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· 175 ·· CONCLUSION · “Japanese” Counterculture Ihave forestalled directly addressing Japanese counterculture until this conclusion, partly to avoid the snare of conceiving a global, and explicitly antinationalist, movement through the category of the nation. Yet the category of “Japanese” counterculture still needs to be tackled because that was the frame within which Terayama’s work was often received (and appraised) once it left Japan. It is not at all a stretch to claim that Terayama’s projectsbecame Japanese onlyonce they left Japan— whereas within Japan they often seemed foreign. This foreignness could be certified by an award from a European festival, for example, and then reintroduced to Japan as international clout. So we find a pattern of movement from international into Japanese characterizing much of Terayama’s work after about 1970. Still, this is not to deny the existence of a domestic countercultural discourse in Japan that spoke in Japanese to an audience mostly in Japan, which was particularly concerned with the response of the Japanese government and the people of Japan to the situation of the late 1950s into the mid-1970s. There are enough domestic referents within that discourse (among the many references to foreign or international issues) that Japan’s national borders, to the extent that they coincide with its linguistic borders, do mark the maximum range of the assumed audience of that conversation. But those borders are never what is meant by “Japan,” even in the domestic discourse about the nation—the name of the nation always embodies a struggle over the meaning of history, a privileging of certain facets of culture, and efforts to control the future of the collective. I will sketch out, very briefly, some contours of this domestic discourse on counterculture before moving on to the slightly thornier issue of “Japanese” counterculture abroad. Japan had a hippie movement, but it is reported to have been limited in scope—communes on small islands, a return to farming, the creation of a rice-growing and filmmaking collective in Yamagata by the radical documentary filmmaker Ogawa Shinsuke during the 1970s—but the ideas 176 CONCLUSION were very much in the air and alive in the media. Japan’s own homegrown hippies, the fūten-zoku (“idler-tribe”), made news by lounging outside of Japan’s busiest train station, Shinjuku, wearing oddball sunglasses and sedated on their drug of choice (possibly their only option): sleeping pills.1 The popularization of the term traces to a manga called Fūten by Nagashima Shinji that was serialized in the magazine COM starting in the spring of 1967. Nagashima explains at the end of the first installment that the main characters of his manga are less Nagahima Hinji—Nagashima’s alter ego, with plays on “spare time” (hima) and “poverty” (hin)—than the group of “fūten” friends he made over the previous years, including poets who do not write and jazz musicians who do not play.2 Terayama comments on a group of about a dozen fūten who formed an ashram in Nagano where they built huts and grew vegetables: Looking at the fūten-zoku laying around on the greenhouse outside of Shinjuku station, I can’t help thinking of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which I read as a kid. Tom Sawyer was a square from a bourgeois family, but Huckleberry Finn was hip. Huck was lazy and coarse, wore rags, and slept in a sugar barrel, but he was an idealist. The Shinjuku fūten have more ideals than they can manage—they talk of love, freedom, liberation from their chains. And with the clear blue sky for a roof, and the air for their furnishings, they dream of the return of a primordial society, when people could live as human beings. This group of fūten who have created their “bums’ ashram” in the village of Kōdo in Nagano, which even includes the beat poet Gary Snyder, have surely outdone the Shinjuku fūten in the loftiness of their ideals. Yet, in dreaming of “human-ness” in the form of a return of primordial society, these young people who have chosen the fūten route seem to be reading from the book of life backwards. Me, I like pop music, the hustle and bustle of the city, the gossip rags and two-bit newspapers. I can’t help loving the people who like deceiving people and being deceived themselves, the ones who focus all their energy on one side of a philosophical...

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