Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People (16 page)

That it notoriously did not turn out that way gives vibrancy to this early Yokoo world. So innocent, so feckless, and doomed. All these frivolous folk are going to go up in flames.

Yokoo's is a new way of looking at things, both ironic and affectionate. Take Mt. Fuji, for example. The actual mountain had been stared at, painted, talked about, until it had become invisible. Yokoo made it visible again. He did this through that change of focus which distinguished all of his work in the 1960s. His image described not a mountain but an attitude toward a mountain. His small, decorative, ubiquitous Fuji, caricature though it was, did not belittle the mountain. What he caricatured was our preconception of Fuji—sacred, perfect, symbol of Japan, etc. Yokoo's Fuji, an ice-cream sundae of a mountain, suggested a new way of seeing it.

Step back, the artist seems to say. Take a new look through innocent eyes. See things now as you saw them when a child. Yokoo's eye is that of the youngster who sees objects in their purity, before the patina of use, of habit, of maturity has dulled them.

To do so is to question. The 1960s were, in Japan as elsewhere, a searching, questioning, dissident time. From the dull and doctrinaire 1990s, an era which accepts everything as given, the 1960s seem improbable, but it was during this time that thinking Japan questioned just about everything.

To question is to be of two minds—it prefers plurality to the monolithic. Singing star Hibari Misora ("the Shirley Temple of Japan") in tails, the Shinkansen bullet train in a cartouche, and everywhere the trademark mouth—just a mouth, no face, the teeth showing, tongue hanging out. Just how serious is Yokoo being? Is he showing us something because he wants us to admire it? Or is he making fun of it? But, if he is, then why isn't he smiling? Instead, he stares out at us, silently watching as we try to make up our minds.

Let's look at some photos of the artist. He is posing. Well, everyone poses, more or less, when being photographed. But does he know he is posing? Many of us don't. Yet, he must—or must he?

Standing with macho film star Koji Tsuruta, his own T-shirt and leather jacket look like an ironic comment in themselves. Likewise, when cross-dressing chanteuse Akihiro Miwa is making him up as a girl. Sometimes the irony is plain enough: Woody Allen-like and hopeless in an aloha shirt, or as a puritanical kamikaze pilot wearing "I Like Sex" badges, or as a parody of the groom at his own (real) wedding. At other times, however, the irony derives from the contrast of Yokoo's blank, uncommitted scrutiny and the strong, unquestioning image of whomever he is with. With a muscled Yukio Mishima in a loincloth, Yoko is just a black-uniformed high school kid.

Like Mishima, Yokoo is always trying on roles, but unlike him he seems to believe in none of them. The succession of role models, of iconographie crushes, is a long one: from Mishima, Tsuruta, the Beatles, and action star Ken Takakura, right down to Lisa Lyon, female body builder. But with Yokoo the "self" remains fluid. When he "played" himself as the lead in Nagisa Oshima's film,
The Diary of a Shinjuku Thief,
there was no one there; a hole in the screen.

Something of this is due to Yokoo's appearance, his very ordinariness, the unexceptional quality of his face and body. We know what he does, but he does not look as though he does it. Even when someone took a photo of him watering a grave it looked as though he was making a comment on watering graves.

His generic type suddenly appears, however, when he is dressed up in Kabuki costume and makeup. We suddenly recognize him: he is the classical
nimaime—
pleasant, irresolute, accommodating, and curiously featureless. And yet those eyes looking out of that white face are so alive with intelligence. He knows that he looks like some dumb Kabuki type and he is inviting us to share this knowledge, to applaud him, to laugh in his face.

This is irony. Yokoo can never be serious because he seems to know too much ever to "be" anything. He is too busy "becoming" to be "being." In his art, this results in a swing from the hard-line cartoon of 1965 to the soft-line expressionist blur of 1985, with forays into bathing suit and wristwatch design, record jackets, sumo aprons, and posters for fashion folk like Issei Miyake. The core remains fluid.

In this he is unlike those other pop figures, Warhol and Hockney. One never changed and the other changes predictably. Yokoo does, however, share much else with them: the ironic attitude and, at the same time, romantic inclinations. Only in the eye of innocent and untutored youth, say the romantics, can "truth" be perceived. Like some latter-day Rousseau, Yokoo indicates that unspoiled youth alone sees things right. The adult world corrupts because it blurs the youthful vision. This, overwhelmingly, was the message of the 1960s, a time when students threw their books away and took to the streets, when the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty was the big issue, when flower people put blossoms in gun barrels.

Now, in the defeated 1990s, Yokoo persists in showing visible regret for lost innocence. If anything really defines the content of his work, it is an undeniable nostalgia, and this perhaps is what makes him so Japanese. He perfectly mirrors his generation—one for whom history is clearly cut in two: prewar and postwar.

Now, of course, Yokoo is the grand
sensei.
Official, even governmental Japan and its attendant academia not only accept him, they court him. He has lived to see his raunchy nudes used to sell foundation garments, has seen his little Fuji sell ice cream. His iconography has turned into "Tokyo Style" and been put to work promoting the very products it originally challenged.

But Yokoo, in his own way, has remained faithful to himself. The child is still there, fingers grubby, working away at his idea of the world.

The meeting came to order. A group of scholars had gathered to discuss and honor the work of Hijikata, now known as the founder of that important contemporary dance form, Buto. We were also to commemorate the death, which had occurred earlier that winter of 1986.

A noted dance critic was speaking. The audience, mostly students, was listening. I, also on the panel, due to speak later, looked out at those unformed faces and wondered what Hijikata would have thought about this. He had never been much interested in explication.

I remembered him in his early thirties, when he had only some thirty more years to go and was already thinking about death, searching for it, incorporating it into his works.

- See, he once said, gradually collapsing, knees rising to his chest, arms crossing, wrists turning, fingers outspread: It's like dying.

And then the splayed fingers turned outward, reached, growing like roots or tendrils; the head rotated, blind eyes looked up, legs stretched, unfolding from the squat.

This was what it felt like in the far north, in snowy Akita, where Hijikata, son of a peasant, was from. In the long winter you shrank into your body, made it as small as possible to avoid the cold. Then in the spring you reached up for warmth, for the sun. This was what his dance was about.

- Hijikata's artistic vision presents us with alternatives: are these then prehistoric folk, before the benefits of civilization, or are they a post-atomic people, after the bombs have returned us all to a primitive state?

The scholar was holding forth. Buto was rapidly becoming a major postwar aesthetic development. I tried to remember if Hijikata himself had ever made such claims for it.

Only once, that I could recall. We had been drinking in a small country inn near the sea. It was late summer. The rice was ripe, reminding him perhaps of northern fields.

- That's where it all comes from, he said: The paddy fields ... You have no idea how tired my parents used to get. They got so tired working in the paddies that they couldn't move. And yet they had to. It hurt to move. And yet they had to because they had to work. No energy, nothing to move with, and yet they moved.

I had already seen something of his work back then: the notorious
Kinjiki
of 1959, where all the movements expressed pain, where everyone seemed to be tied to the stage and straining at his bonds, and where death appeared on the boards.

Pain, exhaustion, death—these were the elements of his dance. But they were not dramatized, they were just there. Not something for a dancer to express; something for a body to show.

And I remembered Hijikata in a Ginza coffee shop—one long since torn down—saying in that occasionally dogmatic way he had: You can't just use the body, you know. It has its own life, you see, a mind of its own.

- And so we can now begin to codify the movements. First there is what we might call the squat. And here we must mention that it so resembles a movement used by Harald Kreutzberg that one wonders if Hijikata
sensei
had not perhaps been in some manner influenced by the German choreographer.

This was the second of the scholars, now just beginning. I was to follow him.

Hijikata's was a northern body, the skin white, the hair black against it. Not the sturdy Japanese peasant body you sometimes see, but the thin farmer's body, all tendon and narrow muscle.

I remembered his squat, and not just from the stage. Back then a lot of Japanese still knew how to do it—it was the normal position for resting by the roadside. Hijikata used to squat down to look at something, to read a passage, to talk.

Pain, exhaustion, squatting. The Japanese body is built close to the earth. Its center of gravity is low. Only Japanese could perform Buto. It has to be low, centered—as though the home of intelligence were not the cranium but the navel.

The navel! I suddenly remembered something else as I sat there looking at those young and unformed faces.

We were at the seaside inn. I was making a film and he had come along to help—no choreography, just a group of children, some fifteen little boys, to be controlled. The plot involved their killing a goat by accident, while playing at war, then holding a funeral for it. They were then meant to forget all about it, to return to being little boys. One of them, however, stays to watch the sea unearth the corpse. The film was called
War Games.

Among the difficulties was the scene I wanted where the children, wide-eyed with knowledge of death, gradually forget what they have seen. They start to laugh, to play again, to go back to being children having fun on a beach.

And now I remembered how Hijikata, himself so death-filled, did it, that summer day twenty-five years before. Slowly—well out of the range of my camera—he pulled down his shorts so that his navel was exposed. Then, still slowly, he arched his back, stuck out his stomach.

The boys looked up from the mound under which they had buried death, their faces solemn, and saw this strange man with his shorts pulled down and his stomach stuck out. This surprised them but, filled with the importance of the goat's funeral, they did not smile. They looked, then looked away.

And there they are to this day, on film: the boys—now fathers of children like them—look up, sideways, abstracted, then look down again. It is as though the knowledge of death has confused them, as though they cannot detach themselves from it.

Then Hijikata undid the top button. The shorts slipped further. With one finger he pointed at his navel and suddenly smiled, all teeth, a small boy's smile.

The children looked up, then glanced at each other. One of them grinned, because he thought the man funny. He nudged the boy next to him, catching his attention.

In the film the child looks up and, as if thoughts of death were too much for him, he breaks into a smile. A moment later he nudges the boy next to him. He too raises his eyes. He seems to be saying: All right, it's just a dead animal.

Hijikata then began capering about. It was a kind of festival dance, a celebration after the rice planting, after all the back-breaking labor, the exhaustion. And the children recognized something. Two or three swayed, their bodies perhaps responding to his. Two or three laughed, perhaps from the pleasure of remembering other festivals they had seen.

In the film, several start swaying, as though to break whatever binds them to the mound they stand before. Then, suddenly, several more start laughing, as though they have found a way to escape from the fact that death lies at their feet.

The capering Hijikata pointed to the children's navels, one after the other, making a connection, pointing out a resemblance, indicating a natural order. If his was funny, so were theirs.

Soon all the little boys were laughing and pointing at each other, mouths open, eyes half-shut in mirth, and Hijikata still just outside camera range was dancing about, shorts slipping, the spirit of the festival, his navel like a large, comic eye.

In the film, the children begin to laugh and their laughter is infectious. They point at each other, soon laughing so hard that they seem frantic with joy, so strong is their relief at being delivered from death.

From peasant death to peasant life—it is not only pain but release from it that forms Hijikata's art. I see him now, hopping on one foot, then on the other, arms at antic angles, all of this enormous rural energy threading its way through the steps of the festival dance.

- And so we honor here the founder of a new Japanese dance form, Buto. Its beginnings were not without controversy, and indeed many of its earlier elements have now dropped away to offer our dancers and choreographers a new set of movements through which they may express themselves. Here, of course, the influence of Tatsumi Hijikata has been seminal—creating as he did this new vocabulary for purely Japanese expression. Thank you.