The Critics of a Neo-Tokyo
Yet as you may be able to tell, it was not all sunshine and rainbows for this dream city. There were some who looked beneath the flowery skyscrapers. There were others who saw how Japan’s uniqueness became less of a priority compared to the global and corporate branding that the developers were trying to achieve.
The allure of corporate branding is precisely the underlying message of Nakamura Masato’s TRAUMATRAUMA, a lights installation featuring colors of popular convenience-store brands.
Brands-as-art was exactly what the developers of Roppongi Hill were trying to achieve then in order to market their utopia dreamland.
There was also the Showa 40 nen kai, a group of extremely talented people all born in 1965 (also known as the 40th year of the Showa period). Aida Makoto, Ozawa Tsuyoshi, Matsukage Hiroyuki, Oscar Oiwa, Kinoshita Parco, and Arima Sumihisa refused to cater their talents to foreigners, with their art being mostly focused on their nostalgia for the glorious Showa period. Their most notorious work is a guidebook to their drinking habits, underworld tastes, and the disappearing city they grew up in.
Conceptual artist Aida Makoto created social-realist mangas starkly different from those known in the West today — notably Mutant Hanako (1996), a pornographic revision of the Pacific war, featuring a monster schoolgirl taking on the American Empire. Another manga artist, Kinoshita Parco’s Drifting Teacher (2001) highlighted the experience of a middle-aged schoolteacher sinking into despair. On the other hand, Oscar Oiwa took to painting to reconstruct the old neighborhoods that the Showa 40 nen kai gang used to frequent.
Photographer Tsuzuki Kyoichi’s Tokyo: A Certain Style highlights the minuscule sizes of apartments in Tokyo. To Tsuzuki, this was the vision of a somewhat psychotic and extremely unfamiliar Tokyo, with life turning sideways for many dwellers of the city. However, foreigners saw this as charming, imagining the allure of living “otaku-style” in a 15-meter square area — another way in which Japan is glorified in the eyes of the West.
Tsuzuki was so talented that David Elliott, director of the MAM, commissioned him to do his own portrayal of Roppongi Hills for marketing purposes. However, his work was nothing like Murakami’s flowery rendition.
Working with Shinsan Nameko, he created Memento Mori: Hills of Dreams, a badly-drawn tour of the tower. Ultimately, the true purpose of the tower was implied: not high culture, but sex. With dimmed lights, mirror-like windows, and a breathtaking view, it seemed that Mori Tower served the purpose of a love hotel for an aging population that refused to reproduce.
Unfortunately, although not unsurprisingly, Tsuzuki and Shinsan’s creative work never made it to the walls of the Mori Art Museum.
One artist whose work did make it to the MAM is Yamaguchi Akira. He portrayed Roppongi Hills in the ukiyo-e style loved by the West, merging the postmodern with the premodern — truly, an alluring image. Yet this may be a trick: are those clouds covering the city, or is it the smog of pollution? Why does the samurai horse have a motor engine? And why are the modern buildings sloping down to pagoda roofs?
It seems that Yamaguchi’s work is more reminiscent of the Showa 40 nen kai’s work — nostalgic for the disappearing parts of the glorious city they grew up in.
On the other hand, graphic designer Itadani Ryu rendered his vision of Tokyo in extremely bright colors. His subjects were the mundane — beer, soy sauce, instant noodles, and the like. Most notably, his To-Den featured a premodern, rickety tram line that had been replaced by the speedy Shinkansen Bullet Train in the urban cities.
Then only present in rundown areas like the Machiya district and the Sumida ward, this image provoked the thought: could the magic of Japan also be found in these charming old areas?
Tabaimo’s breakthrough work is one most controversial indeed — an animated video highlighting the chaos of city life in Japan. The main premise is of a mother slaving over a pot of Japanese hot pot in a shabby kitchen. As she works, bugs are coming out of the walls, an angry politician rattles on inside the TV, and the pot is boiling away loudly. Inside the fridge, an office employee sits at the desk, stressed amidst the other vegetables. The mother then takes the man and cuts off his head to be part of the stew. Outside, school girls are laughing and old cars are driving by as bodies start falling out of a high-rise tower.
Overall, it was a clear representation of the high suicide rates in the country. This, she says, is the urban Japan she grew up in.
