Pastoral Sacrifice of the Dead
Yukio Mishima, Shuji Terayama, Nagisa Oshima, Keisuke Araki... Imagine traveling back in Time to Tokyo in the '70s and making friends with these people?
Imagine walking through the most avant-garde arts theater of the time, watching the heaviest performances all day long: dark dancing steps, a girl who bites the head of a live chicken, a "human flesh pump" that can spit buttons out of her belly... And what does it feel like?
This is all that Ian Bruma experienced in Japan as a young man. "The Japanese are like an anxious housewife who is preparing to receive guests, hiding the ordinary objects used in their daily lives in the cupboard, packing up the comfortable clothes they wear every day, hoping that the guests will appreciate the flawless idealized life in their own home, as far as the eye can see, spotless." With a pair of Westerners' blue eyes, he glimpsed Japan's last avant-garde years.
You can't travel back to Tokyo, you can at least have a "dream". Follow Ian Bruma and let's explore the Japanese "wardrobe".
Erotic, grotesque and meaningless
By Ian Bruma, translated by He Yujia
Excerpt from Tokyo Dreams: Japan's Last Avant-Garde Era
01 Romantic
Play the flute for freedom in a cinematic way
It would be incomplete to discuss Japanese culture in the 70s without mentioning romantic, the official name for the genre. Romantic attracted a group of talented young directors at the time. The students of Hinata's painting department often said to me, leave Ozu and Kurosawa alone, and go to see the works of director Tatsumi Shindai, which contains a small lily, which was the most popular romantic star at that time. Sayuri used to work as a stripper in Osaka and achieved a brilliant career. Many of the films she has starred in have ingenious plots, and are technically mature and even innovative. It's not just that it's becoming increasingly difficult for talented young people to join the rapidly collapsing system of established film studios.
1975 Ian Bruma, 20, arrives in Tokyo
At the time, had become a genre of preference for the left, disillusioned by the failure of radical political action in the 60s. For decades, Japan has been a one-party state, ruling by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, under entrenched bureaucracy, and under the watchful eye of industrial conglomerates, agricultural lobbies, and U.S. security interests. After more than a decade of student protests, the radical and militant left has disintegrated into the extremely violent faction of the Japanese Red Army, with horrific acts of terror that erupt in large scenes and often with suicidal acts. In the end, the Red Army fighters either died, some went to places like Pyongyang or Beirut in Lebanon, and some of their fellow filmmakers unwittingly fell into the vortex of pornography. Political subversion is thwarted and transformed into a social rebellion of on-screen pornography. But this situation has at least spawned a veritable masterpiece.
In 1976, Nagisa Oshima released his hardcore film World of The Senses. His early work was political: reflecting discrimination against ethnic Koreans, student radicalism, crime in the form of social protests, or repression in Osaka's slums. This time, he made pornographic art films to test how far he could push free speech. World of the Senses has caused a huge response because of its notoriety. The film is based on a true story set in the 1920s and depicts Abe, a prostitute, and Yoshizo, a restaurant owner, in an affair. Eventually, after the two had crazy sex, Yoshizo died tragically. During the frenzied sex, Abe almost strangled him to death with the ties of his kimono in order to increase his lover's desire to die; as time went on, the game became less and less fun until it finally became a fatal killing move--driven by the crazy emotion, Abe cut off the lover's penis (including the testicles) and stuffed it into his handbag.
The World of The Senses
Before that, no filmmaker had ever made anything like this. "Sensory World" is both hardcore and gentle, and it is a film way to drum and whistle for sexual freedom, especially women's sexual freedom. The actress who plays the prostitute Abe is Hideko Matsuda, who worked as an actress in Shuji Terayama's Patio Stack Theater Troupe; she is not an object to be manipulated by men, but an equal partner in a pornographic obsession (although this did not prevent Matsuda herself from falling to the bottom of her career and even carrying a name, and the actor fujiryu who played her role became a star). After the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, I went to meet Shuji Terayama at the headquarters of the Courtyard Stack. The troupe is headquartered in Shibuya, a lively area west of Tokyo. Terayama lived in a small apartment there, supposedly with his mother—the theatrical wizard had a somewhat mysterious sexual orientation; he had a previous conviction and was reprimanded by local police for peeping into other people's bedrooms.
Terayama watched the Big Island movie in Cannes, and when I asked him, he pursed his lips. It's not very funny, he said, most romantic is much better. "I suspect it was jealousy that influenced his usually wise judgment. Oshima's film caused a notorious trial of obscenity in Japan— not against the film itself, because it could not be released in its original form in the country; the trial was against a film script published with stills. Oshima made a brilliant defense: "What's wrong with obscenity?" "He was eventually found not guilty.
02 What's in the closet of a Japanese person?
The Wild 1970s are sometimes referred to as the "Showa Genroku" era, a name derived from the Genroku era when hedonism prevailed in the late 17th century. ("Showa" is the era name of Emperor Hirohito, who reigned for most of the 20th century.) Araki wore small round glasses, a dirty old man's beard, and a pair of small eyes belonging to voyeurs, and his eyes were shining—a face that had become one of the hallmarks of "Showa Motoroku". He is the toulouse-Lautrec of contemporary eroticism, grotesqueness and meaninglessness.
Photographers are actually doing the work of Japanese pre-modern printmakers, namely ukiyo-e that documents fashion, drama, sex, and urban life. By the 1970s, one element of the culture of the 1960s was the obsession with the Japanese population. "Mud stink" means "smell of dirt", that is, the desire for depravity or evil. The filthy, the obscene, the debauched, the bloody, the stinking, all seeped into all the realms of art, not only photography, but also theater, film, literature, comics, and even graphic art. In my opinion, this is a reaction to the aesthetics of the elite. Since the mid-19th century, elite aesthetics have been either rigid and conservative traditionalism or a neurotic "Japanese version" of European higher culture.
Yukio Mishima, who instigated the self-defense forces to stage a coup d'état during the Mishima Incident
Turks Weatherby's lover Yatoho published a collection of photographs of fanatical young men at various raucous Shinto festivals. Mishima wrote in the book's introduction that Japan at the end of the 19th century was already ashamed of its indigenous pop culture, fearing that Westerners would be shocked by its vulgarity. Japan, he wrote, "strives to completely negate her past, or at least hide from the old ways in which Westerners cannot see them; these old ways may resist all efforts to eliminate them."
The Japanese are like an anxious housewife who is preparing to receive guests, hiding the ordinary objects used in daily life in the cupboard and packing up the comfortable clothes they wear every day, hoping that the guests will appreciate the flawless idealized life in their own home, as far as the eye can see, spotless." This trend of the 60s continued into the 70s, but in the opposite direction. Although many generations of Japanese during and early postwar periods had very conflicted feelings toward Westerners, the dominant idea was not to eradicate Western influence. That's impossible, even absurd. But in the course of decades of anxious Westernization, Japanese culture has been wrapped in a thick shell of elegance, and artists such as Shuji Terayama, Karashima Nagisa, Noriko Araki, and Yukio Mishima all want to strip Japanese culture from it.
My own desire for depravity or evil has little to do with the Japanese attitude toward the West and is largely influenced by my own good origins. I was completely immersed in the Japanese atmosphere, in part because I wanted to escape the gentry of the middle class, even if the escape was superficial, voyeuristic, and immediate. I photographed the remote streets of Shinjuku, drawing on the style of Moriyama Avenue, which was mostly inspired by the American photographer William Klein. I would also wander around the still backward and vulgar areas on both sides of the Sumida River, which belonged to the low-lying area in the east, the so-called "Lower Town", as opposed to the more prosperous "Yamate" in the hills to the west.
I like to hang out some of the places in Tokyo and take photos. First from Minami Chiba, where there is a small cemetery under the railroad tracks, the ruins of an ancient execution ground of the Edo period; then to the valley, where slums are made every morning, where contract foremen come every morning to find homeless people sleeping in the open to do some low-paying construction work; then to Yoshihara, which was once an elegant red light district with high-class brothels and tea houses, and then reduced to a crowded and chaotic place, full of neon-lit massage parlors; and finally to Sensoji Temple, where the statue of Kannon of Great Mercy and Compassion is enshrined.
An actor in the Minami Senju Theater
This literary guide on the wandering road is one of my beloved Japanese writers named Nagai Hefeng, who died in 1959. Tokyo is his subject, full of elegy-like sorrow. The vulgarity of the current generations made him resentful. Lotus Wind (who people always call him by this alias) loves only in remembrance, only praises things that have disappeared. He was only deeply moved by the Westernized city of the Meiji period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries after the massive destruction of the 1923 earthquake, after which the noisy modern Tokyo was born, and the city was only overjoyed after it was destroyed by B-29 bombers in 1945. Hefeng is accustomed to mourning the old and nostalgia for the past: in a roughly modernized post-war neighborhood, a brick wall belonging to a brothel in the 30s can move him to tears.
03 The desire for depravity and evil
A glimpse into the forbidden world
Shortly after the "Green Middle" trip, I met a group of artists with even lower social status. Tsuda and I set off on a cold November night, during the "Unitary City" period. Held near temples and shrines for 12 days, people pray for prosperity in the coming year, buy bamboo rakes (decorated with rice and flowers) for warding off evil spirits, and eat a taro that is said to improve fertility. The "Human Flesh Pump" is where he sets up his touring tent with brown and green stripes and offers hunting performances for everyone, such as "Snake Girl", whose neck seems to extend all the way to the top of the tent, and a girl who bites the head of a live chicken, and a werewolf with long hair.
The girl who bites off the head of a live chicken
The place where they set up the tour tent was exactly where Tang Shilang's troupe often set up the red tent, just at the entrance of the Garden Shrine. The garden shrine is dedicated to the god Inari, the hermaphrodite fox god who oversees prosperity and worldly success. People would stretch their necks and watch the screaming young woman clutching a chicken with her teeth, her smooth face covered with chicken blood and feathers, illuminated by torches; the snake woman's neck grew longer and longer, accompanied by strange ghost cries; the werewolves barking wildly at the crowd, and the crowd retreating in fear. The main play belongs to the troupe leader "Human Flesh Pump" himself. He is a 40-year-old male albinism patient in dark sweater with the Japanese kana for "human flesh pump" written on it. He would swallow a lot of shiny black and white buttons, and after the audience shouted "white" or "black", the "human flesh pump" would blink those pale eyes and spit out a button of the corresponding color. His specialty is "pumping goldfish". He would swallow a live orange goldfish first, then a yellow one, and shake his head a few times, like the cormorants I saw on a river in western Japan. He let the goldfish slide smoothly through the esophagus.
"Orange!" The crowd shouted. He was unhurried, highly concentrated, and then the orange goldfish would squirt out of his mouth. These may be all carving tricks. When I went backstage and noticed that the lower body of the Snake Girl was made of bamboo and cardboard, I understood the trick of lengthening the neck; but I still didn't understand how the "human flesh pump" vomited different colored objects according to the audience's demands. But there are some qualities of this tour that fascinate me, that unpolished feel, that raw and rough appeal. I think that's the performance that's simplified to the most basic elements.
Human flesh pump
I understood that this had a lot to do with my middle-class romance and my "desire for depravity and evil." It's just a peek into a strange world, a voyeur's glimpse of a forbidden world, but I just can't see enough. So I followed "The Human Pump" and his family ("Snake Girl" was his wife, the girl who bit the chicken head was their adopted daughter, and "The Werewolf" was supposed to be his brother-in-law) on tour, taking pictures backstage and congratulating myself on my intersection with the bottom of the theater world, and they were absolutely "other" to me—although it was undoubtedly as vague as Donald Richie's dream of "innocence", but I didn't realize it at the time. Before they left Tokyo for a tour of other shrines in outer prefectures, the "Human Flesh Pump" handed me his business card. "Come to us when you have time." He said. The address is a small town, not far from Gifu, where the Gu family is located.
Excerpt/Typography: Nine Tubes
【Recommended Books】
👇 Japan's last avant-garde era