Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-21T17:51:50.887Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Acoustics of the Everyday: Between Growth and Conflict in 1960s Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2015

MIKI KANEDA
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Focusing on a multimedia practice labelled ‘intermedia art’, this article shows how experimental musical practices complicate popular characterizations of the idea of politics in 1960s Japan that are polarized by their focus on extraordinary economic growth, on the one hand, and radical protest, on the other. Like their counterparts in art, experimental musicians and artists such as Shiomi Mieko, Kosugi Takehisa, and Yuasa Jōji took an interest in everyday sounds, spaces, and technologies as sites for artistic exploration. However, their musical approaches did not share the overtly political engagement with the scenes of protest playing out in the public sphere that played a central role in the visual arts. Through an investigation of the notion of ambiguity in the acoustics of intermedia, the article seeks to re-examine understandings about the role of sound in shifting perceptions about political participation.

Type
Articles
Information
Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 71 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005.Google Scholar
Baird, Bruce. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity. New York: Kensington Pub. Corp, 2000.Google Scholar
Bithell, David. ‘Intermedia Art’. Oxford Music Online. www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2241749 (accessed 1 April 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chong, Doryun. ‘Postwar Reconstruction – From Occupation to the Cold War’, in From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan 1945–1989: Primary Documents. New York and Durham, NC: Museum of Modern Art, 2012. 96–8.Google Scholar
Chong, Doryun, Hayashi, Michio, Yoshitake, Mika, Sas, Miryam, Mitsuda, Yuri, Masatoshi Nakajima, and Nancy Lim. Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012.Google Scholar
Eckersall, Peter. Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan: City, Body, Memory. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, J. Michele. ‘Shiomi, Mieko’. Oxford Music Online. www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/52888 (accessed 23 February 2012).Google Scholar
Furuhata, Yuriko. Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Furuhata, Yuriko. ‘Multimedia Environments and Security Operations: Expo ’70 as a Laboratory of Governance’. Grey Room 54/4 (2014), 56–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
‘Gakuen Funsō: Non-pori Wa Kō Kangaeru’ (Conflict on campus: What the non-pori students say). Yomiuri Shimbun, 13 October 1968, Morning Edition.Google Scholar
Galliano, Luciana. Yōgaku: Japanese Music in the Twentieth Century. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Hayashi, Michio. ‘Postwar Reconstruction – From Occupation to the Cold War’, in From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan 1945–1989: Primary Documents. New York, and Durham, NC: Museum of Modern Art, 2012. 24–7.Google Scholar
Higgins, Dick and Higgins, Hannah. ‘Intermedia’. Leonardo 34/1 (2001), 49–54.Google Scholar
Hoaglund, Linda, Takeishi, Satoshi, and Nagai, Shoko. ANPO, Art x War: The Art of Resistance. [Harriman, NY]: New Day Films, 2010.Google Scholar
Hudak, John and Takehisa, Kosugi. ‘Fishing for Sound: An Interview with Improvisational Musician/Sound Installation Artist Takehisa Kosugi’. ND, March 1990.Google Scholar
Iida, Yumiko. Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan: Nationalism as Aesthetics. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.Google Scholar
Kaneda, Miki. ‘The Unexpected Collectives: Intermedia Art in Postwar Japan’. PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2012.Google Scholar
Katahara, Eiichi. ‘Japanese Security Policy and the United States 1945–1968’. Paper presented at the conference Power and Prosperity: Linkages Between Security and Economics in U.S.-Japanese Relations Since 1960, National Security Archive and International House of Japan, 2000.Google Scholar
Kawasaki, Kōji. Liner notes in the album Kosugi Takehisa, Catch-wave ‘97. Tokyo: Disk Union, 2008.Google Scholar
Kosugi, Takehisa. Catch-wave ‘97. Tokyo: Disk Union, 2008.Google Scholar
Kosugi, Takehisa. ‘Intāmedia’ (Intermedia). Ongaku Geijutsu 27/4 (1969), 25.Google Scholar
KuroDalaiJee. Nikutai no anākizumu: 1960-nendai Nihon Bijutsu ni okeru Pafōmansu no Chika Suimyaku (Anarchy of the Body: Undercurrents of Performance Art in 1960s Japan). Tokyo: Guramu Bukkusu, 2010.Google Scholar
Marotti, William. ‘Simulacra and Subversion in the Everyday: Akasegawa Genpei's 1000-yen Copy, Critical Art, and the State’. Postcolonial Studies: Culture, Politics, Economy 4 (2001), 211–39.Google Scholar
Marotti, William. ‘Political Aesthetics: Activism, Everyday Life, and Art's Object in 1960s’ Japan’. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7 (2006), 606–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marotti, William. ‘Sounding the Everyday: The Music Group and Yasunao Tone's Early Work’, in Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language, vol. 4, Critical Ear Series, vol. 4. Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2007. 13–33.Google Scholar
Marotti, William. ‘The Performance of Violence and the Theater of Protest’. The American Historical Review 114 (2009), 97–135.Google Scholar
Marotti, William. Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Matsuda, Takeshi. Soft Power and Its Perils: U.S. Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependency. Washington, DC, and Stanford, CA: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Stanford University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
McLuhan, Marshall. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Merewether, Charles, Hiro, Rika Iezumi, Tomii, Reiko, and Institute Getty Research. Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950–1970. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007.Google Scholar
Munroe, Alexandra. Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.Google Scholar
Nihon Sengo Ongakushi Kenkyūkai. Nihon Sengo Ongakushi (Japanese Postwar Music History), Vol. 1. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2007.Google Scholar
Packard, George R.Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966.Google Scholar
Partner, Simon. Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Pedersen, Knud. ‘Comment on Mieko Shiomis Spatial Poems’. post, 20 August 2013. http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/195-spatial-poems-by-shiomi-mieko/comments#188 (accessed 15 May 2014).Google Scholar
Ross, Julian. ‘Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film’, in Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film, ed. Nagib, Lúcia and Jerslev, Anne. London and New York: I. B. Taurus, 2014. 249–67.Google Scholar
Sas, Miryam. Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011.Google Scholar
Sas, Miryam. ‘Intermedia 1955–1970’, in Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012.Google Scholar
Sas, Miryam. ‘By Other Hands: Environment and Apparatus in 1960s Intermedia’, in Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, ed. Miyao, Daisuke. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 383–415.Google Scholar
Sawaragi, Noi. Sensō to banpaku (War and world fairs). Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 2005.Google Scholar
Senior, David, and post editors, ‘Spatial Poems by Shiomi Mieko’. post, 11 July 2013. http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/195-spatial-poems-by-shiomi-mieko (accessed 15 May 2014).Google Scholar
Shiomi, Mieko. ‘Mieko Shiomi’. Art and Artists 8/7 (1973), 42–5.Google Scholar
Shiomi, Mieko. Furukusasu towa nanika: Nichijō to āto o musubitsuketa hitobito (What is Fluxus? The people who connected art and the everyday). Tokyo: Firumu Ātosha, 2005.Google Scholar
Shiomi, Mieko. Interview by the author. Private digital recording, 19 November 2010.Google Scholar
Tone, Yasunao. ‘Hapuningu Kara Intāmedia e’ (From happenings to intermedia). Eiga Hyōron 25 (1967), 80–3.Google Scholar
Tone, Yasunao. ‘A Tectonic Shift in Art: From the Expo to the Hippie Movement’, in From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan 1945–1989: Primary Documents, ed. Chong, Doryun, Hayashi, Michio, Fumihiko, Sumitomo, and Kajiya, Kenji. New York and Durham, NC: Museum of Modern Art, 2012. 241–7.Google Scholar
US Department of State. Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, United States Treaties and Other International Agreements, 1960.Google Scholar
Uno Everett, Yayoi. ‘“Scream Against the Sky”: Japanese Avant-garde Music in the Sixties’, in Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties, ed. Adlington, Robert. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 187–209.Google Scholar
Wade, Bonnie C.Composing Japanese Musical Modernity. Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Wise, J. Macgregor. ‘Assemblage’, in Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, ed. Stivale, Charles J.. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 77–87.Google Scholar
Yoshimoto, Midori. Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Yoshimoto, Midori. ‘From Space to Environment: The Origins of Kankyō and the Emergence of Intermedia Art in Japan’. Art Journal 67 (2008), 24–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yuasa, Jōji. Jinsei no nakaba: Ongaku no hirakareta chihei e. Tokyo: Keio Gijuku Daigaku Shuppankai, 1999.Google Scholar
Yuasa, Jōji. Interview by author, 31 July 2009.Google Scholar
Yuasa, Jōji. Interview by author, 10 January 2012.Google Scholar