Essay Echigo-Tsumari and the Art of the Possible: The Fram Kitagawa Philosophy in Theory and Practice Adrian Favell There are two Japans. One is the futuristic fast-moving, high-tech cityscape of urban sprawl—the Tokyo conurbation that seems to stretch lor hundreds of miles north and south, as well as the nations other important urban hubs. The other Japan is the quiet, declining, rural hinterland, with its crumbling small cities and towns, aging populations, young people moving away to the city, no children being born, and all the old traditions disappearing. In some ways, this is a familiar tale of modernization seen woridwide. But the social polarization visible in Japan is arguably the most dramatic case anywhere, in terms of sheet spatial inequality across an urban/rural divide. Most of the population of Japan is now urbanized. The rest of Japan is, socially speaking, a rural wasteland.1 International perceptions of contemporary Japan center on an almost exclusively unban imaginary. This is the vision of Japan beloved by manga, street fashion, J-pop, and designer fans worldwide: the "neo-Tbkyo" fantasy of an endless, futuristic urban sprawl, full of weird and wonderful subcultures. Fascination with this image of Japan (and now China) has always been driven by the allure of a rising alternate Asian modernity. In many respects, though, it is a screen hiding a more complicated reality. Japan is not what it was during the boom "Bubble" years in the late 1980s. Yet despite ailing economic fortunes, political stagnation, and social decline in the years since, the Japanese government has thought it wise to continue to invest massively in branding the nation in terms of the fantasy, as a kind of futurist cartoon of "Cool Japan." This peculiar policy got going in the early 2000s, and is still high on the agenda despite the shattering disasters of March zon.* Around the same time, in contemporary ait, Japans two best-known international artists, Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nam, rose to fame with a pop art that transposed the culture of "Cool Japan" into elite museums worldwide. Murakamis "superflat" movement—which packaged the art of the Bubble years and the decadent times just after as a conceptual art representing a unique national culture—is often all that is known of recent Japanese art internationally,3 For many yean, this vision has been difficult to dislodge. The kind of ait— indeed, the form of social movement—represented by the manifold projects at Pram Kitagawa's Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennalc has at the same time been almost invisible internationally. Without a realistic context about the social and economic conditions of contemporary Japan, as well as knowledge of the festivals relation to the contemporary Japanese arc world, Echigo-Tsumari can be hard to understand or fully appreciate. Yet as it has grown, and particularly as its patented organizational form was adopted by the even bigger Setouchi Arc Festival in the Japanese Inland Sea, social and community-centered art projects dedicated to the economic revitalization of marginal regions, which address the social divides of young and old ot urban and rural brought on by economic transformation, have risen to become an almost dominant focus of Japanese contemporary art domestically. Indeed, in the wake of the March 2011 disasters, art speaking to the dysfunctions and social tragedies of the nation—as opposed to art reflecting fashionable urban youth cultures and high-tech futures—has become almost ubiquitous. The time is ripe for a full international appreciation of the power and ambition of the artistic movement of which Fram Kitagawa has been the central architect. Not least this is because the same social and spatial polarization effects, stagnating economies, lost generations of youth, and potentially desperate demographic decline are beginning to be a feature of many other highly advanced industrial regions mired in their own long-term economic crises; for instance, the industrial northeast of the United States, eastern Germany, and parts of southern Europe. Through the small but hugely symbolic effects of social interventions enabled by such festivals, Japan offers examples of how these potentially catastrophic and conflicting scenarios of decline might be managed in a rather more gentle, "civilized" fashion—a kind of Utopian vision of art and its social relevance for late modernity. Metobotist Japan: Culture, Economy, and Politics in Postwar Japan On a dear night in Tokyo, visitors to the $20 "City View" on the fifty-second floor of Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills are invited to behold the seemingly infinite nighttime sprawl of a spectacular, futuristic city that seems to incarnate everything imagined to be possible of an alternate Asian modernity. Although its exhibitions are often overshadowed by the sublime view outside, the ascent to the fifty-third-floor Mori Art Museum then offers tourists the chance to cap their experience at Tokyo's premier destination for contemporary art: the local equivalent of the pilgrimage demanded of tourists today when they visit Paris, London, or New York and check off the Pompidou, Tate Modern, and Museum of Modern Art. Around them, the Roppongi Hills site, which was completed in 2001 and heavily influenced by the late Minoru Mori's fascination with Le Corbusier, offers a vision of how a "creative dty" redevelopment may work in what was a problematic, poor, and crime-infested neighborhood. A multipurpose "dry within a dty," It has brought back affluent Tokyoites, as well as legions of national and international visitors, to enjoy its self-contained shopping, entertainment, and residential complexes.4 Not far away, in an Intense, rather chaotic office that is part of Daikanyamas Hillside Terrace—a landmark 1980s architectural development that Fram Kitagawa joined in 1984—lies the headquarters of his organization, An Front Gallery. Kitagawa does not criticise the Mori philosophy directly, but Roppongi Hills might be seen to incarnate much of the negative vision of Japanese urbanism that has motivated him to take art away from the dty into rural areas, in an effort to "cleanse" what the dry has become.' For Kitagawa, the twentieth century, he says, was an age of dries that led to a dark, if not self-destructivt, art and culture. The unhealthy alliance of an, urbanism, and commercial interests has long been dominant in Japan. Japan's drive to both cooperate and compete with American and European modernity has, in its failure, left a highly urbanized population disconnected and alienated from its origins. For Kitagawa, the spiritual core of Japanese culture has, in its urban incarnation, been replaced by consumerism, "Art should not just sit atop consumerism," he says; a contemporary an museum as a "shrine" amp a shopping mall and office cower block has become a "Parthenon for the modern world." Fram Kitagawa and the director of the Mori An Museum, Fumio Nanjo—who has been since the 1980s one of the most familiar Japanese faces in international an and museum drdes—have long parallel histories in the brokering of major public an projects over the years. Indeed, their perceived rivalry is sometimes referred to jokingly as the Japanese an "dvil war {namboku seme) of the north and the south," featuring the Niigata-born Mr. Kitagawa (his name means "northern river") versus Mr. Nanjo (01 "southern quarter"), from Nagoya in the south, Nanjo's vision of "an in the city," which elaborates on the public an installations around Roppongi Hills after a long track record of curadng public an installations in many prestigious urban locations in Tokyo and elsewhere, fits wdl with the mainstream cultural policy of the "creative dty.34 Japanese dries, like so many others internationally, have bought heavily into the vision promoted by urban policy gurus such as Charles Landry and Richard Florida since the 1990s and incarnated by landmark projects such as the Guggenheim in 144 t BCHIOO'TWMAlll AND TH1 AKT OP THE 7DIIIBLE KCWGOTSI'MAR, Mň> THÍ AST OF THE HHIBU 34J Bilbao or Tate Modern in London. In these projects, investment in high-end cultural facilities is said to lead to economic growth by encouraging the talented and creative to engage back in the city, as well as attracting consumers and tourists with disposable time and energy to lavish on the arts.7 In Japan, first Yokohama, then Kanazawa, then any number of other Japanese cities have explicitly adopted a "creative city" justification for high-end cultural funding—particularly the construction of museums and the staging of major cultural events—as a core strategy for attracting tourism, service-industry investment, and new forms of urban consumerism and entrepreneurs alism." The Mori Building Company also cited the "creative city" in its plans for Roppongi Hills, and was distinctive in being a private corporate initiative—indeed, one of the significant channels for international investment that started pouring into Tokyo around 2000 after die crisis-provoked deregulation of Japanese banking and financial industries at the end of the 1990s.' The city of Tokyo then allowed Mr. Mori to build on an unprecedentedly huge site after his slow and costly acquisition over nearly twenty years of the twelve hectares of housing and commercial lots in working-class Roppongi, which he bought up through both carrot and stick pressure on the former residents, so that he could create his signature architectural legacy." This growth-oriented creative city ethos stands as the antithesis of the social movement Fram Kiragawa has tried to create through the activities of Echigo-Tsumari. Art, he claims, should not be an index of modem development, but a way of measuring what has been lost: the distance between urban life and the nature, traditions urban populations have left behind. Nowadays, the modern world only values how fast we can absorb new information. This is why Kitagawa conceived Echigo-Tsuroari as a deliberately difficult, "inefficient'' experience, one that would force the visitor to slow down and think, not just consume everything, and appreciate the process of tracking down an in abandoned village schools, remote old houses, up a hill, or across a deserted field. It would be contemporary art, not packaged as a slick tourist experience, but found in the severest and most unlikely of places. Minoru Mori's philosophy focused on cleaning up the dry and reeducating urban populations through the sublime experience of art and culture in a futuristic museum. Kitagawa's concern, on the other hand, is that art has replaced a God that has been lost. Art is in danger of becoming a commercial accessory to urban living, as well as a fig leaf for ever more urban development. It is, he says, a strategy that merely reproduces the Western, U.S.-dominated system. It worked well for Japan to be in this subservient position during the "air pocket" of the Cold War years. It gave them the financial Bubble, and delusions of world economic power. But this is when the Japanese lost their ethics. Art was then co-opted in the 1990s and 2000s to keep the development logic going. The inward investment of global capital that followed into Tokyo through Mori and other multinational corporations at the turn of the century was the heralding of a full normalization of Tokyo as an archetypal global city—that is, a megalopolis embedded in global circuits of power and capital, but increasingly disconnected with and distinct from Its own national hinterlands.11 Notably, with the partial exception of Fukuoka and Sapporo, which have different, regionally embedded economies linked with China and Korea, other dries in Japan have only suffered in the shadow of Tokyo's ongoing growth. The postwar era of modernization has been a long story of rural to urban flight, in which declining rural homelands were romanticized as the jurwato regional origins of populations going to the dry.11 Yet the hinterlands were also, in the heyday of the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party), quite well sustained through political subsidies (on farming, construction, landscaping, and industrial production), and then later on the promotion of shmkansen package tourism to the regions." This is what political scientists refer to cynically as "pork barrel" politics, feeding all the most important interests and constituencies to keep them politically pliant. But after the Bubble of the 1980s, many of Japan's formerly industrially rich regional dries as well as environmentally rich agricultural terrains went into dedine and shrinkage. As globalization swept in finally at the end of the 1990s, much of this has been impossible to sustain. Meanwhile, the fanning hinterlands have declined ever more sharply, with an almost ubiquitous flight of youth to the dries, and the dramatic aging of agricultural populations that will never be replaced. Moreover, from 1995 onward, the birth rate started to decline to one of the lowest in the developed industrial world. By 200;, the population itself had started to shrink, with an unprecedented proportion of very old people as the postwar baby-boomer generations aged. Japan can look forward almost certainly to a population approaching 25 to 30 percent smaller by 2050 (declining from approximately 130 million to 100 million), with anywhere between 30 and 40 percent past retirement age (that is, never again working), and with a current annual loss of about five hundred thousand people a year (in other words, a dry the size of Nagasaki).'4 Tokyo, whose population and wealth has continued to grow, and whose performance almost entirely accounts for the much-trumpctcd "growth" spurt of recent Abenomics (named for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe), is thus the exception, not EClIlCo-TSDMABI AMD THE ART D* THE POSSIBLE ECH1O0-T3UMA*! *JKO TtU ART OF THE PQUIJLE / the rule.15 The international fixation on the global city of Tokyo as Japan of course masks this, but it fits well with the older, Utopian visions of an ever-expanding, almost entirely urbanized Japan that -were dreamt of by the famous metabolist architects and planners of the 1950s and 19605,* The brilliant students of Kenza Tange, himself inspired by the planning dreams of Le Corbusier, in fact invented a distinctively futurist culture for an Asian growth machine that was thought internationally to have no culture but one of imitation. As documented by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist, this Project Japan of the metabolises for awhile wedded modernist utopianism to vast bureaucratic governmental ambition, such that Japan invented almost a new stage in "total urbanization," akin to the theories of Henri Lefebvrc.17 What the world saw was the organizational wonder of the 1964 Olympics and the cybernetic playground of the 1970 Osaka Expo, registering these then as the image ofa future Asian superpower.1' When all this developed further into the high-tech consumerist wonderland of 1980s Bubble Japan—in which the Japanese economy began even to overtake and surpass America's—many of these oriental dreams seemed to be coming true. It is not a coincidence that Mori's most enthusiastic and well-funded shows at the Mori Art Museum have been about architecture and made an explicit link via Le Corbusier between metabolism and the idea of Roppongi Hills-19 Orchestrating this metabolist economy at the urban core, the liberal Democratic Party nevertheless lived off the support of the conservative heartlands, which they bought off via subsidies and regional backhanders. This was the heyday of the infamous "iron triangle" — the tight relationship between government, bureaucratic planners, and business corporations— which drove the unprecedented growth machine of the post-war boom years.'0 But after the Bubble, with Japans economic decline, the ongoing urbanization and centralization of wealth and power in Tokyo made the regions politically much less significant, Niigata is a case in point. At the heart of Echigo-Tsumari, the small textile-producing city of Tokamachi and the rice farming areas around it was one of the most archetypal, solid heartlands of conservative LDP power during its long postwar reign. This carefully cultivated constituency was the power base particularly of a local Niigata politician, Kakuei Tanaka, a prime minister in the early 1970s who was long the dominant, charismatic figure in the region. He ensured that the prefecture would always have its huge agricultural subsidies, and he created a flow of lucrative public-works projects for businessmen in the region. Kitagawa himself comes from Niigata, and this part of the region is very symbolically important for Japan as a noted area of top-quality rice production. Expensively subsidized, with price tariffs on foreign rice as much as seven times above international .prices, the prized rice is grown on artificially terraced fields on hillsides. This built schools in villages where children's numbers were declining, paved rivers and hillsides in case of any natural disaster, and laid out roads and tunnels through mountains that led nowhere. Export industries were also imposed on the region In place of the self-sustaining local economy. Tanaka's most famous scheme was to persuade the state to finance the Joetsu northern sbinkansen, which runs through mountains and over rivers from Tokyo to Niigata city, stopping in many tiny towns and small tourist resorts en route. It was the notorious shinkanscn that went nowhere. Huge new railway stations were constructed to attract people and development, but all they did was enable the population of Niigata to move out even more quickly to the dty. After the 1980s Bubble, when the money ran out, the region was left with empty schools and public buildings, failed businesses, a disappearing population, and grass growing over brand-new highways. Meanwhile, the last generation of farmers was getting too old to manage its subsidized fields. This is the desolate landscape into which Kitagawa has brought his ideas. It is a Japan largely forgotten in the overwhelming focus of its "modern* arts and high culture in the central cities. In Japan, modernity was urbanization, and funding going to the regions to sustain culture was superfluous. When Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi reached the inevitable conclusion and pursued the downsizing administrative reforms of the "Great Heisei Municipal Mergers" in 2005 as a way of reforming the politics of his own party, costs were cut dramatically by ending subsidies and amalgamating infrastructures.1' Koizumi set out to dramatically reduce the number of municipalities in Japan. This led to a massive downgrading of local governance and a real abandonment of many isolated areas. The big political game during the 2000s was to focus on deregulation within urban economies to enable Japan to embrace global capitalism and to lose as little as possible of the international investment that was being seriously sapped by the spectacular rise of other Asian cities. When disaster struck in March 2011, this was a disaster, too, for the nation in terms of potential flight of business and investment. Ironically, though, the tsunami has been the best news in along time for the "iron triangle" and its growth-obsessed reflex of blinkered modernism: particularly for the old construction industry (think: "concrete futures9}, as Tohoku has been reconstructed through stare-subsidized, cookie-cutter development. The state and its planners ran roughshod over the protests 148 ECKIOD-TJt)»L»!lI MB THIMT at THE lOMIH * F.CHigO^rtUMAlU AMD THE ART OV THE FClHIfilA 149 of many architects and urbanists who said it was time for new thinking about the form of these dries, especially their overwhelmingly old and isolated populations, and the wisdom of coastal sprawl. In the end, though,K has been (cheap) new homes for all—as opposed to prize architect Toyo Ito's much-fanfared hopes"'—as well as new, even higher, concrete sea defenses that still would have railed in March ion. With undignified haste, Abe has sought to switch back on the nuclear reactors that have powered the overlit neon-bright cities of Japanese consumerism—despite the supposed Japanese aversion to the nuclear—and the energy politics that embed Japan most firmly in the emprise of American domination.1' And then Tokyo got lucky once more, when it was chosen, partly on a sympathy vote, partly because of the economic and political collapse of rival bidders, to host the Olympics in 2020. AU of a sudden "Cool Japan" was back up and running again. It was a new chance to plan an earthquake- and radiation-threatened international development bonanza that might hark back to the now almost innocent-seeming heyday of Japanese futurist development in the 1960s, especially, of course, 1964, Whatever happens in 2020, it Is dear that the Tokyo Olympics can only mean the further concentration of capital, culture, and power in die central dry at the expense of the declining regions, and doubtless the further proliferation of fantasies of "neo-Tokyo" at the expense of "real" Japan. A Back-to-tkc-Country Alternative? The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale has since 2000 sought to offer a response to this apparently one-way drift of culture, economy, and politics. Something different needed to be done to create a civil sodety that was missing in Japans relations between the state, its dries, and its consumer populations.1* Pram Kitagawa's anti-urban philosophy, now sharply defined by the praxis of the six Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennali (this count includes the one taking place in zoiy), is a complicated mix of soft traditionalism and sharp political critique. Echigo-Tsumari is inextricable 60m romantic rhetoric about the heartland satoyama, which equates the in-between landscape of cultivated arable lands between wild, forested mountains and urbanized "civilization" with the soul of Japan. For Kitagawa, satoyama symbolizes the unity of the Japanese with the landscape, as well as a lost sense of rural tradition among the populations who now can only experience an alienated modern urban life. Kitagawa wanted to bring these people back to the countryside, to experience an art festival there that could reconnect them with their regional roots. He frequently states that the quality of this sodety has to be measured by the smiles of old people cared for by the festival. At the same time, his philosophy is partly hard-nosed policy orthodoxy: the festival is justified and promoted with the language of rural revitalization, which seeks salvation through new tourist economies, cultural production, and attracting young people and families Co move away frojoti dries. In these terms, it suggests an alternate "creative economy" intervention that encourages the rebuilding of sodal and community relations that have been severed by post-industrial division: machizukuri (town and community building), as it is commonly referred to. Part of this, too, is a consensual concern with putting culture into employment as a form of bottom-up sodal welfare, particularly for isolated, aging populations. Yet Echigo-Tsumari can also be read as a radical politics: angry about a Japanese modernism that seems to equate Japanese modernity entirely with the inequities of international global capitalism, and which bluntly challenges the mainstream fixations of exclusively "urban'9 contemporary commercial art in Japan. As the curator Raiji Kuroda has eloquently pointed out in recent writings, part of Asian modernity necessarily is a struggle for emancipation from this (Westernized) hegemony; such that the unfinished drive of modernity in Asian contexts can indeed be expressed in the focal, the vernacular, the traditional, and the peripheral.1' Kitagawa, bom in 1946, is an archetypal postwar baby boomer who passed through the crudble of 1960s radicalism. Arriving in Tokyo for university in 1965, he was swept up into student politics as an activist and radical, while pursuing a course of study at Geidai (now Tokyo University of the Arts). He studied Buddhist art, which set him on a career of gallery dealing and brokering art for corporations and publications, which brought him into partnership with urban developers. The business activities appear to have been mostly a means to an end: a passion for curating and raking high art to the people. His first major touring show, on Antoni Gaudf (1978-79), was followed in 1988—90 by the landmark anti-apartheid art exhibition Apartheid Nan! International Art Festival, which toured to 194 locations around Japan in a huge articulated truck marked by a red balloon." Some of Kitagawa's carry writings develop novel ideas about the sodal and community relations involved in curating these shows, breaking with an emphasis on locating Japanese contemporary art in a narrative of high (Western) modern and postmodern art. Kitagawa's art theory ends, be says, with Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys. Beyond these two figures—who represent, respectively, the ironic embrace of market forces and the antidote of social art by and for everyone—the ICHIGO-TIUMAI! AND THI ART 0Í THE PDHl»LE SCHIGO-TTUTMAM AND THÄ AKT Of THÄ pOflJBLt theory melts away into a different practical understanding of art as 2 public goad embedded in social and political movements. Kitagawas interest in the vernacular and the traditional makes him a populist, and he is very insistent on how even elite artists coming to Echigo-Tsumari must immerse themselves in the social and political realities of life and work in the region before they begin their residencies. Crucially, too, he has come to reject the typical elite art reflex in Japan of trying to play the '"Western" or "global" game by inserting "Japannes*" into a global conceptual or commercial discourse. This was a talent well developed, tor example, by On Kawara and, later, Takashi Murakami, to establish themselves internationally. The struggle of the late 1960s led to a comprehensive disillusionment with left-wing politics, which Kitagawa associates with the internal executions of Rengo Sekigun (United Red Army) members in 1972, at a time when radical politics created a cult-like fanaticism. From this, Kitagawa learned an emphasis on diversity and pluralism In his organizational practices, at least in theory. The second key element, common to others working in the impossible cultural "void" of the 1980s Bubble, was the necessary cultivation of links with an enlightened segment of corporate japan, in order for any kind of progressive cultural agenda to develop. His involvement in the development of architect Fumihiko Maki's Hillside Terrace in Daikanyama from the early 1980s on provided a base for Art Front Gallery. It was pan of the parallel invention, for the first time, of a genuine commercial contemporary art scene in Japan, with initiatives such as the Seibu Sezon Museum, the rise of galleries such as Fuji TV and Touko, and the opening, with commercial sponsorship, of the influential art space Sagacho.*7 Kitagawa retained his radicalism, however, in terms of his relation to the mainstream art world. Ever since he was young, he explains, he wanted to destroy the existing art system. This is a familiar refrain among nearly all the pioneers of the Japanese contemporary art world in the postwar era. The crucial aspect to note in many of the contemporary art initiatives of the 1980s was the lack of support—indeed, total lack of interest—from the government. Kitagawas anti-apartheid commitment, however, reflected the liberal and cosmopolitan mood of 1980s internationalism in japan, which was predominant in the contemporary art of that period, such as in the work of the Kyoto performance group Dumb Type, and emerging pop art figures such as Shinro Ohtake and Yukinori YanagL" Indeed, Kitagawa and Art Front Gallery was the young Yanagi's first representation, an influence that has been visible in his later large-scale, land- and community-based works.* A more typical response to the "void" of the 1980s was the macabre visions of Arata Isozaki's postmodern turn against metabolism: ruining his own Tsukuba development, or re-ruining Hiroshima.50 Elements of Isozaki's philosophy of the "incubated cities" underlining the ruins latent in all modern development can be read into Kitagawa's subsequent turn away from the city to embrace the quieter rains of the Japanese countryside. Isozaki's later Artpolis projects in Kumamoto, commissioning community-oriented architecture as a tool of urban regeneration, were also forerunners of Echigo-Tsumari in certain respects, as Lynne Breslin discusses in this volume." With his track record of touring shows, as well as the public events at Daikanyama, Kitagawa was selected in the early 1990s to direct the huge and well-funded Fa ret Tachikawa public art project, which, when it opened in 1994, became a defining step in the development of a new mode of curating public works, as well as in the uses of culture to sustain urban development-*1 The remote western suburb of Tokyo had housed an American military base, which returned large areas of open space to the city when it was closed. A new city complex of offices and shops was constructed on part of the site, but it was deemed to need branding in terms of an innovative cultural image. Kitagawa followed his instincts and insisted on commissioning artists to create work in-situ and working with officials and locals to make sure these artists could use the everyday materials of street furniture and city utilities as part of their work As Kitagawa notes in the art guide to the site: "Artists discovered urban functions such as exterior walls, parking ramp walls, lighting, bollards, and tree grates, and turned them into artworks, as if birds had looked for places to build a nest."n Kitagawa's methods and idealism, here, can be contrasted with the mote conventional public art initiatives of Fumio Nanjo, a much more mainstream political and corporate operator with a background in fJTwnctj who had worked for the Japan Foundation and had already curated some of the most important international shows of Japanese art of that era.*4 Faret Tachikawa was still relatively conventional in its selection of international artists and the tendency for some works to simply be monumental sculptures in incongruous sites. It signaled, however, new possibilities for the notion of a public an project, in particular the creation of new urban spaces for art,5 Kitagawas innovations here reflected and built upon a wider artistic movement in which he was central. Notably, there are many parallels with Shingp Yarrtano, the current director of Yokohama's remarkable community an project, the Koganecho Bazaar. * From a similar postwar generation, Yamano was a formalist artist who had been involved with the radical an school Bigakko in Tokyo.97 Frustrated by the conservative commercial ICIUGO-TSUUAl] AMD THE ART OF TUB "C 1J1,LE ECHICO-TIirUtXl AND TKl ART or THE rOKIHLI / art scene in 1970s Tokyo, he sec up base In Fukuoka, where from the early 1980s on he began to organize new forms of public art, carving out radical art spaces in a conservative and skeptical city.3" This led to the Museum City Project, in which the young Raiji Kuroda was a co-curator: a series of art events which, from 1990 until 2.01x1, established a paradigm for street-based art and commercial funding (in the absence of much government support) before similar initiatives had been attempted In Tokyo, and approximately contemporaneous with the parallel organizational innovations of the Tfeung British Artists' movement in London.9 Kitagawa and Yamano became linked up during the 19S0S in connection with the early career of Tadashi Kawamata, the artist from Japan most associated with developing the notion of the "art project" outside conventional museum spaces.40 Yamano also helped stage Kitagawas Apartheid Non! tour in Fukuoka. Kawamata is renowned internationally today for his outdoor wooden architectural constructions that "grow" on the outsides of public buildings, or which create new public spaces and meeting places out of improvised and often discarded materials, usually with the complicated involvement of local communities and public/private networks.41 His articulate conceptual reflections on the two possibilities of the art project—of the work being the "live" documentation of work in progress, and the work being the unique product only possible because of the in-situ materials, personnel, and conditions that he happens to find at the site—are hugely influential sources of ideas feeding into the later Echigo-Tsumari projects, in which he has taken a prominent part.41 In Fukuoka, in 1983, Yamano created for the young Kawamata one of his earliest platforms for an interior installation work (Ottmon, Wada-io) by negotiating access to an empty apartment in a commercial building that was about to be knocked down in the name of early-Bubble era development. Kitagawa, meanwhile, the next year curated Kawamata's controversial Under Construction at Daikanyama Hillside Terrace, a large, open, building site Improvisation around the location, which was forced to close after two weeks because of public outrage at the "mess'1 (like a building site) it created for local businesses and shops. These connections lay the foundations for the next generation of art organisers, several of whom are key players in the current contemporary art scene in Japan. A somewhat younger art producer, the present director of BankABT in Yokohama, Osamu Ikeda, was also involved in the Under Construction project as part of the radical architectural group PH Studio, later was involved in remodeling the articulated truck used in the Apartheid Non! touring exhibition, and worked as a curator for Kitagawa's Hillside Gallery at Daikanyama. Ikeda has thus worked closely with Kitagawa, Yamano, and Kawamata over the yean—he cites Kitagawa and Kawamata, along with the architect Hiroshi Hara, as the three "masters" who taught him—and BankART is today one of the most important city-funded public art centers in Japan.4 BankART also runs an artist residency site in a remote part of Echigo-Tsumari, and Ikeda is often mentioned as a possible successor to Kitagawa at Echigo-Tsumari or SetouchL Ikeda has continued to work with Kawamata over the years, and in Expand BankART (2012—13) staged an enormous installation work by Kawamata involving the whole waterside building in Yokohama. While they share much of the same conceptual philosophy about art projects and art in the community, there is a distinction between the radical idealism of the older Kitagawa and Yamano, and the rather more pragmadst Kawamata and Ikeda. Kawamata takes pains to note his political distance from the older pair, who are the last (or youngest) of the baby-boomer student radicals who experienced the end of the 1960s and early 1970s as students.44 Bom in 1953, Kawamata is too young to have engaged with those formative moments very directly (notably 1968, and then the year of ANPO in 1970). To this list of interconnected figures, we can add Tokyo University of the Arts professor Toyomi Hoshina, who was an early partner of Kawamata at Geldai, and is the creative force behind many of the Ucno-bascd public art initiatives of the last couple of decades. And then there Is Ikeda's direct counterpart in Tokyo, Masato Nakamura, director of 3331 Arts Chiyoda, who works in Hoshina's Oil Painting department at Geidai, Since his break with his early partner, Takashi Murakami, Nakamura has gone on to become the most influential public art organizer in the city: first with his insurgent street-art events in the early 1990s (Gimburart and Shinjuku Boys Art), then the neighborhood collaborations of AtdhabaraTV (1999) and Command N (in Kknda), then the enormous art center project 3331 Arts Chiyoda in an abandoned middle school, and most recently the ongoing TransArt projects utilizing unused corporate buildings in the city.4' With the partnership of Junya Yamaide and Tadashi Scrizawa running similar programs In Beppu in the south, Yukinori Yanagi and his projects in Sew, and the activities of two frequent associates of Nakamura's 3331 Am Chiyoda, Katsuhiko Hibino (whom I discuss below) and Hiroshi Fuji (like Yanagi, a Kyushu-born social artist, now director of the Towada Art Center), this constellation of figures can be a viewed as a who's who of social and community art pioneers in Japan, all circling around Kitagawa, who together lie behind most of the innovations seen in the country in the organization of this mode of art event.4' 154 t AM£r THE AUT ŕ5F TRI MJ3HILB ECHIOO-TroMABl AND THJ AST OP THÍ. rOjJIlLI 155 As a result of die intense exposure he received with Farce Tachikawa, Kitagawa was invited in 199J by the Niigata municipality of Tokamachl to consider the possibilities of new kind of revitalization project in this remote, declining region. As he was born in Niigata, the place held certain emotional possibilities but also presented a totally different kind of environment from the urban art projects he had been hitherto involved in, with its run-down towns, declining villages, and die small city facing further infrastructural shrinkage with the Heisei municipal mergers. Kitagawas practical conversion to the idea of rural art might be dated here, although certainly his interests in regional traditionalism go much further back. Other sources may include one particular feature of post-i by Mibor. Tsumari opens up new possibilities for a largely unexplored idea of non-urban art (and—hence as Kuroda's argument suggests—a potentially non-urban modernity), he stresses already the potentials for a "reconsideration of the formats for what we describe as art exhibitions" as well as the potentials for "change not only among the residents of the region but also among the participating artists themselves."45 This paradigm change would become even more significant as the emphasis of artworks at the triennali shifted from made-in-situ objects to the re-utilization of empty and abandoned houses, schools, and other sites.*" Kitagawa's sober assessment in his dosing essay in this volume describes some of the difficulties in organizing the early editions, particularly the first. The resistance of villagers to cooperating with the sometimes-intrusive plans, and hard challenges about the money spent on works, opened up the organization to criticism that it was all top-down art parachuted in from the city with little respect or sensitivity to the locality. Critics have also pointed out that the environmentally concerned Echigo-Tsumari received funding from a prefecture, Niigata, that had benefited from the opening of the Kashrwazaki-Kariwa nuclear reactor site. This lies only about thirty miles from parts of the tricnnale site. Kitagawa denies any connection. In retrospect, some of the monumental-style works have not worn so welL The permanent open-air installations of earlier editions were often the typical plastic or steel works so familiar from global art fashions of the 1990s. These toxic monuments sit incongruously in their beautiful surroundings, and over the years have cost a fortune to maintain. But criticisms of the inefficiency of the event in terms of travel and logistics miss one of the key defining points of Kitagawa's philosophy: that the art at Echigo-Tsumari can only be consumed slowly, often with difficulty (both physically and practically), and often with many detours and deviations along the route, such as chatting with locals or trying out regional food and resting points. These are the everyday pleasures en route to a new connection with the landscape and its population, even if visitors fail to see all or much of the art. "Sow art" is, he asserts, the antidote to the "sickness" engendered by the fast consumer life of the city. Already in the first events, as Nakalrira has pointed out, there were innovations that have gone on to be signature elements of the tricnnale as a philosophy and practice. Notably, there are works of land art that take their meaning from their dialogue with the landscape or the locals with whom the work had to be painstakingly negotiated: And, after Kitagawa began to successfully negotiate permission, the opening up of abandoned okiya (empty houses) and, in some cases, entire abandoned villages gave a new purpose to the art installations. Artists began to use the houses FCHIQO-YSUMAHI AND TBS ART at THg rotilBLE ECHIOO-TAUMAlU AND THC ART DF THE FUMUU less simply as alternate "white cubes" and more as sites in which the artwork itself becomes part of a renovation and rehabilitation of a dormant dwelling—or perhaps an entire community. Empty schools, meanwhile, are hugely emblematic, as Kitagawa says, because they are sites that remain central to communities beyond their use as places to educate children, and because there is no more stark emblem of the waste involved in past public works projects: building plans that showered construction businesses with contracts when there was literally no future for these communities because children were not being born in sufficient numbers. Echigo-Tsumari faced a funding crisis at the end of the 1006 edition, but by then a new key figure, Soichiro Fukutake, had become involved. Fukutake sees himself also as a pioneer of social and community art because of bis long investment in the Naoshima art site, which has become internationally famous and is much better documented in the English-language literature than Echigo-Tsumari. * As with all of the statements made by the now-senior art pioneers about the exact sources and lineage of their ideas, Fukutake's later pronouncements about his own philosophy and engagements benefit from hindsight and a change in the economic mood of the times, something that has enabled observers to recognize them as part of a wider national or even global Zeitgeist.51 As CEO of the huge Benessc corporation, Fukutake (born in 1945) was a multimillionaire and notable art collector. His return at age forty to live in his native region, and the renewed connection this gave him with islands of the Inland Sea, convinced him that he needed to think differendy about economy and culture.a He felt he should make some kind of investment in the locality. Although a beautiful and legendary part of Japan, the Inland Sea between Kyushu and Kansai has been largely despoiled by industrial development and heavy shipping, with some islands facing a combination of environmental damage and population extinction. His work in Naoshima, the first of the art islands of Setouchi developed by Fukutake, was initially motivated by a fairly straightforward idea of tourism-led revicalization. By the beginning of the 1990s, Fukutake was amassing a serious collection of contemporary art to add to his Claude Monet collection, building a museum on Naoshima to house ic He was particularly inspired by the young Kysuhu artist Yulrinori Yanagi, of whom he became a significant patron. The site was later complemented by Tadao Ando's stunning Chichu Museum, as well as the innovative art house projects in the nearby village of Honmura, In which artists and architects have built a quite extraordinary series of permanent installations. Other sites have been added on the island since, The experience of Naoshima at times has the feel of a rich man's playground, like the secret base of a James Bond villain, with its uniformed attendants and immaculately tendered privatized spaces. But in the art houses, the involvement of site-specific logic and local participants becomes more apparent. In particular, Fukutake's eventual support of Yanagi s vastly ambitious project on Inujima (which dates back to 1994)—to convert the whole despoiled island into a massive art project—engaged Fukutake in an explicitly posrindustrial, post-growth mission in Setouchi. Yanagi envisaged Inujima, with its dying genkai shuraku (a village with a population below the limit of sustainabllity) and its massive abandoned copper factory, as a kind of Gesamtkunsrwerk that could reflect on the demise of modernization in Japan.5* With Fukutake's funding (approved in 2001) and the name Scircnsho (Refinery), he would eventually stage a scries of installations of Fukutake's memorabilia of the extreme nationalist novelist Yukio Mishima in a spectacular, environmentally sustainable museum designed by the young architect Hiroshi Sambuichi, which opened in ioo8. From this point on, much of Fukutake's activities have been devoted to using an to help restore and protect the Seto Islands and their populations. Here, his mission clearly dovetails with Kitagawa's investment into Niigata; once Fukutake discovered Echigo-Tsumari in zoo J, he became a staunch supporter and eventually co-partner in the event. Inspired by Kitagawa, who was first brought in as Acting Director of the Chichu Museum, there was an expansion of the ideas for the island projects into a full-blown festival; the Setouchi Art Festival, which had its first iteration in 2010." Using the exact same model as Echigo-Tsumari, and sharing its environmental and rural reinvestment ideals, it took place in a much more tourist-friendly location and became a stunning surprise success. Nearly one million visitors crammed local boats and buses during the sweltering summer and fall months to visit the fabled "art islands." Kitagawa's central role in Setouchi ensures that both events effectively share the same philosophy. Its originality can be illustrated briefly by two impressive examples of social and community art from the festivals, one from Setouchi, one from Echigo-Tsumari. The well-established Berlin-based artist Chiharu Shiota, who was selected for the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 201$, has been an important participant in both events. At Setouchi, there is her work Distant Memory (zoio) on Teshima, a beautiful mid-size island to the east of Naoshima. Teshima was one of the worst examples of poisonous industrial dumping and population decline, and has been a central concern of Fukutake after his initial attempts to clean up the damage 160 f ftcmao-TsuKMt.1 aw the ait or the possiblb ECHiqo-TIUVAHL AND TEU ART OP THE P05Silt* itfl Top: Chilian! Slimfl. Wff^/Awwiy, haute and imtallatioii on T«hin» Island, Scrauchi (2010-ongolrcE), Photo by author. Botnu Kaautdko Httoa usi itudequ, AaMt (Dpy After TouonowNnrfE^MrCuraqBlDqpfnnirnO. Former ABunUun ftfcmrjr School, Echigo-Taumari (2012]. Photo by atirhor. on NaoshLma. Shiota, a widely recognized installation artist who has mosdy worked in a museum and art-school context, asked Kitagawa how she could ever work on this remote island. He told her that to build her installation she should smile a lot and talk to locals, and ask them what to do and how to do it, something that transformed her own practice and some of the reluctant villagers around her." The resultant work is a converted rice house and former social hall, in which Shiota built a time tunnel made out of collected windows from empty houses around the Sets Island sea, and which connects a rice field at the back to a view (out front with the sea behind) of an old house in which the first child in seventy years was bom on the island. It is one remote work in the sometimes impossible "slow art" treasure hunt across the islands at Setouchi, as in the rice fields and mountains of Nligata at Echigo-Tsumari. Some of the bigger-scale projects, meanwhile, such as Katsuhiko Hibtno's Aiattt (The Day After Tomorrow) at Echigo-Tsumari, echo the many other school conversions that have become a feature of both events. In the very remote village of Azamihara, the former school and other buildings have become the long-term residency for very young students who make a newspaper daily about the not-so-trivial lives of the old people in the village, articulating Hibinos ideas about spreading the seeds of the future throughout Japan. Part of Kitagawa's philosophy thus taps into the resources of what might be called Japans "creative surplus*:" the masses of redundant art and design school wannabe creative* (kvriithaa) who come from the city to join the festival as volunteer kokebi (litde snakes) and in Setouchi as koebi (little shrimps). Many projects explicitly connect this "lost generation" with the other "surplus" population of modern Japan they would never normally meet: the aging villagers in remote locations. For Kitagawa, the success of Setouchi after the more modest (albeit growing) numbers posted by Echigo-Tsumari Triennale over the years might be seen as a double-edged success. Setouchi has been quite well visited and documented by the royalty of global art, and now clearly overshadows the festival that really gave it its central ideas and model. Fukutake has been a sponsor since 2006 of Echigo-Tsumari but he has concentrated more of his legacy on the Inland Sea. It is said that his personal fortune is so large that his endowment could finance Setouchi festivals every three years for the next one hundred.5* The second Setouchi Art Festival in 2013, which still involved Fram Kitagawa's organization in a management role, expanded its ambitions, and took place in three installments over one hundred days through the year. Forced to diversify its sponsors since 2006, Echigo-Tsumari has faced a more uncertain future, particulary in 2012 and 2015. And, as so often is the case with large- l6% / acHtGO-TiUWAai Attn THE AET Of THE ]>OlitEL£ ECHIQO-TtVMAEI AND TBI AIT ot THE POHIBIX tSj scale movements in Japan driven by charismatic individuals, Kitagawas very personal hand in the festival also means it Is hard to imagine how it can continue beyond his own intensely personalised involvement, Post-3.11 Perceptions Without a doubt, there has been a remarkable change in mood within Japanese contemporary an as a result of the triple March 2011 disasters (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor meltdown).9 Partly to do also with the opening up of arts funding to explicitly put culture to use in. the post-disaster period, many artists have shifted their agenda to embrace social and community-related practices that, in some respects, fit with the philosophy that Echigo-Tsumari has always embodied. There is certainly a danger that the ensuing rush of research and publications on this topic will start to frame the an coming out of Japan as if it has gone through this sea change only after ion. The reality is, of course, that the lineage of Kitagawa and his associates as pioneers goes back to the origins of social and site-specific an projects of the 19805. For sure, too, the watershed of the disasters of 1995 was important: the moment at which many NPOrelated artistic initiatives got going, largely out of the wider frustration felt in society at the poor governmental responses to the Kobe earthquake. Moreover, the broad social disasters implicit in the trends in social polarization and rapid rural population decline are, in a sense, an even deeper source of artistic concern. Rather than seeing ion as a turning point in Japanese an after the vacuity of the "Cool Japan" era, then, it is better to read the current period as a time finally ripe for an understanding of Echigo-Tsumari as a critical expression of the Japanese "post-growth1' condition, which effectively dates back to the end of the Bubble, in 1990. For sure, the international an world was interested in other things during the heyday of Murakami and Nara, and Echigo-Tsumari has not always leveraged very wisely the big-name foreign artists and curators who have been expensively brought in to give the event more international credibility. Other problems dog the idealism of Setouchi and Echigo-Tsumari. One is the obvious tension between social and community goals and the implicit and sometimes explicit gentrification that occurs as visiting tourist populations effectively displace and "repopulate" the disappearing villages and villagers in beautiful remote rural locations.*1 Certainly there have been significant aspects of raunter-iirbanization visible in some parts of Echigo-Tsumari, but this on the whole appears to be a very sensitive and engaged younger population, opting to try to make a new life with and among the older residents.'1 Criticisms of heavy-handed management, misunderstandings, and unhappy locals have been reported in some studies about the on-the-ground realities of Echigo-Tsumari.It is also often pointed out that Kitagawas idealism about his pluralist organization and its inclusive philosophy is belied sometimes by the intense exploitation of the young workers as volunteers and the strict, almost autocratic hierarchy of the organization. Kitagawa certainly expects all of his organization to be as committed and engaged as he is, and orders are dispatched in the conventional Japanese corporate style, 60m top to bottom. Meanwhile, most of the projects in Echigo-Tsumari need to be judged on a case-by-case basis in terms of their involvement with, and responsiveness to, local populations. The very positive examples here cited by Kitagawa could be contrasted ' with others. In the end, though, it can hardly be surprising to find that public an management in Japan is a largely macho business. Fram Kitagawa is a tough political and financial operator, and the contradictions in his philosophy are probably pan of the inevitable price of making the vision work Perhaps a more substantive issue is the growing critique among an critics of the "sociological turn" in Japanese contemporary an, for which Kitagawa and Echigo-Tsumari certainly are now the dominant paradigm. These issues evoke classical theoretical concerns' about any an that may get subsumed in its social or political function, as opposed to locating its value in autonomous aesthetics and an historys' In some recent interventions led by the young an critic Futoshi Hoshino, there has been a concerted attempt to attack the overwhelming dominance of social and political criteria in the exhibitions and debates about an and architecture since 3.11, invoking a series of points made by Claire Bishop, initially against proponents of "relational aesthetics'' in contemporary global art, notably Nicolas Bourn aud and Grant Kcstcr.*1 There is always a danger that standards of aesthetic quality and independence get sacrificed in artworks that are seen to be involved in engineering some better community. Moreover, there is a distinct whiff of political co-optation about so many of the social and community art projects embraced as pan of community rebuilding since the disasters. What is the warm glowing feeling of kizHtut (community ties) that they are supposed to evoke but a fake nationalist discourse of unity to cover up sharp social divisions and conflicts produced by the same government and its neglect of marginal populations? And does not the social and community return to roots also sound a lot like a new sakokti (a national closure to the outside world as before 1853) descending over Japan as it has withdrawn into a post-3.11 defensiveness? BCmca-nuVAHI AHEk THE AST Of THE POSSIBLE ECHiad-TEUEUU AHO THE Am OB TIE* roEIIBLK These criticisms echo fairly explicitly those articulated by Bishop in her writings. Drawing on the writings of the French philosopher Jacques Ranciere, she has sought to reassert the need for an independent modernist critique in artwork. Squarely rejecting the "sociological" justification for art's significance, and the illusion of replacing art objects with amorphous social processes mat seem like social work, she might wdl read Kitagawa's work at Echigo-Trarnari (if she were aware of it) as a bad example of the naive "community art" she attacks elsewhere; such as in 1970s Britain, for example, when artists did lots of face painting with kids or provided free meals to pensioners. The danger is that artists end up being a kind of replacement welfare state for "neo-liberal" governmental agencies keen to withdraw their support of the most vulnerable sectors of society. This point has also been made specifically in Japan by some critics of the recent "social turn."*' One can certainly question whether many of the elite art-world heroes feted by Bourriaud and further canonized by Kcster and other anthologies of global social and relational art really do escape these criticisms. Their almost complete lack of coverage of Japanese artists and art organizers who, as we have seen, have been widely active in this area since the 1980s, is a glaring omission. But in terms of the actual criteria set up by Kester to pinpoint the originality and power of certain types of socially engaged collaborative an practices, the large-scale and rather unique ambition of the Echigo-Tsumari an project does fulfill much of what he emphasizes." Rejecting the modernist notion of the all-seeing artist who creates an as a form of rupture and critique, Kester argues that such projects prioritize five dungs: locality and duration; the downplaying of artistic authorship; conciliatory strategies and relationships with specific communities; the process of collaboration as an artistic end in itself; and novd organizational forms similar to NPOs and social movements. Much of what is being done in Ediigo-Tsumari and Setouchi dearly fits these criteria.'7 While the an objects seen in rural festivals such as Echigo-Tsumari do vary wildly from the sublime to the kitsch, and from the charmingly vemacukr to the incongruously tone, where projects have become intrinsically engaged and involved local populations integrally, a new kind of social an has emerged. The an effectively lies in the new social relations that are created, not (really) the objects or final products that are ostensibly the occasion of these interactions. What I hope to have illustrated is how wdl these projects tap into the demographic and social drama of post-growth Japan in decline: the spectacular backdrop of chronically aging populations and masses of redundant, overeducated youth." To defend Kitagawa against some of the suspicions of the over-sociologization of art, then, we need to read Echigo-Tsumari against some of his own positions. Clearly the aesthetic quality of the work matters, and, looking through past catalogues, one can sometimes question whether too many of the domestic artists involved were not indeed engaging in the kind of the Feel-good art-as-social-work that Bishop criticizes. The weaknesses of some works become less significant, however, when we try to conceive of the "big fidd" of Echigo-Tsumari as precisely that: a huge regional artwork in itself, in which Kitagawa's organizational and curatorial practice is the central component. That is, thinking of the triennale as akin to how Yukinori Yanagi apparently conceived the Inujlma island project: as a Gesamtkunstwerk involving the villagers, the decaying buddings, and the desolate post-industrial or agrarian landscapes, On this scale, Echigo-Tsumari can be viewed globally as a unique, ongoing experiment in relational and community art, in which the an organization itself takes on a significant social welfare role in "post-political" spaces of society in which government has Urgdy abdicated responsibility.''' Here, the oft-quoted policy ideal of rural revitalizarion and community building—macbizukuri (literally, "making a town")—may be thought of in a broader, metaphorical sense as the rebuilding of society through the creation of new social rdations and public spaces from the distinct populations brought together by the art festival. While much can be said critically in theory about this kind of intervention, the spectacular ambition and achievements of Echigo-Tsumari over the past two decades may also silence such criticism when viewed up dose. Pram Khagawas guide to the most important works of the triennale and the key concepts of bis movement can then stand as a legacy of truly global importance. Ediigo-Tsumaris significance is therefore much more than just a commentary on the fate of Japan. In the near past, Japan's urbanization represented the future. An and culture were hitched to this growth-driven development, whether in underwriting the building of big new urban monuments or in aiding inner-dty renewal. In post-Bubble, post-growth, post-disaster Japan, that future may be over. Lessons are slowly being learned. But rampant urbanization still rules in many parts of the planet. In America, the dominance of urban life over rural alternatives is absolute. This will go on as long as there are fresh fields and deserts on which to build new housing tracts, and still more oil to put in the tank. In Asia, and China in particular, the frenzy of overdevelopment seems unstoppable.71' Europe faces many of the same problems that are felt in Japan today. Someday, all these places will sober up. When they do, they may look again at Japan's recent experiences for inspiration. Even before the disasters of March ion, with its post-Bubble gloom and shocking urban-rural divides, Japan itfS / ECHIOO-nUHAXt AND THE ART ar THE TOSSIBU ICHinO-TSTOAt! AND THE ART Ot Tat FOUUU / 1S7 Top: Acrid vicwofInuflma An Project SeireruliD (locj). Copper nGnarrite csmtnfon and miwura br Yuldnori Yanagiwich trrihrct Hlru»hi SxmbuitJiJ, Inu^miWuiti, Semnchi. Fhow by Road liuiiitramA. Cnutcirof Yuldnori Yiaig) md Mlyake Rut Art. raced urgent issues in managing its own decline and the social divisions it heralded. Japan in the 1990s and 2000s may, in other words, be everyone's future tomorrow. It is, for sure, not a happy prospect. The Eclugo-Tsumari Art Tricnnale and its cousin event in Setouehi help visitors Think about a different land of future. It is a future a million miles from the futurist vision Japan gave to the world at the Osaka Expo in 1970. And it is such a long way from the "Cool Japan" experience given to tourists at Roppongi Hills on a clear night in neo-Tokyo. SCHIGO-TTUMASI AMD THE A*T OF THE PQSSTELE ECHlca-YgUMARI AMD THE AHT OF THE POUlELS Notar "* Tillscasay extendion the chapterabout Frsjn KrhBorwa in ray book Btfim end Afirr SnprrfUt: A Shett Hitter) »/ Japanese Centtmperetry Art 1999-iar (Bhre lOnc&her / DAP ion), J7+-84- It refltcn 1 tubirmtiit body of«1* corrchactadhlcoUthoiiiucmw theorist Jtdhra "ffisttall of the UnhcxHr/ ofAdidaidn ttrwaid 1 K^ofc wc are pltnrtiruj 00 sodnl and rdariona! art and archireerure in "poi^rffwtn^JapanaliKet^o-liwuIdlnVc to ftclmowlECjge/ especially the help of Ret Jibed* andMnn Worrell ofArt Front Gallery In the research Ibrthil article, u well si many diacuscionr with Julian, the artist Jatait Jack, and the indepe/ulfor curtrer E'ikn Hoods. 02 The policy b urretuy traced ro rhr- ijispirarian of tm American Joorjraktt writing about how Japan rnla^t retthrce trr reliance 00 ailing manufacturing and fmtfrdal sectors by tunrittg to la pop cnJtnrB and htgh-tedi Industries: Dmrgbj McCrsyt lapen't Grots National Cool," Urapt Peticy (May-June 1001) :4*-X4- 03 This it the central concern of Before itteiAfter Steperfat. For example, see Takeshi Mraraarernl. Seperfiet, Im Angela MOCA (»01] mi Little Aarr The Art efjepetts ExpUdittr Smb Cuiamx Japan Society, New Kbit, achibliirm and catalogue (Mew Haven, CTYalc Onlveniry Press, loot); and "Harhicomo Nan, Ntbctfi Foot. erJubltinn and catalogue, «k M/iicsa Chhl and Mlwalfo Trwjka, Aria Sfhiiery Museum (New York: Abnmu, 1010}. 04 Minora Mori streaks proadfy of the 'erttjliaeftt dtf" b "Greetings from Riipt„;ngi Hills: The Cultural Heart of Tokyo," In FtnrJn Nanjo et ei.. Art, Dedp end ttee Oty: Pnttx Art Prefect r (Tokyo: RJkuyosha, 1004), £-7. 05 Interviews with Featn Krarrawa, June zz, zoos, and September 30, 2014, OS Frrtolo Nanjo, MUrban Strxterdei, Art Strategies " in Prinik: Nanjo, An, ZVrijpt end »r City. 166-71. 07 As t4tl»f^ try Otaite Landry, JhOtainQfyA Tefilril jar Urwn* bmweton (London: Ctmuda, 1000) and MrJW Honda, tiul lit OtiltlvCltir (flew YoOc Roudadge, loot). OS See Cmerfoe City YiJxhame; fretn the Peat fete the Future (Yokohama, Japan Fsi.kAKT Ijijl: woof and Mlno"Vauka H il, Enrenrlten In the lilt Century; Pt&tmy—Emtrpter Bettmttnta (Kanarawa. Japan: am Cenrtiry Muaeum of Contemporary Art/Tankotha, aoewt). OS Paul Walry, 'Toayo^TOjtU-Coy: F(easeea«mg the Role of Coital and the Stare in Urban Restructuring,' Urine Srxesef 44, no, 8 (July S007): r46j-5o and Julian worall and Em Golm! Solomon, uitCantry TekyecA Gttkka CeeatwfeenryAidňteettm (Tokyo; Xndantha, scan). 10 Roman Adrian Cybawslcy, Peppengl Otaiinp The Dentist eft T^MshtrkbBhlTin^titfrth*pinrifiGl.i»!l Oty (Athena, Goorpai UnlrCTlfy of Georgia Preis, 1010). 11 A epical Esarore of the "global dty"; sec fet eaample Saalda Satten, The G&tW Oty (Ptlncnoo. NJ: Prtocewm Unhrrshy Pten, tpjil 12 Jtmnlnrr Robertaon, Iclklceta VIlbrtE Imernatiortalřaatibn and Nnamltla In Kntwar Japan,* In Stephen Vhttoa, «I, Mhm ofMtJentty: IweentU Tmlttitmi efMedem Jttpmi (Berkeley, CA: Imhwrity rS CalltatTuaPttrr, loot), no-31. 13 Marilyn hry, rJorrninrr efAtVmishinj[. Meäenitf Uttattesm. Jeptn (dioaio, ILUnivTrsity of Chicago Press, loot). 14 Prrer Witante and Antf^ony Rauprh wim the Shriokttjr; Regioni lleiearch Gtoup, Jnfmnb SbrmntiniBegtimitntiie li*erfty-/^Ckrt»so7 (Amheist, NY: Cambth Press, zon). 15 A«o Saito, "Th« PdIMcj of'Monirrcation' in Tokyo: The Crroscs and Conltfruenrrt ofUrbaa Re-SealinE,0 paper presented at Incernational Sooologkal Association KCzi wiuatiice, Berlin, Aiuyut 29-51,1013, 16 Ilic fnunria of rnctabofMlix KctraöTinfie, hinKfif produced ortrsetsawsCTcral Imtuetitial marjlfertoa that mippedout tbemtoreof a coialh/urhaďth^JarjazL in the twenty-mar century For cotrojik, A PUtt jer tiefe (ljtjo), Mttitielian i/fte Tie PrefeselijeriNm ureenhm, fremiti it fřV VemeUDvjtn Cenfmece (1000), bb "Tokardo Mcf^optJa" theory (i^&fl, and Jefen eftie utt Centetry: A Ratete Vrňem tfete Ak(aH>r/£aMaf(tj^i], These ntopian models of society art? ^1 if"! by Hajttnc Yatmka, The Meraboluto Nexus' Role in Ort^«>mtng McJertrlty," in /V/rafeiuir,,- The Qtf tfttte Fnfrt. Dtemtnt end V**ao efftsanOrertin In Pvttwet end Pnsml-Dey Jefem (Tokyo: Mori Art Mnaeum, aeru). The ideat were Influenrfal for the powerful LOP pmfridat, (and prime miohtal KakueiTkrraka, disftuard later In the cert, wfio publiihetf hfl rrwo pfao lo Fenrometítnr t/tejepeertt 17 Rem KboUssBl and Hans Ulrkh Onvt, PrsjtttJefttn MetmMhm TeUa, od. Kayoko Ota (Cologne: Tascnen, son). IB See Midori Yoriilmoro, rd., "Eipo *yo andjrpinete Ait: Dirronam Voices," a special odftaon of JoieJ Revlntt rf Jefenett CehurrendSetittj 15 (December toll). 19 For ibttancc Mrtekeiitm: The City of tin Pntett. 20 Chalrnenjohmon, Mtiieite'theJeftamtMtnKitr Tht Grevth eflndeefrlel Petit} ifv-tfjt (Palo Ahat. CA: Stanford Uruverjlty Ptesr, loSa). 21 Anthony Rauich, "The Helsel Mumcipal Mergers: Regional SWamabilhy or Natioijal Itrorraality?' in Scetmarrtt Ammnn, ed., Sattslnehititj In nitr-Gmcei Atreijepex Ctitllnipi mndOpftrttaUis (Londoo: Rottdetlge. 101;). 22 I here refer to Toyo fco'i Venice Architectural BirmriaLe priaewrrininglhow of lora at the Japajreia Payilloli, which imegioed enliafnecraf tpatial and archiroctura] •aponjes to the Fukuriiima dirarfficn: Tnyo Ito, Krirriiko foot AkihjsaHirara, and Naoya Ilata);eYa.-:-.a Ardikteltm. Pau&hHert! Viaarar-AVulir(Tokyo: TOTO Publlrhlmr, ion). 23 Shorrya Ynaiunii, ^RaJioacrrfo Kaio aoei the Anrakan XJmbrdi'*? JtmrnelefAderi Satdin yi.no- a (May 1011): 24 In recent yeara there have be fat growitae signs of an eroergen: dyll eodciy in Japan, albeir mc^tryooraide the rralm of convcnrjftntd polltka (Le, ■poat-poaltkaT in many ways). See Jeff rUtlgaton,jkjMat QaaW Tsnmfii emtio*: Seelei Orngt end QeU Strttttj or TteemyPleu Ctmtmyjeftm (tendon: Riruilcdce, »04). 23 Raij i Kotoda, Ounrrieelti ktndek Ajitt bjjntrn we nrmkst 2t*f-iel4 (Behind the Giofaaiiem) (Tokyo: prmbooks, ante). 26 AlatycnlVrnViri cJFqm Kraa^wajerrtifrjwrfdagt in telatfon to these actfvitfes has been pohliahed by An Front Gallery: K&em ne BijiiHmzkyendt\u Kttegawtt Fren ne yen jyem nett (Aft of tlopc: Dreams of Collaboration—40 lean of Fram Kitagawa) (Tokyo: KadokawB^Lora). 27 Adrian Frveil, "The Contemporary An Marker io Galapagos: Japan and the Gkabal Art World," In Oka Ta-rrhuia and Srefano Baso-Otrioni. edi,, Cotswer esať Canter) re j Casmefttiun Cttitkm On tht GUeMeerlte 4»/ CetHtmf »M1J Art Merken (O* ford Univerthy Fleas. 1015). Z3S-6}. 28 Fran Lloyd, est, CenjurmeeBeeän: Sex tad Oummfisttrj JapeMne Art (London: Rtarktaon, loos). 23 lnterriew whh Yanagfs tpúleriřt end close trierrd Shmichi Miyake. June 9, loir. 30 Amelia Gtoom, "The Ohmlete in Rawie." %4sJefrn, Oct aa.aoti, virpJ'/b:e:afapan.rora.aii/lxui/io/iiic- 31 See Ail Sdxgmaiin, AiUMJb Legacies: Proliferation of ftjhhc Aiüiüeeturc Program! for thhan Regencietfon fn "Iúrr«f^ht>Ceiitiliy Japan," PrectttŮnp tftbr Sedtty tf Arthheerantt Htstothtni. 30th Annual Conference, Jury z-j. aca.3, 32 PIí.j1m,iK Norman *mAy&™ ro^ner^ n/oVi^ rt^m^ryi Abont Public Art: The Relevance of Community OR—Examples from Tokyo," ORIiaieMia, no. 1 (Jnly-Sepeembeno97): at-iS. 33 C^mNick wesr,Tht)atieAtt*4: WTaebeVrtwa," Teife Art Butt, September ay, amy, kapjlenrrt. oAjuaall>uiJBwAal)lut^ fi| fl^>lmW \ ntfa'^tJtfl^* ^ H ElkaiSeth Naanan aiidjohi. Notrntb, "Mjldn^ Dcdiioiii About Pahbt Ait* zt^-ii. 35 Sec Kifaa Katy. "Ait Pw^exti ínjtpan: Theíf Hlíiory Rrsccnt D^DpnKDtv," Htmfttm* Art rrýřtí zoefl, ahXtíúan i-atiüoguc {Hlrotídmji, Jsrp ic HhoaT^blu Ctty Univmlty; xaia), ±Gl-jl 36 Interview with &iingo läxisaiio cniiaetDrJ iräb JuJW 37 OjilL^pItt^ra Bigikpu^ In Alice Maudc-Bod)7, tL, AxüAcaeenty, cxhibitjpp saá äolegue tSwuhunpron, EiTi^hud; Jolut Htsruuud G*])**7.1013), ij-in mta^rtcw whri SbimxAn, OonbcT i. tuu\. ITO KCHlQO-Tss?lfMAU AHD THE ART Ol THÄ POJJIUUl ÍCHIGO-TSUMAkl AND THE ART OF THE Pl>UlBL£ I7J 38 Wcnrirw wuh R*iJ1 Kuroda, July 4. icuv I ika ow much of my umkmamjlng about tbii broad hwtoty of aodal aer in Japan »the curator Mould Bndo (iatnrvfcwi an July B. ioi> md Ocwfatf 17,1013). 3d Ou Damlen Himfr legendary umuratlopi in. London with pcrttionustrial spaces and eonamerdal fending and publicity at Frew &9MJ and aim. see Julum Srallabraar, Bifh-Art lite; 7ht fOtrmdfitS tfYowsg British An (Lradra: Veno. 40 InftaviewwrthTadadii Kwamau, July iy, zctts interview with KamamitA by Maknto Mum, Moral Matakj, and Osama Ikeda (1987}* In ZmGubV JWrnttr Etarrtttm (ftriii Edition* Luemle, toij), 41 Inrcrview wWr TarWu Kairtfttatx, July r7,ioij, 5«, for example hii huge Tagawu Coil Mine Project I0$&-2qo6\ developed with Yunano ac an abandoned Indiinriil «te id Kyuibii. 42 Thb fbnnutariou by KawRrnata lr dGraimd in KnJlya Kcnji, "Art Ptojocb in Japan** 156» hi reference to a publinKd dtauatlun between Kawnroara and EfauJ Kawua irr zooj. 43 InceMew with Oxamu Jfccda, September nt un4> 49 Yomlce Nalqhara, "Portentr of a Hnrcnrfoo bt the Arts," In EAtg^ThumtriArt TtiamUd, odilbhiort md catalogue (Tokyo: An ftnm Gallery xdod}. 11-13. 50 See the extcrnivc feature on thifl aspect of the festlni In the Journal of domestic arrikcciure flitaktt Ktrttbik* 41? (September 100$}: 51 Fcrr example, Lars Muller snd Alriko Mlkl, eds., JmuUr Insight What Art dnJArt&ittvtioT Cwsptrr vdtb Nst*rt (Zurich: Lars Mtiller Pablrnra, son), which was heavily pRnnnted wttjj innrrrarJtmaJ talks, for emu pic ar the Wars de Tnkyo, Paris. Deoentber 14,1012. 52 Sinan ^xiaU, 'Nature, NbHaieie, Fbce: Tbwatrij a Relational Anjbirecmre In Jtfmf in Eaten frwittat, exhibition and analogue (Vienna; MAX* aorj), 55-55. til Scsanne Klien, "Yotiog Ud»n Migranm in nV Counbyride: Hk Quen Tqc PurpoM and SuirJecTJre Wcll-Eeiiig,' in Sttpfean Le Aatquun, cdH 5**#*bmbtfirf 62 Surarme Kllen, ''ConwnponuyAttand Healonal RevhalftarJon: Stdexxed Anworki In the Erilgo-Teomflri Art Triennial 1000-6," )tf*rt Anow jju no*, j atid (DectraberaxHo): j-301 Stuinne Klien, ""ColTaborariofi « Conlnmtarieh? Local and Non-Local Actors in the EcbrgO'Tflimari Art Utei nial" Gummpttwy jtym aa, noj, 1 and 1 (September loio): 63 See Auttlti HiiringD3n»^^W5«iW ?Aw*7y Sociob^A/namrtitshiAtTthetki (Cambfidge. UK: Pulhy,ioa4). 64 See Claire Bfehop, The Social Tino> CoUabondon and Itz niBMitenu," Artfintm (February iooo> rpt-S^ Tvhich aromed angty debate wldh Kcarr. She then winked o at her araaunent in a roll length hook, Artifittll He&t buthifftfryAfttjtdthf Pttitia of SftdMtorUtip (LondanE v%na, ion)- Amy good guide to thii deiite li prorided in the twin rrviewi Vy Efcanoi Heutncyv "Can Art Changt Ii»eJ?* ArtinAmoiaa. 100. no. (June la, ion)! 67-69. 65 Ibii debate h*i cenceied tnrticdady on the pojtilafL!; of fl kachrrg xodoiDgLn: of an In Japan, Yadiiraka Motlri, and (he nit critic Ren Fukuxum^ vhv wu fbfmedy MburiVnudenL 66 Grant Kerns, Tbt Omtmd thtMsny: Cnttmftmy Duke UtifTersiiy Prcs*, ton). Hit dfitnandon and the ennorig debate ceiaa phu^; In the riiprtream of Nlcttln Bourriaad, foUtionalAtstktsks tfuir. Lee Frews dq Red. 1990). 67 ImerrJewj with Pom Kiragawt, June 11,1009» and SepTtraber 30, lotf, £8 SwaleoAiirBmFave^Tilattrhjlo^ fleapotnq to Remote Social EWariqpon and Population Dttlihe in Japan," bt Srepluhlc Awmann, ed., SmOahtsbili^ m fost-Grevrth JbotlJ*pt n, A fytnptOBi of thitbai been the emergence of youia^a figurei who have made rifnlncam Impaci on audiences as "poHKpohrkaT guru-like radicah, enicubrring a thonno^igotng rejection and witbdrawal rsom mairurremn sodety and poli dd In Japan. A leading caahipfe 11 the young arcnlbxr and cult figure Kyohd Sakaguchl, known ^bf bit Zm Ytn Hone (too6) projecr, which cekbnted the Jaw-Cost, nundnable, self^sinncreney with whkh the homelett manage to JntAA liimw^iftwthlr|j|H,|MPi thr mmwgrn wittjiP big cacy Alter the ^Jl dttattcr he ctmed hb own alternative '"Zoo Repubnc" In Kiimvnou fcrthote wish trig to reject tnaJottnaun erononuc and poUtW vahaee, ^e^edl^lgM from the mainland and daejaring hbnaeTf ■pcetMem.>' Aranilat figute, Hhoshl Ito, hated in ^ikayanta, ha> ptniuabed popular aelf-beip hookt ab THE AKT OF THE 70SXIBLB KCHIGO'TSUMARI JUNBt THB AST qv TH1 POM1BLE / Art Place Japan The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale and the Vision to Reconnect Art and Nature Fram Kitagawa Translated by Amiko Matsuo and Brad Monsma with ftäys I17 Lynne Breslin and Adrian Favdi Princeton Architectural Preys, New York Contents jo Chapter or 44 Chapter oz 48 Chapter 03 81 Chapter 04 101 Chapter 05 142 Essay 9 The Eehigo-Tntmari An Triennale: How It All Began 1 1 Hie Eehigo-Tiuniari Region z8 How to Get There 30 A Journey: Guided by An through the Smjama Landscape 44 Clearing Artwork cm Someone Else's. Land Human Beings Ate Tin of Nature 49 Everything Starts from Satt/mu 51 Art as a Wry to Measure the Rcladoruhip Between Nature, Human Culture, and Society 59 Terraced Rice Field* as Art 61 The Significance of Clay In Japanese Culture 65 Every Place Reflects the Worid 74 The Harshest Realities Can Become Effective Theme 77 Featuring the Snow Si Ctnasu and Its Relationship to Rice Production Art Discover! Loral Resources 89 Art Discovers Local Resources 92 Forming Temporality and Time 96* The Art of Absence Using Exlsrlruj Things to Create New Values 10; Using Edsttng Things to Create New Values 109 Revitalizing Airiyn Connects Humans to Places, People to People in The Hands of People Can Revitalize an AJtijx its Aiiya Build New Cornrnuniriu 130 Schools Are the Community's Lighthouse i)4 School* as Keystones for the Communiry and the World 138 Turning a School into a Dormitory 140 School Grounds as Sites for Rural-Urban Exchange 141 Outdoor Arcades as Festive Spaces Ediigo-Tsurnari and the Art of the Possible: The Fnm Kitagawa Philosophy In Theory and Practice, Adrian Favel! 174 Chapter 06 CoDaboradonj That Transcend Regionality, Generations, and Professions 17S Art b Like a Baby 177 Cooperation beyond Rcgfonallty, Generations, and Professions 182 Chapter 07 196 Chapter 08 no Chapter 09 150 Chapter 10 159 Essay i$i Afterword Public Works and Art 184 Public Works and Art olS The Transformation of Disaster Relief to Noh Stage Pavilion 191 Turning Roads, Parking Lots, and Bathrooms into Art 19s JR Iiyama Line Art Project 194 James TurreHs Artwork: A House You Can Stay In Unique Community Landmarks 20a Museum as a Gateway: The Echlgo-Tsurnati Saxoyarna Museum of Contemporary Arc, KINARE 106 The Essence of the F-chigo-Ttumari Experience: The Marxndai Snow-JUnd Agragrian Cultural Center NOHBUTA1 lit Every Resident Is a Stieotrst The Art of Daily Life 111 Incorporating Art into life 116 Questioning the Way of the Museum »9 Sounds to Open the Five Senses 119 Physical Expression ar EtaSlgo-Tsuraari ijj IiuduL The Countryside as Site for festive Performances 136 Possibilities of Photography Explored in Echigo-Tsumari 140 Everything Made by Human Beings Is Art 244 Food as Art 149 Ikebana Global and Local iji Asian Nerworking PUtform: The East Asia Art Village 157 Connecdonns with Foreign Countries: Australia House 160 The Art of Tourism in Rural Japsm Footnotes of an Itinerant Architect, Lynne Breslln z8i Reflections on the Rm Hve Edidons 194 Cootributors 196 Index 303 Acknowledgments