FEATURE-Artist sees shadow of defeat on Japanese culture
Sat Aug 13, 2005
By Isabel Reynolds
TOKYO, Aug 14 (Reuters) - Sixty years after the end of World War Two, memories of atomic bombs and defeat are fading in Japan, but pop artist Takashi Murakami believes the trauma of 1945 still overshadows the country's culture.
Known for paintings and sculpture that draw on Japan's rich tradition of cartoons and animated films -- and also for multicoloured designs gracing Louis Vuitton bags -- Murakami is often cited as the country's most influential artist.
His sometimes disturbing juxtapositions of the cutesy and the grotesque or erotic have made him a big hit in the United States, where "Miss Koko," his sculpture of an improbably busty girl, fetched more than half a million dollars at Christie's.
Murakami, a classically trained painter who employs dozens of artists and assistants in Japan and the United States, says much of his inspiration comes from "otaku" or "geek" subculture.
Taken from a word literally meaning "your house," the word otaku has evolved into a label for Japan's legions of obsessive, and often reclusive fans of cartoons and animation, whose tastes are gradually seeping into the mainstream.
The phenomenon comes at least in part from a child-like mindset created by the pacifist constitution drafted by the United States for a defeated Japan, Murakami says.
"The Japanese people have stopped thinking about war," the bearded artist said in an interview in front of his 7-metre (23 ft) sculpture "Mr Pointy and the Four Guards", recently installed at the fashionable Roppongi Hills complex in central Tokyo.
"Even though our troops have been sent to Iraq, we don't see ourselves as having any connection to war," he said.
"The concept of building a nation through military power has disappeared and we just spend our days having fun."
Murakami compares the atmosphere to the Edo period, when for more than 200 years Japan cut itself off from the rest of the world. That seclusion ended only when the United States forced it to open up in the 1850s.
PSYCHOLOGICAL FALLOUT
The tranquillity of postwar Japan has a darker side, Murakami said.
Though born in 1962, long after the war ended, he said the national humiliation of defeat prevented him from developing a Japanese identify as an adult.
"I think that is because we lost the war and because of the way we lost the war. We didn't lose with courage, we just gave up and showed the white flag," he said.
Japan surrendered to the Allies in August 1945 and was governed by Occupation forces for nearly seven years.
"After the war, we had what amounted to a puppet government for some time, making Japan into a country incapable of having an identity," Murakami said.
An exhibition he curated in New York this year entitled "Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture" illustrated Murakami's theory that the psychological fallout from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki still affects art and film.
"Little Boy" was the code name for the Hiroshima bomb.
"If you watch any of the animated films popular with the geek crowd, they always end with an atomic bomb exploding," he said.
"I had wondered for years why this was," he said, adding that the theme seemed to have died out in other countries after the Cold War ended.
"I don't think you can really understand it unless you have the experience of your whole world being destroyed by one bomb."
Although his theories on lost Japanese identity seem to echo the arguments of right-wing activists who want to transform Japan's mindset by encouraging patriotism in schools, Murakami takes a detached view.
"I don't think Japan has been unlucky. It is in the Japanese nature to use whatever experiences they have and think positively," he said.
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