Asks the Present Volume. This Question, Which Distinctly Engages Modern Society, Is One That Confounds Art

State v. (Anti-)Art: Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident by Akasegawa Genpei and Company

Reiko Tomii

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualiﬁcations and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. —Marcel Duchamp, 1957

A Preliminary Overview Open to the public? asks the present volume. This question, which distinctly engages modern society, is one that confounds art. It can be argued that art is open to the public in many post-1945 societies. In Japan, for example, a staggering number of people saw such world treasures as Venus de Milo, the riches of King Tutankhamen, and Mona Lisa. (These works attracted, respectively, audiences of 831,198, 1,297,718, and 1,505,239 in 1964, 1965, and 1974.)1 This phenomenon, however, coexists with a multiplicity of contemporary practices and productions of art, including those of the avant-garde

that are more often than not antagonistic to mainstream taste. Although vanguard artists may aspire to communicate with a large audience, with their exhibition, in theory, open to the public, in reality their art caters to a small circle of people in the hundreds, or even tens, who are receptive to such new art. Generally speaking the “public-openness” of art concerns, in part, the issue of reception and relates, in part, to that of art institutions. What is offered to the public, at which venue, by whom, under what circumstances, resulting in what reception—all are subjects worthy of investigation if one is to understand the mechanism and politics of the exhibition system. At the same time the issue of public-openness also foregrounds the contradictory anddividednatureoftheavant-garde.Whileformalistfactions(forexample, abstractionism) embrace the sanctum of high art, antiformalist factions (such as Neo-Dada and Anti-Art) seek to transgress the boundary between art and life. Still, not unlike the former, the latter tend, despite their merge-art-and- life rhetoric, to operate on the modernist principle of “autonomy,” which is by definition elitist. Thus an inquiry into the public-openness of vanguard art, more than that of masterpiece art, inevitably leads to the fundamental, though contentious question, What is art? Vanguard artists are not entirely indifferent to addressing the public. Okamoto Tar¯o (1911–1996), for one, was an influential artist-theorist whose advocacy of avant-garde philosophy gained a popular audience from the 1950s onward. Still, artists of radical persuasion seldom volunteer to explain themselves and their art to society at large. In this respect, Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident [Mokei sen-en satsu jiken] was a rare occasion of just such open self-explanation. The infamous Incident began quietly in 1963, unbeknownst to the public, when one-sided, monochrome replicas of the 1,000-yen note were fabri- cated for Akasegawa Genpei (b. 1937), a core member of Tokyo’s avant- garde (fig. 1). But there was no incident until a year later when the Tokyo Metropolitan Police launched a criminal investigation of the artist and the printers as coconspirators, decidedly thrusting Akasegawa’s work into public consciousness. Subsequently the Tokyo Metropolitan Prosecutors Office indicted them for currency fraud and successfully tried the case in the court Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 143

Figure 1 Akasegawa Genpei, Model 1,000-Yen Note (1963), as cut to size and inserted in Keish¯o, no. 8. The string visible above Akasegawa’s money is Takamatsu Jir¯o’s work. Collection of the artist; photo courtesy of Nagoya City Art Museum

of law. In 1970 the supreme court upheld Akasegawa’s guilty verdict, thus activating his suspended three-month sentence of hard labor. As the events unfolded in the public press, the artist and his peers made imaginative efforts to cope with the situation. Akasegawa invented the theory of model (mokei); his supporters formed the 1,000-Yen-Note Incident Discussion Group (Sen- en-satsu Jiken Kondankai);2 and what was once an artist’s experimental idea evolved into a collective project titled Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident.3 positions 10:1 Spring 2002 144

Figure 2 Cover of Keish¯o, no. 8, designed by Akasegawa Genpei. The small square opening shows Akasegawa’s Model 1,000-Yen Note. Collection of the artist; photo courtesy of Nagoya City Art Museum

It may not be an exaggeration to say that Incident left an indelible mark in the annals of postwar art,4 largely due to the so-called Exhibition Event at the CourtroomthatmaterializedattheTokyoDistrictCourtontheﬁrstdayofthe trial in August 1966. Akasegawa himself later published a witty account of the guerrilla maneuver during the motion to request defense evidence.5 The thirty-ﬁve minutes taken to review the gamut of art evidence transformed the courtroom into an impromptu exhibition hall and the proceedings into a happening, with unheard-of participation by the gallery audience. The exhibit(ion) was documented by a court photographer in lieu of the hard Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 145

evidence, that is, the “works of art,” that the court found itself unable to properly care for in its custody. Copies made from the color photographs pasted in the official court document have since entered the canon of postwar art,6 within which the performative aspect of Incident has been singled out.7 The courtroom exhibition, however, is but a part of the trial, which in turn is a part of Incident. Furthermore, “action” alone does not characterize the entire undertaking or its public-openness. In fact, at each stage, from the moment the alleged crime was committed to the investigation to the trial to the posttrial phase, Incident offers possibilities of more cerebral readings that will enable further investigation of, among other issues, the place of art in society. Above all, the very act of forging money is provocative, warranting manifold art-historical and theoretical inquiries, which include but are not limited to Marxist and conceptualist analyses.8 Moreover, given the legal nature of Incident, whereby language, exacting yet elusive, is sometimes the sole weapon available against the system, the whole affair can be read as a work, as a part of the creative act as defined by Marcel Duchamp (1887– 1968), one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. (Hence, in accordance with the convention of art history, the incident’s title is italicized in this essay to expressly denote its status as a work of art.) In this sense Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident is not an isolated object made by a solitary creator. Akasegawa’s money was at the core of Incident, in what Duchamp called the “raw state”;9 the body of this work consists of the first set of readings—interpretations and decipherings—produced at the time by Akasegawa and other parties immediately involved (such as the police, the judicial system, and the witnesses) and not involved (fellow artists and critics, the general press, the interested public, etc.).10 While Akasegawa is its primary author, without whom the work would not have existed, the others played crucial roles, if only inadvertently, collaborating with him in its making. The discursive space that Incident engendered is abundantly rich and profoundly insightful: its sheer size is overwhelming, with literally tens of thousands of words uttered and written within and outside the courtroom. Aside from the voluminous court transcript, the records in public—available as published materials—may be roughly grouped as follows: official legal documents, printed primarily in art magazines;11 news reports in the general positions 10:1 Spring 2002 146

Figure 3 Dust jacket of Akasegawa’s An Objet-Carrying Proletarian (1970), designed by the author himself and showing two objet-based works wrapped in Model 1,000-Yen Notes (1963), which were seized and tagged by law enforcement authorities as evidence. Photo courtesy of Nagoya City Art Museum

and art presses; commentaries by Akasegawa and others; a 1970 anthology of Akasegawa’s writings, An Objet-Carrying Proletarian (ﬁg. 3);12 and the discussion group’s publications. What follows is a set of readings of these public records. Not only do they help us reconstruct the narrative of Incident and recapture the circumstances surrounding it, some of which have been obscured over time; they also provide insights into the essence of Akasegawa’s mechanically reproduced moneyaswellasIncidentasawhole.Theissuestouchedonwithsuchurgency three decades ago—the concept of Art (geijutsu), the paradigm of the modern (kindai), and the institutions of the state—still engage us today. This study will guide readers through ﬁve “readings” of Incident and conclude with an examination of its place and that of the avant-garde in the public sphere. Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 147

Reading 1

Genesis of Model: Money Mechanically Reproduced A member of Neo-Dada and Hi Red Center,13 Akasegawa belongs to the generation of Anti-Art (Han-geijutsu) that emerged from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. In retrospect, the label of Anti-Art, which originated in an art critic’s offhand remark that instantly entered the art lexicon,14 aptly points to what was fundamentally at issue: Art, with a capital A. That is to say, the goal of Anti-Art was to question and dismantle Art (geijutsu) as a cultural and metaphysical construct of modern times.15 Onestrategyforachievingthiswasto“descendtothemundane.”16 Stylisti- cally the favorite tool of Anti-Art practitioners was the objet, or a readymade, everyday object that could be employed individually or in combination, with or without alteration (Marcel Duchamp is credited with inventing this mode of making art). Akasegawa’s reproduced money is a classic example of the Anti-Art objet: the artist appropriated the “most familiar yet forgotten object that ordinary people are accustomed to use in everyday life,”17 transcended the routine modes of making art, and displaced the work from the usual confines of the exhibition space into the sphere of life. Unlike many Anti- Art works often physically lost or poorly documented, his production and its details are well recorded, thanks to the groundwork done by the law enforcement authorities (important participants in Incident). Akasegawa first recognized the potential of the 1,000-yen note as a subject of his art in January 1963 when, according to the indictment, he had three hundred images of its face side reproduced photomechanically in green.18 He mailed them as the announcement for his solo exhibition at the Shinjuku Daiichi Gallery, using the post office’s cash mailers (genkin f¯ut¯o). Having been preoccupied with cutting up and collaging photo images of human bodies to “create a blueprint of the anti-human, anti-being,” he was struck by the “intensity he saw in the actualized phenomenon” of reproduced money.19 Inspired by this revelation, he began to paint a copy of the 1,000-yen note magnified approximately one hundred times.20 In the next few months, on three separate occasions he took advantage of the photomechanical plate already made, ordering a total of some twenty-seven hundred images of the money—as outlined in the indictment—printed three images per sheet, positions 10:1 Spring 2002 148

all one-sided and in black or black-green. With some of the printed sheets he created a few large collaged panels and several wrapped objects (fig. 3). Others he cropped to the exact size of the bill and set on fire as a performance work on a TV program. Yet others, also cropped, were inserted in the no. 8 issue of the art magazine Keish¯o [Form] (figs. 1 and 2). Money is not a rare subject in the history of painting, especially in the West. However, while bills depicted on canvas, including the one-dollar bills silk-screened by American pop artist Andy Warhol a year before Akasegawa’s reproductions,21 innocuously reside in the semiotic empire of images, Akasegawa’s money, particularly those bills cut to the exact size, characteristically embodied the Anti-Art desire to infiltrate the space of life, suspend or interrupt the quotidian, and thus “agitate” (kakuhan) human consciousness entrapped in everyday existence.22 Already with the first set of reproductions (i.e., the announcement), Akasegawa had described, on the reverse side, the “subversion of the money system” as a part of the “subversion of the private property system, including the body and body-associated consciousness.” He must have been aware that there was some element of criminality, if conceptual, involved in his work. In the beginning Akasegawa himself, lacking more appropriate nomenclature, called his reproduced money “counterfeit (nise) 1,000-yen notes.”23 More- over, he knew of the famed case of counterfeit 1,000-yen notes, designated Chi-37, which the police had been investigating without much success since the discovery of the first Chi-37 specimen in November 1961.24 More than once the artist faced printers’ refusals or hesitations to help him.25 In the end his fanciful thought did indeed have a tangible effect in real life. Akasegawa’s legal ordeal was fraught with a sense of absurdity. There were curious twists from the earliest stage of Incident. For instance, Akasegawa’s money was illustrated in a journal of Waseda University’s radical student group Criminal League (Hanzaisha D¯omei), which drew police attention to Akasegawa.26 Also, the venerable Asahi shinbun erroneously and sensationally reported that the “self-proclaimed ultra-avant-gardist” was linked to the Chi-37 counterfeit case,27 prompting his group Hi Red Center to publish Eyedrop Special Bulletin [Megusuri tokuh¯o] and take other “direct actions” against the newspaper. Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 149

Most peculiarly, at least to the layperson’s eye, an obscure law was invoked against the artist: Ts¯uka oyobi sh¯oken moz¯o torishimari-h¯o, literally, the “law to regulate the imitation of currency and bond certificates.” Enacted in 1895 (Meiji 28), it categorically criminalizes moz¯o, or “imitations,” as in “imitation diamond.” As defined in Article 1, “One may not produce or sell that which has an appearance that could be confused (magirawashiki) with currency . . . and other official money and money equivalents.”28 In essence the law, by the 1960s barely known beyond the legal professions, covers acts falling outside the more familiar fraud of giz¯o, or “counterfeiting,” of currency included in Keih¯o, Japan’s criminal codes. Under Section 16: Crime of Currency Counterfeit, Article 148 simply reads, 1. Those who counterfeit or forge money, paper currency, or banknotes in use with an express intent to use it will be punished with three years to life of hard labor. 2. Those who use, disseminate, or import counterfeited or forged money with an express intent to use it...will be likewise punished.29 After he voluntarily (that is, without subpoena) submitted to the investigation by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police and gave depositions in January 1964, Akasegawa immediately developed the theory of mokei, or “model” as in “model airplane,” in rebuttal to these legal concepts. (He was also piqued by Asahi’s blunder—what he called “imitation art” of “counterfeiting news.”)30 In his essay “On Capitalist Realism” he wrote, “By the way, my printed matter that became a legal matter of sorts, contrary to my intentions, is not a counterfeit but a model of the 1,000-yen note. It differs from a counterfeit or a real 1,000-yen note in that in my intention and in its actuality it is ‘unus- able,’ and thus a model of the 1,000-yen note stripped of the function of paper currency.” He continued, mindful of the legal ramifications, that whereas the counterfeit “pretends to be real” and “changes hands . . . as real money,” his model “from the beginning, assumes a face distinct from the real and is situated in contrast to the real.”31 In other words, by making a mechanical reproduction, the artist stripped the “authority of the object,” which Wal- ter Benjamin called “aura,”32 from the paper money, another mechanical reproduction invested with exchange value by the state. Akasegawa fought paper with paper, both of which were as real and valuable as paper could positions 10:1 Spring 2002 150

be, although the premise of the money system makes us believe the original money is far more real and valuable than the simulated model.

Reading 2

Genesis of Incident: Artist As Thought Pervert Toying with money, Akasegawa struck a raw nerve in the state’s power (kenryoku). It is not an idle parallelism that in reports and discussions on Akasegawa’s trial, frequent references were made to another kind of Art trial ( geijutsu saiban): the cases related to the art and literature that the state deems obscene. While works by authors such as D. H. Lawrence and the Marquis de Sade laid bare a private but vital part of human existence, Akasegawa’s work theoretically exposed the ubiquitous but often invisible institution of the modern state. It was imperative for the state to regulate equally these transgressors for the sake of the public good, which is to say that Akasegawa was as dangerous as the translators and publishers of Lawrence and de Sade, whom the authorities of postwar Japan brought to court for obscenity. It should come as no surprise, then, that such concerned journalistic outlets as Nihon dokusho shinbun, which sympathetically reported on Incident from its outset, characterized Akasegawa’s model as an “anti-power thought” (han-kenryoku shis¯o).33 For his part, the artist argued that his model was not a “directly anti-power objet” but a tool to observe human reality. Still, he obliquely acknowledged the potential of art as an antipower expression: “Art in essence disavows the mundane and is anti-life. As such, it leads to a form of anti-power, a form against power that secretes the mucus of the mundane.”34 The history of money as the apparatus of the state cast a long shadow on Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident. In the early years of Meiji Japan the gov- ernment was besieged by rampant counterfeiting. To remedy the situation and introduce modernized printing technology, the Ministry of Finance employed Italian artist Edoardo Chiossone (1832–1898) in 1875 (Meiji 8). As the banking system improved, Chiossone, a master printmaker and anticounter- feiting expert, created many engraved plates for paper currency and devised Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 151

a printing technique that would frustrate counterfeiters. In this context in 1895 the currency imitation law was born that would, seven decades later, be applied to Akasegawa, who utilized a by-then commonplace photomechanical process.35 It is interesting that in the 1960s the state was again mired in the same problem that confronted Meiji bureaucrats. The 1,000-yen note, introduced in 1950 bearing a portrait of the ancient statesman Prince Sh¯otoku, fell prey to counterfeiters in the Chi-37 case, as the police call it. From November 1961, when they ﬁrst attracted the attention of the police, to December 1963, when the police probe on Akasegawa was initiated, a total of 343 specimens were known. To counter the situation a newly designed 1,000-yen note, with Meiji politician It¯o Hirobumi on its face, was issued in November of that year. According to reports the investigation cost more than one billion yen, but the police never caught the culprit who created what was then touted as a “work of art” in counterfeiting history.36 An investigation is one thing, but an indictment is quite another. Why was Akasegawa indicted? The fact is that by February 1965 both the detectives and the prosecutor in charge determined that there was no case to try and counseled the artist not to “lightly appropriate money in the future.” How- ever, in a sudden turn of events that October, another prosecutor moved to indict the artist and the printers.37 Some suspected the authorities of ulterior motives. After all, Incident took place in the 1960s, the decade that began with the violent and widespread protests against the renewal of Anpo (U.S.-Japan Security Treaty). And Akasegawa was very much a part of that “Anpo generation” marked by a heightened political awareness. Or, as he put it, “Marx and Lenin were mixed into our young impressionable minds,” just as “the spirit of Zen was mixed into the mind of [sixteenth-century tea master] Rikyu.” ¯ 38 Conversely, the state was haunted by the nightmare of 1960, with another renewal of Anpo slated for 1970. The discussion group’s Kawani Hiroshi put Incident squarely in this context, especially in relation to the Japan-Korea treaty. Since 1952 Japan and South Korea had held a series of conferences to normalize the relationship between the former colonizer and the colonized. Although the treaty was positions 10:1 Spring 2002 152

finally signed in 1965, the process was difficult, and both governments suffered militant popular opposition. In Japan the leftist protests against the Japan-Korea treaty in 1963–1965 were even dubbed the prelude (zensh¯osen) to the 1970 Anpo. In January 1964, immediately before Akasegawa received his first visit from the police, the director of the national police agency gave a New Year’s speech on the intensified focus on thought perverts (shis¯o-teki henshitsusha). This was a law enforcement label that encompassed an assort- ment of politically dangerous elements in society, uncannily and suspiciously reminiscent of the wartime thought criminals (shis¯o-han). In the fall of 1965, at the precise moment when Akasegawa’s indictment was prepared, oppo- sitional activism reached a peak in the attempt to stop the ratification of the Japan-Korea treaty.39 Whether the indictment was politically motivated is a question that re- quires further study. Kawani himself was only suggestive, writing “the dog’s nose is keen” in reference to the wartime police and their study of surrealism.40 At the least there is a telling footnote to Incident: in 1973, when Akasegawa’s “A Course in Capitalist Realism,” serialized in the art magazine Bijutsu tech¯o,41 incited another 1,000-yen note incident, the de- tective put in charge was a specialist on intellectual criminals (chin¯o-han).42 An equally intriguing question is the degree and manner of “redness” in Akasegawa, who was the “Red” (Aka) of the group Hi Red Center. (“Hi” and “Center” derived from the other members Takamatsu Jir¯o and Nakanishi Natsuyuki, respectively.) Never a Communist or an ideological activist,43 he was nonetheless a self-made proletarian (musansha) carrying what he dubbed “post-Stalin objets.”44 Certainly in his 1970 book An Objet-Carrying Proletar- ian one may be tempted to see a radicalism in his sometimes left-leaning tone and vocabulary, including the word proletarian. Yet his true strength lay in his innate ability for ironic and sober observation of the way power operates in real-life contexts, a talent that was further honed over the course of the trial. For the “thought pervert,” for example, his observation in 1969 reads, “Through [this phrase], power (kenryoku) perhaps developed a huge mania (m¯os¯o). . . . Its mania surpassed my own....Power had a firm conviction in its mania. . . . In a duel between the two manias, power is often more radical, because power, by definition, defends reality....Most of all, the power that exists in reality dreads invisible enemies.”45 Such incongruous expressions Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 153

by Akasegawa as “developed a vast mania” and “secretes the mucus of the mundane” evoke a comical image of power (kenryoku) divorced from the concrete operation of the power structure (kenryoku k¯oz¯o) and the baggage of real-world politics. In other words, he did not so much rant against the power structure as displace it into the world of abstraction in which he as an individual could confront it, one on one, through language, his weapon of choice.

Reading 3

A Trial Strategy: Anti-Art Is Art After the indictment the court date was set for 10 August 1966. A trial carried grave consequences: a violation of the currency imitation law meant one month to three years in prison with hard labor; the lesser penalty of a ﬁne was not written into the law. The 1,000-Yen Note Incident Discussion Group was immediately formed, joined by Sugimoto Masazumi, an experienced liberal attorney who specialized in public security (k¯oan) cases.46 Given the outdated law and its vague phraseology “that which has an appearance that could be confused with currency,” the defense decided to contest the constitutionality and applicability of the law itself and demonstrate that Akasegawa’s Anti- Art work was Art that must be protected by the constitutional right to freedom of expression. In a sense it was Akasegawa’s trial and at the same time the discussion group’s trial. Though not defendants themselves, group members saw their principles also put on the line. “We are all in the position of victim (hi- gaisha),”47 said Kawani Hiroshi, who introduced Akasegawa to Sugimoto after the artist had decided to use a state-provided defender and who as- sumed administrative responsibility for the discussion group. Critic and surrealist poet Takiguchi Shuz¯ ¯ o, who played an important role as a “special defender,” had once suffered the oppression of the state during wartime himself when he was jailed and interrogated for a possible connection with Communism. Critic Ishiko Junz¯o, who pioneered manga criticism, viewed his participation in the discussion group as a vital part of the “formative process of [his] own thought.”48 positions 10:1 Spring 2002 154

While working with Sugimoto to prepare for the trial, the discussion group served as a nucleus that engendered a space of discourse within and outside the art world. It issued a newsletter titled “Toward the 1,000-Yen Note Trial,”49 held public meetings, and organized benefit events.50 These activist efforts, as will be examined later, inspired counterdiscourses. In addition they perhaps provided a guide to the general press and helped define the tone of its coverage. Thoughtful comments appeared in respected magazines, including Ch¯u¯ok¯oron [Central public discourse]; even popular weeklies, such as Sh¯ukan taish¯u [Masses weekly], whose business was to sensationalize, stopped short of making a gaffe like the one Asahi shinbun had made in 1964 by reporting an unfounded speculation.51 To execute the Art portion of the trial strategy, the discussion group mobi- lized an impressive list of expert witnesses, including Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, a man of letters and defendant in the Marquis de Sade trial, and Fukuzawa Ichir¯o, a surrealist painter who was arrested with Takiguchi during the war. Others were Ikeda Tatsuo, Nakamura Hiroshi, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Ushio Shinohara, Suzuki Yoshinori, and Takamatsu Jir¯o (artists); Akiyama Kuniharu and Tone Yasunao (musicians); Awazu Kiyoshi (designer); Ya- mada Munemutsu (legalist); Yamamoto Takashi (gallerist); Aik¯o Kenji and Kawani Hiroshi (editors); and Takiguchi, Haryu ¯ Ichir¯o, Nakahara Yusuke, ¯ and Oshima¯ Tatsuo(critics). Over eleven sessions the court heard testimonies from a total of three special defenders (i.e., expert witnesses) and seventeen witnesses (Nakahara and Haryu ¯ doubled as witnesses and special defenders). Especially memorable was the first day: following Akasegawa, who poeti- cally stated the intention and meaning of his “model 1,000-yen note,” special defenders Takiguchi and Nakahara gave “exclusive lectures” on modern and contemporary art to properly contextualize the idea and act that constituted Akasegawa’s work, which might not be appreciated as Art in the uninitiated eyes of the three presiding judges and the prosecutor. Attorney Sugimoto reiterated the art lessons and masterfully handled the motion to introduce defense evidence, that is, Exhibition Event at the Courtroom.52 Overall the trial was a rare occasion in which Art articulated its meaning to society at large in plain language comprehensible to an ordinary person.53 After the first day the defense continued to actively appropriate and monop- olize the courtroom as its own site of discourse. It forced through the entire Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 155

list of defense witnesses, in spite of the prosecutor’s repeated attempts to cut the defense short after a few days of testimony.54 Thus the site sanctioned by the state became, albeit temporarily, a part of what may be called the public sphere of Art. The judges and the prosecutor resigned themselves to listening to the testimonies through to the end, though with admirable “tolerance and patience.”55 Ultimately, however, it did not matter to the prosecutor, for whom the decision against the defendants was a foregone conclusion, because in his view the interest of public welfare and social trust must always and unequivocally override constitutional rights. He brought in no witness of his own and posed only a few irrelevant questions to some of the defense witnesses.56 (Unlike its English or U.S. counterpart, the Japanese court lacks a jury; therefore the prosecution need only address the presiding judges.) All he needed was the fact of the reproduction, dissociated from the entire creative process.57 In essence the prosecutor’s closing argument amounted to: even if it is Art, it is still a crime.58 The judges split the difference between Art and law,59 recognizing Akasegawa’s “model 1,000-yen note” as Art but on 24 June 1967 pronounc- ing him and the printers guilty as charged. The grounds for the guilty ver- dicts were the reproduced notes cut to the exact size, while the uncut ones, including those incorporated in the collages and objets, were not deemed “imitation.”60 Exceptforthecopperplate,alltheevidenceseizedbythepolice was returned to Akasegawa. Thus the outcome of the trial was, as Kawani put it, a “partial victory yet total defeat.”61 Subsequently Akasegawa alone appealed twice, but the trial ended in April 1970 when the supreme court, after a closed deliberation, upheld the decision of the lower court, activating his three-month sentence, with one year’s probationary suspension.

Reading 4

The Court of Art Rules: Anti-Art Must Be Guilty As the trial unfolded at the TokyoDistrict Court, the court of art, so to speak, also took issue in its natural domain of the art-related press with Akasegawa and the discussion group. The focus there was the true nature of his work, positions 10:1 Spring 2002 156

which apparently eluded the prosecutor. From the antipower perspective, implicit in his theory of model, Akasegawa should choose from among the following three options: to defy the court and pursue a direction of absolute nonconformity; to acknowledge, of his own free will, the express intent of “counterfeiting” and sentence himself to life; or to render the whole court process as a happening involving the defendant and witnesses.62 Some criticized the defense for its unabashed assertion that Akasegawa’s Anti-Art work was Art. In the Sat¯o Gallery’s newsletter, critic Segi Shin’ichi charged that the defendant spinelessly sought “cover” (kakuremino) in Art, when Anti-Art was seriously “antagonistic” to Art.63 Others felt cheated. Kat¯o Yoshihiro, a member of the radical nude- happening group Zero-Dimension, blamed the discussion group for making the trial less interesting by calling for a mistrial.64 Indeed, after the first day of the trial, when the courtroom was packed, the interest of the art world and trial attendance dropped as the case was tried intermittently over a period of ten months.65 The unlikelihood that the conceptually transgressive potential of Akasegawa’s project would be physically fulfilled as a public spectacle culminating with his imprisonment may well have been a factor. There were also a few direct exchanges. In the reader’s column in Me, the newsletter of Ogikubo Gallery in Tokyo, which provided office space to the discussion group, Akasegawa was challenged by Kon Aki (possibly a pseudonym). Kon, who came to know of Akasegawa’s work when contacted bythediscussiongroup,suspectedtheartisthadlaunchedtheprojectwithout much homework; Kon went on to say that in the anything-goes world of contemporary art, a murder could be Art.66 Akasegawa bluntly countered that the question “Can a murder be Art?” was informed by the “courtroom- attuned mind”: “The distinction between a verdict of a death sentence—or sentencesthatdescribeamurderinanovelorthethoughtofmurder—andan actofanactualmurder—oramotionoraphenomenonthereof—mayappear confusing to a human brain but is quite clear to a pig’s eye.”67 Kon in turn expressed his amazement that the artist took the murder reference literally and complained that the artist’s language was too opaque.68 Impenetrable as it may be, Akasegawa’s view about the “pig’s eye” appears to address the profound gap between the realms of abstraction and reality, language and action, and finally Art and life. The declaration of Anti-Art as Art extracted Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 157

his mechanical reproduction from everyday life, once again demarcating the boundary of Art that Anti-Art had sought to blur. It is likely that, at the time, he may have been unaware of the signiﬁcance of what he wrote; not until after the trial did he understand the damage caused by his trial strategy. In Nihon dokusho shinbun the publication of the discussion group’s statement was immediately followed by another series of letters in the reader’s column, “Dokusha no koe” [The reader’s voice]. Kud¯o Susumu, a “30–year- old public servant” well versed in recent avant-garde art, condemned the discussion group for “embracing the illusion ( gens¯o) that is Art,” which he believed was dead. Indeed, Kud¯o made the penetrating observation that the real threat of Akasegawa’s “model 1,000-yen note” to a social order maintained by law lay in the possibility of its circulation in life, which he contended was the artist’s secret intention and the work’s intention as well. He therefore castigated the discussion group for its “inability to translate the artistic avant-garde that had to go so far as to violate the law into an avant-garde as aggressor that does not fear to take on the law.” “To keep his honor intact,” Kud¯o continued, “Mr. Akasegawa should have forsaken the merry partying, and, just as in the case of a pickpocket or mugger, submitted himself quietly to the criminal trial proceedings and gone through the trial.”69 A rebuttal from Takamatsu Jir¯o, a member of Hi Red Center, who circumvented Kud¯o’s militant queries, led to Kud¯o’s demand that critic Ishiko Junz¯o, whom he regarded as a unique voice in the discussion group, submit his opinion.70 It was, in fact, Ishiko who advanced the most thoughtful and thought- provoking argument. Since he believed that modernism rendered Art “harmless” (mugai) under the pleasing notion of autonomy, he greatly appreciated the “harmfulness” of Akasegawa’s “model 1,000-yen note,”71 com- paring its illumination of the obscene ﬁction of the money system to the illumination of obscenity invited by taboos in the manner of Georges Bataille.72 However, he did not want the prosecution to take advantage of this harmfulness in order to pronounce the artist guilty. That is why he objected to the defense’s modernist logic, that “Anti-Art is Art, and thus can never be a crime,” and personally favored the purely legalistic tactic of questioning the constitutionality of the law regarding imitation. What does it matter, he positions 10:1 Spring 2002 158

asked, if the prosecution and the court consider Akasegawa’s reproduced money a “mere toy or flyer,” so long as the artist is set free?73 As for Akasegawa, Anti-Art literalism was not an alien idea. When he first met with attorney Sugimoto, he was presented with two legal options. He could keep his integrity as an artist intact by presenting himself as a knowing offender (kakushin-han); this would require him to maintain complete silence and endure the trial and the inevitable prison term. Or he could fight the charge, turning the trial into an Art trial ( geijutsu saiban). Unsure of his strength, the artist chose the latter, with the secret proviso that he might play with the judicial process.74 Yet, as he later recognized, the sad truth was that “the submission to the trial to begin with was a step toward concession.”75

Reading 5

After the Trial: Reflections on the Tragicomedy The trial provided Akasegawa with an opportunity to examine his model to the fullest theoretical extent, although in exchange he had to abandon his credo and, in fact, forfeit the whole premise of Anti-Art: what he does is not Art. By asserting what he does is Art, albeit for legal expediency, he lost what he called namelessness (mumeisei).76 The nameless work is best exemplified by Cleaning Event (1964), staged by Akasegawa’s group Hi Red Center. This clandestine project to literally scrub the streets took place in broad daylight in the crowded Ginza district of Tokyo six days after the Tokyo Olympics opened. Yet many passersby paid little attention to it, assuming it to be an official beautification effort; only a handful cast somewhat skeptical glances.77 Simply put, namelessness means public invisibility. On one hand, Anti- Art in general and Akasegawa’s money in particular need namelessness in order to infiltrate freely into everyday life without being recognized (that is, named) as Art. On the other hand, the namelessness of Akasegawa’s money theoretically simulates the invisible workings of the governmen- tally sanctioned money. People may pay cursory attention to money in its transactions—most likely its amount—but will hardly stop to scrutinize the object itself and the premise behind it. In this sense the state ought to strike Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 159

back at Akasegawa and contain his namelessness, for he in effect exposed the namelessness of its power through mimicry. For Akasegawa, even though the loss of namelessness was an enormous blow,78 there was a self-imposed reason for taking on the conflict-ridden task. As the artist revealed in his posttrial writing, he had a secret he wanted to protect at any cost. It concerned the “cut-here line” (kiritori-sen) perforated on the margin of the 1,000-yen notes inserted in the magazine Keish¯o (fig. 1). The story goes back to 8 January 1964, the day two police detectives called on him at his apartment. The police had already learned of his cut-here line from the work order discovered at one of the printers. Asked about it by the visiting detectives, Akasegawa instinctively decided to avoid giving a “truthful” answer and subsequently hid the incriminating evidence in an “iron box,” which he “sealed by welding.” The police neither found a copy of Keish¯o nor saw an actual cut-here line.79 The discussion group agreed to abide by Akasegawa’s decision, keeping silent on the matter throughout the trial. If circumstances had warranted it, the discussion group would not have hesitated to perjure themselves as a form of free expression in order to protect their friend.80 Why was the seemingly insignificant perforation so important to the artist, and why was it such a provocation for the authorities? Conceptually, to Akasegawa, the cut-here line embodied the “life” of his model; as the trial progressed, it grew in his mind to epitomize the very namelessness of his money that he was losing. Legally the invitation to “cut here” separated the crime of imitation from the crime of counterfeiting, for it would constitute “an express intent to use”—the key element in the penal code’s definition of counterfeit. The “possibility of circulation in life” remarked by Kud¯o Susumu was thus not at all groundless. Had the police found the 1,000-yen notes in Keish¯o, critic Ishiko wrote in his posttrial text, the prosecutor might have pressed a more serious charge of counterfeiting.81 Even under the law concerning imitation, Akasegawa’s decision proved to be critical: “cutting the printed image to the exact size” did become a make-or-break point in the prosecution’s argument in determining the precise moment when the crime was committed, which the three-judge panel duly considered in its final deliberation.82 positions 10:1 Spring 2002 160

The drama of Incident features a fourth person, in addition to the artist and the two printers, who escaped a charge of counterfeiting thanks to the lie about the cut-here line. This was Imaizumi Yoshihiko, the editor of Keish¯o and a member of the discussion group. It so happened that the publication data (okuzuke) was missing from the issue of Keish¯o in question, amistakethatkepttheincriminatingissuefromopencirculation.Thedata,if printed as it should have been, would have customarily included Imaizumi’s name, implicating the editor as a distributor of the 1,000-yen counterfeits.83 (Another twist in the story: Imaizumi was the sharp-tongued Kud¯o Susumu, a fictitious character concocted by Akasegawa, his fellow editor Kawani, and himself to rekindle the waning interest of the art world in the trial.)84 If there is a brighter side to this story it would be that thanks to his experi- ence in the “exacting domain of the courtroom,”85 the timid, insomniac, and neurotic artist who once felt exasperated with the ambiguity of language re- covered the ability to sleep and gained an impressive command of language and thought. Shortly before he received the guilty verdict in 1967, he wrote, Only in the courtroom does it become possible and necessary to “expressly pronounce” a work as “Art.” Most of us do not carry a doctor’s letter that certifies we are normal; not that we are not normal, but we don’t need the doctor’s note. The same may apply to the title (sh¯og¯o) of “Art.”... By the way, in the courtroom, as the trial progressed, I became more confident in using the word “Art.” Anti-Art is a supplementary word.... In the courtroom, “Art” cannot be anything but a cover (kakuremino) and I am on the side of giving this title. The courtroom is a place where one must be sober, where only such titles matter.86 Indeed, the court transformed Akasegawa into a formidable player in the realm of discourse. The first work he developed after the verdict was Greater Japan Zero-Yen Note (1967), which, based on a “law-abiding” ( junp¯o) spirit, embodied the concept of the “real” (honmono) (fig. 4). Akasegawa’s “calcu- lation” went as follows: if people kept exchanging three hundred yen (three 100-yen notes) for his zero-yen note, there would eventually be no “real money” issued by the state in circulation. Zero-Yen Note was at once a re- venge on his part and a new outlet for his “parodic” creativity. He successfully promoted it through various print media, and many people sent him three Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 161

Figure 4 Akasegawa Genpei, Greater Japan Zero-Yen Note Poster, blueprint poster (1967). Collection of the artist; photo courtesy of Nagoya City Art Museum

hundred yen, using the post ofﬁce’s cash mailers. He went on to work in the mode of parody, taking aim at “civil society,” every corner of which was now “stained by power.”87 In 1972 he devised a project called Ultra-Art Tomason, which has since attracted many participants through photo magazines. A compilation of haiku-like visual puns, the series consists of nameless works of art hidden in the everyday, such as A Record of the Wind, concentric traces left by wind-blown tree branches on a concrete wall, that the artist and his followers uncovered and photographed.88 Moreover, having published his ﬁrst novel in 1978, he also established himself as an Akutagawa Award– winning novelist under the pen name Otsuji Katsuhiko. Now a propertied positions 10:1 Spring 2002 162

man ( y¯usansha) and cultural celebrity, he has slipped back into public sight through the back door, as it were.

The Avant-Garde in the Public Sphere Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident is a story of Anti-Art that became Art; it is also about the complications that ensued when art entered the domain of life and vanguard practices intersected with the public sphere and with the apparatus of the state. In brief, Akasegawa’s replica money enabled him to operate namelessly, without declaring that what he did was Art, in social space; the law enforcement authorities, the guardians of public security, noticed and prosecuted the artist’s work, which constituted non-Art in their eyes; in response the artist, a proponent of Anti-Art, made a public affirmation of Art, albeit for the sake of legal expediency. At the crux of Incident lies a riddle of the avant-garde: the eventual institutionalization of even the most radically iconoclastic, vanguard practices within public culture. No matter how we define the ambition of the avant-garde—to descend to the mundane or to break down the barrier between art and life or to repudiate the institution of art—the uncomfortable fact remains that the avant-garde will, sooner or later, be separated from the sphere of life and preserved in the realm of art in a historicized, academicized, or otherwise institutionalized form. Ordinarily this process is mediated by the modern systems of the museum, the market, and the discipline of art history, which in themselves are the cornerstones of public culture. What makes Incident unusual is that the power of the state, which has already hegemonized the public sphere, actually instigated it, and the artist himself reluctantly participated. Yet this institutionalization is also an unsought victory for the vanguard movement. It is ironic that when Akasegawa’s trial was in progress, the vanguard movement in Japan stood at a crossroads. Once on the fringe of the art establishment consisting of Nihonga and y¯oga (Japanese- and Western-style painting, respectively), the avant-garde factions were increasingly gaining entry into official culture. Toward the end of the 1960s some of Akasegawa’s Anti-Art colleagues, including Takamatsu Jir¯o, were selected to represent the nation at the international biennial exhibitions in Venice, São Paolo, and Paris, and quite a few vanguard artists participated in the state-sponsored Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 163

Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. In fact, by then the avant-garde had become a force to be reckoned with, an institution unto itself called “contemporary art” ( gendai bijutsu), separate from the Nihonga-y¯oga establishment. (There- fore, in Japanese art history, contemporary art, which succeeded avant-garde [zen’ei], is more than a generic label based solely on periodization.) Anti-Art purists may condemn the vanguard artists’ acceptance of Art and entrance into conventionality as a betrayal. Still, art is not a fixed category but an ever expanding field of praxis. The expansion of art is no doubt predicated on individual artists’ contributions, which in turn are stimulated by a society that also undergoes changes, offering the artists more areas of inquiry and more material means to work with. It should be noted that Incident not only brought about the dreaded institutionalization of the avant-garde but also helped illuminate new possibilities for art in post-1945 society. Mechanical reproduction is a modern tool of mass access. However, Akasegawa deployed it not so much to achieve a mass circulation of his fake money as to devise a layer of remove, theoretical as well as physical, from the original bill. Through his ingenious simulation he deconstructed the perceived value and authority of money, the fetishized commodity par excellence. It is tempting to argue that the artist destroyed money’s aura yet created another one, that of a work of art. But what is this aura that Akasegawa was supposed to have created with his model, one that seems to share nothing with masterpiece art like Mona Lisa? Lacking the uniqueness of material existence—that attribute that Walter Benjamin decreed confers a work of art with its aura89—Akasegawa’s money, no more than cheaply made printed matter, offers little that pleases and excites our eyes. What it engages instead is our minds; what makes it unique is not its aesthetics but its thought. Art as a thought, rather than as a thing, has a long lineage in the twentieth century, harking back to Marcel Duchamp’s urinal titled Fountain (1917), frequently invoked during the trial as the predecessor of the Japanese artist’s money. A plain urinal factory-produced in mass quantity, Fountain epitomizes art as a thought rather than a thing. Between Fountain and Incident, aside from the differences that are beyond the scope of the present discussion, there are certain notable parallels. Just as the French dadaist “under the new title and point of view—created a new thought”90 for the plumbing fixture, so the positions 10:1 Spring 2002 164

Japanese artist did likewise for paper money. Yet however meager it may be, the material body of the art as a thought, like Fountain and Incident, is more than an index that stands for the thought behind it; its banal presence triggers a reaction in people and further discourse, sometimes even inciting a public scandal. Significantly, the endless arguments and interpretations each of these works has spurred have amounted to what Benjamin called the “tradition,” or attendant history of appreciation, that underlines the aura.91 In Duchamp’s and Akasegawa’s works, the deficiency in aesthetic quality, not unrelated to the German philosopher’s “exhibition value,”92 is amply compensated by the almost built-in discursive capacity that engenders “publicity value” and public engagement. The publicity value, similarly to the exhibition value and the market value, is extrinsic to a given work of art, defined within a matrix of public culture. It corresponds to the media-based, informational mode of cultural consumption, as opposed to the experiential (visiting a museum/gallery) and commodifying (buying a work) modes. Although the publicity value, borne by both visual and linguistic vehicles, is not new, the exponential development of mass and information media in late modern, consumerist society makes it more relevant than, say, in the 1930s when Benjamin wrote his famous essay on mechanical reproduction. (For instance, high-quality reproductions of Mona Lisa in lavishly produced coffee-table books enhance rather than undermine its status as a masterpiece, affording the public a different order of reality.) While Akasegawa’s money initially attained little public exposure and attention outside his circle, Incident has, thanks to the intervention of law enforcement authorities, since achieved truly wide public exposure, being enshrined in the art history and social history of postwar Japan.93 Since the space of publicity is, by definition, part of everyday life and open to the public, Incident’s success therein symbolizes an ultimate descent to the mundane. After the trial Akasegawa did not denounce art-making per se or jointheinstitutionalizedavant-garde—thelatterwouldhavebeenstrenuous in any case for the convicted artist. Neither did he turn to political activism, which some artists might have done in light of the futility of the avant-garde movement (as advocated by the tough-minded Kud¯o Susumu). Instead he Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 165

simply moved on to exploit the space of publicity, using his newly acquired weapon of discourse in the print media. Accordingly, after Incident the degree of public openness in his work and career greatly multiplied. His cultural celebrity in Japan is comparable to that of the late Andy Warhol in the United States, who also traveled at will between art and life. The latest of his proliﬁc output, the concept of r¯ojin- ryoku, or “geriatric faculty,” is a case in point. The witty declaration by the artist, now more than sixty years old, that loss of memory in the elderly, together with other symptoms of senility, constitutes a gain in their geriatric faculty, has captured the imagination of the aging country and irrefutably made him a “person of the moment.”94 His success is not unproblematic. Some may accuse him of an opportunistic avant-gardism, although he has won his fame and respectability the hard way. Whether his coinage and observation, devoid of any visual component, qualify as a work of art is arguable. Akasegawa at the end of the 1990s appeared to incite as many questions as did the avant-garde at the end of the 1960s. His loss of recogni- tion as an artist, let alone an Artist, by the art world would be the ﬁnal irony in Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident.

Notes

This essay is a revised and substantially expanded version of the paper presented at the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting in Chicago in March 1997. The original paper can be found, with Japanese annotations, in ArtCom (Tokyo), no. 7 (1997). In the course of thinking about Incident, I am indebted to many people for their encouragement and support. I especially thank Akasegawa Genpei, Kawani Hiroshi, Kond¯o Tatsuo, Nakajima Masatoshi, Nakajima Yasuko, Shinohara Ushio, and Yamada Satoshi for their generous assistance in research. My deep gratitude goes to Tone Yasunao, who ﬁrst directed my attention to the “thought pervert” dimensions of Incident. All translations from Japanese material are my own. 1 Theexhibitionsthatfeaturedthesemasterpiecescomprisethetopthreeonthelistofexhibition attendance records for 1945–1980 compiled by Asano Sh¯oichr¯o in Sengo bijutsuten ryakushi, 1945–90 [A brief history of postwar exhibitions, 1945–90] (Tokyo: Kyury ¯ ud¯ ¯ o, 1997), insert. 2 The discussion group’s July 1966 publication, Sen-en-satsu saiban e: Jiken no keika to app¯ıru [Toward the 1,000-yen note trial: Chronology and appeal], lists the following signatories: Akasegawa Genpei, Izumi Tatsu, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Takamatsu Jir¯o, and Tone Yasunao positions 10:1 Spring 2002 166

(artists related to Hi Red Center); Imaizumi Yoshihiko and Kawani Hiroshi (editors); Sug- imoto Masazumi (defense attorney); Haryu ¯ Ichir¯o, Ishiko Junz¯o, Miki Tamon, Nakahara Y¯usuke, Takiguchi Shuz¯ ¯ o, and Yoshida Yoshie (art critics). 3 This “title” is taken from “Mokei sen-en-satsu jiken k¯ohan kiroku” [Trial documents of the model 1,000-yen note incident], published in Bijutsu tech¯o [Art notebook], no. 274 (November 1966): 137–168. It should be noted that in Kikan [Organization], no. 10 (January 1966), which published the police and prosecutorial documents, the authorities’ dry designation was simply adopted: “Akasegawa Katsuhiko (Genpei) hoka 2-mei ni taisuru tsuka ¯ oyobi sh¯oken moz¯o torishimari-h¯o ihan higi jiken” [Incident of suspected violations by Akasegawa and two others of the law to regulate the imitation of currency and bond certificates]. 4 For a general overview of post-1945 Japanese art see Alexandra Munroe, ed., Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky (New York: Abrams, 1994); hereafter referred to as Scream. 5 Akasegawa Genpei, Tokyo mikis¯a keikaku: Hai reddo sent¯a chokusetsu k¯od¯o no kiroku [Tokyo mixer plans: Documents of Hi Red Center’s direct actions], pocketbook ed. (Tokyo:Chikuma Bunko, 1994), 269–294; for excerpt translation see Scream, 374. 6 This information is provided by Yamada Satoshi, curator of Nagoya City Art Museum. For color reproductions see Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–80s, exhibition catalog (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), fig. 114 (p. 155). 7 For example, see Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, exhibition catalog (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998), 151. 8 IaddressthelargerframeworkofinterpretingIncidentasaconceptualistworkin“Concerning the Institution of Art: Conceptualism in Japan,” in Global Conceptualism, 15–29. 9 Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” lecture, 1957; published in Art News 56, no. 4 (summer 1957); reprinted in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 818. 10 Akatsuka Yukio, comp., “‘Sen-en-satsu saiban’ kankei bunken mokuroku” [Bibliography related to the 1,000-yen note trial], special issue on Akasegawa Genpei, Kikan, no. 14 (1987): 93–96. See also bibliography and checklist in Akasegawa Genpei no b¯oken/The Adventure of Akasegawa Genpei, exhibition catalog (Nagoya: Nagoya City Art Museum, 1995); hereafter referred to as Adventure. 11 The indictment, depositions, and receipts for impounded objects were published in Kikan, no. 10 (January 1966): 2–17; the indictment and statements made on the trial’s first day were in Bijutsu tech¯o, no. 274 (November 1966): 137–168; the verdict appeared in Bijutsu tech¯o, no. 287 (September 1967): 71–76; Akasegawa’s appeal to the supreme court was in Nihon dokusho shinbun [Japan book-readers’ newspaper], 3 March 1969; and Nakanishi Natsuyuki’s testimonies were in Bijutsu tech¯o, no. 347 (October 1971): 89–112 and no. 348 (November 1971): 201–224. Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 167

12 Akasegawa Genpei, Obuje o motta musansha (Tokyo: Gendai Shich¯osha, 1970); hereafter referred to as Musansha. 13 Neo-Dada was formerly named Neo-Dadaism Organizer. See Neo-Dada Japan, 1958–98, exhibition catalog (Oita:¯ Art Plaza, 1998). 14 T¯ono Yoshiaki, a response to the questionnaire “Tomorrow’s Art, Tomorrow’s Artist,” Gei- jutsu Shinch¯o [Arts Shinch¯o], May 1960; reprinted in Tone Yasunao, Hikosaka Naoyoshi, and Akatsuka Yukio, comps., “Nenpy¯o: Gendai bijutsu no 50-nen, 1916–1968” [Chronology: Five decades of contemporary art], pt. 2, Bijutsu tech¯o, no. 355 (May 1972): 61, 63. 15 The Japanese language has two distinct words, geijutsu and bijutsu, that correspond to the English word art. Geijutsu is an elusive term that can be translated as the arts, Art, or simply art, depending on the context. Bijutsu is art, conventionally consisting of painting and sculpture. In this essay Art is hereafter used consistently for geijutsu, as the meaning of geijutsu was made an explicit issue in Incident. 16 Miyakawa Atsushi, “Han-geijutsu: Sono nichij¯o-sei eno kak¯o” (Anti-Art: Its descent to the mundane), Bijutsu tech¯o, no. 234 (April 1964): 48–57; for excerpt translation see Scream, 385. 17 Akasegawa Genpei, police deposition, 9 January 1964; reprinted in Kikan, no. 10 (January 1966): 5. 18 Tokyo District Prosecutors Ofﬁce, indictment, 1 November 1965; reprinted in Kikan, no. 10 (January 1966): 2, and Bijutsu tech¯o, no. 274 (November 1966): 139. In the course of the reproduction process the relief plate of the note was created. 19 Akasegawa Genpei, “K¯oi no ito ni yoru k¯oi no ito” [Intention of action by intention of action], Kikan, no. 10 (January 1966): 23; reprinted in Musansha, 41. 20 The process is described in Akasegawa’s novel-like account, “Renzu no shita no Sh¯otoku Taishi” [Prince Sh¯otoku under the lens], Umi [Sea] 10, no. 4 (April 1978): 24–67. 21 See Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, exhibition catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), plates 143, 145, 146. Another notable instance of painted money is also American: see Old Money: American Trompe L’oeil Images of Currency, exhibition catalog (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1988). In addition there are a number of post-1945 examples of artists’ real-life intervention based on money, not unlike Akasegawa’s. Among them the case of U.S. performance artist J. S. G. Boggs is well documented; see Lawrence Weschler, Boggs: A Comedy of Values (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 22 “To agitate” is the key concept of Akasegawa as well as his fellow members of Hi Red Center. 23 Akasegawa Genpei, “Shizan shita nisesatsu” [Fake-money stillborn], September 1969, in Musansha, 169. Materials not previously published elsewhere and those whose originals I have not examined are cited here as printed or reprinted in Musansha. 24 Sh¯owa-shi zenkiroku [Complete documents of Sh¯owa history] (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1989), 695. 25 Ibid., 186–188; Akasegawa, depositions, 9, 31 January 1964, 5–6, 10–12. positions 10:1 Spring 2002 168

26 Editorial, “Jiken no keika to mit¯oshi” [The incident’s development and outlook], Kikan, no. 10 (January 1966): 18. For the group see “‘Akai fusen ¯ . . . ’ fukkokuban kank¯o” [Red balloon . . . reissued), Bijutsu tech¯o, no. 359 (October 1972): 17. 27 “Gaka ga kyu ¯ sen-en-satsu o moz¯o” [Painter imitates the old 1,000-yen note], Asahi shinbun, morning edition, 27 January 1964. 28 Ropp¯o zensho [Compilation of six laws] (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, ¯ 1969), 1658. 29 Ibid., 1649. 30 Akasegawa Genpei, “‘Shihon-shugi riarizumu’ ron,” February 1964, reprinted in Musansha, 26. 31 Ibid., 31. 32 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 221. Notably, the discussion group’s Ishiko Junz¯o referred to Benjamin’s text and Arendt’s exegesis in “Kankyo no dezain to geijutsu no kansei” [State-endorsed design and Art’s pitfall], Gendai no me [Contemporary eye], June 1970; reprinted in Hy¯ogen ni okeru kindai no jubaku [Modernity’s spell on expression] (Tokyo: Kawashima Shoten, 1970), 152. 33 “Han-kenryoku shis¯o no mokei” [Model as anti-power thought], Nihon dokusho shinbun, 31 January 1966, 1. 34 Akasegawa, “K¯oi no ito ni yoru k¯oi no ito,” 36. 35 Ishiko examined the history of money design in “Kankyo no dezain to geijutsu no kansei,” 138–160. 36 Sh¯owa-shi zenkiroku, 695, 700–701, 727. 37 Defense attorney Sugimoto Masazumi’s opening statement, reprinted in Bijutsu tech¯o, no. 274 (November 1966): 157. 38 Akasegawa Genpei, “Geijutsu genron” [Principles of Art], in Geijutsu genron, pocketbook ed. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991), 292. 39 Kawani Hiroshi, “Butsu to sakuhin to h¯otei” [Evidence, work, and the courtroom], Nihon dokusho shinbun, 12 September 1966. Another discussion group member, Tone Yasunao, recently discussed the political dimension of Incident in “Sen-en-satsu saiban ni tsuite” [About the 1,000-yen note trial], in Adventure, 110. For the Japan-Korea treaty see Sh¯owa-shi zenkiroku, 754–755, 765. 40 See, for example, the Internal Affairs Ministry’s documents, reprinted in Tone, Hikosaka, and Akatsuka, “Nenpy¯o,” pt. 1, Bijutsu tech¯o, no. 354 (April 1972): 93, 95. 41 Akasegawa Genpei, “Shihon-shugi riarizumu k¯oza,” Bijutsu tech¯o, nos. 365–373 (March– November 1973). The section in question was titled “Kokka ni sasageru konsepucharuato” ¯ [Conceptual art dedicated to the state], no. 371 (September 1973): 284–286. 42 Akasegawa Genpei’s autochronology, Kikan, no. 14 (1987): 85. Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 169

43 Akasegawa’s autochronology lists his participation in the protest against the U.S. base in Sunagawa-ch¯o, Tokyo, in 1956; see ibid. The discussion group included at least two ex- Communists, Ishiko Junz¯o and Haryu ¯ Ichir¯o. 44 Akasegawa Genpei, “Sut¯arin igo no obuje” [Post-Stalin objet], October 1967, in Musansha, 68–73. 45 Akasegawa Genpei, “Shis¯o-teki henshitsusha” [Thought perverts], November 1969, in Mu- sansha, 293–294. 46 “Jinbutsu soby¯o: Sugimoto Masazumi” [Profile], Bijutsu tech¯o, no. 276 (December 1966): 65. 47 Quoted in Ishiko Junz¯o, “Sairon ‘geijutsu no mugai-sei o utsu tame ni’” [Once again, “To blast the harmlessness of Art”], Me [Eye], no. 21 (March 1967): 6. 48 Ishiko Junz¯o, “Geijutsu to hanzai” [Art and crime], Mita bungaku [Mita literature] 54, no. 9 (September 1967): 16. 49 Two issues were published in 1966; one reported on Incident’s chronology and trial strategy, and another described the first day of the trial. 50 They were Gendai bijutsu sh¯ohin sokubai-ten [Sales of small works of contemporary art], Tsubaki Modern Gallery, Tokyo, July 1966; Tenj¯okan hataage k¯oen [Tenj¯okan inaugural presentation], Ogikubo Gallery, Tokyo, July 1966; and Hy¯ogen no fujiy¯u [Unfreedom of expression], Muramatsu Gallery, Tokyo, August 1967. 51 “‘Sen-en-satsu saiban’ to zen’ei geijutsu” [“1,000-yen note trial” and avant-garde Art], Ch¯u¯o k¯oron 81, no. 10 (October 1966): 42–43; “Zendai mimon ‘sen-en-satsu saiban jiken’ no chin- saiban” [Unprecedented: A peculiar trial of “1,000-Yen Note Incident”], Sh¯ukan taish¯u, 22 September 1966, 96–97. 52 The 1967 blueprint work by the discussion group, Invitation to the Trial [K¯ohan b¯och¯o sh¯osei- j¯o], implies that the group very likely preplanned the whole event. It appropriated the official summons issued to Akasegawa that required his appearance in the court on 10 August 1966 with a few telling alterations. For example, it added the titles and names of a “special speaker” (Sugimoto) and “special lecturers” (Takiguchi and Nakahara), signaling its ulterior intention to appropriate the trial process as it own. For a reproduction see Global Conceptualism, fig. 213 (p. 256). 53 Parenthetically but no less significantly, the defense primarily relied on the avant-garde precedents of the West, not of Japan, reflecting the internationalist, or universalist, approach to art prevalent in the 1960s. In particular the special lectures on art history by Takiguchi and Nakahara included no mention of the avant-garde of Taish¯o (1912–1926), whose radical antiaesthetics is today acknowledged to be an important precursor of Anti-Art. Granted this is a topic for a separate investigation, suffice it to say that discussion group member Tone Yasunao expressly made this connection in the early 1970s, together with Biky¯ot¯o artist Hikosaka Naoyoshi and critic Akatsuka Yukio, in their four-hundred-page, multicolumn “Nenpy¯o” (see n. 14). One of its pages is reproduced in Global Conceptualism, fig. 108 (p. 151). 54 Ishiko, “Geijutsu to hanzai,” 19. positions 10:1 Spring 2002 170

55 Ibid. 56 Ishiko Junz¯o, “Geijutsu no mugai-sei o utsu tame ni” [To blast the harmlessness of Art], Nihon dokusho shinbun, 30 January 1967, 2. 57 Akasegawa Genpei, “Hanketsu no teishi o” [Stop the rendering of a verdict], April 1966, in Musansha, 48; Yamada Munemutsu, “Zoku ‘sen-en-satsu’ saiban b¯och¯oki, IV” [Attending the “1,000-yen note” trial, 4], Bijutsu tech¯o, no. 279 (February 1967): 73. 58 Nakahara Yusuke, ¯ “H¯oritsu wa kannen ya gens¯o o sabakiuruka?” [Can law try ideas and illusions?], Bijutsu tech¯o, no. 281 (April 1967): 14. 59 Ishiko, “Geijutsu to hanzai,” 20. 60 Nakahara Yusuke, ¯ “Mokei sen-en-satsu saiban: Geijutsu wa sabakareuruka?” [Model 1,000- yen note trial: Can Art be tried?], Bijutsu tech¯o, no. 287 (September 1967): 60–61. 61 Ishiko, “Geijutsu to hanzai,” 16. 62 “Jiken no keika to mit¯oshi,” 19. 63 Segi Shin’ichi, “‘Han-geijutsu’ to wa nanika?” [What is ‘Anti-Art’?], Sat¯o gar¯o gepp¯o [Sat¯o gallery monthly newsletter], no. 129 (April–May 1967): 1–2. 64 Quoted in Yoshida Yoshie, “’Hanzai to geijutsu’ sunk¯o” [A brief thought on “crime and Art”], Me, no. 20 (February 1967): 1. 65 Yoshida Yoshie, “Kankei naisa, honto kane?” [No concern to me; oh, really?], Sat¯o gar¯o gepp¯o, no. 126 (November–December 1966): 1. 66 Kon Aki, “Tsuka ¯ giz¯o geijutsu jiken” [Currency counterfeit Art incident], Me, no. 13 (June 1966): 4. 67 Akasegawa Genpei, “Buta no me” [Pig’s eye], Me, no. 14 (July 1966): 4. 68 Kon Aki, “Kaimaku 2-fun mae no taiwa” [Conversation two minutes before a curtain call], Me, no. 16 (September 1966): 5. 69 Kud¯o Susumu, “Shishita geijutsu wa sabakezu” [Dead Art cannot be tried], Nihon dokusho shinbun, 25 July 1966, 2. 70 Takamatsu Jir¯o, “Kagirinaki ‘toi’ no tame ni” [For limitless “questions”], Nihon dokusho shinbun, 8 August 1966, 2; Kud¯o Susumu, “‘Aimai-na umi’ ima izuko” [Where is the “Ambivalent Sea”?], Nihon dokusho shinbun, 5 September 1966, 2; Ishiko Junz¯o, “Kenryoku mo mata gens¯o no k¯oz¯otai” [Power is also an illusory structure], Nihon dokusho shinbun, 3 October 1966, 2. 71 Ishiko, “Geijutsu no mugai-sei o utsu tame ni.” Ishiko also debated with critic and special defender Nakahara over the defense strategy in print. 72 Ishiko, “Geijutsu to hanzai,” 25. Yoshida also saw Incident in a Bataille-ian manner in “‘Hanzai to geijutsu’ sunk¯o.” 73 Ishiko, “Sairon ‘geijutsu no mugai-sei o utsu tame ni,’” 6. 74 Akasegawa Genpei, interview with the author, 5 April 1996. 75 Akasegawa, “Shizan shita nisesatsu,” 160. 76 Ibid., 161, 185. Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 171

77 Akasegawa, Tokyo mikis¯a keikaku, 258–268. For reproductions see Global Conceptualism, figs. 10, 182 (pp. 21, 223). 78 Tone pointed this out in his review of Akasegawa’s 1970 book in Bijutsu tech¯o, no. 332 (September 1970): 178. Akasegawa himself, however, appeared to have left his grief behind, given the more lighthearted accounts he gave much later. It is notable that his 1970 book has not to date been reprinted, while many of his later books, including Tokyomikis¯a keikaku, have been reprinted and even made into pocketbook editions. Critic Sawaragi Noi seems oblivious to this essential fact in his recent discussion on the trial, making no reference to Akasegawa’s 1970 book. See chap. 9 in Sawaragi, Nihon, gendai, bijutsu [Japan, contemporary, art], (Tokyo: Shinch¯osha, 1998). 79 Akasegawa, “Shizan shita nisesatsu,” 152, 188, 190–192, 195–197. 80 Ishiko Junz¯o, “Satsujin wa naze ‘hy¯ogen no jiyu’ ¯ toshite yurusareteinainoka?” [Why is a murder not allowed as freedom of expression?], Doroppaw¯a, [Drop-power], 10 June 1970; reprinted in Ishiko Junz¯o chosakush¯u [Writings by Ishiko Junz¯o] (Tokyo: Rappasha, 1987), 2:170. 81 Ibid. Notably, two most ardent supporters of Akasegawa’s work and discussion group members, Ishiko and Imaizumi, did not take the witness stand. According to Kawani, he testified on behalf of them as the last witness; see telephone interview with the author, 28 May 1998. 82 Nakahara, “Mokei sen-en-satsu saiban,” 60–61. 83 Imaizumi Yoshihiko, dialogue with Kikuhata Mokuma, Kikan, no. 11 (1980): 11. 84 Kikan,no.11(1980),includestwotextsbyKud¯owithoutlistingthepseudonymousauthorship. Tone Yasunao also disclosed Kud¯o’s identity in “Sen-en-satsu saiban ni tsuite,” Adventure (p. 110). Imaizumi recently expressly confirmed Kud¯o’s identity, indicating an intricate personal dynamic within the discussion group; see letter to Yoneyama Akemi, 7 June 1998. I thank Ms. Yoneyama for her assistance in communicating with Imaizumi. 85 Akasegawa, Tokyo mikis¯a keikaku, 279; excerpt translation in Scream, 374. 86 Akasegawa Genpei, “Poketto ni haburashi o” [A toothbrush in my pocket], May 1967, reprinted in Musansha, 52, 54. 87 Akasegawa Genpei, dialogue with Kikuhata Mokuma, Kikan, no. 14 (1987): 33. For the zero- yen work, see Reiko Tomii,“Rebel with a Cause: Akasegawa Genpei’s Greater Japan Zero-Yen Note,” M’Ars (magazine of the Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana) 12, nos. 3–4 (2000), theme issue titled “Worthless (Invaluable): The Concept of Value in Contemporary Art”: 10–11. 88 Akasegawa Genpei, Ch¯o-geijutsu tomason [Ultra-Art Tomason], pocketbook ed. (Tokyo: Chikuma Bunko, 1987). See Scream, 250–251, for a reproduction. 89 Benjamin, “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 220. 90 “The Richard Mutt Case,” unsigned statement by Marcel Duchamp et al., Blind Man 2 (1917): 5; reprinted in Stiles and Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, 817. 91 Benjamin, “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 220. 92 Ibid., 224. positions 10:1 Spring 2002 172

93 For example, Sh¯owa-shi zenkiroku (p. 734) lists “Akasegawa Genpei sen-en-satsu moz¯o” [Akasegawa Genpei imitates 1,000-yen note], giving its headline in the same weight as “Nikkan j¯oyaku hijun” [Japan-Korea treaty ratiﬁed] on p. 765. 94 Akasegawa Genpei, R¯ojin-ryoku [Geriatric faculty] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shob¯o, 1998), esp. “Monowasure no chikara wa dokokara deru noka?” [Where does an ability to forget come from?], 20–29.