Hideki Nakazawa: New Method

Post by: Brian Weiland

In January 1963, Genpei Akasegawa, the artist associated with the influential Japanese collective Hi-red Centre, sent out invitations to a solo show in Tokyo on papers made to look like 1,000 yen notes. In the same year Hideki Nakazawa was born in Niigata.

The 1,000 yen note invitations became the source of artistic and legal attention. After the police became aware of the single sided and very blatantly copied 1,000 yen notes Akasegawa was charged in one of Japan’s highest courts with violation of a 1895 law that controls the imitation of currency.

The act of reproducing a government issued currency—the point of intersection between capitalism and State authority— targeted the State at the crux of its hegemony. For it was the State, not private enterprise, that fueled Japan’s economic ‘miracle’ by giving massive loans to corporations in the form of currency printed at the Bank of Japan throughout the period of post-war resurgence. The eventual economic collapse of 1991 and the ensuing lost decades confirmed the importance of Akasegawa’s early 1960s critique of the State’s imperious attitude towards meddling in the economy. As an artist he revealed the existence of a basic structure that cannot be altered, fabricated, or mitigated by the material abstraction of a superficial body. The Bank of Japan, not Akasegawa or small time criminal gangs, was Japan’s worst counterfeiter. Read the full story

Naomi: A Pyrrhic Victory for the Ages

Post by: Thalia Harris

Junichiro Tanizaki’s Naomi (痴人の愛, Chijin no Ai, “A Fool’s Love”) is a novel about a sado-masochistic relationship between a Western culture-fixated salaryman named Joji, and his quasi-foundling-turned-seductress, Naomi. Though this tumultuous tale was released as a complete work in 1947, the chapters were originally published as a series in Osaka Morning News from March-June of 1924.

Historically around this time, Japan was in the midst of their Industrial Revolution, which technologically advanced the nation as a whole and allowed the burgeoning influence of Western culture to take root. In addition to the textile factories in existence, service industries were burgeoning as well. Young Japanese women, newly dubbed as the modan garu (“modern girl”), were especially partial to the societal beliefs accompanied by Western aesthetics (such as looser-fitting fashions, Hollywood movies and social dances), which encouraged independence from male relatives and agency in their romantic relationships. The environmental tension between Western influence and Eastern tradition caused some opposition to the modan garu and serves as a backdrop in the novel Naomi. Read the full story