The nature of the treaty, which had the potential to embroil Japan in a war on the side of the United States, sparked huge protests in Japan, with demonstrators sur- rounding and entering Japan’s legislature, the National Diet, in advance of a planned visit by Eisenhower on 15 June 1960. The clashes between protesters and police at the Diet resulted in the death of twenty-two-year-old student Kanba Michiko. The American president cancelled his visit to Japan but the treaty automatically came into effect on 19 June regardless. As a way of showing it had taken responsibility for the controversy, Kishi’s Cabinet resigned.

This was followed by a period in which the Japanese economic miracle was in full swing. Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics in 1964 and in 1969 construction started on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which began operation in 1971. This optimistic time of prosperity reached its zenith, in many ways, with Expo ’70, which opened in Osaka with the theme of Progress and Harmony for Mankind. Around sixty per cent of the population of Japan would eventually visit the expo. However, the end of the 1960s was also a time of global upheaval – protests against the Vietnam War, the Cultural Revolution in China, and the May 1968 unrest in Paris. In Japan, the anti-Anpo movement returned, with activists, especially students, campaigning not only to block the automatic renewal of the treaty in 1970 but also for Japan to withdraw from it. The campuses of major universities were barricaded and large protests took place throughout the country. Yet with the renewal of the security treaty in June 1970, the student movement largely waned. Supposedly stable conservative governance and capitalism had established the firm grip on every corner of the country that it has generally retained to this day. The postwar period up to around 1970, then, was arguably a time that cemented the major elements shaping the current Japanese socio-political landscape.

On the other side of the Pacific, 1970 saw the democratic election of a socialist government in Chile. The government’s progressive spending policies led to hyperinflation and, with the support of the United States, which feared another Cuba in Latin America, the military staged a coup in September 1973, over- throwing the government and replacing it with a dictatorship. Thirty thousand people were killed in the subsequent oppression and a hundred thousand others fled the country.

This was also around the time that the landscape theory practices of Japanese film critic Matsuda Masao, filmmaker Adachi Masao, scriptwriter Sasaki Mamoru, and photographer Nakahira Takuma were unfolding across film, photography, publishing and other mediums, sparking much debate. Matsuda, Adachi and Sasaki, joined by Nonomura Masayuki, Yamazaki Yutaka and Iwabuchi Susumu, collaboratively made an experimental film called A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969), which became a central part of the discourse around landscape theory.

A.K.A. Serial Killer traces the trajectory of Nagayama Norio, a nineteen-year-old who stole a gun from a residence on a United States military base in Yokosuka in 1968 and then killed four people in Tokyo, Kyoto, Hakodate and Nagoya.² As Matsuda later wrote: “While calling it a documentary film, we single-mindedly kept filming the landscape of each area that Nagayama might also have seen with his own eyes. We are now creating a strange work that can only be called an actual landscape film.”³ Over the course of four months of travelling and filming the route taken by Nagayama, who was brought up in poverty and found him- self at the mercy of his social circumstances and times, Matsuda and his collaborators came to realise that the “unique local character [of the regions] was extremely eroded, and we discovered instead a homogenized landscape which can only be called a copy of the central city”.⁴ Matsuda then developed this idea further: “We became conscious of that very landscape as hostile ‘authority’ itself. It is very likely that Nagayama shot bullets to tear apart the landscape.”⁵

Matsuda argued that the Japanese landscape as had been debated, developed or “discovered” in various fields from the Meiji (1868–1912) to the postwar period, no longer existed, having been replaced by the boundless systems of the nation-state and capitalism. This fundamentally changed the implications of the word landscape and presented a new means of critically engaging with political power. In the more than fifty years since Matsuda and his peers first advocated landscape theory, the structures of state and capitalist power have extended their reach to every part of our lives in ever more sophisticated forms, now truly existing as the landscape. It becomes increasingly difficult to examine whose power is furthered whenever we are prompted to buy something through means intricately embedded in the social media that we enjoy for free, and in which systems we are ensnared. Karatani Kojin writes in Origins of Modern Japanese Literature that with the appearance of “landscape” in Meiji Japan, “the epistemological constellation” had shifted, so much so that “Meiji Japanese who searched for a landscape that predated ‘landscape’ faced the contradiction of being able to envision it only in relation to ‘landscape’”.⁶ Indeed, when we attempt to look at the landscape in the present, it is impossible for that to be anything other than the landscape as a power structure that Matsuda and his peers identified.

The landscape of Jinushi Maiko’s A Distant Duet (2016) features a large hole in the middle of a desolate place and looks nothing like a central city. This work has become the most exhibited entry in Jinushi’s oeuvre both in Japan and overseas. Its easily installable single-channel format is perhaps one factor in this, and yet surely not the only one. Something in the work has continued to captivate viewers. What is it? How does the hole in A Distant Duet connect to the landscape that appeared in Japan in the late 1960s and 1970s?

Jinushi’s interest in holes has been ongoing since she participated in My Hole: Hole in Art – a research project and resulting group exhibition in 2015. This research related to a 1970 exhibition by Enokura Koji, Takayama Noboru, Fujii Hiroshi and Habu Makoto, held at the same time as landscape theory was developing, and for which curiously all the artists created works featuring holes. Though regarding this research as having a significant impact on her subsequent practice, Jinushi has also described her unease during the experience. “I felt this sense that the reality of a single human being making something cannot be explained just by the macho worldviews of the student movement, Mono-ha, and so on.”⁷

In the wake of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Liberal Democratic Party re- turned to power, led by Abe Shinzo, ushering in a period of resurgent conservativism in Japanese society, with the passing of the State Secrecy Law in 2013,⁸ and in April 2015, the military legislation that allowed Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to operate over- seas in “collective self-defence” on behalf of its allies. In the midst of this steady shift to the right of the political spectrum, Jinushi encountered the work of the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, which forms the core of A Distant Duet. Jinushi quotes from Bolaño’s semi-autobiographical novel The Savage Detectives (1998), which deals with the journey of two avant-garde poets who travel to northern Mexico in search of another poet. This unconventional novel does not have a fixed protagonist through whose eyes the story progresses, but rather unfolds over the course of rambling conversations seemingly unrelated to the subject matter.⁹ Jinushi was intently drawn to this way of capturing the world through almost literally endless, pointless con- versations as well as Bolaño’s unswerving portrait of society and the perspectives of the Other or outsider in a community. A sup- porter of the socialist government that came to power in Chile in 1970, Bolaño was arrested and detained in the US-supported coup of 1973, after which he moved to Mexico and then to Spain, where he died in 2003. In A Distant Duet, Jinushi pursues traces of Bolaño in Spain. A.K.A. Serial Killer is also about the search for someone who is no longer present, and in both works, the identity of the person in the viewfinder can only be discerned through the contexts or voices later layered over the footage. This references the specific nature of the medium of moving image as something that appears truthful. While employing an entirely different medium, The Savage Detectives is also a story about the search for an absent figure.

In ‘A Hole’, the fourth chapter of A Distant Duet, Jinushi quotes from an episode in The Savage Detectives where a child has fallen down a deep hole, but the adults are too scared to do anything, and she then tells her interviewee that if such a thing were to happen in Japan, the witnesses would forget about having seen the hole, which confuses her interlocutor. Jinushi’s statement evinces an utter distrust in society, a feeling of power- lessness and resignation, and it is this quality that links her and Bolaño, and also arguably resonates with landscape theory.

In the 1970s, a large hole opened up in the landscape. Some people, especially students, tried to tell society about that hole. In A Distant Duet, the woman becomes frustrated during her conversation with Jinushi, saying that we must stay around such holes, to see them and not avoid them. But Japanese society today is content to ignore the hole and, as such, has forgotten about it. And at that moment, someone might fall down the hole. To write this essay, I revisited landscape theory and found it hard to understand Matsuda’s almost heroic assertation about Nagayama, that he “shot bullets to tear apart the landscape”. When mulling over their own place as urban consumers unable to resist the new era emerging as a kind of formidable landscape in the wake of the failed student movement, Matsuda and his peers saw violence as the manifestation of a certain ideal. And yet, I came to realise that to think about Jinushi’s work, and by extension Japanese society, through the lens of landscape theory enables us to tear apart the landscape as a form of political power as well as think of those practices as a way to resist the oblivion and obliviousness of a society engulfed by the landscape. Because immense political power can usher in social amnesia. Over the past fifty years, the landscape has been torn apart by various factors: in Fukushima, Kyoto, Noto, Okinawa, Nara, and in New York, Aleppo, Yangon, Avdiivka and Gaza. But this is not always caused by ordinary citizens. Political power tears apart the landscape of other political powers, creating new holes. And yet, people continue to forget and the system remains unshaken.

Kumakura Haruko. Translation by Wiliam Andrews.

Further reading

William Andrews, ‘Japanese landscape theories, pre and post’, Throw Out Your Books, 2 September 2023, https://throwoutyourbooks.wordpress.com/2023/09/02/japanese-landscape-theory-exhibition (accessed 2 December 2024). Sasaki Yusuke, Call History, 2019, 89 min.