Japanese Youth and Representation in Araki's photographs and Susumu's "Bad Boys"
Two young boys stand mirroring one another, arms outstretched with slingshots pulled back at the ready, so close to the camera their hands are out of focus. Their faces are hidden behind their cocked hands. With one eye closed they aim their myopically grim gaze at the camera. Their t-shirts are dirty. Their loose trousers are held up by rope wound around their waists. In the background is a dusty yard and then a large, weathered building dwarfed and unimportant by the commanding doubled power of the photograph’s twinned subjects. Satchin and his younger brother Mabo were the central protagonists in Araki Nobuyoshi’s first solo show in the Shinjuku Station in 1965 and for which he won the prestigious Taiyo prize in 1963. Araki has become one of Japan’s preeminent visual artists, a prolific photographer who famously uses his fantasies as the inspiration for his work that is predominantly populated by young women intricately bound in erotic submission. While Araki’s oeuvre has earned him a reputation as a “risky” artist, his work is nothing but safe, familiar in its re-entrenchment through commodified circulation of “dangerous” heterosexual male dominance fantasies: women subordinated, immobilized first by the ropes and knots and then to the power of Araki’s camera, itself complacent in his subjects’ powerless predictability. The photographs in Satchin, by contrast, are as wild as their subjects. The camera seems possessed by the young pair and their friends who play in the street of a ramshackle post-War Tokyo. So exuberant are the kids they appear to have run off all the adults and then colonized for their own and exclusive pleasure the alleys, streets, porches, stairwells, the roofs of Chevy cars and interiors of abandoned trucks. They lay half-naked on the dusty ground, gleefully wriggling as blurry hands of friends reach in to tickle them. They perch and pose and mug, distorting their faces in grotesque displays of childish plasticity.
The camera seems to struggle to keep up and never has the luxury of anticipation, of being in place before the action spills outward in another direction. The compositions barely keep everything in the frame let alone under control and in focus. The streets of their neighborhood do not demarcate zones of control but instead become the corridors of pleasure, veering deliciously into the space of heterotopia, if only for a moment of delirious play before the entranced camera. Indeed, Araki’s camera seems nearly incapable of registering the intensity of life expressed by these unruly waifs or furō-ji (浮浪児). Taking over the street in a joyful if chaotic collective, they represent vivacious possibility and mutualism, a becoming encouraged even in elementary schools to produce caring solidarity and deep affections among one another before transition in middle school to hierarchy, ranking, willing domination by lines of authority, and competition (Fukuzawa & LaTendre 2001, 38). What looms just out-of-frame are the intense forces of social shaping “where there is no longer any alternative to disciplinary falling into line or illegal drifting away, that is, one form or another of prison and wandering outside the pale” (de Certeau 1988, 130).
Araki made these images while Tokyo was undergoing its major transformation for the 1964 Olympics and its grand return to the world stage. As concrete superstructures were erected throughout the western suburbs, Araki was hanging out with a crew of street rats.
The city’s logics changed and so did Araki’s focus. Perhaps the kids proved too much for him, or perhaps they “drifted away” beyond the tidy confines of his camera, or perhaps they were caught up in the disciplinary regimes of school or prison. After his solo show he never again photographed young people but changed his approach to working in controlled environments, frequently indoors. Perhaps Tokyo had become too orderly as the post-War miracle manifested itself in tidied-up neighborhoods and new forms of social order. Perhaps his fantasies coincided with those of the high-growth nation and he retreated to his bondage dioramas with live models. Under the increasing pressures of economic growth and fevered consumer desire, Araki’s shift from youth to commodified images of restrained women recalls an earlier period of intensified consumer fantasies organized contained, spectacularized women.
In the late 1920’s live models displayed goods in shop windows as animate mannequins, sparking a range of reactions from titillation to sharp critique. Mark Driscoll quotes painter and essayist Sakai Kiyoshi’s observation that the mannequins represented “the most hyper mobilization to date of the sociological concept of ‘women’s work” (Driscoll 2010, 159). The idea of women’s work is taken beyond static, eroticized display on the department store stages of capitalist fetishism and into the dark factories of female bodies rendered for beautiful reassemblage on these stages in the novel The Black Beast. Driscoll pulls apart the dense, modernist allure of modernizing Tokyo through the critical imagination of erotic-grotesque writer Edogawa Rampo who tells a story of young, modern women, or moga, seduced, kidnapped, tortured, and finally brought to total submission in begging for their “final, quasi-contractual degradation” of “mutilation and dismemberment” by the sadistic hand of their captor, a blind, predatory masseuse (Ibid., 160). The Blind Beast then sells the body parts to department stores for fascinatingly “life-like” mannequin components. Several of the Beast’s victims are rural girls as part of a larger pattern of domestic dispossession and violent possession by capitalist enthrallment and incorporation. “As Tokyo’s population doubled from 2.5 million to 5 million between 1913 and 1928, new arrivals often passed directly from formal subsumption into a new and overwhelming real subsumption. This invasive subsumption demanded more than the occasional subservience to capital that characterized the mere formal subsumption of living labor to capital in biopolitics” (Ibid., 161). The possession and rendering of bodies is luridly central to this grotesque imagining of modernizing Japan and it shifts from the enclosure of display and production to the fields of social delinquency de Certeau describes above—the seizure of bodies within capitalist desires and state institutions. Together they produce discourses of knowledge about young people.
Susumu’s Bad Boys
Once again under the modernizing imperatives in the streets of post-war Tokyo, youth are framed by filmic approach that slip between documentary and fiction, picking up where Araki’s still-photographic, unruly method and feral obsessions were bound up in capitalist/patriarchal fantasies of the constrained women put to work as image commodity. Young men, all ex-reform school inmates and non-actors, play themselves in director Hani Susumu’s Bad Boys, the 1960, black-and-white case study of juvenile delinquents ensnared and produced in Japan’s reformatory system. The film is remarkable for its play within a cinéma vérité style of direct observation unmade through collaboratively staged scenes between filmmaker and actors who at times draw upon the unwitting complicity of others to produce intensely real reenactments that double as narrative explosions. Most notable is a scene depicting a theft in a jewelry store in Asakusa where the camera lingers outside and records the crime through the glass: violating the law of property as part of an act. The folds are replete. The boys enact themselves as they were but in the process, become themselves in the present only to end up improvising a narrative about their own incarceration in which they recount the criminal solidarity they had with the other boys and girls in their gangs.
The film reminds us that the reformatory is a space of national enclosure, where young male bodies are disciplined with techniques reprised from the Imperial Army. Yet, “life inside and outside the reformatory is filled with ambivalences; kindness and exploitation exist inside the walls of the prison and without” (Desser 1988, 63). Hani emphasizes the fascistic remainder reproduced across the bodies of the inmates within the school’s logic, a common challenge to the state made by the New Wave directors as they echoed the protests sweeping Japan in the early 60s (Ibid.). In the aftermath of war, in a nation remade into a pre-fab democracy, and in a city only recently totally burned to the ground, modern life is indeed “hard on youth.” The contrast is sharp between the wildly playful kids skittering through the sparse streets in Araki’s photographs contrasts with the teenage boys wandering the gaudily illuminated streets only to be incarcerated within the harsh, military-style architecture of the reformatory.
The boys live perpetually on the margins of a nation and culture intent on consuming them invisibly behind prison walls rather consumed on display like the young women trapped and sensually dismembered in Rampo’s erotic grotesque origin story about the bodies taken over by Tokyo’s surging capitalist fetishism of the pre-war. The military incarceration, consumption and dismemberment of bodies lies darkly between these two historical moments. They are connected through this explicit bloody subsumption of young flesh in state and imperial power so guileless in its violence it is perhaps easy to dismiss the youth experiences on either side of the war as incomparably better. Rather than making comparisons it is more useful to trace the effects of Stanley Hall’s truism: What is the shape, dispositions, techniques, and desires of youth when it comes into legibility through national and capitalist pressures? What are Japanese youth becoming at the intersections of intense local built and cultural space and multiple planes of global media and lifestyle?
The camera seems to struggle to keep up and never has the luxury of anticipation, of being in place before the action spills outward in another direction. The compositions barely keep everything in the frame let alone under control and in focus. The streets of their neighborhood do not demarcate zones of control but instead become the corridors of pleasure, veering deliciously into the space of heterotopia, if only for a moment of delirious play before the entranced camera. Indeed, Araki’s camera seems nearly incapable of registering the intensity of life expressed by these unruly waifs or furō-ji (浮浪児). Taking over the street in a joyful if chaotic collective, they represent vivacious possibility and mutualism, a becoming encouraged even in elementary schools to produce caring solidarity and deep affections among one another before transition in middle school to hierarchy, ranking, willing domination by lines of authority, and competition (Fukuzawa & LaTendre 2001, 38). What looms just out-of-frame are the intense forces of social shaping “where there is no longer any alternative to disciplinary falling into line or illegal drifting away, that is, one form or another of prison and wandering outside the pale” (de Certeau 1988, 130).
Araki made these images while Tokyo was undergoing its major transformation for the 1964 Olympics and its grand return to the world stage. As concrete superstructures were erected throughout the western suburbs, Araki was hanging out with a crew of street rats.
The city’s logics changed and so did Araki’s focus. Perhaps the kids proved too much for him, or perhaps they “drifted away” beyond the tidy confines of his camera, or perhaps they were caught up in the disciplinary regimes of school or prison. After his solo show he never again photographed young people but changed his approach to working in controlled environments, frequently indoors. Perhaps Tokyo had become too orderly as the post-War miracle manifested itself in tidied-up neighborhoods and new forms of social order. Perhaps his fantasies coincided with those of the high-growth nation and he retreated to his bondage dioramas with live models. Under the increasing pressures of economic growth and fevered consumer desire, Araki’s shift from youth to commodified images of restrained women recalls an earlier period of intensified consumer fantasies organized contained, spectacularized women.
In the late 1920’s live models displayed goods in shop windows as animate mannequins, sparking a range of reactions from titillation to sharp critique. Mark Driscoll quotes painter and essayist Sakai Kiyoshi’s observation that the mannequins represented “the most hyper mobilization to date of the sociological concept of ‘women’s work” (Driscoll 2010, 159). The idea of women’s work is taken beyond static, eroticized display on the department store stages of capitalist fetishism and into the dark factories of female bodies rendered for beautiful reassemblage on these stages in the novel The Black Beast. Driscoll pulls apart the dense, modernist allure of modernizing Tokyo through the critical imagination of erotic-grotesque writer Edogawa Rampo who tells a story of young, modern women, or moga, seduced, kidnapped, tortured, and finally brought to total submission in begging for their “final, quasi-contractual degradation” of “mutilation and dismemberment” by the sadistic hand of their captor, a blind, predatory masseuse (Ibid., 160). The Blind Beast then sells the body parts to department stores for fascinatingly “life-like” mannequin components. Several of the Beast’s victims are rural girls as part of a larger pattern of domestic dispossession and violent possession by capitalist enthrallment and incorporation. “As Tokyo’s population doubled from 2.5 million to 5 million between 1913 and 1928, new arrivals often passed directly from formal subsumption into a new and overwhelming real subsumption. This invasive subsumption demanded more than the occasional subservience to capital that characterized the mere formal subsumption of living labor to capital in biopolitics” (Ibid., 161). The possession and rendering of bodies is luridly central to this grotesque imagining of modernizing Japan and it shifts from the enclosure of display and production to the fields of social delinquency de Certeau describes above—the seizure of bodies within capitalist desires and state institutions. Together they produce discourses of knowledge about young people.
Susumu’s Bad Boys
Once again under the modernizing imperatives in the streets of post-war Tokyo, youth are framed by filmic approach that slip between documentary and fiction, picking up where Araki’s still-photographic, unruly method and feral obsessions were bound up in capitalist/patriarchal fantasies of the constrained women put to work as image commodity. Young men, all ex-reform school inmates and non-actors, play themselves in director Hani Susumu’s Bad Boys, the 1960, black-and-white case study of juvenile delinquents ensnared and produced in Japan’s reformatory system. The film is remarkable for its play within a cinéma vérité style of direct observation unmade through collaboratively staged scenes between filmmaker and actors who at times draw upon the unwitting complicity of others to produce intensely real reenactments that double as narrative explosions. Most notable is a scene depicting a theft in a jewelry store in Asakusa where the camera lingers outside and records the crime through the glass: violating the law of property as part of an act. The folds are replete. The boys enact themselves as they were but in the process, become themselves in the present only to end up improvising a narrative about their own incarceration in which they recount the criminal solidarity they had with the other boys and girls in their gangs.
The film reminds us that the reformatory is a space of national enclosure, where young male bodies are disciplined with techniques reprised from the Imperial Army. Yet, “life inside and outside the reformatory is filled with ambivalences; kindness and exploitation exist inside the walls of the prison and without” (Desser 1988, 63). Hani emphasizes the fascistic remainder reproduced across the bodies of the inmates within the school’s logic, a common challenge to the state made by the New Wave directors as they echoed the protests sweeping Japan in the early 60s (Ibid.). In the aftermath of war, in a nation remade into a pre-fab democracy, and in a city only recently totally burned to the ground, modern life is indeed “hard on youth.” The contrast is sharp between the wildly playful kids skittering through the sparse streets in Araki’s photographs contrasts with the teenage boys wandering the gaudily illuminated streets only to be incarcerated within the harsh, military-style architecture of the reformatory.
The boys live perpetually on the margins of a nation and culture intent on consuming them invisibly behind prison walls rather consumed on display like the young women trapped and sensually dismembered in Rampo’s erotic grotesque origin story about the bodies taken over by Tokyo’s surging capitalist fetishism of the pre-war. The military incarceration, consumption and dismemberment of bodies lies darkly between these two historical moments. They are connected through this explicit bloody subsumption of young flesh in state and imperial power so guileless in its violence it is perhaps easy to dismiss the youth experiences on either side of the war as incomparably better. Rather than making comparisons it is more useful to trace the effects of Stanley Hall’s truism: What is the shape, dispositions, techniques, and desires of youth when it comes into legibility through national and capitalist pressures? What are Japanese youth becoming at the intersections of intense local built and cultural space and multiple planes of global media and lifestyle?
| Previous page on path | Youth: Anthroplogy, Theories, and Discourse, page 3 of 5 | Next page on path |
Discussion of "Japanese Youth and Representation in Araki's photographs and Susumu's 'Bad Boys'"
Add your voice to this discussion.
Checking your signed in status ...