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  • Olympic Labor and Displacement:Babel and Its Towers
  • Namiko Kunimoto (bio)

In 1964, as Japan surged with national pride over economic growth and the global showcase of the summer Olympics that year, artists such as Nakamura Hiroshi (b. 1932), critiqued the use and abuse of civilian bodies in the name of patriotism.1 Nakamura had expressed concern with laboring male bodies and their relation to the state prior to the 1960s, and his provocative paintings during the 1960s Olympic era, such as Sightseeing Empire (1963) and Sacred Torch Relay (1964), vividly linked Olympic grandstanding and tourism with Japan's past. In the past five years prior to the 2020 Olympics, a younger generation of artists including Sakuragawa Takatoshi, Sakauchi Miwako, and Hashimoto Satoshi, as well as amateur artists such as Ochi Sachihiro and Shimamura Munemitsu, have reignited Japan's Olympic dissent, once again raising an awareness of race and labor practices.2 Perhaps the most prominent artist to address these issues is Takayama Akira (b. 1969), who has created performance art and installations that critically engage with the overreach of government control and the use of laboring bodies for the benefit of state development.

In Babel: The City and Its Towers, a multi-channel video installation work displayed in 2016 at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum, Takayama draws visitors into the complex relations between bodies and Olympics-related construction. Upon entering the gallery, viewers encounter projections of video interviews with two elderly men: one is the president of a lucrative construction company, who previously participated in building some of the high-rise buildings in downtown Tokyo in the 1960s, while the other is a migrant daylaborer from Niigata Prefecture, who worked construction in Tokyo during the period leading up to the 1964 Games.

The construction CEO referred to as "Kurosaki" is wearing a designer suit and resting easy in his leather office furniture, describing how he dropped out of high school to work as a scaffolder on the site of his family's company, which he now runs. His [End Page 88]


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9.1.

Takayama Akira, Babel: The City and Its Towers (detail), 2016. Published in My Body, Your Voice: Roppongi Crossing 2016 (Tokyo: Mori Museum of Art, 2016), 48–49. © Takayama Akira.

[End Page 89] privileged position in relation to other East Asian countries is reinforced as he describes a childhood living in Taiwan and Korea before returning to Japan and later joining the construction sites—biographical details that reveal he was part of the Japanese colonial presence in those countries at that time. Kurosaki reminisces over the dangers he faced as an on-site construction worker and the satisfaction he felt over his contributions to the building of Tokyo Tower. "It's a wonderful thing to build up and up," he remarks, heedlessly beckoning Takayama's reference to the tale of Babel and its warnings. When the 1964 Olympics began, he said he felt proud of what he had done. Kurosaki's wealth likely grew during the period of preparation for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. This was not the case for others, as Babel: The City and its Towers demonstrates.

Sitting outside near his illegal encampment and sporting an Oakland Raiders cap, surrounded by old toys and forgotten umbrellas, the former construction worker known as Makoto describes being a scaffolder during the heady lead-up to the 1964 Games (fig. 9.1). His words intermingle nostalgic pride with bitterness, as he remembers the days when he was recruited by a labor broker and "trapped like that for years." Makoto recalls how he helped build the city and daringly wore little protective gear, unlike today's workers. These memories echo those of Kurosaki, who also recalled the thrill and fear of working dangerous construction jobs as a young man. Later in the interview, Makoto's voice turns mournful as he describes how he will lose his friends and his home because the city is "cleaning up" these camps to make way for new Olympic buildings and create a sterile image of the country in anticipation of international visitors in 2020. "They are cleaning up the city, but then we have nowhere to...

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