CASSEGARD Activism Beyond the Pleasure Principle

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Activism Beyond the Pleasure Principle?Carl Cassegard

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Activism Beyond thePleasure Principle?

Homelessness and Art in theShinjuku Underground

Carl Cassegard

Looking back at the pictures now, it is almost palpable how a kind ofenergy related to life and existence an energy different from that ofso-called political social movements welled up from the humblepractice we engaged in.1

Yamane Yasuhiro wrote these words about the cardboard village wherehe and his friends had spent almost three years, from 1995 to 1998,painting on the walls of homeless peoples cardboard houses in the under-

ground passages around Shinjuku Station in Tokyo. These same passagesat the time became the centre stage of Japans first large-scale homelessmovement, which unfolded in order to defend the village against thethreat of eviction by the metropolitan government.2

Although not much co-operation between artists and activistsoccurred during the cardboard villages span of existence, the Shinjukucardboard art was pivotal in the development of new forms of activismin Japan. The sociologist Mori Yoshitaka points out that it pioneeredthe development of todays new cultural movements characterized byhumour, the use of art or popular culture, and a preference for looseanti-hierarchical forms of organization. The radical critic Hirai Genagrees, stating that it inaugurated a current of new political street art

which later blossomed into the street parties conspicuous today.Making use of music, dancing and a festive mood to mobilize andattract participants, these new cultural movements differ in style fromearlier student and citizen movements or traditional labour organiz-ations. They also differ in composition, participants usually being so-called freeters, young people without regular employment who haverapidly increased in number in Japan since the early 1990s.3 As shownby the examples of the struggles of Nagai Park in Osaka in 2006, or ofMiyashita Park in Tokyo in 2008 2010, when theatre, music and

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Vol. 27, No. 5, 620 633, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.830446

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1. Yasuhiro Yamane, letterto the author of thisarticle, 16 April 2010

2. For background onhomelessness in Japan, seeHideo Aoki,JapansUnderclass: Day Laborersand the Homeless, TransPacific, Melbourne, 2006.

For reports and analysis ofthe cardboard villagestruggle in English, seeMiki Hasegawa,We arenot Garbage!: TheHomeless Movement inTokyo, Routledge,London, 2006 and David-Antoine Malinas, Voicesfrom the Underground:Homeless Peoples SocialMovement in Japan The19941996 ShinjukuCase Study,Shidaishakaigaku5, 2004, pp43 50. For the cardboard

house art, see YoshitakaMori, Culture Politics:The Emergence of NewCultural Forms of Protestin the Age ofFreeter,Inter-Asia CulturalStudies, vol 6, no 1, 2005;and (in Japanese) thecontributions collected inShinjuku danboru kaigakenkyu (Studies of theShinjuku Cardboard


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poetry were spectacularly deployed to stop the evictions of homelesspeople, cultural activism is also no longer marginal to the homeless move-ment.4 Compared with the mid-1990s, art has become much more inte-grated into political activism.

The question that will preoccupy me in this article is how the role ofart in cultural activism should be understood. While it is clearly reductive

to neglect its political context, reducing it to politics would in many casesseem to do it injustice as art. In what sense, then, is it political? How haveartists themselves viewed their role in the political struggles in which theyhave participated? The cardboard village art helps illuminate these ques-tions since it represents an early stage in the formation of cultural acti-vism, when the place of art in the homeless movement was stillundecided. When the painters started to paint the cardboard houses, nosimilar activities had ever taken place in Japan, and nothing indicatedthat art would ever become part of the regular repertoire of politicalstruggles. My argument will be that the cardboard village artwasimmen-sely political, but in a sense that cannot be exhausted by conventionalconcepts such as instrumental or prefigurative politics, and is better

illuminated through the concepts of trauma and empowerment.

TRAUMA AND THERAPEUTICAL ACTIVISM

Street demonstrations, petitions and boycotts the traditional repertoireof social movements are usually conceptualized as a primarily instru-mental form of politics, as means towards achieving a certain result byappealing to or pressuring authorities or public opinion. By contrast, ithas been argued that the street parties, concerts and alternative spaces

associated with many movements today are better seen as a prefigurativepolitics, in which the desired change is prefigured in the activity itself.Prefigurative activities manifest the capacity of people to realize thekind of society they wish to see, rather than relying on authorities toimplement changes. Fun, play, pleasure or enjoyment are thereforenot seen as signs of lack of serious political commitment but as acrucial ingredient in prefigurative activities.5

One problem with understanding social movements as engaging solelyin instrumental or prefigurative activism is that both perspectives tend topresuppose subjects sufficiently intact to choose the most efficient instru-mental action or freely project a desired utopian outcome. Probing intothe cardboard house art in the Shinjuku underground, I will question

this assumption. Much activism is not, and cannot be, wholly instrumentalor prefigurative, since it is rooted inpresentneeds. The fact that activism isalways dialectically caught up in a present is also why fun is not alwaysthe relevant emotion to produce, even in todays new cultural movements.

A whole range of activities revolving around empowerment cannot beneatly classified as either instrumental or prefigurative and are better seenas what I will call therapeutical. ByempowermentI mean the strengthen-ing of peoples self-confidence as political actors.6 Therapeutical activismis politically important not by virtue of its instrumental or prefigurativeachievements but because it helpsproduce actors experiencing themselvesas capable of political action, and it does so through activities that are

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Paintings), Swamp,Kamio, Japan, 2005.Several of thepaintings areavailable inPaintings onthe Cardboard Houses atShinjuku Underground inTokyo, Japan 19951998, Swamp, Tokyo,

2005; on the webpageDanboru hausukaigashu, http://cardboard-house-painting.jp/mt/; and inSakokawa Naokosrecently published photocollectionShinjukudanboru mura: SakokawaNaoko shashinshu 19961998(The ShinjukuCardboard Village:Sakokawa Naoko PhotoCollection 19961998),DU, Tokyo, 2013.

3. Mori, op cit, p 26, andSutorto no shiso (TheThought in the Streets),NHK Bukkusu, Tokyo,2009; Gen Hirai,MikkMausu no puroretariasengen(Mickey MousesProletarian Manifesto),Ota shuppan, Tokyo,2005, pp 116126

4. These struggles arediscussed further in CarlCassegard,YouthMovements, Trauma, andAlternative Space in

Contemporary Japan,Brill, Leiden, forthcomingin 2014.

5. For the notion ofprefigurative politics, seeCarl Boggs, Marxism,PrefigurativeCommunism, and theProblem of WorkersControl,Radical America6, 19771978; WiniBreines,Community andOrganization in the NewLeft, 19621968: TheGreat Refusal, Praeger,

New York, 1982; andBarbara Epstein,PoliticalProtest and CulturalRevolution: NonviolentDirect Action in the 1970sand 1980s, University ofCalifornia Press, Berkeley,California, 1991, pp 16,83ff, pp 108 117, 122f.

6. It thus implies theconfidence in ones abilityto challenge existingrelations of domination,

John Drury and Steve


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experienced as valuable and empowering even when they do not prefigurea better society.

As I will show, the cardboard village artists conceived of themselvesneither along the lines of the romantic notion of the creatively expressiveself nor as rational self-directing subjects. Instead they tended to idealizethe idea of decentring or emptying the self, which was conceived as a

receptacle or channel for forces foreign to it. This way of doing artcomes close to what Mihai Spariosu labels prerational play. As hepoints out, such play is by no means apolitical. While rational thoughtconceives of play as unfolding in a sphere separate from the powerrelations of society, prerational thought sees play itself as a manifestationof power, capable of affecting and playing with reality. Although far froma mere political instrument, art becomes political through engaging withreality, spilling over into it and thereby fashioning new languages thatallow for the expression of subjectivities outside the frameworks thatare hegemonic or dominant in mainstream society.7

Paying attention to therapeutical aspects of activism is important,since social movements often have their roots in experiences of collective

trauma, mobilizing on behalf of people who have suffered severe hard-ship, or addressing the need to struggle with the lingering memory of pre-vious defeats in the movement history. Collective trauma can be definedas damage sustained not by individual psyches but by discursive systems.To borrow Ron Eyermans expression, it is a tear in the discursive fabricwhich renders certain things unsayable, or sayable only at great expense.8

Collective traumas differ from individual ones since this unsayability canremain an enduring feature of a discourse and affect even people whonever took part in the original experience. The effect is that certainexperiences are denied a place in public discourse.9

In the case of the cardboard village, at least two levels can be distin-

guished on which the concept of collective trauma is applicable. First,trauma enters the analysis through the mood of pessimism and impassethat permeated public discourse in Japan during the lost decade follow-ing the bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s. As I will show,the cardboard art was strongly infused with the sensation that Japanspostwar system, for so long a source of economic prosperity and nationalpride, had now utterly failed. Second, the homeless movement in Shin-juku had to struggle with the legacy of the New Lefts failure anddefeat in Japan. Symbolized by the descent of the radical student move-ment into violence and sectarian infighting during the 1970s, thislegacy served as an important barrier to subsequent efforts to reviveradical political activism in Japan. Art and music played an important

role in surmounting this negative legacy since it was only with the riseof the so-called new cultural movements from the 1990s onwards thatforms of radical activism could emerge that were no longer consideredtainted by that legacy.10

Central to therapeutical politics are processes of recovery from collec-tive trauma, ie repairing the tear in the discursive fabric. New culturalmovements in Japan have been doing this by articulating a language forcoming to terms with the seeming collapse of the Japanese modelsince the early 1990s that also resuscitates some of the radical energiesdiscredited by the New Left. They were helped by the fact that thetrauma of the lost decade was not universally experienced as a

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Reicher, ExplainingEnduring Empowerment:A Comparative Study ofCollective Action andPsychological Outcomes,European Journal ofSocial Psychology, vol 35,no 1, 2005, p 35.

7. Mihai Spariosu,DionysusReborn: Play and theAesthetic Dimension inModern Philosophical andScientific Discourse,Cornell University Press,Ithaca, New York, 1989, p12; Carl Cassegard, Playand Empowerment: TheRole of Alternative Spacein Social Movements,Electronic Journal ofContemporary Japanese

Studies, vol 12, no 1,2012,http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/ejcjs/vol12/iss1/cassegard.html

8. Ron Eyerman,CulturalTrauma: Slavery and theFormation of AfricanAmerican Identity,Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge, 2001,p 2

9. My emphasis on trauma asa discursive tear means that

I do notemploy the conceptin the sense it is used bytheorists such as JeffreyAlexander, for example inhis Toward a Theory ofCultural Trauma,Alexander et al, CulturalTrauma and CollectiveIdentity, University ofCalifornia Press, Berkeley,California, 2004, for whomcultural trauma is amemory publiclyconstructed through afunctioningdiscourse thatfounds or strengthens

collective identity. Thismakes their concept oftrauma hard to apply tosituations where the traumaremains unverbalized orleads to a weakening ordisintegration of collectiveidentity.

10. For the perceived failuresof the New Left in Japan,which included violence,infighting and dogmatism,see Cassegard,YouthMovements, op cit.


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catastrophe. To some including the cardboard village artists, as I willshow the collapse of the Japanese model signified a liberation and achance to recover political activism.11 Part of the importance of thenew cultural movements resides in their ability to contribute to a recoveryfrom both traumas providing a language that is seen as untainted by thefailures of earlier radical movements and that helps people put into words

their present experiences of precarity and economic hardship.But whose recovery? As for the homeless people themselves, they

remain silent in my account. Although several of them engaged in politi-cal protest at the time of the Shinjuku cardboard village, not many wereengaged in artistic activities. Only much later did they take the initiativeto engage in artistic activities within the homeless movement, the bestexample being the innovative theatre performance which was held inNagai Park in 2007, a last-ditch attempt to keep the police at bay andstop the eviction of the parks remaining homeless. The simple answeris that if collective trauma is a discursive event, recovery can only be aproperty of discourse. The focus in this article will be on the discourseof the young artists active in the Shinjuku cardboard village discourse

understood in a wide sense, as including art and artistic activities. I alsohope to show how the emergence of the cardboard village art affectedthe homeless movement in Japan by making art part of its language.

THE SHINJUKU UNDERGROUND ANDTHE CARDBOARD VILLAGE

The Shinjuku cardboard village quickly grew up in the wake of the post-bubble recession of the early 1990s and attracted attention for manyreasons. One was its size. At its largest, it consisted of 300 cardboard

houses inhabited by 600 to 800 people, lined up along two pedestrianpassages leading from the space known as Information Square, an under-ground plaza near the West Exit of Shinjuku Station. Another was its con-spicuous location. Shinjuku Station is the busiest railway station in Japanand the underground passages are located at the very foot of the TokyoMetropolitan Government Building.12 Third, the villagers seemed to rep-resent a new category of homeless people, different from the former day-labourers who used make up the majority of homeless people in Japanand who tended to cluster around the working-class district of Sanyaor nearby parks in eastern Tokyo.13

The geography of Shinjuku is important to understand the dynamicsof the conflict that soon developed around the village. Closeness to the

amusement district of Kabukicho where the homeless could obtainfood and work and the day-labour recruitment centre at Takadanobabawas an important reason why the homeless gathered in Shinjuku. Inaddition, the underground passages offered a roof, tolerable temperaturesand access to toilets.14 After the first eviction from the station, which tookplace in 1994, activists quickly mobilized to support the villagers, helpingthem set up joint meetings and organize themselves, providing food andother kinds of assistance, helping villagers apply for welfare from wardauthorities, and physically protecting them against eviction. The mainmovement body, the Shinjuku Renraku-kai (Shinjuku Co-ordinationAssociation), was created in 1994 by activists from a day-labourer organ-

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11. Trademark elements of theJapanese model ofemployment andmanagement, such as theseniority system andlifetime employment,although never available toall employees, had helpedto secure a large measureof legitimacy for thesystem. When this modelcame under pressure in the1990s, the crisis of worksent repercussions throughthe entire social fabric. SeeCassegard, op cit.

12. Hasegawa, op cit, p 71f;Keiko Yamaguchi, Toshikukan no henyo tonojukusha (TheTransformation of UrbanSpace and the Homeless),in Kariya Ayumi, ed,Furachi na kibo,Shoraisha, Kyoto, 2006,p 63

13. Aoki, op cit, p 107;Kazuaki Kasai,Shinjukuhomuresu funsenki(ARecord of the HomelessStruggle in Shinjuku),Gendaikikakushitsu,Tokyo, 1999, pp 22ff, p 58

14. Hasegawa, op cit, p 72;Yamaguchi, op cit, pp 59f


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ization, a group of Shibuya-based young activists and an organization setup by the villagers themselves.15 A larger-scale eviction followed in early1996 under the pretext of setting up a mechanized sidewalk. The citymobilized some 600 riot police, guards and municipal employees totear down the village and evict the villagers. The activists and villagersset up resistance together with supporters who had arrived from major

cities such as Osaka, Yokohama and Nagoya, and passers-by contributed200,000 yen daily to the campaigns funds. After the eviction, the home-less regrouped in the Information Square, where the supporters preparedmeals and provided medical care. A third eviction was carried out in1998. The homeless again regrouped, but tragically a fire broke outshortly afterwards, destroying fifty of the cardboard houses and claimingthe lives of four villagers. The Metropolitan Government evicted theremainder, some of whom moved to a shelter while others relocated toa nearby park.

During its span of existence, the village also attracted many other acti-vists and young people who engaged in activities connected to the village.Inaba Tsuyoshi one of the Shinjuku Renraku-kai leaders writes that

with artists coming to paint the houses and photographers setting upphoto exhibitions, the cardboard village had the air of a liberatedzone.16 The art student Take Junichiro, one of the artists who tookthe initiative to the art movement, explains that he certainly sawutopia there, but his reason for exhilaration was different fromInabas. What attracted him was the idea of outcasts living in a societyof their own, in an unofficial economy and without the strictures andprotections of the affluent mainstream world.17 He points out that thecardboard villagers were living in a

. . .millennial economy, gathering up the leftovers and refuse of the Tokyometropolitan economy just like people did in primitive ages when people

lived by picking up pampas grass and branches to build their homes.18

At the same time, both Inaba and Take stress the cruelty and brutality oflife in the village. It was a space experienced in strikingly ambivalentterms. As Inaba says, it was a place where extremes met wherepeople both helped each other and fought one another. Take stressesthat cruel things happened in the village there were violent quarrels,stealing, even killings, and people dying.19 He constantly feared beingrobbed while he was painting. At the same time, he felt that the villagewas a miracle, a place for mutual help, where vulnerable people, whowere different yet dependent on each other, were helping each other.20

THE PAINTINGS

Fresh from having dropped out of art school, Take started to paint thecardboard houses in 1995 together with his friend Yoshizaki Takewo.

Joined by Yamane and a few others (the number fluctuated over time),they painted more than a hundred houses until the end of the village in1998. It all began when he and Yoshizaki went to Shinjuku to do guerrillapainting without any thought of painting the cardboard houses. Havingfailed to find a suitable spot, Take describes how they felt overwhelmedby the sheer enormity of the city and let themselves drift along until

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15. For insider reports of thesemobilizations, see Kasai,op cit, and Takeshi Mitsu,Piriodo kara no shuppatsu(Starting Over from aPeriod), Inpakutoshuppankai, Tokyo, 1995,pp 206235, 287291.

16. Tsuyoshi Inaba, Inaba-sanni kiku (Asking MrInaba), 2005, http://kenkyukai.cardboard-house-painting.jp/?eid=211275, accessed 15

January 2010

17. JunichiroTake, Shinjukudanboru kaiga kenkyu kai(The Shinjuku CardboardPainting ResearchGroup), inShinjukudanboru kaiga kenkyu,Swamp, Kamio, Japan,2005, p 13

18. Ibid, Rojogaka TakeJunichironi kiku(Asking Street PainterTake Junichiro),interview by OguraMushitaro,Gendai Shiso,vol 25, no 5, 1997, p 60

19. Take, Shinjuku danboru,op cit, pp 11ff; Inaba,op cit

20. JunichiroTake, interviewwith the author, Tokyo, 2August 2011


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they ended up in the stations West Exit underground passage. Realizingthat the cardboard houses would make a fine painting surface, theyknocked on one of the doors and got permission to paint from the sur-prised villager.21 From that day on, they commuted to the undergroundpassages, painting every house where they were granted permission.The motifs ranged from the surrealistically dream-like or weirdly gro-

tesque and comical to macabre pastiches of Buddhist hell paintings,with stylistic influences from manga and graffiti. Some pictures werehighly expressionistic, others reminiscent ofukiyoe (ie pictures of thefloating world, the woodblock prints of the Edo period depicting theeveryday world of entertainers and other common people). They hadthree rules: (1) asking for permission from the inhabitant, (2) not paintingaccording to requests from the inhabitant, (3) and not painting prettyart.22 During the first period, until the first big eviction in January1996, they often worked together on the paintings.

The first setback for the artists came in 1996 when the Tokyo Metro-politan Government spent forty million yen on setting up contemporaryart sculptures after the eviction to prevent the cardboard houses from

being rebuilt. Take was arrested when he modified the sculptures intofunny dolls.23 Around the same time, Yamane quit painting but othersjoined the group instead. From now on, the artists started to work indivi-dually rather than together. The painting went on as long the village itselfexisted, until the fire in 1998. All paintings were destroyed in the wake ofthe fire. Damaged by water, they were discarded by the authorities alongwith the remains of the cardboard houses.

SHAMANIC SPACE

Take states that he started painting without any particular political motive.He claimed to feel a power in the passages that compelled him to paint.What drove him was the air or scent of that place, which he tried tomake apparent through his art and which he associated with the spirits(seirei) of dead people.24 Asked by a visitor to the cardboard village howhe did his painting, he is said to have replied There are spirits here, andwhile drawing, he often said: I feel so sad.25 To create was for him tobe receptive to the spirits of the many homeless people who had diedthere in infightings, or out of weakness or cold. This is a place wherepeople really often die. When you walk by you often see people lyingthere and you dont know if theyre alive or not.26 Instead of actively inter-vening with any preconceived design or message, he wanted to turn himself

into a mere passageway or channel.27

Rather than feeling that I had created the paintings with my own imagin-ation and talent, I felt as if I had been made to paint by a mysteriousforce. . . as if I had been a mere medium. . . I called it spirits. It wasnothing that could be seen, only felt.28

Over the first days, he tells me during an interview, he did not have thelatitude to think of his experience in terms of spirits. But the feelinggrew stronger the more he painted. Although he used the word spirit,he still does not know what it was. The underground passages were theonly place where he had ever felt like that, and he has never felt it any-

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21. Ibid

22. Yasuhiro Yamane,Shinjuku rearisumu(Shinjuku Realism), inShinjuku danbo

ru kaiga

kenkyu, op cit, pp 17f

23. Mori, op cit, p 25; Take,Rojo gaka, op cit, p 58

24. Take, Rojogaka, op cit,p 61C

25. EiichiroFukase, Danboruni egaku yume (DreamsPainted on Cardboard), inShinjuku danboru kaigakenkyu, op cit, p 54, p 67

26. Take, Rojogaka, op cit,p 60

27. Take Junichironi kiku(Asking Take Junichiro),interview by OguraMushitaro, in Shinjukudanboru kaiga kenkyu, opcit, p 7. Also see SatoshiNakamura,Danboruhausu de miru yume(Dreams Dreamt in aCardboard House),Soshisha, Tokyo, 1998,p 255.

28. Take, ShinjukuUnderground, op cit


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where else since. In any case, whenever I went to the cardboard village, Iwould always get inspiration.29

Takes reliance on the unconscious makes him define the role of theartist as a shaman rather than a political activist. Although spiritshave been driven away everywhere in society, ironically a shamanicspace had reappeared here, he says, at the very foot of the TokyoMetropolitan Government.30 To Take, this space was an embodimentof the unconscious and of the traumas of the modern city, repressedand denied in the attempts to create a clean, fashionable city. Thesurface is prettified with shops and boutiques, but the whirling resent-ment of the dead spirits down here in the underground will surely neverbe extinguished.31

EYES AND MONSTERS

The artworks painted on the cardboard houses are characterized by astriking profusion of eyes and faces. The most famous of these eyes wasprobably Shinjukus Left Eye (Shinjuku no hidarime), which waspainted on a particularly big cardboard house used as a storehouse onthe Information Square. This is a work of expressive colours and richdetail. Almost the entire painting is occupied by a single colossal eye,

Take Junichiro, Yoshizaki Takewo, Yamane Yasuhiro, Shinjukus Left Eye, 1996, painting on cardboard house, Infor-mation Square, Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, photo: Sakokawa Naoko. All images in this article are taken fromPaintings on

the Cardboard Houses at Shinjuku Underground in Tokyo, Japan 19951998, Swamp Publication, Tokyo, 2005.

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29. Take, interview with theauthor, op cit

30. Take, Rojogaka, op cit,p 60



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the contours of which resemble flames that suggest an explosion. In theiris is a city, with people, buildings, and shapes resembling planets orperhaps cells. Inside the pupil is a smaller eye, also surrounded byflames, and inside the second eye is a third, still smaller eye. Despite theexplosive colours the overall impression is one of serenity. The eye inthe centre, towards which the onlookers gaze is pulled as if by a gravita-

tional force, gives the impression of silently watching the onlooker andperhaps the entire cosmos. Take, Yoshizaki and Yamane had begunwork on it early in 1996 and painted from night until morning, allthree at the same time, brushes in hand. Take describes their collabor-ation as akin to a jam session. I had played in a band and wanted todraw paintings in the same way.32 He also describes it as a battle ofthree where one would paint and somebody else would paint over it, aprocess that was repeated over and over. The result was a work of power-ful expressionism, a symbol-laden and dreamlike mandala. It was village,Shinjuku and Tokyo at the same time, all hanging together and creatingan image of cosmos, as Yamane writes.33 After finishing the painting, hewrote in his notebook:

This painting,Shinjukus left eyeIs it the manifestation of a new religion?I am a religious painter.This religion has no holy scriptures.No need of theoretical exegesis.It calls out to heart and soulShinjukus left eyeis a religion that lets me be myself.34

The idea of painting an eye had originally been Yamanes. It had beenprompted by Shinjukus Eye, a gigantic glass eye created by Miyashita

Yoshiko in 1969, which was located on a nearby wall close to theentrance of one of the passages leading away from the square. Since ithad struck him as unbalanced with just one eye, he had wanted topaint another to match it. Referring to the fact that it formed a pairwith Shinjukus Eye, Take evokes the image of an enormous two-eyedcreature or monster that had now sprung to life a newborn god ofthe underground. In the Shinjuku Underground a gigantic pair of eyeshas come into being, belonging to the Underground, a living creaturewith its fangs turned against Shit-Japan.35

Randall Collins points out that successful interaction rituals andsurely the jam session of which Take speaks must be counted as that give rise to symbols that are laden with the emotion experienced in

those moments: Whenever the group assembles and focuses its attentionaround an object that comes to embody their emotion, a new sacredobject is born.36 This appears to have been what happened during thenightly jam session. The new object was the subterranean monsterwho had come into being, and its emotion-laden symbol was the paintingShinjukus Left Eyeitself.

The idea of complementing an existing eye with the missing one is gen-erally associated with the popular Daruma-san good luck doll a roundand rather cute doll whose missing eye is filled in when a wish has cometrue. In fact, the Daruma-san doll was also an explicit motif in anotherartwork, Yoshizakis Daruma-san Totem Pole. To connect the birth of

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32. Take Junichironi kiku,op cit, p 6

33. Yamane, op cit, p 19ff

34. Ibid, p 21


36. Randall Collins,Interaction Ritual Chains,Princeton University Press,Princeton, New Jersey,2004, p 37


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the underground monster with some form of wish-fulfilment is not far-fetched. Take himself often expressed his hope that something wouldbe born from the underground passages, which he likened to a womb.

If one looks at the stations underground complex from the air, hesays, it looks like a womb, forming a pair with the Metropolitan Govern-ment Building which rises to the sky like a phallus, the symbol of the con-

scious ego that tries to synthesize the citys teeming myriads.37

He hadalways felt that the Shinjuku underground was something organic,something moist, soft and warm that possessed life. Thats why I ima-gined that a big creature or monster might be living there, although Ididnt know whether it was good or evil. Asking him what kind of crea-ture he imagined it to be, he says he has no concrete visual image, exceptthat he thought of it as still unformed and grotesque. Hirai Gen, who wasborn and raised in Shinjukus red-light district, appears to have sharedTakes vision, but to him the monster was explicitly linked to thegrowth of urban poverty. In what is surely an oblique reference to thecardboard village, he affirms the revolutionary potential of Shinjuku, agigantic wilderness run through by innumerable passageways and

tunnels. The lower stratum blown in there is certainly increasing.From inside one hears the wailing of demons, struggling to get out.38

Several other paintings depict sinister-looking babies or birth-scenes.Praying Hands (Ogamu te) depicts two gigantic hands holding amother giving birth to a baby who glares provocatively at the viewer, sig-nalling the coming birth of something that will overturn all existingvalues. In Child From a Flower (Hana kara kodomo), we see a slightlymonstrous child born from a flower: This country likes to put the lidon everything that smells bad, but under that lid a fearful multitude ofmonsters are proliferating, Take remarks.39 These children and monstersappear to symbolize a return of uncanny forces the return of something

familiar that has been repressed, or, to quote Sigmund Freud, somethingwhich ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.40

Why were eyes and faces such a prominent theme? Since the face is apowerful symbol of humanity, painting them may have been a device to

Take Junichiro, Take Yoko,Child from a Flower, probably 1996, painting on cardboard,underground passage near Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, photo: Sakokawa Naoko

628

37. Rojogaka, op cit, p 63

38. Gen Hirai,Ai to nikumi noShinjuku(Shinjuku ofLove and Hatred),Chikuma shinsho, Tokyo,2010, p 191, p 210


40. Sigmund Freud,Art andLiterature, Penguin,London, 1990, p 364


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resist the dehumanization suffered by the homeless. This would be in linewith Moris characterization of the cardboard village art as aiming atvisualization of those who were forced to be invisible in urbanspace.41 However, referring to this art simply as a project of makingthe homeless visible risks missing an important point. As Take writes,passers-by are used to looking at the homeless as if looking at a thing

without the ability of looking back at them in return. But what if theylooked back at you?

I emphasize eyes because I want to raise the self-awareness of the passers-by,who always seem to look at the homeless village. . .as nothing but a heap ofthings. . .I wanted to make them realize that they toowere being watched.42

The art was not just about providing visibility to the homeless, about pre-senting them as objects for the public gaze. It was also about showing thatthey were looking back, that the gaze was returned. The eyes and faceswere not about instrumentally achieving visibility for a neglectedproblem, and neither was it about enacting a better or happier societyhere and now. If anything, it was about showing how the repressed

people themselves had the ability to be subjects. With Jacques Ranciereone might use the word subjectivation, a term for acts where onepolemically adopts a role for which the political order lacks place, so asto lend voice to the repressed or excluded. Implying a challenge to theestablished order or distribution of parts, such subjectivation is oftengrotesque, a breach of aesthetic form.43 Another painting, Kick(Kikku), depicts a gigantic foot aimed at the passers-by. This foot, likethe many eyes and faces, expresses a similar subjectivation: Yourewrong if you think that we are passive objects.

GOODBYE TO THE GROTESQUE

Since the cardboard village struggle ended in defeat, it itself came to func-tion as a trauma on an individual level for many of its participants.Although trauma in this sense is not central to my investigation, it entersthe picture through the subsequent activities of Take, who today producesart that contrasts strikingly to the art of the cardboard village. People nolonger appear in his drawings, nor any faces or eyes. Typically it consistsof black-and-white drawings of intricate miniature worlds, with smallplanets covered with towns, houses, trees and flowers. One might callthem vortex paintings, since they produce a sensation of being sucked in

or drawn in. There is a strong sense of movement. With this feeling offlying, there is no time to let ones eyes wander at leisure.44

He explains that he developed this style after withdrawing from hisengagement in the cardboard village and in the various squat-commu-nities in which he had then been engaged, such as the Shingenchiproject in Kobe from 1998 to 2000, or the struggle to defend MiyashitaPark from 2007 to 2010. Both of the latter had triggered periods of with-drawal from activism. His repeated setbacks made him want to depict theideal world inhis art instead. Instead of making his art on the spot as hehad used to do in the underground passages or squat-communities hetoday works at home in the atelier.

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41. Mori, Culture Politics,

op cit, p 2542. Take, Shinjuku

Underground, op cit

43. Jacques Ranciere, TheAesthetic Dimension:Aesthetics, Politics,Knowledge, CriticalInquiry, vol 36, no 1, 2009,p 11

44. His recent works can befound at http://homepage.mac.com/take_junichiro/Menu9.html.


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I started to think that I should reproduce the utopia I had seen in the midstof the drawing itself, here in my room. Probably, somewhere in my mindwas the idea that since reality wont change, I should at least express mylonging in drawings.45

Takes explanation of the shift in his style is also related to changes in

society. In the suffocating climate of the 1990s, he explains, he could restsatisfied, hoping for the birth of a grotesque monster that would liberatelife. But today the grotesque is proliferating in ways that threaten life asin the case of violent right-extremist groups like Zaitokukai or the 2011nuclear accident in Fukushima.46 The grotesque may have been a life-affirming force as long as life was repressed by form, but today formitself is collapsing. That is why he prefers to give shape to his idealworld, instead of hoping for more destruction.

So what Im drawing today is exactly that, the idea of another world. Inthat sense its all the same, but in the 90s I had really seen and felt thatworld myself in the midst of reality and wished for it to continue

eternally. . .

I now believe that I have to realize that other world orrather universe in the midst of my drawings instead.47

The shift in Takes later works towards drawings that no longer celebratethe grotesque appears to reflect a more general shift within freeter acti-vism. Just as the early freeter groups advocacy of dropping out ofwork no longer seems very rebellious in todays generalized precarity,the grotesque no longer seems subversive when form has already col-lapsed. Paralleling Freuds idea that the encounter with the repressed inthe form of repeating the trauma might further a recovery by dispellingthe sense of helplessness and victimhood, Take had believed in the1990s that the grotesque would help bring about a recovery of life.

Take Junichiro, mid-1990s, underground passage near Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, photo:

Sakokawa Naoko

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45. Take, interview, op cit

46. For more on Zaitokukai,see for example TessaMorris-Suzuki, Freedomof Hate Speech: AbeShinzo and Japans PublicSphere,Asia-Pacific

Journal, vol 11, issue 8, no1, 25 February 2013.

47. Ibid


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A decade later, when so many of the social structures and cultural pat-terns associated with the Japanese model already appeared to lie inshambles, such a rebellion was no longer meaningful. What mattersnow is rather to try to preserve life from the grotesque forces that have

become predominant.In a certain sense, the other world of his recent art is indeed reminis-cent of the Shinjuku underground it is not about wonderful peoplecreating a wonderful community, but about good-for-nothings anddrunkards helping each other.

It looks like its very detailed, but if you look closely the lines are roughlydrawn. . . To me thats important. So many of us are far from brilliant orperfect. I want to show that beauty arises from all these imperfect lines,when you gather together all these imperfect people or dilapidated things.48

Here, then, a prefigurative element enters his art, but at the same time it istinged with resignation. Barred from letting utopian play contaminate

social reality, he now paints utopia as another world to which we nolonger have access. The small worlds he depicts give the impression ofbeing separated from the viewer by a huge, unbridgeable distance.

A POLITICS OF RESURRECTION?

Was the cardboard village art political, and, if so, in what sense? Unlikemany manifestations of todays homeless movement, there was hardlyany collaboration between artists and activists in the Shinjuku cardboardvillage struggle.49 Take himself explicitly denies any political commit-

Take Junichiro, Yoshizaki Takewo, Yamane Yasuhiro,Pleasant Life Relaxation Express,

1996, painting on cardboard house, underground passage near Shinjuku Station, Tokyo,

photo: Sakokawa Naoko

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48. Ibid

49. Leading activists inShinjuku Renraku-kai arereported to have dislikedthepaintings.Inaba, op cit;Kasai, op cit, p 296


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ment behind his art and takes care to identify himself as an artist ratherthan an activist. To him and his friends, the passages were more than aspace of action for movement activities. It was a space where the spiritsof the dead themselves told them to paint. Art, he writes, must havesomething in it that is incomprehensible or prerational to useSpariosus term and it becomes uninteresting if it is exhausted in a

political aim.Despite statements like these, it is not hard to find explicit political

messages in his art. Pleasant Life Relaxation Express (Jinsei kairakuyutori-go) shows a train headed for Rich Japan with passengers laughingderisively at a man who is falling off the train. A political message is alsopresent in works likeSpider Man and Woman(Kumo otoko to onna). Abig half-human spider bends over a woman who is ensnared in his web,trying to make her accept the food he offers, drooping from his mouth,while she keeps rejecting it. This painting, as Take reveals in a commen-tary, depicts the relation between the Tokyo Metropolitan Governmentand the homeless.50

How should we understand this vacillation between avowedly apoli-

tical and de facto political stances? A reasonable interpretation is torecognize that no one can be completely apolitical in the sense of beingneutral. Takes statement that he is not political is best understood asmeaning that his art does not serve any existing political ideology or pol-itical group. However, acting as a shaman trying to give voice to thetraumas of the underground can itself be seen as political. Giving voiceto the repressed is itself a political act, an act of therapeutical politics,since it protests against repression and forgetfulness and, in doing so,furnishes a language for that which has been silenced. The recovery of

Take Junichiro, Yoshizaki Takewo, Yamane Yasuhiro, Sweet Home, 1996, painting on

cardboard house, underground passage near Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, photo: Sakokawa

Naoko

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a discursive system is a precondition for other forms of politics, since aslong as people feel unable to express their concerns there can be neitherinstrumental nor prefigurative politics.

By using the term therapeutical politics, I have tried to indicate that artcan be political even where it fails to conform to the more establishedmodels of instrumental or prefigurative politics. In particular, I have

sought to relativize the common assumption that cultural activismtends to be permeated by fun and pleasure and hence also to function pre-figuratively. The cardboard village art was dominated by themes such asdeath, monsters and uncanny births. The cardboard village itself was tootinged by cruelty and grief to be a blueprint for an ideal society. If it wasutopian, as Take claimed, it was by virtue of the fact that the extremity ofdeprivation and misery was not hidden or denied, and in that senseoffered a way out of the claustrophobia of mainstream society with itsever-present desire to repress its unwanted others.

Where therapeutical activism succeeds, it helps restore agency It seemsundeniable that the cardboard art in Shinjuku helped the effort to renewsocial movement activism in Japan by catalysing the deployment of art in

political activism. In a state in which the existing jargon, style and organ-izational forms of activism were still heavily indebted to the New Left, artand culture helped furnish activism with a new language. Today, art is amuch more established part of the repertoire of the homeless movementthan at the time of the Shinjuku cardboard village. Despite their mobiliz-ation, however, the homeless have been evicted again and again fromthe Shinjuku underground, Nagai Park, Miyashita Park and manyother places. One can only hope that somewhere Takes wish for aspace where life returns will be fulfilled, a space where the spirits, thehomeless, or those suffering under the stifling strictures of mainstreamculture will be able to return the gaze again.

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CASSEGARD Activism Beyond the Pleasure Principle

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