Table Of ContentPerformativity and Event in 1960s Japan
Other titles by Peter Eckersall
KAWAMURA TAKESHI’S NIPPON WARS AND OTHER PLAYS (2011)
THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC: Regional
Modernities in the Global Era (co-authored with Denise Varney, Barbara
Hatley and Chris Hudson, 2013)
THEORISING THE ANGURA SPACE: Avant-Garde Performance and
Politics in Japan 1960–2000 (2006)
Performativity and
Event in 1960s Japan
City, Body, Memory
Peter E ckersall
University of Melbourne, Australia
© Peter Eckersall 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-01737-6
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First published 2013 by
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Zero Jigen’s Pre-expressive Utopian Body:
Ritual Theory and Urban Transformation 1 5
2 Butoh Cine Dance and the Remediated Sixties 37
3 Singing Yokoo Tadanori: Ichiyanagi Toshi, the City, and
the Aesthetics of Listening 6 1
4 Performing Revolution at Shinjuku Plaza 81
5 The Osaka Exposition: Bodies and the Impossible Utopia 1 06
6 Memory and City: Port B and the Tokyo Olympics 132
Closing: Transforming Everydayness 1 61
Notes 1 65
References 1 69
Index 179
v
List of Figures
5.1 Scale model of the Expo ’70 site. Expo ’70 Exhibition.
The National Museum of Nature and Science
(K okuritsu Kagaku Hakubutsukan ), 2009 113
5.2 Australia Pavilion hosts pose in front of the pavilion 1 27
6.1 T okyo/Olympics poster 1 36
6.2 P ort B actor Takayama Akiko performing the tour guide 1 44
6.3 T akeshita dōri: map issued to audience,
courtesy of Port B 1 47
6.4 The tour commemorative photograph. Each participant
was given a copy at the end of the tour 1 48
6.5 T he experienced tour guide Oikawa Mitsuo instructs
actor Takayama Akiko in the correct stance for guides 149
6.6 The tour participants lined up at the window of
the go parlour 1 53
6.7 A kihabara Games Centre 154
6.8 Yasukuni Shrine 1 56
vi
Acknowledgements
This book is an outcome of a three-year research project funded
by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project Scheme. I am
grateful to the ARC and to the University of Melbourne for their
administrative and financial support of the project. My thanks also
go to the Japan Foundation for their support of the ‘Understanding
Japan’s Dynamic Decade’ symposium, held at the University of
Melbourne in December 2011, and to the colleagues who contrib-
uted to that event. I conducted research in Japan while a visiting
scholar at the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences, and my thanks go to Toshiko Ellis and Uchino Tadashi
there. I undertook some of the writing of this book as a fellow at the
International Research Centre: Interweaving Performance Cultures,
Freie Universität, and I thank the co-directors, Erika Fischer-Lichte
and Gabriele Brandstetter, the staff, and other fellows for their
support and productive feedback.
In writing this book I owe thanks to many other people. My
gratitude goes to Philip Flavin, who worked as a researcher on this
project and in particular brought his Japanese musicological exper-
tise to Chapter 3. Philip contributed extensively to that chapter
and to the overall research for this book. My thanks to David
Kelly for his patient and considered editorial work and to Corey
Wakeling for formatting assistance. Thank you also to Naomi Ota
for help with research in Japan and to Helena Grehan for reading
drafts and giving generous feedback. I give special thanks to Vera
Mackie, who has been a great supporter of this project. I have
benefited from participating in her workshops: ‘Space, Place and
Emotion in Modern Japan’ (2010) and ‘The Embodied Experiences
of Globalisation in the Asia-Pacific Region’ (2009). Thank you to
the people who participated in interviews and in discussions for
this project, including Rio Otomo, Toshiko Ellis, Kuroda Raiji, Katō
Yoshihiro, Takayama Akira, Fujii Shinatrō, Sawada Keiji, Yamanashi
Makiko, Alisa Freedman, Katherine Mezur, Katja Centonze, Nakao
Hidehiro, and Stanca Scholz-Cionca (there are many such others to
thank as well).
vii
viii Acknowledgements
Thank you also to Felicity Plester and Chris Penfold at Palgrave
Macmillan for their patience and for their support for this project.
Finally, thank you to Denise Varney and my colleagues at the School
of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne.
Some of the material from Chapter 2 has already been published
in A Kaleidoscope of Japanese Theatre , edited by Barbara Geilhorn,
Eike Grossmann, and Thomas Hackner (Munich: Iudicium Verlag).
An earlier, condensed version of Chapter 4 was published as ‘The
Emotional Geography of Shinjuku: The Case of C hikatetsu Hiroba
(Underground Plaza, 1970)’, J apanese Studies 31:3, 2011, 333–43. Part
of Chapter 6 was published as ‘Tokyo/Olympics: Digging the High
Times of the 1960s’, I ntersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the
Pacific 23:1, 2010.
Japanese names are written surname first except when the people
concerned prefer otherwise, and macrons for Japanese vowels are
used except where a word is commonly used in English.
Introduction
Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan: City, Body, Memory exam-
ines the Japanese city of the 1960s as both the locus of performa-
tivity and the place of tremendous avant-gardism. It explores how
in an age of dramatic change and newfound optimism, dimensions
of performance, culture, and society became entwined and swung
between the violent and utopian ideas of revolution and the prosaic
everyday world. It examines how specific cultural events marked
the progress of the 1960s in historical terms; these events included
national civic operations such as the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games
and the 1970 Osaka Expo ( Banpaku ). The idea of event is also made
manifest in other more local and prosaic contexts as well, including
where performances were interacting with city spaces and where
people occupied space for the purpose of political protest. Thus an
important idea in this study is to investigate how social and cultural
events are performative and have the capacity to mark moments
of disruption and broker the possibility of change. They interrupt,
insert, invade, and have the potential to influence the daily applica-
tion and maintenance of cultural production and power.
An important factor linking the diverse examples of events
analysed in the book is the creative generation of hybrid, interactive,
and multiple subjectivities. I take this idea from Henri Lefebvre, who
in The Urban Revolution writes:
In the street, a form of spontaneous theatre, I become spectacle
and spectator, and sometimes actor. ... The street is a place to
play and learn. The street is disorder. ... This disorder is alive. It
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