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From Issue 65
EDITOR’S LETTER Is the whole world watching?
NEWS Tyeb Mehta (1925–2009)
NEWS Ai Continues Activism Against China;

Government Responds
NEWS Photojournalist Seized at India­Bangladesh
Border
ESSAYS Shots Heard ’Round Beijing
PROFILES Fereydoun Ave
PROFILES John Kaldor
FEATURES Taboos in Japanese Postwar Art: Mutually

Assured Decorum
REVIEWS Fiona Connor
REVIEWS Idris KhanREVEIWS Raqib Shaw
PROJECTS Naiza Khan

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TABOOS IN JAPANESEPOSTWAR ART: MUTUALLYASSURED DECORUM

SATOSHI FURUI, Mushroom Cloud #02 (Plumbbob Fizeau), 1997, oil on wood, 30 × 30 cm.
Courtesy Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo.

FEATURES BY ASHLEY RAWLINGS FROM SEP/OCT 2009
JAPAN

“Although we don’t know what to do about nuclear weapons, or how
to live with nuclear weapons, we are slowly learning how to write
about them,” wrote British novelist and anti­nuclear campaigner
Martin Amis in his 1990 essay “Unthinkability.” In his
consideration of how language is rendered impotent in the face of
the world’s vast nuclear arsenals and their collective potential for
total destruction, Amis observes that “questions of decorum present
themselves with a force not found elsewhere.” Though he isreferring to the process of writing, these “questions of decorum” areequally relevant to the representation of atomic explosions in thevisual arts. As Japanese artists have discovered, addressing thebombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a complex endeavor as

Japan continues to wrestle with its modern history and the legacy of
its imperial ambitions during World War II.
At 8:15 am on August 6, 1945, Little Boy—the first atomic bombused in an act of war—exploded over Hiroshima, instantly killing
70,000–80,000 people. Over the next ten minutes, a mushroom
cloud rose more than 60,000 feet, showering the city withradioactive fallout, which pushed the death toll to an estimated140,000 by the end of the year. In her testimony to journalist John
Hersey from the New Yorker magazine the following summer,
Toshiko Saeki, a 26­year­old tin factory worker, described watching
three B­29 bombers flying over the city moments before the blast:“It seemed very, very strange. I was still wondering what would
happen. Then suddenly there came a flash of light. I can’t describe
what it was like.”
Photo documentation of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945.
Courtesy Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Hiroshima.

At 7:30 am on October 21, 2008, Hiroshima residents
witnessed a different kind of flash. A small plane spelled out
the word PIKA [] in white smoke in the clear blue sky
above the city. Written in Japanese katakana script, this curt
onomatopoeia—pronounced “p’kah!” and meaning “flash”—
is an overt reference to atomic explosions. Later thatmorning, the writing reappeared four more times. Unlike thedeafening bang and the blinding light of the original

ピカッ

explosion,the word floated silently in the sky. Written large,

explosion,the word floated silently in the sky. Written large,
it appeared to hang low over the city, and yet the faint, thinletters dissipated quickly with the wind.

This act of skywriting was perpetrated by Chim↑Pom, a Tokyo­
based, six­person artist collective—composed of Ryuta Ushiro,
Yasutaka Hayashi, Toshinori Mizuno, Masataka Okada, Motomu
Inaoka and Ellie (known only by her first name)—renowned forirreverent and often socially provocative actions. Reflecting thegroup’s puerile, happy­go­lucky approach to art­making,Chim↑Pom’s name is derived from the slang word chimpo,
meaning “cock” or “prick.” Their PIKA stunt was preparatory
material for a video to be shown in their solo exhibition entitled“Hiroshima!”, which was planned to open at the Hiroshima City
Museum of Contemporary Art (Hiroshima MOCA) in November

MAKOTO AIDA, mokomoko, 2008,
acrylic on canvas, 291 × 197 cm. Photoby Kei Miyajima. Courtesy the artist andMizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo.

2008. As the letters appeared in the sky, standing in the Hiroshima
Peace Memorial Park in the city center, Chim↑Pom, accompaniedby staff from their Tokyo gallery Mujin­to Production, and Shoko
Kobashi, a curator at Hiroshima MOCA, filmed and photographed
the event from an angle that framed the word directly above theskeletal ruins of a former industrial building now known as theHiroshima Atom Bomb Dome—one of the few structures to havesurvived annihilation and thus a potent symbol of the city’s trauma.

CHIM↑POM, Making Hiroshima’s Sky Pika, 2009, a photograph showing the word pika (“flash”)

written in white smoke above the Atom Bomb Dome in Hiroshima on October 21, 2008. Photo by
Cactus Nakao. Courtesy the artists and Mujin­to Production, Tokyo.

The public reaction, as voiced in local media, was irate. In a seriesof reports from October 22, the regional newspaper Chugoku
Shimbun criticized the artists and the museum for not giving priorwarning of the performance. The newspaper quoted Chim↑Pom
leader Ryuta Ushiro’s claim that the work was intended as a “callfor peace,” but immediately followed this by quoting complaints
from residents both young and old that the work made them feel
“uncomfortable” and that it was “in bad taste.” Ushiro told thenewspaper: “We were anticipating problems and feel sad if we havehurt the feelings of the hibakusha [atom­bomb survivors], but wewanted to reach out to young people and others who do not know
about the war.”NOBUYUKI OURA, Holding Perspective, 1982–85, from a series of 14 lithographs
and silkscreen prints. Courtesy the artist.

Although Hiroshima MOCA gave its backing to Chim↑Pom’s
project on the grounds that it was ostensibly about the promotion ofpeace, the museum quickly became the focus of the controversy.
From the outset, the Chugoku Shimbun focused on the fact that
Kamiya, the museum’s chief curator, was present at the filming in
the Peace Park, quoting her as saying: “I don’t believe it was just a
prank. I cannot judge the validity of the artists’ act, but it will beinteresting to see what kind of debate comes out of this. The
opinions of the hibakusha groups aren’t the only ones that matter.”
In response to this, a local hibakusha leader denounced theperformance as “self­indulgent” and asserted, “It has nothing to dowith a call for peace,” adding that “[the museum] should have given
us appropriate advance notice.” The inevitable public apology came
three days later, on October 24, in a televised press conference at
Hiroshima City Hall. In front of five of the city’s
seven hibakusha groups, Ushiro and Yasuo Harada, the director of
Hiroshima MOCA (and a hibakusha himself), apologized for thepain they had caused and announced the cancellation ofChim↑Pom’s exhibition “out of self­restraint” (jishuku).
Claiming that it had been inundated with telephone calls fromoutraged locals, the local newspaper was instrumental in dictating
what constitutes appropriate and acceptable art about the atombomb. On October 23, the paper published an article by Kenji Oi, an
art history professor at Hiroshima City University, commenting on
Chim↑Pom’s act. In its deployment of a respected senior art
expert, the paper seemed to be countering any artistic license that
Chim↑Pom might have claimed. In his essay, Oi declared
Hiroshima to be “hallowed ground” and said: “To write PIKA in thesky without any warning is simply to upset the city’s residents.
Provoking anxiety in elderly people who have been emotionallytraumatized by the experience of the atom bombing is tantamountto an act of violence against them”—as if it were a second bombingof the city. (Given the five appearances of the word, one could say
the city had been symbolically bombed several times over.) Oi thensuggested that an anti­war message such as “NO A­BOMB” would
have been more appropriate. In his view Chim↑Pom’s call forpeace was not literal enough.
An opportunity to compare and contrast Chim↑Pom’s PIKA withanother artist’s response to the Little Boy explosion appeared fourdays after their transgressive skywriting. To mark the opening of his
solo exhibition at Hiroshima MOCA on October 25, Chinese artist
Cai Guo­Qiang, renowned for his spectacular but nuanced use of
gunpowder to create scorched paintings and massive explosion
events, staged Black Fireworks. For one minute after 1:00 pm,
crowds of city residents lining the banks of the Motoyasu River infront of the Atom Bomb Dome witnessed the firing of more than
1,000 small fireworks, which created an approximately 35­meter­tall cloud of dark­gray smoke that loomed over the river and theDome for several minutes before dissipating. Whereas
Chim↑Pom’s semantic allusion to the flash of the atomic explosion
had incited indignation only days earlier, onlookers responded to
Cai’s visual approximation of a mushroom cloud with applause.
The public’s positive reaction to Cai’s artwork can be partly
explained by the fact that it had received advance coverage in thelocal media. Cai had also left a good impression in the city in 1994
by consulting with the hibakusha before staging The Earth Has Its
Black Hole Too: Project For Extraterrestrials No.16 at Hiroshima
Central Park, where he detonated 114 helium and gunpowder­filled
balloons tethered in a spiral to create a swirling ribbon of fire thatdisappeared into a black hole dug in the ground—a visual metaphor
for the implosion method used in nuclear weapons. In its reportageof Cai’s Black Fireworks, the Chugoku Shimbun quoted Shoko
Okamoto, a 65­year­old hibakusha woman, as saying: “The cloud
looked like black rain [nuclear fallout] but if it conveys the tragedyof the atomic bombing to young people, then I suppose this kind of
expression is okay.” Okamoto’s comment carried the implicit
suggestion that, in addition to prior consultation
with hibakushagroups, art about the bombing should contain an
explicit anti­war or pro­peace “message,” or else respond to thetragedy with a sufficient air of gravity.
In Hiroshima, artistic representation of the bombings is closely
scrutinized by a shrinking generation of hibakusha who areincreasingly concerned about ensuring that their trauma remains
part of the collective memory. Whatever artistic license Chim↑Pom
thought they had when they embarked on the PIKA project wasoverridden by codes of decorum that in Hiroshima, at least, arefirmly entrenched.

∴∴On the national level, in the relatively neutral spaces of museums
and commercial galleries outside of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
artists appear not to be bound by any codes of conduct governing
the representation of atomic explosions. Postwar Japanese art andpop culture is full of references to Japan’s nuclear experience,
ranging from the reverent to the absurd. The artist couple Iri and
Toshi Maruki (1901–95, 1912–2000), who aided rescue workers in
Hiroshima after the bombing, spent more than 30 years
collaborating on the haunting series of expressionistic paintings“The Hiroshima Panels” (1950–82), which depict the casualties ofthe Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in black and red sumi ink.
Meanwhile, some artists have adopted a more emotionally detachedapproach to their exploration of nuclear issues. Since the 1990s,
Satoshi Furui has made photorealistic oil paintings of mushroom
clouds that depict the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings as well as
US nuclear tests, dwelling on the paradox of the beauty in such
destructive power.
Less than ten years after the bombings, themes of mutation crept
into popular culture, and are overt in the film Godzilla (1954), in
which a nuclear test awakens the giant fire­breathing monster fromits slumber in the sea and incites it to rampage through Tokyo.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Toho Company, the film studio behind
Godzilla, became renowned for its use of special effects, withimages of human mutation running through films such asThe H­
Man (1958) and Matango (1963), also known as Attack of theMushroom People. In a more comical manner, at the end of each
episode ofTime Bokan, a popular mid­1970s TV anime series, theeruption of a skull­faced mushroom cloud signaled the villain’sdeath (bokan is an explosive onomatopoeia like “kaboom”). Morerecently, futuristic scenes of a post­apocalyptic Tokyo haveappeared in anime such as Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira(1988) and
Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion television series (1995–
96).
Artist Takashi Murakami responded to this conflation of Japanesewartime history with pop culture in his own work, including his“Time Bokan” paintings (2001), which depict the same skull­faced
mushroom clouds as the original anime series, but with rings ofsmiling flowers in their eyes. Murakami also explored theundercurrent of nuclear anxiety in Japan’s postwar art and pop
culture in his curation of “Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding
Subculture,” an exhibition at New York’s Japan Society in 2005 thatshowcased the work of ten contemporary Japanese artists andsurveyed everything from Godzilla figurines to Hello Kitty.
In the “Little Boy” exhibition, on a wall above the Godzilla figurines,
Murakami placed Article 9 of Japan’s postwar constitution, which
renounces the nation’s right to war as a means of settlinginternational disputes. In the exhibition catalog, the artist
posits that the postwar kitsch and childlike aesthetic of Japanese
pop culture is the product of generations struggling to internalize
and rationalize the unprecedented trauma of the atomic bombings
followed by the United States’ 1945–52 occupation of the country,
which infantilized the Japanese people. Murakami writes: “It would
not be an exaggeration to say that the American­made constitution
prevented the nation from taking an aggressive stance, and forced
the Japanese people into a mindset of dependency under theprotection of America’s military might. However just or unjust theAmerican position may have been at the time, it cast Japan in therole of a ‘child’ obliged to follow America’s ‘adult’ guidance, and thenation willingly complied.”In an apparent example of this trend, at his solo show at Mizuma
Art Gallery in Tokyo in September 2008, Makoto Aida unveiled anabsurd representation of an atomic explosion,
entitled mokomoko (2008), a large­scale oil painting of a fiery
mushroom cloud shaped like a penis and adorned with a cute,
mouse­like face. In a similar vein to
Chim↑Pom’s PIKA, the mokomoko of the title is an onomatopoeia—meaning “fluffy.” In an email interview with ArtAsiaPacific in
July, Aida wrote: “I intended it to be a fusion of three images: thepostwar cuteness of Japanese pop culture as symbolized bycharacters like Hello Kitty; an erect penis; and the atomic bomb’s
capacity for mass slaughter. I thought this combination would
symbolize the distorted infantilism that characterizes contemporary
Japan.” However, when asked if mokomoko is a response to
Murakami’s “Little Boy” theory, Aida replied: “No, I’ve not read his
writings from that show. I’ve known Takashi Murakami sincearound 1992, but I have consciously avoided being influenced byhim.”
Issues of infantilism aside, there is no doubt that Murakami’s idea
is based on the truth that as the first country to sustain nuclear
attacks, Japan suffered an unprecedented national trauma that has
been sublimated into its postwar art and pop culture. However, thetheory is flawed in that it frames the atomic bombings and Article 9solely in terms of a binary relationship with the United States,
portraying Japan as the exclusive victim of World War II. It glosses
over Japan’s invasion and occupation of numerous Asian countries
between 1894 and 1945—including Korea, Taiwan, large parts ofChina and Southeast Asia, the Philippines and several other Pacificisland nations—in the name of liberating them from Westerncolonialism.
Murakami’s theory may engage directly with Article 9 but it is rareto find an artwork that does so. One example is Hiroshima­based
artist Yukinori Yanagi’s The Forbidden Box (1995), which consistsof an open lead box with “Little Boy” engraved on its lid. Above it,
two 17­foot­long translucent red voiles are suspended back to back,each with a faded image of a mushroom cloud on it. Overlaying thecloud on the front voile, in English and Japanese, is the original
version of Article 9—drafted in 1945 by US general Douglas
MacArthur, supreme commander of the Allied forces—which
renounced the country’s right to use military force for any reason,
including defense. However, following a period of debate andnegotiation between the US occupying forces and the Japanese
government over the definition of national defense, the version of
the article included in the 1947 constitution allows for military
action that can be interpreted as self­defense. This later version isprinted on the rear voile of Yanagi’s installation. These translucent
layers present viewers with a visualization of the ambiguities in thepacifist ideology that redefined Japan’s position in the world.
The Forbidden Box alludes to the Greek myth of Pandora’s Box, in
which Pandora opens a box that contains all the world’s evil andhope; when she realizes what she has unleashed she closes the lid toprevent hope from escaping. The work also references a well­known
Japanese folk tale,Urashima Taro, in which Taro, a fisherman,
stops some children from bullying a turtle. As a gesture of gratitude
for his good deed, the turtle takes him to an underwater palace,where a princess gives him a jewel­encrusted box but tells him
never to open it. Back in the real world, he realizes that time moved
slowly in the palace and that several hundred years have passed.
Dismayed that nobody remembers him, he opens the box. A whitecloud emerges, causing him to age instantly and die.
In light of Japan’s increasingly aggressive military expansion in
Asia during the 1940s—believed at the time to be a “good deed” ofliberation and executed in the name of the divine emperor—thewhite cloud that ages Taro can be read as the atomic cloud that
rendered the emperor human. Until Japan’s defeat, the emperor
was considered the descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, themost important Shinto deity. At noon on August 15, 1945, six days
after the bombing of Nagasaki, emperor Hirohito announced
Japan’s surrender over public radio; this was the first time theJapanese public heard him speak, and the realization that he washuman came as an immense shock. During the next few months,
general MacArthur was concerned that to put the emperor on trial
for war crimes could destroy Japan’s sense of national unity in atime of crisis, and he insisted that Hirohito remain head of stateand not be prosecuted. On January 1, 1946, the emperor formallyrenounced his divine status in an imperial rescript.
Although the atomic bombings are a pervasive theme in Japan’svisual arts, artworks that engage with this theme escape criticism
provided they are apolitical or at least not overtly critical of Japan’s
wartime past. The Forbidden Box is ambiguous enough in its
connotations to have avoided controversy in either Japan or the US—it has been shown in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Tokushima, Okinawa,
New York, Philadelphia and Miami without censorship.

∴
While most representations of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
bombings are tolerated, providing that they adhere to certain rulesof decorum, depictions of the emperor come under close scrutiny
from right­wing organizations. When these portrayals are deemedunfavorable, they have been met with vicious backlashes. To right­

wing nationalists, the emperor embodies Japan’s pre­1945 imperial
glory and even mild criticism of his legacy can be interpreted as an
attack on their ideals. Right­wing nationalists are a significant
political force in Japan—in 1996, there were an estimated 800
groups with a total of 100,000 members, although the police
estimated that only 50 groups and 23,000 individuals were active.
They are frequently seen driving black vans around Tokyo andother cities, from which they blast military anthems and chillingrecorded speeches, demanding an end to Japan’s militarydependence on the United States and a repudiation of Article 9.
During the early 1970s, Kikuji Yamashita was one of the first artists
to encounter resistance for his portrayal of the emperor. Haunted
by his experience of being a soldier in South China during WorldWar II, in 1971 Yamashita began to make the “Anti­Emperor Series”
of collages. The works were inspired by emperor Hirohito’s trip to
Europe that year—his first foreign engagement after the war.
Feeling that the emperor should have visited neighboring countries
first, Yamashita took news photographs from the European trip andcopied them onto canvases. In An Encounter, the emperor is
portrayed together with Jews persecuted in Nazi Germany andAsian victims of Japanese occupation. His black­and­whitesilkscreen print Dannori No. 1 (1972) [“Riding Bullets”], is
composed of three small images of emperor Hirohito standing onrifle rounds above a larger image of the emperor with Charlie
Chaplin by his side, staring at him. Yamashita’s use of Chaplin’s
image is believed to be inspired by the actor’s satirical anti­Hitler
film The Great Dictator (1940), first screened in Japan in 1960. In
1973, Dannori No. 1 was shown in the “Japan Graphic Art”
exhibition in London and Stockholm, but was rejected when it was
taken to the Seibu Museum of Art in Tokyo.
The most notorious controversy over an artist’s depiction of theemperor was stirred by Nobuyuki Oura’s series of lithographs,“Holding Perspective” (1982–85), which juxtaposes black­and­white photographs of Hirohito as a child, a young adult and an old
man with images of the tattooed buttocks of a yakuza gangster,
naked women, a Buddhist mandala, Biblical illustrations of angels,anatomical cross­sections, several landscapes and a mushroom
cloud.
Oura made the works in New York, where he had been living since
1976, as a form of self­portraiture that used images of the emperor
taken on both pre­ and postwar visits to the US and Europe as a
metaphor for his own sense of dislocation. Though Oura did notintend to mock or criticize Hirohito, the works are neverthelessloaded with nuances that stir right­wing anger. In his essay “TheEmperor’s New Clothes in Old Photos” (2008), art historian Kenji
Kajiya explains that before and during the war, photographs of theemperor most often depicted him wearing military dress, whereas
after the war, at the behest of the occupying forces, he appeared inWestern civilian attire. For “Holding Perspective,” Oura purposelychose some images that show Hirohito wearing Western clothes
during the 1920s and 1930s, breaking down the prewar/postwar
dichotomy in the perception of the emperor as a formerly
traditional figure who was westernized only after 1945. Kajiyaobserves that this is “a point that right­wing conservatives refuse to
examine.”Though Oura first exhibited the prints in a solo show at Gallery
Yamaguchi in Tokyo in 1984, the troubles erupted in June 1986,
two months after he exhibited ten works from the series in “Toyamano Bijutsu ’86” [Art of Toyama ’86], a group exhibition at the
Toyama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art in northwestern Japan.
Right­wing groups began to protest the work after a member of theprefectural assembly denounced them as “disagreeable.” Themuseum had purchased four pieces from Oura and arranged for theartist to donate the remaining six, but following the backlash
withheld the acquisitions from public display and returned the gift
to the artist.
The national mood grew tense in 1988, when it was announced thatemperor Hirohito was critically ill. The media entered a periodof jishuku “self­restraint,” referring to the emperor in archaichonorific language, refraining from broadcasting programs orcommercials with humorous content and urging the public to avoid
all celebrations or festivities. The emperor’s death in January 1989
was followed by a surge in right­wing extremism during the early
1990s. In one of the most violent episodes, a member of a Nagasaki­
based right­wing group shot the mayor of Nagasaki, Hitoshi
Motoshima, in January 1990 after he had stated his belief that theemperor bore responsibility for the war.
At this time, the dispute over Oura’s works escalated. In response to
the museum republishing the exhibition catalog a local right­wing
Shinto priest tore up a copy in the Toyama Library. Following asustained right­wing campaign against the museum’s support of thework, in 1993 the museum burned its 470 remaining catalogs andsold the previously purchased lithographs to an anonymous buyer.
In 1994, Oura filed a suit against Toyama prefecture, demandingthat the museum repurchase the works and reprint the catalog. In
2000, the traditionally conservative Supreme Court rejected Oura’s
appeal.
The controversy reemerged this year when “Holding Perspective”
was included in “Into the Atomic Sunshine: Post­War Art Under
Japanese Peace Constitution Article 9,” a group exhibition of 12
artists—eight Japanese and four international—that used Japan’s
pacifist constitution as a starting point to examine the country’s

wartime past and the meaning of the nation state. Organized by the
New York­based independent curator Shinya Watanabe, theexhibition contained several other works that address Japan’s
wartime history, including The Forbidden Box.
Though “Into the Atomic Sunshine” encountered no difficulties
when it debuted at Puffin Room gallery in New York in January
2008, or when it was held in August that year at Daikanyama
Hillside Forum in Tokyo, the Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art
Museum singled out Oura’s works for exclusion two months before
they hosted the exhibition in April 2009. In the Japan Times, thedirector of the museum, Hirotaka Makino, was quoted as sayingthat he barred the works on the grounds that “the museum is an
educational facility run under the prefectural board of education,and such a facility is thus supposed to display works in a fair andneutral manner . . . There are no problems because the organizers
have agreed with us.”
When asked about the issue in a Skype interview with AAP in July,
Watanabe explains that the issue is rooted in complex local
historical sensitivities. Japan annexed the Okinawan islands in 1872and officially declared them a part of the nation seven years later.
Though the imperial soldiers stationed there were named the“Friendly Forces” (y gun), as the three­month Battle of Okinawa

ū

concluded in June 1945, these forces ordered Okinawan civilians tocommit suicide in the face of defeat. This matter—combined withthe continued presence of US troops on the islands under the 1960
US­Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security—is a sourceof ongoing tension between the Okinawan people and the central
government; in March 2007, the Ministry of Education, Culture,
Sports, Science and Technology advised academic textbook
publishers to soften their descriptions of the y gun’s acts ofcoercion.

ūWatanabe also points to an earlier, related incident of historicalrevisionism involving Makino. In a May 2 report on the censorshipof Oura’s works, the Okinawan newspaper Ryukyu Shimpo referred
to a dispute that erupted in 1999, while Makino was vice governorof Okinawa prefecture as a member of the ruling conservative
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Two weeks before the opening of
the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum, the governor’s
office ordered the alteration of a diorama of the Battle of Okinawa.
The original diorama depicted the y gun pointing their guns at
Okinawan civilians, but the governor’s office had them turn theguns towards US soldiers, glossing over the Japanese military’s warūcrimes against its own people. “LDP government officials in
Okinawa don’t want to upset the conservative elements of Japan’scentral government. Without national funding, they are helpless,”says Watanabe. “Had I known that public protest led to a reversal ofthis decision, I would not have submitted to Makino’s unfair
request to remove Oura’s works from the exhibition.”
The controversy over the censorship of Oura’s work looks set tosimmer for some time. In July, without Watanabe’s involvement,
Gallery Maki in Tokyo protested the decision by holding an
exhibition of work by 25 Japanese artists, including three works
from “Holding Perspective” and Kikuji Yamashita’s Dannori No. 1.
Among the show’s organizers are some of those who assisted withthe litigation against the Toyama Prefectural Museum of Modern
Art in the early 1990s. At the time of publication, the online
message­board set up for the event listed 262 names and messagesof support from university professors, art critics and peace activists.
The message­board has also attracted incendiary words from anumber of far­left figures. Munehiro Yoshida of the group “Networkof Workers Against War and Against the Emperor System” decries
the censorship of Oura’s works as an example of the state, and thus
the emperor, suppressing free speech and democracy. Heconcludes, “We have to strengthen the fight against the emperor
system.”Annoyed that Gallery Maki did not consult him during theorganization of this show, Watanabe says: “I just hope that thiscontroversy over Oura’s work doesn’t eclipse the broader issues I
was trying to address in ‘Into the Atomic Sunshine.’ I included his
work because I find it interesting that he used emperor Hirohito’s
image as a self­portrait while living in New York. The beginning ofmodernity and the creation of the nation­state is related to thehistory of self­recognition and self­portraiture, so I wanted toconnect this historical background to the story of postwar Japaneseart.”Japan is now in the 64th year of a turbulent process of national self­reflection and self­recognition. Although Article 21 of theconstitution asserts the people’s right to freedom of expression andforbids censorship, in practice, artists and curators in Japan have tonegotiate unwritten codes of decorum when exploring the atom
bombings and the broader context of the country’s wartime past.
The controversies surrounding Chim↑Pom’s skywriting over
Hiroshima and the censorship of Nobuyuki Oura’s works in “Intothe Atomic Sunshine” highlight still­raw sensitivities in two of theregions that bore the brunt of the nation’s defeat. When emperor
Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender over the radio, he called on
the people to “endure the unendurable.” It is sadly ironic that while
he agreed to Japan’s surrender in order to preserve the unity of thenation and its people, what Japan continues to endure is the burdenof his legacy. To question that legacy is to expose schisms in thevery fabric and identity of the nation itself.

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