Arts Npo and the Civic Coproduction of Yokohama City, Japan
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PUISSANCE AND THE ART OF WORLDING: ARTS NPO AND THE CIVIC COPRODUCTION OF YOKOHAMA CITY, JAPAN A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI’I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ANTHROPOLOGY DECEMBER 2016 By Yuka Hasegawa Dissertation Committee: Christine R. Yano, Chairperson Geoffrey White Jonathan Padwe Lonnie Carlile Jon Goss ABSTRACT The social structures that organized Japan’s postwar ways of life are rapidly dissolving in post-recessionary Japan as neoliberalism pushes large numbers of youth into precarious employment conditions, forcing them to put off or give up having families and shifting the demographic ratio to an aging society. The City of Yokohama, the second largest municipality in the greater Tokyo metropolis, is implementing the Creative City policy since 2004 that promotes culture and the arts as a solution to this national crisis. In this dissertation, I study several Creative City programs and events coordinated by government-affiliated arts NPO Koganechō Area Management Center and BankART 1929. I also study a number of artists who have unintentionally produced civic spaces at the periphery of Yokohama city by adopting global signs and symbols to organize cultural events in new historical assemblages. This dissertation studies the Creative City programs and events in order to show how the municipal region’s solution to a national crisis is also a political strategy to constitute civic spaces as the ground from which to produce figures that support the cultural production of Yokohama city at a time when the relationship between cities and the state is undergoing change. This dissertation analyzes Creative City programs and events including the 2014 Yokohama Triennale, the Koganechō walking tours and a lifelong education course at the BankART School. I show how these programs and events organize volunteers into communities of practice where they learn the cultural literacy to performatively enact as figures of ‘the city’ that author and articulate puissance, defined as the self-organizing power of communities in crisis. In doing so, I argue that Creative City programs and events provide a stage for the volunteers to performatively enact their lives-in-the-city, through which volunteers manage the ontological reality of ‘the city’ i as they also support the City of Yokohama respond to the political reality of neoliberal capitalism by bringing the City’s stories, sights and visions of ‘the city’ to life. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is the product of puissance from the different communities to which I belong. From Yokohama city, I extend my gratitude to the Koganechō Area Management Center Director Shingo Yamano, Masaya Ueno and Tatsunori Yoshioka who have been particularly helpful in providing guidance and information. Moreover, the Koganechō Supporters including Mr. and Mrs. Ogushi, Takumi Wada, Shuichi Miyazaki and others were instrumental in becoming acquainted with the members of the Koganechō area. From BankART 1929 I would like to thank the facilitators of Korekara Dōnaru Yokohama Tatsurō Sasaki and Yasuyuki Akimoto along with the members of the course including Naohiro Kashiwabara, Sho Kadono and Naoko Akiyama. I am also indebted to Satoko Hayama from the Yokohama Museum of Art and the Yokohama Triennale Supporters including Shinji Narita and Kenichi Hiruma. Also, my research would not have been complete without the help of Kengo Matsumoto from Echo Beats Shōnan, Shinji Morishita from Kamando Ichiba and Kōji Setoh from Root Culture. I also thank my committee members, particularly my advisor Professor Christine Yano for patiently working with me to complete this dissertation and Professor Geoffrey White for encouraging me to keep moving forward. I also thank Professors Yoshitaka Mouri and Yoshiharu Tezuka for taking their time to meet and discuss my work with me. Last but not least I thank my mother, Aiko Hasegawa, for being my teacher and mentor in the discipline of life. This dissertation is written in the memory and with the financial resources of my father Ichiro Hasegawa (1946 - 1999). I dedicate this work to my friend Morito Shindo (1974 - 2003) whose spirit, I believe, had guided me to find the answers to my questions in Yokohama city. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Global city-region and East Asian regionalism .............................................................. 6 1.2 Puissance ........................................................................................................................ 9 1.3 Arts NPO and machizukuri ........................................................................................... 13 1.4 Methods......................................................................................................................... 22 1.5 Dissertation outline ....................................................................................................... 27 Chapter 2 Acts of Puissance: Narratives of Self-Transformation .................................... 29 2.1 Acts of puissance and the production of civic space .................................................... 31 2.2 New historical assemblages in old cosmological order ................................................ 34 2.3 Self-transformation narratives ...................................................................................... 38 2.3.1 Echo Beats Shōnan ............................................................................................... 40 2.3.1.1 Emotional force ................................................................................................. 41 2.3.1.2 Common sense .................................................................................................. 43 2.3.1.3 Poetic space ....................................................................................................... 46 2.3.2 Kamando Ichiba .................................................................................................... 49 2.3.2.1 “I” and “me” ..................................................................................................... 51 2.3.2.2 Knowing ............................................................................................................ 53 2.3.2.3 Performative space ............................................................................................ 56 2.3.3 Root Culture .......................................................................................................... 59 2.3.3.1 Heterotopia ........................................................................................................ 61 2.3.3.2 Speech acts, movements and code-switching ................................................... 63 2.3.3.3 Middle voice ..................................................................................................... 65 2.4 Chapter Summary ......................................................................................................... 66 Chapter 3 Authoring Puissance: 2014 Yokohama Triennale ........................................... 68 3.1 Biennalization and the volunteers ................................................................................. 70 3.2 Chronotope of the threshold.......................................................................................... 73 3.3 Community of practice ................................................................................................. 77 3.3.1 Partner in civic coproduction ................................................................................ 78 3.3.2 Student of lifelong education ................................................................................ 80 3.3.3 Art mediator .......................................................................................................... 83 3.4 Authoring puissance ..................................................................................................... 86 3.4.1 Subjectifying puissance: disciplining selves ........................................................ 88 3.4.2 Interpreting puissance: altered subjectivities ........................................................ 91 3.4.3 Qualifying puissance: negotiating self-positioning .............................................. 98 3.5 Supporter figure .......................................................................................................... 104 3.6 Chapter summary ........................................................................................................ 111 Chapter 4 Articulating Puissance: Koganechō Walking Tours ...................................... 113 4.1 Koganechō Area Management Center ........................................................................ 114 4.2 Figuring ‘the city’ ....................................................................................................... 117 4.2.1 Literature of walking tours.................................................................................. 119 4.2.2 Encoding, decoding............................................................................................. 121 4.3 Walking tours (machi aruki) ....................................................................................... 124 iv 4.3.1 Encoding puissance: art tour ..............................................................................