Midori Yoshimoto
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REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY
DECEMBER 2011
studies. Furthermore, the inclusion of two fictional writings from the time of Expo ’70,translated by Kyoko Selden and Alisa Freedman, paints a fuller picture of the era andmakes this issue relevant in the field of literature as well. Finally, Hyunjung Cho’s selectannotated bibliography of Expo ’70 is the first of its kind in English and will provide astarting point for scholars interested in this relatively new topic.
Expo ’70: A Turning Point and Polarized Discourse
As this volume demonstrates, Expo ’70 marked a major turning point not only inJapanese art, architecture, and design, but also in the history of world expositions as awhole. The first essay featured in this volume, “Japan World Exposition – ReconsideringExpo Art” by the curator Nakai Yasuyuki, translated by Mika Yoshitake, traces Japan’sparticipation in world expositions dating back to 1873 and examines how the nature of theexpo and Japanese art displayed at expos have changed over the course of the twentiethcentury. Expo ’70 was a major benchmark in Japanese history as well, commemoratingtwenty-five years after World War Two by realizing Japan’s long-held dream of hostinga world exposition since 1940. Following the success of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics,it was regarded as the best opportunity to establish Japan as one of the world powers,equal to European countries and the United States. In his book
Expo Syndrome: PostwarPolitics and Cultural Struggle in Postwar Japan
(Banpaku gens∂: sengo seiji no jubaku,
2005),
the sociologist Yoshimi Shunya has argued that world expositions have functionedas a kind of syndrome, namely, a system that enables a collusion between the populistdesire for wealth and national development policy.
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For many Japanese artists, Expo’70 provided unprecedented opportunities to realize ambitious and big-budget projectsthat would otherwise never have been conceived and sponsorship by the Japanesegovernment and corporations made the previously impossible, possible.Due to national backing and the political context of Japan at the time, however,art created for Expo ’70 (Expo Art hereafter) was widely criticized for its inherentpropagandistic nature by artists, architects, designers, and critics, even before it opened.
A group of photographers, including Taki K∂ji, issued the photo magazine
Provoke
in1968 not only to attack conventional photography, but also to critique the nationalisticphase of the country in anticipation of Expo ’70.
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The same year, a number of artists andcritics participated in the five-day symposium “Exposé 1968: Say Something Now, I AmLooking for Something to Say” (Exposé 1968: nanika ittekure, ima, sagasu) held at the
S∂getsu Art Center in Tokyo, to probe the state of contemporary art in advance of Expo
’70. The organizers and participants of this symposium included those who had alreadycommitted to producing pavilions at the expo and expressed their visions and concernsof the expo through performance art and mixed media presentations rather than directdiscussions.
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In the meantime, the 1968 May Revolution in Paris intensified universityupheavals and the anti-Vietnam War movement in Japan, which had begun in themid-1960s, and fueled artists’ opposition to Expo ’70