Hijikata: Revolt Of The Body

CHAPTER ONE

FROM THE NORTH

The coastal north-western corner of Japan formed a wild and neglected terrain at the end of the 1920s, a world away from Tokyo. It was the marginal land known as Tohoku, which remained an obsession throughout Hijikata’s life.

Siberian winds blew in relentlessly across the Sea of Japan, and the rural, peripheral zone of the Akita region was covered in thick snow for much of the year. North of that region, the coastline of the main island of Japan, Honshu, ended in an axehead-shaped peninsula; still further north, across the turbulent Tsugaru strait, the vast, volcanic island of Hokkaido marked Japan’s northernmost point, and directly above Hokkaido, another volcanic island, Sakhalin, at the eastern edge of the Soviet Union, ran vertically upwards towards Magadan, where Stalin was then establishing his death camps. Akita faced outwards, geographically and sensorially, towards the ocean and the East Asian mainland, rather than inwards, towards Tokyo and its increasingly militaristic governmental power. Except in the region’s main city, also called Akita, that frozen landscape of small villages was inhabited by peasants who believed in an infinity of devils and gods, and held yearly riotous festivals which punctuated the monotony of life in the north. The southern regions of Japan were too warm to keep livestock, but northern Tohoku could support any animals or crops able to withstand its savage climate. Its peasants were reviled or ridiculed by the metropolitan inhabitants of Japan. By the 1960s, Tohoku would become the focus of a preoccupation in urban Japan with supposed ‘authentic’ cultures and populations that had been able to escape contamination by the consumerist, media-driven forces of the postwar country; but in the late 1920s, Tohoku was nowhere.

Tatsumi Hijikata was born as Kunio Yoneyama on 9 March 1928, in Asahikawa, an outlying area of the coastal city of Akita. Although the vast majority of the population of the Akita region lived in a state of destitution, Hijikata was born into a family who were among that region’s more prosperous inhabitants. Hijikata’s father, Ryuzo Yoneyama, worked as a silk-worm cultivator, and also ran a soba-noodle restaurant within the family’s large wooden house; he was hard-drinking and often beat his family. He also entertained the restaurant’s customers with vocal recitations of folk narratives; in that era, long before radio and television reached the margins of Japan, the evenings focused on alcohol and stories. To increase the family’s income, Hijikata’s father took in lodgers, mainly students, who often spoke to the attentive child Kunio about literature and dance.

Japan’s involvement in the Second World War began when Hijikata was thirteen years of age, after a decade in which the militaristic country had been incessantly seizing territory on the mainland, massacring millions of Chinese and other East Asian civilians, many of them with chemical weapons, as part of that process of imperially-sanctioned expansion. For the first time, the Akita region had become wholly subjected to Tokyo’s imperatives, as a source both of young men to fight in the conflict, and of weapons manufacture for its armies. At first, the war went well, with the capture of Hong Kong and Singapore, and the Japanese population supported the conflict in delirium; then, the situation swung to the opposite extreme, as the American forces decimated the Japanese navy, and began to dominate the air space over Japan itself. Almost every major city in the country would be attacked from the air and left in ruins by the time of the conflict’s end; Akita became the target of the very last American bombing-raid, which completely destroyed the city’s Nippon Oil Company Refinery, two hours after Japan’s surrender. In his mid-teens, during the war, Hijikata appears in photographs in an outdoor landscape of ice and wooden buildings, surrounded by his uniformed elder brothers; during this period, he was pushed down a flight of stairs in the course of a school fight, and his legs were seriously injured; thereafter, one of his legs would always be shorter than the other, ensuring that he could never become a conventional dancer.

Three of Hijikata’s older brothers took part in the war, and all three were killed. Their cremated remains were then shipped back to Akita. By the final stage of the conflict, as the American forces advanced across the Pacific ocean, from island to island, the death-rate of young Japanese soldiers was exceptionally high, since they were not allowed to surrender; the Japanese forces had overstretched themselves in their conquest of South-East Asia, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were left to starve during the chaotic retreat. Once Japan had been ruined and defeated, the American forces occupied and governed the country for seven years. The only reason Hijikata himself was never dispatched to be killed was because he was marginally too young to be conscripted; he was only seventeen years of age when Japan finally surrendered to the American forces, and had instead been assigned weapons manufacture duties at the Akita Steel Corporation, where he suffered severe burns to his back in a fire. At the end of his life, Hijikata wrote about his family in Akita and the vanishing of his brothers in the war: ‘Sometimes when it gusts up north, the snow swirls around and the wind is just incredible… The snow drips down and that’s how babies dripped from my mother. Eleven of them. And I was the last. The day after having a baby, my mother was already back in the kitchen, washing dishes. With eleven children, there are lots of older brothers and sisters for me. All my older brothers went into the army. My dad has them drink sake from a sake cup, and maybe he said something like, ‘‘Do your best’’, but I don’t really know. Then they all get red from drinking sake. They get that way because they are all such serious big brothers. And when they come back there is sand in funerary urns. They left red and came back sand. Ah, that thing which is form emerges as it disappears; form becomes vivid in disappearing.’(2) A number of Hijikata’s sisters also disappeared during his youth and the war years; he would often assert that they had been sold into prostitution (as was the case with many young women from Akita during that period), and that one of these accursed, lost girls later inhabited his body as a kind of phantom presence, though, after his death, his wife Akiko noted that Hijikata’s sisters had actually left for other parts of Japan for arranged marriages, in cities such as Kobe, rather than for lives of prostitution. In the final decade or so of his life, Hijikata would endlessly engulf himself in memories of Tohoku, fabricating and reconfiguring the elements of his childhood; he became the final child when, in fact, he had been only the tenth of the eleven children.

By the end of the war, and despite his damaged leg, Hijikata had stubbornly decided that he wanted to become a dancer: an experimental dancer. At that time, he knew of European and American experimental dance almost solely from magazines, and he had soon exhausted the dance training available in the city of Akita, including classes in German Expressionist dance. The entirety of Japan’s limited experimental-dance culture was concentrated in Tokyo, and Hijikata spent a brief period there in 1949, expecting to be able to support himself while training as a dancer. But migrants from the north were rapidly disabused of such expectations in the harsh metropolis, and poverty soon propelled the homeless Hijikata back to the north. He remained in the Akita region for the next three years, employed as a forestry worker; during that period, he gave his first solo dance spectacle, at a cinema in Akita city, and also joined a group of dancers who toured the region, performing in the open air for peasant communities. Hijikata finally decided to confront life in Tokyo again, and left the north at the age of twenty-four, in 1952, the year in which the American Occupation of Japan ended.

Chapter Two

Asbestos And The Colour Black

Hijikata formulated his project for a dance form able to transform the human body and to intimate death, for almost a decade, before he gave his first performances embodying that project, and began to speak of his work, from 1960, as ‘Ankoku Butoh’. From the start, in Tokyo, that dance of ‘utter blackness’ resonated with Hijikata’s ambivalent nostalgia for the north. He missed the profound darkness of the night skies of wintertime Tohoku, which accentuated the brilliance of the stars; in Tokyo, the glow transmitted upwards by the colossal city of burning neon hoardings and street-light illumination cancelled-out the blackness which he had been habituated to, and the stars were invisible. But Hijikata was thinking of other blacknesses in naming his performance art. The dance of darkness seized death, and engulfed death within itself; although white was habitually the colour of death in Japan, Hijikata would overturn that.

Black was the colour of the abyss of the human body, which remained petrified and futile, in Hijikata’s perception; that body was restricted to an unrealized and chaotic form, but had the potential to implode cataclysmically and uniquely, in the act of gesture, with one instant of unrepeatable incandescence, to the point at which it would terminally swallow all light. Blackness, for Hijikata, was