Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 7, Number 4, 2006

Political aesthetics: activism, everyday life, and art’s object in 1960s’
Japan
William MAROTTI

Around 1960, revolutionary forms of activism and critique emerged to challenge
administrative forms of politics and daily life. In Japan, despite massive strikes and widespread
protest, the ruling party used a Diet majority and riot police to renew the USA–Japan Security
Treaty. After this display of force, this party’s new administration sought a new legitimacy, and ameans to assuage and co-opt the defeated opposition, through promoting a depoliticized everyday
world of high growth and consumption, and a dehistoricized national image in preparation for the1964 Tokyo Olympics. Among those activists who emerged to contest this new cultural politics, adiverse group of young artists worked to repoliticize daily life through an interventionist art practice.
Their practices arose out of a particular local, playful art practice, whose focus on the material debris
and spaces of the economic expansion led to an engagement with the transformations of daily life.
Focusing on the art practices connected with the yearly exhibition, the Yomiuri Indépendant, I
examine the advent of a critical art examining the everyday world of Japan in the late 1950s and early
1960s, reflecting on its complex relation with an internationalized art world and domestic art scene,mass culture, and domestic protest movements. Examining the history of this art illuminates thestate’s investments in a normative cultural order, and a particular configuration of the politics ofculture in the early 1960s.

wamarott@ucsc.edu
Inter-Asia
10.1080/14649370600983048
RIAC_A_198205.sgm
1464-9373
Original
Taylor7402006
WilliamMarotti
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and&ArticleFrancisCultural(print)/1469-8447
Francis2006
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Studies: Movements(online)

ABSTRACTKEYWORDS: 1960s, politics of culture, post-WWII Japan, aesthetics and politics, art activism

That art on the one hand confronts society autonomously, and, on the other hand, is itself
social, defines the law of its experience. (Adorno 1997: 348)

I begin with two narratives: one familiar to students of post-WWII Japanese history, theother, familiar to students of avant-garde art in Japan ca. 1960.
Protest in Japan punctuated much of the late-1950s, and reached a crescendo in 1960
during the demonstrations and strikes over the revision and renewal of the US–Japansecurity treaty, raising fears in the United States of revolution, anarchy, and a Kremlin
triumphant in East Asia. After the treaty’s midnight ratification on June 19, and the June 23
resignation of Prime Minister Kishi, however, the streets cleared, and by August, newspaper polls showed support for the successor administration of Prime Minister Ikeda at thehighest level recorded for any post-WWII government, save for the Yoshida Cabinet at thesigning of the Peace Treaty.1
Contemporaneous with the protests of the late 1950s, the yearly Yomiuri-newspapersponsored art exhibition, (conventionally called the Yomiuri Indépendant, or Yomiuri
Anpan for short)2 came into its own, as a new crowd of young artists fled the Socialist Realism tendencies at the rival Japan Indépendant to engage in an explosive, anarchic art ofobjects, installations, and action/performance works. The exhibition became a crucible forthe production of art and art groups of an increasingly provocative nature through to the
ISSN 1464–9373 Print/ISSN 1469–8447 Online/06/040606–13 © 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14649370600983048

Political aesthetics 607
final exhibition in 1963; the following year, in January, barely one month before theexhibition was scheduled to open, the newspaper announced that it would permanently
cancel the exhibition. Participating groups and artists went on to a diversity of projects, but
one of their number, Akasegawa Genpei, was visited by police that same month, and ultimately prosecuted and convicted for the crime of money imitation (Marotti 2001a and2001b). Here I propose briefly to sketch the relationship between the Yomiuri Indépendant
as a crucible for the emergence of this critical art that came to confront the state, and theformer, familiar picture of protest and cooptation.3 It is my argument that the two are reciprocally illuminated by an examination of the cultural politics at play in both. Behind thebacks of the millions who participated in spectacular mass protest, the under-examinedtransformations in daily life contributed to the weaknesses of the political opposition andopened the way for effective depoliticizing strategies by the state. Similarly, by virtue of its
exploration of the everyday world and its objects, artistic practice centered on the Yomiuri
Indépendant exhibitions opened the way for a critical examination of this daily life. It
investigated otherwise little-examined aspects of this transformation of the lived world, andbrought artists into conflict with the state’s investments in a normative cultural order. I offer
this brief sketch of the above as an example of the interpenetration of art and politics during
the global moment of the 1960s.
The spectacle of politics, and the politics of spectacle
The Occupation of Japan had combined democratizing reforms and a new Constitution
with, for the sake of geopolitical expediency, the reversal of initial pro-labor and pro-leftpolicies and the resurrection of large parts of the old order. The intertwined strategic objectives of containment, fortifying American interests in Asia, and showcasing American-led
modernization globally led to choices that increasingly compromised stated progressive
political and economic goals. These measures included the rehabilitation of rightists who
had been initially purged, maintaining or restoring political advantages for elites, anddestruction of the newly created activist labor unions. These all followed from the earliest,
central compromise of democratic objectives: the retention of the emperor and the return offorms of imperial state authority within single party rule, and the promotion of historicalnarratives obscuring issues of war responsibility – especially imperial responsibility (Bix2000; Dower 1999; Harootunian 2001; Schaller 1985, 1997; Schonberger 1989; Takemae 2002).
Contestation over the American-sponsored revitalization of much of the old ordercontinued during and after the Occupation under the general banner of ‘postwar democracy’, fighting for expanded political opportunity and against remilitarization and a returnto authoritarian government. Despite the escalation of protest actions in the late 1950s, thefailure in 1960 to prevent the Security Treaty from being revised and renewed (’Anpo’) –despite massive strikes throughout the country and ever-larger demonstrations outside the
National Diet and the Prime Minister’s residence – seemed to point to the limited effectiveness of these political tactics in the face of an (at best) indifferent ruling bloc. Despite accusations of force and violence,4 the protests were primarily spectacular, and supplicatory, innature, seeking to move hearts and votes through the visible demonstration of theircommitted opposition: even during the Diet compound incursions, protestors stopped shortof actually entering the Diet building itself, and the huge strikes of June were not sustained.
However, especially damaging to the opposition was the state’s tactical shift from confrontation, with naked force, to consolation, based on providing material comforts.
The grounds of political debate shifted virtually overnight with but a single change ofPrime Minister. Much activism had found a mobilizing focal point in the figure of Prime
Minister Kishi Nobusuke. A former Tôjô Cabinet member and high-level colonial administrator for Manchuria who had close ties to zaibatsu industrial combines and the military, and608 William Marotti
incarcerated in Sugamo prison for three years during the Occupation as a suspected class-A
War criminal, Kishi was one of hundreds of thousands depurged by the Occupation under
General Matthew B. Ridgeway in 1951.5 Less than six years later, Kishi was Prime Minister.
He seemed to represent a direct return to fascist Imperial Japan, an impression strengthenedby his efforts toward revising the Constitution, suppressing teachers, and expanding Police
authority. The key role of this over-determined figure in backing the US–Japan Security
Treaty renewal obscured the complexities of Japan’s Cold War position, in which economic
prosperity was tied directly to America’s Asian wars and strategic policy and Japan’s own
troubled history of war and colonial expansion in Asia. These issues receded before thenightmare vision of Kishi as a revivification of the old order.6 The May 19, 1960 dispatch of
500 police inside the Diet Chambers and their televised, forcible extraction of Socialist
members from their sit-in outside the Speaker’s office, prior to a surprise vote on the treaty
in the Lower House, persuaded many others of Kishi’s duplicitous nature, and brought
universal press condemnations (Packard III 1966: 242–251).7 Kishi’s resignation just after the
Security treaty renewals diffused a potentially volatile situation, and provided many with akind of substitute, compensatory victory (Igarashi 2000: 140–142; Schaller 1997: 159–161).
This gave his successor, Ikeda Hayato, room to defuse the situation. He quickly formeda cabinet full of new, younger faces (and the first female cabinet minister, Nakayama Masa,
appointed as Welfare Minister), demonstrating continuity and confidence against expectations of persistent chaos, and signaling a new governmental outlook. Ikeda’s government
immediately adopted a ‘low profile’ (teishisei), replacing the violence and confrontational
policies of Kishi with well-orchestrated public gestures towards reconciliation with the
opposition parties. When a nine-month struggle at the Miike coal mine in Kyushu flared up
in a massive confrontation in July, Ikeda and his new labor minister, Ishida Hirohide,negotiated to re-submit the dispute to mediation, an action that ultimately brought an end
to the conflict, the last major action by an activist union in post-WWII Japan. The workers
had sought to link the strike to the Security Treaty protests, a move that left them similarly
vulnerable to the new tactics of the Ikeda government. Conciliation ended a visible, violent
spectacle of class conflict, and handed labor a major defeat (Price 1997: 214–218).
A notable exception amongst the new faces in the cabinet was Yamazaki Iwao, placedin charge of the Ministry of Home Affairs and the National Public Safety Commission –policing. Yamazaki had been Home Minister in the Higashikuni cabinet, and had thus
presided over an unreconstructed security apparatus from Imperial Japan – including thenotorious tokkô police. His seizure of newspapers for publishing the famous picture ofGeneral MacArthur and the emperor in September of 1945 directly led to the October 4‘Japanese bill of rights’ directive freeing political prisoners, ending the Peace Preservation,lese-majesty and other repressive laws, and dismissing heads of most major police bureaus– including Home Minister Yamazaki himself (Takemae 2002: 236, 238). The choice of thenotorious Yamazaki points to an underlying repressive counterpart to the Ikeda administration’s public conciliatory stance. When a rightist assassinated Socialist Party Chairman
Asanuma Inejirô in October, however, Yamazaki took responsibility and resigned, leaving
the position to longtime Yoshida Shigeru protégé Sutô Hideo. Prime Minister Ikeda himself
delivered an unprecedented eulogy for his deceased political opponent, and the emperor
dispatched sympathy and condolence money to Asanuma’s widow, the first time that sucha gesture had been made for someone neither in the cabinet nor with an imperial
appointment. All three gestures worked to prevent the incident from becoming an effective
opportunity for remobilizing opposition to the government.
At the same time, Ikeda further undercut opposition (and especially electoral challenges from the Socialist Party) with promises for action on improved social security, tax
reductions, and public projects, and, at the end of the year, through announcing a sweeping
program of national ‘income doubling,’ pledging to fulfill this goal within ten years. By

Political aesthetics 609
promising to deliver high growth and substantial material benefits to all in short order,
Ikeda positioned the government behind the effects of an economic expansion underway atleast since the mid-1950s – one fueled by domestic consumption, trumpeted by advertising,and associated with profound changes in how people worked, lived, and conceived of theirlives. Everyday life in urban Japan by the late 1950s was changing at all levels, and yet,apart from an explosion of enthusiastic advertising, television, and light journalism,8 theeffects of this transformation constituted the great unaddressed political phenomenon of
the period. This was in spite of the fact that many of its causes were directly related to thesecurity arrangement with America, including Korean War procurements, a transistor andtelevision industry arising from technology transfers, and continuing beneficial tradearrangements.
More than just an electoral ploy, Prime Minister Ikeda’s strategy was able to takeadvantage of these transformations already underway to ease and displace the memory of
naked state force and thwarted demands for democratic participation. The elaborate performance of conciliation, the abandonment of Constitutional revision, and calls to ‘respectsocial order’ promised a path away from violence and confrontation, while the prospect oftrue economic benefits had a real appeal for people whose recent memories included postWWII starvation conditions and devastating economic contractions.9 The confidential
assessment of the American Embassy at the time was that, to stay in power, conservatives
needed economic prosperity and the adoption of a ‘progressive, more liberal image, inorder to undercut the left’s fixation that contemporary Japanese conservatism is no morethan the old pre-war militarist conservatism in disguise.’10 The state’s promise of order, andto deliver ‘the good life’ and ‘income doubling’ within a decade, became a primary meansfor co-opting dissent.11 And thus, with the everyday world increasingly becoming both thevery grounds for state political legitimacy and the agent of depoliticization, the stakes forartistic investigation and intervention into daily life were inherently high.12
The Yomiuri Indépendant: art finds its object
Outside of the ‘official’ art establishment’s patronage networks, the Yomiuri Indépendant
was in constant dialog with the Japan Indépendant, sponsored by the Japan Arts Association. The Japan Art Society (Nihon bijutsukai) was closely connected with the Communist
Party, and thus, although entry was free and open (the definition of an Indépendant),
political and stylistic preferences came together so that by the 1950s the exhibition was
dominated by art inspired by a Socialist Realist reportage style.13
In an era well-punctuated by protest, the Socialist Realist yoking of artistic expression
to polemical affirmation of the power of the people appealed to many as supporting the best
goals and aspirations of postwar democracy. But towards the end of the 1950s the representations of ever-larger raised fists were beginning to appear rather pitiful and ludicrous to a
new generation of artists.14 As postwar democracy’s possibilities receded and popular
protests met with failure, Socialist Realist representation came to be seen as a form inadequate to the politics of the contemporary situation.15 Despite the eclecticism with which it
was practiced in Japan, it nonetheless substituted a reified gesture of political commitment
for actual artistic engagement through practice.
Politically committed artists faced a choice. Many continued to soldier on with reportageat the Japan Indépendant, but others were drawn to the problem of form, as they attempted
to construct an art that could speak to their situation, and their time. Examining the complexities of the contemporary everyday context, these artists focused upon the artistic object, andupon the practice of art itself. Yet this is to speak of the end results of a complex dialog; thisart arose out of an enthusiastic and committed kind of playful competition at the Yomiuri
Indépendant.16

610 William Marotti
While there had always been an undercurrent of oddities at the exhibition, the majority
of Yomiuri Indépendant exhibits in its early years were fairly conventional, and spoke to thepractices of a wider amateur art world and the economy of images in general: notably,
portraits of famous figures predominated.17 The Indépendant exhibition’s initial effect was
not in artistic forms so much as in its democratization of a previously closed institutional
space. With the mere payment of a nominal exhibit fee, the Yomiuri Indépendant allowedanyone access to display art within the walls of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum in Ueno
Park, the same place in which many prestigious art groups and collections were exhibited.
During the annual exhibition, works of professional artists hung next to children’s
drawings; amateurs with no access to patronage networks could hang anything, without
having to pass through a jurying process.18
The first signs of change underway at the Yomiuri Indépendant came in 1955, as theexhibition attracted a number of young artists of a new generation. From this period
onward the Yomiuri Indépendant came into its own, with the steady proliferation ofincreasingly provocative and bizarre objects, performances, and installation works. The
apparent vitality of this art won over a number of established art critics; for example, it
prompted Hariu Ichirô, who had previously supported the reportage works of the Japan
Indépendant, to begin to champion a return to Dada.19
Akasegawa Genpei, one of the young artists of the Yomiuri Indépendant, gave a
tongue-in-cheek account of how the object emerged:
I held in my hand the explosive to fuse fiction and the real world and I could foresee that flatand closed pictorial space could now be twisted out in to three dimensions. At first, our timid
attempts to protrude further from the picture surface progressed rapidly. Wood, rope, shoes
and cooking pans were all used. Then steel ribs, car tires, scrap metal were brought into play;
the protrusion leapt from 17 centimeters to 30, and then on to 1 meter. This soon went
beyond the boundaries of what the picture surface could support and the projections began
to fall off. In this way the picture was left behind and we began to look at different kinds ofobjects lying on the floor.
It was by doing this that we learnt what an object was. (Akasegawa 1985b: 86)

This is something of a caricature, but Akasegawa’s depiction nevertheless locates theorigins of this new practice in an unexpected organic extrusion from conventional framed
works, and thus captures the sense nonetheless of the dynamic dialog in forms that wasunderway at the Yomiuri Indépendant. Akasegawa’s term for the ‘object’ is the Frenchterm, objet; at the Yomiuri Indépendant, this came to be shorthand not for something
aestheticized, but rather for an object that, first of all, was put under a kind of radical scrutiny. There was the expectation that the artist’s gesture of setting forth the object implied akind of suspicion: whether it was a specially assembled art construction, or an everyday
item sitting there with little or no embellishment or reconfiguration, it was to be interrogated like a criminal, for a yet-unknown crime. Encouraged and legitimated in turn by a
new critical appreciation of Dada, and the readymades of Duchamp, artists continued to
expand their practice in this huge potential field of action and investigation.
The works described as objets, objects, were often uncanny, bringing waste materials
together into organically suggestive shapes, or objectifying isolated parts of the humanbody. Toyoshima Sôroku’s output illustrates the circuitous route such work could take:around 1960, as a member of the group ‘Neo Dada’, Sôroku’s work consisted of pieces suchas ‘Junk Put on the Wall’ (Kabe oki no janku), a fantastic, looping frenzy of old painted tatami
mats, or assemblages featuring large, jagged pieces of broken glass jutting from thesurface.20 With the breakup of the Neo Dada group, Toyoshima departed from this form ofjunk art to produce a series of works fusing metal scraps together into increasingly wellformed, organic, and provocative creations.

Political aesthetics 611
His 1962 works for the exhibition, “The Collaborative Work of the Crowd Personified’,
and the complex piece ‘The Trouble with Me and You’ (I to YOU no toraburu – lit. ‘The Trouble with I and You’), emerged as finely detailed, smooth, rounded forms that might be welltaken to be puzzlingly figurative. In the former, the undecidability of the figure leaves open
the question of what the ‘crowd’ of the title has created.21 We might see in both the notion of‘crowd’ authorship, and its paradoxical result, a variant of the Surrealist quest for the
profound disclosures of a truly ‘automatic’ work, a search that was being revisited by anumber of Toyoshima’s contemporaries.22 In the case of ‘The Trouble with Me and You’,
giant organelle-like, pod-shaped bodies were clustered together on their stands, connectedby cords to wall-mounted electrics.23 Discrete yet congregating bodies, with electricalumbilici: a hidden life of objects and debris emerging from new patterns of daily life?24 Or is
this us, reduced to unrecognizability and concealed dependencies by this daily life? The
undecidability of these forms plays against the title’s promise to identify – what? Our
trouble? Is that what these forms constitute? But then, where are the ‘I’ and the ‘You’? Or isthat very formulation itself the problem, and the work an exploration of deeper structuresof connection missed by an I/you perspective? All of these readings are possible within the
ambiguities of the title’s language and the context of the Yomiuri Indépendant works.
Such contextual potentials have tended to be overlooked in retrospective examinationsof these and other works. For example, in the biographical entry in the exhibition catalog fora recent retrospective, Toyoshima’s penchant for scrap metal materials was associateddirectly with his childhood play with similar items left in the rubble after the end of WWII.
Despite the ubiquity of such aesthetic claims, and their reductiveness, we might reconsider
this gesture for what it leaves out: the origins of the material, the scrap metal itself, in thethen-contemporaneous economic expansion, and the puzzling, uncanny link between suchdebris and war posited by this characterization. Rather than returning us to the narrative
origins of a ‘postwar’ Japan and the aesthetic preferences of an individual artist, this latterlink is ultimately decipherable only through considering the connection between Japaneseprosperity and war in Asia.25 While Prime Minister Ikeda’s shift in strategies of politicallegimation effectively obscured such connections, the Vietnam War would exhume theseissues again for millions of protestors later in the decade.
Artists’ explorations of the uncanny potentials of the discards of the everyday world
expanded in the practice of ‘installations’ to consider massive repetitions of materials andobjects. The hundreds of whiskey bottles constituting Yoshimura Masunobu’s entry in 1961,‘Mr. Sadada’s Reception Room’ (Sadada-shi no ôsetsushitsu), created a cramped standalone
room within the exhibition room.26 Entered in the exhibition under the ‘painting’ category,27
the work suggested an everyday world confined, menaced, and enabled through constant,numbing intoxication – increasingly the very definition of salaryman existence, but also afavorite romanticized preoccupation of defeated political activists, and indeed of avantgarde artists. The bottles were allegedly the products of Yoshimura’s own particular everyday life: the empties from get-togethers with the other members and associates of group
Neo-Dada at his atelier in Shinjuku, the ‘White House’ – although such a claim was manifestly preposterous, albeit hilariously so, and in fact the bottles were obtained from theneighborhood liquor shop owner, whose daughter was being tutored in art by Yoshimura.
Such insider jokes often coexisted in combination with the uncanny formal aspects of works
to produce a multi-level critical representation of daily life, beginning with self-critique(and playful self-mythologization), and expanding outward to a more general reference.
The development of the categories of action and performance at the exhibition was also
closely linked to the evolving significance of the objects. Although initially derived from the‘Action Painting’ of contemporary, well-known American and European artists – many ofwhom had put on exhibitions and demonstrations in Japan – the practice of ‘akushon’,action, came to encompass experiments investigating the very notion of artistic practice as a

612 William Marotti
general category of action, and agency. This was to develop a focus increasingly pointing
beyond the ‘art’ institutional frame to a general consideration of the possibilities of action –and even direct action – through their practice.
Group Zero Dimension dispensed with the art object entirely by adopting the then-stillsurprising ‘happening’ format: during the 1963 exhibition, group members took over agallery room, laid out futon mattresses on the museum floor, and reclined to stare for hours,
motionless, at an Edo-era explicit erotic print (shunga) stuck onto the ceiling (Akasegawa
1985a: 169, 196). While a part of the group’s own, distinct vocabulary of ritualistic performance and gestures, the ‘action’ performed at the exhibition amounted to a dramatization
and attack upon the very act of museum exhibit-viewing as a form of sedentary voyeurism.28
Nakanishi Natsuyuki’s entry at the last Yomiuri Indépendant exhibition, in 1963,
combined objects and performance elements, the artist’s own body, and spectators. The
work’s title, ‘Clothespins Assert Agitating Action (sentaku basami wa kakuhan kôi o shuchôsuru)’, was a pun conflating ‘political agitation’ and the ‘agitation’ (kakuhan) of washingmachines: a fine example of the humorous yet nonetheless serious concern these artists had
with the relation between political action and the transformations of daily life brought
about by the new booms in mass consumption.29 Yet during the prior year, this shy artist,
together with Imaizumi Yoshihiko, had begun serious planning for an ultimately aborted
guerrilla art installation that would have placed a guillotine in the plaza outside of theImperial Palace.30
In Nakanishi’s Yomiuri Indépendant installation, the masses of clothespins, like strange
swarms of aggressive metal insects, coalesce into half-formed images, including something
resembling a mushroom cloud.31 The feeling of attack and transformation was strengthenedby large rents in the canvasses, looking as if they had been torn by live clothespins; yet theholes, taken with the egg forms of the compact objects, suggest an ovulatory version of
Akasegawa’s narrative of objects extruding themselves from canvasses. One set includes an
egg covered in the complex forms employed in Nakanishi’s ‘Rhyme’ [In] series of paintings,
echoing their complex meditation upon pattern, repetition, and texture – in the midst of apiece in which such concerns were translated into clothespins and cloth.32 Nakanishi
himself showed up in the exhibit room with a face and body covered with the pinching,aggressive clothespins. When not shocking patrons by his appearance, Nakanishi, hisfriends, and others in on the joke, would surreptitiously affix clothespins to the clothing ofpassersby, who would then unwittingly extend the work out into the everyday world.
Including one’s own body in works as a kind of strange object framed the promise andexcitement of doing artistic work within the artifact itself, by entering into its enigmatic
surface and partaking of its uncanny nature. The practice dramatized a central concern
developing from this art: the desire to take the emergent critical, active art practices into
direct contact with the everyday world. An art that blurred the boundaries between art andperformance expanded conventional notions of the ‘work’ to posit ‘action’ as an explicit
problem for consideration.
Many of the works at the Yomiuri Indépendant were as short-lived as the yearly exhibition itself: rather laboriously, they were created for the space, and then simply abandoned
after the exhibition, leaving behind only impressions, rumors, and occasionally, photographs.
Performance pieces were by nature ephemeral. While there were a number of carefully
crafted objets and other works, their content was equally specific to the time and place of
exhibition: when re-exhibited, they required a space to recreate the Yomiuri Indépendant’s
anarchical atmosphere. This accounts for the elusive, dissatisfying element noted by many
artists in retrospective shows. Ultimately, Akasegawa may be right in stating that the real
work the artists produced was the space and energy of the Yomiuri Indépendant itself. It was
this created space that in turn nurtured and energized artistic activity that would overflow
its institutional frame.

Political aesthetics 613
Although the end of the exhibition was not officially announced until early 1964,
many artists recognized the likelihood that the 1963 Yomiuri Indépendant would be thelast. In late 1962, the exhibition site, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, issued a set of new
regulations, inspired by many of the above works, forbidding ‘unpleasant noise or hightemperatures’, things that rot or smell, that incorporate ‘bladed instruments’ or otherpotentially injurious objects, works that were possibly contrary to health laws and offensive to viewers, or that soiled the floor with sand, and the like, or that featured objects
hung from the ceiling.33 This was also the year that the exhibition spilled out of themuseum, with works such as Takamatsu Jirô’s ‘Cord’ (Himo) which featured a plastic
rope, studded with objects, narrowing to a line of packing string running through themuseum, out the doors, and all the way to Ueno station, a key commuting landmark
nearly a kilometer distant.34 Both Takamatsu and the aforementioned Nakanishi were
inspired by their prior participation in the so-called ‘Yamanote Event’. In this 1962 event,artists carrying strange art objects boarded Tokyo’s central circular subway line, theYamanote, put on white face paint, and proceeded to improvise ritualistic happenings in
the train cars and in extended performances on station platforms. In so doing, theyinjected their defamiliarizing artistic practice into this everyday space of commuting, anexus of transformation under economic expansion and urbanization – and a peculiar
space of concentrated itineraries and bounded interactions.35 The manifesto for the event
imagined possibilities for the ‘agitation’ of its witnesses, using a physics-influenced
vocabulary of voids, aggregates, molecular attraction, and agitation.36 Subsequent to theperformance, round-table discussions in late 1962 with Kawani Hiroshi and Imaizumi
Yoshihiko, the editors of the radical art magazine, Image (Keishô), and artists Akasegawa
Genpei and Kinoshita Shin led to the theoretical foregrounding of the anarchism-associated concept of ‘direct action’ (chokusetsu kôdô) in their artistic practice itself as it expanded
into intensified, critical and provocative engagement with everyday life – including
Akasegawa’s 1000-yen project.37
Police broke up protests outside the museum in 1963 by artists whose works had beensummarily removed the previous year, for ‘assembling without a permit’. Itoi Kanji and
Nakajima Yoshio’s performance with objects on the steps, with Nakajima dressed only inunderwear, ended with the arrival of a police car, sirens blaring, and their arrest (Hariu
1998: 279). In a sense, the Yomiuri Indépendant artists’ attention to, and attempted interaction with, the wider context was met halfway by the political authorities themselves. When
the Yomiuri announced the following year that it would no longer conduct the exhibition,
most artists were upset, but not shocked.
The end of the Yomiuri Indépendant was part of a general pattern in the early 1960sof pressure to tidy up symbols that detracted from the presentation of a Japan reborn into
happy prosperity (Aso 2002; Igarashi 2000: chapter five). This became increasingly oppressive as the 1964 Olympics drew near, the event that was to symbolize Japan’s triumphantemergence from under the clouds of wartime and occupation, standing on its own as ashowcase of America-sponsored modernization. During the year of the Olympics, theYomiuri Indépendant was cancelled, and Akasegawa was interrogated by police for his
1000-yen printed works – leading to his indictment in 1965.38 Both incidents spoke to the
expansion of cultural policing within the broad program of affirmative cultural production and repression that typified the post-1960 political scene. At stake was the defense ofdaily life from politicization – at the very moment in which its depoliticized image ofimminent prosperity and comfort was enabling a new configuration of hegemonic politics.
Once a series of art practices emerged to intervene in and critique this quotidian world,
they too were targeted – with the ironic result of further radicalizing a portion of thiscommunity, and giving art such as Akasegawa’s 1000-yen works notoriety and politicalprominence.

614 William Marotti
In a certain sense, agents of the state became this art’s most enthusiastic appreciators,
albeit negatively, identifying nascent political potentials within it. Analogous contemporaneous examples abound, of course – such as the notorious state responses to leftist works
in 1950s’ America, or conversely, the coordinated Cold War support for Abstract Expressionism.39 And what were the practices that attracted repression, and energized artistic
activism? Interestingly, they anticipate the key strategies associated with the explosive
activism marking the second half of the 1960s in Japan: the analysis of the everyday world
through its signs and fragments for the operations of hidden forms of domination; thefocus on local practice, the here and now, as a space implicated in larger structures andevents, and the locus either for their replication, or transformation; strategies of radical
defamiliarization and disidentification against unconscious forms of routine; the unearthing of hidden connections to politics and history in the simplest object of daily life; andabove all, the identification of the world of the everyday itself as the central space forinvestigation and transformation.
Notes
1. As discussed by Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II to Secretary of State Christian Herter, August 12,
1960.
2. The exhibition was actually called the Japan Indépendant (Nihon Indépendant), the same name as theJapan Art Society’s exhibition inaugurated in 1947 with 141 participants, falling to 19 during the second
exhibition in November of 1948, and skipping a year in 1949. When the Yomiuri Shinbun company
announced in September of 1948 their plan to open a rival exhibition of the same name in 1949, they were
met with complaints and not a little confusion. The initial Yomiuri-sponsored exhibition drew 958
participants. In 1955, the newspaper changed the name to ‘Yomiuri Nihon Indépendant,’ and in 1958, to‘Yomiuri Indépendant.’ From the beginning, artists distinguished the two by consistently referring to the
Yomiuri exhibition as the Yomiuri Indépendant (or Anpan), and reserving ‘Japan Indépendant’ for theJapan Art Society’s exhibition. The nickname, ‘Yomiuri Anpan’, is both an abbreviation and a pun – ananpan is a sweet bean bun – and was popularly in use from the first. See Akasegawa (1985a: 41–42); Kaidô(1983: 6); Seki (1993: 276).
3. The term, ‘crucible’, is Akasegawa’s: rutsubô. See Akasegawa (1985a: 3).
4. For example, on May 25, 1960, Supreme Court Chief Justice Tanaka Kotarô thundered against the‘organized forces under the influence of powers outside the country which attempt to overthrow by revolution the democratic system of Japan’ and their ‘resort[ing] to violence in the fields of politics and labor’(Undated translation, Department of State, RG 59, Tokyo Embassy Records, Box 70, ‘350 Japan July–Dec
1960’). Justice Tanaka called upon the courts to assert their powers vigorously against these threats.
5. Right-wing racketeers Kodama Yoshio and Sasagawa Ryôichi were simultaneously freed; Kishi had
befriended Kodama during their incarceration at Sugamo. Kishi was notorious for his ties to rightist
organizations, which blossomed forth again during his administration, alarming many (Takemae 2002:
247; Schaller 1997: 124–125, 155, 157).
6. Yoshikuni Igarashi argues that Kishi’s political maneuvers and notorious use of police force even within
the Diet rendered him ‘a stand-in for the military regime … as well as for the humiliation that this regime
brought to Japan’, and points to the reduction of the Security Treaty issues to formulations of ‘Democracy
or Dictatorship’ by leading intellectuals such as Maruyama Masao and Takeuchi Yoshimi as evidence(Igarashi 2000: 136-7).
7. It was in this atmosphere that Kishi made his famous dismissal of the protestors in favor of a silent
majority purportedly in solidarity with his views: ‘I think that we must also incline our ears to thevoiceless voices. What we hear now are only the audible voices, that is all’ (Asahi Shinbun [evening],
28 May 1960, translated in Packard 1966: 245).
8. Advertising reached 1.5% of GDP by 1959 (Partner 1999: 153).
9. Discussed in MacArthur to Herter, August 31, 1960 and the confidential memo of September 1, 1960. See
generally Department of State, RG 59, Tokyo Embassy Records, Box 70, ‘350 Japan July-Dec 1960’ for avariety of opinions of US and Japanese officials and citizens concerning Ikeda’s prospects.
10. MacArthur to Herter, September 1, 1960.
11. On the particular vulnerabilities of Anpo opposition to such tactics, see Takabatake (1978). For an
exploration of the politics of everyday life in a contemporaneous situation, see Ross (1995).

Political aesthetics 615
12. As Nakamura Takafusa and Simon Partner both point out, Ikeda’s ‘income doubling’ plan merely took
advantage of trends underway long before 1960, and did little to alter them. As Partner states, it instead
best demonstrates ‘the power that can accrue to an ideological slogan if used shrewdly and at the righttime’ (Partner 1999: 188; Nakamura 1994: 209–210).
13. The style in practice in Japan was often much more eclectic than the orthodox varieties in evidence inEastern Europe and the USSR: surreal and fantastic interpretive images often hung next to paintings of‘Uncle Ho’ embracing children, or protestors beaten by police. Yet despite this eclecticism, most were
nonetheless recognizably reportage or agit-prop in character. See Nihon bijutsukai (1972).
14. Akasegawa complains in a retrospective essay of his depression over seeing these cartoonishly distorted
fists during his participation in the Nihon Indépendant in 1956 and 1957 (Akasegawa 1985b: 85).
15. Support for both the reportage style and the JCP itself was also eroded by contemporary events, particularly Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalinism, and repression in Hungary in 1956, which contributed to
fracturing the left and tainting Socialist Realism by association. The American government’s covert andovert promotion of Abstract Expressionism (and the undermining of Socialist Realist art) across Europe
created echoes in the art trends in Japan as well, such as the undermining of the 1959 Communist YouthFestival.
16. Many of the Yomiuri Indépendant artists took part in the major protest actions of the time. See, forexample, the account of the artists of the group Neo Dada during the June 15, 1960. Diet demonstration in
Yoshida (1982: 96–97).
17. Akasegawa credits these ‘Sunday painters’ for giving the exhibition its free, honest, and unpretentious
atmosphere, and making a space for further radical play (Akasegawa 1994: 64–66).
18. This was true of both of the Indépendant exhibitions, the essential political meaning of the independentlabel: these exhibitions purported to inject democratic practices into the hitherto closed art world. Artist,
poet, and critic Takiguchi Shûzô complained in 1956 of the loss of these goals at the Indépendants – crude
ideology at the Nihon Indépendant, and – at that moment – too much dependency on the conservative
corporate sponsor at the Yomiuri Indépendant (Takiguchi 1992b: 50).
19. See for example, Takiguchi (1992a: 51); Akasegawa (1985a: 74–78); Hariu (1998: 276), discussing his
January 1957 article in Mizue.
20. See Ryûdô suru bijutsu III: Neo Dada no shashin/Art in Flux III: Neo-Dada Witnessed, Photo Documents (1993:
26, 32), for photos of these works, and generally for discussion of the Neo Dada group and thesubsequent activities of its participants.
21. See Neo Dada Japan 1958-1998 (1998: 82) and Nihon no natsu – 1960-64 (1997: 47) for photos of the work.
22. It was a central concern, and authorizing concept, for the early activity of the Music group (gurûpu ongaku),
which included Kosugi Takehisa, Tone Yasunao, Mizuno Shûko, Shiomi Chieko, Tanno Yumiko, andTojima Mikio. Conventionally rendered as ‘Group Ongaku’ in English, the group’s name is in fact meant
to parallel that of the journal, Littérature, (founded by Aragon, Breton and Soupault in 1919), asserting theiranalogous claim to liberating music in its entirety. They claimed that, by adding improvisation to Music
Concrete’s objet sonore, they achieved the ‘universality of automatism’ and true concreteness (Marotti2007). See Tone (1960: 15–16), and their 1960 work, ‘Automatism (ôtomatizumu)’ (Group ONGAKU 1996).
23. See Neo Dada Japan 1958-1998 (1998: 74), and Nihon andepandan ten: Zenkiroku 1949-1963 (Seki 1993: 273)
for photos of the work.
24. Takashina Shûji saw in the complexities of the piece ‘the volition of an autonomous system beyond thatof its creator’ (Seki 1993: 273).
25. It was also in the 1960s that Japan’s economic connections to Southeast Asia came to reduplicate thosepresent during WWII – fulfilling an American strategic goal from the late 1940s, but also adding anotherlayer of connections to wars past and present.
26. For photos of the work, see Ryûdô suru bijutsu III: Neo Dada no shashin (1993: 48–49 and 72), and Neo Dada
Japan 1958-1998 (1998: 73).
27. In her astute analysis of the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Arts Festival, the first Olympic cultural festival to showcase the arts of the host country, Noriko Aso points out how the canonical, naturalized aesthetic categories for art exhibition in Japan were thoroughly integrated within the state’s hegemonic cultural politics(Aso 2002). This suggests another dimension in which artistic practice at the Yomiuri Indépendant (andindeed, in many of the avant-garde practices of performance at the time) acquired a further politicalcharge in its trampling of these categories.
28. On the actions of this group and its performance vocabulary, see KuroDalaiJee (Kuroda Raiji) (2003).
29. For a photo of the original work, see Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994: 153), and Nakanishi Natsuyuki: shiroku, tsuyoi, mokuzen, e (1997: 10). Note that these catalog’s translation of ‘kakuhan’ as‘churning’ misses the title’s political significance.

616 William Marotti
30. This action was contemplated in the wake of suppressions and rightist terrorism that had followed ashort story featuring a fantasy sequence in which the Imperial family is beheaded during a revolution.
The Imperial Plaza was also a major focal point for Occupation-era struggles: dubbed ‘People’s Plaza’,this contested space was a key rally site until protestors were banned from it; during a forcible reoccupation of the Plaza in 1952, police killed two protestors and injured 2300, making over 1000 arrests(Takemae 2002: 481, 494–495). The two artists contemplated a couple of versions for working, but nevertheless artistically spectacular, gigantic guillotines, or as an alternative, filling the plaza with miniatureversions (Marotti 2001a: chapter 4). Such planning was not unique – artists from the Neo Dada groupseriously debated blowing up the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (the host site for not only the Yomiuri Indépendant, but the Nitten exhibition, the center for the patronage networks of the art
establishment, and a periodic recipient of Imperial visits) at one point in 1960 (Yoshida 1982: 96, 103).
31. Ôka Makoto and Nakahara Yûsuke both commented on this strange assertion of life by the clothespins intheir reports on the exhibition for the Yomiuri Newspaper. See Seki (1993: 269–270).
32. See Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994: 171) for a photo of the ‘Rhyme ’63’ eggs. For the‘Rhyme’ [In] series of paintings, see Nakanishi Natsuyuki: shiroku, tsuyoi, mokuzen, e (1997: 41–47).
33. See Hariu (1998a: 278–279) for the full list. Kazakura Shô pointed out to museum workers that the
restriction against works emitting ‘unpleasant smells’ would in principle be violated by every painting
employing oil paints (Akasegawa 1985a: 194).
34. See Akasegawa (1994: 93–97), for photos of the work and its extension to Ueno station. Imaizumi
Yoshihiko suggested the extension of the work to Takamatsu, and he and Nakanishi actually carried out
stretching the line through the museum to the train station. See Imaizumi (1986).
35. Mark Augé analyzes the analogous spaces of the Paris Métro in his study, In the Metro (Augé 2002).
36. The text of the invitation is reproduced in Keishô (1963: 15), and Akasegawa (1994: 33–34), and istranslated in Marotti (2001a: 161–162). The Music group (guruppu ongaku)’s Tone Yasunao shared in thistendency, characterizing their improvisational performances – and Surrealism’s ‘convulsive’ ideal – interms of magnetism and subatomic particle interactions (Tone 1961: 7–8).
37. See Note 3 for my writings on this project of Akasegawa’s. On the significance of ‘direct action’(chokusetsu kôdô), in this context, see Marotti (2001a: chapter four).
38. I chart the evolution of state action against Akasegawa – from the discovery of his art in a book by the‘League of Criminals’ (Hanzaisha dômei) during an police search of the League’s office, to its referral to a
special police anti-counterfeiting section, to an extended series of interrogations by police andprosecutors, and on to the further discretionary decision to indict Akasegawa and prosecute him as aserious criminal (Marotti 2001a: chapter two).
39. For the exemplary case of the film, Salt of the Earth (Biberman 1954), see Schrecker (1998: 309–358); for thepoliticized support for ostensibly apolitical Abstract Expressionism, including covert funding andextensive use of patronage networks, see Saunders (1999).

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Special terms
akushonanpan
chokusetsu kôdô618 William MarottiGurûpu ongaku
I to YOU no toraburu I YOU
Hanzaisha dômei
HimoKabe oki no janku
kakuhanNihon bijutsukai
Nihon Indépendant
rutsubôSadada-shi no ôsetsushitsu
sentaku basami wa kakuhan kôi o shuchô suru
shungateishisei
tokkô
Author’s biography
William Marotti received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2001. He was the Woodrow Wilson
postdoctoral fellow for 2001–2003 at NYU’s International Center for Advanced Studies, participating in their‘Project on the Cold War as Global Conflict.’ Following another postdoctoral fellowship, at Columbia
University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and a visiting position at the University of California, Santa
Cruz History Department, he is now an assistant professor in the UCLA History Department. His main
research interests are post-WWII Japanese cultural politics, Cold War and everyday life, art and activism,and the global 1960s.
Contact address: c/o Dept. of History, UCLA, 6265 Bunche Hall, Box 951473, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473,
USA.