Thank you, Tomomi, for uploading the video of Masa playing “Akatonbo” at my house. I can savor it even more now that others can share in it in this way.
So I want to share some of the things I learned from my conversations. I may misremember, so please correct me, Tomomi.
Tari had said that she’s been working with alcoholics through body-training for about a dozen years. I wondered if these were mostly men or women. She said both. At first there were only men, and they made fun of her, but she persisted. Now there are many women, too, and various kinds of addiction represented, including gambling. What is the body-training for, I asked. She said that the broken health of such people manifested itself in “blurred body contours” (rinkaku ga boketeiru). For alcoholics who have come through AA, all their reflection has been verbal. She wanted them to become aware of their bodies. It’s been rewarding for her to see their bodies take on clear contours as they practice with her.
She mentioned going to a Thai village near the Cambodia border with the Asian Feminist Arts group. A major goal was to get the word out on the fate awaiting the young girls lured to Japan on the promise of good jobs. I wondered if that message were conveyed explicitly. She said the group took a slide show of artist Tomioka Taeko’s series on comfort women, but she did only performed with this slide show at a high school, not in the village with the very young girls–that seemed too direct, too unmediated. (I’ve begun to wonder if the adults in these villages really don’t know what happens to their girls, or if it’s a case of the unbearableness of knowing when there are no viable options for economic survival.)
Tari-san is invited to perform in the Philippines in June and to create a piece on domestic violence for an international symposium in Tokyo in September. So I want to ask her if there’s a link in her mind–
ターリーさん、フィリピンでのパフォーマンス（ジャパユキさん的要素、従軍慰安婦的要素が入るのでしょうか）とドメスティック・バイオレンスを扱うものと、どこか関連していますか。前者のエキゾチック性（日本人ではない女性、または成人していない、女の子を求めるもの）とDVとの関連が感じられますか。
Oh, in class, she mentioned the performance in a school gym during which an old woman left in the middle of the performance, referring to Japan’s wealth–which apparently made the performance repellent to her. Tari-san said that she realized then that she couldn’t thoughtlessly visit such places in SE Asia (i.e., carrying the unarguable message about the dangers of sex trade for young girls wasn’t justification enough?)
Tari-san knows a lot about the artists (Russian constructivist-influenced) who were part of the avant-garde to proletarian culture movement of the1920s-30s in Japan, as I realized to my thrill, sharing things I’ve collected, mostly not shown in museums in Tokyo but in Otaru, Hokkaido (remember how Nori thought his family had done relatively well because they lived in Hokkaido?–though of course, that’s only partially so).
Masa-san and I discovered some (to me) incredible commonalities. She said “it all started” with her older sister buying her a ticket and sending her to see a movie about Kobayashi Takiji, the proletarian writer killed by police torture in 1933 (he’s the guy I’ve been researching). She has visceral anger about such acts by the state and sympathy for the families–wishing they’d sue.
I also learned that she’d known Louise（ルイズ), the fourth daughter of anarchist Osugi Sakae and feminist Ito Noe. After the couple were killed, together with many Koreans, in the aftermath of the great earthquake of 1923, Louise and her siblings were adopted by Noe’s parents in Nagasaki, where her name was japanized to “Ruiko.” There is a wonderful 1997 documentary about her, Ruizu sono tabidachi (directed by Fujiwara Tomoko). Masa got to know Louise in the anti-death penalty movement and, I think, in the legal support of those arrested in the East Asia Armed Struggle group. She saw her two days before her death in 1996. (The Osugi-Ito children all have weird-sounding names because they were named after European revolutionaries and anarchists–Louise being Louise Michelle, in the Paris Commune, I believe.)
Masa-san, as we know, identifies with anarchism; but she says she’s been voting for about ten years, wanting to find whatever ways (and again, seeking to collaborate widely) to do something about the current situation. I’ll be they’re both miserable, as I am, about the results of the Tokyo gubernatorial election.
I’ve been trying to think about how to put all this together with lesbianism, lesbian performance art, then about art and politicsーsexual politics and other (?) politics broadly.
Jake asked a question about how it is that performance art is more effective than a lecture. (I’m not one to take that as an insult!)
I guess art makes visible phenomena, or aspects of phenomena, or connections among phenomena, that aren’t readily apparent in our everyday lives. I had a teacher decades ago who said that Noh theater makes things by slowing action down; other things, by contrast–like a bud opening–have to be speeded up for our eyes to catch. Then there are movements–links–that are too subtle or fragile to be captured by discursive statements. A statement that’s starkly logical can seem not only distorting but alarming or merely crude; nonverbal language can be more supple.
Okay–this is all for tonight.
Norma
I realize I’ve traced a circle back to Tari-san’s comments on the recovery of one’s bodily contours through nonverbal practice.
