Bringing little things to the surface: intervening into the Japanese post-Bubble impasse on the Yamanote

Abstract

Between the tragic events of the 1995 subway gassing and the triple disaster of 11 March 2011, Japan was stuck in relative stasis, an impasse marked by mundane violence and an ever-forward perpetual motion designed to break Japan out of its post-Bubble malaise. Some have called this time the Lost Decades. However, throughout this period artists, activists and others intervened into this quiet impasse in a range of creative ways, which drew on historical reference points to bring buried issues of internationalisation, urban belonging and capitalist alienation to the surface. They often did so using everyday terrains such as train carriages, and in particular Tokyo's Yamanote loop line. This article traces three such interventions–the Knit!Tokyo activities of 2002/3; the annual Halloween parties on the Yamanote line and the right-wing reaction against these in 2009; and the 2012 work, JR Yamanote Line: Dialogue to the Public, by contemporary artist Tanaka Kōki, to suggest that while these processes are often about the surfacing of the contradictions of everyday life, as they were in earlier times, the nature of these interventions in recent years has shifted as people's understandings of their relationship to national history and the transnational present have also changed.