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.
It seems that although Nori is primarily a writer and activist; although Tari and MASA are primarily artists; and although Kama-san is primarily a filmmaker – a good chunk of their work is in fact making new social relations between people. In other words, creating communities which don’t yet exist.
Being both a Germanophile and a nostalgist I watched Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg last night. I’d recommend it to everyone – the forcefulness of her rhetoric, and the great tragedy of her life, is enough to make it worth it. It won Cannes at one point. But what was incredible about the film is that there are these incredible scenes where Rosa Luxemburg is expounding from podium after podium after podium to full auditoriums, full lecture halls, full of excitement. Everyone is holding on to her words and the whole world feels like a powder keg. There is an entire international left movement that is listening to her speak. The German Social Democrats are watching closely what the French, and the English, and the Belgians are doing; everyone is reading their history, everyone is in contact with one another. They hold huge conferences in London. There is no such international left movement now and to our horror the opposition to the war in Iraq seemed to disintegrate after the US army went ahead and invaded anyway. The question that hangs in the air is, how do we start to push the world in the right direction? It seems like community is the right place, and it also seems like making connections between different countries is also a giant step in the right direction. A big heartfelt thanks to everyone who has come so far – for having hearts big and warm and open enough to want to act in a time of incredible, penetrating, oily-slick cynicism.
Mike
