We’ve now had four visitors in three camps: Imai Noriaki, student environmentalist; Ito Tari & MASA, performance artist and musician respectively; and Kamanaka Hitomi, a documentary filmmaker.
Many of them have talked in detail about the importance of making community or communities. One of Nori’s big projects now is creating a community portal online, Beppoo!, where people can organize on a local level. It involves Youtube somehow. An incredibly formative influence on the work of Tari and MASA is their status as lesbians vis-a-vis a larger society; and a lot of our class’ discussion on Japanese lesbians revolved around the groups which women, loving women, had formed to share their experiences and their lives. We also talked a lot about Shinjuku 2-chome, Tokyo’s gay district, and how bars and clubs and all of the physical places where gay social networks were at risk, on account of Ishihara Shintaro’s plan to ‘beautify’ (i.e. destroy) the district; and how the community was itself mobilizing to defend Ishihara’s opposition candidate. Today, Kama-san came to class and told us about how her film, Rokkashomura Rhapsody, is in fact helping build social networks: people across Japan are getting together, through social networking sites like Mixi, to hold screenings in their towns and cities, and they are getting to know each other in the process. Kama-san said that she sees the work of networking as helping to build a place for creative criticism and democracy; that it is part of starting a society of thinkers from square 1.
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