Recall
Budding Flowers
I can still recall clearly the emotional landscapes of prewar Japan, enlivened by flower buds, the stream water in spring, and fields in summer. I can smell the soil and see the cabbage white butterflies. In the early part of Japan’s Showaera (1926-1989), a creative-dance studio was built in the silk-weaving town of Hachioji in Musashino, a suburb of Tokyo. Sunshine would glint off the cream-colored door and window frames of the stylish stand-alone building. Wearing training clothes that my mother had made and red dance shoes, I would take lessons as the youngest pupil. Everyone’s beaming smile was dazzling, without the slightest of gloom.
It wasn’t long before the war came. Military men in khaki uniforms strutted the streets and circulars of neighborhood associations were quickly passed around. Our stock of provisions and clothes was gradually running out. B29s constantly roared across the sky, above our heads shining black with grime. Two weeks before the war ended, our town was burned out beyond belief in the air raid. I was in thesixth grade. Our town was smoldering. Everything had shrunk. The lower part of every building was flattened to ashes. When I finally made it home from my place of refuge, our house was completely crushed and had turned to ashes.
After the end of the war, shanties were built on the burnt ruins in no time. With black-market goods rampant, the emerging new-rich became preeminent. While people were making every effort to rebuild their lives, our family was having a hard time getting back on our feet. My siblings and I had to find a way to be independent from our parents at early stages of our lives.
Since Japan lost the war, my passion for dance quickly faded. Around that time, I felt disgusted with my body and I disliked it. That translated to my rebellion against dance.
Traditional Japanese culture was well established and still in existence after the war. Unfortunately, there was little opportunity to come in contact with traditional performing arts during the post-war chaos. What shined before my eyes were avant-garde art performances from Western Europe. In hindsight, I think I was fortunate that I was completely on my own in the post-war devastation because that allowed me to explore my own art form.
Current of Times
Whatever the era, people in both Japan and the US have had to constantly compete and battle one another to survive in a highly complex and densely populated society.
People’s revolt against convention peaked in the early 1960s. We were fully exposed to expressions of abnormal beauty that went against convention, such as “denial of human beings” and “junk is also one form of art.” Once those expressions became the definition of beauty, people were panicked and confused. And they were swayed by the next trend that arrived.
Immediately after the end of the Vietnam War, people in the US were hysterical in the midst of liberation. Along with eroticism, dance became something for the masses all at once—dance explosions, punk rock, aerobics, tai chi, yoga, and breaking. On the other hand, many professional dancers were open for business but getting none.
But once dancers had strong ambitions to express themselves earnestly and the sense of “living on stage” became mainstream, the trend of art performances changed at a dizzying pace, with movements like minimal arts, post-modernism, new wave, next wave, and then the next-next wave emerging one after another.
Japan traced the same trends, exactly in that order. But unlike the cool and apathetic trends in the US, the mainstream in Japan was wet and sentimental “BUTOH” in its embryo. The Japanese art world embraced the underground movement, the red tent, and Yukio Mishima’s suicide by disembowelment.
Up until today, many a person has been buffeted by countless passing trends and lost his/her sense of self. Both music and art suffered the same fate and weredevoured by commercial design. Studies on “the core of human existence” have been pushed aside and value lies in visible output. Now that the world is plagued by economic imbalances and tilting towards the resurgence of war, if people become obsessed with Olympic-like competitiveness, will we repeat the same history?
No one can keep us from competing against one another.
Maybe the only solution is for each and every one of us to take that energy of competing with others and direct it towards self-control. I sincerely hope the spirit of seeking how we should live as human beings lives on.
Translated by Nanami Araki
