Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan: City, Body, Memory by Peter Eckersall (review)

The experimental performance culture of 1960s Japan, and especially its connections to that tumultuous decade of riots and social protest centered on the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, has been a focus of accelerating interest in recent years. This interest, both in Japan itself and beyond, has manifested in exhibitions, films, re-stagings of seminal events of the era, and notably in English-language studies such as William Marotti’s Money, Trains, and Guillotines (2013), which situates Tokyo’s performance art culture within its political context, and Alice Maude-Roxby’s edited volume Anti-Academy (2013, coinciding with an exhibition), which analyzes the way upheavals in the art-school structures of 1960s Japan generated innovations in performance and visual media. That engagement with memorializing and even reactivating the insurgent culture of 1960s Japan especially assumes an archival form, with art museums and universities in Japan now amassing the surviving traces of what were always precarious works.

Peter Eckersall’s book Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan has a distinctive focus on the interrelationship between Japan’s urban culture and a range of intermedial performance experiments notably traversing noise, architecture, and film. Eckersall argues that the 1960s remains an exceptional decade in both Japan’s history and its performance culture, with the inhabitants of that era “under the mass sway of the energetic events of Japan’s most dynamic decade — an era of perhaps greater agitation and change than any other in its history” (164). Eckersall emphasizes how the decade’s two major architectural programs that were designed to reconfigure Japan’s global status two decades after WWII — the massive reconstruction of Tokyo in anticipation of the 1964 Olympic Games, and the building of a spectacular sub-city of technological innovation on the peripheries of Osaka for the Expo ’70 world’s fair — were intimately shadowed by performance cultures that both opposed and became integrated into those urban upheavals. The reconfiguration of Tokyo’s avenues and infrastructure for the Olympic Games formed a volatile urban backdrop for outdoor performance events in plazas and wastelands, such as those by the Zero Jigen and Jokyo Gekijo groups, whose performances — in sites such as the Shinjuku plaza, which simultaneously formed the axis for the era’s riotous protests — were documented by prominent experimental filmmakers of the time, such as Donald Richie and Nagisa Oshima. Pivotal groups and figures of 1950s and ’60s Japanese performance culture, such as the Gutai art group and the Butoh choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata, were commissioned to participate in Expo ’70 events, to the horror of many of their contemporaries.

Eckersall’s book is especially incisive in its evocation of the project of Artaud-inspired corporeal interrogation, which was essential to street-located experimental performance culture in 1960s Japan, and also generated its social provocation. Both at the beginning and end of the 1960s (notably in 1960 and 1969), immense and violent demonstrations tore through Tokyo’s avenues to threaten its governmental institutions. These pitted militant student activists against riot-police in the context of fierce opposition to the US-Japan Security Treaty, widely perceived by the protestors as subjugating Japan to US military imperatives such as the deployment of air-bases close to Tokyo during the war in Vietnam. Performance groups engaged primarily with anatomical experimentations remained inflected by the riotous urban events surrounding them. Eckersall’s chapter on Zero Jigen’s work adeptly traces both the outlandish provocations of the group’s performances — often undertaken for accidental audiences of urban passers-by — together with their wider social incitation: “Zero Jigen’s ritual performances (called gishiki) included absurd and uncanny processions, naked acts of sensual arousal, and scandalous confrontations with the public. Zero Jigen performances caused consternation and revelled in conflict with state authorities and institutions, defiling urban spaces and outraging social decorum” (17).

An especial merit of Eckersall’s study is its focus on previously overlooked performances in 1960s Japan, especially those that presciently inhabit an unstable edge...