Masao Adachi: Pt I

RECONCEIVING SOLIDARITY – RENTAI O SOUZOU SURU
By Andrew Maerkle


Still from Artist of Fasting (2016). All images: Courtesy Masao Adachi.

Born in Kitakyushu in 1939, Masao Adachi is a legendary figure of Japan’s postwar avant-garde film and art scenes. He got his start in filmmaking with the Nihon University Film Study Club before co-founding the VAN Film Science Research Center, an experimental film-making cooperative with ties to the early 1960s Neo-Dada and anti-art art scenes, but is perhaps best known for his work in the pink film industry – primarily as a scriptwriter and director for Koji Wakamatsu’s independent Wakamatsu Productions. In films like Violated Angels (1967), School Girl Guerillas (1969), Sex Jack (1970) and Ecstasy of the Angels (1972), Adachi and Wakamatsu boldly combined lurid sex and violence with radical politics, while with 1969’s AKA Serial Killer, Adachi applied the concept of fukei-ron, by which he attempted to identify the traces of political hegemony in the everyday landscape, to the story of the 19-year-old serial killer Norio Nagayama. Around this time, he also played a crucial role in expanding the discourse of postwar Japanese cinema as a contributor to the journal Eiga Hihyou.

In 1971, on their way back to Japan from the Cannes Film Festival, Adachi and Wakamatsu traveled to Lebanon and Palestine to shoot the footage that would become their propaganda newsreel documentary, The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971). Once completed, the film was shown across the country in a grassroots roadshow movement led by volunteers who toured around on a “red bus” and held discussions with audiences after each screening. Adachi returned to Lebanon in 1974 to shoot a follow-up film, but ended up joining the extremist Japanese Red Army, which carried out violent operations around the world throughout the 1970s and ’80s. In 1997 Adachi was arrested in Lebanon, charged with passport violations, and after three years of incarceration forcibly repatriated to Japan, where he served additional jail time.

Since his release in 2003, Adachi has returned to film-making and script-writing. In 2007, he directed Prisoner/Terrorist, loosely based on the experiences of Kozo Okamoto, a JRA member involved in the Lod Airport massacre of 1972. His latest film, Artist of Fasting, an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s short story, “A Hunger Artist,” was commissioned in 2015 by the Asian Culture Complex in Gwangju, Korea, and began screening at cinemas in Japan at the end of February of this year. Set in contemporary Japan, the film is a ribald but pointed critique of a society beholden to spectacle and media culture, and crippled by entrenched power systems.

ART iT met with Adachi in early February, prior to Artist of Fasting‘s Japan release, to discuss his career and the evolution of his ideas about politics, film and culture.

Interview:


Poster for the The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War.

ART iT: Today I would like to speak with you not from the perspective of a film researcher or political scientist but rather from that of an art critic. To explain about my personal background, I was born in 1981 and have spent more or less my entire life under neo-liberal regimes. At a certain point I intuitively felt something was wrong, and part of what drew me to art was the desire to research conditions for culture prior to the age of neo-liberalism, and think up alternatives to neo-liberal values. Of course, as a field of knowledge production contemporary art is both incredibly free and yet full of contradictions – starting with the fact that many museums across the world are supported by the state, or if not, then by large corporations and banks or wealthy private collectors. So in thinking about the possibilities and limitations of contemporary art today, I feel it’s also important to understand the historical development of art as an institution.
You have lived through an incredible history, starting with your engagement in the avant-garde art and film scenes of the 1960s through to your life in exile in Lebanon, from 1974 onwards, as a member of the Japanese Red Army, and then your forced repatriation to Japan in 2000. What kind of changes did you notice in Japanese culture and society between the 1960s, when you were a younger man, and now, since your return home?

MA: I think the crux of the problem is already there in your question. In the 1960s, my position was that it didn’t make sense to divide art and politics into opposing categories, as had been the traditional understanding to that point. I felt that for people working in all fields of art – from literature to poetry to visual art, painting, film – it was essential to directly confront social and political problems and to probe the issues regarding the subjectivity of the artist as a person who makes things and has a voice. Takaaki Yoshimoto and Kiyoteru Hanada, who were then around your age, were engaged in their heated literary debates, and ultimately they thought they might be able to reclaim a decaying culture and society in the field of literature by clearly articulating the subjectivity of the artist – its position, orientation and message. But I gradually lost interest in these debates because the conversation simply ended with the question of how to exercise individual subjectivity, without going further into more substantial issues. I was more of a surrealist, so rather than worrying about the position of the individual artist, I thought making works and expressing oneself was already a social action that encompassed the subjectivity of the artist. And then because there is always someone on the receiving end of those works and expressions, and the artist necessarily operates within those relations, I equated being an artist with being an activist. This is not so different from Hanada’s thinking, but in his case Hanada was overwhelmingly concerned with the action of the individual, and welcomed any and all movements, whereas, in equating artist and activist, I held that it was fine for the individual position and subjectivity of the artist to be absorbed into a relational movement.

ART iT: Was there any particular movement with which you identified?

MA: At the time there were all kinds of avant-garde movements, starting with contemporary poetry, and anti-theatre in the realm of theater. Reflecting on what kind of free expression might be possible under these conditions, I concluded that surrealism was the answer, and that’s how I approached things. I didn’t make any categorical distinction between art and politics. Political language had been enervated by categorization, and, having constructed their own cages of “art” around themselves, artists had become complacent, so I thought the best thing was to do away with categories altogether. And actually a model of this already existed in Neo-Dada, where, just as with the beginning of the Surrealist movement, a group of peers developed a scandalism which, in its juxtaposition of the everyday and the extraordinary, could overturn and expose the institutions of authority and prevailing trends that appeared to be the exact opposite of what they actually were.

ART iT: What was happening in the case of your main field of activity, film?

MA: In the end many filmmakers had also straight-jacketed themselves into questions about the subjectivity of the artist, and instead of speaking out as filmmakers, they claimed that everything they had to say was already there in the film, and that everybody would understand once they saw it. I thought that was bunk. It was only later that people began to emerge who both made films and were highly outspoken, like Nagisa Oshima and Toshio Matsumoto. But even they got caught up in theoretical discussions about subjectivity and process, which I felt was a mistake. Then I met Koji Wakamatsu, who had no problem with being anti-authority and anti-police, and I began working in pink films. But once I got involved, people said that what we made weren’t really pink films, and even though they were at the height of popularity, Wakamatsu’s films started getting shelved because of me. So I began writing under a pen name.
Also, as I was thinking about what to do in film, I got to know Donald Richie, who had introduced Akira Kurosawa to the world and also had contacts in the American beatnik and underground film scenes. He said that it was odd that there was no salon or group in Japan for filmmakers to watch and critique each other’s works. Feeling that it was no good for people doing important experiments in independent film, private film, and avant-garde film to get stuck in their own work, he started encouraging us to make our own film center. So along with people like Katsue Toyama, Shigechika Sato, Nobihiro Kawanaka, Yoichi Takabayashi, Nobuhiko Obayashi and Takahiko Iimura, we created the Underground Center.
But at the same time, with industry promoting commercial technology, television started to flourish along with 8mm film and video. All kinds of cameras, video cameras and video itself were rolled out as consumer objects, and on top of that there were also people who started to converge upon a kind of fetishization of video. Even though it was just a medium, many people were enamored of its newness. Media theory also started to go downhill after Yoshiaki Tono, and the structure became that it was now industry that would supply new media. The Underground Center was organized in opposition to this. But the concern for things that existed prior to their being praised, copied and distorted by the media was subsumed by commercialism, and when I looked around me there was no one left anymore. That was one of the major changes going from the mid-1960s into the 1970s.

ART iT: What led you to go to Palestine?

MA: Until 1974 I had been involved in all kinds of film projects in Japan, but I always believed that film and revolution were the same thing. Around the time that I put together a team for organizing a grassroots roadshow of the newsreel film Wakamatsu and I shot in Palestine, The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971), I heard that Jean-Luc Godard had set up the Dziga Vertov Group, and felt it was confirmation that he and I were on the same wavelength. Of course Godard had his way of doing things in France, and I had my own crude way of doing things in Japan, but I think the overall theme was similar. Godard had been to Palestine about a year-and-a-half prior to us. Under the slogan, “Could some Shinjuku drunks become guerillas?” Wakamatsu and I stopped in Palestine to film on our return from the Cannes Film Festival, and we came back with the footage that became Red Army/PFLP. And of course the answer to the question in the slogan was already decided: “You have to be a drunk to be a guerilla!” A few years later, when I went back to Palestine to make a follow-up film, I thought the Japanese kids who were there trying to continue the path of violent political revolution were so naïve that they would get crushed if they kept it up, so I suggested they form the Japanese Red Army, and ended up becoming their spokesman. The next 30-odd years went by in a flash.
Getting back to your original question, I think Japanese society has been ruined by neo-liberalism. After I came home, I actually didn’t think things had changed so much on the surface, but where in the past there would be dark places as you walked on the street, now everything is delineated in a stream of light. I think this is dangerous. Things may have gotten bigger and more extravagant, more exaggerated, but when you think about how their essence remains the same, then you can understand how the control keeps spreading. The system of control is there wherever you look as you walk around, starting with things like the signs in train stations warning people, “Danger! Please walk to this side.” It may be done in a polite way, but everything is monitored.
When I see billboards on the streets proclaiming a “cosmetics revolution” or a “fashion revolution,” I wonder what the point was of fighting all those years only for “revolution” to become a logo. “Revolution” has become such a commonplace that everybody feels they can use the word, but with the exact opposite meaning. This was how I could tell that control fascism in the form of neo-liberalism has corroded people’s minds, and co-opted the revolutionary essence of social transformation.

ART iT: Do you have many opportunities to speak to the young people who have grown up under these conditions? 

MA: When I speak with young people, instead of using the Japanese words for culture and art, they keep using the loanwords “art” and “artist.” It’s become so flimsy, and I feel something’s been lost there. For example, there are no longer people who have gone through the process of thinking about the subjectivity of the artist, realizing that they won’t achieve anything on their own, learning to act as agents for a movement, and only then understanding about themselves and how things work in the world. Instead, based on phrases that turn on “discovering ideas” – like the “fashion revolution” I mentioned – they get wrapped from head to toe in the misty cotton wool of neo-liberalism, and although they are only capable of living stifled lives, they think this is the normal social condition. They may lack self-awareness, but instead of blaming them, I want to keep spreading the message, because I certainly share their suffering. If the 1960s were worthwhile, then the only thing to do is to create a new renaissance movement. That is, we have to create the cultural conditions for people to say they don’t like what they don’t like, they like what they do like, and they will do what they have to do. That’s what I admonish myself.


Photograph of Fusako Shigenobu, Leila Khaled and Koji Wakamatsu, taken during filming of Red Army/PFLP.

ART iT: In the book of interviews you made with Go Hirasawa, Eiga/Kakumei (Film/Revolution, Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2003), you mention how your generation was the first and last in Japan to received a democratic education. If that’s so, then don’t you think your generation could have found a better way to connect with those that followed? 

MA: It depends on how you define the next generation, but one reason we couldn’t connect with them is probably due to the rupture of the Zengakuren (All-Campus Joint Struggle) movement, which was run by the generation that directly followed mine. They failed because they narrowed the movement’s appeal by invoking the heroism of “violent revolution.” But in that sense you could say that up until the Zengakuren generation there was a continuity of people who were made to fight for post-war democracy. The difference is that my generation were raised during the war as “militarist youth,” so after the war ended we had a visceral understanding of the complete transformation of social values. The most fearsome teacher at school was chastised by everyone, and had to apologize to us all. The special policeman who had been swaggering around with a saber at his side became a different person. That was a real revolution!
The Japanese-style control system was eventually revived under the American occupation, but the long 12 or 13 years until then were a world of chaos. But I think this was the most “substantial” period. It was a time when, even as militarism was completely renounced and people were working to build a democratic society, the nature of democracy itself was being questioned. It was the kind of “chaotic society” idealized by the Taisho anarchists, with equality in a real sense. This was something my generation experienced firsthand.
Compared to us, the next generation was a bit weaker culturally. I called them the “political pioneers after the end of culture.” This was the time of the university occupations, and, feeling a sense of responsibility as things devolved into frivolous political language, I went to the barricades to do a self-critique. And where in the beginning the scandalous films I had been making with Koji Wakamatsu were critiqued for being “right-wing,” two or three years later everything changed and people started supporting us – not that I put much stock in it. Concurrently, following the United Red Army’s Asama-Sanso incident in 1972, the police started strengthening the security system, and artists were not really able to fight back against it.
In a word, art is about destruction and creation. If something does not have the productive weight implied by destruction, then it is weak and cannot be called art. What I mean to say is that it’s fine to do festivals for contemporary art, but the most important thing is that art can radically resist the way globalization has co-opted everything since neo-liberalism, and I think this is what is lacking right now. We are suffocating, and as a surrealist I think the only way to break through is to keep creating scandals. But no artists do that. For example, even if artists in Indonesia or Malaysia want to speak out, they can’t do it in their own countries. But in Japan we still have at least that much freedom. So we need another renaissance maybe, or rather we need to bring back surrealism, and destroy the constructs of control and banality. Until we do so, we won’t get to see the voices and energy buried in people’s hearts. I think it is my mission to make the young people realize this – as opposed to old folk like myself – and spur them to create that situation on their own.

ART iT: One thing that impressed me about your activities in the 1960s was how you interacted with people from all kinds of fields – not only within film itself, but also in avant-garde art and literature as well as in the student movement and in politics.

MA: I wouldn’t call it an inter-disciplinary practice so much as that, following Neo-Dada, there came the “anti-conceptual” conceptual art movement, which proposed that even the political message in what we had been doing was too simple, and that it was precisely for this reason that we should recreate political power ourselves by reintegrating it without categorization as an ideological, cultural thing. In fact, today it is no different. Everybody says Shinzo Abe is wrong, but I think Abe is himself a kind of avant-gardist – because he is leading in the worst way possible. He’s gone so far that people think things will only get better if we can overthrow him. The more bad things he does, the more clearly people will see what needs to be done, right? And then in the case of the 1960s student movement in which I participated, when Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, was the prime minister, once it got to the point where we wouldn’t put up with it, everyone called out, “Down with Kishi! Down with Kishi!” And at the very end we would say, “Death to Kishi! Death to Kishi!” – thousands of us raising our voices together in protest. Now, even when 100,000 people gather, you don’t hear anyone saying “Death to Abe!” In the past people could say it, but now they can’t. I think my generation bears some responsibility for this, and in a sense things have gotten weaker. I think it’s necessary for the people coming up with the message to think about that. I’m not against SEALDs. They have finally worked their way out of the cotton wool and are just starting to raise their voices. If someone asks how the young people can resist this kind of economic conscription, no one is willing to offer up a guarantee – that is, in response to the youth who are finally able to say what they don’t like. So I think it’s a big mistake to tell them they have to think things through before they act. Rather, it’s the role of the older people to help them do it. It’s the older people who are not doing their part. If the older people boasting about violent revolution organized, there would be more than 30,000,000 of us. If you got SEALDs and all the young people together they would only be one-tenth of that. The negligence of the older people created this situation. Get off your ass, instead of talking by yourself as if you were young! The older people have the numbers, so even if none of us can even stand straight, we can still link arms and crawl around together. There’s no need to run.

I | II | III

Masao Adachi: Reconceiving Solidarity – Rentai o souzou suru

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