Expo 70 and Japanese Art:

Dissonant Voices An Introduction

and Commentary
Midori Yoshimoto

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

DECEMBER 2011

REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY

Midori Yoshimoto

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.

REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY

DECEMBER 2011

Midori Yoshimoto

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

DECEMBER 2011

REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY

Midori Yoshimoto

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

REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY

DECEMBER 2011

Midori Yoshimoto

counterpart, space (kkan), which implied a relatively fixed harmonious relationship.

By presenting many interactive and kinetic works and generating dynamism among
those works, the exhibition proposed environment/kanky as a socially relevant concept,
promoting a new relationship between the spectator and artwork and interaction among
separate genres such as visual art, music, design, and architecture.
As I have elsewhere demonstrated, although environment/kanky was a
precursor to the later term intermedia, which originally referred to the indefinable area
that exists among different media, these terms were almost interchangeable by the time
of Expo 70, in which the major players of From Space to Environment participated.21
Although Sawaragi has emphasized the nationalist concept of architecture during World
War Two as the origin of kanky,22 I would argue that it is the outgrowth of the close
synergy between the postwar Japanese and Euro-American avant-garde art movements,
which derived the new concept of environment from cybernetic and communication
theories and urban design, and was popularized in art and architecture. After Expo 70,
however, both intermedia and environment/kanky took on strong technological
connotations in Japan, and Environment Art was reduced to technological art.23 Because
of the continued misunderstanding of these terms and the overall negative reception of
them by Japanese critics, the majority of Expo Art has been dismissed as unimportant
and marginalized in Japanese art history.
Multitude of Attitudes
It goes without saying that there was a wide spectrum in artists attitudes toward taking
part in Expo 70: Some were optimistic and positive while others became critical as
the projects developed. The Osaka-based members of the Gutai Art Association were
perhaps situated toward the top of this spectrum, devoting themselves almost wholeheartedly to orchestrating multivalent projects. Included within these were a collective
sculpture display, Garden on Garden, part of the Expo Art Outdoor Exhibition, the
Gutai Group Exhibition at the entrance of the Midori Pavilion, and the three-day
multimedia extravaganza Gutai Art Festival at the Festival Plaza. Most of the existing
Gutai scholarship considers these works a mere rehashing of Gutais past works, dismissing
them in favor of Gutais early performances, installations, and paintings. According to
the art historian Ming Tiampo, whose book on Gutai was recently published, Gutai
did not see Expo 70 as a nationalist stage, but rather as an opportunity to engage with
interlocutors from around the world. For Gutai and particularly its leader Yoshihara Jir,
Expo 70 provided a large-scale embodiment of the international common ground that
Gutai had been building for itself since 1955 and it was a perfect occasion to showcase
both historic and new works to stress its international contemporaneity.24 Having built
on their international standing since the 1950s, it was natural for Gutai to represent the
Kansai region and take these important commissions at Expo 70. There was even a
sense of pride in their participation as they had been at the forefront in presenting

DECEMBER 2011

REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY

Midori Yoshimoto

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

REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY

DECEMBER 2011

Midori Yoshimoto

art.30 In fact, the difficulty in categorizing Okamoto as either modern or anti-modern

may have affected the way his art has been received. While Okamoto became a celebrity
after the expo, his art has remained relatively unappreciated until recently.31 The art critic
Kurabayashi Yasushi has pointed out that Okamoto was aware of this ambivalence, but
sought to reconcile these paradoxes by often juxtaposing the modern and the pre-modern
in his bipolar oppositionalism (taikyokushugi).32
Considering himself one of Okamotos demon children (onigo), Isozaki sought
to counter Okamotos primitive folk art with his cybernetic environment designed for
the Festival Plaza. However, as Isozaki admits in his retrospective statement featured in
this volume, artistic intentions behind the Tower of the Sun and the Festival Plaza were
both subverted by the appearance of the emperor and prince at the opening ceremony.
Their presence co-opted what Okamoto and Isozaki thought of as avant-garde,
swallowing them up into the national monuments.33 Compared to the members of Gutai
and Okamoto, Isozaki was located somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, one of the
most conflicted individuals due to his ambivalent position as an architect who has worked
closely with avant-garde artists. Yet, Isozaki found Expo 70 an irresistible temptation
making a long-held dream come true. His ambition was to realize architecture on a
city-like scale, something which the world had never seen before. Even though he was
well aware of the criticism surrounding Expo 70 and was even sympathetic to some of it,
he found himself emotionally immersed in the expo; as if he were seized by a fever.34
In fact, it was Isozaki himself who retrospectively admitted that I felt as though I had
participated in executing a war.35
Dissonant Voices
The artists, curators, and writers discussed in this volume can be situated in the wide
spectrum of attitudes toward Expo 70 as mentioned above. The second essay in
the volume, The 1970 Osaka Expo and/as Science Fiction by William O. Gardner,
highlights the rather unknown role of the Thinking the Expo study group at Kyoto
University in conceptualizing Expo 70 as the city of the future (mirai no toshi) and its
overarching theme of Progress and Harmony for Mankind. The group, which included
the science fiction author Komatsu Saky and the anthropologist Umesao Tadao, was
prescient in addressing the dystopic dangers of nuclear apocalypse, problems of overpopulation, social inequality, and pollution, but such concerns were not well addressed at
the expo grounds and pavilions due to many political factors. It is evident that Komatsu
and the Thinking the Expo study group did not necessarily believe in the rose-colored
future suggested by Expo 70 and sought to incorporate critical issues in the planning.
The art critic Hary Ichir, who recently passed away in 2010, was consistently
critical of Expo 70 and published several articles critiquing it, including the essay Expo
70 as the Ruins of Culture, translated by Ignacio Adriasola for this volume. Written
shortly after the opening of Expo 70, this article is more grounded in Harys personal

DECEMBER 2011

REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY

Midori Yoshimoto

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.

REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY

DECEMBER 2011

Midori Yoshimoto

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

DECEMBER 2011

REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY

Midori Yoshimoto

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-

REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY

DECEMBER 2011

ment. Miyauchi Yoshihisa, Mujun

o itsukusu itsuwari no saiten [Fake
Festival that Conceals Contradictions], Kenchiku jnaru, no. 1066
(June 2004): 43.
8.
Regarding Expo70 Destruction
Joint-Struggle Group, see KuroDalaijees article in this volume.
9.
Beheiren was begun by the political
scientist Takahata Michitoshi, the
philosopher Tsurumi Shunsuke, and
the writer Oda Makoto in April 1965.
It became internationally known
through an anti-war advertisement
written by the writer Kaik Takeshi
and printed in The New York Times in
November 1965. Another English ad
in The Washington Post (April 1967)
included the message Korosuna
(Do not kill) calligraphically drawn
by the artist Okamoto Tar.
10.
Taki Kichi, Banpaku hantai-ron
[Anti-Expo Discourse], Tenb
(January 1969), reprinted in Hary
Ichir, ed., Wareware ni totte banpaku towa nanika (1969). Quoted
in Kurabayashi Yasushi, Okamoto
Tar to Yokoo Tadanori (Tokyo:
Hakusuisha, 1996), 12.

Midori Yoshimoto

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-

ing the expo and art. Isozaki Arata,

Tningupointo: Kkan kara kanky
e/Banpaku/Posutomodan (Turning
Point: From Space to Environment/
Expo 70/ Postmodern), a transcription of a lecture given in conjunction
with the Yamaguchi Katsuhiro exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art,
Kanagawa on 5 March 2006, available
in PDF format through Christophe
Charles page on Musashino Art
Universitys website (http://iasserver.musabi.ac.jp/mov/charles/
ATT00015.pdf), 48-55.
18.
Ibid. The same PDF document
contains not only transcriptions of
important lectures by creators such
as Isozaki and Matsumoto Toshio
and the curator Jasia Reichardt,
but also critical essays on art and
technology by Christophe Charles
and Iguchi Toshino among others.
See also, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro ten:
media to no senkusha/ Yamaguchi
Katsuhiro: Pioneer of Media Art,
exh. cat. (Kamakura: Museum of
Modern Art, Kanagawa, 2006).
19.
For example, see Chiba Shigeo,
Gendai bijutsu itsudatsu-shi, 19451985 [History of Deviation of
Contemporary Art, 1945-1985]
(Tokyo: Shbunsha, 1986). More
recent scholarship on Mono-ha
includes: Alexandra Munroe, Lee
Ufan: Making Infinity (New York:
Guggenheim Museum, 2011).
20.
Bankokuhaku Ibento Chsa Iinkai
(Expo Event Research Committee),
Shkei chsa [Research on Landscaping], unpublished document, 20
February 1967; Bankokuhaku Ibento
Chsa Iinkai, Omatsuri hiroba o
chshin toshita gaibu kkan ni okeru,
mizu, oto, hikari nado o riy shita
sgteki enshutsu kik no kenky
[Research on the Total Presentation
System Using Water, Sound, Light,
etc. in Outdoor Spaces, Centering on
the Festival Plaza], undated unpub-

DECEMBER 2011

lished document (I date the latter as

having been written circa late 1967).
The author obtained access to these
documents at the Akiyama Kuniharu
Archive housed at Tama Art University. I thank Professor Ebizuka Kji
of Tama Art University for granting
me access to the archive.
21.
The term intermedia was popularized internationally in the late 1960s
and introduced to Japan circa 1969
when two eventsIntermedia Arts
Festival and Cross Talk Intermedia
were held at such major locations as
the Yoyogi National Stadium. The
latter was sponsored by American
institutions and corporations such
as the American Cultural Center
in Tokyo and Pepsi Co. For more
detailed examination of kanky and
early intermedia art in Japan, see
Midori Yoshimoto, From Space to
Environment: The Origins of Kanky
and the Emergence of Intermedia Art
in Japan, Art Journal, vol. 67, no. 3
(Fall 2008): 24-45.
22.
Sawaragi, Sens to banpaku/World
Fairs and World Wars, 265-65.
23.
Chiba, Gendai bijutsu itsudatsu-shi,
103-106.
24.
Ming Tiampo, Gutai: Decentering
Modernism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press), 167.
25.
For Okamotos interest in Jmon
art, see Okamoto Tar, On Jmon
Ceramics, trans. Jonathan M. Reynolds, Art in Translation, vol. 1, no. 1
(March 2009): 49-60.
26.
Umesao Tadao, conversation with
Okamoto Tar. Umesao Tadao,
ed., Minpaku tanj, kanch taidan
(Birth of the Ethnographic Museum,
Conversation among the Directors),
Cho Kronsha, 1978.
27.
Isozaki Arata, Han kais [Coun-

REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY

11

Midori Yoshimoto

ter Recollection] (Tokyo: A.D.A.

EDITA, 2001), 192.
28.
The Steel Pavilion (Tekk-kan) is the
only other major structure remaining there today. See the website of
Nihon Bankoku Hakurankai Kinen
Kik (Commemorative Organization
for the Japan World Exposition 70)
http://park.expo70.or.jp/
29.
There was a week-long protest
staged in the Tower of the Sun by
one of the student activists. See
Angus Lockyer, The Logic of
Spectacle c. 1970, Art History 30.4

12

(September 2007): 571-89.

30.
Kurabayashi Yasushi, Okamoto
Tar to Yokoo Tadanori (Tokyo:
Hakusuisha, 1996), 19.
31.
Ibid., 213.
32.
Ibid., 213, 247.
33.
Isozaki, Han kais, 216.
34.
Ibid, 205.
35.
Ibid. Isozaki mentioned that he was
derided for the statement by his peers,

REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY

DECEMBER 2011

including the art critic Tno Yoshiaki.

See Isozaki Arata, Tningu pointo:
Kkan kara Kanky e/Banpaku/
Posutomodan, 52.
36.
Yoshimi Shunya, Introduction in
Banpaku to sengo Nihon [World
Expositions and Postwar Japan]
(Tokyo: Kdansha, 2011).
37.
Sophie Knight, Fukushima Crisis
Prods Controversial Art Group
into Action, Asahi Shimbun (3
June 2011), accessed through
http://www.asahi.com/english/
TKY201106020209.html