Not all artists of the avant-garde were interested in direct action, however. In the midst of pervasive anxiety about urbanization and industrialization, there were also frequent attempts to reconnect to or re-create tradition. This instinct sprang at least partially from the reality of rural to urban migration and the sense that rural traditions were being lost. The reach for tradition was, however, more connected to a modernist interest in indigenous art, rather than a form with which rural folks would have identified. In this case, rather than being an opportunity for an encounter with the strange and foreign, as with European surrealism, the turn was to Japan’s own indigenous and folk practices. For many Japanese artists, including architect Kenzō Tange, visual artist Tarō Okamoto, and designer Kiyoshi Awazu, this was evident through their turn to the prehistoric Jōmon period for figurative and conceptual inspiration. This served two ends. First, as Michio Hayashi so elegantly put it: “The primitive cultural force is summoned as the dialectical other vis-à-vis modern technology.”13 Second, the turn to the indigenous and the folk gestured to a people unsullied by the consequences of the nationalist-modernist ideology that drove the state for almost a century. The idea of a prenational Japan provided an alternative model to both Japanese empire and industrialization in the midst of midcentury upheaval and restructuring.14
Eiko and Koma, like many young people in Japan, confronted the fundamental changes in society by joining the vibrant student protest movement that swept Japan, and much of the world, in the 1960s. Although aware of the dynamic spirit of avant-garde experimentation, Eiko says, “We were too busy with anti-government and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations to pursue art seriously.”15 Koma joined the movement when he arrived in Tokyo as a political science student at Waseda University in 1967. Eiko, following her family’s example, had been involved in activism from an early age and even led the first strike by Japanese high school students in 1969. When she entered the law department at Chuo University in 1970, her activism continued.
The 1960s Japanese student movement had its roots in the postwar years. The 1947 Constitution, though drafted by an American team led by General Douglas MacArthur, concentrated Japanese optimism about liberal changes in Japanese society, including individual rights, a democratic government, and a commitment to international peace.16 Many people, however, felt betrayed by the Japanese government’s military relationship with the United States as concentrated in Anpo, which they felt contradicted Article 9’s renunciation of war.17 By 1968, the resurgent New Left student protest movement had expanded its concerns to include Vietnam, Okinawa (which remained under US control until 1972), and the very nature of universities and education. Noting the relationship between the Japanese government and higher education, students resisted indoctrination into state ideology, which they linked to capitalism and militarism. The groups Zengakuren (the All Japan Federation of Students’ Autonomous Bodies, founded in 1948) and Zenkyoto (Joint Struggle Committee, 1968–1970) were at the center of this unrest, a mass movement employing direct action, riots, strikes, and occupations. By the early 1970s a lack of effective unity at the time of the 1970 renegotiation of Anpo as well as police suppression and violence led to splintering of the movement into factions. Finally, the public and bloody United Red Army fiasco in 1972, in which a revolutionary armed group killed some of its own members and engaged in a drawn-out standoff with police, signaled the end of the student movement.
In 1971 both Eiko and Koma had begun to feel the effects of the dogmatic and increasingly violent student movement, and they began to seek other outlets for their oppositional beliefs. Eiko explains the transition in this way:
While numerous political theorists—none standing out any more than the others—presented us with logic, idealism, and tactical thinking, somehow these things led us to despair. By contrast, [artists such as filmmaker Oshima Nagisa, playwright/theater director Kara Juro, artist Kudo Tetsumi, and designer/artist Yokoo Tadanori, as well as European filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini] showed us how they built their lives upon their confusion and frustration. In their works, we sensed that the means and the end are inseparable, that being revolutionary means being radical, and that the body is our vessel and foundation for exploration, experimentation, and expression.18
For Eiko and Koma, then, the move from the barricades to the dance studio was not about abandoning their political ideals but about finding a new, sustainable way to practice them.
Given the close associations between art and protest in 1960s Japan, Eiko and Koma’s transition from one movement to the other is not so unusual. Marotti notes that members of the new avant-garde made “an attempt to conduct politics directly out of artistic performance, neither as an adjunct to protest nor through the conventional forms of agitprop but rather through the political potential of their practice itself.”19 Though the methods of protest were different, the goals were often aligned. For example, the policy statement of the 1969 conference of the student body of Waseda University declared: “We start from individuals … There should exist neither sectarian nor bureaucratic logic. We must start speaking with ‘words’ from inside of ourselves…. Let us found a radical struggle based on self-reliance and individualistic conceptions.”20 This call for individual determination as opposed to dependence on institutions or ideology echoed the turn to personal, immediate experience already present in the new avant-garde, particularly through performance, installation, and even painting that evidences the involvement of an active body. These practices were especially evident in the Gutai Art Association, including Kazuo Shiraga’s Challenging Mud performance (1955) and his method of painting with his feet; Shōzō Shiramoto’s paintings made by hurling glass bottles full of paint; and Saburō Murakami’s Passing Through (1956), in which he propelled himself through twenty-one paper screens.21
For Koma, leaving the student protest movement and New Left politics meant leaving behind the entrenched hierarchies and leader-follower roles of the old society.22 For both Eiko and Koma, withdrawing from the student movement was about opposition to dogmatism and violence. Throughout their work in the 1970s, they repeatedly rejected the black and red flags of their movement days in favor of the white flag of surrender. One could also see their rejection of a single meaning in their work as an ongoing reaction against dogmatism. And yet, they also seem to be perpetually working through these early experiences. The themes of joint struggle and interpersonal violence, for example, repeat over and over across their body of work as part of a cycle of violence, remorse, mourning, and new beginnings.
As Eiko and Koma each made the transition from activist to artist, each dove into the thriving Tokyo avant-garde art scene. They did not have far to go. The Shinjuku area of the city was home to both Waseda University and underground theaters. It was there that they each came upon performances by Tatsumi Hijikata’s dancers. By this time, the “new” avant-garde had been active for over fifteen years (in fact, some would say it ended by 1970). Dance and performance were integral parts of the Japanese avant-garde, significantly through Hijikata’s dance experiments that pushed the boundaries of the form.23