves having a rest.

Despite a few misunderstandings, absurd non-sequiturs, and hearing malfunctions, Kitty acquitted herself well. She may not be Voltaire or Dr. Johnson just yet, but already she can converse at a more sparkling level than most bar-room conversations. No doubt, in a few years’ time, she’ll be able to make a lot more sense than the average politician or college professor. We have seen the future and she is cute.

Kansai Time Out
February, 2007

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A Rose by Any Other Name

Late 1943 – after a few successes, the war in the Pacific is now going well for the Americans, but casualties are mounting. Following landings on the tiny Pacific island of Tarawa, in which over 1,000 US Marines had been killed by 2,600 heavily outnumbered Japanese, it is starting to sink in just how long and drawn out this war is going to be.

From the very beginning, this was the Japanese plan – to grab a vast defensive perimeter, then doggedly defend each and every inch of it in the hope of breaking America’s will to attack. This war is not just about firepower. It is also about which side can take the most punishment, and, here, the Japanese think they have detected a key American weakness, a weakness they aim to exploit to the utmost.

Their key weapon in this struggle is a 27-year-old native of Los Angeles, a Japanese American stranded in Japan on the outbreak of WWII while visiting relatives and interned. The ‘Zero Hour’ starring Iva Toguri as Tokyo Rose is about to take to the airwaves.

The ‘Zero Hour’ had actually been running since March 1943. It was a typical by-the-book propaganda radio show, featuring popular music, punctuated by messages from POWs, snippets of genuine news censored by the Allies, and occasional calls to surrender or sabotage the war effort. Just like the broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw from Nazi Germany to Britain during the London Blitz, it provoked a mixture of disdain and amusement.

Nevertheless, there were good reasons why the Japanese decided to continue with the program and develop it. Unlike the situation in Britain, where the nation’s contempt for Lord Haw-Haw’s sneering tone had been steeled by the threat of imminent invasion, the Americans in the Pacific were fighting a long way from home. With the war turning into a grueling, island-hopping campaign of attrition, there was every reason to expect American morale to erode. This reflected the opinion of the Japanese military caste that US troops were basically selfish individualists unwilling to risk their lives in a long-term, high-risk war that didn’t directly concern them. The key was to simply speed up this process of demoralization through the skillful use of propaganda.

The decision taken in November 1943 to use a female announcer was in line with Japanese propaganda objectives. The basic message being sent out to the average grunt was that he was a long way from home, and putting his neck on the line in a war from which he personally had nothing to gain and plenty to lose. Major Shigetsugu Tsuneishi, who had devised the program, rightly guessed that US troops would find it harder to ignore this message if it was ‘sugar-coated’ in a female voice.

Iva Toguri, who had been surviving by working as a typist at Radio Tokyo, agreed to do the broadcasts. She had already struck up friendships with several POWs working on the program, like Major Charles H. Cousens of the Australian Army, who had been threatened with execution if he did not cooperate. Toguri’s motivation seems to have been a feeling of sympathy for these prisoners. Perhaps, like them, she managed to convince herself that the program would have little impact on the war.

Ironically, the sympathetic tone that Toguri imparted helped ensure the program’s popularity and thus made it more effective as propaganda. Although it was still seen as a hopeless attempt to undermine Allied morale, the mere fact that it was listened to ensured that its message got through. The romantic tone of the music played made it easy for the program’s controllers to foment feelings of homesickness, separation from loved ones, and even jealousy, as the scripted messages reminded GIs that many of their wives and girlfriends back home were probably feeling just as lonely as they were, and in a position to do much more about it. This, clearly, would have engendered feelings of cynicism and have made many GIs think twice about risking their lives.

Whatever the show’s direct effect on the war, Tokyo Rose’s voice became something of an aural pinup, a soundtrack to go with the posters of Betty Grable or Ginger Rogers posted on barrack lockers or stowed away in kitbags. This star quality, however, was to backfire badly following the Occupation. In September 1945, Toguri was arrested, but quickly released as there was no more evidence against her than there was against people like Major Cousens, who had written many of her propaganda segments. Believing that she was now safe, Toguri began to trade on her name as ‘Tokyo Rose,’ selling stories to the media and declaring that she was the one and only Tokyo Rose, although several other female announced had also filled the role.

When it was announced that she was returning to the States, the broadcaster Walter Winchell, the Rush Limbaugh of his day, denounced her as a traitor cashing in on her infamy, stirring up a media storm that even President Truman couldn’t ignore, leading to a trial on charges of treason. Although concrete evidence was hard to come by, Toguri was finally convicted on one lame count of mentioning American shipping losses on her program, receiving 10 years in a US prison. Learning the lesson that the nail that sticks up gets hammered down even in America, Toguri spent the rest of her life living quietly in Chicago, helping out in the family store. She was pardoned in 1977.

While some still see her as a traitor who willingly collaborated, others take the opposite view that she was in fact a patriot and a heroine, who only worked on the show to help the POWs and did everything in her power to subvert the broadcasts by using odd pauses and ironic intonation. Even if the show did reduce American fighting spirit, it is still hard to blame Iva Toguri for what she did. The only crime she was really guilty of was becoming too famous, and this had as much to do with lonely GIs separated from the wives and girlfriends as it did with the odd circumstances that placed Iva Toguri in front of a microphone.

Metropolis
October 22, 2006

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Book Review: 'Unbeaten Tracks in Japan' by Isabella L. Bird

If, as the British writer L.P. Hartley famously wrote, “the past is a foreign country,” then this paperback reprint of an 1880 travelogue by an intrepid Victorian lady who traversed the back roads of Japan, offers us a doubly alien world, made yet more surreal by the fact that the writer was the last thing early–Meiji rural Japan was expecting. The daughter of a Yorkshire clergyman, Bird was 47 when she set out for Japan in 1878, “in order to recruit my health,” as she writes. But this seems to have been no more than a convenient excuse, necessary in an age when the notion of a woman globetrotting on her own was evidently frowned upon. The writer simply had itchy feet, as her other travels to the American West, Hawaii, Malaysia, Tibet, Korea, China, Turkey, and Morocco testify.

Written, as many travelogues of the day were, in letter form, the book describes her dissatisfaction at arriving at a city that had already been adequately described by other writers. Like the backpackers of the present day, she seems driven by a hunger for the ‘authentic’ and what she describes as the “real Japan.” In search of this, she decided to travel, largely by pack–horse, with a Japanese interpreter over the forested mountain routes to Nikko, Nigata and the distant north, finally crossing to Hokkaido (then called Yezo) to describe the Ainu.

The journey presents us with fascinating details – blind ‘shampooers,’ holes poked in shoji, straw rain cloaks, and curious crowds of natives. As the pages turn, a picture also emerges of the writer. In Nikko she visits some Japanese houses, which she describes as “so light and delicate, that even when I entered them without my boots I felt like a ‘bull in a china shop,’ as if my mere weight must smash through and destroy.”

Details like this suggest that she was hardly a ballet dancer. Although it is hard to like her at first, over the course of the book, her relentless energy, rugged endurance, and bluff frankness, blissfully unshackled by modern political correctness, eventually win over.

While finding several positives – the gentleness of the common people, the kindness shown to children, etc. – she doesn’t pull her punches when it comes to describing negatives. As an upstanding Victorian Christian lady she also has much to say on the subject of nudity, then a common sight in Japan.

“A coolie servant washed some rice for my dinner, but before doing so took off his clothes, and the woman who cooked it let her kimono fall to her waist before she began to work, as is customary among respectable women,” she writes with a hint of sarcasm.
But, while she is always ready to subject the Japanese to her frequently uncharitable scrutiny, she is also willing to look at herself through their eyes:

“The house–master’s wife and Ito [her interpreter] talked about me unguardedly. I asked what they were saying. ‘She says,’ said he, ‘that you are very polite – for a foreigner,’ he added. I asked what she meant, and found that it was because I took off my boots before I stepped on the matting, and bowed when they handed me the tabako–bon.”

One of the strengths of the book is that the journey, as it heads north, takes us into ever more backward or unspoilt areas, so that we appear to be traveling back in time, from modernizing Meiji Japan to the primitive tribal life of the Ainu. In one of the most gloriously un–PC passages ever written, she brutally contrasts these two groups:

“After the yellow skins, the stiff horse hair, the feeble eyelids, the elongated eyes, the sloping eyebrows, the flat noses, the sunken chests, the Mongolian features, the puny physique, the shaky walk of the men, the restricted totter of the women, and the general impression of degeneracy conveyed by the appearance of the Japanese, the Ainos makes a very singular impression. All but two or three that I have seen are the most ferocious–looking of savages, with a physique vigorous enough for carrying out the most ferocious intentions, but as soon as they speak the countenance brightens into a smile as gentle as that of a woman.”

The fact that it doesn’t try to please a modern audience is ironically one of the book’s charms, but its main virtue is that it provides us with a vivid and unforgettable picture of Meiji Japan, traditional Ainu society, and the mindset of an opinionated and fearless Victorian lady.

Metropolis
April 4, 2008

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