Art, Riot, Terror: The 60s Tokyo Avant-Garde: Mishima, Hijikata, Oshima(2013)

Stephen Barber

This book explores the unique and volatile art scene of 1960s Tokyo, and its connections to the culture of violent rioting and street-protest which developed across that decade, in intimate contact with avant-garde art, photography, performance and film. Through studies of seminal figures of that culture “ the choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata and the novelist Yukio Mishima “ together with a close analysis of film-culture experimentation embodied in the works of Nagisa Oshima, Toshio Matsumoto and Donald Richie, the book maps Tokyo's insurgent 1960s terrain. In the subterraneas of Tokyo's avant-garde, a culture of out-of-control aberrance and sexual obsession underpinned the city's surface locations, especially that decade's emblematic site of Shinjuku. The book also interrogates the preoccupations with violence and erasure “ manifested notably in the form of opposition to Japan's subservient role in servicing the USA's war in Vietnam “ one strand of which led to Japan's implosive terrorist cells of the early 1970s, as documented in Koji Wakamatsu's recent film "United Red Army". This book, charting the pivotal elements of 60s Tokyo avant-garde, illuminates that unprecedented era in Japan, as well as forming the key to understanding the resurgent experimental cultures of contemporary Tokyo.