On the night of November 15, 1962, the "Great Meeting of Heroes" was held. It was heldat Momochi-Ya, a two-story reed dressing room at Momochi Beach, facing Hakata Bay,
where the tide slips under the floor at high tide and seeps into the sand.

Kyushu-Ha

presided over the event.
Takami Sakurai picked me up at Mochita Station, and we went to Nishijin to drink a coupleof glasses of shochu (distilled spirits) before heading out into the deep autumn sky.

Already

present from Tokyo were Yasunao Tone, Takehisa Kosugi, Takumi Kazakura Shin Kinoshita,and Shintarou Tanaka, who showed up with a dusty face and a tendency to rant, "I want totake a bath. Tanaka drove westward alone in a beat-up car. S Shin Kinoshita was formerly amember of the artist group "Kyushu-Ha" and exhibited at the first exhibition of "Kyushu-Ha"
in Tokyo in August 1958. After that, he got in touch with Neo Dada and had a solo exhibition
at Muramatsu Gallery in March of that year.
I gazed at the late autumn scenery. Around 1953, I walked around Kyushu without a break,carrying the "Atomic Bomb Drawing" on my back. The trip took me to Kokura, Tobata, Yahata,Wakamatsu, Ongagawa, Nogata, Iizuka, and Gyobashi. I was 24 years old and carrying adesperate heart. All I could see were ruins, both inside and outside.I saw Chikuho's deadmounds of rice paddies, leaning coal dwellings, and flickering yellow lights. There was ablack, stagnant rock bath.

The depression of the time was a dead giveaway for Ken

Domon's photo book. The dry skin of the unclothed woman I held in Iizuka was covered withcoal.
Why did I come here? What is the connection between the despair that struck me then andthe "avant-garde art" with which I am now involved? In 1962, as I have mentioned manytimes before, there was a storm of "anti-art" blowing around me, including at the "Yomiuri
Andebangun" exhibition.

It was as if they were trying to open up the blockage of thesituation immediately after the 1960 Security Treaty by crashing and twisting themselves
against the objects around them. The season of Unformel to Action Painting was about tobegin. But this was different from political action.It consciously presented a meaninglessness
that straddled both, diffusing ceaselessly into the everyday. It did not believe in solidarity, it
was complicit in disrupting it, and it was antagonistic to those closest to it. This was sadly
appropriate in the post-"political" era, when there was no creed. We danced around theTwist with amused faces.
August of that year, we held a "Defeat Memorial Dinner" at the Kunitachi Community Center.

I was the first one to negotiate the venue, and we all gathered in a room I was renting,listening to the sound of the freight cars of the Chuo Line echoing nearby as we planned theevent. Strangely enough, this happening, which may have been a distant, oceanic precursor
to the establishment of the Hi-Red Center, stuck with me like a drowning dream. When I was
invited by "Kyushu-Ha" right after that, I thought I would go because of this ambiguity.
At seven o'clock in the evening, the group began to gather around the candlelight flickeringin the sea breeze. Takami Sakurai pointed to the black-painted timetable and tried to write
down the schedule of tonight's participants. Those of us from Tokyo, including Tone, Kosugi,
Kazakura, and myself, objected first. We were already on the train. We have already begun,including on the train, and it is not as if it will end tomorrow morning with the dissolution. We
were already familiar with the method of constantly dismantling and changing the everyday
through the National Dinner Party and Yoko Ono's happenings. We had not yet read Allan
Kaprow properly, but we had just completed a rushed baptism of John Cage, stimulated byTone and Kosugi. These were the clear, detailed, and cool winds that blew in from the holein the ground after the frenzy of Neo-Dada. The wind had begun to form, albeit dimly, some
unexpected shapes in our space. In this respect, at least for me, Jikan-Ha's attack was moreinteresting than Neo-Dada's. In fact, by letting the audience move their objects, they createda tense space in which vision and experience were reversed.