NEO-DADA | neodada1105

Japanese urban planning, characterized by a high degree of centralization and administrative power of the central government, was also heavily influenced by the modern planning practices ideas taking place in Western towns and cities (Sorensen). Broad avenues, large parks, green corridors, and stunning architecture were seen as symbols of progress.

However, when news arrived in 1959 that Japan’s capital city had been chosen to host the 1964 Olympic Games, the municipal government chased bold new architecture and public works projects in order to present a new, beautiful, and modern Tokyo to the world. Numerous plans were proposed, creating an architectural debate obsessed with aesthetics and industrial architecture, as well as pride and enthusiasm in economic growth.

As the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), led by Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, was in the midst of negotiating a revision to the original 1951 United StatesJapan Security Treaty, a wide range of citizens took to the streets of Tokyo and formed opposition rallies.

After being nearly destroyed in WWII, the postwar reconstruction of Tokyo ushered in a highgrowth economy that quickly transformed the city into a modern metropolis. Large redevelopment projects were planned in order to create a modern State that could compete with the cities of the West.

The Neo-Dada “art actions” were held in public spaces throughout Tokyo, often in very busy urban areas, and were meant to shock the audience with impulsive, disturbing performances.

Day after day tens of thousands of protestors--from high school students to the elderly--surrounded the Diet building and the American Embassy. On June 4th, around 5.6 million people participated in a general strike, shutting down thousands of stores as well as public transportation.

By colliding with a growing sense of nationalism in Japan, the anti-Treaty rallies allowed the Japanese people to express emotions which had long been repressed under a foundational narrative imposed on them by the State.

Violence of the City

The squalor and decay unfolding in Tokyo’s unplanned residential areas was masked by the sleek facade of Downtown Tokyo’s shopping district, Ginza. This district was the nucleus of the city’s beautification campaign in preparation for the Olympic Games, where the metropolitan police used sought to sanitize the environment and create a “bright and crimefree town”.

Violence of the Body

The Japanese State was able to pacify the protesters with aggressive tactics and physical confrontation. Many were injured, several students were killed, and eventually the United StatesJapan Security Treaty was automatically ratified without deliberation.

NEO-DADA

Amidst the social and political tumult of 1960s Tokyo, a group of artists who called themselves “NeoDada,” began to experiment with new kinds of artistics modes that blended the avantgarde with elements of social protest.

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The anti-Security Treaty struggle brought tens of thousands of protestors day after day to the Diet building to show their opposition to what they saw as Western dominance and authoritarian Japanese politics. The treaty was ratified, and a great number of protesters, mostly students, were injured in confrontations with the police.

Many saw the anti-Treaty movement as an opportunity to address a kind of authoritarian democratic order that that existed even before the war. At the same time, the protesters opposed the hegemony of U.S. military power in East Asia.

After the Treaty was ratified, what lingered was a feeling that the protests were not only against the treaty, but against the government’s increasing control over the body.

In the years leading up to the 1964 Olympics, the Japanese government implemented various policies that sought to regulate, and modernize, the body in what can be considered everyday spaces of the city. The Women’s Bureau in the Tokyo Metropolitan Welfare Office initiated a campaign to protect Japanese women from the romantic and sexual impulses of foreign men. Popular culture magazines also began to encourage the chastity of Japanese females, which formed part of a larger discourse that claimed

The Tokyo police played a major role in administering the State’s increasing interest in the control and oversight of the body.

There is an inverse relationship between the quality of moral life and the quantity of urban bodies. As Rousseau says, “everything is judged by appearance because there is no leisure to examine anything." Citizens become more selfish, more concerned with accumulating wealth and reputation than personal value.

The police were an important arm of the metropolitan government’s beautification campaign, which involved legislation against the illegal dumping of trash, obstruction of traffic, illegal construction, and urination in the street. As Yoshikuni says, this goal to create a clean city was “part and parcel of Japan’s attempt in the 1960s to construct a more modern, rational space in Tokyo.”

One of the students who was injured in a confrontation with the police during the antitreaty protests expressed his desire that the wound last the rest of his life in order to inscribe his political experiences as a physical scar.

Suspended between art and guerrilla warfare, their text echoed the inflammatory rhetoric of radical movements and their artistic strategies mimicked the aggressive tactics of the police and municipal government.

In a society where the body is increasingly the site of political and social control, it also becomes the essential tool for opposition.

One of the students who was injured in a confrontation with the police during the antiTreaty protests expressed his desire that the wound last the rest of his life in order to inscribe his political experiences as a physical scar.

Performed as provocative responses to the era’s political climate, the Neo-Ddada art actions were meant to shock and interrupt the everyday spaces of Tokyo in order to demonstrate how bodies were being increasingly obstructed, sterilized, and surveilled through Tokyo’s path to modernity.

In the mid-50s, most of the districts of Tokyo, including Ginza, were waterfront districts that still relied on river transport. With the economic growth and the development of vehicle-centered transportation, the moats around the Ginza area were filled up and transformed into expressways at the end of the 1950s.

The artists that eventually formed the NeoDada group were deeply influenced by the contestation and violence of the body present in Tokyo at the time. In fact, the NeoDada's manifesto was read aloud at the demonstrations, saying that "the only way to avoid being butchered is to become butchers ourselves."

The construction of subway lines followed shortly afterwards. Since the first completion of Ginza station in 1957, several lines and subway stations were opened one after another in the early 1960s.

This urban renovation tremendously changed the cityscape—both spatially and socially—and created an iconic image of Ginza: the interweaving flow of crowds, motor traffic, and flickering neon signs.

The NeoDada artists opposed what they saw as a perversion of urban space, and placed their performances within Ginza in order to expose its hidden logic as an environment for social control. It’s ritual order, and the hedonistic fascination with modernity it inspired in the public, is instead seen as a mode by which the State regulates culture and everyday life in Japan.

Motorized traffic eventually led to the shutdown of the trams in 1967, which at the time had busily shuttled passengers throughout the city.

While images of large Tokyo shopping streets overflowing with pedestrians have become a popular representation of the city, at the time this transformation of everyday life implied a violence of the city on human behavior. If seen as a kind of stage, the ritual order of these modern spaces “is precarious and in need of constant repair...order exists insofar as social actors seek to avoid stigmatization and embarrassment in public gatherings.”

The crowd congregated with a collective belief, sought for mutual supports, and demanded to express their discontent with the dictatorial politics. They stood hand-in-hand and clashed head-on with the police using their body as the medium for political expression. In this way the living body—as both the user and producer—endowed the space with new social order while also creating new space through the appropriation of the built environment.