The Japanese skaters formulate through their practice a response to their urban conditions, economic realities, and social desires similar to the Dadaists.  Their intense, energetic actions on the streets, in visceral contact with both architecture and social apparatus, is a performance of “irrational” play, seemingly atomized and yet producing new intimate spatial and social relations among its participants.  Like the Dadaists imagining a “counter-world” within the blood-soaked features of the European nation-states after World War I, perhaps to be a skater shares in Huelsenbeck’s expectation of being thrown and  “…to oppose all sedimentation; to sit in a chair for a single moment is to risk one's life”.

In skating, not only is the body itself threatened with wreckage, but also the social order, (where state and society are represented most immediately in architectural structure, following Harvey and Lefebvre), towards which young people are expected to put their energies. Back at the DIY skate spot near Haneda airport, Tetsuya says, “I work all day. It's a factory, you know, and its boring.”  He gestures loosely with a work-hardened hand towards the area closer to the bay, a dense conglomeration of small, family-owned parts fabricators housed in grimy sheet metal sheds packed tight, a ghetto of manufacture.  “The other guys say ‘We’re real men because we are rodosha, manual workers’ but it's a boring idea, I think.   As soon as I get to work, I’m already tired. But then, I’m totally energetic when I come here to skate.  That’s when I’m alive, after work.”  He unscrews the cap from a plastic bottle of green tea and sips it carefully, wiping the sweat that trickles from his sideburns.  Under the intense July sun, he squints.  Squatting into the scant shade offered by the wall, he begins massaging his right shin, carefully working his fingers around a cloudy archipelago of bruises and small lacerations that disappear into his sock.  “Are those all from skating?” I ask, nodding my head knowingly towards his leg.  Tetsuya grimaces comically, “Whoooo, I’m crazy!  I get hurt more here than at work!”  He held up both hands and wiggled his fingers at me while ghoulishly stretching his mouth in a child-like imitation of a traditional ogre, each intact finger dancing its lively evidence of survival of the factory’s risks to the body and its claim to the worker’s energetic vitality.  I laughed as I looked down at Tetsuya’s bruised and scabbed shin.  “Maybe you should take care of your legs too.  They’re beginning to look used-up.  So sad for someone so young,” I teased.  “Who cares if I can barely stand for work?!  At least its from play and not from being half drunk!”  Tetsuya stood, stretching himself in a careless version of taiso, the formal exercises practiced throughout Japan by schoolchildren, office employees, and factory workers.  Throwing down his skateboard in front of him, with a brief sprint he lightly jumped onto it and raced toward the trick box.  He tensed, knees flexing until he rose into the air with the board spinning in a kickflip below him, his rear foot arcing outwards and back, catching the board as he landed.  The wooden surface shuddered and a muffled bang reverberated against the concrete.  A shaky hesitation, rolling forward on atop the box on his rear wheels until the delicate equilibrium of balance and energy was lost and Tetsuya leapt sideways, hands now whirling aloft, a moment of distress and recovery, kicking the board away as he landed down on the pavement.  Tetsuya pronounces an immediate diagnosis: “Not enough speed” against expectation that going slower would allow for more control and more thought. Body operations and board physics run counter to caution and commonsense rules governing control.  The faster the board and body go, the more intense the pressures of contact are, the more closely the two objects—rider and board—seem to adhere to one another.  Their increased momentum invisibly gives shape to a shared trajectory existing in the future space produced at the point of engagement with the obstacle.  What I mean is this: the body and board move faster, but the barrier between the two objects is diminished, creating a unity that projects its line of flight forward in space.  The space contains both the forward energy, a linear position, and the micro-world at the frayed edges of the momentum.  Imagine energy flaring off from the solid line of movement, pulling into the body’s sensory realm the features of the micro-world that frame the act.  When I ask Tetsuya about what he sees just before attempting the kickflip to manual atop the trick box, he replies, “I can’t see anything!  There is just the top [of the box] and I’m hovering over it.  Then I make it!”  He laughs.  “But what about controlling the kickflip so you land correctly?  Isn’t that scary?”  My insistent questions point to my uncertainty at several registers with Tetsuya’s.  First Tetsuya claims a temporary “blindness,” a suspension of conscious clarity.  Second, he collapses the spatial relations of the board, his body, the pavement, and the specific structures of the box into a single location—the flat, elevated surface of the box—his point of desire and contact.  Finally there is the compression of conscious time, from the moment of “hovering” into the completion, the instant when the trick has “ended” and the body returns to its pre-trick disposition and with this return is the reassertion of the conscious mind, reflective of the immediate past.
What enables the body to project itself forward in space (and time) as a spectral pre-presence ahead of, out-living consciousness? What faith allows the conscious mind to lose itself to the energy of the mobile body? Tetsuya describes a mechanism of repetition. “I do kickflips all the time.  Jidouseigyo, automatic control, you know?” Tetsuya invokes a micro-memory of the body that demands a trust using a word that eerily recalls his environment at the factory, a space where one could seemingly still function half-drunk, in between states of “alert worker” and a body operating under “automatic control.”

Explosive Change/Speed as Control and Amplified Risk
The speed seems to almost necessary to overcome conscious thought.  In learning a trick involving just the board, like the kickflip that Tetsuya used to launch himself into a wheelie or manual atop the box, the skaters start slow, sometimes completely stationary.  Risk is almost totally neutralized, allowing the cautious, serialized, active mind to have full control of the body.  The head is tilted down, looking at foot placement, noting minute shifts, recording the specifics of this attempt to allow for corrections in the next.  The conscious mind is concentrated on crucial points of contact and change: the feet, the attitude of the legs, the deployment of weight.  The arms, the core muscles, are engines responding to repetition.  The basic leap is so familiar that these parts of the body can be left unattended.  They know already what to do through the drill.  So the mind focuses on the front foot to push forward and slightly down while the back initiates the launch by slamming the tail down and both board and rear foot, with the body’s weight leap upwards.  He seems to be drifting until he lands and the board skitters and Tetsuya falls, his hands catching him, but barely. Recovering his board, he pushed away to line himself up for another attempt at the tightly compressed series of tricks.  While the whole body is engaged, an impossible number of operations are put into action in a fractional amount of time, reminding me of the “irrationally” fast time codes the skater lives within when engaged in practice, so unlike the time code of the everyday endured on the factory floor.

Tetsuya tells me more about his life as a factory worker.  He moved into a workers’ dormitory, sharing a cramped room with 5 other men employed at low-wage jobs throughout the city.  “I’m lucky. I met another guy at the dorm who told me some places in Haneda were getting contracts to make replacement parts for Honda.  A lot of foreign workers take those jobs, because they don’t pay a lot, they aren’t real company jobs, so when the boss saw me, he was really happy.  I got the job and then I recommended my friend from school to the boss.  Now we both work there and live in the company dorm (shaiinryo).”   We watch another skater, Masao, who at 22 is close to Tetsuya’s age and who grew up nearby and still lives with his mom.  He pushes and speeds across the open pavement towards a battered trick box—a rectangular plywood structure with its long edges covered in angle iron. He pops the board up and it spins under him, but the trajectory is off and he leaps to the side while the board clatters away. The failure is constant.

Masculinity, Youthful Futures, and Boxing
Play, or sports, that place young people, especially males, at risk, is hardly uncommon.  Boxing comes closest to sharing the explicit bodily trauma that skateboarding produces, indeed, the ability to avoid and inflict pain are the basic criteria for “winning” in a boxing match.  Boxing’s logics and myths of masculinity, its historical depth, its valorized genealogies of fighters and trainers, and celebrated gyms and rings as mythical sites of reproduction and ritual give it the social contours so fetishized in anthropological research.  The bodily discipline of the fighter is valued as a demonstration of individual responsibility to shape the self into a legible agent in broader society, a normativizing regulation of “male energies.”  In the US this discourse especially incorporates poor men of color into a form of resistance against immediate circumstances both disorderly and disordered, though this narrative also emerges among zaiinichi or ethnic Koreans in Japan who have endured long-standing discrimination.  I use Loic Wacquant’s ethnography of boxing gym in Chicago as a necessary text to flesh out techniques of initiating and training male bodies and also to understand how placing bodies in risky positions is generative of positive value in opposition to the pathology of “chaos” or irrationality that exists “on the streets”.  The dangerous disciplining within the boxing gym is presented as an intensified of the “real” and is dedicated to preserving youthful male bodies.  This preservation/reformation/transformation of these young men occurs as they subject themselves to the ritualized rigor and pain of becoming a fighter, perhaps eventually leaving the marginalized confines of the ghetto gym to join the professional circuit with its promise of limitless global opportunities to fight.  By embodying the mythos of boxing and altering the body into the form of the fighter, young men may survive their immediate world and even move beyond it and concomitantly they are being disciplined into a inhabiting the claims of futurity made for youth.  This gym in Wacquant’s study featured a banner proclaiming this exact spatialization of time: “It is today’s youth who represent the leadership, the force and the vision of our city.  But too many potential leaders of tomorrow learn, too early, that the street is the scene of a struggle for survival and that the only choice available to them is a life without a future.” (Excerpt from the mission statement of the Boys and Girls Club of Chicago.)  The club in Woodlawn was home to the boxing gym where Wacquant studied the training and bodily incorporation of young men into a deep social world of embodied masculinity coded as “hopeful”—a spatialized site of bodily risk contained safely in the ring and the larger gym that operates to isolate the risky bodies of young men from the unmanageable risks “of the street,” the “vector” of social disorder. (Wacquant 2004, 27, 56)  The gym, while it contributed to bodily failure (injury, disability and perhaps ultimately dementia pugilistica) nonetheless orchestrated a “protected sociability,” pulling its members into a secret, isolated “temple” such that Wacquant views this “collective closure” as “bordering on ‘claustrophillia’” (Ibid., 26).

In contrast to the boxers the skaters erupt from the shadowy margins of body practice and socio-economic positions at the very center of cities.  There is no retreat into a private, spatial zone of practice but instead an exploration of the city’s possibilities where the significatory mechanisms of architecture and the normative assembled messages of thoroughfares, shopping districts, and neighborhood wards are circumvented by energies insistent on an unmediated and unintended/disorderly contact with the city’s surfaces.  In sharp contrast to dementia pugilistica, a mental incapacitation suffered from years of sparring blows to the head, skaters manifest “dementia” as a pre-existing condition manifested in the broken bodily grammars of skating and a simultaneous confluence of energies generated from the environment and the social world. 

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