Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan: The Performing Body During and After the Cold War

Description

Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan examines how the performing arts, and the performing body specifically, have shaped and been shaped by the political and historical conditions experienced in Japan during the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. This study of original and secondary materials from the fields of theatre, dance, performance art, film and poetry, probes the interrelationship that exists between the body and the nation-state. Important artistic works, such as Ankoku Butoh (dance of darkness) and its subsequent re-interpretation by a leading political performance company Gekidan Kaitaisha (theatre of deconstruction), are analysed using ethnographic, historical and theoretical modes. This approach reveals the nuanced and prolonged effects of military, cultural and political occupation in Japan over a duration of dramatic change. Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan explores issues of discrimination, marginality, trauma, memory and the mediation of history in a ground-breaking work that will be of great significance to anyone interested in the symbiosis of culture and conflict. Cover Contents List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Differentiating the universalized human subject: Grounding an approach Hibakusha in post-war Japan: Ongoing war at war’s end Chapter outline: Alternatives to the atomic gaze in post-war Japan 1 An Outline of Japan’s Modern Nation-State Formation Enemy destruction and friendly re-construction The atomic gaze as US geostrategic policy The re-orientation of forbidden subjects Occupied landscapes The reverse course: Purges and nuclear escalation 2 Occupied Bodies: Aesthetic Responses in New Japan American and Japanese popular atomic representations Cultural negotiations of occupation reforms Occupation and the role of the medium in cultural imagination Occupied responses: Activists and artists in the protest decades 3 The Performing Body in a Bicephalous State: Ankoku Butoh in Context ‘Tōhoku’ as signifier in modern Japanese colonialism Positioning Ankoku Butoh Schismatic frames in Ankoku Butoh Rebellion of the flesh Discrimination and the village narrative 4 An Aesthetic Analysis of Ankoku Butoh Fragmentation: masks, words, bodies 5 The Politics of Form in Post-Ankoku Butoh: (Not) a Dance of the Nation-state Poetic witnessing and cultural politics The politics of ‘emptiness’ in post-war Japanese aesthetics Status quo transition: Otaku prototypes in the 1970s and 1980s Otaku and Article 9: The beginning of the security shift 6 Gekidan Kaitaisha: Growing the Seeds of Butoh What is the ‘empty body’ in Kaitaisha? Transformations (Sei-sei henka): Becoming-Animal Critical reception 7 Kaitaisha in Social Context: Otaku and Military-Media-Technologies Global conceptualism and the body The Dream Regime collaborations Grounded truths: Timor-Leste and the return to the Pacific 8 Occupied Bodies in the Twenty-First Century: Continuing the Butoh Legacy Vivisection Vision: Animal Reflections (VVAR) Conclusion: Occupied Conditions and Re-shaping Public Consciousness Notes Bibliography Index