Godzilla's Children: Murakami Takes Manhattan

"Little Boy" is the nickname of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. In Murakami's formulation, Little Boy is also Japan in relation to the United States and the passive consumer of capitalist excess, but also the wide-eyed child of manga and anime. In this exhibition, Murakami presents a wide range of art, artifacts, and imagery and thereby stakes a claim on the artistic consciousness and conscience of the twenty-first century.

For some time I have believed that manga and anime will do for visual culture in this century what African American music did for music in the last century: provide the peoples of the world with a common expressive medium. The work Murakami has assembled supports that conjecture, though only time will tell if it is correct. Japan's visual arts work at a fundamental level that demands our fullest attention and respect. I disagree, however, with Murakami's arguments-and those of other contributors to the exhibition catalog-about the driving force behind those arts. But let us put that aside for now and consider the work, and the argument, as Murakami arranges it in the handsome bilingual catalog (English and Japanese).

The catalog's presentation is well considered and seductive. First Murakami gives us a two-page spread of Okamoto Tarō standing, arms outspread, in front of his large avant-primitive sculpture, the iconic Tower of the Sun, created for Expo '70 in Osaka, Asia's first world's fair. (The sculpture was represented in the exhibition by a shoulder-high maquette and a ceiling-high photograph.) Okamoto was the son of a manga artist and a writer, studied in Europe at the University of Paris, and became a household name for uttering "Art is explosion" in a TV commercial. Then Murakami shows us the opening animation for Daicon IV, an eight-minute anime film made by amateurs-who play a significant role in manga and anime culture-and shown at the Twenty-Second Japan Science Fiction Convention in 1983. The film is a collage of cultural references: Godzilla, an atomic explosion, a magic sword, Darth Vader, a cute girl in a bunny costume (who surfs the sky standing on the sword), space stations and satellites, Batman and Robin, ray weaponry, cherry blossoms, Mt. Fuji, robots cute and not, and a happy ending.

Having given us a monument and a visual encyclopedia, Murakami turns to broadcast TV, presenting a sci-fi slapstick anime series from 1975-76 called Time Bokan. Each week the good guys fight the bad guys and vanquish them in a mecha battle, only to have the bad guys reappear intact the following week. Each episode ends with the highly stylized image of a mushroom cloud resembling a sepulchral skull. It is this image that Murakami has appropriated for his own Time Bokan-Pink. Here, the image has become even more stylized and is now completely "flattened" (all shading gone), appearing in white on a hot pink background and balanced beneath a smaller black version of itself that has been turned upside down, with wreaths of colorful flowers in the eye sockets. A pretty picture.

Thus ends Murakami's overture. As the catalog continues, he moves us from art to reality, presenting a two-page photograph of a mushroom cloud created by a hydrogen bomb detonated at Bikini Atoll in 1954 (16-17). In brilliant reds, oranges, and yellows, the image is gorgeous. On the heels of that image comes a black-and-white image of a bombed Hiroshima: "The two atomic bombs have left a permanent scar on Japanese history: they have touched the national nerve beyond the effects of the catastrophic physical destruction" (19). Then Murakami yanks us back into...