Metanarrative, landscape, and photography: Sakata Haruto’s Sanrizuka

When does a landscape die? What does a “dead” landscape look like? And can we see death in a seemingly benign, even beautiful, landscape? Posing these provocative questions, the photographer Sakata Haruto’s Sanrizuka series was first shown in August 2023 in an exhibition, Landscape of death (Eshi suru fūkei), at the artist-run space Totem Pole Photo Gallery. It deals with the contemporary landscape of a place synonymous with the fiercely opposed construction of Narita Airport.

In the 1960s, the decision was taken to build a new international airport in a part of Chiba that was largely occupied by small agricultural villages, farmland, and a horse ranch owned by the Imperial Household Agency. The resulting land seizures were violently resisted by locals, supported by the New Left factions (then at the height of their influence), who framed the struggle not as NIMBYism but as part of the fight against the nation-state at a time when Okinawa remained occupied by the United States military and was central to the conflicts in Southeast Asia, and likewise other bases and facilities in Japan were vital cogs in the war machine. Completion of the airport was delayed by several years and, even after Narita did finally open, it did so at a greatly reduced scale than originally planned. The protests involved huge numbers in virtual pitched battles with the authorities at several key junctures (including as late as the 1980s) as well as longer-term campaigns that aimed to disrupt construction through direct action, including bombs. Four police officers died in clashes and two workers were killed in an arson attack (and a family member in an attack on the home of an aviation manufacturer), while at least two activists died. Several others died by suicide. The opposition movement eventually split acrimoniously. Today, a small yet fervent group continues to fight further expansion of the airport through rallies and lawsuits.

The title of Sakata’s exhibition derives from a 1970 book by the Nora-sha Collective and Kitai Kazuo, the photographer perhaps best known for images of Sanrizuka. Sakata is not directly referencing The Extinction of Landscape, the seminal collection of essays on landscape theory published by the film critic Matsuda Masao in 1971, but his project is clearly resonant with landscape theory.

Comprising a diverse set of photomedia and film practices as well as attendant discursive interventions in print media particularly at the end of the 1960s through the early 1970s, landscape theory sought to confront Japanese modernity, capitalism, power, and the discourse of the landscape and gaze. Scholars have identified numerous analogues in concurrent and subsequent practices worldwide, and artists continue to reference landscape theory in their work today, perhaps most notably Éric Baudelaire.

Sanrizuka was already the subject of a landscape theory practice in the early 1970s, the fifteen-minute 8 mm animation The Extinction of Landscape (1971) by Aihara Nobuhiro, which featured both scenes of construction of the airport and the protests as well as time-lapse photography of flora in the area. The Sanrizuka struggle was also the inspiration for several documentaries by Ogawa Shinsuke’s collective that are classics of militant cinema and practice-based nonfiction filmmaking, with the crew embedded among the farmers and wearing their bias so plainly that they suffered arrest for it.

Sakata’s work, though, stands in contrast with all this. He rejects the political subjectivity of Ogawa et al and the inherently political inflection of landscape theory in favour of a representation of landscape and the photographic gaze as neutral (or at least, what he avows to be neutral).

He professes no opposition to expansion of the airport in principle, albeit remains skeptical of the necessity for development given the climate crisis times in which we live. In this respect, Sakata does not approach Sanrizuka with baggage or bias: he became aware of the historical struggle against the airport only two years before he began exhibiting the series. As he writes in his first artist statement: “In search of distinctive satoyama landscapes, I set out to photograph the disappearing rural villages, but it was too late; depopulation had taken its toll. Village communities had collapsed and farmland lay in ruins. From what I could gather, most of the villagers seem to be in favor of the airport expansion. I’m not against the expansion, but in an era where environmental protection is paramount, it’s worth considering whether further intrusion into nature to construct massive man-made structures is justified. These landscapes, I believe, are a microcosm of our contemporary world, part of a much larger situation.”

In his statement for the second exhibition, he expands on this attitude. “I decided to adopt a neutral stance, focusing on observing the landscapes where the struggle took place. While the movement is still ongoing, I wanted to view it as a ‘struggle of the past’ from an objective perspective. Although Shinsuke Ogawa reportedly said that one should shoot from the farmers’ viewpoint and that neutrality is deceptive, I chose to pursue the middle path as an ideal, rather than the methodology of a ‘participatory film’.”

In concrete terms, this methodology comprises photography, field recording and video. Putting aside the latter two for the sake of expedience, can photography ever be truly neutral? Is there not always a stance, a bias, to some degree? Can we banish subjectivity entirely from the frame? Does orientation towards neutrality denote what Sontag called a flight from interpretation in its entirety? More importantly, perhaps especially for a subject like Sanrizuka, is this the right approach? Sans politics, what is left? A dry ethnographic record of the community? Merely the picturesque? Serenity? The rural idyll?

The second exhibition in the series, which was the first that I saw in person, seems to shift the focus to postmodernity. History of Metanarrative ran in December, again at Totem Pole Photo Gallery (of which Sakata is a member). The metanarrative, of course, is something that was supposed to end with postmodernist thought, giving way to localised and smaller narratives. Sanrizuka both exemplifies and contradicts this: it was a highly localised narrative that took on an intense, almost religious fervour over the defence of a place, and yet it was consistently framed in terms of grand narratives (the struggles against imperialism, against the nation-state, against capitalism, inter alia).

Postmodernity’s skepticism towards metanarratives should not conflated with disillusionment and apathy, the latter frequently cited as a characteristic of the generations in Japan that came of age in and since the Heisei period. It has been convenient framing: with the economy in the doldrums, there was far less optimism going around, and this seemed to dovetail with the general decline in voter turnout, the birth rate decline, the increasing numbers of shut-ins and dropouts, the atomization of mass culture with the arrival of the internet, and so on. Born in 2000, Sakata is a dyed-in-the-wool member of this cohort, who encounter no politics on their university campuses (occasional flare-ups like SEALDs in the mid-2010s notwithstanding) and enter an uncertain job market upon graduation. Should we read Sakata’s rejection of a political stance for his practice in line with a postmodern or post-Shōwa paradigm?

“What does it mean to see the grand narratives of the past through landscapes?” he asks in the artist statement. “The students who fervently believed in revolution. The farmers who dreamed of a new liberated zone, a utopia, when the airport construction was halted. The people who hoped for the growth of the nation thanks to the airport. As grand narratives are becoming prominent again, could we perhaps derive new ideas by observing the structures of past ideological conflicts through these landscapes?”

If you are professing neutrality, any answer to that first question becomes a moot point because you, the practitioner, are nominally not seeing the metanarratives of the past in the landscape, or are seeking to avoid framing them that way for the viewer. And yet Sakata does seem aware of the bigger societal shifts — Black Lives Matter, MeToo, climate activism, to name a few — and that these affect any attempt to look again at historical movements, even if just by osmosis.

The exhibition featured a select number of images in large-format prints pinned to the walls. These showed signs of life and habitation, but no signs of activity (which is a crucial distinction to make). Instead, the viewer beheld fields and forests, roads and infrastructure. The images felt flat, bereft of human figures to put them in scale, so to speak. A parking lot has highway coaches, but no passengers. A playground sits eerily empty (a sign as much of depopulation and birth rate decline as the oppressive development of the airport). What seems to be a church is an incongruous sight in a Japanese pastoral scene, but makes sense to anyone who knows about the late Tomura Issaku, the original leader of the protest movement. The only apparent sign of life is a train passing over raised tracks above a field, though this felt impersonal and almost vertically imposed upon the landscape. (It is presumably the Shibayama Line, a rarely used line built as compensation for the separation of communications in the area, cleft in two by the airport.) In this way, the viewer searched for clues, and found little concrete. The well-versed viewer would recognise more, but was still frustrated by the vacant, uncaptioned images.

The absence of human life complicates the ethnographic, documentarian nature of the series, and also, conversely, makes the images more like landscapes (in defiance of the death of landscape referenced in the exhibition titles). Perhaps, then, we should regard Sakata’s nonhuman or human-less mode of representation as an attempt to decenter the ethnographic record of a place and foreground only the locations themselves, sans inhabitants. Sakamoto Hirofumi draws a parallel between Aihara Nobuhiro’s focus on flora and abandoned houses and Nakahira Takuma’s rejection of a human-centric view of the world in favour of an “illustrated botanical dictionary” in 1973. Of relevance here may be film scholar Laura Rascaroli’s notion of the ethnolandscape: “landscape as the product of a specific gaze, stemming from a number of traditions and discourses that combine art, science, and popular entertainment, spectacle, power, and ideology.” In other words, you can take the people out of the landscape, but you can’t separate the landscape from the traces of the people who were there, whose presence and gazes are what made the landscape in the first place. (Cf. Simmel and his interpretation of landscape as a creative achievement, seen and made anew by the artist, while the general viewer relates to a landscape, both in nature and in art, through the “wholeness of the being of nature” that draws us in.)

You may note that I am pointedly avoiding a certain conceptual buzzword — hauntology — despite the obvious temptation to apply it here, since to do so would open up a whole new can of epistemological worms. The venue was, however, if not haunted then at least attended by traces of the past. A pile of memoirs and other books stood by the doorway to the gallery. A table in the middle of the space likewise hosted a pool of primary sources (media coverage, etc., photojournalism of 1970s land resistance). The magazines were pointedly open to these pages, deliberately contrasting with the plain, contemporary images on the surrounding walls. This, whether Sakata wanted it or not, generated a before-and-after effect (and indeed, the affect of before-and-after). And the conscious choice to bring research materials, especially primary materials written by first-hand observers and participants, was an attempt to lend not only context but also authenticity and authority to the present-day images. (This marked a development from the first exhibition, which limited the resources available in the middle of the room to the Nora-sha Collective and Kitai Kazuo book and another publication, and a map with the locations of each photograph.) The photographs on the walls and the resources on the table became reciprocally indexical: that is, they bestowed contexts on each other; this became that, that was once like this. Neutrality went out the window, whatever the artist statement said.

Held at Totem Pole Photo Gallery in January and February this year, the third exhibition in the series was the second to bear the (slightly rejigged in English) title of Death of Landscape, came with the subtitle Landscape Variations.

Due to an infection, I was masked during my visit, which felt oddly appropriate, as if I were an activist from past arriving at a rally incognito to hide my identity from police photographers. The truth was far more prosaic, of course, yet the work on display likewise played with mundanity and spectacle, and the blurry world in between.

The “non-politics” of the series was more problematized in this iteration, which tackled less the past than the present and future of Sanrizuka, facing further encroachment, if not outright extinction, by the proposed expansion of the airport. From the artist statement: “This area is famous for its vehement protests against the airport’s construction, inspiring a myriad of movies, photo books, plays and artworks, thus becoming a sort of holy ground for protest art. Back then, recording and photographing by protesters was commonplace. However, rather than creating directly within this context, I opted to deliberately leave out human subjects in my photography. By coldly observing and methodically documenting the landscape, I sought to maintain a neutral stance, moving beyond superficial humanism.”

This begs the riposte, is neutrality not the more superficial form of humanism? Moreover, it became increasingly clear that the claimed neutrality of the stance and aesthetic actually conjures affect. The viewer asks what is not present and why. The viewer questions the origin and impact of roads. They worry about the crops. Without the context of Sanrizuka, it would be another matter entirely, but the “cold” observational style cannot help but appear deliberate — and, moreover, suggestive. The images become, in short, sympathetic to Sanrizuka because they are presented to us within a specific set of circumstances. And considering the careful efforts Sakata goes to with his artist statements (which are bilingual, to boot) and other reference materials provided in the venue, he is complicit in this act of context-layering of the images in advance.

The gesture towards neutrality and the landscape is not a flight from interpretation, but an expression of a certain interpretation in its own right: a decision to interpret Sanrizuka without explicit triggers of punctum, as a stripped-down aesthetic, and to banish the studium outside the frame to accompanying reference materials and artist statements in the venue. And yet this bare aesthetic provokes an emotional response by its very unembellished and unspectacular nature: the viewer fills in the blanks, sees the context behind the present-day landscape.

The third exhibition was notably more comprehensive, featuring a larger number of prints (in pinned sheets of twenty small images, in deliberately random layouts). These showed a greater range of landscapes, from fields to farms, fences, roads, cemetery, planes and forest shrines. There was also more infrastructure and presumed activity. While no human figures were shown overtly, neither were the images bereft of life. Indeed, these landscapes were curiously more populated than before: diggers seem only temporarily abandoned, a bonfire burns, a kei truck is parked with a portaloo on the bed, etc. A car driving along a country road must surely contain a driver. Squint and you could actually see a farmer in a plough vehicle in a paddy. The people were camouflaged, not absent.

The scenery of satoyama — a common, even hackneyed Japanese cultural trope of agriculture and countryside in harmony — is disrupted by the airport, for sure, but there are other signs of disquiet too. A small road is sandwiched between a pair of fences endlessly stretching out; an enclave enclosed by the airport. There was more emphasis on the planes in the sky overhead, which felt ominous despite the azure (like with the previous exhibition, all shots were taken on bright days and even the dull concrete and asphalt looked pellucid). And yet, this was not a simplistic image of man versus nature, of Arcadia disturbed, since the farms themselves use modern tractors. The concrete and asphalt has encroached into the pastoral much more pervasively than just the obvious violence of the airport itself. And is nature winning? Do we not see signs of rewilding? A watchtower in one image is overgrown with foliage and the surrounding fences rusting, no longer used with the decline of the protest movements. Nature’s return to the fore is concomitant with the ebbing of radical politics.

This third iteration of the series included a film projection of an annual sumo tournament at a shrine that faces destruction with the airport expansion (this is the only explicit sign of human activity in the series and it seems significant that the medium chosen for it is moving image, not still photography). Almost everything shown in the gallery, we realise, will disappear. This imbued the exhibition with a more obviously elegiac tone than previous entries. In part, this was due to the footage of the sumo bouts. The implied loss made the footage wistful and raw.

Ultimately, the viewer left with the impression not so much of a “death” of landscape; rather, of an altered and, perhaps begrudgingly, tolerating landscape.

Sakata’s series will next be shown at Bar Jūgatsu in Golden Gai, from March 16 to March 30. The bar is named after the owner’s birth month, but apparently many assume the moniker is a nod to the Bolshevik revolution. This ambiguity perhaps makes it a particularly apt venue for the series.

WILLIAM ANDREWS

All images from Sakata Haruto’s Death of landscape (2023).

News from K: A forgotten radical’s letters and landscapes

We seem to have entered a new phase in historical memory vis-à-vis the New Left in Japan in which the focus is gradually moving away from an emphasis on the spectacular showdowns between the state and protesters (usually shown through archival footage) or on the grisly internal violence (usually shown through re-enactments) to pinpoint the aftermath, the afterlives. The default tone when doing so is typically elegiac, with ageing talking heads recounting what happened during the struggle, and then the subsequent struggle to find meaning after it was supposedly done and dusted. This trend is perhaps epitomized by recent feature-length documentaries about the Sanrizuka movement, the Haneda Airport clash of 1967, and the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front.

Much harder to deal with, though, are the people who fell between the cracks (the dropouts and past activists who didn’t pursue regular jobs, etc.) and the forgotten radicals — those ones still languishing in prison or who got out but didn’t (either by choice or otherwise) achieve the “legacy” of their peers who published memoirs. In this respect, a kind of hierarchy exists among militants in both their activism and historical memory. Some, perhaps many, of course, wanted to be forgotten, to live a quiet life.

Koarashi Kuhachirō’s book Hōki ni wa itarazu: Shin-sayoku shinin retsuden [Failed Uprisings: Lives of the New Left Dead] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2003) deals with the fates of several lesser-known radicals, and I included various snippets of their stories in my book Dissenting Japan (2016), though there are richer narratives that deserve far more than just an aside or endnote.

One is Kamata Toshihiko, who was convicted of carrying out a bombing in Shinjuku on Christmas Eve, 1971. A warning phone call was apparently given but there was not enough time to act. The bomb, which was disguised inside a small Christmas tree left in a bag near a police substation opposite the Isetan department store, exploded, injuring seven, including a police officer.

Newspaper images of bomb in Shinjuku on Christmas Eve, 1971

The incident was one of several examples of militant activism in 1971 and part of a surge in bombs and violent incidents since 1969, most notably with the emergence of the Red Army Faction that year. Such militancy was not completely new (examples of direct action and violence predate the post-Anpo second wave of New Left factions in the late 1960s, plus lone wolf incidents had occurred throughout the decade). But it was also accompanied by rhetoric from the New Left promising a coming revolution. The mass media responded with its own intense level of coverage, and the state then reciprocated in kind with a police crackdown and harsh judicial measures.

The attack in Shinjuku was pinned on the so-called Black Helmet Group. Helmets were, of course, a vital part of the New Left factions’ “costume”, decorated with their respective name and symbol. “Black helmet” is a somewhat ambiguous label, used by the police and others to signify non-affiliated activists and cells who did not belong to the major sectarian streams, and also Kamata’s specific group, which was not linked to a major New Left faction (though had interactions on an individual level with the Red Army Faction). Kamata was on the run for eight years but was eventually caught and put on trial. He received a full-life sentence and remains behind bars.

News From K runs from 27 October to 3 December at the innovative art space Asakusa, located inside a small house in the titular district of Tokyo. It is described in the publicity materials as an “experimental video sketch in progress” by Heidrun Holzfeind, an Austrian artist whose previous work about Japan, the time is now. (2019), screened at Asakusa in 2022. Holzfeind is set to develop the project into a full-length film in the future, but the current iteration comprises a short film called The 49th Year.

Divided into eight sections set in several locations around the country (Yamaguchi, Tokyo, Sendai, Fukushima, Kosagawa), The 49th Year features landscapes that Kamata may have seen during the life he led before his apprehension in 1980, and a female narrator reading out Kamata’s letters written from behind bars in which he shares the history of his group and his observations of Japanese society, economics and capitalism.

In preparation for her project, Holzfeind was able to meet Kamata by connecting with his support group, which maintains that Kamata’s full-life sentence is unjust and was handed out because of the anti-state, anti-capitalist nature of the bombing. Such grassroots networks are a vital part of social movement’s infrastructure in Japan, providing support when arrested, during trial and then during the protracted imprisonment. They also organise events and publish newsletters, often linking the individual prisoner’s case with larger issues like the treatment of prisoners and the death penalty.

This is all off-screen, with the filmic space restricted to banal and everyday scenes, on rural dilapidation. A port. A mountain. A suburban parking lot. A farmer in a field. The detached gaze is sometimes almost voyeuristic, like the shots of a private house or restaurant now abandoned. Holzfeind is the latest film-maker to take up the mantle of landscape theory, demonstrating its plasticity and the resonance it continues to have as a filmic practice and mode of engaging with questions of state power.

Landscape theory (fūkeiron) was developed by Matsuda Masao from around 1969 across a series of seminal texts. The early and most emblematic example of the theory in practice was A.K.A. Serial Killer, an experimental film made by Matsuda, Adachi Masao and others about the spree killer Nagayama Norio, but with the “protagonist” himself absent from the shots of landscapes that he presumably witnessed before his apprehension by the authorities.

Though Kamata’s trajectory seems similarly peripatetic, The 49th Year avoids the obvious choice of landscapes like the site of the Shinjuku bomb, and also eschews the focus on transportation, mobility and speed that A.K.A. Serial Killer has, or the displays of overt state power like the Self-Defense Forces parade that memorably features in the 1969 film. Perhaps only the shots of the oppressive-looking prison in Miyagi are analogous. The almost-illiterate Nagayama was a drifter for socioeconomic reasons; the well-educated Kamata was for political ones. Though contemporaries, their contexts differ significantly, as do those of the film-makers, and the resulting films reflect this.

A.K.A. Serial Killer and The 49th Year diverge in other ways. Instead of the chilling homogeneity that Adachi, Matsuda and their collaborators detected underneath the beauty of the provincial locations, the disparate sites in Holzfeind’s film are haunted by the efficacy and astute perspicaciousness of the disembodied voice of the prisoner, who is not wholly absent from the film like Nagata is from A.K.A. Serial Killer, but rather half-present, a voice from beyond the wall of his penal location. Holzfeind’s approach effectively captures Kamata’s purgatorial existence, his state of limbo, and also manages to do something more than simply emulate the work that serves as her model.

Even in prison, Kamata is a loner. Political prisoners are the most ostracised in prison, he says. They lack a common language in which to speak to their fellow inmates. And the time he spent on remand before his conviction has affected him physically, leaving him unable to march in the yard like the others.

Despite his incredible isolation, Kamata is acutely observant about the state of Japan. “This country has been built up at the expense of the weak.” He compares the forced labour in prison that he must participate in (making boots). No matter the skill of the prisoners in what they do, the system cannot compete with mass production on the Asian continent. “Prisons are the ‘Asia’ of Japan,” he muses. Small companies are unable to expand with the stagnant economy and competition from elsewhere in Asia, so they turn to prions as a source of cheap labour. Some days, Kamata writes, are so hectic that he doesn’t even have time to think deeply. The labour logic of prisons in Japan negates the nominal reason for a sentence: that the convict develop remorse and contrition for their crime.

“As usual, my days are filled with skepticism.” With his quietly perceptive mind, he notes the “advancing tsunami” of “puff pieces” in newspapers about the post-earthquake reconstruction efforts in north-east Japan. He makes a kōan-like confession — “My dreams are square” — as if his slumber is moulded by the dimensions of his prison cell. He dreams of being caught and wakes up relieved to find himself behind bars. Kamata then links this to the square frame of the TV screen that he is permitted to watch for limited periods of time: the mass media and televisual entertainment that binds us in the jail that late-stage capitalism has become for us all.

Even the details of his past that Kamata placidly relates never feel like a sinister conspiracy. Rather, he narrates the birth of the Black Helmet Group at Kosagawa as an almost carefree time of hanging out at the coast, of climbing mountains with friends. No doubt nostalgia has coloured his memory, and yet viewed from the present within Holzfeind’s film, it makes a welcome change from the usual portrayal of clandestine militancy.

Installation view of News from K at Asakusa

In the downstairs space, Asakusa presents an array of materials related to Kamata’s case, including newspaper clippings, a map marking key sites and support group gazettes. Piles of books also line the walls on both floors: yellowing paperbacks and hardbacks, supposedly a fraction of the volumes that Kamata has read while serving his sentence. Like many other radicals (and also Nagayama), Kamata has himself published from behind bars.

Kamata Toshihiko’s book, published in 1997

A book by Kamata’s brother, Katsumi, by published in 2015. After participating in campus activism while a student at Hōsei University in 1968, he was named as a suspect in the 1971 bombing and (like his sibling) went on the run for around eight years. He was caught and served seven and a half years in prison. Upon release in 1988, he set up a demolition business. He died in December 2014 at the age of sixty-six.

Kamata Katsumi’s book, published in 2015

In this way, the two floors form a repository of materials about an invisible, forgotten radical. “The exhibition space is envisioned as a platform for reflection and debate about the prospects for social change,” as the publicity text posits.

The multimedia approach to how Holzfeind’s project is exhibited recalls Also Known As Jihadi, another work heavily influenced by landscape theory and A.K.A. Serial Killer. Éric Baudelaire’s film, which marks his third made either in collaboration with or in response to the work of Adachi Masao, incorporates judicial documents and other materials alongside landscapes as another means of narrating the trajectory of an unseen radical (in this case, a jihadi), and the state power that lurks behind it. In the process, he extends and enriches the original landscape theory filmic practice in Japan.

In an interview with the curator Anna Gritz from 2017, Baudelaire explains:

I am not interested in a dogmatic way in the so-called landscape theory. Not as a disciple. I am interested in its potential to raise questions about the social and political context of a place, and the relationship between this context and the kind of alienation that leads certain individuals toward trajectories of violence. It seemed like an interesting starting point to explore the journey undertaken by the young man who is the subject of Also Known As Jihadi. But the title is also important: it implies that the true nature of this person remains hors champs, outside of the frame. The film is about what he is “also known as.” I use the landscape theory as a foil because I accept the notion that it fails, that it is inexact, that it raises questions instead of giving answers, and this is the only position I feel capable of adopting for a film like this. The same ambiguity is true about the surveillance and judicial documents that form the narrative track of the film. They tell a story. But it’s the story told by the state surveillance and judicial apparatus in the face of a phenomenon it doesn’t really know how to process.

We too, in the Tokyo of 2023, do not know how to process a figure like Kamata, an inconvenient part of the Long Sixties’ legacy that doesn’t easily transmute into a nostalgic memoir, a sentimental movie, a visually striking photographic retrospective. The state has hidden Kamata from view and the culture has moved on.

Unsurprisingly for a work so focused on the fate of an activist, News from K is politically engaged in its own right: it is, as Asakusa says, “casting doubt on the efficacy of the current legal system”. On the final weekend of the exhibition, a used book fair will be held to sell Kamata’s books and encourage the public to contemplate what it means to read in prison, especially when you are serving a full-life sentence. This event follows on from similar ones held at Shinjuku infoshop Irregular Rhythm Asylum: another Kamata-related book fair in December last year, and a series of sessions over the course of 2023 where activists from the Letters Slash Walls Writing Collective came together at IRA to write letters to those languishing behind bars.

Out of sight, out of mind, as the saying goes. But the collective poignantly argues that “we believe that we will only know the reality of our society or what our society consists of when we listen to the voices of those in prison or pushed to the margins of our society”. And this includes people like Kamata Toshihiko, even if — or rather precisely because — the events seem like the distant past and the tactics he employed so utterly divorced from our present reality.

Heidrun Holzfeind: News From K
Asakusa
27 October to 3 December, 2023
https://www.asakusa-o.com/en/news-from-k/

WILLIAM ANDREWS

Japanese landscape theories, pre and post

As defined by Tokyo Photographic Art Museum curator Tasaka Hiroko, landscape theory (fūkeiron) was an engagement around 1970 with the ways in which “the structure of authority of the state and capital manifested as commonplace, everyday landscapes”.¹ It involved an influential coterie of film-makers, photographers and critics in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s, most notably Matsuda Masao, Adachi Masao, Ōshima Nagisa, Hara Masato (Masataka) and Nakahira Takuma. Their collaborations and endeavours produced both a significant tranche of discourse (essays and articles, photography and text dialogues, round-table discussions, full-length books) and several key films, the most renowned of which are A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969) — a kind of “anti-film” or “anti-documentary” about spree killer Nagayama Norio comprising only the landscapes that he presumably saw during his peripatetic life until his arrest, narrated by a disembodied, dispassionate voice-over (in direct contrast to the sensationalized media coverage of Nagayama’s crimes) — and the Ōshima Nagisa cult classic Secret Story of the Post–Tokyo War: The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970) (usually known in English just by its subtitle), about a man in search of the landscapes that a friend filmed before his suicide.

As noted by Hirasawa Gō, a film scholar and the foremost expert on landscape theory, this discourse emerged not only from the specific contexts of the Long Sixties, when the protest cycle was beginning to wane while Japan’s economic juggernaut continued to roar, but also from the nature travelogues and landscape writings by the likes of Shiga Shigetaka in the late nineteenth century.² These ushered in a wide range of voices and thought on landscape, in particular what constituted the “Japanese” landscape, and such nationalist messages often dominated this discourse. We continue to live with the legacy of this Meiji iteration of landscape theory, as tourism campaigns and government efforts to promote Japan through soft power means almost always reach for lazy tropes of the country’s “pristine” and “beautiful” nature (often contrasted admiringly with the “high-tech” and “high-octane” buzz of “futuristic” Tokyo).

Matsuda’s new landscape theory circa 1970 was a response to this nationalist, romantic discourse, and its interrogation of the nation-state and post-war modernity is a defining feature of its achievements. Rather than a celebration of Japan’s incredible economic development, landscape theory problematized what this was doing to the regional character of the nation, and suggested that placeness was being usurped by the hidden presence of capitalism and the state. It was a political theory as much, if not far more, than an aesthetic one, and rooted in contemporary engagement with archipelagic concepts and practices, not to mention the activist-poet Tanigawa Gan’s critique of Tokyo during the 1960s.

As Matsuda famously wrote in his essay “City as Landscape” (1970):

[T]he unique local character was extremely eroded, and we discovered instead a homogenized landscape which can only be called a copy of the central city. Whether it was the colonized city Abashiri or the indigenous town of Itayanagi or ultimately the metropolitan city of Tokyo, they all looked almost identical to our eyes.³

The metropole subsumes all and the local is helpless in the face of the creeping, colonial force that invades the quotidian. We gaze at the landscape and it gazes back at us, surveilling inhabitant and visitor alike. The landscape rendered invisible the flows of exploitation and dispossession at a time when many people were migrating from regional parts of Japan to the large cities — leading to an emptying-out of the regions that remains chronic today — and attempts to capture the truth of Nagayama’s crimes via a camera failed, since the images contained only picturesque scenery. And it was at this landscape that, figuratively speaking, Nagayama fired his gun.

But beyond the binary of city/country, centre/periphery, beyond the violence of equivalence enacted upon the landscapes, we are urged to confront the homogeneity, to fight back: to engage with the landscape is to journey physically and geographically, to seek out our true selves hidden under the saturation of images, and to forge “livable purgatories” that purify our souls.

A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969) (dirs. Adachi Masao, Iwabuchi Susumu, Nonomura Masayuki, Yamazaki Yutaka, Sasaki Mamoru, Matsuda Masao)

Landscape theory has undergone an extraordinary revival of interest this century, helped by the online availability of A.K.A. Serial Killer — a film so underground and obscure that it did not even receive a public screening until several years after completion — as well as the return of Adachi Masao to Japan after nearly three decades abroad, the efforts of Hirasawa and others to organize screenings and symposia in Japan and overseas, and a wealth of publications, not least a new, expanded edition of Matsuda’s landmark essay collection The Extinction of Landscape (1971) in 2013. Other scholars to contribute to this burgeoning field include Yuriko Furuhata, Rei Terada and Hayashi Michio.

Franz Prichard has delineated the remarkable interest in landscape theory, especially Matsuda’s work, as speaking

to the need to locate alterities within an expansion of the global imaginaries and aesthetic genealogies of the radical left. This has become an even more urgent task, in light of the ceaselessly destructive consolidations of neoliberal and state capital in the half-century since Matsuda’s essay “City as Landscape” (1970) first appeared.⁴

And so the opening of a new exhibition in Tokyo devoted entirely to landscape theory should be heralded as something of an apogee for this “landscape theory boom” ongoing since the early 2000s. On the other hand, it also marks the completion of an incredible trajectory of landscape theory that has taken it from a somewhat esoteric field, one that unfolded across obscure independent or underground films and a sprinkling of articles and texts published largely in specialist journals, to a movement that is feted at a public museum.

Aside from publications, the landscape theory revival has largely taken the form of screenings and events at festivals, universities, cinemas, film institutes and so on, raising awareness of previously obscure works and preparing the ground for reconsiderations of landscape theory’s importance. Exhibitions at art museums, though, have been relatively absent. A museum with an existing collection, not to mention several galleries for displaying different kinds of works and materials, can enable a different, perhaps more comprehensive approach that is apposite for a discourse that was transdisciplinary from the outset and engaged with preceding practices.

After the Landscape Theory runs at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum from 11 August to 5 November, 2023, curated by Tasaka Hiroko with the assistance of Hirasawa Gō. The exhibition attempts to present the landscape theory propounded by Matsuda, Adachi, Nakahira and others alongside subsequent practices. “What does it mean to engage with ‘landscape’ now, a half-century later?” as the opening text to the exhibition declares. The intent is to “reassess landscape theory, unravel various works of landscape-related expression, and explore the potential for new avenues”.⁵

The exhibition, which developed out of one about expanded cinema in Japan also curated by Tasaka (with Hirasawa and Julian Ross) in 2017, also includes an extensive screenings programme, with both works by the contemporary artists as well as of the earlier films highlighted among the exhibits (Boy, Secret Story of the Post–Tokyo War: The Man Who Left His Will on Film, A.K.A. Serial Killer, Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War), related works by Japanese film-makers like Group Posiposi, Nihon Documentarist Union and Takamine Gō, and other works by film-makers outside Japan in the 1970s like Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet that adhere to aspects of landscape theory. It is one of the most impressive selections of landscape theory film works curated in Japan, though a minor quibble is the omission of a film like Eric Baudelaire’s Also Known As Jihadi (2017), made in direct response to A.K.A. Serial Killer and dealing with a radicalized migrant instead of Nagayama Norio.

The 4K restoration of A.K.A. Serial Killer, now in the collection of the museum, is also available to watch in the penultimate room of the exhibition, screening in full several times a day. It is worth the admission fee solely to watch this pioneering work in such crystal-clear quality, accentuating the picture-postcard beauty of the purported scenes from Nagayama’s life. For viewers with full knowledge of what Nagayama did, the effect is all the more chilling, and we find our eyes searching each image for meaning or explanation, for the clues hidden in the landscape — though, as Matsuda argues, the true clues have been rendered invisible by post-war modernity.

The exhibition also includes rooms containing works by more recent, quite divergent practitioners like Imai Norio, Sasaoka Keiko and Endō Maiko. The question that arises is: Does this somewhat patchwork approach yield dividends and further our understanding of landscape theory? While this does in part, the exhibition remains unsatisfying as a whole, primarily because, I would argue, of the parameters and internal logic it erects for itself.

I should preface all these claims with a caveat or disclaimer of sorts. I am an interested party here, a kind of fellow traveller. Though not a film scholar and not specifically concentrated on landscape theory, I have researched adjacent fields for some time, not least for a critical biography of Adachi Masao, whose early work forms the main focus of my current research. All this is to say that I have higher expectations and demands than a general visitor.

The exhibition is nominally arranged in reverse chronological order, starting in the 2000s–2020s, followed by 1970–2020, then 1968–1970, and only then reaching the “origins” of landscape theory, which includes exhibits from the late 1960s and early 1970s, most of which are short film clips and archival material in the form of journals and ephemera.

The title of the exhibition establishes a strong binary of landscape theory and post–landscape theory, and therein lies the rub. The exhibition fails to set up what landscape theory was besides an opening text on the panel near the entrance. The uninitiated are left to pick up the thread from this brief summary and then roll right into the first room — a somewhat crowded display of large prints from Sasaoka Keiko’s PARK CITY series of Hiroshima scenes — presumably with their eyes already filtering the exhibits as examples of post–landscape theory practices.

Positioning such a before-and-after binary based on a very specific theory/movement so centrally invites the viewer to interpret everything as in some way evincing signs of influence by or a response to the original practices. This, as will be discussed later, is not the explicit aim of the curator, but even attempting to do something more subtle is arguably neutered by not laying the groundwork from the start: namely, showing what landscape theory was and did, and the contexts from which it emerged (the waning student movement, the high-growth period, etc.).

Given that so much of the “original” landscape theory exhibits are rather dry archival displays, in which the visitor is forced to peer at the pages of journals or books in a glass case, or make guesses about a film’s content and style from just a short excerpt or poster, beginning with that room would certainly not make for the most inspiring start. Was that the reason behind the structure? Tasaka does not give an explicit rationale for the decision to place the exhibits in (almost) reverse chronological order, nor does the exhibition grapple with the problems that its choice of title conjures up.

This is not meant to appear churlish or pedantic over the wording of a title. The exhibition also omits to establish the more foundational landscape discourse — the true “original” landscape theory — that arose in the Meiji era, though it is referenced in the organizers’ greeting message to visitors. Given the overt way in which Matsuda and others were responding to that discourse, not to mention the resources available to the museum in its collection, would it not have made sense to begin there? And perhaps rather than the simplistic “before” and “after” suggested by the exhibition title, might it not have better reflected the discourse to frame landscape theory pluralistically, not as after “the” landscape theory, but everything as layers of landscape theory or as part of a continuum of landscape theories (or even just responses to landscape)? Within this, the efforts of Matsuda and his peers would have sat comfortably, as would have many other examples of photomedia and moving image.

These questions surface not least because the later practices showcased in the exhibition do not seem to resonate sharply enough with the works and materials presented as the “origins” of landscape theory. And that is to be expected, since Tasaka notes:

At first glance, while none of these works appear to have anything to do with the intersection of politics and art found in landscape theory, and though they differ from one another by era, by method, by technique and technology, and by philosophy, what you experience through all of the works is the imagination of the relatedness, historicity, and the whole range of issues contained within the details of commonplace landscape. In this, can’t we say they are a continuation of landscape theory?⁶

In other words, the exhibition treats landscape theory primarily as hinging on what is invisible in the landscape, and proffers various examples of subsequent practices that explore commonplace scenery. But to do so surrenders the ability to reassess landscape theory, as tantalizingly promised by the stated aims of the exhibition. And indeed, Tasaka performs a kind of volte-face in her curatorial essay in the catalogue by shifting the focus to the meaning of landscape itself, and the problematic nature of that very question. “By continuing to examine the invisibility that lies behind landscape and the history and memory that might once have existed there, it may become possible to come closer to an answer.”⁷ It is her right to do this, but I don’t think this was the key question that Matsuda’s landscape theory was originally asking, nor are the other post-Matsuda works in the exhibition rigorously engaged in that query in the way her essay suggests at the end. Landscape theory was a rupture with erstwhile accepted conventions of landscape. It is not enough to examine the invisibility behind landscape; the works must seek to problematize landscape itself.

The incongruity is possibly exasperated by the fact that various works exist that were directly related to or influenced by the original set of landscape theory works, aesthetically and conceptually, many of which are referenced by Hirasawa in his catalogue essay or included in the screenings programme. This genealogy is mostly absent from the exhibition rooms. The organizers’ greeting message proposes a more general and malleable definition of landscape theory: “the radical methodology of re-examining everyday landscapes from the angle of reality — expressing, through visual arts, landscape in its relationship to culture, society, and politics”.⁸ This has the potential to make all the exhibits feel consistent regardless of their theoretical, methodological or artistic correspondence, and yet the works ultimately never quite hang together.

In the exhibits dating from after the mid-1970s, landscape becomes a medium for personal, even confessional, meditation, not least Takashi Toshiko’s Itami series that is described as “a kind of diary” of her everyday life in Hyōgo, or it becomes an object of formal and media experimentation, as in Endō Maiko’s X, an online work that was originally uploaded daily during a festival and then re-edited for subsequent exhibition: the result is something visually interesting yet slight, a work that “was an experiment to see what could be conveyed to the viewer by faithfully relating the ‘naturally spontaneous’ movement of her own heart”.⁹

If landscape theory is just an artist playing with ways to capture images of landscapes through a lens, these become landscapes of affect, whereas Matsuda perceived landscapes of oppression. It might be tempting to posit the more confessional practices of the contemporary practitioners as symptomatic of Japanese art in late Shōwa, Heisei and Reiwa, which is often frequently yet inaccurately seen as apolitical and inward, even self-indulgent, as reflecting deeply entrenched anxieties and a wider societal shift away from political ideologies. (See, inter alia, art critic Matsui Midori’s concept of Micropop and Murakami Takashi’s Superflat.) These tropes have been exploited by certain artists and writers to great commercial success and it is not my intention to refute them entirely, but nor are they as applicable wholesale as is often presumed. Regardless, that analogy does not seem the intent here, and the same kind of highly personal approach is evident even in the 1970s work of Imai Norio, for instance.

The real danger, though, is that this co-opts landscape theory into a bourgeois ideal of the artist as someone producing greatness from their own subjectivity, when in fact the initial output of landscape theory possessed a strong anti-art and anti-auteur character. Even the very act of exhibiting all these works in an institution like a museum dedicated to photographic art inevitably reinforces that auteurism.

An aspect of landscape theory given less scope in the exhibition is its nature originally as a practice-led movement. When the film-makers shot A.K.A. Serial Killer, they traversed Japan, a long and arduous journey of detection in search of Nagayama, themselves and modern Japan. Likewise, when Wakamatsu Kōji and Adachi Masao travelled to the Middle East to film what became Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971), it was an act of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, one enacted through physically going there, living among the guerrillas, and taking part in their everyday existence. Perhaps only Imai Norio’s exhibits come close to this, which integrate notes and a map, revealing the trail of images he took of the Abenosuji district of Osaka.

The other exhibits sometimes feel like false friends; works chosen from the museum collection because they match some of the tropes and motifs of landscape theory — namely, landscapes, the everyday, the invisible. But this risks diluting the original polemic of landscape theory or, in the less politically explicit practices like Nakahira’s, their aesthetic aggression and provocation. The crux lies not just in the everydayness of the landscape, but the tension between the everyday, the placeness, and external influences. The pieces from two series by Seino Yoshiko included in the exhibition portray intentionally anonymous landscapes; these locations could be Chiba, Aomori or Aichi. But this is framed as an enabling device of affect. Seino describes these anonymous landscapes as a “passage” that is opened to the viewer to apply to their life. Such works have a place in an exhibition about, say, landscape or the everyday, but these choices are (by the exhibition’s own admission) inconsistent with the politics of landscape theory and its engagement with power. As Adachi once said in 2008: “People say that power is located in the state as a mechanism of violence along with the military or police apparatus that guarantees that power, but this is only a small portion of power, a piece of the system. The point of landscape theory was to say that landscape itself is a reflection of the omnipresence of power.”¹⁰ When specificity is reduced to the anonymous, then the infrastructures and process of urbanization complicit in this act like an Althusserian ideological state apparatus, its tendrils spreading extensively and profusely.

Tasaka offers possible hints of new contexts that may be epistemologically and hermeneutically fertile. We live our lives today awash in images, furnished with the ability to take photographs and videos almost without thought, instantly, thanks to the phones we carry with us wherever we go. Our relationship with media is light years from the slower, methodically rigorous approaches that contemporary technologies forced Adachi and his collaborators to take while filming A.K.A. Serial Killer, though those very constraints contributed to the film’s aesthetic, which is essentially an example of slow cinema. Given our casual, almost unconscious relationship with the snapshot today, the aura of the landscape or picturesque is experienced in increasingly brief bursts. Might this suggest the time is ripe for a theory of landscape that is post-landscape? In other words, the exhibition’s gestures towards questions of contemporary lifestyle in an age of digital photomedia might have worked better if the whole exhibition was reconfigured to explore not landscape theory and what came after that discourse, but landscape in general and what is emerging after the concept of landscape has been challenged, rethought or even debased.

After the final room of the exhibition, which is taken up mostly with archival materials, the visitor must exit by circling back to the first space and leaving the way they came in. Happenstance of the floor layout though this may be, it does help to reframe Sasaoka’s PARK CITY in the light of the politicized landscape theory of Matsuda and his cohorts. Suddenly, we look at those images of Hiroshima through new eyes: of history and trauma diverted and, if not buried (since Sasaoka directly includes the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum), then in a state of repose beneath the everyday life of the residents decades after the atomic bombing. This effect is one of the best experiential moments of the exhibition and suggests a more side-by-side curatorial approach might have yielded fresher insights.

Given the issues with the selections of post–landscape theory works, we might assume that things would be on firmer ground with the “origins” of landscape theory section that forms the final part of the exhibition. With the exception of some Nakahira photographs and the room showing A.K.A. Serial Killer, the “conventional” landscape theory exhibits are mostly confined to archival materials like journal issues, books and posters. These are comprehensive, as anyone familiar with the discourse and paper trail of landscape theory will appreciate. Nonetheless, it is inherently difficult to exhibit discourse and visitors may tire of peering into glass cases to read the pages at which the publications are open. The section struggles to find a solution regarding how to exhibit a movement that primarily yielded films, which cannot all be shown in the same space, or published essays and photo series, which also cannot be displayed in archival form in full.

The section does include footage from films as examples of the “original” landscape theory, though the results are a mixed bag. Ōshima’s Boy (1969) is presented without explanation, not even in catalogue. Archival materials from the production (a press sheet, draft screenplay and still photographs) are included, and we are expected to fill in the blanks as to why it is supposed to demonstrate traits of landscape theory’s origins. The film portrays the titular young boy, whose family makes a living defrauding people, travelling from prefecture to prefecture to evade local police forces. Hirasawa, building on a suggestion by Sasaki Mamoru in 1970, has elsewhere elaborated on his assertion that Boy qualifies as part of the landscape theory canon.

They are arrested in Osaka, and all their bad deeds are revealed. What matters here, however, is not the characteristics and differences of the regions to which they escaped, or where they were caught. It is rather that the images of landscape depicted in the film indicate that everything, everywhere in Japan is subsumed by the state. This not only means that the entire land of Japan is controlled administratively from above by a repressive police governance. It rather means that all forms of power in everyday life are embedded as apparatus in landscape. This is evident in the images of the Japanese flag that are seen everywhere the family goes, regardless of whether metropolitan area or remote region. The family migrate silently in a landscape enclosed by such apparatuses. Despite the individual beauty of those landscapes, signs of violent interventions by the state are filmed in them. What is depicted here is the story of the family’s flight, but also the process of bringing the structures of state and power to the surface through the landscape they had to see in their daily lives. Whether they leave towns to escape the hands of the police, or slip into the crowd of the city, or even if they remain nearly inhumane as a family engaging in extortion, they cannot exist outside of Japan.¹¹

The trailer from Secret Story of the Post–Tokyo War captures the oblique, cryptic nature of the film, but likewise does not demonstrate its relevance to landscape theory. Viewers may also find the excerpts and poster for Red Army/PFLP hard to parse. The footage of Wakamatsu’s Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969) (written by Adachi) perhaps makes its pertinence clearer to viewers. The sexploitation film, part of an extraordinary cycle Wakamatsu-Adachi collaborations at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, was critiqued by Matsuda in his landscape theory writings. However, Hirasawa’s suggestion in his catalogue essay that the Wakamatsu films Ecstasy of the Angels (1972) and Sex Jack (1970) (again written by Adachi) are also made in the “landscape theory mode” is not wholly convincing or expatiated.¹² While the final shot of the bridge in Sex Jack was indeed described at the time as a metaphor for the Imperial Palace, and thus implying an attack on imperialism, such one-off moments do not seem to constitute real engagement with landscape theory.

Admirers of Nakahira’s work, of which there are many, may have wanted to see some of his slightly later work included, since it demonstrates more fully the scope of his interventions into landscape. As Franz Prichard has written in his recent monograph, Nakahira’s travels to Okinawa, Amami and Tokara between 1974 and 1978 were undertaken to “interrogate the role of photographic invisibility in the redrawing of the boundaries and pathways of the Japanese archipelago”.¹³

That process of redrawing boundaries and pathways has not ended and various practices are ongoing. There is no “pre” or “post” in this regard; everything is always “mid”. As my reservations about the current exhibition at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum hopefully indicate, we are only just beginning to tap into the rich conceptual and aesthetic possibilities that landscape theory offers. May this work long continue.

WILLIAM ANDREWS

1. Tasaka Hiroko, “After the Landscape Theory”, trans. John Junkerman, in After the Landscape Theory, eds. Tasaka Hiroko, Hirasawa Gō and Kurokawa Noriyuki, exh. cat., Tokyo: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2023, p. 12.

2. Hirasawa Gō, “Rethinking Landscape Theory: For the Sake of Post-Landscape Theory”, trans. John Junkerman, in After the Landscape Theory, p. 57.

3. Matsuda Masao, “Fūkei toshite no toshi” [City as Landscape] (1970), trans. Yūzō Sakuramoto, https://www.aub.edu.lb/art_galleries/Documents/Matsuda-City-as-Landscape.pdf.

4. Franz Prichard, “Introduction to ‘City as Landscape’ (1970) by Matsuda Masao (1933–2020)”, ARTMargins, 10, 1 (2021), p. 60.

5. After the Landscape Theory, p. 17.

6. Tasaka, p. 14.

7. Ibid., p. 15.

8. The Organizers, “Greetings”, trans. John Junkerman, in After the Landscape Theory, p. 5.

9. After the Landscape Theory, p. 26.

10. Harry Harootunian and Sabu Kohso, “Messages in a Bottle: An Interview with Filmmaker Masao Adachi”, trans. Philip Kaffen, boundary 2, 35, 3 (Fall 2008), p. 86.

11. Hirasawa Gō, “Landscape theory: post-68 revolutionary cinema in Japan”, PhD diss., Leiden University and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, 2021, p. 240.

12. Hirasawa Gō, “Rethinking Landscape Theory”, p. 62.

13. Franz Prichard, Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan, New York: Columbia University Press, 2019, p. 13.

References

Harootunian, Harry and Sabu Kohso, “Messages in a Bottle: An Interview with Filmmaker Masao Adachi”, trans. Philip Kaffen, boundary 2, 35, 3 (Fall 2008), 63–97.

Hirasawa Gō, “Landscape theory: post-68 revolutionary cinema in Japan”, PhD diss., Leiden University and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, 2021.
———, “Rethinking Landscape Theory: For the Sake of Post-Landscape Theory”, trans. John Junkerman, in After the Landscape Theory, eds. Tasaka Hiroko, Hirasawa Gō and Kurokawa Noriyuki, exh. cat., Tokyo: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2023, 57–64.

Matsuda Masao, “Fūkei toshite no toshi” [City as Landscape] (1970), trans. Yūzō Sakuramoto, https://www.aub.edu.lb/art_galleries/Documents/Matsuda-City-as-Landscape.pdf.

The Organizers, “Greetings”, trans. John Junkerman, in After the Landscape Theory, 5.

Prichard, Franz, “Introduction to ‘City as Landscape’ (1970) by Matsuda Masao (1933–2020)”, ARTMargins, 10, 1 (2021), 60–66.
———, Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan, New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

Tasaka Hiroko, “After the Landscape Theory”, trans. John Junkerman, in After the Landscape Theory, 12–16.

Nighttime land seizure at Narita Airport sparks fierce protests and memories of the past

On the night of 15 February, a patch of land near one of the runways at Narita Airport was filled with the ranks of riot police facing off against an angry crowd of dozens of residents and activists. With the Chūkaku-ha helmets and flags, with the chorus of Sprechchor chants, it seemed like something out of Japan’s “season of politics” from the 1960s and 1970s, only this time with many of the participants livestreaming the events via their phones.

The police were there to oversee the seizure of Shitō Takao’s farmland, which has become a emotional and symbolic lodestone for the anti-airport movement, a kind of last-stand Alamo that activists are determined to protect at all costs. The first such forced removal since 2017 (when the Yokobori Site Struggle Headquarters hut was removed), it was unusual enough that it was announced beforehand and reported by the mainstream media, making a standoff and clash between supporters and the authorities inevitable.

A court ruling last September authorized the removal of structures from the 4,600-square-meter lot of land, on which the seventy-two-year-old Shitō has doggedly continued to farm while planes fly low overhead. The courts ordered Shitō to surrender the land back in 2016 but its seizure has been delayed by further legal proceedings and the presence of a small tower occupied by activists. Around three hundred police officers guarded the operation on 15 February in which vehicles demolished the most visible elements of resistance — the watchtower and a large sign that said “No Farm, No Life” — and also set about tearing down bamboo trees and other farm structures. Activists were physically removed from the tower and the land was eventually fenced off, though protests and demolition carried on right through the night and into the next day. Videos from news media and circulating on social media showed some scuffles, with protesters (who numbered perhaps as many as one hundred) hitting riot police officers’ shields. At least three people were arrested for obstructing public officials, according to media reports.

Activists from Zengakuren streamed the events live on their popular YouTube channel.

The airport hopes to straighten a taxiway that is currently forced to steer around the land, though another ongoing court case over a second lot of Shitō’s land still prevents it from proceeding with construction. Narita is full of design quirks like this, such as the shrine that is encircled by the airport’s security fences, or the Shibayama Railway line that runs almost entirely under the airport before reaching its one and only stop in the middle of nowhere on the other side. Strange as they may be, they reveal the troubled history of the airport; they are the results of compromises made to appease residents during the protracted negotiations over its construction and expansion.

Activists on the morning of 15 February preparing for the arrival of police. Photo: Asahi Shimbun

While the protests against Narita Airport are relatively well known, many are surprised that they are still ongoing, with rallies and marches held regularly (albeit with far more modest numbers of attendees compared to the thousands in decades past), lawsuits filed in the courts, and resistance against the removal of the towers that protesters erected.

Usually known in Japanese as the “Sanrizuka struggle” (after the name of the farming area affected by the development of the airport), the anti-Narita protest movement emerged in the 1960s as soon as the plans to build the airport were announced. The movement quickly took on a political character, whereby the local residents, who were mostly farmers, were supported by young New Left activists who saw the construction of the airport as part of the infrastructure that was underpinning Japan’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The residents and activists held mass protests to oppose the land seizures and built fortified towers and “solidarity huts” to guard the areas not yet taken by the state. As the airport construction proceeded and even after it opened, it turned the surrounding land into scenes resembling fiercely fought siege warfare.

Over the course of the struggle, hundreds were injured and arrested, and people were killed on both sides (by my count nine, plus at least two suicides and five deaths in a helicopter crash), including in the 1980s and 1990s, when the movement gained renewed impetus over opposition to further expansion of the airport. Security checks were common when entering the airport from the train station until recently, and a glance in a certain direction out the window of your plane as it touched down could reveal a large sign defiantly denouncing the airport from the edge of the disputed land.

A dissertation waits to be written that considers the anti-airport movement through the lens of hauntology. At the risk of reducing what was a genuinely life-and-death struggle for many participants and residents to pat academese, both the airport and protest movement are haunted by failure: neither side has won outright and so the whole struggle remains in a state of perpetual stasis, spectral and tense. Yes, the airport was ultimately built and opened, yet at incredible cost in terms of human life and time. Though “finished”, the airport has never reached the size and scale originally designed, and even after the recent expansion of the airport to meet the demand for inbound tourism in the 2010s, it is merely the shadows flickering on the cave wall, haunted by its initial vision as a grand transport hub for the whole of East Asia. The protest movement itself is also haunted — by its inability to halt the construction, by internal splits and betrayals, by infighting and death.

Despite the presence of a museum in the area dedicated to the history of the airport (including the protests), despite the largely retrospective perspective and elegiac tone of recent documentaries like The Wages of Resistance: Narita Stories (2014) and The Fall of Icarus: Narita Stories (2018), the movement resists easy historization. As the events on the night of 15 February showed, the struggle continues to this day.

WILLIAM ANDREWS

Farewell to a Self-Professed Rogue: Remembering Manabu Miyazaki

Q. When you wrote your book, what period of your life gave you the most pleasure to recall?
A. 1968. This was the time during the Vietnam War when throughout the world there were anti-war demonstrations and movements by students. I think that was the most pleasurable time of my life when I look back on it.

Self-professed outlaw and rebel Manabu Miyazaki died on 30 March, aged seventy-six. His death generated the expected raft of obituaries in the Japanese press but, despite the relative fanfare that greeted the English-language publication of his memoir in the mid-2000s, his death seems to have gone largely unnoticed in the anglophone world.

Miyazaki is often regarded as an archetypal countercultural figure in Japan, as a rebel and rogue. This reputation is, at least in part or even in whole, the result of his own savvy self-marketing (or that of his publishers). He proved himself adept at aggrandizing and his romantic views on the yakuza also slot easily into mainstream discourse (cemented by cinema) about the Japanese mafia. In his view, the yakuza were, at least originally, honourable people whose role complemented that of the police, and the lack of secrecy about the yakuza — such as maintaining offices — remains important to understanding its place in Japanese society. A crime committed by a true “outlaw”, Miyazaki believed, is not something horrific, like an arbitrary murder. “When outlaws commit a crime, they look for a very clear purpose. It is either for honour or for money,” he remarked in 2005. And the political rebel, another kind of outlaw with which Miyazaki was well acquainted, also had a “purpose”.

In this respect, Miyazaki might be positioned as a flashy version of the social bandit that Eric Hobsbawn famously identified (or perhaps, that manner of Robin Hood figure is how Miyazaki himself wanted us to think of him — though not giving to the poor but at least taking the rich and powerful down a peg or two). As Hosbawn wrote in Bandits, “bandits, by definition, resist obedience, are outside the range of power, are potential exercisers of power themselves, and therefore potential rebels.”

Miyazaki’s memoir, Toppamono: Outlaw. Radical. Suspect—My Life in Japan’s Underworld, published in Japanese in 1996 and in English (with a foreword by Robert Whiting, himself a noted author and memoirist) in 2006, was not only a popular book, it has been widely cited by scholars as an account of the Long Sixties, though Miyazaki’s experiences and trajectory were far from typical. (In fact, it should arguably be referenced more because of what made Miyazaki so unusual, as an outsider’s perspective.) Zenkyōtō memoirs are a veritable cottage industry, yet Miyazaki’s bestseller (600,000 copies) stands out amid the welter of standard leftist accounts (and also by default because it has been translated, while whole shelves of similar books remain obscure beyond the shores of Japan). Miyazaki belies standard dualisms of left and right, nor does he easily conform even to what we might expect from a countercultural and anti-establishment figure, someone who (in the words his publisher) “has spent a lifetime in conflict with authority”. For a start, he was a wealthy celebrity by the end. So what kind of rebel was Miyazaki? A clue is there in the title of his memoir, which derives from a Kansai dialect word meaning someone with a devil-may-care attitude.

Like all memoirs, however, his should be treated with kid gloves. Issues of credibility always cling to life writing and Toppamono is no exception. It is a slick, fun read, and Miyazaki is possibly playing to the gallery at times in his happy-go-lucky portrayal of a scrappy life akin to a picaresque adventure. As the English translation’s publicity blurb puts it: “Shot, stabbed, and beaten, Manabu Miyazaki somehow emerged intact from his first fifty years to put his astonishing life story down on paper.”

The basic facts don’t dispute this per se. Miyazaki was born to a yakuza father in Kyoto and his underworld background meant he was at odds with polite society from the get-go. After failing to get into the prestigious Waseda University in the mid-1960s, he joined the Japanese Community Party. When he finally passed the entrance exam for Waseda, he became a leading member of the JCP’s “foot soldiers” on the campus, the Akatsuki Kōdōtai fighting corps (though the JCP was officially opposed to violence and nominally avoided direct clashes with New Left factions).

Miyazaki claims to have been attracted to student politics by the violence, by the illicit chance to fight ultra-nationalists, sports students and other radical leftists. “I felt that being a Communist was a lot cooler than being a yakuza,” he enthuses in his memoir. This recalls what Akira Asada later said about the Long Sixties in Japan: that the chauvinism and romanticism attracted men but this appeal was also one of the forces that subsequently warped the movement. “The romanticism of the movement was more martial and male-chauvinist,” Asada remarked in 2000. “So when its impetus was frustrated, it turned more quickly and disastrously to internal violence.”

This romanticism also shapes legacy. In an obituary of Miyazaki published in the summer 2022 issue of Jōkyō, a periodical with deep roots in the Japanese New Left, the critic and former Bund activist Osamu Mikami emphasises Miyazaki’s exploits in the Akatsuki Kōdōtai and has apparently little time or inclination for other aspects of Miyazaki’s life and career.

In discussions of the Long Sixties in Japan and beyond, it is common to frame the era around oppositional politics and, unless one is inclined to brave the complex and often murky waters of the various factions’ ideological nuances in detail, discourse quickly descends into enumerations of spectacular incidents, strung together to form a rough, easy-to-digest narrative (and some of my own efforts over the years have unwittingly fallen into this trap). Miyazaki’s later popularity possibly stems from how he played up to that mindset, that in the 1960s it didn’t matter what you were fighting for or who you were fighting, as long as you were fighting.

After his time as a student rebel, Miyazki left the JCP. Mikami suggests that Miyazaki only joined the party by chance and had misgivings from the start. In this sense, his departure represents not the familiar kind of “conversion” — often called tenkō, in reference to pre-war JCP apostasy — that many of his generation underwent once the barricades had come down, but simply the inevitable corollary of someone who was more attracted to the JCP as an extension of an innate anti-authoritarianism instead of a belief in Marxist ideology.

Miyazaki became a journalist in the 1970s and then ran his family’s demolition business in Kyoto. The latter would land him in trouble with police, when he was accused of extortion. He was eventually arrested and released without charge, though his business went bankrupt. In the following decade, he became a kind of outlaw figure involved with shady land deals and the yakuza in the Wild West of Japan’s Bubble era. His reputation was such that he was for a time a prime suspect in the infamous Glico–Morinaga kidnapping and blackmail case, one whose perpetrators was known as the “fox-eyed man”.

He even had political aspirations in late 1990s and early 2000s, though his “party” name — Dennō Toppatō, roughly Cyberbrain Toppa Party, but known in English as the Internet Breakthrough Party of Japan — suggests these were only half-serious, a quasi-parodic gesture cashing in on his notoriety soon after publishing his popular memoir in 1996.

The party was formed by Miyazaki essentially to campaign on a single issue: the new wiretapping law passed in August 1999 that gave the police increased surveillance powers. The party supported candidates from other parties who opposed the wiretapping law, such as Shin’ichirō Kurimoto, a judge on the TV show Iron Chef as well as an academic and member of the House of Representatives. When Miyazaki failed to win a seat in the 2001 House of Councillors election’s national proportional representation block, his party disbanded (as planned). The effectiveness of this campaigning is questionable and in hindsight may seem merely a stunt by a savvy author keen to stay in the limelight that he appeared to crave. Miyazaki’s election poster, instead of disguising his dubious past, highlighted his time as prime suspect in the Glico–Morinaga case: “with the fox-eyed man’s ‘poison’, get the better of the ‘poison’ of the corrupt bureaucracy.”

The wiretapping law was a cause that united yakuza (usually associated with ultra-nationalism) and the Left, since it enabled police tactics that could be utilized effectively against both. It is, then, a characteristic example of Miyazaki’s status and identity: operating in a sphere that didn’t adhere to classic political boundaries, positing himself as an anti-government figure with wide appeal. Miyazaki was a “bipartisan” radical, able to court figures from other sides of the political spectrum (and reap the rewards in terms of publishing contracts and media appearances). At a jocular 2005 press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan to promote the translation of his memoir, for instance, Miyazaki expressed admiration for the words of the anarchist Shūsui Kōtoku — a strange match with his pro-yakuza stance. His wealth, about which he was very open, if not boastful, further sits uneasily with quotations from executed anarchists. Bipartisan, then, but also contradictory.

After his successful memoir, Miyazaki wrote numerous other books about such topics as the buraku and yakuza. He remained a noisy thorn in the side of the establishment, penning a book critical of the police handling of a crime. In 2010, he even sued the Fukuoka police for asking convenience stores to remove yakuza-themed manga and books from its shelves. He argued it was a violation of freedom of expression, though it was personal too, since his own publications were targeted. The lawsuit was eventually thrown out. It surely provoked little surprise when Miyazaki was one of the most prominent people to speak out against anti-yakuza legislation in 2012.

Yakuza advocate (or even apologist). Communist. Criminal. Suspect. Contrarian. Provocateur. Bestselling author. Celebrity. All of that and more, but perhaps one word encapsulates Miyazaki best of all: toppamono.

WILLIAM ANDREWS