“Have you ever tried to translate Mount Fuji?”
“‘Translate’…?”
“You translate nature and it all turns human. It’s noble, or great, or heroic…”
         —Natsume Sōseki, Sanshirō

For most of Japan’s literary history, Fuji was a distant, rather mystical presence, only seen by adventurous souls far from the western capital. Take Manyōshū poem #317, by Yamabe no Akahito:

Heaven and earth:
Since the time they parted,
Of manifest divinity,
Reaching the heights of awe,
In Suruga stands
The high peak of Fuji…

…And so on. By the time Japan’s center of cultural mass shifted east to Edo a thousand or so years later, though, Fuji had become a much more everyday presence. Some people reacted to this by taking it more seriously than ever and building religious sects around it. Others preferred to make light of it, like Bashō with his famous bit about it being nice to not see Mount Fuji for once.

It wasn’t until the Meiji restoration, however, that Mount Fuji really attained its current status as national symbol. It was perfect for the job: awe-inspiring yet simple, unique to Japan yet easily-grasped as a concept by outsiders, and convenient to access through public transport. Once the existing body of work in praise of the mountain was retconned into proto-nationalism, Mt. Fuji became the perfect white screen on which everybody could project their agenda.

Yosano Akiko’s short poem “Mount Fuji at the Dawn of the Year” (「元朝の富士」) is a product of this trend. Written while the Japanese body politic was high as a kite on the economic and diplomatic successes of World War I, the poem is as subtle as a brick to the head. It begins with the portentous line “Now, the first sun of 1919 shall rise” and wastes no time in describing Mount Fuji as the “eruption of a new world” at the “edge of the eastern sky.” Then it gets better:

Behold! There stands
The silhouette of some giant Dante,
Colossal in the center of the Heavens.

It is that young poet’s form
As painted on a Bargello wall:
Blue hat, red robes,
Narrow face,
Handsome gaze turned to the skies,
There, there, the Dante of La Vita Nuova. […]

O people, in this first year after war,
If you would you see the mysteries I do,
Lo! Gaze heavenwards with me,
At Fuji in this vermillion dawn.

Yosano’s vision has a striking universalism to it. In one line, Mount Fuji is described as an amalgam of exotic and primitive materials (coral, lava); in another, it is an echo of High Art or an avatar of one of European civilization’s greatest poets. Parallels to Japan’s post-Meiji drive to preserve an unsullied core of “Japaneseness” in the belly of a national machine built on the best ideas of the West could not be accidental.

In retrospect, of course, Japan at the time looks more like the Dante of the Inferno (mi ritrovai per un selva oscura/ ché la diritta via era smarrita) — and once everything went to hell, being hitched to the nation’s bandwagon became a liability for the mountain.

Hence, the backlash: epitomized by Fukao Sumako’s How Lovely For Mount Fuji That She Is Beautiful (「ひとりお美しい富士山」, excerpt here), published in 1949:

Hmph — so you’re Miss Fuji?
How tiresome!
That classic white New Look reflected
In the clear and unkind mirror of mirror
Honestly/ Who are you supposed to be?
From Tokyo with its barrack roofs
You’re a regular “crane on a pile of trash“.

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Wakamatsu Kōji’s latest film 『実録・連合赤軍：浅間山荘への道程』 (The True Story of the United Red Army: the Road to Asama-Sansō) is probably the final and definitive cinematic retelling of the United Red Army (URA) story. In early 1972, the URA terrorist cell achieved infamy for killing off twelve of its own members during ideological training and then battling police from the inside of a mountain lodge near Nagano’s Mt. Asama. Over the course of three hours, Wakamatsu covers the group’s entire history from their formation and eventual arrest, moving the viewer through a brief history of the student movement, the internecine fighting accompanying the foundation of the Red Army Faction (赤軍派), the brutal lynching of fellow members in its secret mountain training lodge, and the final standoff at Asama-Sansō.

Telling the “full” story of such a fractured and complex set of events forces Wakamatsu to use a no-frills “docudrama” approach, including plenty of on-screen text and voice-over narration. The story could not fit neatly into the conventional three-act film. Almost none of the Red Army members survive or stay free of police custody long enough to act as an emotional anchor or arch-villain for the entire three hours. Some characters are little more than historical bookmarks; for example, future Japanese Red Army leader Shigenobu Fusako shows up in the forward to bond with future URA victim Tōyama Mieko, but soon leaves for Lebanon to found the “international wing” of the Red Army. Likewise, Red Army founder and philosopher Shiomi Takaya is arrested in the first hour and taken completely out of the central story. But so goes the actual history.

Wakamatsu and fellow soft-porn filmmaker Adachi Masao were both Red Army sympathizers and chronicled the early proto-Japanese Red Army / Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Lebanon training camps in their 1971 documentary 『赤軍PFLP世界戦争宣言』Red Army-PFLP Declaration of War. In the last few years, both have apparently felt the need to create new films reflecting on the ’70s Japanese leftist terrorism. Adachi’s lackluster 『幽閉者テロリスト』Prisoner / Terrorist retold the story of Lod Airport Massacre attacker Okamoto Kozo losing his mind from years in an Israeli jail. With multiple Japanese fictional films about the United Red Army’s self-destruction already in circulation, however, it may seem odd that Wakamatsu went to such lengths to make yet another film on the topic. He has specifically stated a need to correct falsehoods in the 2002 film 『突入せよ！浅間山荘事件』(Choice of Hercules), which tells the story of the Asama-Sansō hostage crisis from the perspective of law enforcement. Wakamatsu protege Takahashi Banmei’s 2001 film 『光の雨』(Rain of Light) , on the other hand, very skillfully visualizes the horrific URA training deaths, but somewhat tempers it with a distancing meta-approach where the actors are shown “adapting” the novel that lends the film’s name. Although there are slight discrepancies between Takahashi and Wakamatsu’s versions, both generally work from the same historical chronicles and hit the same notes. Wakamatsu’s only real addition is combining the lynchings with the Asama-Sansō tale in a single epic-length film.

The other notable film to pick up the United Red Army narrative is 『鬼畜大宴会』 (Banquet of the Beasts) — Kumakiri Kazuyoshi’s ultra-gory mondo-horror retelling of the early ’70s student movement disintegration — where post-gunshot head-wounds spew blood, men are castrated with knives, and limbs are frequently severed. Beyond twisting this important historical event into purely prurient content, Kumakiri does the URA story great disservice by recasting the event’s true horror — the legitimatization of comrade purging through Marxist utopian ideology — into the result of the evil female leader’s growing “insanity.” When the stand-in for female URA leader Nagata Hiroko is killed late in the movie (by brutal means which I never want to think about again), Kumakiri gives viewers the karmic revenge they ultimately desire. (The historical URA denouement is not so rewarding: sadistic leaders Nagata and Mori were unceremoniously arrested before the Asama-Sansō siege even starts. Mori’s later suicide is always reduced to an afterword.)
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Sight unseen, Japan’s first truly contemporary art fair opens tonight. Scheduled on the same week as the Art Fair Tokyo, the 101 Tokyo Art Fair forces the megalopolis into its first Tokyo Art Week.

The world looks to Tokyo for what’s next, casually ignoring that what is there now consists of a tangled and underdeveloped infrastructure. It’s akin to many folks’ experience of moving to Tokyo and learning that it actually takes months to even get an internet connection installed. Compared to Basel and New York, Tokyo is a relative village of hovels when it comes to fine art as a commercial system.

On the macro scale, there is a severe lack of support unparalleled in other first world nations. No zaibatsu has a contemporary (or even modern) collection of note, and there is a complete lack of consumer awareness regarding fine art, though magazines like Brutus and Art-It have slowly been attempting to educate their readers about art history and the contemporary milieu. On the micro level, most Tokyo apartments lack adequate systems to actually hang art and real-estate agents charge exorbitant fees to plug holes in walls. There is a complete lack of a support network for emerging artists age 20 to 30 who more often than not leave their art careers in the dust in order to pursue a regular paycheck.

What has been present is an art fair that is more akin to a trade show than an art fair in both look and spirit. The Art Fair Tokyo would do well to look at the 101 interlopers as a source of inspiration. In lieu of a hodgepodge, non-curated mishmash of different genres, eras, and stuffed walls of the work that hasn’t sold for the year, 101 Tokyo offers another option. Namely, it’s a cultivated, highly curated sampling of exhibition spaces. Each gallery involved with 101 is permitted to show three artists maximum, and only new work is exhibited. The 101 Tokyo organizers are committed to educating their audience. They have gone as far as offering two separate seminars on art investing in Tokyo’s market in both English and Japanese, as well as a seminar on Collecting Art in the Context of Wealth Management.

There are other aspects of 101 Tokyo that are quite a change from the other gig in town. The fair is a stark contrast — the Director is an artist, and the crew running the fair is genuinely excited about visual work. All are young, a 32 year-old being the eldest, and they are decidedly international. 101 Tokyo stands as a series of events of inclusivity, something that must be cultivated if contemporary fine art as a commercial sector is to grow into something viable in Tokyo. They even have parties where you can shake your ass and even potentially get laid by someone your age whom you enjoy talking to about contemporary aesthetics with — more than can be said for elsewhere.

As purportedly over-invested in design and architecture as Tokyo is (which is debatable and a whole lot of lip service to say the least), contemporary fine art in Tokyo could really use a kick in the pants. With luck, 101 Tokyo will deliver a decent bruise.

Evidently, the Japanese Cabinet Office has a yearly PR budget to place ads in women’s fashion magazines like CanCam to educate “the kids” about the never-ending Kuril Island Dispute.

The ad back in 2005 featured a straightforward manga-based explanation, but Team Japan Gov went all “Japan Cool” this year and decided to place a map of the four godforsaken disputed islands on the back of an imaginary Japan-theme embroidered “stadium jumper” baseball jacket, which for those not living here, are all the rage with rural delinquent youngsters with bad taste and cookie-cutter rock bands that play unattended gigs in Shimokitazawa. Perhaps referencing this ironically-uncool-and-also-actually-uncool jacket is an attempt to target a taste culture navel-gazing enough to actually cry the necessary tears over this spilt milk very serious issue. (Not that a CanCam girl would ever be seen in a jacket like this.)

Seriously, however, Japan totally called “shotgun” for these islands a long time ago and then some other country took the front seat — even though Japan clearly called “shotgun!” Japan may have longer, better, and awesomer historical claims on these volcanic rocks (how more clearly could they have said “shotgun”?), but when you go on Imperialist Death Race 1937 in Asia, you are pretty much going “all in” with your entire local empire in the pot. Losing $2 chip properties like Shikotan is exactly what happens when you ask the dealer to “hit you” at 19. But hey, if there is some geopolitical legal technicality that would let Japan expand its empire once again after 60 years of totally boring, soul-crushing, pansy-making, samurai-shaming peacetime, the State should let the Ebi-chan Epigone know all about it.

So not only does the government do absolutely nothing to remedy the kind of social stratification that causes middle-class office ladies to fight to the death for a space on the palanquin of a Lehman Brothers employee, but then uses the popularity of the guide-to-being-beloved-by-rich-men to give everyone a rallying point of past nationalistic victimhood to take their minds off of more pressing contemporary issues. How can anyone whine about the consumption tax and stagnant wages when Khabomai is in Red hands!

Interesting, however, to see the government try to build up sympathy for this ancient issue in such an odd media context. Will the Cabinet Office continue to advertise their ancient territorial losses in 2045 — when translucent titanichrome cyber-textiles are all the rage in Neo-Shibuya?

See a full-color version of the advertisement here.

The mustachioed romanizers of the Meiji period — from the Roman Character Association (羅馬字会) and their 1885 pamphlet “How to write Japanese in Roman characters” to Mori “Let’s just all speak English” Arinori — were the first to seriously make the argument that Japan’s writing system would be better abandoned than reformed. The idea was influential for the better part of a century among certain circles of Japanese society, and there’s still a Nihon Rōmaji Kyōkai (”Society for the Romanization of the Japanese Alphabet”, 日本ローマ字協会) in operation today. Shiga Naoya’s famous 1946 “Let’s all just speak French” proposal, however, was essentially the movement’s last hurrah.

1946, after all, was the year that the Ministry of Education announced gendai kanazukai (modern[ized] kana usage) and the tōyō (”general-purpose”) list of simplified kanji. These two changes swept away the most egregious archaisms and inconsistencies of written Japanese, depriving the Indo-Europhiles of the orthographic horror stories they were forced to fight against in the past. With only cerebral arguments on general principles left, groups opposing the kana-kanji-kana orthography faded into irrelevance as the Japanese economic miracle progressed.

But romanizers and modernizers were not the only ones who wanted to rebuild Japanese in the Imperial years. The Kanamojikai (カナモジカイ, “Kana Character Society”), founded in 1920 and still active, were inspired by the same issues — our children waste too much time learning kanji, our writing system doesn’t fit properly down linotype wires, etc. — but had, in a way, a more radical program than other groups worrying about these issues.

(There were no doubt many practical considerations behind the decision to spell “Rōmaji kyōkai” with as many kanji as possible — 羅馬字会 — not least the lack of public understanding at the time of how to read Roman characters, but dog food is dog food and someone has to take the first bite.)

The Kanamojikai’s aim was to convert the katakana syllabary into a form that that would let readers recognize words as gestalts, like readers of English and other alphabetic languages can. Kanji and hiragana were to be locked in the basement and never spoken of again.
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