Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. x, 268 pp. (B&W photos.) US$35.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-231-19131-9.
Franz Prichard’s book is an original and in-depth study of how various Japanese artists and critics negotiated the urban transformations at play during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics “reconstruction” and Okinawa reversion of 1972. Whereas most analyses on the subject tend to read the period’s radical aesthetics as an expression of sheer political discontent, Prichard rather focuses on how issues related to social space, subjectivity, and distribution of power were at the core of some of the most compelling works of the era.
What has currently been labelled the “Japanese economic miracle” was not only an issue of economic and national recovery but also of power redistribution by means of profound spatial and infrastructural shifts. Divided into six chapters, the book deals extensively with these changes and how filmmakers, writers, and photographers alike deployed various practices and theoretical writings to critically engage with those. Chapter 1 focuses on On the Road: A Document (1964) by famous documentary filmmaker Noriaki Tsuchimoto. The movie follows a group of taxi drivers working in and around Japan’s capital city, a year before the 1964 Olympics. As Prichard demonstrates, Tsuchimoto does not content himself with recording Tokyo’s dramatic spatial transformation but also discloses, through his skillful use of montage and soundtrack, novel ways of critically situating oneself in the ever-expanding infrastructural landscape. In chapter 2, the author analyzes Kōbō Abe’s The Ruined Map (1967). The main character, a private detective looking for a man who has suddenly disappeared, reads the signs of the new urban landscape—the story is set in a danchi or public houses environment, one of the most prominent symbols of spatial and social changes in 1960s Japan—in a literal and uncritical manner and himself vanishes abruptly at the end of the novel. Prichard stresses that Abe’s novel must be read as a metaphor of the act of “reading” and that it offers a critical understanding of how various forms of violence and visuality were deeply embedded in Japan’s spatial remaking of the 1960s. Photographer Takuma Nakahira is the subject of the three following chapters. The third part deals with For a Language to Come (1970), a photobook composed of works mainly published in the second half of the 1960s and representative of Nakahira’s famous are, bure, boke (rough, blurry, out of focus) style. One of Nakahira’s main critical concerns was the idea of the camera conceived as an “objective” recording device of the world. Prichard convincingly demonstrates that his are, bure, boke style must be read against the backdrop of fūkeiron or “landscape theory”—an influential discourse at the beginning of the 1970s seeking to critically address the uniformization of the Japanese landscape—and constitutes one of the first attempts to “denaturalize” the new geopolitical and visual environment. In Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary (1973) and Overflow (1974), respectively a photobook and a photographic exposition, Nakahira tries to self-critically address the commercial success of his are, bure, boke style and continues his reflection over the complicity between power and images. These works are discussed in chapter 4, where Prichard argues that Nakahira’s creativity had evolved towards an assemblage of various theoretical writings and photographs purposefully taken from disparate contexts to provoke a decentering of the seeing subject in its relation to the world. Chapter 5, one of the most interesting of the book, deals with the theoretical and photographic activity of Nakahira during his various trips to the islands of Okinawa, Amami, and Tokara (1974–1977). Against former theoreticians and artists who tended to look for the archetypal ideal Japanese community yet unaffected by modernity in those remote islands, Nakahira shows how the 1972 reversion has on the contrary fully succeeded in integrating those localities into the national and global capitalist economy. Through a close analysis of the photographs and texts produced during that period, Prichard shows that Nakahira’s activity did not simply document in an ethnographic manner the changes wrought by the reversion of Okinawa to those places but also aimed to underscore once visible thresholds—inside/outside, national/local, insular/continental—rendered seamless by the new geopolitical order. The last chapter, titled Residual Futures, is about photographs by contemporary artists like Osamu Kanemura addressing issues of urban landscape and invisible violence, the Fukushima catastrophe, and Tokyo’s rebuilding for the 2020 Olympics.
As the title suggests, Prichard’s study contends not only with writing an historical account of works and practices hitherto overlooked or ignored, but also addresses their relevance for present and future understandings of urban and visual media systems. This approach, though justified, has unfortunately been made at the expense of the ideological background of the periods covered. Chapter 6, underlining the continuities between Tsuchimoto, Abe, Nakahira, and contemporary artists like Kanemura, Hiroko Komatsu, or Shuji Akagi, fails to address the feeling of political resignation, expressed for instance in historically low voter turnout, pervading contemporary Japanese society at large. People in Fukushima were perfectly aware that the 2020 Tokyo Olympics had nothing to do with “recovery” and “reconstruction,” yet a huge majority still supported the Games. By the same token, Nakahira’s multiple and obvious connections with the student uprising of 1968—he founded the magazine Provoke in November 1968, was a regular contributor to publications like Asahi gurafu, Asahi jānaru, and Gendai no me, which were all affiliated with the Japanese New Left, and his theory of the “breaking down of the self” (discussed in chapter 5) resonates uncannily with the theory of the “negation of the self” (jiko-hitei) espoused by Zenkyōtō student activists—are nowhere addressed. In the end, the reader is under the impression that Nakahira was an almost isolated artist/critic whose practices and theories could be picked up and reused in any context without losing their critical impact. Prichard relies extensively on the expression “Cold War remaking” throughout the book, implying that geopolitical reasons motivated the spatial and visual transformations of the archipelago. Though accurate within the context invoked, the expression does not do justice to the strong opposition between the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) and various intellectuals and radical students that was a defining feature of the period. It is no overstatement to say that Tsuchimoto, Abe, and Nakahira’s creative energy and discursive possibilities owe as much to “Japan’s Cold War remaking” as to their profound disillusion and repulsion towards the JCP and the status quo politics it was standing for at the time. A more nuanced and dialectically informed approach to the works covered—including the contemporary ones—would have brought additional depth and value to the book.
Fabien Carpentras
Yokohama National University, Yokohama