Morimura Yasumasa. Self-Portrait No. 72 (Marilyn in University, Komaba Campus) . 1995. © Morimura Yasumasa. Courtesy of the Yoshiko Isshiki Office, Tokyo.

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IGNACIO ADRIASOLA

Screening the Japanese Gothic Actress M stands on a platform placed on the desks in a large auditorium, surrounded by students who stare despondently at her. She turns, seeking the camera over her shoulder; she pushes her white dress down as a fan makes it swell and rise above her knees. Dwarfed by the auditorium’s heavy pointed arches, Actress M’s pale, overexposed figure flickers like a photographic ghost. She has become Marilyn Monroe. While usually presented as a single photograph, Morimura Yasumasa’s Self- Portrait No. 72 (1995) is in fact the record of a performance. The rarely seen video recording reveals a heavy and oppressive gesture lurking beneath the comical veneer of camp. Actress M moves slowly between the desks, clenching her fists and emitting sharp, horrific screams that continue throughout the photo shoot. She appears possessed by something invisible to those around her. Morimura, who appears as Actress M, used the shoot as an opportunity to conjure the past at Tokyo University’s Komaba Campus. Twenty-six years earlier, in the same Auditorium 900, author, perennial Nobel Prize contender, and future neofascist terrorist Mishima Yukio carried out his own performance—a provoca - tive debate with the radicalized students of the left-wing group Zenkyôtô. In a subsequent essay, Morimura recalled the uncanny sensation that overtook him during his performance as Actress M. “I am not someone who has researched [the Mishima and Zenkyôtô debate] much. However, something profound struck me as I was invaded by the feeling of having arrived belatedly somewhere.” 1 In his essay, Morimura weaves an intricate web of allusions to the gothic imagi - nary, self-consciously evoking a foreboding sense of recurrence that frames the

* I have benefited from numerous conversations as I developed the ideas in this essay. In par - ticular, I would like to acknowledge Gennifer Weisenfeld, Kristine Stiles, Annabel Wharton, Beatriz Balanta, Madhumita Lahiri, and Chase M. Foster. Ikeda Shinobu, Kumakura Takaaki, and Chiba Kei provided thoughtful comments to an early version of this project. Last but not least, I thank Mignon Nixon for her generous editorial comments. Throughout this essay I observe the traditional naming convention for Japanese names of family name first. All translations are mine, unless noted. 1. Morimura Yasumasa, “Onna? Nihon? Bi? Noto” [Woman? Japan? Beauty? Notes], in Onna? Nihon? Bi?—Aratana jendâ hihyô ni mukete [Woman? Japan? Beauty? Towards a new gender critique](Tokyo: Keiô Gijuku Daigaku Shuppankai, 1996), p. 260.

OCTOBER 151, Winter 2015, pp. 108 –127. © 2015 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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existence of a secret. Morimura, however, has already disclosed his secret: He inter - vened in a site haunted by the memory of Mishima and his debate with the Zenkyôtô, only to claim that he has not “researched this much.” He enacts here what Eve Sedgwick once described as the central figure of the gothic novel: the “live burial” of a secret, always too great and terrible to be mentioned, and already nonetheless com - mon knowledge. 2 In Sedgwick’s view, the gothic story hinges on its building on a secret’s deferral to elicit in the reader a sense of unease and foreboding—in its bury - ing of the secret within the text and evocation of desolate landscapes and ruinous structures whose darkness mirrors the terrible past that is being deferred. In this sense, the literary gothic’s concern with affect and temporality prefigured Sigmund Freud’s notion of the repressed; indeed, the gothic directly informed Freud’s con - cern with the immanence of the past in the present, and its uncanny effects. 3 The gothic elements present in Self-Portrait No. 72 illuminate certain neglected aspects of Morimura’s appropriative practice, in particular the political implications of his incessant return to notions of past and history, which had been evident already in his elaborate art-historical tableaux of the 1980s. 4 Indeed, appropriation is firmly rooted in the history of Japan’s postwar avant-garde, in particular the so-called Anti- Art generation and its problematization of discourses of originality and authenticity. 5 As elsewhere, imitation and appropriation were the means by which they challenged modernism, for example in Shinohara Ushio’s “imitation art” and its implicit under - mining of the teleological and ultimately racist hierarchies operative in portrayals of modern Japanese art as merely derivative of Euro-American modernism. Butoh dance co-founder Hijikata Tatsumi similarly reclaimed imitation as a strategy. The most iconic of his performances in the 1960s made productive use of cross-dressing, which he saw as a subversive appropriation of the entrapments of bourgeois society that he sought to harness in a critique of sexual and economic reproduction. 6 There is, in all this copying, all these imitations, a particular affective quality,

2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Arno Press, 1980). 3. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud acknowledged that gothic literature had anticipated the fun - damental psychoanalytic notion of the repressed. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), vol. 17. 4. Morimura’s work first came to public attention in the mid-’80s, when he began an increasingly elab - orate series of photographic tableaux that placed him as the protagonist in canonical European paintings. These included a series of self-portraits as Vincent van Gogh ( Portrait—Van Gogh , 1985), an ambitious reproduction of an objet by Marcel Duchamp ( Doublenage B , 1986), and, most famously, a japonisant version of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (Portrait—Futago , 1988). The Japanese critic Sawaragi Noi first theorized these works in relation to Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacra, grouping Morimura in what he called “sim - ulationism” with other artists of his generation. Morimura’s early work is surveyed in Morimura Yasumasa “kûsô bijutsukan” kaiga ni natta watakushi [Morimura Yasumasa: Self-portrait as art history] (Tokyo: Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo and Asahi Shimbunsha, 1998 ). 5. A thorough discussion of the problem of originality and imitation in postwar Japanese art can be found in Reiko Tomii, “‘International Contemporaneity’ in the 1960s: Discoursing on Art in Japan and Beyond,” Japan Review 21 (2009), pp. 123–47. 6. Hijikata rehearses this problematic conflation of cross-dressing and male homosexuality and its deployment as socioeconomic critique in his essay “ Keimusho he ” (1968). An English translation has been published as Tatsumi Hijikata, “To Prison,” trans. Nanako Kurihara, TDR/The Drama Review (Spring 2000), pp. 44–45. On Hijikata’s early happenings and the development of butoh , see dance his - torian Kuniyoshi Kazuko, “Hijikata Tatsumi to ankoku butô—midasareta nikutai” [Hijikata Tatsumi

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one that I would describe as gothic. A sense of malaise seems to adhere to these appropriative projects, and it becomes acutely evident in Morimura’s Actress series, which enacts what we might call the uncanniness of the double. In this series, Morimura invites us to reconsider the defamiliarizing effects of the copy— and how, in eliciting a sense of discontent that transports the viewer to an idea of a past not yet overcome, it casts doubt on the implications of modernism’s teleo - logical narrative of rupture, specifically that in postwar Japan. 7 Freud considered the uncanny to be an aesthetic phenomenon and situated it squarely in the realm of affects—diffuse, indeterminate, and inarticulate sensations, surging from the unconscious, disrupting everyday life. In his discussion of E. T. A. Hoffman’s gothic stories, Freud characterized the uncanny as an instance where an unnameable and unspecified “something” elicits in the subject an intense sensation of dread. 8 The nature of this “something” is difficult for the subject to establish, but its effects are immediately recognizable. Freud recognized in Hoffman’s pre-psycho - analytic articulation of the uncanny the sense of recurrence (Wiederholung ) that was critical to his own theories of the unconscious, and he characterized this sensation as symptomatic of a splitting and alienation of the ego. 9 Ultimately, the analytic signifi - cance of the uncanny resided in how the feelings of dread evoked in the subject signal to a past that is altogether present, because “this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.” 10

and the dance of utter darkness: recovered flesh], in Hijikata Tatsumi no butô—nikutai no shûrurearizumu, shintai no ontorojî , ed. Kawasaki-shi Okamoto Tarô Bijutsukan and Keiô Gijuku Daigaku Âto Sentâ (Kawasaki: Okamoto Tarô Bijutsukan, 2003). See also Bruce Baird, Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). 7. “[T]he trope of modernity may in that sense be considered as self-referential, if not performa - tive, since its appearance signals the emergence of a new kind of figure, a decisive break with previous forms of figurality, and is to that extent a sign of its own existence, a signifier that indicates itself, and whose form is its very content.” Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso Books, 2002), p. 34. 8. The figure is elsewhere evoked in Freud’s essay through the motif of the Doppelgänger or double in Hoffman’s tales (comprising the automaton, the ghost, the mirror image, and the shadow), as well as notions like the omnipotence of thought (which he associates with wish-fulfillment) and that quintessential motif in gothic literature, being buried alive. Though his engagement of the uncanny demonstrates how the role of affects in lived experience continued to interest him, Freud’s metapsychological theorization of affects changed dramatically in his later years. Initially affect ( Affekt ) was seen as a sort of memory arising from an important life event, and thus attaching to a particular object or set of objects. However, Freud later re-theorized affect as an expression of psychic energy independent of representation ( Vorstellung ). Laplanche and Pontalis remark that the use of the term in his metapsychology appears progressively sup - planted by that of “quota of affect ( Affektsbetrag ),” in keeping with his economic hypothesis. Even after this change, a conceptual ambiguity remained: Freud continued to shift between the two terms. Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967). 9. Building on Otto Ranke’s observations, Freud argued that at the core of the feelings of dread and uncanniness elicited by these figures lies the inherent ambivalence of this process of alienation: For example, if the Doppelgänger as image has initially expressed itself as a cipher for the extension of life and preservation of the ego, it becomes afterward a harbinger of death. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny.” 10. Ibid., p. 241. I am particularly struck by Freud’s truncated self-analysis in this essay. The analyst narrates the sensation of dread that invaded him upon finding himself returning time and again to

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The defamiliarizing effects of the uncanny lead both to a re-signification of space and a disruption of the linear perception of time: They illuminate the haunting work of a past that pervades the present. 11 In this essay, I examine three moments marked by uncanny resonances: the takeover by left-wing students of Tokyo University’s Yasuda Auditorium in 1968; Mishima’s debate with the student radicals during the university crisis; and Morimura’s engagement with the past in his Actress M series almost three decades later. These moments replicate and refer - ence each other: Morimura cites Mishima and the students; the students and Mishima cite each other and the past. Even the buildings are referential: Auditorium 900 is a replica of the Yasuda Auditorium, which in turn references the architectural conventions that have undergirded the project of higher educa - tion in the modern period. Each of these three moments indicts Japanese modernity by eliciting the sense of dread carried within the particular formal qualities of the copy and its deterioration: the uncanniness of the double.

The Japanese Gothic and the Repressed Memory of Empire During the wave of protests that swept through Japan in 1968, student radi - cals occupied Tokyo University’s Grand Auditorium. The occupation of this symbolic site brought renewed attention to the building and to its claims regard - ing the overall unity and coherence of the modern national project. To these students, who founded their analysis on a tradition of Marxist research on the nature of Japanese modernity, the auditorium appeared inextricably linked to a history of colonial and capitalistic exploitation. Indeed, the building embodied such a history. Originally planned as part of the redesign of Tokyo University’s main Hongô Campus, the Yasuda Auditorium was the first campus structure completed after the Great Kantô earthquake of 1923. 12 It was intended to operate as a ritual space, one fit to host the emperor—the center of the Japanese polity in the prewar period, who presided at the graduation ceremonies of the country’s elite. Construction was financed through a donation by Yasuda Zenjirô, an entrepreneur whose zaibatsu had become an irreplaceable partner in Japan’s

the—gothic, we may safely presume—center of an Italian town, and his particular vexation on realiz - ing that his presence had been noted by the made-up women ( geschminkte Frauen ) in the windows. Freud does not elaborate on why the sight of prostitutes elicited in him such a response, but his atten - tion to their painted faces highlights a certain phantasmal quality in their performance of sexuality, one that will be of use in my later consideration of the gothic nature of the Marilyn image. 11. Anthony Vidler has connected Freud’s uncanny to a theorization of space. Vidler stresses deterioration as a key component in the constitution of the “architectural uncanny, ” which he situates as the polar opposite of the familiar. Vidler’s interpretation of the uncanny relies, however, on a some - what ossifying interpretation of the text that disregards the unpredictable and fluid continuity between familiarity and uncanniness that Freud stressed in his original formulation. See Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). 12. Construction began in 1921, was interrupted by the 1923 earthquake, and was finally com - pleted in 1925. Uchida Yoshikazu, who later became the university’s president, designed the building. His assistant was Hideto Kishida, an authority in anti-seismic construction who later taught both Maekawa Kunio and Tange Kenzô, two architects who would dominate the postwar landscape with their monumental architecture. Itô Michio, ed., Nihon no kenchiku ( Taishô Shôwa) [Japanese archi - tecture (Meiji, Taishô, and Shôwa periods)] , vol. 8 (Tokyo: Sanseidô, 1982).

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imperial pursuits. 13 Standing at the end of a broad gingko-lined boulevard that led from the Chinese-style main gate, or karamon , designed by architect Itô Chûta in 1912, the Yasuda Auditorium anchors a hallowed axis in the campus’s spatial logic. Since its construction, it has functioned primarily as a symbol of the elite imperial universities and by extension of the notion of higher education itself. The auditorium’s mass is striking. The ascending lines of the neo-Gothic façade convey a sense of sheer phal - lic force, a result of the pointed-arch entryway, decorative pilasters, and single tower that pierces the sky with its pinnacles. The circular form of the building and its interior becomes apparent from its back: an isolated apse punctuated at its cen - ter by the building’s clock tower. The 1923 earthquake had pro - vided a virtual tabula rasa on which to rewrite the national narrative, a chance to inscribe in the urban land - scape a view of things as they are and will be, but also—less evidently per - haps—as they should have been. 14 Tokyo was an old city whose urban fabric predated the rule of , and the earthquake provided an opportunity to adapt the city to the enlightened rule of modern emperors. The architectural style chosen for the project therefore reflected a specific understanding of the new - The Yasuda Auditorium, 1925. Courtesy of the University of Tokyo Library System. found possibilities within Tokyo. A relatively recent addition to the repertoire of Japanese public architecture, the Gothic Revival had come into vogue in in the late eighteenth century, paralleling the period’s increased interest in historicism. Neo-Gothic architecture created an eclectic mélange of diverse architectural types, and its proponents sought to evoke an idealized past through which they could establish an architectural language for the present.

13. The zaibatsu were expansive family-held conglomerates that controlled a large portion of the Japanese economy in the prewar period. The zaibatsu’s sprawling business interests were organized as vertical monopolies. They were officially dissolved during the Occupation. Hidemasa Morikawa, Zaibatsu: The Rise and Fall of Family Enterprise Groups in Japan (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1992). 14. Art historian Gennifer Weisenfeld has examined this particular aspect of interwar discourse in her excellent monograph on the visual culture of the Great Kantô earthquake. Gennifer Weisenfeld, Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

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Throughout the “long nineteenth century,” the Gothic Revival became a global phenomenon—quickly spreading throughout Europe and beyond. 15 Its wide - spread use underlines a sense of availability evident in the ubiquitous architectural plundering and pastiche that constitute this rhetoric as style and that are intrinsi - cally related to the birth of a new era of nationalism and empire. 16 In its plundering of the past, the neo-Gothic simultaneously constructed the modern present as the end of history. The student radicals’ intervention highlighted how the Yasuda Auditorium had helped to create this overdetermined history. Japan’s modern territorial expansion and economic development existed not only as the background of the auditorium’s gestation: Facing four directions, the tower’s clocks announce the homogeneous time of the modern Japanese empire. 17 The tower itself telegraphed the nation- state’s teleological claims to a singular time frame, which extended back to the mythical past of divine emperors and forward to the present and harmonious future promised in wartime slogans such as the “eight corners of the world under one roof” (hakkô icchû ). The student takeover traced this history, reading it against the grain. In the postwar period, the Yasuda Auditorium interfered with the willful amne - sia of official discourse. Still standing after failed wars in China and the Pacific (1931–1945) and the end of the US-led Occupation (1945–1952), the building served as a reminder of the brutal, and artificial, rupture between the prewar and the postwar periods; the attempted discursive effacement of the imperial institution; and the permanent deferral of the question of wartime responsibility. 18 The practice of rhetorically staging the postwar period as a clean slate, of relegating the past to the past, continued well after that point. In the aftermath of the enforced ratification of the US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security of 1960—known in Japanese as Anpo —Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato sought to defuse a politicized atmos - phere through the promise of affluence, effectively curtailing the reassessment of Japan’s modern trajectory and of the continuities of the prewar past into the present.

15. In his foundational study on the neo-Gothic, architectural historian Georg Germann high - lighted how this style served multiple ideological purposes and stressed that its deployment must be understood in the context of fairly distinct national situations. Georg Germann, Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain: Sources, Influences and Ideas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973). 16. The first example of public use of the neo-Gothic in Japan was the private Dôshisha University Chapel, built in in 1887. In Japan, the deployment of the neo-Gothic relates to a rather generalized culture of eclecticism during the Meiji period (1868–1911). While previous discus - sions of Meiji eclecticism in architecture have tended to disparage the perceived mimicry of the Meiji elite, cultural historian Jordan Sand has argued that the period’s notorious stylistic condensation of geography and history is best understood as an attempt to consolidate a theory of national culture, and in particular to assert Japan’s place within the world imperial order. Jordan Sand, “Was Meiji Taste in Interiors ‘Orientalist’?,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 8, no. 3 (Winter 2000). 17. Narita Ryûichi, “Kindai no ‘toki’ ishiki” [The conception of “time” in modernity], in Toki no chiiki-shi [A regional history of time](Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppan, 1999). 18. Historian Carol Gluck has underlined how postwar ideology was based on the notion of an absolute break from and partial erasure of this history. Gluck has discussed how, for example, the famous declaration in the finance ministry’s “Economic White Book” (1956) that the current moment was “no longer the postwar” [ mohaya sengo dewa nai ] was quickly reinterpreted in media discourse as proposing a clean break with the authoritarian and expansionist past. Carol Gluck, “The Past in the Present,” in Postwar Japan as History , ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

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Yet the erasure of the memory of empire, in particular, proved problematic, as Japan depended on the remains of empire for its sustenance. Before the war, the emperor had been considered an embodiment of the state, and as supreme com - mander of the army he oversaw strategy and surveyed the troops on horseback. After Japan’s defeat, however, was spared by the occupation forces and was never charged with the war crimes ascribed to his prewar government. Instead, he was propped up as a symbol of peace and popular sovereignty. Similarly, the university that spearheaded Japan’s transformation into a pacifist “cultural nation” ( bunka kokka ) had once led a network of imperial institutions that extended to Taipei and Seoul, housed scholars who expounded on the moral necessity of war, and educated the elite that staffed the upper echelons of the state machinery (and was now again employed in the postwar state). This memory of empire was permanently inscribed in monuments such as the Yasuda Auditorium. By underlining the role of higher education as part of the modern national project, the student takeover of the build - ing called attention to the contradictory nature of these continuities. The on-campus activities of the protesters added pressure to the debate on uni - versity autonomy, ironically generating a new conflict over the institutional continuities between higher education and the postwar state, in particular the piv - otal role academic censorship played in postwar accounts of the rise of totalitarianism. The so-called Minobe Incident, for example, was portrayed as a key event in postwar narratives of modern Japanese history. A highly regarded law scholar and member, Minobe Tatsukichi had postulated a relatively conserva - tive account of the within the Japanese state, the so-called Organic Theory of the Emperor ( Tennô kikan-setsu ). Minobe’s doctrine sought to reconcile the Prussian-inspired prewar constitutional order with the reality of a weak ruler, which helped justify a strengthened parliament between the wars. 19 However, amidst the rapid rise of a virulently militaristic and monarchist rhetoric, Minobe’s views were denounced in the Diet in 1935 and his appointment at Tokyo Imperial University revoked. 20 Postwar commentators cast the incident as a milestone in Japan’s turn to fascism that highlighted the failures of the country’s modernization, arguing that the modern trajectory could be resumed and corrected through the transformation of Japan into a liberal bourgeois democracy. In the demilitarization of Japan, education was conceived as a separate space, untainted by politics. 21 In practice, however, the prewar structures of the university were unchanged, and its relationship to the state would soon be tested in the polarized atmosphere of the late 1960s. 22

19. The short-lived reign of the Taishô emperor (r. 1911–1925), whose ailments prevented him from taking an active role in government, is sometimes referred to as “Taishô democracy” and regular - ly held up as a precedent for postwar democracy. 20. Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: Harper Collins, 2000). 21. The postwar constitution of 1947 and the Basic Law of Education enacted that same year established strict control of government intervention in higher education, while the university simulta - neously retained its strong links to the state. 22. This was a widely acknowledged issue at the time. In the midst of the student crisis, the Science Council of Japan ( Nihon Gakujutsu Kyôkai ), an advisory body to the cabinet, issued a series of recommendations regarding campus democratization. Ôhashi Hisatoshi, ed., Shiryô daigaku no jichi (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobô, 1970).

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In the latter half of the decade, the question of university autonomy and reform became increasingly politicized, with the tenth anniversary and renewal of the Anpo treaty looming and the growing popular opposition to the Japanese gov - ernment’s collaboration in the Vietnam War. This reignited the student movement, which had strongly protested during the initial struggle against the Anpo treaty, and whose protests now often turned into physical confrontations with the riot police throughout the country. The conflict returned to campuses in late 1968, with student radicals occupying major universities. 23 Across Japan, cam - puses became sites of struggle for a new cultural revolution. At Tokyo University, Itô Chûta’s “Chinese gate” was promptly reinscribed with the Maoist slogan zôhan yûri : “There is reason in making a revolution.” The students justified their use of force from a utilitarian perspective, as the unavoidable consequence of the repressive measures taken by the state, but student “violence” was foregrounded in the media as a problem—one that, together with the movement’s increasing sec - tarianism, would end up alienating a once-sympathetic public. 24 The student occupation meant that even administrative decisions had an increased political significance and urgency. This was certainly the case during the debate surrounding Tokyo University’s decision to cancel entrance examinations in January 1969. Because of security concerns, university authorities sought to defer the famously exigent exams, but a government eager to demonstrate that it remained in control refused to recognize that the students had managed to dis - rupt business. A protracted standoff between the university authorities and the ministry of education ensued, pitting state against university and testing the ill- defined parameters of university autonomy. As the student movement became increasingly splintered, competing agen - das further complicated the negotiation scenario: Mainstream political parties still had some form of representation in student government; Far Left youth par - ties such as the ex-Communist group Bund led new protests and controlled the main student group, the Zengakuren (All Japan Students Federation); and new political organizations like the Zenkyôtô (the All Japan Students Joint-Struggle Committee) were formed. 25 Tokyo University authorities sought to defuse the cri - sis by giving voice to less radicalized factions and thus allow the examinations to continue. On the eve of a meeting organized by the authorities, the daily Asahi Shimbun characterized the situation as a high-stakes game. From a common-sense perspective, there seem to be only two choices. One is to isolate the anti-Yoyogi students [i.e., the radical students

23. A series of financial scandals at Tokyo and Nihon Universities triggered this development, propelling students to demand a greater say in university administration. Takasawa Kôji, Rekishi toshite no shinsayoku [The New Left as history] (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1996). 24. The historian William Marotti provides an overview of the development of the student protest movement in the late ’60s and focuses in particular on the media’s portrayal of student protest - ers as violent. William Marotti, “Japan 1968: The Performance of Violence and the Theater of Protest,” American Historical Review (February 2009), pp. 97–135. 25. The Bund had been instrumental in organizing the mobilizations against the Anpo treaty in 1960, but was expelled from the Communist Party for criticizing party strategy during the crisis.

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unaffiliated with the mainstream parties] inside the campus, or to send in the riot police. If neither can be done, the decision to suspend the entrance examinations will be unavoidable. And if the entrance exami - nations are suspended, it will be difficult for the university to argue against the public perception that its capacity to be autonomous has been irretrievably lost. 26 The newspaper wrote of three potential outcomes: successful containment of the rad - icals through a campus political maneuver; acquiescence to the government’s demand to allow riot police to enter the campus; or suspension of the exams and irre - trievable loss of university autonomy. But it was unlikely that university authorities could salvage any type of extra-political autonomy. Even if they defused the crisis by responding to some of the students’ demands—namely, the democratization of uni - versity governance through student representation—the university would become politicized through the recog nition of students as legitimate political actors. This crisis of autonomy had already exposed the vacuity of the academy as a nonpoliti - cal space. A return to the status quo appeared impossible. Despite university authorities’ repeated appeals to the students to attend classes as usual, and attempts to initiate an officially sanctioned process to debate university reform, the student blockade of campus effec - tively prevented the “autonomous,” university-led reform proposal as a solution to the crisis. In the end, uni - versity authorities allowed approxi - mately five thousand riot police to be deployed inside Hongô Campus on the night of January 18, 1969, under Mishima Yukio at Auditorium 900 on the official excuse of preventing sec - Komaba Campus. Courtesy of Shinchosha. tarian violence from spreading between rival factions of the radicalized students. A massive showdown ensued. Although the students had prepared for this in advance, they were overwhelmed by the sheer size of the police force. Students were attacked with water cannons, six hundred students belonging to seventy-two universities from around the country were arrested, and the Yasuda Auditorium was set on fire. The building survived—it had, after all, been designed by Japan’s foremost authority on anti-seismic construc - tion at the time—but its interior was heavily damaged. 27 For reasons still unclear, the building remained closed to the public for twenty years, existing as the uncanny memory of empire.

26. Editorial page ( shasetsu ), Asahi Shimbun, January 11, 1969. 27. One projection for its reconstruction estimated that the damages suffered by the auditori - um exceeded five billion yen.

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A Deferred Secret That Is Modernity’s Debt To the novelist Mishima Yukio—a graduate of Tokyo university’s law depart - ment—the inaction favored in defense of supposed autonomy was just as threatening as the violent action of the student revolutionaries. In a stinging essay he railed: They should simply turn Tôdai into the second Ueno Zoo. There are enough “monkeys” in there to turn it into a new monkey cage. Rather, [the authorities] should actively pursue a total shutdown of the universi - ty campus, or in any case, give [the students] “complete autonomy.” . . . Complete autonomy, complete freedom. Once Tôdai is turned into a free district of humanity, what will happen? What happens if you fully liberate humanity? It turns into something scary. Besides trashing the place, there is theft, assault, and rape, even murder . . . . People always have in them the capacity to devolve into animals. 28 Beneath his incendiary characterization of Tôdai’s student radicals, Mishima appears concerned with a deeper problem in the libertarian drive that under - girded the student movement. In his view, the chaotic combination of the students’ actions and the university authorities’ laissez-faire approach to campus governance had the potential to disrupt Japan’s traditional order; it represented a threat to the Japanese people’s human nature ( ningensei ). Mishima expresses a deep-seated anxiety regarding the residual animality in human beings, and free - dom itself is at the core of his concern. His anxiety is evoked through his implausible comparison of the University as a site of autonomy and the Ueno Zoo. In condemning the students’ cause, however, Mishima did not defend the status quo. He saw in the affluence of postwar Japan and its consumer society the direct cause of the student protests. Like the students, he wanted something that would shake to the core postwar society’s consumerist ethos, or what he called “my-home-ism” ( maihômu-shugi ). He argued that the Japanese people’s sense of purpose was being blunted by the country’s newfound economic ascendancy. It is just as Freud said as he neared his own death—people have a death drive . . . . These young men, who believe that dying in the bar - ricades is glory . . . J apan does not give them anything at all that could satisfy their death drives. And it is not only the young. It does not provide it to its citizens either. People will not die for a red roof on a green lawn, for “my home.” People will not die for things that can be seen. People are more spiritual than that. 29

28. The essay originated as an interview, which was then revised by the novelist and published in the influential general-interest magazine Chûô Kôron [The central review]. Mishima Yukio, “Tôdai wo dôbutsuen ni shiro” [Turn Tôdai into a zoo], in Ketteiban Mishima Yukio Zenshû [Complete works of Mishima Yukio], vol. 35 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 2003), p. 363. 29. Ibid., pp. 363–64.

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In Mishima’s view, only absolute authority could productively mobilize the students’ death drive in a way that benefited society, for it is only in the face of authority that humanity is defined. 30 It was for this reason that he considered the revolutionary politics of the student movement—which he saw as mobilizing the youth by appealing to their death drive—so dangerous for Japan. While he viewed the student protests as a real alternative to the politics of affluence, Mishima thought the students’ appropriation of this impulse deviated dangerously from the project of affirming the national-cultural essence of Japan. In the current political context the only thing that could dispel the threat of a Japanese version of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution was the program he had delineated in his essay The Defense of Culture (1967)—a political system with the emperor at its cen - ter, serving as a bonding agent of culture and society. 31 In his critique of postwar democratic Japan as a castrated society, Mishima presented it as a country lacking a political system adequate to its culture. Instead, Japan had fallen into a politics of affluence, becoming a society of mass consump - tion that deprived its citizens of a sense of purpose. Mishima’s critique of the students relied in this regard on the psychoanalytic figure of the bad object choice —a desired object that deviates from the norm—as a symptom of a failed process of an individual’s maturation. Ironically, the author’s pathologization and infantilization of the students resembles the type of accusations that were wielded against him by the eminently left-wing belletristic establishment. At the time, the Left’s portrayal of the radical Right relied heavily on accusations of homosexuality as a form of psy - chosexual immaturity. Thus Mishima’s perceived sexual perversion—an ambiguous sexuality that he consciously played up as part of his self-presentation—was con - flated with his political perversion: that is, his outspoken neofascist views. 32 Mishima claimed he understood the students’ radicalization. In his view, the student protests were a form of acting out aimed at a society that prevented their for - mation as properly adult citizens by foreclosing the possibility of facing in death the Absolute—an extra-historical, cultural principle embodied by the emperor. 33

30. Mishima refers here to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). The death drive (G. Todestriebe = J. shi eno shôdô ) is conceived of as one of the fundamental drives of all organisms, which designates their natural tendency to seek a return to an inorganic state where all tensions are resolved. In complex organisms the libido is tasked with neutralizing this tendency to self-destruction; it instead redirects this destructive force to the outside. This establishes in Freud’s metapsychology the ground - work for a new theory of hatred and aggression. In contrast, what Mishima suggests appears closer to a “death wish” (G. Todeswunsch = J. shi no yokkyû ). The main difference is the death wish’s formulation as unconscious fantasy: It is not any death that is desired, but death for “more spiritual things,” i.e., mar - tyrdom in the name of the emperor. See the discussion of “ pulsions de mort ” in Laplanche and Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse. 31. Mishima Yukio, “Bunka bôeiron [The defense of culture],” in Ketteiban Mishima Yukio Zenshû , vol. 35. 32. See Keith Vincent, “Ôe Kenzaburô to Mishima Yukio ni okeru homofashizumu to sono fuman” [Homofascism and its discontents in the work of Oe Kenzaburo and Mishima Yukio], Hihyô Kukan II (October 1998). 33. Mishima’s view of the absolute is indebted to the Frühromantiker of the German Jena circle, for whom the Absolute was an organizing principle existing outside the realm of human activity. In Hegel, this principle is replaced by the spirit of history.

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It was perhaps because he believed he understood them that Mishima sched - uled a debate with members of the Zenkyôtô, the nonsectarian radical student organization that led the occupation of Tokyo University. The debate took place in Auditorium 900, in Tokyo’s Komaba Campus—Hongô Campus’s uncanny archi - tectural double. Expressly designed by Uchida Yoshikazu as a scaled-down copy of the original in Hongô Campus, the duplicate extended and amplified the tempo - ral operation effected by the Yasuda Auditorium. Photographs of the event show how the duplicate structure’s pointed arches and flying-buttress-like pilasters frame the bodybuilding novelist, who stands on a platform before a sea of specta - tors and towers monumentally, not unlike the Yasuda Auditorium. During the debate with the Zenkyôtô students, Mishima invoked the emperor, one of the ghosts that resided in the Yasuda Auditorium, recalling a sin - gular personal event from his days as a student at Tokyo University: his graduation, which took place in the auditorium. In the latter half of the 1960s, sensing the threat of left-wing radicalization, Mishima increasingly referred to the image of the emperor, but the weight of personal investment in his words on this occasion is comparable only to that in his speech in front of the Self-Defense Forces, a year and a half later. In a key passage in the debate, he says, We, who were born during the war, watched the emperor sit right there and not move for three hours. Through our graduation ceremony he did not even budge, like a wooden statue. From this emperor I received a watch. It was such a kind, individual gesture of patronage. I really don’t want to say [such trite things] [ laughs ]. I don’t want to say this, but in people’s individual histories, there are such experiences. And for some reason within me, I could never negate that. He was very impressive, the emperor, at that time. And now that he was recalled after defeat, he could never go back to being that way. But within me, there certainly remains this foundational image ( gen-imêjii ). 34 The appeal of his words lies not in his persuasiveness but rather in his deployment of a personal memory that he rediscovers as poetic image. The image of a young Mishima receiving a silver watch from the emperor enables him to conjure a myth - ical figure separate from that of the current emperor Hirohito, whom he despises, and from whom he actually received that silver watch . It is important to remark that Mishima’s evocation of the emperor as sover - eign is not that of the modern ruling emperor. Rather, in Mishima’s thought, the emperor is the sole worshipper and guardian of that “invisible thing” that people will die for: the phallus. He in fact is the phallus, invisible, because—in true Freudian fashion—it is now missing. Mishima’s emperor image appears as an all- encompassing figure, the very promise of communion in the collective. Is

34. Mishima Yukio and Tôdai Zenkyôtô, Bi to kyôdôtai to Tôdai tôsô [Beauty, community, and the Tôdai struggle] (Tokyo: Kadokawa Bunkô, 2006), p. 110.

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Mishima’s emperor image, then, the still uncastrated phallic mother? Even with - out psychoanalytic theory it is possible to reach this unsettling conclusion, as the convoluted political theology of the prewar imperial system clearly pointed in that direction. The constitution of 1889 stated that sovereign and subject had a filial relationship—his subjects are his blood children ( sekishi ). This was a relationship that connected the Japanese family-nation ( kazoku-kokka ) to the sun goddess Amaterasu, a deity progressively conflated with the figure of the emperor in the run-up to the war. 35 Mishima names this phallic mother figure “the emperor as a cultural concept” [ bunka gainen toshite no Tennô ]. Contrary to what is commonly understood, then, Mishima’s regressive poli - tics are not motivated by simple “prewar nostalgia.” Mishima makes this point clear during the debate: When I say emperor, I do not refer to the ruling human emperor [ nin - gen tennô ]. That ruling human emperor is bound to Confucian princi - ples, and for that reason after the , he even becomes bound to Christianity. . . . When I say human emperor, I mean such type of ruling emperor, the emperor as a form of power. Therefore, when I now say emperor, I mean that I want to revive a line that con - nects to the divine emperors of the past [ mukashi no kaminagara no tennô toiu mono no hitotsu no nagare wo saigen shitai ]. 36 Mishima is advocating a return not to the prewar constitutional order but to an imaginary past. It is an impossible vision of a divine emperor [ kaminagara no tennô ] that he recalls through an embodied memory that “cannot be denied”—this fig - ure that like a wooden statue did not move for three hours during his graduation ceremony in the Yasuda Auditorium. Again, this is not Hirohito, or even the leg - endary Meiji ’s modernization: They are markers of an unfulfilled promise. The “invisible thing” that Mishima so craves is the Absolute; the unseen thing that he desires is the phallus. To the novelist, modernity was a promise betrayed—the promise of collective communion with the Absolute, which now can never be fulfilled. 37

35. Chiba Kei’s analysis of the iconographic program of the Tower of the Eight Corners of the World (1943) in Miyazaki Prefecture is illustrative of this point. It is interesting to note that the architectural rhetoric of the tower is in fact heavily indebted to the neo-Gothic. Chiba Kei, “‘Hakkô no motohashira’ no zuzô puroguramu” [The iconographic program of the “Tower of the eight corners of the world”], Bijutsushi 166 (March 2009). 36. Mishima and Tôdai, Bi to kyôdôtai to Tôdai Tôsô , p. 110. 37. The twin motifs of the modern emperor’s betrayal and modernity as debt are most clearly articulated in Mishima’s novella “Spirits of the Heroic Dead,” where a group of dead officers of the Imperial Army intervene in a séance. They are later revealed to be the putschist officers involved in the coup attempt of February 26, 1936. On that occasion, the emperor had sided with the constitutional order, cutting short the officer’s hope for a new (i.e., fascist) “restoration.” In the novella, Mishima has their ghosts chant an excoriating critique of the sitting emperor, Hirohito, referring to his renuncia - tion of the divine status of emperors in 1946 and asking the famous rhetorical question, “Why did His Majesty have to become human [ Nadote sumerogi wa hito to naritamaishi ]?” Mishima Yukio, “Eirei no koe”

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Modernity, then, was little more than an ongoing state of debt. Counter to the official discourse, which portrayed the postwar period as one of prosperity, Mishima saw affluence as distraction, meaningless and potentially harmful to Japanese culture and identity. While his nationalist politics centered on a notion of culture to which many of his interlocutors in the debate would object—except perhaps those who shared his views as a form of ethnic resistance to American imperialism—there is a clear resonance in a left-wing articulation of debt. In the Left’s vision, an unfulfilled modernity could only be completed through the futu - rity of revolutionary politics. “If you only said the word emperor , I would gladly join hands with you.” 38 With that famously provoking statement, uttered by Mishima in the midst of the debate, he clearly subverted the politics of the student move - ment. But in juxtaposing his own radical reactionary politics with those of the revolutionary students, the author was not merely creating an ultimately implausi - ble ideological equation. More provocatively, and perhaps more perceptively, Mishima cast himself as the double of the radical students, highlighting the ghostly nature of both of their interventions. He exposed how, despite their claims regarding the futurity of revolutionary politics, the radical students were just as haunted as he was by the remainders of the past in the present. 39

Restaging the Haunted House In Self-Portrait No. 72 , Morimura restages the famous scene from The Seven Year Itch (1955) in which Marilyn Monroe stands over a subway vent. In Billy Wilder’s comedy, full of insights on fantasy, doubles, and disorientations, the mar - ried, middle-aged protagonist is free to relive his life as a single man in Manhattan while his family leaves on vacation. He struggles to contain his sex drive upon meeting The Girl (played by Monroe), a nameless and seemingly clueless ingenue who moves temporarily to an apartment upstairs and becomes the protagonist’s object of desire and fear. In a key scene, the protagonist fantasizes about his future encounter with The Girl: She sultrily rolls on top of a grand piano while the (in reality utterly incompetent) protagonist plays a Rachmaninoff concerto. Giving voice to the dislocating effect she has over him, she exclaims, “It shakes me! It quakes me! It makes me feel goose-pimply all over! I don’t know who I am, or where I am, or what I’m doing . . . ! Don’t stop! Don’t stop! Don’t you ever stop!” 40

[Spirits of the heroic dead], in Ketteiban Mishima Yukio Zenshû, vol. 20 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 2002). A provocative discussion of the Patriotism cycle of which this novella is part can be found in Chigusa Kimura-Stevens, Mishima Yukio to teroru no rinri [Mishima Yukio and the ethics of terror] (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2005). 38. Mishima and Tôdai, Bi to kyôdôtai to Tôdai Tôsô , p. 111. 39. Mishima’s response to the student movement and the perceived threat of a Japanese version of the Cultural Revolution was to train at the Self-Defense Forces, establish a paramilitary organiza - tion, and undergo guerrilla-warfare training. The novelist led his Shield Society in an attempted reac - tionary coup on November 11, 1970; his ritual suicide by disembowelment after its failure shocked the world, and his shadow still looms large over Japan’s postwar history. 40. The Seven Year Itch (dir. Billy Wilder, 1955).

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In his recollections, Morimura portrayed his performance at Auditorium 900 as a meeting of sorts, an encounter of opposites. He arrived at the same class - room as Mishima Yukio twenty-six years later, and as Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe, this is “woman,” and “America.” Mishima Yukio, who had to be “man” and “Japan,” followed a completely different path. But I also arrived at Auditorium 900. I felt how the now departed Mishima Yukio and Marilyn Monroe became one with my body as a catalyst. . . .

Mishima joined the Self-Defense Forces. However, I ran away from the Self-Defense Forces. Mishima went to the Self-Defense Forces, built up his body, and became a “man.” I “cross-dressed” and made a series of works based on “actresses.” Instead of a helmet and body armor, I wore a dress; instead of weapons, I carried makeup. I cannot give up the feeling that it would not have been strange if Mishima had chosen what I chose to do. Either to “man” or to “woman,” was it not but a subtle shift? In that sense, I feel I can say that my choice was that of “the other Mishima.” 41 In the video recording of the performance, the viewer sees Actress M scream as if possessed: Her body has been taken over by both Mishima and Marilyn. The two unite inside Actress M through performance (indeed, gattai suru connotes “to fuck,” an interpretation highlighted by Actress M’s screams). It is Morimura’s body in per - formance that allows the ghostly encounter portrayed in his essay to take place. For Morimura, being Marilyn is not that different from being Mishima. The hypermasculine self-presentation reflective of Mishima’s militaristic ethos required as much of a production as Marilyn’s hyperfeminine and consumeristic self-presen - tation. Both acts destabilize the terms of the binary within which Morimura’s performance seemingly operates. Just as Mishima (né Hiraoka Kimitake) becomes Mishima through a process of transformation, Morimura’s Actress M can only become Marilyn through a transformation of her self-presentation. 42 What is crucial here is that Actress M’s cross-dressing does not operate either as a reinscription of the sexual binary or as simple “gender trouble” (in the vulgar understanding of Judith Butler’s term). Cross-dressing operates instead as a means of evoking, through imitation, a deeply unsettling double. Actress M’s pos - session qua embodiment highlights the phantasmal nature of masculinity and femininity as constructs. Rather than opposites, Mishima and Marilyn are por - trayed as doubles: a split representation whose affective charge could go either way . In Freud’s view, such affective ambivalence and the potential fluidity and imma - nence of transformation are described as uncanny; their significance resides in how this affect evinces the actuality of the repressed.

41. Morimura, “Onna? Nihon? Bi? Nôto,” p. 260. 42. One is reminded here of the displaced “I” invoked in the novelist’s essay “Sun and Steel ” [Taiyô to tetsu ] (1967). On Mishima’s displaced “I” and the critical questions it raises, see Gavin Walker, “The Double Scission of Mishima Yukio: Limits and Anxieties in the Autofictional Machine,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 18, no. 1 (2010), pp. 145–70.

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Just as Mishima offered himself as a mirror image of the students in his debate, Morimura too offers himself up as a mirror image—a double of the writer. Self-Portrait No. 72 resonates with the photographs of Mishima debating the Zenkyôtô students: Both stand on platforms, presenting their bodies for consump - tion by the viewer, with students sitting in the background. Both of them are framed by the rationalized Gothic arches that rise and guide the camera in its staging of monumentality. Morimura visually claims Marilyn as the “other Mishima,” and through the photograph Marilyn appears as Mishima’s ghost. But who is this Marilyn Monroe? As part of his Actress series, Morimura pre - pared a group of large-format portraits of the blonde. The first, Self-Portrait (Actress)/Red Marilyn (1994), spectacularly appropriated the infamous centerfold pinup commissioned by Hugh Hefner for the first issue of Playboy magazine in 1954. 43 The color pho - tograph presents Morimura sitting and burying half of his face in his raised, folded left arm. This gesture is, of course, meant to expose the torso of the sitter, who is nude but for a bra to which a pair of plastic breasts has been attached. Mori- mura had effectively used this appropriative strategy in his previ - ous work, which mainly centered on the destabilization of the European painting canon through the incor - poration of the image of the Oriental other. In this case, how - ever, the destabilization sought by the artist hinges less on the inser - tion of the Other than on the simultaneous turn-on and turn-off of the viewer/voyeur’s gaze as framed through the photograph’s Morimura. Self-Portrait (Actress)/Red Marilyn. foregrounding of Morimura’s pros - 1994. © Morimura Yasumasa. Courtesy of the Yoshiko Isshiki Office, Tokyo. thetic breasts. As art historian Chino Kaori remarked, these plastic breasts transform the prurient interest of the male gaze into two questions: “Who are you?” and “Why are you doing this?” 44

43. This photograph appeared as the first of twelve monthly pinups based on famous actresses in the men’s- interest magazine PanJa throughout 1994. The original title of this series was “ Joyû kôrin ” [Descent of the actresses]. 44. In her analysis of Morimura’s Actress series, Chino Kaori suggested that these two questions destabilize the predatory masculine gaze and are key to understanding Morimura’s work more broadly from a feminist perspective. Chino Kaori, “Onna wo yosou otoko—Morimura Yasumasa ‘Joyû’-ron” [A

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The self- staged artificiality of Morimura’s appropriation calls attention to the artifice that Marilyn qua image seeks to construct: Morimura identifies this as woman, seduc - tion, America, plenty. The Marilyn image could be heralded as the gothic image par excellence. In its endless procession of doublings and its ubiquitous rep - etition, the Marilyn image stages its own deterioration, and the drama of the efface - ment of the original. Like a ghost, the Marilyn image is simultaneously present and absent, and disrupts the expectations of the living; it inhabits the space between life and death. Morimura recognizes the power of such images and actively participates in the mythmaking of glamour, even if it is only to stage the “upset.” After Marilyn (1996), for example, presents Actress M in a three-fourths pose. Her head is Morimura. After Marilyn . tilted slightly backwards; her short golden locks 1996. © Morimura Yasumasa. frame her parted lips. The viewer immediately Courtesy of the Yoshiko Isshiki Office, Tokyo. recognizes her beauty mark, her heavy eyelids, and the plunging neckline. Morimura’s photo - graph is based on Gene Kornman’s famous 1952 publicity still. It was this 1952 image that would become the original Marilyn, the Marilyn as she would be remembered in death, and as she would be memorialized in Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych (1962). It is worthwhile to recall the American artist’s words about his subject: I just see Monroe as just another person. As for whether it’s symbolical to paint Monroe in such violent colors: it’s beauty, and she’s beautiful and if something’s beautiful it’s pretty colors, that’s all. Or something. The Monroe picture was part of a death series I was doing, of people who had died by different ways. There was no profound reason for doing a death series, no victims of their time; there was no reason for doing it all, just a surface reason. 45 Warhol’s words are disingenuous. Monroe, after all, was not “just another per - son.” What Warhol makes clear in his statement is that this is not a portrait in the traditional sense—a truthful likeness of a subject. His objective was the uncanny deterioration of the painterly surface itself and through it a reflection

man who dresses as a woman—On Morimura Yasumasa’s “Actress” Series], in Morimura Yasumasa Bi ni itaru yamai—joyû ni natta watashi [Morimura Yasumasa: A sickness unto beauty], ed. Bijutsukan Yokohama (Yokohama: Yokohama Museum of Art, 1996). 45. Andy Warhol, quoted in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds. , Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 343.

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Morimura. Self-Portrait (Actress)/White Marilyn . 1996. © Morimura Yasumasa. Courtesy of the Yoshiko Isshiki Office, Tokyo.

on the economy of the image. Likewise, Morimura’s White Marilyn (1996) ren - ders visible the economy of the double through the process of multiplication: In the work, a group of three Marilyns are elevated on platforms at different heights; each of them has her hands clasped in front of her white dress and her head tilted at the same angle. Black Marilyn (1996) is the last of the variations on the theme of the doubles with a single Marilyn figure in a black dress. Actress M stands on a black platform against a dark background; her skirt climbs up with the wind. This time, however, she stares deadpan at the camera while holding up the folds of her skirt, revealing a pink prosthetic phallus attached to a furry base. The prosthetic phallus may lead initially to questions regarding the verisimil - itude of performance and the authenticity or sincerity of the performer (who appears cross-dressed even in his/her nakedness). However, in this work the true sex of Actress M is not the issue. In terms of the logic of the series, the question of sex is relevant only as part of Morimura’s ongoing interrogation of the nature of doublings. Like the prosthetic breasts in Red Marilyn , the dildo performatively declares, “I am a double,” and it does so with the emphatic marker of the phallus. Black Marilyn appears as the negative of White Marilyn . Its position is reminis - cent of the Marilyn/Mishima opposition in Morimura’s essay on Self-Portrait No. 72 . If Marilyn is Mishima’s mirror image, Black Marilyn can be understood as embodying the attributes Morimura identified with Mishima. This phallic Marilyn highlights an issue that is key to understanding Japan’s postwar trajectory, which Mishima had characterized as “America,” “woman,” “plenty.” Japan’s economic growth was propelled by domestic consumption and industrial exports, yet such a successful economy could only develop in the shadow of US military intervention in Asia. Japan’s postwar affluence was predicated on its assistance in the American imperial endeavor—first in the Korean War, then, almost immediately afterwards,

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Morimura. Self-Portrait (Actress)/Black Marilyn . 1996. © Morimura Yasumasa. Courtesy of the Yoshiko Isshiki Office, Tokyo.

the conflict in Vietnam. US investment in Japan’s procurement industry generated the capital necessary for reinvestment in the secondary sector, opening a path to the meteoric economic growth that would propel Japan from postwar devastation to affluence within twenty-five years. 46 Marilyn’s dildo doubles as nuclear missile and mass-produced commodity: Under the Anpo system, Japan has both. The phallic Marilyn image not only speaks to the idea of Japan’s perceived military castration and Westernized hyper-consumerism, as evoked by Mishima in the Defense of Culture —something a literal interpretation of the image might sug - gest. The dildo visually evokes the Yasuda Auditorium’s phallic form and its role in the Japanese state’s narrative of modern progress. The dildo also appears as the ironic foil to Mishima’s worship of the lost imperial phallus and his denunciation of the debt of modernity—a debt that the Zenkyôtô students decried in their hypermasculine performance of protest. As the “other Mishima,” Actress M, too, indicts Japan’s postwar trajectory, if only to undermine the phallocentric dis - course of debt. Despite the state’s claims of rupture with the past, Japan’s affluent society appears as a ghostly iteration of the modern national project. Fifty years after Japan’s defeat, Morimura exposed once again the uncanny presence of the past at the end of history.

46. Tachibanaki Toshiaki, ed. Sengo Nihon keizai wo kenshô suru [Examining postwar Japan’s econ - omy] (Tokyo: Tôkyô Daigaku Shuppankai, 2003).

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