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The 1970 World Exposition in Osaka (Nihon bankoku hakurankai; referred to as Expo
70 hereafter) was the first world exposition hosted by an Asian country and, until
recently, the largest and best attended exposition in history. Expo 70 sprawled over
three-hundred-thirty hectares of newly developed land in Suita City, a northern suburb
of Osaka, with seventy-seven nations participating in the event. During its six-month
run from March 15 through September 13, the number of visitors reached 64,218,770,
more than half of Japans population at the time.1 Although the impact of Expo 70 was
immediately felt on Japanese society and culture, it took more than three decades for
scholars to historically assess the monumental event. Since the millennium, Expo 70
has become one of the most frequently discussed topics in the Japanese art world, but
little has been published on the topic outside Japan.
The purpose of this special volume, Expo 70 and Japanese Art: Dissonant
Voices, is to present Expo 70 as a cacophony of dissonant voices rather than a
harmonious chorus orchestrated by one ideology. By featuring wide-ranging attitudes
and strategies of artists who participated in Expo 70 as well as those who opposed it,
the volume seeks to reclaim the richness of Expo 70, which has been overlooked.
Serving as the first English-language resource on Expo 70 for artists, scholars,
and writers worldwide, this volume not only features current research on Expo 70 by
international scholars, but also English translations of contemporary writings and visual
statements by Japanese artists and writers. By interweaving contemporary statements
from ca. 1970 with present-day academic analyses instead of separating them, this
volume contextualizes the past within the present. This new organization should
also help readers discover less apparent connections among individual articles. While
the majority of contributors are art historians or curators, the entire volume addresses
Japanese social contexts ca. 1970 and will be useful to the broader discipline of social
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studies. Furthermore, the inclusion of two fictional writings from the time of Expo 70,
translated by Kyoko Selden and Alisa Freedman, paints a fuller picture of the era and
makes this issue relevant in the field of literature as well. Finally, Hyunjung Chos select
annotated bibliography of Expo 70 is the first of its kind in English and will provide a
starting point for scholars interested in this relatively new topic.
Expo 70: A Turning Point and Polarized Discourse
As this volume demonstrates, Expo 70 marked a major turning point not only in
Japanese art, architecture, and design, but also in the history of world expositions as a
whole. The first essay featured in this volume, Japan World Exposition Reconsidering
Expo Art by the curator Nakai Yasuyuki, translated by Mika Yoshitake, traces Japans
participation in world expositions dating back to 1873 and examines how the nature of the
expo and Japanese art displayed at expos have changed over the course of the twentieth
century. Expo 70 was a major benchmark in Japanese history as well, commemorating
twenty-five years after World War Two by realizing Japans long-held dream of hosting
a world exposition since 1940. Following the success of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics,
it was regarded as the best opportunity to establish Japan as one of the world powers,
equal to European countries and the United States. In his book Expo Syndrome: Postwar
Politics and Cultural Struggle in Postwar Japan (Banpaku gens: sengo seiji no jubaku,
2005), the sociologist Yoshimi Shunya has argued that world expositions have functioned
as a kind of syndrome, namely, a system that enables a collusion between the populist
desire for wealth and national development policy.2 For many Japanese artists, Expo
70 provided unprecedented opportunities to realize ambitious and big-budget projects
that would otherwise never have been conceived and sponsorship by the Japanese
government and corporations made the previously impossible, possible.
Due to national backing and the political context of Japan at the time, however,
art created for Expo 70 (Expo Art hereafter) was widely criticized for its inherent
propagandistic nature by artists, architects, designers, and critics, even before it opened.
A group of photographers, including Taki Kji, issued the photo magazine Provoke in
1968 not only to attack conventional photography, but also to critique the nationalistic
phase of the country in anticipation of Expo 70.3 The same year, a number of artists and
critics participated in the five-day symposium Expos 1968: Say Something Now, I Am
Looking for Something to Say (Expos 1968: nanika ittekure, ima, sagasu) held at the
Sgetsu Art Center in Tokyo, to probe the state of contemporary art in advance of Expo
70. The organizers and participants of this symposium included those who had already
committed to producing pavilions at the expo and expressed their visions and concerns
of the expo through performance art and mixed media presentations rather than direct
discussions.4 In the meantime, the 1968 May Revolution in Paris intensified university
upheavals and the anti-Vietnam War movement in Japan, which had begun in the
mid-1960s, and fueled artists opposition to Expo 70.
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Soon, the anti-expo sentiment among artists was crystallized into the analogy of
Expo 70 participants to war propaganda painters during World War Two. In its July
1969 statement, Appeal to Artists, Bikyt (short for Bijutsuka Kyt Kaigi, or
Artists Joint-Struggle Council) advocated the destruction of every artistic institution
that they considered a part of modern rationalism, including Expo 70 and Tokyo
Biennale. Critical of artists political complacency, Bikyt claimed, At a certain critical
point, apathy tends to make us stampede with the majority, like war painters did.5 As
Reiko Tomii has pointed out, The university conflicts of 1968-69 incited art students
radicalism and these artist activists brought issues surrounding the institution of Art/
art to both militant and theoretical extremes.6 Bikyts highly politicized rhetoric
was echoed by other anti-expo coalitions, such as Architects 70 Action Committee,7
and Expo70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group (Banpaku Hakai Kyt-ha).8 In addition,
Japans anti-Vietnam War movement, Beheiren (short for Betonamu ni heiwa o! Shimin
reng, or Japan Peace for Vietnam! Committee), joined forces with the anti-expo
groups in 1969.9 By then, prominent critics Hary Ichir and Taki Kji had intensified
their criticism of Expo 70 for what they felt was a hidden government agenda to
distract the nation from the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty and to establish
domination through technology and communication while incorporating intellectual
elites within the institution.10
To these artists and critics who allied with the New Left, Expo 70 symbolized
the end of art in which art was co-opted by commercialism and technology and lost
its autonomy. The success of the expo meant their defeat and the nullification of their
struggle; their top concern, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, was automatically renewed.
It was amid this mood of disillusionment and desperation that the writer Mishima Yukio
resorted to his public death by ritual suicide at the Ichigaya self-defense forces base on
November 25, 1970, in his failed attempt to incite a coup dtatto restore imperial sovereignty. Even though Mishima believed in his own sect of ultra-nationalism, he shared in
the acute criticism of the Japanese government by the dissident students of the New Left.11
The mood of disillusionment and insecurity overturned the dreamy era of progress
leading up to Expo 70 and prevailed throughout the 1970s, beginning with the ominous
incident of the Yodog Hijacking (March 31, 1970) during the expo and the rise of
pollution issues and the oil shock of 1973 and 1979. In his book World Fairs and World
Wars (Sens to banpaku, 2005), the art critic Sawaragi Noi argues that these depressing
events contributed to the propagation of the Armageddon fantasy in 1970s Japan and
produced such best sellers as Japan Sinks (Nihon chinbotsu, 1973) by the science
fiction author Komatsu Saky, who was involved in the planning of Expo 70.12 Sawaragi
further argues that Komatsus eschatological vision was shared by other planners of
the expo and their anticipation for a dystopia might have translated into a darker
undercurrent within the expo.13 Sawaragis fatalistic narrative was partly informed by
artists of his generation, including Yanobe Kenji, whose adolescence was affected by
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the pessimistic mood of the 1970s and subsequently produced artworks harking back to
Expo 70.14 Their nostalgia for the bright utopian future presented at the expo was mixed
with disillusionment that such a future would never arrive, producing complex feelings
toward Expo 70. The artist Murakami Takashi has addressed the prevailing impact of
Expo 70 on contemporary subculture including the animation with which his generation
grew up in his exhibition Little Boy: The Arts of Japans Exploding Subculture (2005).15
Within this fatalistic perspective from the twenty-first century Sawaragi tactically
revived the analogy of Expo 70 artists as war painters that was used in the pre-1970
anti-expo discourse.16 Although he takes a sympathetic stance toward some of the
expo participants, such as the architect Isozaki Arata, he uses their episodes merely
as a backdrop to reinforce the earlier comparison of Expo 70 to World War Two.17
While Sawaragis polemical approach has been widely circulated, this kind of political
rhetoric polarizes the issues surrounding Expo 70, creating a superficial categorization
of winners and losers, of heroes and villains, and denies a more nuanced and sensitive
interpretation of the event. This issue proposes instead a revisionist approach that
takes into account the varied gradations between black and white. By reevaluating the
multiplicity of positions surrounding the expo, the issue seeks to paint a picture of the
complex manifold realities of Expo 70 and its milieu in order to reconsider the
previously polarized critical discourse.
Intermedia/Environment Art
Despite the long shadow cast from the past, some scholars have finally begun to
reassess the actual contents of Expo 70 and the development of intermedia art, which
had its origins in the late 1950s and culminated in Expo 70.18 Japanese art history tended
to regard intermedia art superfluous and insignificant compared to Mono-ha (School
of Things), which emerged partly in reaction to the political upheaval in the late 1960s
and has received considerable attention in recent scholarship for its refusal of Westcentric modernism.19 In Japan, intermedia art was synonymous with Environment Art
(Kanky geijutsu) and both terms are the key to understanding the artistic and conceptual
underpinning of Expo 70. In fact, the Expo Event Research Committee (Bankokuhaku
Ibento Chsa Iinkai), formed in early 1967 to undertake preparatory research for Expo
70, examined varied topics such as festivals (matsuri), music, space, and Environment
Art, which was assigned to the art critic Tno Yoshiaki.20 In addition to Tno, the core
members of this research committee included the architect Isozaki Arata, the music
critic and composer Akiyama Kuniharu, and the artist Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, who had
participated in a groundbreaking interdisciplinary art exhibition and event held in Tokyo
in 1966 titled From Space to Environment (Kkan kara kanky e). The Environment
Society (Kanky no kai), which included the aforementioned avant-garde luminaries,
publicly heralded the term environment (kanky) to mean an actually occurring
dynamic relationship between a human and his or her surroundings, as opposed to its
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interactive and performance art to the general public and their work was not limited to
fine art connoisseurs.
Situated at the other end of the spectrum and expressing overt criticism of Expo
70 was, surprisingly, its theme producer, Okamoto Tar. As early as 1968, Okamoto
openly stated that he envisioned his Tower of the Sun as an anti-expo monument. As
discussed in Bert Winther-Tamakis essay in this volume, To Put on a Big Face: The
Globalist Stance of Okamoto Tars Tower of the Sun for the Japan World Exposition,
Okamotos defensive stance may have been a reaction to critics of the expo such as Hary
Ichir. Instead of fulfilling the expectation of the expo organizers, Okamoto decided to
disrupt the order by creating something in opposition to what he considered the products
of modernist machines. Inspired by prehistoric Jmon and ancient Mayan art, which he
discusses at length in his Magic Power of Beauty (Bi no jyuryoku, 1971), translated by
Reiko Tomii for this volume,25 Tower of the Sun was conceived as a giant personification
of the sun and an anti-modern symbol. Okamoto writes: While Tange Kenzs Grand
Roof was mechanistic, I created something totally primitive and let it break through the
roof. I think anti-harmony is real harmony.26 The project architect of the Festival
Plaza, Isozaki Arata, recalled later that he felt stupefied when he learned that Tanges
Grand Roof, the zenith of the latest architectural technology, would be penetrated by
Okamotos giant phallic tower, or primitive folk art. Isozakis Counter Recollection
(Han kais, 2001), his critical memoir on his involvement in Expo 70, which includes
the preceding statement has been translated for this volume by Machida Gen.27 Isozakis
assessment of Okamotos overpowering tower has proved to be prophetic as the Tower
of the Sun is one of the few remaining monuments at Expo Park today.28
It is ironic that the anti-expo movement considered Okamotos Tower of the Sun
to be the ultimate symbol of the modernist expo and did not recognize his anti-modernist
intentions.29 KuroDalaiJees essay in this volume, Performance Art and/as Activism:
Expo 70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group, discusses how anti-expo artist groups, such
as Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension) and Kokuin (Heralding Shadow), employed ritualiststyle performances that are inherently oppositional to Expo 70 in their attempt to attack
the modern with pre-modern Japanese elements. Similarly, the artists who produced the
Textiles Pavilion at Expo 70 intentionally used anti-modern elements in their design
to subvert the expos ultra-modernism, as examined in my essay, Textiles Pavilion:
An Anomaly and Critique of Expo 70, in this volume. The clash of the pre-modern
and modern was one of the most debated issues of Expo 70 and is addressed across the
various essays in this volume.
What made Okamotos position confusing was that he did not view the avant-garde
as a part of modernism, but rather, as a counter force. His assessment was not consistent
with the generally accepted view of modernism and caused some misunderstanding and
confusion. The anthropologist Umehara Takeshi, for example, found Okamotos art to be
inconsistent in that it relied on the modern ego while still maintaining its ties to Jmon
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observations and reveals his deeper reflections on the issues surrounding Expo 70 and
concerns for the future. Reflective of Harys socialist orientation, the harshest criticism
in his article exposes how the intended protagonists of the Festival Plaza, regular
citizens, succumbed to the position of the spectator, passively receiving a festival
(matsuri) bestowed on them by their master (okami). Even though Hary understands
the complex positions of the artists who participated in Expo 70 and acknowledges
their artistic aspirations and intentions, he points out their contradictions and failures.
For example, while praising Isozakis concept of the Festival Plaza as an environment
for an interactive site and its underlying philosophy of an invisible monument, Hary
charges that the actual plaza became a plaza imposed upon people by the authorities in
power. The third section of the essay constitutes Harys detailed accounts of his personal
and candid responses to his experience of a myriad of pavilion presentations and is also
useful to our study. Commenting on the problem of the image-overload at Expo 70,
Hary presciently concludes that information and images are todays mononoke (sprits
of things), which lure humans and control them.
Tange Kenz, Isozaki Arata, and Kurokawa Kishthe three key participating
architects in Expo 70are the subject of Hyunjung Chos essay, Expo 70: A Model City
of an Information Society. Through close examination of works by these architects, Cho
delves deeper into the futuristic vision behind Expo 70. Although these architects Expo
70 projects were received negatively as a symptom of the breakdown of modernism
and degraded as the precursor of commercialized postmodernism, Cho recontextualizes
them in the new paradigm of architecture and urbanism in a postindustrial information
society. Varied positions and visions that the three architects held in relation to Expo 70
are articulated in detail.
This volume is greatly enriched by the full-page reproductions of photographs
and visual statements by artists who were clearly opposed to participating in the expo.
Yasufumi Nakamoris essay, Criticism of Expo 70 in Print: Journals Ken, Bijutsu
tech, and Dezain hihy, examines in detail the photographer Tmatsu Shmei and
the artists Akasegawa Genpei, Matsuzawa Yutaka, and Senda Mitsuru, all of whom
published their visual and conceptual reactions to Expo 70 in art journals such as KEN
and Bijutsu tech. The accompanying texts by Akasegawa and Matsuzawa have been
translated by Reiko Tomii. Nakamori also discusses the June 1968 issue of Dezain hihy,
which covered the aforementioned symposium, Expos 1968, as a pretext of the expo
criticism in printed media. These contemporary publications offered an invaluable space
for artists and writers to express their opposition to the mainstream.
The final section of this volume on Expo 70 reveals two different aspects of
internationalization in contemporary art circa 1970. Hiroko Ikegamis essay, World
Without Boundary?: E.A.T and the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo 70, Osaka, analyzes how
the American collective Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T. hereafter) realized
their most complex interactive environment to date through international collaborations.
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E.A.T.s experimentalism, however, could not be compromised even with the demands of
their sponsor, PepsiCo, and they were forced to leave the expo only after a short period.
E.A.T.s radical ideas questioned the simplistic utopianism and commercialism behind
PepsiCos theme, World Without Boundary and critiqued Expo 70 as a whole by
extension. The Pepsi Pavilion presented yet another dissonant voice within Expo 70.
While E.A.T.s participation in Expo 70 marked the height of internationalization
in intermedia art, Reiko Tomiis essay, Toward Tokyo Biennale 1970: Shapes of the
International in the Age of International Contemporaneity, illuminates a decisively
critical approach to the rapidly internationalizing field of contemporary art. Organized
simultaneously with Expo 70, Tokyo Biennale can be seen as a dissonance that
countered Expo 70 in several ways. By intentionally presenting the phenomenon of
ephemeral art through site-specific installations and conceptually oriented works, the
commissioner of the biennale, Nahakara Ysuke, contrasted such non-art direction
of contemporary art with the high-budget intermedia art presented at Expo 70. Tokyo
Biennales innovative curatorial strategy of theme-based as opposed to nation-based
representation set a precedent for numerous biennales and triennales that take place
worldwide today. In this regard, Tokyo Biennale can be seen as a counterpoint to
Expo 70 and Tomiis close examination of the former sheds light onto two different
shapes of the international.
As these essays demonstrate, Expo 70 was a remarkable turning point not only in
Japanese art and architecture, but also in the broader currents of contemporary art.
In a macro view, Expo 70 symbolized the end of modernism and the rise of postmodernism. Intermedia art that flourished at the expo became eclipsed by the conceptual
and self-critical tendency known as Non-Art, which reverberated with the international
phenomenon of institutional critique. We hope that this volume will serve as groundwork
for future studies circa 1970 and further promote the inclusion of Japanese contemporary
art in global art history.
Epilogue
These dissonant voices surrounding Expo 70 have particular resonance today as we have
recently witnessed the Fukushima nuclear disaster that followed the Great East Japan
Earthquake on March 11, 2011. Little did we know until this disaster that Japan had
developed into one of the most nuclear-powered and dependent nations in the world and
that the electricity needed for Expo 70 had been provided by the then brand-new Tsuruga
Nuclear Plant.36 In this volume, Winther-Tamaki articulates how Okamoto expressed
his concern of nuclear apocalypse through the Black Sun in the Tower of the Sun and
his mural Tomorrows Myth (1968-69). The latter was executed simultaneously with
Okamotos expo projects in Mexico City and has recently been restored and relocated
to a covered passageway leading to Shibuya station, Tokyo. The strong anti-nuclear
message that Okamoto expressed in Tomorrows Myth has become ever more relevant
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today in light of the disaster. Tellingly, the collective of young artists ChimPom added
their painting of the Fukushima nuclear plant to fit the originally indented lower-right
corner of Okamotos mural, in order to express that now is a product of the past,
referring to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented in Okamotos work.37
The group sought to pay homage to Okamoto by borrowing his caricaturist style and
vivid colors. Although their addition to the mural was promptly removed by the police,
their guerrilla actions were videotaped and broadcast on the internet. While they
were heavily criticized by some, their subsequent exhibition in Tokyo drew thousands
of visitors in a week. Would Okamoto have approved of their audacious undertaking?
Perhaps he would have encouraged younger artists to speak out against the governments
inability to protect its people. Through their respective creative output, the artists and
writers featured in this volume provide insight into how we can find and express our
critical voices while facing a volatile turning point in history.
Notes
1.
Japan Association for the 1970 World
Exposition, Nihon banpakuhaku
kshiki kiroku [Japan World Exposition, Official Report], vol. 2 (Suita:
Commemorative Association for
the Japan World Exposition, 1972),
374. The record number of visitors
was recently surpassed by that of the
Shanghai World Exposition in 2010.
2.
Yoshimi Shunya, Banpaku gens: sengo seiji no jubaku [Expo Syndrome:
Postwar Politics and Cultural Struggle
in Postwar Japan] (Tokyo: Chikuma
Shob, 2005). This book has been
recently reprinted as Banpaku to sengo
Nihon [Expo and Postwar Japan]
(Kdansha Gakujutsu Shinsho, 2011)
with a new introduction reflecting on
the Fukushima nuclear plant crisis
and Japans postwar development of
nuclear plants.
3.
Charles Merewether, Disjunctive
Modernity: The Practice of Artistic
Experimentation in Postwar Japan, in
Charles Merewether and Rika Izumi
Hiro, eds., Art Anti-Art Non-Art:
Experimentation in Public Sphere in
Postwar Japan, 1950-70 (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2007), 26-27.
10
4.
Sgetsu Art Center, Expos 1968:
nanika ittekure, ima, sagasu, invitations and programs, 1968. [Courtesy
of the Research Center for the Arts
and Arts Administration, Keio
University.]
5.
Bikyt, Bijutsuka e no teisho [An
Appeal to Artists], mimeographed
flier (5 July 1969), reprinted in
Concerning the Institution of Art:
Conceptualism in Japan, in Global
Conceptualism: Points of Origin,
1950-80s (New York: Queens Museum
of Art, 1999), 156. I thank Reiko Tomii
for pointing me to this reproduction.
6.
Reiko Tomii, Concerning the Institution of Art: Conceptualism in Japan,
in Global Conceptualism: Points of
Origin, 1950-80s (New York: Queens
Museum of Art, 1999), 23.
7.
Kenchikuka 70 Kd Iinkai [Architects 70 Action Committee] sought
to rally with anti-war/anti-Anpo
joint-struggle of revolutionary workers, farmers, students, and citizens,
reject and destroy Expo 70 and its
authority, in order to explore a perspective for a new architectural move-
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11.
Hisaaki Yamanouchi, Mishima
Yukio and His Suicide, Modern
Asian Studies 6, 1 (1972): 1. Also see
Mishima Yukio and Tdai Zenkyt,
Bi to Kydtai to Tdai ts [Beauty,
Community, and The University of
Tokyo Struggle], originally printed
in 1969 (Tokyo: Kadokawa Bunko,
2002).
12.
For the English translation, see
Komatsu Saky, Japan Sinks: A Novel
about Earthquakes, trans. Michael
Gallaher (New York: Kodansha
International, 1995).
13.
Sawaragi Noi, Sens to banpaku/
World Fairs and World Wars (Tokyo:
Bijutsu Shuppansha, 2005), 34-37.
14.
Sawaragi discusses at length how
Yanobe, among others, grew up
as Armageddon children with an
obsession for ruins of the future.
Ibid., 152-64. See also: Gunhild
Borggreen, Ruins of the Future:
Yanobe Kenji Revisits Expo 70,
Performance Paradigm 2 (March
2006): 119-31.
15.
The image of the Tower of the Sun
by Okamoto Tar loomed large in the
beginning of the exhibition at Japan
Society Gallery and its entry was the
first in the eponymous exhibition
catalogue. Murakami discusses
the complex feeling his generation
has toward Expo 70 in his essay.
Murakami Takashi, ed., Little Boy:
The Arts of Japans Exploding Subculture (New York: Japan Society,
2005), 2-5, 118-21.
16.
Sawaragi, Sens to banpaku, Chapter 8.
17.
In a recent lecture, Isozaki pointed
out that Sawaragis equating of Expo
Art to war propaganda painting is too
simplistic and that he only examines
the surface of the issues concern-
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