Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan

by William Marotti

Overview

During the 1960s a group of young artists in Japan challenged official forms of politics and daily life through interventionist art practices. William Marotti situates this phenomenon in the historical and political contexts of Japan after the Second World War and the international activism of the 1960s. The Japanese government renewed its Cold War partnership with the United States in 1960, defeating protests against a new security treaty through parliamentary action and the use of riot police. Afterward, the government promoted a depoliticized everyday world of high growth and consumption, creating a sanitized national image to present in the Tokyo Olympics of 1964. Artists were first to challenge this new political mythology. Marotti examines their political art, and the state's aggressive response to it. He reveals the challenge mounted in projects such as Akasegawa Genpei's 1,000-yen prints, a group performance on the busy Yamanote train line, and a plan for a giant guillotine in the Imperial Plaza. Focusing on the annual Yomiuri Indépendant exhibition, he demonstrates how artists came together in a playful but powerful critical art, triggering judicial and police response. Money, Trains, and Guillotines expands our understanding of the role of art in the international 1960s, and of the dynamics of art and policing in Japan.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822349808
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/27/2013
Series:	Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	458
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

William Marotti is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Read an Excerpt

MONEY, TRAINS, AND GUILLOTINES

ART AND REVOLUION IN 1960S JAPAN

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By WILLIAM MAROTTI

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4980-8

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE VISION OF THE POLICE

On November 1, 1965, the artist Akasegawa Genpei, along with two printers whom he had never met, were indicted for criminal violation of the 1895 Law Controlling the Imitation of Currency and Securities (tsuka oyobi shoken mozo torishimari ho). Akasegawa had ordered some three thousand monochrome prints of the 1,000-yen bill from the print shops in the first four months of 1963 (figs. 1.1a and 1.1b). Following a prolonged, though fitful, police inquiry beginning in January 1964, his indictment closed this first phase of investigation, while commencing the trial and appeal process that would occupy him for the remainder of the decade. The terms of this prosecution open a window onto the nature of the contestation between insurgent artists and the state and the wider politics of culture.

INDICTMENT:

1. Defendants Akasegawa and Ito, on the basis of a conspiracy to make life-size prints of the face of the 1,000-yen bill, did near the end of January, 1963, at the aforementioned Sankei Print Shop, using a life-size copper plate made of the face of the 1,000-yen bill prepared by defendant Akasegawa using photo engraving, cause the employee of the print shop, Kojima Yasuo, to print in monochrome a life-size obverse of the 1,000-yen bill on the face of cream-colored high grade paper in green ink, and to print on the reverse information as to a painting exhibition by defendant Akasegawa, and in so doing, manufacturing 300 prints having an exterior confusable with a life-size 1,000-yen bill, and

2. Defendants Akasegawa and Yasumasa, on the basis of a conspiracy to make life-size prints of the face of the 1,000-yen bill, did on three occasions between the middle of March and mid-May of the same year ..., all at the Yasumasa Print Shop, using the previously noted copper plate, either cause the employee of the print shop, Akiyama Kihei, to print in monochrome a life-size obverse of the 1,000-yen bill on the face of paper, or defendant Yasumasa did print in monochrome a life-size obverse of the 1,000-yen bill on the face of paper, and in so doing, manufactured 2,700 prints having an exterior confusable with a life-size 1,000-yen bill. [These actions are] punishable under Articles 1 and 2 of the tsuka oyobi shoken mozo torishimari ho, and article 60 of the Criminal Code.

Mozo, the "imitation" of currency criminalized by the 1895 law, is distinguished from gizo, the crime of counterfeiting currency. Counterfeiting occurs when the resemblance "is to the extent that it gives the impression of being the genuine thing; when it does not rise to this point, it is called mozo," a lesser offense. This legal distinction came about historically; it was not set forth as such from the beginning. The law against mozo was enacted a bare six years after the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution of 1889, under which all branches of government were subsumed under imperial sovereignty. It prohibited the imitation of currency and securities, defined as "the manufacture or sale of things with an exterior confusable" with them ("seifu hakko shihei, ginko shihei ... ni magirawashiki gaikan wo yusuru mono wo seizo shi mata wa hanbai suru koto"). It is the adjective magirawashiki (confusable) upon which the definition turns; it usually refers to something difficult to distinguish from something else, that is, a very close resemblance. Punishment for this offense under the law ranged from one month to three years imprisonment at hard labor, plus a fine of between 5 and 50 yen. This was the first attempt by the Meiji state to fix penalties for the forgery and counterfeiting of currency and securities.

With the promulgation of the Criminal Code in 1907, which included a specific counterfeiting offense called gizo, the opportunity for a two-tiered system of punishment for money resemblance was established in legal practice. The Criminal Code, through all of its many subsequent revisions, did not supersede or repeal the previous patchwork of individually promulgated criminal laws, unless a provision of the Code directly specified this effect. Neither were those laws struck from the books when the new postwar Constitution was adopted. Thus from 1907 onward, when faced with a case of money resemblance, prosecutors could at their discretion indict under either law. At some point common prosecutorial practice articulated the distinction between the more specific crime of gizo, counterfeiting or forgery, and the broader category of mozo reported in the legal reference works. Legal practice thus understood the mozo law's criminalization of items "confusable" (magirawashiki) with currency and securities as some sort of resemblance short of "giving the impression of being the genuine article"; the exact meaning of "confusable" is left open, broadly criminalizing potentially all resemblance short of outright counterfeiting. The reach of this law is further extended by the fact that, unlike the gizo offense, the mozo law did not require any intent to use the item in question as money.

Many of the Meiji criminal laws and codes were directly modeled on similar provisions from European court systems; most likely the mozo statute of 1895 was derived from one of these. The later positioning of the law in practice as criminalizing resemblance itself instantiated another feature of the Meiji Constitution, under which the law was promulgated: the figure and prerogatives of the emperor, in whose name the state acted. Under the two-tier penalty system of gizo-mozo, the law reserved broad powers to defend the state's and the emperor's right to monopolize the printing of money and define its reality, its genuineness. The two statutes thus defend officially "real" money from two different sorts of challenges. Gizo becomes the crime of simulating money, making items which are intended to pass for currency, while mozo criminalizes items that, regardless of intent, resemble but are distinguishable from currency—in other words, identifiable simulacra of currency. The meaning of the latter is altered through this practice: magirawashiki gaikan, "confusable exterior," becomes "confusing exterior"; the criminalized item is no longer something likely to pass for currency but rather something that initially looks like currency but on second glance is obviously not and that thereby confuses the everyday, uncritical perception of the genuine article.

Akasegawa was well aware of the difference between simulations and simulacra and their relative critical potentials. It is the recognizable simulacrum, the imperfect copy, which raises expectations and excites desire only to disappoint, that points to the constructedness of the genuine status of actual government printed currency. It does not demystify in itself; rather it disrupts the everyday, uncritical perceptions of the reality of money, all through near resemblance. Consequently the prosecution of Akasegawa for currency imitation, mozo, defended the official reality of money against his exploration of its nature. The state reserved and defended its prerogative of fixing this reality and maintaining belief in it through Meiji-era criminal statutes, established under the expansive authority of the imperial state. By the terms of this state authority, Akasegawa's crime of mozo amounted to a kind of blasphemy, or better, lese-majesté, an affront to the emperor's prerogatives as exercised by the state as his instrument. Hovering behind the prosecution in 1964 using the law of 1895 was the phantom of the prewar state, the Meiji Constitution, a Doppelgänger of the postwar Constitution, an old order whose expansive auth
(Continues...)

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All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Chronology of Select Events xiii

Introduction 1

Part I. Art against the Police: Akasegawa Genpei's 1,000-Yen Prints, the State, and the Borders of the Everyday 9

1. The Vision of the Police 15

2. The Occupation, the New Emperor System, and the Figure of Japan 37

3. The Process of Art 74

Part II. Artistic Practice Finds Its Object: The Avant-Garde and the Yomiuri Indépendant 111

4. The Yomiuri Indépendant: Making and Displacing History 117

5. The Yomiuri Anpan 152

Part III. Theorizing Art and Revolution 201

6. Beyond the Guillotine: Speaking of Art / Art Speaking 207

7. Naming the Real 245

8. The Moment of the Avant-Garde 284

Epilogue 317

Notes 319

Select Bibliography 393

Index 405

What People are Saying About This

Maximum Embodiment: Yoga, the Western Painting of Japan, 1912–1955 - Bert Winther-Tamaki

"The annual Yomiuri Indépendant exhibition, the Hi Red Center group, and the ¥1000 Note Trial are surely among the most significant avant-garde initiatives anywhere in the world in the 1960s. This stunning study assesses the oppositional politics of these and other Japanese avant-garde undertakings by probing deep into the history of that which they opposed: the arrogation of power by the postwar Japanese state over everyday life. In William Marotti's hard-hitting theoretical analysis and accessible prose, the seemingly nonsensical antics of avant-gardists become occasions for grasping fundamental truths about the political makeup of postwar Japanese society."

The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation - Thomas LaMarre

"Money, Trains, and Guillotines is the first extended study of art and activism in Japan during the 1960s, and as such it constitutes a major contribution not only to the history of Japanese art and politics but also to our knowledge of activism in the 1960s."

Editorial Reviews

"[An] innovative, carefully crafted interdisciplinary history of the cultural origins of Japan's 1968. . . . Appropriate to its rich and diverse visual subject matter, it is also beautifully illustrated and produced. Its provocative interrogation of conventional scholarly boundaries of discipline, chronology, narrative, and ontology, at the level not only of theory but also of practice, suggests a kinship with the efforts of the artists whose story it so carefully and sympathetically excavates."--Ethan Mark "American Historical Review"

"Marotti's detailed analysis of the Japanese artists' evolution from surrealist sensibility to interventionist action contributes immensely to our understanding of how the political aesthetic so characteristic of the 1960s emerged simultaneously in numerous countries.... A vivid, highly informed and richly rewarding investigation of art and politics under post-1945 capitalism in Japan."--Justin Jesty "Art in America"

"Marotti's subtle readings of these texts, underappreciated in Japanese scholarship, make a strong case for their importance within art history. Money, Trains, and Guillotines not only fills in a major gap within English-language understanding of postwar Japanese art. Once translated into Japanese--which it should be, promptly--it should sharpen the discourse within Akasegawa's home country."--Kenji Kajiya "Pacific Affairs"

"None of these art interventions documented in Money, Trains and Guillotines are fully understandable without the background of the politics of the time, and the author skillfully presents both art and politics, focused and interwoven. Author William Marotti's twenty-year effort has produced a fine book."--Mike Mosher "Leonardo Reviews"

"This book will form a major addition to my teaching, providing an important counter-balance to the dominant narrative of a postwar Japan marching in drumbeat towards a capitalist future. In illuminating the ways in which culture and radical politics were enmeshed at this key juncture of postwar Japanese history, Marotti highlights the importance of the everyday as 'the central political arena for dissent and for policing.'"--Mark Pendleton "Journal of Asian Studies"

"William Marotti explicates the social and political context of the Yomiuri Independent avant-garde. . . . [A] remarkably detailed and vivid view of the activities of Akasegawa and his circle."--Mark Schilling "Japan Times"

"William Marotti's book is a landmark study of political art and the politics of artistic expression in contemporary Japan. . . . Marotti uncovers a fascinating, provocative, and sometimes-shocking history of political art. . .. Marotti's attention to detail and to the emotional life of his subjects is truly engrossing in the best traditions of microhistory. . . . [T]his is a richly documented, thoughtprovoking, and marvelously sculptured piece of scholarship that will be immensely enriching for anyone interested in issues of constitutional freedoms, artistic expression, and the intersection of politics and the everyday in postwar Japan."--Simon Avenell "Journal of Japanese Studies"

From the Publisher

[An] innovative, carefully crafted interdisciplinary history of the cultural origins of Japan’s 1968. . . . Appropriate to its rich and diverse visual subject matter, it is also beautifully illustrated and produced. Its provocative interrogation of conventional scholarly boundaries of discipline, chronology, narrative, and ontology, at the level not only of theory but also of practice, suggests a kinship with the efforts of the artists whose story it so carefully and sympathetically excavates.

American Historical Review - Ethan Mark

William Marotti explicates the social and political context of the Yomiuri Independent avant-garde. . . . [A] remarkably detailed and vivid view of the activities of Akasegawa and his circle.

Japan Times - Mark Schilling

"This book will form a major addition to my teaching, providing an important counter-balance to the dominant narrative of a postwar Japan marching in drumbeat towards a capitalist future. In illuminating the ways in which culture and radical politics were enmeshed at this key juncture of postwar Japanese history, Marotti highlights the importance of the everyday as 'the central political arena for dissent and for policing.'"

Journal of Asian Studies - Mark Pendleton

William Marotti’s book is a landmark study of political art and the politics of artistic expression in contemporary Japan. . . . Marotti uncovers a fascinating, provocative, and sometimes-shocking history of political art. . ..  Marotti’s attention to detail and to the emotional life of his subjects is truly engrossing in the best traditions of microhistory. . . .  [T]his is a richly documented, thoughtprovoking, and marvelously sculptured piece of scholarship that will be immensely enriching for anyone interested in issues of constitutional freedoms, artistic expression, and the intersection of politics and the everyday in postwar Japan.

Journal of Japanese Studies - Simon Avenell

[An] innovative, carefully crafted interdisciplinary history of the cultural origins of Japan’s 1968. . . . Appropriate to its rich and diverse visual subject matter, it is also beautifully illustrated and produced. Its provocative interrogation of conventional scholarly boundaries of discipline, chronology, narrative, and ontology, at the level not only of theory but also of practice, suggests a kinship with the efforts of the artists whose story it so carefully and sympathetically excavates.

Ethan Markn Historical Review

Marotti's detailed analysis of the Japanese artists' evolution from surrealist sensibility to interventionist action contributes immensely to our understanding of how the political aesthetic so characteristic of the 1960s emerged simultaneously in numerous countries…. A vivid, highly informed and richly rewarding investigation of art and politics under post-1945 capitalism in Japan.

Art in America - Justin Jesty

None of these art interventions documented in Money, Trains and Guillotines are fully understandable without the background of the politics of the time, and the author skillfully presents both art and politics, focused and interwoven. Author William Marotti's twenty-year effort has produced a fine book.

Leonardo Reviews - Mike Mosher

"Marotti’s subtle readings of these texts, underappreciated in Japanese scholarship, make a strong case for their importance within art history. Money, Trains, and Guillotines not only fills in a major gap within English-language understanding of postwar Japanese art. Once translated into Japanese—which it should be, promptly—it should sharpen the discourse within Akasegawa’s home country."

Pacific Affairs - Kenji Kajiya

"The annual Yomiuri Indépendant exhibition, the Hi Red Center group, and the ¥1000 Note Trial are surely among the most significant avant-garde initiatives anywhere in the world in the 1960s. This stunning study assesses the oppositional politics of these and other Japanese avant-garde undertakings by probing deep into the history of that which they opposed: the arrogation of power by the postwar Japanese state over everyday life. In William Marotti's hard-hitting theoretical analysis and accessible prose, the seemingly nonsensical antics of avant-gardists become occasions for grasping fundamental truths about the political makeup of postwar Japanese society."

Maximum Embodiment: Yoga, the Western Painting of Japan, 1912-1955 - Bert Winther-Tamaki

"Money, Trains, and Guillotines is the first extended study of art and activism in Japan during the 1960s, and as such it constitutes a major contribution not only to the history of Japanese art and politics but also to our knowledge of activism in the 1960s."

The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation - Thomas LaMarre