Theater of Cruelty (52 page)

In other works, the violence is more overt. Aoshima’s
Magma Spirit Explodes. Tsunami Is Dreadful
shows a
kawaii
girl as a monster spewing fire, rather like a traditional Buddhist vision of Hell. Komatsuzaki Shigeru is obsessed with the Pacific War, which he depicts in a weird mixture of comic-strip exaggeration and hyperrealism.
There is much of the souped-up heroic quality of wartime propaganda art in his paintings, which is surely deliberate.

The sense of catastrophe, of apocalyptic doom, in much Japanese neo-pop imagery, echoing the popularity of Japanese animation films and computer games about world-destroying wars and Godzilla-type monsters, is explained by Murakami as a reflection of Japan’s ill-digested wartime past. The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, smothered in silence during the US occupation, have left a kind of unresolved, largely repressed rage. Japan’s own atrocities have not been forthrightly faced either. Murakami argues that the US has successfully turned Japan into a pacifist nation of irresponsible consumers, encouraged to get richer and richer while leaving matters of war and peace to the Americans.

“Postwar Japan was given life and nurtured by America,” writes Murakami in one of the catalog essays:

Part of this state of permanent childhood, in Murakami’s view, is a sense of impotence, fostered by the US-written pacifist constitution, which robs Japan of its right to wage war. Murakami writes:

This, we gather, is Murakami’s explanation of the images of tied-up little girls, exploding galaxies, atom-bomb clouds, Pacific War battles, and angry prepubescent children with tiny bodies and enormous heads—the overheated fantasies of frustrated Peter Pans, dreaming of national and sexual omnipotence, while playing the keyboards of their personal computers in the cramped quarters of suburban apartments. This is the culture of
otaku
, literally “your home” but used to describe the millions of nerdish fantasizers living inside their own heads, filled with the mental detritus of comic strips and computer games. Not responsible for the real world, the Japanese, Murakami believes, have retreated into a virtual one, which can be blown to smithereens with the click of a mouse. It is all about the war, the bomb, General MacArthur’s emasculation of Japan, and American capitalism.

Murakami and other theorists of this persuasion link these infantile “tantrums” and dreams of omnipotence to the actual violence of Aum Shinrikyo, the quasi-Buddhist cult, whose followers murdered unsuspecting Tokyo subway passengers in 1995 with sarin gas while waiting for Armageddon. They, too, used apocalyptic fantasies to explode the meaninglessness of the postwar greenhouse. The difference is that these deluded men and women, many of them well-educated scientists, led by the half-blind guru Asahara Shoko, really believed they could find utopia by waging war on the world.

One thing that Aum Shinrikyo, with its paranoid visions of a world governed by a secret cabal of Jews, has in common with the theorists of
otaku
neo-pop is a deep self-pity. One of Murakami’s most avid admirers, a cultural critic named Sawaragi Noi, writes to him ecstatically that “the time has come to take pride in our art,
which is a kind of subculture, ridiculed and deemed ‘monstrous’ by those in the Western art world.” The crowds at the opening night of the show in New York suggested otherwise, as did the hyped-up press coverage. But Sawaragi goes on to say, “Art is made by monsters at odds with the everyday life we live.” To which Murakami adds: “We are deformed monsters. We were discriminated against as ‘less than human’ in the eyes of the ‘humans’ of the West.”

All this strikes me as wildly exaggerated. No one disputes that the atomic bombings were a terrible catastrophe or that the pumped-up postwar prosperity of Japan did much to bury the traumas of the wartime past. That overdependence on US security—combined with a de facto one-party state—has led to a kind of truncated political consciousness is at least plausible (I have argued this myself). And the humiliation of feeling dominated by Western civilization for more than two hundred years cannot be dismissed. But to explain contemporary Japanese culture entirely through the prism of postwar trauma is much too glib.

Most modern art movements, waving their banners and manifestoes, like to think they are onto something totally new. But the combination of grotesque violence and sexual perversity is hardly new. In fact, there is more than a little
ero-guro
in Japanese neo-pop. Nor is the fascination for very young girls, tied up or not, a novelty; Kawabata was obsessed by this theme all his life. Variations of
ero, guro, nansensu
appear at different stages of Japanese art history. The middle of the nineteenth century, just when Asakusa came into its licentious own, was a rich time for it. The Kabuki stage was given to dark tales of violence by such playwrights as Tsuruya Namboku, and woodblock artists like Yoshitoshi did prints of tortured women, suspended in ropes, and the like. We know about the 1920s, but the 1960s, too, were an
ero-guro
time, when poster designers, photographers, filmmakers, and playwrights borrowed heavily from the 1920s.

Even though the oversize, indeed grotesque proportions of human genitalia in premodern Japanese erotic art give a very different impression than the childlike humanoids in current art, a feeling of impotence goes back much further than General MacArthur’s occupation. It might have something to do with the traditional constraints that have been a constant feature of Japanese society. Who knows, it may even have something to do with overbearing mothers, smothering their (male) toddlers with too much care, before the social handcuffs are applied and early childhood becomes a lost Eden to be pined for until death.

I think Murakami, Sawaragi, et al. are right about one thing: the impotence they protest is political, apart from anything else. Sawaragi draws our attention quite rightly to the failure of the left during the 1960s to challenge the power of the state, and the security treaty with the US in particular. They tried. Students were mobilized in large numbers to demonstrate against the treaty and the Vietnam War, but political radicalism was made irrelevant in the end, not by police brutality so much as the blandishments of ever greater material prosperity. When radical energy could no longer find an outlet in politics, it turned inward, first to extreme violence inside the protest movement itself, and then to
ero-guro
. It is interesting to see how many artists turned from political radicalism to pornography in the 1970s.

In a way, it was always like this. Japan under the shoguns was close to being a police state, with no room for political dissent. Instead, men were allowed to let off steam in the designated pleasure districts, whose courtesans became the stars of popular art and fiction. Kawabata’s Asakusa was a late echo of this. There were periods of rebellion, of course, but when these came to an end, crushed by the authorities,
ero-guro
would usually gather force.

But the latest generation of artists and consumers, represented in
the “Little Boy” show, appears to have lost the physical energy of their forebears in the 1840s, 1920s, and 1960s.
Otaku
and
yurui
, another term often used by neo-pop theorists, meaning “loose, lethargic, slack,” denote a lack of vigor. The eroticism in contemporary Japanese art is virtual, not physical, narcissistic, and not shared with others. It, too, takes place entirely inside the
otaku
heads. Here, I think, there is a new departure, which is not uniquely Japanese.

The virtual world, in art and life, is perfect for a generation that has broken away from collective effort, be it political, artistic, or sexual. This is why the novels of Murakami Haruki are so successful, in East Asia especially, but also in the West, where the
otaku
culture is spreading. His characters are disengaged from society, often isolated, living out their private fantasies in a world of their own. This began, in the 1960s, as a quiet revolt against the extended family with all its duties. Traditional arrangements were increasingly being replaced by nuclear families in suburban bedroom communities. But things have progressed since then. Since family is the main symbol of constraint, people tend to interpret individualism in a narrow way, as a retreat into solipsism, where no one can touch you.

The other escape route from traditional life has been to recreate the family in an alternative way, as theater troupes and hippie communes did everywhere in the 1960s. Murakami Takashi has followed this model, with himself as the patriarch of a family of artists. And yet many of these artists show all the signs of deep self-absorption. The world they express is oddly bloodless, indeed a bit slack, in fact rather monstrous, a grotesque world where all sex and violence are unreal. That it often looks so pretty makes it all the more disturbing.

TO STAND SOMEWHERE
in the center of an East Asian metropolis, Seoul, say, or Guangzhou, is to face an odd cultural conundrum. Little of what you see, apart from the writing on billboards, can be described as traditionally Asian. There are the faux-traditional façades—Japanese bamboo screens, golden Chinese dragons, Korean farmhouse walls—of certain restaurants providing local cuisine, but you can see those in London or New York City too. The architecture is mostly in the postmodern or late-modernist style, high-rise buildings with curtain glass walls, concrete office blocks, shopping malls, and hotels in granite or marble. You could be in Cincinnati. And yet … you are not. There is something non-Western, indeed something distinctly East Asian about these cityscapes that is hard to put your finger on.

Perhaps it is the advertising, or the hustle-bustle of the raucous entertainment areas, or the myriad small stores that cluster around the high-rise buildings like mushrooms on trees. In Tokyo, the old street plan has been more or less preserved, which lends a kind of phantom historicity to the city, but this is much less true of Beijing or Wuhan. Perhaps it is precisely the absence of visible history that looks distinctive. The same might be said of many cities in the United States,
but somehow Pusan, Nagoya, and Chongqing resemble one another more than they do Cleveland or New York. They are monuments, in constant flux, of modern Asian life. But what makes the contemporary Asian style distinctive? What does Shenzhen, a mere village between Hong Kong and Guangzhou twenty years ago, and now a sprawling metropolis of more than three million people, tell us about the nature of post-Maoist China?
¹
One clue, I think, is the extraordinary proliferation in East Asia of theme parks. They are to East Asian capitalism what folk-dancing festivals were to communism.

Japan and China are now the main homelands of theme parks, more so even than the United States. New ones appear all the time and are sometimes as quickly abandoned as they were built, or even before they were finished: on the highway from Beijing to the Great Wall is a half-finished theme park that looks like a Babylonian ruin; the money ran out before it could be completed. Driving past it in 2003, I was reminded of the huge skyscraper in Pyongyang intended to be the highest building in Asia, the Babylonian tower of Kim Il Sungism, which still stands there, unfinished, an empty shell, probably a premature ruin forever. Not only did the money run out but the building was so shoddily and quickly constructed, with such inferior material, that it is hopelessly unsafe.

Anyway, there they are, a small-scale Dutch town on the coast near Nagasaki, Austrian villages in Hokkaido, a simulacrum of Stratford-upon-Avon in northern Japan, models of famous Asian temples in the middle of Beijing, a replica of the White House in a small town near Guangzhou, Tibetan monasteries, Italian palazzi, Egyptian pyramids and French châteaux, a Disneyland near Tokyo, a Disneyland planned in Hong Kong, and on and on. What is curious
is not just the insatiable taste for these fantasy places but the fact that they often blur almost seamlessly into the “real” urban landscape. In Shenzhen, a brand-new residential “European city” looks out upon a theme park, named Windows on the World, with its Eiffel Tower, its Colosseum, and its Potala.

A variation of the theme park is the golf course, an equally controlled artificial landscape. Golf courses have proliferated almost as fast as theme parks in East Asia. One whole city, named Zhuhai, opposite Macao, has been designed as a kind of residential golf course, a leisure city to complement the feverish working environment of Hong Kong and Shenzhen, an urban culture given over to tourism. The golf range is Nirvana promised to all those who do well in East Asian capitalism.