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ART, RIOT, TERROR

BY STEPHEN BARBER

AN EBOOK

ISBN 978-1-909923-05-8

PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

COPYRIGHT 2013 ELEKTRON EBOOKS

www.elektron-ebooks.com

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TOYKO 1969

Revolutionary Image-Thieves In The Disintegrating City

Tokyo’s period of urban unrest extended across the 1960s, beginning with widespread rioting, and demonstrations around the parliament building, in 1960, and culminating in sustained protests and confrontations that lasted throughout 1968 and 1969, before mutating into other forms; film constituted a sensitised medium for the exploration of that uproar, with a number of directors initiating stylistic experiments and outstanding approaches to the representation of urban space in transformation. In particular, two films from 1969, Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade Of Roses (Bara No Soretsu) and Nagisa Oshima’s Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief (Shinjuku Dorobō Nikki), probed the intimate rapport between the dynamics of Tokyo’s urban unrest and the intensive artistic and sexual experimentation ongoing during that period in the city’s Shinjuku district. This essay gives an account of the unique cultural history of postwar Tokyo, and its relationship to filmmaking; it then examines the particular challenges faced by filmmakers in creating images of the excessive space of Tokyo, looking in particular at sequences in films by Chris Marker and Andrei Tarkovsky. The essay then considers Funeral Parade Of Roses and Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief as exceptional filmic explorations of the urban culture of Tokyo (a culture viewed by many of its participants as a revolutionary one); it then concludes by evaluating the enduring relevance of that strand of urban filmmaking for contemporary Tokyo’s visual culture.

Urban filmmaking in Tokyo at the end of the 1960s reflects the very particular dynamics and range of filmmaking practice during that era, as well as the wide-ranging architectural expansion and experimentation that had been taking place in the city during the preceding decade. In the face of a studio system which appeared to be increasingly disintegrating, Tokyo-based filmmakers operated in a vast range and combination of forms and styles, from the structuralist experimental filmmaking exemplified by Takahiko Iimura, to independently or collaboratively funded projects, often preoccupied with issues of sexuality and dissident political issues, as in the films of Shuji Terayama.

Filmmakers often oscillated between working on studio-funded projects and more independent projects, at a time when the hard-pressed studios were focusing their attention on previously peripheral genres, such as pornographic and horror films, often commissioning directors to work on entire series of such films. To some extent, this flexibility and mutability of late-1960s filmmaking in Tokyo replicates that of European filmmaking of the same period, including its concerns with political and sexual issues and with stylistic experimentation; however, the particular historical and cultural context of Japan in the late 1960s, and its influence on urban life and on urban representations in film, is distinctly different from that of Europe.

Both the visual form of Tokyo as an urban entity, and the tensions which generated the exceptional filmmaking of the late 1960s, have their origins in the large-scale destruction of the city during the Second World War, and the Occupation by US military forces which succeeded that destruction. As with many other industrial cities in Japan, Tokyo was extensively fire-bombed, especially in March 1945, with enormous casualties in the urban population; entire areas of the city vanished, and four million people fled the city in the war’s closing months. As well as the human losses, the firebombing also engulfed Tokyo’s libraries, film-archives, and historical buildings such as temples and shrines, so that much of the city’s historical and cultural history became erased. The American film-historian and filmmaker, Donald Richie, arrived in the city in the following year, 1946, and commented on the visual reconfiguration of the city which its destruction had generated: ‘I stand at the main crossing on the Ginza, nothing between me and the mountain [Mount Fuji] ... I stand and watch the mountain fade. From this crossing it had not been seen since Edo times, but now all the buildings between are cinders. Between me and Fuji is a burned wasteland, a vast and blackened plain where a city had once stood.’(1)

For many young filmmakers, artists and architects in Tokyo, such as Arata Isozaki and Juro Kara (the theatre-director who plays one of the central characters in Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief), the erasure of the city also entailed the sweeping-away of the constrictive militarist and familial structures of the pre-war era, so the city’s destruction also possessed an exhilarating aspect, with the sense that the city could now be transformed from scratch into an entirely new entity. However, the US Occupation of Japan, which extended from 1945 to 1952, created its own unprecedented cultural impact, including that upon cinema, since the American authorities imposed an often idiosyncratic censorship regime on Japanese filmmaking. American military forces remained in Japan, and during the era of the Vietnam war, air-bases close to Tokyo were to be used extensively to supply and reinforce the US war-effort.

However, the most significant legacy of the US Occupation was the imposition upon Japan of a long-term treaty which many Japanese citizens, students and filmmakers, saw as subjugating the country to both the military and cultural power of the USA. The treaty, known as the ‘Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan’, needed to be ratified once a decade after its initial signature in 1960, and the violent urban-protests and street-battles – which form the key narrative event that frames late-1960s films such as Funeral Parade Of Roses and Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief – were related in part to the treaty’s imminent renewal.

Those two films, then, are impelled by a very specific set of cultural and historical traumas, which impact directly upon the urban space of Tokyo as the location for the fast-moving riots and protests which inflect the films’ narratives.

Urban space is in a multiple state of turmoil in such films, and therefore needs to be captured in a mobile way which accentuates the ongoing process of urban and human mutation taking place; filmmakers such as Matsumoto and Oshima responded to those imperatives by adopting styles of filmmaking such as extensive use of handheld cameras and blurred or manipulated images, to indicate the speed with which the city’s uproar is being perceived.

In many ways, the process of filming the urban space of Tokyo presents very distinctive challenges and imperatives for filmmakers. The city has often been perceived, especially by visitors, as an excessive urban space, impossible to grasp in its entirety, labyrinthine in structure, extending into limitless suburban sprawl. Those demands of the city upon its filmmakers are present in works such as those of Matsumoto and Oshima, and the turmoil of the period of fast-moving street-protests, at the end of the 1960s, served only to exacerbate that aura of excess. But the urban gestures and movements of Tokyo have also been revealingly seized by filmmakers from other countries, who have often incorporated fragments from the engulfing space of the megalopolis into films which are composed of trajectories across the city, generated in order to probe issues of memory and representation. From this perspective, Tokyo requires images which approach it at a tangent, either those resulting from a distinctive style of urban filmmaking, or those which disregard the archetypal images of a city of packed crowds, image-screens and multi-storey corporate towers, and seek to reinvent or realign urban space, in a parallel way to that in which the street-protestors of the late 1960s aimed to do.

The French filmmaker and traveller, Chris Marker, visited Tokyo over a period of time that spans the city’s seminal filmic moment of 1969. Marker arrived in Tokyo with the plan to film the Olympic Games of 1964, the preparations for which entailed a wide-ranging transformation of urban space, including the construction of many inner-city highways, often poised one on top of the other in the city’s most crowded areas. During that visit, Marker made the film The Koumiko Mystery, about his obsession with a young Japanese woman. But the most revealing of Marker’s Tokyo images were collected in his film Sunless (Sans Soleil), from 1982, in which Marker returns to the city after a long absence, and films the locations of the city in which his memory has concentrated past moments – with those moments represented by past film-images, so that film itself supplants the city. Marker visits sites with individual resonances for him, such as the Gotokuji temple, dedicated to the cats of Tokyo, but also amasses his images on the move, in transit from site to site, and from moment to moment, filming the sleeping inhabitants of subway trains, and interposing the hallucinations and nightmares – drawn from Japanese popular culture and television shows – which occupy their mental space. In his commentary, Marker evokes Tokyo’s unique urban space:

‘Tokyo is a city criss-crossed by trains, tied together with electric wire, she shows her veins ... One could get lost in the great architectural masses and the accumulation of details, and that created the cheapest images of Tokyo: overcrowded, megalomaniacal, inhuman. He thought he saw more subtle cycles there, rhythms, clusters of faces caught sight of in passing, as different and precise as groups of instruments.’

Marker also filmed confrontations between protesters and riot-police, just as Matsumoto and Oshima had done, though Marker’s images are primarily those of protests about the construction of the Narita airport in the countryside outside Tokyo, which involved the uprooting of numerous farming communities. He includes images of those violent riots in the computer-treated sequences of Sunless, as images which have entered the area which he calls the ‘Zone’: an area, inspired by Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, that propels the human eye beyond the habitual parameters of both the filmic and the urban, into an amalgam of future technologies and endless spatial mutations.

Andrei Tarkovsky himself visited Tokyo during September 1971, at a time when the urban protest-movement of two or three years earlier had itself mutated, with many of its young participants despairing of the possibility of radical or revolutionary social change, and entering a kind of ‘internal exile’ within the ascendant corporate Japan of the 1970s, while others, inspired by terrorist movements in Europe, joined Japan’s own terrorist groups, notably the Japanese Red Army, the ‘Sekigun-ha’, founded in 1971 and allied to the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Palestine. Tarkovsky perceived Tokyo as a salutary urban space, writing in his diary: ‘Japan is a wonderful country, of course. Nothing in common with Europe or America. Tokyo is an amazing city. There’s not a single factory chimney, not a single house that looks like any other.’(2) In this sense, Tarkovsky’s perception of Tokyo’s urban space is at profound variance with many other visitors to the city, who saw it as a site enduringly imprinted with the residues of its US Occupation, and also noted an extreme homogeneity in its architectural forms, especially those of its suburbs. Tarkovsky effectively streamlines and reconfigures the city for his filmic purposes. He had arrived in Tokyo to shoot a sequence for his film Solaris, in which an astronaut, Berton, is inhabiting what Tarkovsky calls ‘a town of the future’: an unnamed megalopolis entirely composed of highway underpasses and overpasses, bordered by immense towers. Berton has an argument with another astronaut, Kelvin, who is shortly to leave on a mission to the planet Solaris; Berton then abruptly leaves Kelvin’s rural house, and in an extended five-minute sequence, the astronaut drives through the urban terrain of Tokyo at speed, from underpass to overpass, through the dense network of highways which had been constructed in advance of the 1964 Olympic Games. Finally, the camera ascends, away from Berton’s car, in order to view the chaos of intersecting highway-junctions from above. Once the sequence is over, Tokyo, which has never been identified, vanishes from the film. The city may be reinvented by such fragmentary apparitions within the films of visitors to Tokyo, such as Marker and Tarkovsky, in which memory, imagination and duration are intensively probed by transits across the face of the city, using the film-camera to examine urban facades and to unleash sensations. But in films actually centred within the axis of Tokyo’s unrest of the late-1960s, as with Funeral Parade Of Roses and Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief, that charge of urban tension comes to generate very distinctive stylistic forms of urban filmmaking.

Matsumoto’s film Funeral Parade Of Roses was principally shot on the streets of Tokyo, notably in the district of Shinjuku, which in the late 1960s was intimately associated with experiments in visual arts, as the location of nightclubs for the city’s gay cultures, and especially as the axis for the mass street-protests which took place throughout 1968 and 1969. One area, in particular, a large plaza alongside the area’s railway station, was seen as a gathering place for both demonstrators and for sexual outcasts; it also formed an impromptu space for spectacles by performance artists, and also comprises the key location for Oshima’s Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief. The department stores and business towers surrounding the plaza were already illuminated with immense neon hoardings advertising technology corporations, and by the end of the following decade, those hoardings had been replaced by the moving-image screens which reputedly inspired Ridley Scott, in planning his film Blade Runner (1982), for the depiction of an urban amalgam that oscillates between Los Angeles and Tokyo. The Shinjuku district had a heavy police presence, and Matsumoto was unable to obtain official permission to film there. As a result, the exterior sequences of the film were done covertly, usually in one take, before the police arrived to break up the filmmaking process.

This urgency and spontaneity in part determines the stylistic form of Funeral Parade Of Roses, as it does with Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief, shot in similar conditions of rapidity. The film image becomes one infused with a sense of immediacy, with urban space caught by hand-held cameras in single takes, which focus primarily on the faces and bodies of the characters in their juxtaposition with the surrounding buildings’ facades; such approaches resonate from the strategies of neo-realist filmmaking in Europe. The film’s interior spaces form similarly improvised ones, shot in small rooms, often crowded with figures dancing or undertaking sexual acts, so that the camera has to manoeuvre and negotiate its way through space, with a perpetual sense of mobility.

That element of flexibility also relates to the particular forms of filmmaking adopted by young directors such as Matsumoto and Oshima in late 1960s Tokyo, and to the ways in which their films were financed and distributed.

Filmmakers could form alliances with the studio-system, and adapt their preoccupations to the demands of the studios’ prevalent genres of the time, such as youth-culture, pornographic, and horror films. At the same time, several collective organisations of independent film-production existed in Tokyo, as they did at that time in European countries such as Germany, and both Funeral Parade Of Roses and Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief were produced by the Art Theatre Guild company, which had been formed in 1961 and also produced films by Shuji Terayama. Although such production structures possessed relatively small budgets, they were associated with networks of autonomous cinemas which allowed the films to be widely seen. Both independent and studio-based filmmaking of the time presented combinations of flexibility and constriction, either in terms of the funds available for filmmaking, or the stylistic parameters of filmmaking. Funeral Parade Of Roses was Matsumoto’s first feature film, and rather than moving subsequently into studio productions, his later work extended further into experimental forms, in short films which analysed issues of camera movement and the manipulation or multiplication of visual images.

The narrative of Funeral Parade Of Roses, drawn obliquely from Greek mythology, concerns a young transvestite named Eddie who has previously murdered his mother and now works as a prostitute in a gay bar in Shinjuku, the Bar Genet. He also pursues friendships with other transvestites and with a group of young revolutionaries who are preoccupied with the ongoing street-riots. Eddie has an affair with the bar’s drug-dealing proprietor, but when the proprietor discovers that he is actually Eddie’s father, he stabs himself to death in their apartment, leading Eddie to then pierce his own eyes with the same knife, before going out onto the street, still clutching the knife, and attracting a crowd of onlookers; the final shot of the film circles through those onlookers before focusing on the knife, poised against the face of the city.

Funeral Parade Of Roses is located in the gay sub-cultures of Tokyo, which literally take place underground, below street-level, especially in bars, night-clubs and art-galleries, as well as on the urban surfaces. In many of the subterranean, interior sequences of the film, dense crowds of figures amass, so that the film-camera must infiltrate its way between the human figures. Similarly, once the action shifts to street-level, the camera follows the film’s characters through enclosing masses of figures, who often obstruct or assault those characters. The filming of Tokyo’s urban space demands a sense of mobility that remains adhered to the bodies of the protagonists, as they attempt to penetrate that space. The opening-out of urban space only emerges when the camera ascends to a viewing-position above the city, in the same way that Tarkovsky, in the final image of his Tokyo sequence in Solaris, films the highway junctions of Tokyo as a panorama, from above. In Funeral Parade Of Roses, those openings of urban space, from density to expansion, are situated at moments when the camera either looks down on the plazas of Shinjuku, from the summits of adjacent buildings, or else when the characters ascend to the viewing platform of a tower which gives a perspective of the entire city.

In Funeral Parade Of Roses, the urban space of Tokyo is seen by its characters as being involved in a process of disintegration, reflecting the widespread perception of the time in Japan that rapid urban proliferation, together with pollution and the exhausting of natural resources, had radically destabilised the environment of the country, whose precarious existence was also mediated by the culture of violent protest against the country’s presence of US military power. Urban space constantly fragments in the film. In one of its sequences, the funeral takes place of the manager of the Bar Genet, who has committed suicide out of jealousy about the relationship between Eddie and the bar’s proprietor. After the funeral has ended, Eddie notices that much of the vast, decrepit cemetery has become waterlogged, and that many tombs have subsided, vanishing below the water. That disintegration of the cemetery is explicitly that of Tokyo itself, and Eddie exclaims that he wishes that not only Tokyo, but the entirety of Japan, would sink below water and disappear. The city is moving in precarious transits between moments of past disappearance, such as that of its destruction by firebombing in 1945, to future moments in which its excess, or the violence generated by its protest movements, may also entail the vanishing from sight of its space.

The title of a film directed by Shuji Terayama in the same era incites its spectators: Throw Away Your Books, Let’s Go Out Into The Streets. However, the young revolutionaries of Funeral Parade Of Roses are never seen in the streets of Tokyo, and decline to participate in the demonstrations taking place at the moment in which the film is set. Instead, in company with Eddie, they remain enclosed in interior spaces, engaged in wild sex parties, and watching the television news broadcasts which show images of the ongoing confrontations between young protesters and riot-police. They also make films of the television news images, and then project those films, of the media images of riots, to themselves, in the same room, with the film-images distorted by technological processes of replication, in a parallel way to those which Chris Marker includes as the contents of the ‘Zone’, in his film Sunless. Matsumoto anticipates a global obsession with media images of conflict, and the loss of a direct physical contact with urban protest. Revolution has been abstracted, and transformed into ever-diminishing media images, which form a source of excitation, for sexual acts or for the filmmaking process itself, but not for social activism.

Matsumoto also demonstrates the estrangement and familiarisation of urban space through film, by including a number of interview sequences in Funeral Parade Of Roses, clearly resonant of those in films by Jean-Luc Godard, and which insurge into the film, as documentary elements, to intentionally fracture its linear narrative consistency. In those sequences, Matsumoto conducts dialogues with young transvestites in the avenues of Shinjuku, filming them at night against the background of the district’s illuminated buildings.

Most of the interview sequences follow a set framework, in which the same questions are posed and the same answers are given, so that they form a repetitive element of the film, providing a sense of stability within the disintegration and furore which the narrative itself carries. In part, that stability is provided by the recognisable urban presence, of the familiar plazas and hoardings of the Shinjuku district. The city may be eroding and submerging into riots, and the film’s characters are all heading into death, but the distinctive urban aura of Shinjuku allows momentary coherings of filmic space.

Oshima’s film Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief, filmed around the same period as Funeral Parade Of Roses, opens with a sequence set in the same Tokyo location: the plaza alongside the Shinjuku railway station, where a theatre company are staging an open-air performance. In fact, the film never leaves the Shinjuku district, focusing on a narrow psychogeographical area which the film relates to the interior journey of its central character, Birdey, a young book-thief who steals books from the shelves at the huge Kinokuniya bookshop, located directly alongside the Shinjuku plaza. In many ways, the film attempts to generate a narrative element from the particular resonances of that urban location, and its reputation as a site for counter-cultures and sexual experimentation, in the way that filmmakers of the same era might have selected as locations the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, or the Kreuzberg district of West Berlin, in order to conjure a parallel aura of urban exploration.

Oshima’s film is concerned more explicitly than Funeral Parade Of Roses with making connections between sexual acts and revolution, cutting directly between sex-scenes and shots of the street-riots in Shinjuku; the film ends with an extended sequence of rioting, so that its narrative is one that is left open, as though prised-apart by the engulfing violent uproar of the period.

However, one factor which unites the two films is their obsession with the work of the French writer Jean Genet, whose novels are cited in both films’ titles, and whose film Un Chant d’Amour, from 1950, had been distributed internationally via filmmakers’ co-operatives and seen by directors in Japan; it exerts a strong stylistic influence on the filming of sexual acts in Funeral Parade Of Roses. The naming of the nightclub where Eddie works in that film forms a homage to Genet, and when Birdie steals books from the Kinokuniya bookshop, he heads directly for the works of Genet, who had himself been a book-thief and was imprisoned several times for those thefts. Genet was at the height of his international reputation in 1969, engaged in that period in his support for the Palestinians, for the Black Panther movement in the USA, and for the rights of immigrant workers in France itself; all of his novels had been translated into Japanese, and he was a seminal figure for many of Tokyo’s experimental filmmakers, artists, choreographers and theatre directors, as he remains in contemporary Tokyo. By an aberrant urban coincidence, Genet spent part of 1969 in Tokyo, where he visited his friend Jackie Maglia, and took part in several of the largest and most violent of the confrontations between the student movements and riot-police, in November and December of that year. Maglia recalled Genet’s participation in the demonstrations: ‘People hooked up to one another... so they’d be harder to arrest. Genet pretended to be ‘’reviewing’’ the masked soldiers who’d come to control the crowd. He looked each soldier squarely in the eye (many of them were handsome).’(3) However, Genet declined to meet filmmakers and artists while in Tokyo.

Even more than Matsumoto’s film, Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief is a film of urban fragments, in which narrative elements are disconnected and subordinated to the exploration of urban space. The film comprises a set of momentary encounters, transits and pursuits, between the book-thief and a female assistant at the Kinokuniya bookshop who arrests him in the act of theft, and between them and a theatre director played by Juro Kara. As with Funeral Parade Of Roses, the film focuses on the ability of the mobile camera to scan the surfaces and subterraneas of the city, and collect traces and residues, including those imprinted upon exterior walls and buildings in the forms of graffiti and advertising hoardings, which then amass, to form a representation of the city, in many ways allied to those created by neo-realist works, as one in a state of crisis.

Although the exploration of urban space is largely accorded the work of defining and carrying the film – to the point at which, in Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief, the characters occasionally appear peripheral to the film’s preoccupations – that urban space is itself one which is seen as disintegrating, subject to perpetual amendment, and presented as a sequence of fragments which will never cohere.

In both Funeral Parade Of Roses and Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief, the revolutionary aspirations of the protesters are treated by the filmmakers with a degree of irony, and linked to the ideas of revolution as an art of performance which Genet had developed in his theatrical work. The revolutionary ‘cell’ in Matsumoto’s film never leave their room, and become consumed by the media images of the riots taking place in the avenues outside; the sexual imperatives around the relationship between the two characters in Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief also render them largely oblivious to the riots which finally engulf the entire film. This preoccupation with an oblique, ambivalent relationship to activism and revolutionary commitment is also present in films by the director Koji Wakamatsu, who analysed the rapport between sexual and revolutionary acts in his films of the same era, structured in the form of exploitation or pornographic films. Wakamatsu was also preoccupied with the connections between the protest-culture of late-1960s Tokyo and the terrorist movements which emerged, directly or indirectly, from that culture; he visited the Palestinian liberation movements in 1971, and recently made a new film, United Red Army (2008), which looks back at the terrorist groups of 1970s Japan and at their implosive internal dynamics. Both Funeral Parade Of Roses and Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief appear prescient of the aftermath of the urban riots in late-1960s Tokyo, in their depictions both of an all-consuming apathy, and of forms of terrorism whose imageries and definitions could be endlessly manipulated and distorted.

In that same period, the Tokyo-based filmmaker Donald Richie made his film Cybele, which, like Funeral Parade Of Roses, adopts a mythic narrative structure and uses a cemetery location, that of the vast Yanaka cemetery in eastern Tokyo, to explore its concern with urban and cultural disintegration. In the final sequence of his film, Richie depicted a group of naked figures who appeared to have been slaughtered and piled-up on top of each other – images which led to the censorship and banning of the film in numerous countries. In some ways, those images intimate an overturning of the sense of exhilaration and often-playful experimentation which had occupied Tokyo-based filmmakers during the second half of the 1960s, and resonate instead, even against the filmmaker’s intentions, more directly from wartime images such as those of the results of the US firebombing of the city in 1945. Those unexpected transits across time, in Japanese cinema of the late 1960s, are as revealing as the perpetual movements through urban space which propelled those films’ narratives and determined their distinctive stylistic texture.

The images of Tokyo’s urban space, in a state of violent turmoil, remain resonant ones for filmmaking and for digital arts in contemporary Tokyo, evident, for example, in the work of the director Shinya Tsukamoto and the mutating megalopolis of his films, such as Tokyo Fist. The films of Takashi Miike carry an allied preoccupation, to those of Funeral Parade Of Roses and Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief, with the city’s Shinjuku district as a unique urban environment in which events habitually occur that would otherwise be impossible and unconceivable, and which need to be seized at speed. The particular ethos of late-1960s film-production and distribution structures in Japan, exemplified by the Art Theatre Guild, still survives in Tokyo through institutions such as Image Forum. After being rarely seen for many years, Funeral Parade Of Roses and Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief were, in many ways, resuscitated by the DVD medium, which allowed viewers the opportunity to reconstruct the time and space of their fast-moving urban transits. Even though the urban space of Tokyo, including that of Shinjuku, is now largely unrecognisable from its late-1960s documentation in films such as those by Matsumoto and Oshima, it still presents an open environment for filmmakers and digital artists preoccupied with the scanning of urban mutations, and with the exploration of pivotal moments of disquiet and unease with the forms of the city.

That filmic exploration often took the form of an intimate examination of urban surfaces, and their interaction with the human figures poised against them. The urban surfaces of Tokyo, at the end of the 1960s, mediated a set of traces and indicators, about memory and conflict and sexual dynamics, that appeared precarious and unstable, and had to be recorded with both urgency and flexibility, in movements across the face of the city, generating films which enduringly appear as vital archives, of the forms of urban space in a state of uproar and transformation.

Notes

(1) Donald Richie, Tokyo: A View of the City (Reaktion Books, London and Washington DC, 1999), p.27.

(2) Andrei Tarkovsky, Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986 (Faber and Faber, London, 1994), pp.43-44.

(3) Edmund White, Genet (Chatto and Windus, London, 1993), p.596.

MISHIMA : DEATH-FRAGMENTS

In a television interview recorded in 1969, the year before his death by self-disembowelment and decapitation by one of his acolytes, Yukio Mishima spoke of how ‘an extreme form of eroticism’ had always driven his life, unleashed by his experiences of Tokyo under warfare and the sensation of imminently-expected death he experienced there, and carrying him far beyond the stratified parameters of Japanese literary and cultural life, as though that life had been choreographed towards death, by his close friend of the 1960s, the instigator of Ankoku Butoh dance, Tatsumi Hijikata – as a set of compulsive gestures, simultaneously pathological and exquisite, and propelled, too, outside the anticipated boundaries of the corporeal and the rigorously annotated sensory categories of Japan, always a hairsbreadth away from both orgasm and erasure.

Three years before his death, Mishima wrote The Way Of The Samurai from his lifelong engagement with the Hagakure, an eighteenth-century manual on samurai life, compiled in the form of fragments imparted by a now-retired samurai (who had expected to be allowed to commit ritual suicide on the death of his master, but through an anomaly, was prevented from doing so, and chose instead to distance himself from life) and transcribed by a young auditor. The Hagakure is a set of austere interdictions about the necessity of the samurai’s readiness for death at every moment, but it also contains elements of gratuitous contradictions, black holes of nihilism, as though the profound rigour of samurai life, and its ultimate futility (as in the comparison the manual draws with puppetry-gestures) together form part of the same movement of implosion.

In exploring the Hagakure, Mishima refines the material that is vital for his own death: the act of death that engulfs every gestural act, every creative act, every sexual act, reversing in time to simultaneously validate and erase all of those prior acts. Mishima is always irresistibly compelled, almost unable to restrain himself for another instant, from his act of death; as in the theoretical texts and novels of Georges Bataille, if every act of outrage, excess and death-obsession cannot be concentrated into an identical moment of life, now, then everything must be done to ensure that it will happen in the next moment of life. What French philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva learned from their reading of Mishima is that, if death cannot be carried through immediately (the state of perpetual suspension which is that of the samurai’s life), then it must, at least, be made the sole focus of representation: representation with its own cancellation engrained within the obsession to expose, to transmit, to project.

The year before writing The Way Of The Samurai, Mishima had co-directed a film which represents and anticipates his ritual suicide, acted by himself, though without the participation of his private army of erotically-uniformed young men, the Shield Society, who accompanied him in 1970 on his death-mission to the Ichigaya barracks in Tokyo.

The pre-eminent writer on contemporary Japan, and close friend of Mishima, Donald Richie, attended the shooting of Mishima’s film, and remembered: ‘In time, he asked me to come to the Daiei film studio… The movie, The Rite Of Love And Death (Yukoku), based on the short story ‘Patriotism’, was already half-completed and this was the second day of filming. A container of pig intestines stood ready and after rehearsal, these were packaged inside Mishima’s trousers. When the knife seemed to enter the author’s abdomen it actually cut into the plastic sack containing the guts… This transformation was strong.’

Mishima’s film is pitched so tightly at the interstice between orchestrated sexual bliss and blood-drenched corporeal chaos, with its loving shots of his own thighs, muscled chest, barely-covered penis, immediately before the act of self-laceration, that it exceeds and annuls all linear narration, and projects itself in the form of a sensorially-attuned sequence of fragments – exactly the same form he sets to work in The Way Of The Samurai for his exploration of the Hagakure. All language, all image, must be dismantled, disassembled, into the form of the fragment, so that it detaches itself from its tainting by its habitual social misuse, in order to become the medium of pure obsession, perpetual orgasm, with the instant of the onrush of death sustained into infinity.

In The Way Of The Samurai, Mishima contrasts the eighteenth-century samurai era with that of contemporary Japan (that of 1967, a year poised between the two ratifications of the US-Japan Security Treaty, which had rendered Japan an obsequious client-state of the USA, and shortly before the great end-of-the-decade era of violent street-riots which Mishima lived to witness, but rejected as just one more void consumer-experience), tellingly castigating a city in which consumerism-induced frenzies have overridden the grandeur and stature he wants to accord to the corporeal, in its moment before death: ‘Throughout Tokyo, pygmy romances are rampant today.’ In doing so, he creates a parallel with the temporal system of the Hagakure, in which the retired samurai laments an era, thirty years before, in which samurai warriors had been authentic, and had not been consumed only by thoughts of wealth and ‘effeminacy’. A gap of time must always be generated, in Mishima’s obsessions, in order for the contemporary moment to be conjured into such vilification, that the only recourse is death.

Mishima experiences those boundaries of time as spatial boundaries, too. In his conversations with Donald Richie, he projected himself into the excessive time and space of imperial Rome, but also into a contemporary space of Tokyo denied to him: that of the sexual and alcohol-driven sensory furore of the down-at-heel San’ya district. Donald Richie recalls: ‘Mishima sometimes said he felt so cut off from the things he really liked. He said that some time in Rome under Tiberius would have been interesting. Or maybe Diacletian – he was thinking of Sebastian. He toyed with the idea of reincarnation – not seriously, but as a kind of joke, wondered if he hadn’t been a Persian slave boy in an earlier life, or an indulgent emperor. As for San’ya (a district something like the Bowery of Tokyo, home of the proletariat worker), here the barrier was spatial, not temporal. He could not go there because of who he had become. He would have been recognized.’

To reconcile his unique time and space, and to project it to the world as an act beyond representation, Mishima’s final act of death forms the embodiment of that ‘extreme form of eroticism’ which led, as he said in the same television interview of 1969, to ‘a proud form of death’: ‘Harakiri makes you win.’ In the police photographs of the aftermath of Mishima’s death, in which his severed head had been placed upright, on a cloth, alongside that of one of his Shield Society acolytes, and photographed in close-up, his face emanates an oblivion that has passed through every corporeal, sensory and sexual aperture, in order to mediate his obsession, stopped-dead in that instant of raw bliss, for the eye of his reader and spectator.

HIJIKATA : A STORY OF TOKYO

Tokyo lives by its images, its sexual obsessions, its human bodies, and through the memory and prescience of its own destructions. Long ago, in the furnace of images that heats Tokyo, a form of dance performance emerged that condensed that imagery and situated it deeply within the fractured substance of the bodies inhabiting the city. From the endless proliferation of Tokyo’s images and sensations, in order to survive, the eye can extract just one or two, and saturate them in seared memory and sensory convulsions. And out of that material, the final story of Tokyo originates.

At the end of the 1950s, in Tokyo, a young dancer from northern Japan named Tatsumi Hijikata created a form of dance performance that he named Ankoku Butoh – dance of utter darkness . Hijikata was starting to visualize a dance form that could transform the human body. He saw the body as a matter that had to be excoriated, placed in intimacy with gestures resonant of sensory excess and death, and then insistently reactivated, violently. In Tokyo, Hijikata, a riotous and insurgent presence, formed an incompatible element within a city that was then pre-occupied far more with its dreams of affluence than with visions of bodily mutation.

After arriving in Tokyo from his home in the isolated region of Akita, on the far north-western coast of Japan, Hijikata had worked for years as a menial labourer in the docks and laundries of the city, while his unruly obsessions gradually took focus. At night, in the Tokyo dancehalls, he dressed provocatively in the white suits with long, drape jackets that were worn by gangsters in Akira Kurosawa’s films of the time. He began performing in sex cabarets, in the heated and labyrinthine districts of a city still damaged and reeling, knocked permanently awry, by its incineration of a decade earlier. Hijikata, surrounded by the aura of death that had embedded itself inextricably into the nerves of Tokyo, was gripped by the idea of a harsh corporeal resuscitation that the performances he was planning could incite. He wrote, “Butoh is a corpse standing straight up in a desperate bid for life”.

In May 1959, in collaboration with a young dancer, Yoshito Ohno, who was then nineteen years old, Hijikata undertook the first performance of his Butoh dance, Kinjiki, which took its inspiration from the writings of Yukio Mishima. Over the previous years of his gruelling solitude in the city, Hijikata had been conspiring with himself on a performance that could set a sudden gash on the face of Tokyo. The once-only performance took place largely in darkness, the spectators unsighted and unnerved, their eyes catching impacts of body against body, with Ohno strangling a chicken between his thighs, and Hijikata assaulting Ohno and seemingly raping him. The performance didn’t last long. The stage was left spattered with blood; the spectators – habituated to rigid, innocuous dance performances – responded with silent fury and outrage to Hijikata’s unprecedented images of the body; at the end, only Mishima and one or two others in the crowd applauded.

That moment in Tokyo was one when, after the torpid, defeated submission to American culture that had pervaded the lives of its inhabitants during the period of the United States Occupation and through the ensuing years, the city’s culture abruptly exploded, in reaction, with work that probed Tokyo’s deep layers of sex and damage, as the city accelerated and expanded spectacularly into the 1960s. Many of the figures who came to prominence during that decade – the poet and theatre director Shuji Terayama, the film-makers Nagisa Oshima and Koji Wakamatsu – saw the creation in their work of intricate, visceral con-stellations of sex and political revolution as forming the most direct visual means of reinventing Tokyo. Collaborations between writers, artists, musicians and performers scrambled the boundaries in the city’s culture, and matched the ongoing mutation which the exterior form of Tokyo itself underwent in those years, as it expanded out into an unending terrain of concrete buildings and glaring neon signs: the city in upheaval left behind all of its former borders and fixed points. As the visual arena of Tokyo then assembled itself into a multiple onslaught of images, Hijikata’s Butoh dance acted as a contrary force, that collected the essence of that tearing upheaval, but then challenged it, propelling out instead his own unique images of the body, against the images of Tokyo.

In the face of the raging visual storm that contemporary Tokyo exerts upon the eye, beating it into entrancement, I decided to see if I could track down a few of the rare surviving traces of those spiked images of transformation, which Hijikata had made in the city.

Looking for the lost traces of Hijikata’s work, I visited Yoshito Ohno, Hijikata’s collaborator on the performance of Kinjiki. In his wooden studio, out in the suburbs, he was working with a group of around ten young dancers. Ohno was a dignified, austere figure with a shaven head, and over sixty years old. The lights in the studio went down; the young dancers appeared exhausted even before they started their work. Ohno gave them a scattering of dried flowers, mostly roses, that were stored in an old glass cabinet. The dancers held the flowers to their bodies. Ohno instructed them to make the flowers become flesh, and incorporate them into their bodies. He told them to change their bodies, in that way.

The dancers worked in a silent, dense delirium of gestures. Ohno was silent too, and still. Two hours or more went by. Something had been unleashed in the dark, concentrated air.

Then the lights in the studio snapped back on.

Later, we sit and share a barrel of sake. The ram-shackle studio lies up on a steep hill, looking out over a partly-wooded valley of little houses affixed, by precarious concrete bases, to the slopes. It is late at night, and the rainfall from the last convulsion of an autumn typhoon pounds the ground outside like an exasperated, useless fist. Yoshito Ohno remembers the first moments of his work with Hijikata, who died of cirrhosis in 1986, with affection and empathy. Ohno is a drinker, too. The children of the district have to lead him home sometimes, when he can’t recognize the way to his house. And on other days, the neighbourhood thugs make him dance like a village idiot in the streets. The intervening decades have been hard. But in Ohno’s memory, the image that survived it all, in Tokyo, was that of a body dancing.

One night, in a cellar bar in the Ikebukuro district, I met a philosopher named Kuniichi Uno who had been an intimate friend of Hijikata in the mid-1980s, at the end of his life. By that time, Hijikata had stopped performing for over a decade, though he remained in Tokyo and still choreo-graphed works for a small number of performers, including Yoshito Ohno’s father, Kazuo Ohno, a legendary figure, now in his nineties, but still performing. Uno remembered his alcohol-fuelled talks with Hijikata that revolved around Hijikata’s preoccupation in his work with meshing together images of the human scream, the body, language, and Tokyo. They would disappear together into the sub-terranean zone of Shinjuku’s bars to talk through their ideas, not re-emerging until three days later, Uno stunned and hallucinating with exhaustion, Hijikata still lucid, his head glowing with new projects.

As autumn came down coldly in Tokyo, the back alleyways of the Meguro district became wreathed in an evening smoke that smelt of burning leaves and charred fish. The gangs of cats roaming the alleys were hungry. It was a peripheral district, far from the blaze and cacophony of Shinjuku and Shibuya. I tracked my way through the dark, tangled streets.

Turning a corner into a dead-end alleyway of detached houses, I came across a tall, three-storey building with a sharply pointed roof. Outside, a revolving pole of white light carried the word “asbestos”.

I had decided to visit Hijikata’s widow, at the house where she and Hijikata lived together for twenty-five years and where he developed almost all of his work, in the studio located in the building’s basement. Akiko Motofuji met me on the flight of steps leading up to the house. She was herself a dancer, tiny and squat, with thinning black hair that started high up on her forehead. All of her stories came edged with horror and loss. Born in Tokyo at the end of the 1920s, she saw most of her friends disappear or die over the war years.

One day, her best friend was blown up next to her as they walked, arm in arm, along a Tokyo street. The city abruptly vanished in burning silver light, and she and her few surviving friends believed that it was the end of the world, at least for them. Then life obstinately began again. Her father had been an industrialist who made a fortune out of asbestos production, and when he decided to give his daughter a dance studio, in 1950, she named it the “Asbestos hall” . During that period of Tokyo’s frantic reconstruction, asbestos had been considered an invaluable building material; it was only during the following decades that the name began to possess its lethal resonances. Hijikata came to live with her there soon after the Kinjiki performance that had scandalized its spectators and instilled its own corrosive presence into Tokyo. Hijikata had still been working on the Tokyo docks, and living, starving and desperate, in a hostel for derelicts; now, he had a space in which to work through his obsessions.

In the Asbestos hall, the death of Hijikata exerted a tangible presence. Akiko Motofuji kept a little shrine dedicated to her husband beside the window of the living-room, with a photograph, two tiny wooden cats in a basket, and a burning candle: a few precious fragments of memory. In the photograph of Hijikata, long, wild hair covered a tender face.

When, later in the evening, Akiko Motofuji began to project films of his performances in the studio downstairs, it was a different face I saw.

Hijikata was carried onstage at a Shinjuku theatre on a kind of throne. It was October 1968, and Tokyo had erupted in uproar, with riots going on in the streets outside. Hijikata danced an exultant fury of perversion and calamity. At one moment he wore a white dress, at another moment he was naked except for a long, golden phallus, strapped around his waist. The dance transformed Hijikata’s body in incessant ricochets, from decrepitude to youthful fluidity, and from a disciplined body of magisterial control to a shattered carapace of skin over nothing at all. The dance began in pulsing sexual exhilaration and proceeded through to a taunting and a killing. Towards the end of the performance, Hijikata’s body was strung precariously by ropes, high above the audience, in a dance of vertigo that, at any moment, threatened to overturn itself. The images of the performance, entitled Revolt Of The Body, passed through the film projector, jagged. They were all that survived of Hijikata, and they ended abruptly, in mid- gesture. I was suddenly back in the darkened studio with Hijikata’s widow and the breathless violence of his presence. Tokyo pressed hard outside the studio, colder still.

The American writer and film-maker Donald Richie lived in the cemetery district of Yanaka in the 1950s and 1960s, during the years when he was a close friend of Hijikata and of Yukio Mishima. At that time, the vast cemetery had grown semi-derelict, many of the tombs covered in a rampant foliage. One Sunday, Richie shot the entirety of a film, from beginning to end, at the edge of the cemetery. His actors – the young members of a Japanese experimental theatre company, eagerly ready for anything he could demand from them – were soon all stripped naked, enacting a myth of sex and death. Richie’s neighbours came out of their low wooden houses to watch, attracted by the spectacle; they viewed Richie’s behaviour with bemused indulgence, and the Yanaka district was habitually so deeply somnolent that the film shoot threw their lives pleasurably out of kilter for an instant. Soon, the atmosphere was one of festive hilarity, with Richie, his performers and the neighbours all laughing together. By the end of the afternoon, the actress playing the goddess of destruction in the film lay back, an exhausted but satiated smile on her face, on top of a great heap of naked, bloodied male bodies. The day had been a delirious experiment with the intersecting terrains of Yanaka and the lithe, naked bodies of Richie’s performers. But, when he later came to edit together the images he had shot that day, for a film entitled Cybele, those images transformed themselves aberrantly before his eyes, from the capricious fragments of ecstasy that he had envisaged, into a monument-ally solemn work of horror and extremity. Tokyo had seized Richie’s images.

When he showed the film around the world, appalled spectators assumed that it was a work about genocide, evoking for them the piles of massacred bodies in the abandoned Nazi concentration camps, or else the fragile layers of carbonized victims left behind by the firebombing of Tokyo. In Britain, the film was simply banned.

I sat with Donald Richie one evening in a silent restaurant in Tokyo, overlooking a dense garden of dying flowers. The night before, the first cold winds of the winter had hit Tokyo, and the air was still shot through with ice. As I travelled around the city during the course of the day, the salary-men on the subway trains had exuded an air of increasing panic as the hours wore on – it was a day when the news reports had been urgently jammed with stories of threatened economic collapse, of mass redundancies caused by financial corruption. But Tokyo itself, oblivious to all of those ructions on its surface, remained immutable. It had no need even of time. Decades could flash by and leave only an easily uprooted scattering of scars, concrete blocks and burnt-out images strewn across the city. As the sky over the garden darkened, Richie spoke to me about his memories of attending the performance of Kinjiki by Hijikata and Yoshito Ohno, over forty years earlier. He remembered Ohno as a beautiful nineteen-year-old boy, a gaunt and elegant presence within the storm of blood and anger that the performance generated. Richie’s friend, Yukio Mishima, sitting alongside him in the turbulent hall, had said that the young Ohno looked like a dark angel.

In the same year as the performance of Kinjiki, in 1959, Richie made a film with Hijikata, together with a group of dancers based at the Asbestos hall. Richie shot the film in an empty schoolyard surrounded by warehouses in the industrial zone of Shinagawa, close to Tokyo Bay. One male figure in the film, Sacrifice, is surrounded by a circle of exultant women who urinate on him, defecate on him, and finally tear him open. At that time of furore in Tokyo, Richie was immersed in the city’s experimental culture, helping to instigate collaborations between film-makers, choreographers and photographers. He had arrived in Tokyo thirteen years earlier, in 1946, as part of the military Occupation of the city, and had witnessed the still-devastated expanse of Tokyo from a zero distance. Then, as Tokyo rapidly resurged from its obliteration, an atmosphere of exhilarating tension and awry sexual decadence generated itself for all those with the means to experience it. Captivated, Richie stayed on in Tokyo forever. By the end of the 1950s, with the American Occupation over, the city was starting to ignite with the first of the fierce riots against the enduring subservience – cultural, political and military – of Japan to the United States. Concussions of roaring sound crossed the city from end to end. Hijikata’s work had begun at that instant.

Yukio Mishima had first introduced Richie to Hijikata with the words, “I have an evil god for you now”. Three years after they had worked together on the film Sacrifice, Richie wanted to make a new film in collaboration with Hijikata, at the vast beach of Kujukurihama, on the Pacific coastline to the east of Tokyo. Hijikata was in a sly mood. He gathered together a gang of gullible boys from the tiny fishing village of Osato, and, as a typhoon whipped over them all, Richie filmed the boys in the act of killing a goat on the beach. He wanted to capture the exact moment at which the boys forgot that they had just killed, and went back to the usual rhythm of their lives. While Richie filmed the boys, caught in their startled confusion, Hijikata danced wildly on the beach of white sand, just out of the range of Richie’s film camera, propelling his stomach spasmodically out from his body. At first, the boys looked at the dancing figure in frowning disbelief. Then they suddenly broke into great fits of laughter, the violent tension instantly seeping out from their bodies. In Richie’s film, War Games, from moment to moment, the onset of oblivion from carnage became palpable.

In the early 1960s, the photographer Eikoh Hosoe created a legendary series of portraits of Yukio Mishima, Death By Roses, combining intricate superimpositions, distortions and fragmen-tations of the images. He photographed Mishima naked in all the intensity of the novelist’s sexual obsessions – in leather, in bondage, and in extreme oscillations between multiple identities. Every image became saturated luxuriously in dreams of death, as though death itself were a matter pulped together from sperm, velvet and darkness.

Shortly before Mishima’s suicide, they worked together on the opulent design of a new catalogue publication of the portraits, which Mishima evidently conceived of as his final, provoking apparition before the world. Before Hosoe’s images, the naked body had rarely formed such a raw, direct concern in Japanese art; Hosoe invented an imagery of the human body for Tokyo after its destruction. As a young man, he had been among the audience for Hijikata’s Kinjiki performance, and that experience seared him and precipitated his work.

In his studio, close by a seething traffic intersection in the Yotsuya district, Hosoe makes his first assertions about his work with Hijikata emphatically – but then something within the solemnity of the words disintegrates, his statements turn in on themselves, and every sentence tails off in an abrupt riot of laughter. He shows me a photograph taken while he was walking with Hijikata in the dawn streets of Shinjuku, in 1967, after a night of drinking. They had stopped a young boy who was busy delivering bottles of milk on his bicycle, and had paid him off so that Hijikata could ride on the bicycle instead. In the image, the background appears blurred, a gestural smear of speed that compacts together the shuttered shop fronts and the figures of suited salary-men on their way to work. In the fore-ground, Hijikata, barefoot, dressed in a striped coat and a straw hat covered in flowers, struggles with the bicycle. As it swerves precariously, Hijikata adroitly fixes his gaze on the camera from the corners of both eyes, his teeth clamped down in concentration on his lower lip. The image captured the presence of Hijikata in Tokyo, as a crazed rapport.

Tokyo itself, for Hosoe, forms a living body that can mesmerize its inhabitants and induce engulfing sensations of astonishment. He has seen the city in a state of obliteration, and so that feeling of being corporeally stunned by Tokyo is sharp and immediate for him. He tells me that he was sent away from Tokyo as a boy by his father, a priest, in order to evade the wartime fire-bombings, and when he returned, arriving back at Ueno station from his exile in the wild rural zone of northern Japan, Tokyo had gone. Later, he wanted to discover more about the men who had made Tokyo disappear so fatally and completely, as though by a malign conjuring trick, and he began to hang around the bases of the occupying United States army, taking photo-graphs of the wisecracking young Americans and learning their turns of phrase. In the autumn of 1965, twenty years after arriving back in Tokyo, Hosoe finally returned to the northern wilderness to which he had been evacuated, along with Hijikata, whose home that isolated terrain had originally been. As they travelled by car through the villages of the Akita region together, they created a work entitled Kamaitachi, in which Hijikata embodied a mythical, sexual creature who stalked the rice fields and attacked the peasants, leaving deep but bloodless wounds. At times, Hijikata ran in frantic abandon through the immense fields, and buried himself deep into the earth, under black skies. At other times, he seductively lured the peasants’ children away into his world. The smiling peasants carried Hijikata around on a bier, raised high above their heads – Hosoe had concocted the story that he and Hijikata were preparing a programme for a television company, and the peasants, in open-mouthed awe of the new medium of television, did whatever they were asked. For Hosoe, as he photo-graphed, the bitter landscape around the dancing body of Hijikata appeared to convulse in gestures too, whipped with Siberian wind, glowering with pain and fury. Like the city of Tokyo, that black landscape also formed a living body in Hosoe’s eyes, dense and intoxicating as it pressed itself around the figure of Hijikata within it.

On the day after Hijikata had died, in January 1986, Hosoe went to the Asbestos hall to photograph his dead friend. Hijikata had died suddenly; in the previous month, he had been preparing a work about the myths and gods of Akita, and was planning to perform himself, for the first time in thirteen years, in the form of a dance in which he would embody the riotous gods of wind and thunder, trampling furiously on a ground strewn with hundreds of thousands of fallen cherry blossoms. Then he had told Akiko Motofuji that his insides hurt, and he had been suddenly spirited off to hospital. A few seconds before he died, he looked at Akiko Motofuji and told her, “I am giving out the light of the gods”.

Then he closed his eyes. Hosoe’s other friend, Yukio Mishima, had been photographed for the last time not by Hosoe, but by the Tokyo press media snappers, who had burst into the military office of the Ichigaya district where Mishima had committed ritual suicide in 1970, and placed his newly severed head neatly upright on the sodden carpet in order to photograph it. The image of Mishima’s intensely prepared, ultimate affrontment to the world had been stolen away from him. But Hosoe photographed Hijikata in his coffin, surrounded by flowers, his eyes closed but with his mouth open, as though exhaling one final time. It was the last image of Hijikata.

Only the illuminated signs of lurid amusement arcades carried the detritus of Tokyo’s burning core out to the peripheral suburb where Yoshito Ohno’s father, the legendary dancer Kazuo Ohno, was giving a rare perform-ance. He was well over ninety years old, and still dancing, in extremis. Like Hijikata, who danced just with his fingers on the hospital blanket covering his body as he lay terminally ill, Kazuo Ohno was dancing headlong, but slowly and lovingly, into death.

Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno collaborated together over a period of several decades. Although Hijikata was the younger man by over twenty years, he directed Ohno’s work. They performed a version of Jean Genet’s novel Our Lady Of The Flowers in a desolate back alleyway behind the main Tokyo commercial district, the Ginza, at the beginning of the 1960s, with Hijikata’s head encased within a tight black hood, above his naked upper body, and with Ohno in an old dress and hat, incorporating the character of Genet’s transvestite prostitute, Divine, with an ultimate vulnerability. The American photographer William Klein documented the performance – the shirt-sleeved salary-men at the end of the street standing and staring in horror, as the spectacle avalanched its way down the rainy alleyway – and included it in his catalogue of Tokyo images. In other photographs of their later performances together, the two men lie entangled on the floor, with Hijikata crushing down violently on Ohno’s back, while Ohno’s face contorts in blissful submission. The obsessions of Ohno and Hijikata appeared to lie in acutely opposed directions – Ohno believed that his dance was endless and infinite, while Hijikata’s work was intently immediate and brutally cut – but they were insistently drawn back to one another. For Ohno, no such thing as an opposition existed, anyway.

The event begins long behind schedule. The audience in the breathless hall is confronted with the sheer fragility of such a performance. Kazuo Ohno appears at last in a beam of light that traverses the stage. He dances in gestures that propel themselves forward for a moment and then stop suddenly, collapsing inward – gestures transforming themselves constantly, on a boundary between breathing and extinguishment. Ohno’s body, on its knife-edge, careers forward in intricate spasms of movement, then collapses again. As in the 1960s, Ohno dances in a dress, which he exchanges for another, several times during the performance, each time taking on more vivid extravagance, as his own movements gradually fade away into darkness. Between the short bouts of dance, lasting only a few seconds and lit only marginally, the air in the hall is tangibly black and silent. At some moments, Ohno dances alongside his son, and also with a presence at the back of the stage that first manifested itself as a discarded sack of debris, then mutated upwards into the human form of a young man in a black cloak, who stands at Ohno’s shoulder, as though supporting him into death. But at the end, Ohno moves alone, in fragments of gestures, dissolving.

In an empty cinema, I watched a film dating from the autumn of 1973 of Hijikata’s last performance: an appearance of only ten minutes or so, at the end of a spectacle created at a hall in Tokyo by a group of his Butoh collaborators. Hijikata appeared alone, in isolation, when all of the other performers had left the stage. At that point, it had been fourteen years since he had undertaken the unique performance of Kinjiki with Yoshito Ohno that had ferociously activated his work in Tokyo. Until his death, another thirteen years later, Hijikata never performed before an audience again. He occasionally worked on collaborations in those years, especially with Kazuo Ohno and a performance artist named Min Tanaka.

But otherwise, they were years in which he would remain mostly closed up, in seclusion at the Asbestos hall, drinking, teaching acolytes, arguing with friends about their favourite books, and growing increasingly enveloped by memories of his childhood world of Akita. He wrote about himself as “the ailing dancer”, his body inhabited by the capricious demons that terrorized the rural terrain of Akita at night, but living by some obstinate accident under the permanently glowing and pulsing sky of Tokyo, which never reached the pure density of blackness that he desired.

At the time of his final performance, Hijikata’s hair had become so long and tangled that it stood upright on his head, as though it possessed its own autonomous existence. He had grown a long beard. In the film images, his last dance was one of limbs gone insane, but now so detached from the world which they used to move in tension with, that they simply convulsed intricately, in a jarred rhythm of their own.

Those limbs carried the tautness of a body which had struggled intensively for decades with a kind of vital illness of incessant gesture, but that had now started to wind down into extinguishment, the bones grown brittle, the skin turning into a raw crocodile hide, the fingernails terminally twisting in towards the palms of the hands. Hijikata’s face was set deep in concentration, holding the slowly diverging, colliding trajectories of his body together, in the infinite expanse of time that comprised the ten minutes of his performance. His face and body appeared to head off in different directions, turned sharply and synchronized for a moment, then tore apart again and veered away at even more extreme angles.

In the last images of the film, Hijikata’s body was moving gradually towards the back of the performance space, and the film cut suddenly into darkness – the spectacle had been shot with a 16mm film camera that could only shoot its images for a set amount of time before the celluloid reel ran out. As with the film of the Revolt Of The Body performance which Akiko Motofuji had shown me, the final moments of the performance were missing. Across the visual screen of Tokyo, a million flashing images were seized and annulled every moment, but the last movements of Hijikata’s body had been transformed into void images, filmed by an empty camera, the end of the finished film spool clicking around uselessly in its container. Hijikata’s body had adroitly slipped through the hold of the image. In photographs, Hijikata briefly re-emerged from his isolation, a decade or so later, in the closing months of his life, looking exhausted, his hair still long but now confined under a beret, his beard cut down to a moustache. Finally, he appeared in his coffin in Hosoe’s photograph.

Whenever I spoke in Tokyo to the friends and collaborators of Hijikata – to Yoshito Ohno, to Kuniichi Uno, to Akiko Motofuji, to Donald Richie, to Eikoh Hosoe – the voice of Hijikata was always present. During Hijikata’s lifetime, all of them had, in their different ways, been assaulted or pulverized by Hijikata’s presence, their lives set into upheaval or irreparably overturned by it. Searching to find a way to evoke his corporeal presence for me, they invariably seized upon his voice to project Hijikata, wryly imitating it or else allowing it to inhabit them for a few uneasy moments.

The voice of Hijikata had a low, grumbling emphasis that rode along sequences of guttural intonations, strongly different from those of people born in Tokyo: a voice wildly scattering sounds which displayed an apparent astonishment that they had come pouring out of their speaker’s mouth.

Hijikata’s language had relentlessly conjured up its own capacity to beguile his listeners, as it spoke of the corporeal forces that inspired him to dance or else brutally impeded that dance. He used an authoritarian tone that made imperative demands on a younger collaborator, such as Yoshito Ohno; then, that note of rigour would abruptly descend in scale, into a contemptuous cancellation of its own authority. And in the mouths and throats of all of Hijikata’s friends, that ghost voice wavered incessantly between gravity and laughter, breaking out from its driving obsessions into a great roar of utter self-deflation.

All of those lined faces that spoke about Hijikata held the traces of some deep injury or other from their encounter with him. And every surviving voice that I heard taking on the voice of Hijikata formed a kind of broken medium, like the old women of Mount Horror, that had the power to materialize memory fragments of Hijikata in space. You need a wounded body and a wounded memory to make a dead man speak.

The search through Tokyo for the traces of Hijikata’s presence took me finally back to the Asbestos hall, to the basement studio where he had undertaken his work. The previous occasion I had been there was to watch the films of Hijikata’s performances. But this time, the studio was empty of those images.

The wooden floor of the studio formed an intricately stained surface, with engrained layer upon layer of dirt and sweat.

For a time in the 1960s, Hijikata had run a riotous drinking club in the studio; at that time, Yukio Mishima would often visit the studio and, under Hijikata’s gaze, make shy, tentative attempts to dance there. At peripheral points on the floor’s surface, it appeared strangely scarred, as though the extreme momentum of a particular gesture had made Hijikata or one of his dancers unbalance, and plough the edge of a foot or hand into the surface of the wood. It was a small space, and the marks possessed a density, struck in intimate proximity with one another, forming the visual index of a delirious body in movement.

The white walls of the studio were hung with thick black curtains, to be drawn together on the rare occasions when a performance took place, and also with a screen at one end, for the projection of films. Whenever Hijikata had shown the films of his performances himself, for visitors, he would lift up the projector into his arms and joltingly dance with it, so that the images of his dancing body ran up against the curtains and ceiling of the studio, becoming distorted, elongated or concentrated. But now, the curtains were pulled back and the screen was rolled up. All of the lights were full on, and the walls were naked. They bore the infused traces of damp, from the accumulated condensed heat of bodies.

Below the roof, the metal framework of the lighting system criss-crossed the ceiling. Near to the entrance, a few photographs of Hijikata’s face had been pinned on the wall, hanging haphazardly. In one image, he had his face immersed in an enormous watermelon. In a far corner, an old heater erratically blew out warm air, making the only sound in the room. When the heater abruptly went dead, a deep silence set in.

The studio had formed the site of Hijikata’s creation of unique images of the human body in Tokyo, experiments into death and into the potential of the anatomy, that were designed intensively, in preparations often extending over several years, before they were finally given two or three public performances, in halls across Tokyo, and then instantly evanesced. If there were to exist a tangible surviving trace of Hijikata’s presence in Tokyo, it had to be there, in that studio.

But all of those innumerable gestures and experiments had vanished into the air, embedded only in the scars and marks on the floor. Where Hijikata had survived, it was in a work of deep incitement and provocation.

The streets of Tokyo exploded into a wild procession of noise and human figures. It was the anniversary of the death of Hijikata, and the dancers from the Asbestos hall screamed their invocation of his presence into the Tokyo night. They spilled out in uproar from the basement nightclub where their celebration of mourning had been taking place, and started to career through the Ebisu district of department stores and markets. A hundred young dancers – some masked, some naked – moved out towards the railway station. Circling around the front of the procession, a gang of photo-graphers, including Eikoh Hosoe and the pre-eminent instigator and recorder of Tokyo’s night outrages, Araki, took shots of Akiko Motofuji dressed in a scarlet cloak, accompanied by some of Hijikata’s surviving collaborators. The insurgent cacophony of the accompany-ing musicians propelled the spectacle along.

As the procession traversed the Ebisu station complex, the salary-men and office ladies gazed in horror, turned and took off in fright. Those who failed to get away in time stood paralysed as the procession charged past, pressed back along the glass walls of the walkway that led into a department store. The security guards stood in frozen consternation, apparently unable to act, while the procession rampaged through the pristine aisles. The department store had only been built and opened over the last few months, but already it had merged seamlessly into Tokyo’s endless face of concrete and glass; now, that surface was momentarily shattered. The procession reached its most forceful evocation of darkness, death and obscenity under the eye-splitting over-illumination of the department store. From that point on, as the procession began to exit from the department store, twisting into a network of narrow market alleyways, it resonated with William Klein’s photographs from 1961 of Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno performing Our Lady Of The Flowers in the Tokyo backstreets. The procession for Hijikata’s death formed a gaudy and overloaded variant on Klein’s austere images, but Tokyo itself demanded ever more extravagance in its provocations.

By the time the procession headed back for the nightclub, after an hour of outrage, it had fallen apart into a ragged concoction of trailing elements, gradually disintegrating in the darkness. The blaring musicians had become detached, and a few of the naked dancers followed forlornly, far behind, their slight figures almost lost under the now-closing maw of Tokyo that had momentarily been prised open, all of its vivid scarlet underflesh and its insane ritual shockingly visible.

But, in that instant, Hijikata had been resusci-tated, and inflicted, one last time, upon the life of Tokyo.

Then the door to the night-club slammed shut behind the body of the last trailing dancer, and the city streets outside fell empty again – the domain of dirt, digital images and convenience stores, and of salary-men heading in a breakneck rush for the last commuter trains of the night, their faces imprinted in flashes from above with the illuminated and exclaimed names of consumer products, and by the burning images of Tokyo.

Table of Contents

ART, RIOT, TERROR

credits

TOYKO 1969

Notes

MISHIMA : DEATH-FRAGMENTS

HIJIKATA : A STORY OF TOKYO

BACK COVER