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Nagasaki through Early
Photographs: Revisiting
the City of Dreams
Here and There introduces art, artists, galleries and museums around Japan that non‒Japanesereaders and ﬁrst‒time visitors may ﬁnd of particular interest. The writer claims no art expertise, just

Alice Gordenker
2 April 2018a subjective viewpoint acquired over many years' residence in Japan.
Materials, Methods,

Nihilist Moralists for a Traumatized Japan: Chimand Geometries: 30

Pom's "Real Times"

Exploration by

Alan Gleason

Years of Creative

Architect Kengo Kuma
James Lambiasi
2 April 2018

Tomoko Konoike's
Furry Animals
Alan Gleason
2 April 2018

Travelers: Stepping into
the Unknown
2 April 2018

The Kan'ei Era:
Cultivating an
Aristocratic Splendor
J.M. Hammond
1 March 2018

Forest Contemplations
by Yoshihiko Ueda, andthe Closing of an Iconic
Gallery
Susan Rogers Chikuba
1 March 2018

Installation view of "Real Times" at the Mujin‒to Production gallery; photo by Kei Miyajima, © 2011 Chim
Pom.
Starting from Zero: TheThe Japanese art scene today is full of ambitious young Dadaists ﬂauntingLiberated Nihonga ofFumiko Hori

their irreverent takes on art or the world at large. But no one does

Alan Gleason

irreverence quite so hilariously as the six‒person collective known as Chim

1 March 2018

Pom. Normally the name appears with an upward‒thrusting arrow in themiddle; "Chim Pom" derives from a slang term for penis. Consisting of Ellie

Denshoubi: NewFrontiers in Art(the only female member), Ryuta Ushiro, Yasutaka Hayashi, Masataka
Okada, Toshinori Mizuno and Motomu Inaoka, the group formed in Tokyoin 2005 and ﬁrst achieved notoriety with its "Super Rat" installation theReproduction
Alan Gleason
16 February 2018

following year.
Kumagai Morikazu: The
Joy of Life
1 March 2018

"Super Rat" involved theﬃ

capture and stu

ng of>> Back Issues

several of the large ratsthat browse throughgarbage in the alleys of
Shibuya, Tokyo's teeming
youth‒culture mecca. Chim
Pom arranged the animals
in poses reminiscent of
the Pokemon anime
character Pikachu. The
artists later explained thatthey thought the rats (and"Radiation‒exposed Flower Harmony,"
ikebana collaboration with Jun'ichi Kakizaki (2011);
photo by Kei Miyajima, © 2011 Chim Pom.

Pikachu) looked
remarkably like theteenage girls who frequent
the district.

Subsequent productions continued the theme of tweaking urban taboos ‒‒ﬀ

notably "Black of Death" (2007) in which the artists drove a large stu

edcrow through the streets of Tokyo on a motorcycle, attracting hordes ofcircling birds by blaring crow calls through a loudspeaker.

Gradually, however, the group seems to have edged its way ‒‒ winking
furiously all the time, mind you ‒‒ into areas of social commentary thatbetray concerns beyond standard‒issue tweakery. For "I'm Bokan" (2007)
Chim Pom ﬂew to Cambodia, where they dropped household appliancesand other personal possessions onto the mineﬁelds, and ﬁlmed thedetonations from the air.

But it was not until 2009 that the group achieved nationwide visibility
when they skywrote the word Pika (onomatopoeia for the ﬂash of theatomic bomb) above the city of Hiroshima. Public outrage was instant,particularly from aging A‒bomb survivors who felt their sensibilities werebeing mocked. For the ﬁrst time in its career, Chim Pom was compelled tocall a press conference to explain itself and apologize for the hurt it had
caused. Though the group's explanation sounded less than convincing ‒‒something about calling attention to the fading of the bomb from Japan's
collective memory ‒‒ it redeemed itself in impressive fashion by following
up with a nationwide tour in tandem with one of Hiroshima's leading
spokesmen for the survivors.

My ﬁrst encounter with Chim Pom was at their Tokyo event on this tour.
When an audience member asked Mr. Tsuboi, the survivors'
representative, what he thought of Chim Pom when he ﬁrst learned about
the skywritten "Pika," he snapped, "I thought they were idiots!" Then hegrinned. It was obvious that somehow, the survivors and Chim Pom had
achieved a sort of detente, if not complete understanding.

I was not really surprised, then, when I heard that in the wake of the twin
disasters of tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Chim Pom hadtaken its guerilla art tactics right into the no‒go zone, within shouting
distance of the stricken ‒‒ and still radiation‒spewing ‒‒ reactors. "RealTimes," the group's latest installation, documents this confrontation withpost‒3/11 reality in compelling fashion.

Image from the Chim Pom video "100 KIAI" (2011); © 2011 Chim Pom.

When I entered the gallery, the video (one of several) that ﬁrst caught myattention showed Chim Pom's members in a huddle amid the tsunami‒smashed rubble of Soma, a coastal city on the edge of the nuclear no‒gozone. With an upended ﬁshing boat in the background, they embark on an
endless loop of enthusiastic cheers, mostly absurd, yelling everythingfrom "Long live life!" to "Long live nuclear disasters!" At ﬁrst I thought thiswas a cynical jab at fair‒weather volunteers who ﬂock to the disaster area
only to spend their time congratulating themselves on volunteering
instead of doing any actual work. It turns out, however, that the young
people in the huddle included residents of Soma, and that Chim Pom
spent several days helping them clean up their devastated neighborhoods.

No guerilla art is worth its salt without an actual run‒in with the law, andChim Pom did not disappoint in this regard. Another video chronicles an"addition" they surreptitiously appended to "Myth of Tomorrow," thefamed mural of atomic holocaust by Taro Okamoto that covers a wall inbusy Shibuya station. Chim Pom's contribution was a panel, built to ﬁtseamlessly to Okamoto's mural without damaging it, of the smoking

remains of the exploded reactors ‒‒ an update to the original, if you will.
The "addition" remained in plain view, passed (and generally ignored) by
thousands of commuters for an entire day before someone took it down,
and it took the police another two weeks to trace it to Chim Pom. So far
there have been no arrests.

Chim Pom members adding their contribution to Taro Okamoto's "Myth of Tomorrow" mural in full viewof commuters at Shibuya station; © 2011 Chim Pom.

A third video follows two Chim Pom members in radiation suits as theywalk to a tourist overlook (the road now a jumble of cracked asphalt) only
a few hundred yards from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which you
can see steaming in the background. There they take out a white banner,
spray‒paint it with the universal symbol for radiation ‒‒ uncannily like
Japan's Rising Sun ‒‒ and hoist it aloft. One wonders how many
microsieverts they absorbed in the process.

The videos are fascinating, but they are not the most unnerving elementsof "Real Times." Those would be an ikebana arrangement of radioactive
ﬂowers and plants picked near the reactors ‒‒ a Geiger counter next to itread 0.21 microsieverts when I was there ‒‒ and a wall of still photos ofpets (starving) and cattle (dead) abandoned in the no‒go zone.

Mujin‒to Production, an umbrella group that manages Chim Pom andseveral other artists who are kindred spirits, hosted "Real Times" for aweek in late May at its new gallery in Fukagawa on the east side of theSumida River. From there the installation moved on to Osaka for anotherweek in late June. It would be a pity if that were the end of it; I hope Mujin‒
to and Chim Pom see ﬁt to take the show on the road, not only in Japanbut overseas. "Real Times" represents a new level of sophistication in thecollective's art. After some years of trial and error they have attained anadmirable balance on the razor‒thin line between satire and nonsense ‒‒ all
the while thumbing their noses at those who would make any such
distinction. In "Real Times" Chim Pom wields irreverence like a weapon toshield what is, in fact, a deadly serious message.

Chim Pom members hoist their hand‒painted radiation ﬂag with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant inthe background; © 2011 Chim Pom.

All images courtesy of Mujin‒to Production, TokyoChim Pom
Mujin‒to Production
1F, Watanabe Bldg., 2‒12‒6 Miyoshi, Koto‒ku, Tokyo
Phone: 03‒6458‒8225(See website for gallery exhibition schedule and hours)
Transportation: 2 minutes' walk from Kiyosumi‒Shirakawa station on the Hanzomon and Oedo subwaylines

Alan Gleason
Alan Gleason is a translator, editor and writer based in Tokyo, where he has lived for 25 years. In
addition to writing about the Japanese art scene he has edited and translated works on Japanesetheater (from kabuki to the avant‒garde) and music (both traditional and contemporary).

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