Art, Riot, Terror: The 60s Tokyo Avant-Garde: Mishima, Hijikata, Oshima Read online

  To reconcile his unique time and space, and to project it to the world as an act beyond representation, Mishima’s final act of death forms the embodiment of that ‘extreme form of eroticism’ which led, as he said in the same television interview of 1969, to ‘a proud form of death’: ‘Harakiri makes you win.’ In the police photographs of the aftermath of Mishima’s death, in which his severed head had been placed upright, on a cloth, alongside that of one of his Shield Society acolytes, and photographed in close-up, his face emanates an oblivion that has passed through every corporeal, sensory and sexual aperture, in order to mediate his obsession, stopped-dead in that instant of raw bliss, for the eye of his reader and spectator.

  HIJIKATA : A STORY OF TOKYO

  Tokyo lives by its images, its sexual obsessions, its human bodies, and through the memory and prescience of its own destructions. Long ago, in the furnace of images that heats Tokyo, a form of dance performance emerged that condensed that imagery and situated it deeply within the fractured substance of the bodies inhabiting the city. From the endless proliferation of Tokyo’s images and sensations, in order to survive, the eye can extract just one or two, and saturate them in seared memory and sensory convulsions. And out of that material, the final story of Tokyo originates.

  At the end of the 1950s, in Tokyo, a young dancer from northern Japan named Tatsumi Hijikata created a form of dance performance that he named Ankoku Butoh – dance of utter darkness . Hijikata was starting to visualize a dance form that could transform the human body. He saw the body as a matter that had to be excoriated, placed in intimacy with gestures resonant of sensory excess and death, and then insistently reactivated, violently. In Tokyo, Hijikata, a riotous and insurgent presence, formed an incompatible element within a city that was then preoccupied far more with its dreams of affluence than with visions of bodily mutation.

  After arriving in Tokyo from his home in the isolated region of Akita, on the far north-western coast of Japan, Hijikata had worked for years as a menial labourer in the docks and laundries of the city, while his unruly obsessions gradually took focus. At night, in the Tokyo dancehalls, he dressed provocatively in the white suits with long, drape jackets that were worn by gangsters in Akira Kurosawa’s films of the time. He began performing in sex cabarets, in the heated and labyrinthine districts of a city still damaged and reeling, knocked permanently awry, by its incineration of a decade earlier. Hijikata, surrounded by the aura of death that had embedded itself inextricably into the nerves of Tokyo, was gripped by the idea of a harsh corporeal resuscitation that the performances he was planning could incite. He wrote, “Butoh is a corpse standing straight up in a desperate bid for life”.

  In May 1959, in collaboration with a young dancer, Yoshito Ohno, who was then nineteen years old, Hijikata undertook the first performance of his Butoh dance, Kinjiki, which took its inspiration from the writings of Yukio Mishima. Over the previous years of his gruelling solitude in the city, Hijikata had been conspiring with himself on a performance that could set a sudden gash on the face of Tokyo. The once-only performance took place largely in darkness, the spectators unsighted and unnerved, their eyes catching impacts of body against body, with Ohno strangling a chicken between his thighs, and Hijikata assaulting Ohno and seemingly raping him. The performance didn’t last long. The stage was left spattered with blood; the spectators – habituated to rigid, innocuous dance performances – responded with silent fury and outrage to Hijikata’s unprecedented images of the body; at the end, only Mishima and one or two others in the crowd applauded.

  That moment in Tokyo was one when, after the torpid, defeated submission to American culture that had pervaded the lives of its inhabitants during the period of the United States Occupation and through the ensuing years, the city’s culture abruptly exploded, in reaction, with work that probed Tokyo’s deep layers of sex and damage, as the city accelerated and expanded spectacularly into the 1960s. Many of the figures who came to prominence during that decade – the poet and theatre director Shuji Terayama, the filmmakers Nagisa Oshima and Koji Wakamatsu – saw the creation in their work of intricate, visceral con-stellations of sex and political revolution as forming the most direct visual means of reinventing Tokyo. Collaborations between writers, artists, musicians and performers scrambled the boundaries in the city’s culture, and matched the ongoing mutation which the exterior form of Tokyo itself underwent in those years, as it expanded out into an unending terrain of concrete buildings and glaring neon signs: the city in upheaval left behind all of its former borders and fixed points. As the visual arena of Tokyo then assembled itself into a multiple onslaught of images, Hijikata’s Butoh dance acted as a contrary force, that collected the essence of that tearing upheaval, but then challenged it, propelling out instead his own unique images of the body, against the images of Tokyo.

  In the face of the raging visual storm that contemporary Tokyo exerts upon the eye, beating it into entrancement, I decided to see if I could track down a few of the rare surviving traces of those spiked images of transformation, which Hijikata had made in the city.

  Looking for the lost traces of Hijikata’s work, I visited Yoshito Ohno, Hijikata’s collaborator on the performance of Kinjiki. In his wooden studio, out in the suburbs, he was working with a group of around ten young dancers. Ohno was a dignified, austere figure with a shaven head, and over sixty years old. The lights in the studio went down; the young dancers appeared exhausted even before they started their work. Ohno gave them a scattering of dried flowers, mostly roses, that were stored in an old glass cabinet. The dancers held the flowers to their bodies. Ohno instructed them to make the flowers become flesh, and incorporate them into their bodies. He told them to change their bodies, in that way.

  The dancers worked in a silent, dense delirium of gestures. Ohno was silent too, and still. Two hours or more went by. Something had been unleashed in the dark, concentrated air.

  Then the lights in the studio snapped back on.

  Later, we sit and share a barrel of sake. The ram-shackle studio lies up on a steep hill, looking out over a partly-wooded valley of little houses affixed, by precarious concrete bases, to the slopes. It is late at night, and the rainfall from the last convulsion of an autumn typhoon pounds the ground outside like an exasperated, useless fist. Yoshito Ohno remembers the first moments of his work with Hijikata, who died of cirrhosis in 1986, with affection and empathy. Ohno is a drinker, too. The children of the district have to lead him home sometimes, when he can’t recognize the way to his house. And on other days, the neighbourhood thugs make him dance like a village idiot in the streets. The intervening decades have been hard. But in Ohno’s memory, the image that survived it all, in Tokyo, was that of a body dancing.

  One night, in a cellar bar in the Ikebukuro district, I met a philosopher named Kuniichi Uno who had been an intimate friend of Hijikata in the mid-1980s, at the end of his life. By that time, Hijikata had stopped performing for over a decade, though he remained in Tokyo and still choreographed works for a small number of performers, including Yoshito Ohno’s father, Kazuo Ohno, a legendary figure, now in his nineties, but still performing. Uno remembered his alcohol-fuelled talks with Hijikata that revolved around Hijikata’s preoccupation in his work with meshing together images of the human scream, the body, language, and Tokyo. They would disappear together into the subterranean zone of Shinjuku’s bars to talk through their ideas, not re-emerging until three days later, Uno stunned and hallucinating with exhaustion, Hijikata still lucid, his head glowing with new projects.

  As autumn came down coldly in Tokyo, the back alleyways of the Meguro district became wreathed in an evening smoke that smelt of burning leaves and charred fish. The gangs of cats roaming the alleys were hungry. It was a peripheral district, far from the blaze and cacophony of Shinjuku and Shibuya. I tracked my way through the dark, tangled streets.

  Turning a corner into a dead-end alleyway of detached houses, I came across a tall, three-storey building with a s
harply pointed roof. Outside, a revolving pole of white light carried the word “asbestos”.

  I had decided to visit Hijikata’s widow, at the house where she and Hijikata lived together for twenty-five years and where he developed almost all of his work, in the studio located in the building’s basement. Akiko Motofuji met me on the flight of steps leading up to the house. She was herself a dancer, tiny and squat, with thinning black hair that started high up on her forehead. All of her stories came edged with horror and loss. Born in Tokyo at the end of the 1920s, she saw most of her friends disappear or die over the war years.

  One day, her best friend was blown up next to her as they walked, arm in arm, along a Tokyo street. The city abruptly vanished in burning silver light, and she and her few surviving friends believed that it was the end of the world, at least for them. Then life obstinately began again. Her father had been an industrialist who made a fortune out of asbestos production, and when he decided to give his daughter a dance studio, in 1950, she named it the “Asbestos hall” . During that period of Tokyo’s frantic reconstruction, asbestos had been considered an invaluable building material; it was only during the following decades that the name began to possess its lethal resonances. Hijikata came to live with her there soon after the Kinjiki performance that had scandalized its spectators and instilled its own corrosive presence into Tokyo. Hijikata had still been working on the Tokyo docks, and living, starving and desperate, in a hostel for derelicts; now, he had a space in which to work through his obsessions.

  In the Asbestos hall, the death of Hijikata exerted a tangible presence. Akiko Motofuji kept a little shrine dedicated to her husband beside the window of the living-room, with a photograph, two tiny wooden cats in a basket, and a burning candle: a few precious fragments of memory. In the photograph of Hijikata, long, wild hair covered a tender face.

  When, later in the evening, Akiko Motofuji began to project films of his performances in the studio downstairs, it was a different face I saw.

  Hijikata was carried onstage at a Shinjuku theatre on a kind of throne. It was October 1968, and Tokyo had erupted in uproar, with riots going on in the streets outside. Hijikata danced an exultant fury of perversion and calamity. At one moment he wore a white dress, at another moment he was naked except for a long, golden phallus, strapped around his waist. The dance transformed Hijikata’s body in incessant ricochets, from decrepitude to youthful fluidity, and from a disciplined body of magisterial control to a shattered carapace of skin over nothing at all. The dance began in pulsing sexual exhilaration and proceeded through to a taunting and a killing. Towards the end of the performance, Hijikata’s body was strung precariously by ropes, high above the audience, in a dance of vertigo that, at any moment, threatened to overturn itself. The images of the performance, entitled Revolt Of The Body, passed through the film projector, jagged. They were all that survived of Hijikata, and they ended abruptly, in mid-gesture. I was suddenly back in the darkened studio with Hijikata’s widow and the breathless violence of his presence. Tokyo pressed hard outside the studio, colder still.

  The American writer and filmmaker Donald Richie lived in the cemetery district of Yanaka in the 1950s and 1960s, during the years when he was a close friend of Hijikata and of Yukio Mishima. At that time, the vast cemetery had grown semi-derelict, many of the tombs covered in a rampant foliage. One Sunday, Richie shot the entirety of a film, from beginning to end, at the edge of the cemetery. His actors – the young members of a Japanese experimental theatre company, eagerly ready for anything he could demand from them – were soon all stripped naked, enacting a myth of sex and death. Richie’s neighbours came out of their low wooden houses to watch, attracted by the spectacle; they viewed Richie’s behaviour with bemused indulgence, and the Yanaka district was habitually so deeply somnolent that the film shoot threw their lives pleasurably out of kilter for an instant. Soon, the atmosphere was one of festive hilarity, with Richie, his performers and the neighbours all laughing together. By the end of the afternoon, the actress playing the goddess of destruction in the film lay back, an exhausted but satiated smile on her face, on top of a great heap of naked, bloodied male bodies. The day had been a delirious experiment with the intersecting terrains of Yanaka and the lithe, naked bodies of Richie’s performers. But, when he later came to edit together the images he had shot that day, for a film entitled Cybele, those images transformed themselves aberrantly before his eyes, from the capricious fragments of ecstasy that he had envisaged, into a monument-ally solemn work of horror and extremity. Tokyo had seized Richie’s images.

  When he showed the film around the world, appalled spectators assumed that it was a work about genocide, evoking for them the piles of massacred bodies in the abandoned Nazi concentration camps, or else the fragile layers of carbonized victims left behind by the firebombing of Tokyo. In Britain, the film was simply banned.

  I sat with Donald Richie one evening in a silent restaurant in Tokyo, overlooking a dense garden of dying flowers. The night before, the first cold winds of the winter had hit Tokyo, and the air was still shot through with ice. As I travelled around the city during the course of the day, the salary-men on the subway trains had exuded an air of increasing panic as the hours wore on – it was a day when the news reports had been urgently jammed with stories of threatened economic collapse, of mass redundancies caused by financial corruption. But Tokyo itself, oblivious to all of those ructions on its surface, remained immutable. It had no need even of time. Decades could flash by and leave only an easily uprooted scattering of scars, concrete blocks and burnt-out images strewn across the city. As the sky over the garden darkened, Richie spoke to me about his memories of attending the performance of Kinjiki by Hijikata and Yoshito Ohno, over forty years earlier. He remembered Ohno as a beautiful nineteen-year-old boy, a gaunt and elegant presence within the storm of blood and anger that the performance generated. Richie’s friend, Yukio Mishima, sitting alongside him in the turbulent hall, had said that the young Ohno looked like a dark angel.

  In the same year as the performance of Kinjiki, in 1959, Richie made a film with Hijikata, together with a group of dancers based at the Asbestos hall. Richie shot the film in an empty schoolyard surrounded by warehouses in the industrial zone of Shinagawa, close to Tokyo Bay. One male figure in the film, Sacrifice, is surrounded by a circle of exultant women who urinate on him, defecate on him, and finally tear him open. At that time of furore in Tokyo, Richie was immersed in the city’s experimental culture, helping to instigate collaborations between filmmakers, choreographers and photographers. He had arrived in Tokyo thirteen years earlier, in 1946, as part of the military Occupation of the city, and had witnessed the still-devastated expanse of Tokyo from a zero distance. Then, as Tokyo rapidly resurged from its obliteration, an atmosphere of exhilarating tension and awry sexual decadence generated itself for all those with the means to experience it. Captivated, Richie stayed on in Tokyo forever. By the end of the 1950s, with the American Occupation over, the city was starting to ignite with the first of the fierce riots against the enduring subservience – cultural, political and military – of Japan to the United States. Concussions of roaring sound crossed the city from end to end. Hijikata’s work had begun at that instant.

  Yukio Mishima had first introduced Richie to Hijikata with the words, “I have an evil god for you now”. Three years after they had worked together on the film Sacrifice, Richie wanted to make a new film in collaboration with Hijikata, at the vast beach of Kujukurihama, on the Pacific coastline to the east of Tokyo. Hijikata was in a sly mood. He gathered together a gang of gullible boys from the tiny fishing village of Osato, and, as a typhoon whipped over them all, Richie filmed the boys in the act of killing a goat on the beach. He wanted to capture the exact moment at which the boys forgot that they had just killed, and went back to the usual rhythm of their lives. While Richie filmed the boys, caught in their startled confusion, Hijikata danced wildly on the beach of white sand, just out of the range of Richie�
�s film camera, propelling his stomach spasmodically out from his body. At first, the boys looked at the dancing figure in frowning disbelief. Then they suddenly broke into great fits of laughter, the violent tension instantly seeping out from their bodies. In Richie’s film, War Games, from moment to moment, the onset of oblivion from carnage became palpable.

  In the early 1960s, the photographer Eikoh Hosoe created a legendary series of portraits of Yukio Mishima, Death By Roses, combining intricate superimpositions, distortions and fragmentations of the images. He photographed Mishima naked in all the intensity of the novelist’s sexual obsessions – in leather, in bondage, and in extreme oscillations between multiple identities. Every image became saturated luxuriously in dreams of death, as though death itself were a matter pulped together from sperm, velvet and darkness.

  Shortly before Mishima’s suicide, they worked together on the opulent design of a new catalogue publication of the portraits, which Mishima evidently conceived of as his final, provoking apparition before the world. Before Hosoe’s images, the naked body had rarely formed such a raw, direct concern in Japanese art; Hosoe invented an imagery of the human body for Tokyo after its destruction. As a young man, he had been among the audience for Hijikata’s Kinjiki performance, and that experience seared him and precipitated his work.

  In his studio, close by a seething traffic intersection in the Yotsuya district, Hosoe makes his first assertions about his work with Hijikata emphatically – but then something within the solemnity of the words disintegrates, his statements turn in on themselves, and every sentence tails off in an abrupt riot of laughter. He shows me a photograph taken while he was walking with Hijikata in the dawn streets of Shinjuku, in 1967, after a night of drinking. They had stopped a young boy who was busy delivering bottles of milk on his bicycle, and had paid him off so that Hijikata could ride on the bicycle instead. In the image, the background appears blurred, a gestural smear of speed that compacts together the shuttered shop fronts and the figures of suited salary-men on their way to work. In the fore-ground, Hijikata, barefoot, dressed in a striped coat and a straw hat covered in flowers, struggles with the bicycle. As it swerves precariously, Hijikata adroitly fixes his gaze on the camera from the corners of both eyes, his teeth clamped down in concentration on his lower lip. The image captured the presence of Hijikata in Tokyo, as a crazed rapport.