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Activism Beyond the Pleasure Principle?

Carl Cassegard
Published online: 16 Oct 2013.

To cite this article: Carl Cassegard (2013) Activism Beyond the Pleasure Principle?, Third Text, 27:5,
620-633, DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2013.830446
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Activism Beyond the

Pleasure Principle?
Homelessness and Art in the
Shinjuku Underground
Carl Cassegard

1. Yasuhiro Yamane, letter

to the author of this
article, 16 April 2010
2. For background on
homelessness in Japan, see
Hideo Aoki, Japans
Underclass: Day Laborers
and the Homeless, Trans
Pacific, Melbourne, 2006.
For reports and analysis of
the cardboard village
struggle in English, see
Miki Hasegawa, We are
not Garbage!: The
Homeless Movement in
Tokyo, Routledge,
London, 2006 and DavidAntoine Malinas, Voices
from the Underground:
Homeless Peoples Social
Movement in Japan The
1994 1996 Shinjuku
Case Study, Shidai
shakaigaku 5, 2004, pp
43 50. For the cardboard
house art, see Yoshitaka
Mori, Culture Politics:
The Emergence of New
Cultural Forms of Protest
in the Age of Freeter,
Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies, vol 6, no 1, 2005;
and (in Japanese) the
contributions collected in
Shinjuku danboru kaiga
kenkyu (Studies of the
Shinjuku Cardboard

Looking back at the pictures now, it is almost palpable how a kind of

energy related to life and existence an energy different from that of
so-called political social movements welled up from the humble
practice we engaged in.1

Yamane Yasuhiro wrote these words about the cardboard village where
he and his friends had spent almost three years, from 1995 to 1998,
painting on the walls of homeless peoples cardboard houses in the underground passages around Shinjuku Station in Tokyo. These same passages
at the time became the centre stage of Japans first large-scale homeless
movement, which unfolded in order to defend the village against the
threat of eviction by the metropolitan government.2
Although not much co-operation between artists and activists
occurred during the cardboard villages span of existence, the Shinjuku
cardboard art was pivotal in the development of new forms of activism
in Japan. The sociologist Mori Yoshitaka points out that it pioneered
the development of todays new cultural movements characterized by
humour, the use of art or popular culture, and a preference for loose
anti-hierarchical forms of organization. The radical critic Hirai Gen
agrees, stating that it inaugurated a current of new political street art
which later blossomed into the street parties conspicuous today.
Making use of music, dancing and a festive mood to mobilize and
attract participants, these new cultural movements differ in style from
earlier student and citizen movements or traditional labour organizations. They also differ in composition, participants usually being socalled freeters, young people without regular employment who have
rapidly increased in number in Japan since the early 1990s.3 As shown
by the examples of the struggles of Nagai Park in Osaka in 2006, or of
Miyashita Park in Tokyo in 2008 2010, when theatre, music and
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621

Paintings), Swamp,
Kamio, Japan, 2005.
Several of the paintings are
available in Paintings on
the Cardboard Houses at
Shinjuku Underground in
Tokyo, Japan 1995
1998, Swamp, Tokyo,
2005; on the webpage
Danboru hausu
kaigashu, http://
cardboard-housepainting.jp/mt/; and in
Sakokawa Naokos
recently published photo
collection Shinjuku
danboru mura: Sakokawa
Naoko shashinshu 1996
1998 (The Shinjuku
Cardboard Village:
Sakokawa Naoko Photo
Collection 1996 1998),
DU, Tokyo, 2013.
3. Mori, op cit, p 26, and
Sutorto no shiso (The
Thought in the Streets),
NHK Bukkusu, Tokyo,
2009; Gen Hirai, Mikk
Mausu no puroretaria
sengen (Mickey Mouses
Proletarian Manifesto),
ta shuppan, Tokyo,
O
2005, pp 116 126
4. These struggles are
discussed further in Carl
Cassegard, Youth
Movements, Trauma, and
Alternative Space in
Contemporary Japan,
Brill, Leiden, forthcoming
in 2014.
5. For the notion of
prefigurative politics, see
Carl Boggs, Marxism,
Prefigurative
Communism, and the
Problem of Workers
Control, Radical America
6, 1977 1978; Wini
Breines, Community and
Organization in the New
Left, 1962 1968: The
Great Refusal, Praeger,
New York, 1982; and
Barbara Epstein, Political
Protest and Cultural
Revolution: Nonviolent
Direct Action in the 1970s
and 1980s, University of
California Press, Berkeley,
California, 1991, pp 16,
83ff, pp 108 117, 122f.
6. It thus implies the
confidence in ones ability
to challenge existing
relations of domination,
John Drury and Steve

poetry were spectacularly deployed to stop the evictions of homeless

people, cultural activism is also no longer marginal to the homeless movement.4 Compared with the mid-1990s, art has become much more integrated into political activism.
The question that will preoccupy me in this article is how the role of
art in cultural activism should be understood. While it is clearly reductive
to neglect its political context, reducing it to politics would in many cases
seem to do it injustice as art. In what sense, then, is it political? How have
artists themselves viewed their role in the political struggles in which they
have participated? The cardboard village art helps illuminate these questions since it represents an early stage in the formation of cultural activism, when the place of art in the homeless movement was still
undecided. When the painters started to paint the cardboard houses, no
similar activities had ever taken place in Japan, and nothing indicated
that art would ever become part of the regular repertoire of political
struggles. My argument will be that the cardboard village art was immensely political, but in a sense that cannot be exhausted by conventional
concepts such as instrumental or prefigurative politics, and is better
illuminated through the concepts of trauma and empowerment.

TRAUMA AND THERAPEUTICAL ACTIVISM

Street demonstrations, petitions and boycotts the traditional repertoire
of social movements are usually conceptualized as a primarily instrumental form of politics, as means towards achieving a certain result by
appealing to or pressuring authorities or public opinion. By contrast, it
has been argued that the street parties, concerts and alternative spaces
associated with many movements today are better seen as a prefigurative
politics, in which the desired change is prefigured in the activity itself.
Prefigurative activities manifest the capacity of people to realize the
kind of society they wish to see, rather than relying on authorities to
implement changes. Fun, play, pleasure or enjoyment are therefore
not seen as signs of lack of serious political commitment but as a
crucial ingredient in prefigurative activities.5
One problem with understanding social movements as engaging solely
in instrumental or prefigurative activism is that both perspectives tend to
presuppose subjects sufficiently intact to choose the most efficient instrumental action or freely project a desired utopian outcome. Probing into
the cardboard house art in the Shinjuku underground, I will question
this assumption. Much activism is not, and cannot be, wholly instrumental
or prefigurative, since it is rooted in present needs. The fact that activism is
always dialectically caught up in a present is also why fun is not always
the relevant emotion to produce, even in todays new cultural movements.
A whole range of activities revolving around empowerment cannot be
neatly classified as either instrumental or prefigurative and are better seen
as what I will call therapeutical. By empowerment I mean the strengthening of peoples self-confidence as political actors.6 Therapeutical activism
is politically important not by virtue of its instrumental or prefigurative
achievements but because it helps produce actors experiencing themselves
as capable of political action, and it does so through activities that are

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Reicher, Explaining
Enduring Empowerment:
A Comparative Study of
Collective Action and
Psychological Outcomes,
European Journal of
Social Psychology, vol 35,
no 1, 2005, p 35.

7. Mihai Spariosu, Dionysus

Reborn: Play and the
Aesthetic Dimension in
Modern Philosophical and
Scientific Discourse,
Cornell University Press,
Ithaca, New York, 1989, p
12; Carl Cassegard, Play
and Empowerment: The
Role of Alternative Space
in Social Movements,
Electronic Journal of
Contemporary Japanese
Studies, vol 12, no 1, 2012,
http://www.
japanesestudies.org.uk/
ejcjs/vol12/iss1/cassegard.
html
8. Ron Eyerman, Cultural
Trauma: Slavery and the
Formation of African
American Identity,
Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 2001,
p2
9. My emphasis on trauma as
a discursive tear means that
I do not employ the concept
in the sense it is used by
theorists such as Jeffrey
Alexander, for example in
his Toward a Theory of
Cultural Trauma,
Alexander et al, Cultural
Trauma and Collective
Identity, University of
California Press, Berkeley,
California, 2004, for whom
cultural trauma is a
memory publicly
constructed through a
functioning discourse that
founds or strengthens
collective identity. This
makes their concept of
trauma hard to apply to
situations where the trauma
remains unverbalized or
leads to a weakening or
disintegration of collective
identity.
10. For the perceived failures
of the New Left in Japan,
which included violence,
infighting and dogmatism,
see Cassegard, Youth
Movements, op cit.

experienced as valuable and empowering even when they do not prefigure

a better society.
As I will show, the cardboard village artists conceived of themselves
neither along the lines of the romantic notion of the creatively expressive
self nor as rational self-directing subjects. Instead they tended to idealize
the idea of decentring or emptying the self, which was conceived as a
receptacle or channel for forces foreign to it. This way of doing art
comes close to what Mihai Spariosu labels prerational play. As he
points out, such play is by no means apolitical. While rational thought
conceives of play as unfolding in a sphere separate from the power
relations of society, prerational thought sees play itself as a manifestation
of power, capable of affecting and playing with reality. Although far from
a mere political instrument, art becomes political through engaging with
reality, spilling over into it and thereby fashioning new languages that
allow for the expression of subjectivities outside the frameworks that
are hegemonic or dominant in mainstream society.7
Paying attention to therapeutical aspects of activism is important,
since social movements often have their roots in experiences of collective
trauma, mobilizing on behalf of people who have suffered severe hardship, or addressing the need to struggle with the lingering memory of previous defeats in the movement history. Collective trauma can be defined
as damage sustained not by individual psyches but by discursive systems.
To borrow Ron Eyermans expression, it is a tear in the discursive fabric
which renders certain things unsayable, or sayable only at great expense.8
Collective traumas differ from individual ones since this unsayability can
remain an enduring feature of a discourse and affect even people who
never took part in the original experience. The effect is that certain
experiences are denied a place in public discourse.9
In the case of the cardboard village, at least two levels can be distinguished on which the concept of collective trauma is applicable. First,
trauma enters the analysis through the mood of pessimism and impasse
that permeated public discourse in Japan during the lost decade following the bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s. As I will show,
the cardboard art was strongly infused with the sensation that Japans
postwar system, for so long a source of economic prosperity and national
pride, had now utterly failed. Second, the homeless movement in Shinjuku had to struggle with the legacy of the New Lefts failure and
defeat in Japan. Symbolized by the descent of the radical student movement into violence and sectarian infighting during the 1970s, this
legacy served as an important barrier to subsequent efforts to revive
radical political activism in Japan. Art and music played an important
role in surmounting this negative legacy since it was only with the rise
of the so-called new cultural movements from the 1990s onwards that
forms of radical activism could emerge that were no longer considered
tainted by that legacy.10
Central to therapeutical politics are processes of recovery from collective trauma, ie repairing the tear in the discursive fabric. New cultural
movements in Japan have been doing this by articulating a language for
coming to terms with the seeming collapse of the Japanese model
since the early 1990s that also resuscitates some of the radical energies
discredited by the New Left. They were helped by the fact that the
trauma of the lost decade was not universally experienced as a

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623

catastrophe. To some including the cardboard village artists, as I will

show the collapse of the Japanese model signified a liberation and a
chance to recover political activism.11 Part of the importance of the
new cultural movements resides in their ability to contribute to a recovery
from both traumas providing a language that is seen as untainted by the
failures of earlier radical movements and that helps people put into words
their present experiences of precarity and economic hardship.
But whose recovery? As for the homeless people themselves, they
remain silent in my account. Although several of them engaged in political protest at the time of the Shinjuku cardboard village, not many were
engaged in artistic activities. Only much later did they take the initiative
to engage in artistic activities within the homeless movement, the best
example being the innovative theatre performance which was held in
Nagai Park in 2007, a last-ditch attempt to keep the police at bay and
stop the eviction of the parks remaining homeless. The simple answer
is that if collective trauma is a discursive event, recovery can only be a
property of discourse. The focus in this article will be on the discourse
of the young artists active in the Shinjuku cardboard village discourse
understood in a wide sense, as including art and artistic activities. I also
hope to show how the emergence of the cardboard village art affected
the homeless movement in Japan by making art part of its language.

11. Trademark elements of the

Japanese model of
employment and
management, such as the
seniority system and
lifetime employment,
although never available to
all employees, had helped
to secure a large measure
of legitimacy for the
system. When this model
came under pressure in the
1990s, the crisis of work
sent repercussions through
the entire social fabric. See
Cassegard, op cit.
12. Hasegawa, op cit, p 71f;
Keiko Yamaguchi, Toshi
ku kan no henyo to
nojukusha (The
Transformation of Urban
Space and the Homeless),
in Kariya Ayumi, ed,
Furachi na kibo,
Shoraisha, Kyoto, 2006,
p 63
13. Aoki, op cit, p 107;
Kazuaki Kasai, Shinjuku
homuresu funsenki (A
Record of the Homeless
Struggle in Shinjuku),
Gendaikikakushitsu,
Tokyo, 1999, pp 22ff, p 58
14. Hasegawa, op cit, p 72;
Yamaguchi, op cit, pp 59f

THE SHINJUKU UNDERGROUND AND

THE CARDBOARD VILLAGE
The Shinjuku cardboard village quickly grew up in the wake of the postbubble recession of the early 1990s and attracted attention for many
reasons. One was its size. At its largest, it consisted of 300 cardboard
houses inhabited by 600 to 800 people, lined up along two pedestrian
passages leading from the space known as Information Square, an underground plaza near the West Exit of Shinjuku Station. Another was its conspicuous location. Shinjuku Station is the busiest railway station in Japan
and the underground passages are located at the very foot of the Tokyo
Metropolitan Government Building.12 Third, the villagers seemed to represent a new category of homeless people, different from the former daylabourers who used make up the majority of homeless people in Japan
and who tended to cluster around the working-class district of Sanya
or nearby parks in eastern Tokyo.13
The geography of Shinjuku is important to understand the dynamics
of the conflict that soon developed around the village. Closeness to the
amusement district of Kabukicho where the homeless could obtain
food and work and the day-labour recruitment centre at Takadanobaba
was an important reason why the homeless gathered in Shinjuku. In
addition, the underground passages offered a roof, tolerable temperatures
and access to toilets.14 After the first eviction from the station, which took
place in 1994, activists quickly mobilized to support the villagers, helping
them set up joint meetings and organize themselves, providing food and
other kinds of assistance, helping villagers apply for welfare from ward
authorities, and physically protecting them against eviction. The main
movement body, the Shinjuku Renraku-kai (Shinjuku Co-ordination
Association), was created in 1994 by activists from a day-labourer organ-

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624

15. For insider reports of these

mobilizations, see Kasai,
op cit, and Takeshi Mitsu,
Piriodo kara no shuppatsu
(Starting Over from a
Period), Inpakuto
shuppankai, Tokyo, 1995,
pp 206 235, 287 291.
16. Tsuyoshi Inaba, Inaba-san
ni kiku (Asking Mr
Inaba), 2005, http://
kenkyukai.cardboardhouse-painting.jp/?eid=
211275, accessed 15
January 2010
17. Junichiro Take, Shinjuku
danboru kaiga kenkyu kai
(The Shinjuku Cardboard
Painting Research
Group), in Shinjuku
danboru kaiga kenkyu,
Swamp, Kamio, Japan,
2005, p 13
18. Ibid, Rojo gaka Take
Junichiro ni kiku
(Asking Street Painter
Take Junichiro),
interview by Ogura
Mushitaro, Gendai Shiso,
vol 25, no 5, 1997, p 60
19. Take, Shinjuku danboru,
op cit, pp 11ff; Inaba,
op cit
20. Junichiro Take, interview
with the author, Tokyo, 2
August 2011

ization, a group of Shibuya-based young activists and an organization set

up by the villagers themselves.15 A larger-scale eviction followed in early
1996 under the pretext of setting up a mechanized sidewalk. The city
mobilized some 600 riot police, guards and municipal employees to
tear down the village and evict the villagers. The activists and villagers
set up resistance together with supporters who had arrived from major
cities such as Osaka, Yokohama and Nagoya, and passers-by contributed
200,000 yen daily to the campaigns funds. After the eviction, the homeless regrouped in the Information Square, where the supporters prepared
meals and provided medical care. A third eviction was carried out in
1998. The homeless again regrouped, but tragically a fire broke out
shortly afterwards, destroying fifty of the cardboard houses and claiming
the lives of four villagers. The Metropolitan Government evicted the
remainder, some of whom moved to a shelter while others relocated to
a nearby park.
During its span of existence, the village also attracted many other activists and young people who engaged in activities connected to the village.
Inaba Tsuyoshi one of the Shinjuku Renraku-kai leaders writes that
with artists coming to paint the houses and photographers setting up
photo exhibitions, the cardboard village had the air of a liberated
zone.16 The art student Take Junichiro, one of the artists who took
the initiative to the art movement, explains that he certainly saw
utopia there, but his reason for exhilaration was different from
Inabas. What attracted him was the idea of outcasts living in a society
of their own, in an unofficial economy and without the strictures and
protections of the affluent mainstream world.17 He points out that the
cardboard villagers were living in a
. . .millennial economy, gathering up the leftovers and refuse of the Tokyo
metropolitan economy just like people did in primitive ages when people
lived by picking up pampas grass and branches to build their homes.18

At the same time, both Inaba and Take stress the cruelty and brutality of
life in the village. It was a space experienced in strikingly ambivalent
terms. As Inaba says, it was a place where extremes met where
people both helped each other and fought one another. Take stresses
that cruel things happened in the village there were violent quarrels,
stealing, even killings, and people dying.19 He constantly feared being
robbed while he was painting. At the same time, he felt that the village
was a miracle, a place for mutual help, where vulnerable people, who
were different yet dependent on each other, were helping each other.20

THE PAINTINGS
Fresh from having dropped out of art school, Take started to paint the
cardboard houses in 1995 together with his friend Yoshizaki Takewo.
Joined by Yamane and a few others (the number fluctuated over time),
they painted more than a hundred houses until the end of the village in
1998. It all began when he and Yoshizaki went to Shinjuku to do guerrilla
painting without any thought of painting the cardboard houses. Having
failed to find a suitable spot, Take describes how they felt overwhelmed
by the sheer enormity of the city and let themselves drift along until

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625

they ended up in the stations West Exit underground passage. Realizing

that the cardboard houses would make a fine painting surface, they
knocked on one of the doors and got permission to paint from the surprised villager.21 From that day on, they commuted to the underground
passages, painting every house where they were granted permission.
The motifs ranged from the surrealistically dream-like or weirdly grotesque and comical to macabre pastiches of Buddhist hell paintings,
with stylistic influences from manga and graffiti. Some pictures were
highly expressionistic, others reminiscent of ukiyoe (ie pictures of the
floating world, the woodblock prints of the Edo period depicting the
everyday world of entertainers and other common people). They had
three rules: (1) asking for permission from the inhabitant, (2) not painting
according to requests from the inhabitant, (3) and not painting pretty
art.22 During the first period, until the first big eviction in January
1996, they often worked together on the paintings.
The first setback for the artists came in 1996 when the Tokyo Metropolitan Government spent forty million yen on setting up contemporary
art sculptures after the eviction to prevent the cardboard houses from
being rebuilt. Take was arrested when he modified the sculptures into
funny dolls.23 Around the same time, Yamane quit painting but others
joined the group instead. From now on, the artists started to work individually rather than together. The painting went on as long the village itself
existed, until the fire in 1998. All paintings were destroyed in the wake of
the fire. Damaged by water, they were discarded by the authorities along
with the remains of the cardboard houses.
21. Ibid
22. Yasuhiro Yamane,
Shinjuku rearisumu
(Shinjuku Realism), in
Shinjuku danboru kaiga
kenkyu, op cit, pp 17f
23. Mori, op cit, p 25; Take,
Rojo gaka, op cit, p 58
24. Take, Rojo gaka, op cit,
p 61C
25. Eiichiro Fukase, Danboru
ni egaku yume (Dreams
Painted on Cardboard), in
Shinjuku danboru kaiga
kenkyu, op cit, p 54, p 67
26. Take, Rojo gaka, op cit,
p 60
27. Take Junichiro ni kiku
(Asking Take Junichiro),
interview by Ogura
Mushitaro, in Shinjuku
danboru kaiga kenkyu, op
cit, p 7. Also see Satoshi
Nakamura, Danboru
hausu de miru yume
(Dreams Dreamt in a
Cardboard House),
Soshisha, Tokyo, 1998,
p 255.
28. Take, Shinjuku
Underground, op cit

SHAMANIC SPACE
Take states that he started painting without any particular political motive.
He claimed to feel a power in the passages that compelled him to paint.
What drove him was the air or scent of that place, which he tried to
make apparent through his art and which he associated with the spirits
(seirei) of dead people.24 Asked by a visitor to the cardboard village how
he did his painting, he is said to have replied There are spirits here, and
while drawing, he often said: I feel so sad.25 To create was for him to
be receptive to the spirits of the many homeless people who had died
there in infightings, or out of weakness or cold. This is a place where
people really often die. When you walk by you often see people lying
there and you dont know if theyre alive or not.26 Instead of actively intervening with any preconceived design or message, he wanted to turn himself
into a mere passageway or channel.27
Rather than feeling that I had created the paintings with my own imagination and talent, I felt as if I had been made to paint by a mysterious
force. . . as if I had been a mere medium. . . I called it spirits. It was
nothing that could be seen, only felt.28

Over the first days, he tells me during an interview, he did not have the
latitude to think of his experience in terms of spirits. But the feeling
grew stronger the more he painted. Although he used the word spirit,
he still does not know what it was. The underground passages were the
only place where he had ever felt like that, and he has never felt it any-

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626

Take Junichiro, Yoshizaki Takewo, Yamane Yasuhiro, Shinjukus Left Eye, 1996, painting on cardboard house, Information Square, Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, photo: Sakokawa Naoko. All images in this article are taken from Paintings on
the Cardboard Houses at Shinjuku Underground in Tokyo, Japan 1995 1998, Swamp Publication, Tokyo, 2005.

where else since. In any case, whenever I went to the cardboard village, I
would always get inspiration.29
Takes reliance on the unconscious makes him define the role of the
artist as a shaman rather than a political activist. Although spirits
have been driven away everywhere in society, ironically a shamanic
space had reappeared here, he says, at the very foot of the Tokyo
Metropolitan Government.30 To Take, this space was an embodiment
of the unconscious and of the traumas of the modern city, repressed
and denied in the attempts to create a clean, fashionable city. The
surface is prettified with shops and boutiques, but the whirling resentment of the dead spirits down here in the underground will surely never
be extinguished.31

EYES AND MONSTERS

29. Take, interview with the
author, op cit
30. Take, Rojo gaka, op cit,
p 60
31. Take, Shinjuku
Underground, op cit

The artworks painted on the cardboard houses are characterized by a

striking profusion of eyes and faces. The most famous of these eyes was
probably Shinjukus Left Eye (Shinjuku no hidarime), which was
painted on a particularly big cardboard house used as a storehouse on
the Information Square. This is a work of expressive colours and rich
detail. Almost the entire painting is occupied by a single colossal eye,

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the contours of which resemble flames that suggest an explosion. In the

iris is a city, with people, buildings, and shapes resembling planets or
perhaps cells. Inside the pupil is a smaller eye, also surrounded by
flames, and inside the second eye is a third, still smaller eye. Despite the
explosive colours the overall impression is one of serenity. The eye in
the centre, towards which the onlookers gaze is pulled as if by a gravitational force, gives the impression of silently watching the onlooker and
perhaps the entire cosmos. Take, Yoshizaki and Yamane had begun
work on it early in 1996 and painted from night until morning, all
three at the same time, brushes in hand. Take describes their collaboration as akin to a jam session. I had played in a band and wanted to
draw paintings in the same way.32 He also describes it as a battle of
three where one would paint and somebody else would paint over it, a
process that was repeated over and over. The result was a work of powerful expressionism, a symbol-laden and dreamlike mandala. It was village,
Shinjuku and Tokyo at the same time, all hanging together and creating
an image of cosmos, as Yamane writes.33 After finishing the painting, he
wrote in his notebook:
This painting, Shinjukus left eye
Is it the manifestation of a new religion?
I am a religious painter.
This religion has no holy scriptures.
No need of theoretical exegesis.
It calls out to heart and soul
Shinjukus left eye is a religion that lets me be myself.34

32. Take Junichiro ni kiku,

op cit, p 6
33. Yamane, op cit, p 19ff
34. Ibid, p 21
35. Take, Shinjuku
Underground, op cit
36. Randall Collins,
Interaction Ritual Chains,
Princeton University Press,
Princeton, New Jersey,
2004, p 37

The idea of painting an eye had originally been Yamanes. It had been
prompted by Shinjukus Eye, a gigantic glass eye created by Miyashita
Yoshiko in 1969, which was located on a nearby wall close to the
entrance of one of the passages leading away from the square. Since it
had struck him as unbalanced with just one eye, he had wanted to
paint another to match it. Referring to the fact that it formed a pair
with Shinjukus Eye, Take evokes the image of an enormous two-eyed
creature or monster that had now sprung to life a newborn god of
the underground. In the Shinjuku Underground a gigantic pair of eyes
has come into being, belonging to the Underground, a living creature
with its fangs turned against Shit-Japan.35
Randall Collins points out that successful interaction rituals and
surely the jam session of which Take speaks must be counted as that
give rise to symbols that are laden with the emotion experienced in
those moments: Whenever the group assembles and focuses its attention
around an object that comes to embody their emotion, a new sacred
object is born.36 This appears to have been what happened during the
nightly jam session. The new object was the subterranean monster
who had come into being, and its emotion-laden symbol was the painting
Shinjukus Left Eye itself.
The idea of complementing an existing eye with the missing one is generally associated with the popular Daruma-san good luck doll a round
and rather cute doll whose missing eye is filled in when a wish has come
true. In fact, the Daruma-san doll was also an explicit motif in another
artwork, Yoshizakis Daruma-san Totem Pole. To connect the birth of

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the underground monster with some form of wish-fulfilment is not farfetched. Take himself often expressed his hope that something would
be born from the underground passages, which he likened to a womb.
If one looks at the stations underground complex from the air, he
says, it looks like a womb, forming a pair with the Metropolitan Government Building which rises to the sky like a phallus, the symbol of the conscious ego that tries to synthesize the citys teeming myriads.37 He had
always felt that the Shinjuku underground was something organic,
something moist, soft and warm that possessed life. Thats why I imagined that a big creature or monster might be living there, although I
didnt know whether it was good or evil. Asking him what kind of creature he imagined it to be, he says he has no concrete visual image, except
that he thought of it as still unformed and grotesque. Hirai Gen, who was
born and raised in Shinjukus red-light district, appears to have shared
Takes vision, but to him the monster was explicitly linked to the
growth of urban poverty. In what is surely an oblique reference to the
cardboard village, he affirms the revolutionary potential of Shinjuku, a
gigantic wilderness run through by innumerable passageways and
tunnels. The lower stratum blown in there is certainly increasing.
From inside one hears the wailing of demons, struggling to get out.38
Several other paintings depict sinister-looking babies or birth-scenes.
Praying Hands (Ogamu te) depicts two gigantic hands holding a
mother giving birth to a baby who glares provocatively at the viewer, signalling the coming birth of something that will overturn all existing
values. In Child From a Flower (Hana kara kodomo), we see a slightly
monstrous child born from a flower: This country likes to put the lid
on everything that smells bad, but under that lid a fearful multitude of
monsters are proliferating, Take remarks.39 These children and monsters
appear to symbolize a return of uncanny forces the return of something
familiar that has been repressed, or, to quote Sigmund Freud, something
which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.40
Why were eyes and faces such a prominent theme? Since the face is a
powerful symbol of humanity, painting them may have been a device to

37. Rojo gaka, op cit, p 63

38. Gen Hirai, Ai to nikumi no
Shinjuku (Shinjuku of
Love and Hatred),
Chikuma shinsho, Tokyo,
2010, p 191, p 210
39. Take, Shinjuku
Underground, op cit
40. Sigmund Freud, Art and
Literature, Penguin,
London, 1990, p 364

Take Junichiro, Take Yoko, Child from a Flower, probably 1996, painting on cardboard,
underground passage near Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, photo: Sakokawa Naoko

629

resist the dehumanization suffered by the homeless. This would be in line

with Moris characterization of the cardboard village art as aiming at
visualization of those who were forced to be invisible in urban
space.41 However, referring to this art simply as a project of making
the homeless visible risks missing an important point. As Take writes,
passers-by are used to looking at the homeless as if looking at a thing
without the ability of looking back at them in return. But what if they
looked back at you?
I emphasize eyes because I want to raise the self-awareness of the passers-by,
who always seem to look at the homeless village. . . as nothing but a heap of
things. . . I wanted to make them realize that they too were being watched.42

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The art was not just about providing visibility to the homeless, about presenting them as objects for the public gaze. It was also about showing that
they were looking back, that the gaze was returned. The eyes and faces
were not about instrumentally achieving visibility for a neglected
problem, and neither was it about enacting a better or happier society
here and now. If anything, it was about showing how the repressed
people themselves had the ability to be subjects. With Jacques Rancie`re
one might use the word subjectivation, a term for acts where one
polemically adopts a role for which the political order lacks place, so as
to lend voice to the repressed or excluded. Implying a challenge to the
established order or distribution of parts, such subjectivation is often
grotesque, a breach of aesthetic form.43 Another painting, Kick
(Kikku), depicts a gigantic foot aimed at the passers-by. This foot, like
the many eyes and faces, expresses a similar subjectivation: Youre
wrong if you think that we are passive objects.

GOODBYE TO THE GROTESQUE

41. Mori, Culture Politics,

op cit, p 25
42. Take, Shinjuku
Underground, op cit
43. Jacques Rancie`re, The
Aesthetic Dimension:
Aesthetics, Politics,
Knowledge, Critical
Inquiry, vol 36, no 1, 2009,
p 11
44. His recent works can be
found at http://homepage.
mac.com/take_junichiro/
Menu9.html.

Since the cardboard village struggle ended in defeat, it itself came to function as a trauma on an individual level for many of its participants.
Although trauma in this sense is not central to my investigation, it enters
the picture through the subsequent activities of Take, who today produces
art that contrasts strikingly to the art of the cardboard village. People no
longer appear in his drawings, nor any faces or eyes. Typically it consists
of black-and-white drawings of intricate miniature worlds, with small
planets covered with towns, houses, trees and flowers. One might call
them vortex paintings, since they produce a sensation of being sucked in
or drawn in. There is a strong sense of movement. With this feeling of
flying, there is no time to let ones eyes wander at leisure.44
He explains that he developed this style after withdrawing from his
engagement in the cardboard village and in the various squat-communities in which he had then been engaged, such as the Shingenchi
project in Kobe from 1998 to 2000, or the struggle to defend Miyashita
Park from 2007 to 2010. Both of the latter had triggered periods of withdrawal from activism. His repeated setbacks made him want to depict the
ideal world in his art instead. Instead of making his art on the spot as he
had used to do in the underground passages or squat-communities he
today works at home in the atelier.

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630

Take Junichiro, mid-1990s, underground passage near Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, photo:
Sakokawa Naoko

I started to think that I should reproduce the utopia I had seen in the midst
of the drawing itself, here in my room. Probably, somewhere in my mind
was the idea that since reality wont change, I should at least express my
longing in drawings.45

Takes explanation of the shift in his style is also related to changes in

society. In the suffocating climate of the 1990s, he explains, he could rest
satisfied, hoping for the birth of a grotesque monster that would liberate
life. But today the grotesque is proliferating in ways that threaten life as
in the case of violent right-extremist groups like Zaitokukai or the 2011
nuclear accident in Fukushima.46 The grotesque may have been a lifeaffirming force as long as life was repressed by form, but today form
itself is collapsing. That is why he prefers to give shape to his ideal
world, instead of hoping for more destruction.
So what Im drawing today is exactly that, the idea of another world. In
that sense its all the same, but in the 90s I had really seen and felt that
world myself in the midst of reality and wished for it to continue
eternally. . . I now believe that I have to realize that other world or
rather universe in the midst of my drawings instead.47
45. Take, interview, op cit
46. For more on Zaitokukai,
see for example Tessa
Morris-Suzuki, Freedom
of Hate Speech: Abe
Shinzo and Japans Public
Sphere, Asia-Pacific
Journal, vol 11, issue 8, no
1, 25 February 2013.
47. Ibid

The shift in Takes later works towards drawings that no longer celebrate
the grotesque appears to reflect a more general shift within freeter activism. Just as the early freeter groups advocacy of dropping out of
work no longer seems very rebellious in todays generalized precarity,
the grotesque no longer seems subversive when form has already collapsed. Paralleling Freuds idea that the encounter with the repressed in
the form of repeating the trauma might further a recovery by dispelling
the sense of helplessness and victimhood, Take had believed in the
1990s that the grotesque would help bring about a recovery of life.

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631

Take Junichiro, Yoshizaki Takewo, Yamane Yasuhiro, Pleasant Life Relaxation Express,
1996, painting on cardboard house, underground passage near Shinjuku Station, Tokyo,
photo: Sakokawa Naoko

A decade later, when so many of the social structures and cultural patterns associated with the Japanese model already appeared to lie in
shambles, such a rebellion was no longer meaningful. What matters
now is rather to try to preserve life from the grotesque forces that have
become predominant.
In a certain sense, the other world of his recent art is indeed reminiscent of the Shinjuku underground it is not about wonderful people
creating a wonderful community, but about good-for-nothings and
drunkards helping each other.
It looks like its very detailed, but if you look closely the lines are roughly
drawn. . . To me thats important. So many of us are far from brilliant or
perfect. I want to show that beauty arises from all these imperfect lines,
when you gather together all these imperfect people or dilapidated things.48

Here, then, a prefigurative element enters his art, but at the same time it is
tinged with resignation. Barred from letting utopian play contaminate
social reality, he now paints utopia as another world to which we no
longer have access. The small worlds he depicts give the impression of
being separated from the viewer by a huge, unbridgeable distance.

A POLITICS OF RESURRECTION?
48. Ibid
49. Leading activists in
Shinjuku Renraku-kai are
reported to have disliked
the paintings. Inaba, op cit;
Kasai, op cit, p 296

Was the cardboard village art political, and, if so, in what sense? Unlike
many manifestations of todays homeless movement, there was hardly
any collaboration between artists and activists in the Shinjuku cardboard
village struggle.49 Take himself explicitly denies any political commit-

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ment behind his art and takes care to identify himself as an artist rather
than an activist. To him and his friends, the passages were more than a
space of action for movement activities. It was a space where the spirits
of the dead themselves told them to paint. Art, he writes, must have
something in it that is incomprehensible or prerational to use
Spariosus term and it becomes uninteresting if it is exhausted in a
political aim.
Despite statements like these, it is not hard to find explicit political
messages in his art. Pleasant Life Relaxation Express (Jinsei kairaku
yutori-go) shows a train headed for Rich Japan with passengers laughing
derisively at a man who is falling off the train. A political message is also
present in works like Spider Man and Woman (Kumo otoko to onna). A
big half-human spider bends over a woman who is ensnared in his web,
trying to make her accept the food he offers, drooping from his mouth,
while she keeps rejecting it. This painting, as Take reveals in a commentary, depicts the relation between the Tokyo Metropolitan Government
and the homeless.50
How should we understand this vacillation between avowedly apolitical and de facto political stances? A reasonable interpretation is to
recognize that no one can be completely apolitical in the sense of being
neutral. Takes statement that he is not political is best understood as
meaning that his art does not serve any existing political ideology or political group. However, acting as a shaman trying to give voice to the
traumas of the underground can itself be seen as political. Giving voice
to the repressed is itself a political act, an act of therapeutical politics,
since it protests against repression and forgetfulness and, in doing so,
furnishes a language for that which has been silenced. The recovery of

50. Take, Shinjuku

Underground, op cit

Take Junichiro, Yoshizaki Takewo, Yamane Yasuhiro, Sweet Home, 1996, painting on
cardboard house, underground passage near Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, photo: Sakokawa
Naoko

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633

a discursive system is a precondition for other forms of politics, since as

long as people feel unable to express their concerns there can be neither
instrumental nor prefigurative politics.
By using the term therapeutical politics, I have tried to indicate that art
can be political even where it fails to conform to the more established
models of instrumental or prefigurative politics. In particular, I have
sought to relativize the common assumption that cultural activism
tends to be permeated by fun and pleasure and hence also to function prefiguratively. The cardboard village art was dominated by themes such as
death, monsters and uncanny births. The cardboard village itself was too
tinged by cruelty and grief to be a blueprint for an ideal society. If it was
utopian, as Take claimed, it was by virtue of the fact that the extremity of
deprivation and misery was not hidden or denied, and in that sense
offered a way out of the claustrophobia of mainstream society with its
ever-present desire to repress its unwanted others.
Where therapeutical activism succeeds, it helps restore agency It seems
undeniable that the cardboard art in Shinjuku helped the effort to renew
social movement activism in Japan by catalysing the deployment of art in
political activism. In a state in which the existing jargon, style and organizational forms of activism were still heavily indebted to the New Left, art
and culture helped furnish activism with a new language. Today, art is a
much more established part of the repertoire of the homeless movement
than at the time of the Shinjuku cardboard village. Despite their mobilization, however, the homeless have been evicted again and again from
the Shinjuku underground, Nagai Park, Miyashita Park and many
other places. One can only hope that somewhere Takes wish for a
space where life returns will be fulfilled, a space where the spirits, the
homeless, or those suffering under the stifling strictures of mainstream
culture will be able to return the gaze again.