Angura Afterlives | On Sakurai Daizō’s Theory of “Tent Theater”

Angura Afterlives
On Sakurai Daizō’s Theory of “Tent Theater”
Robin WEICHERT

Vertigo of another Japanese way: Tokyo relinquishes its status as the Eastern capital of Western capitalism in order to become the Northern capital of the emancipation of the Third World. (Félix Guattari, 2 January 1986)

As unyielding as Japan’s post-war transformation into the first US-styled liberal democracy and consumption-based society in East Asia was, it was not a smooth process that happened without social disruption, political contestation, and cultural resistance. The 1960s not only saw rapid economic growth but also a large-scale student uprising that coincided with “countercultural” experimentation and the development of new artistic forms. Japanese angura¹ theater emerged as a part of this movement. A reaction against the earlier, realist shingeki, the theater form is most frequently associated with the Tenjō Sashiki, “Black Tent,” and “Situation Theatre” troupes and the names of Terayama Shūji and Kara Jūro. In this essay, however, I want to focus on a less prominent figure, the playwright and actor Sakurai Daizō. Sakurai and the theater groups he has formed—Kyokubakan, Kaze no Ryodan, and Yasen no Tsuki—, have been largely excluded from the historical narrative of contemporary Japanese theater due to their “radicality” (Lin 2010, 16).² Yet Sakurai has not only continuously performed angura-style “tent theater” throughout Japan since the early 1970s.³ He has also staged plays and led workshops in other parts of East Asia since the late 1990s, initiating “tent theater” groups in Taiwan, mainland China, and South Korea (Jeju Island) during the 2000s and 2010s. While Sakurai has remained on the margins of the Japanese theater scene, it was thus mostly through his activities that “tent theater” has become known around East Asia.⁴

In the following I aim to critically examine the aesthetic conception of “tent theater” that Sakurai has promoted vis-à-vis his East Asian interlocutors by relocating it within a specific Japanese context and a genealogy of political militancy and radical thought. To do so, I will first give an account of the theoretical elaborations about revolutionary subjectivity in New Left activism and the labor movement in the day-laborer districts of the early 1970s. I will then probe Sakurai’s engagement in and interpretation of the day-laborers’ struggle in the 1980s when labor activists were involved in a violent conflict with a yakuza group. Lastly, I will examine a short manifest-like text titled “What is Tent Theater?” written by Sakurai for a Taiwanese audience in the year 2000. By tracing common motifs that link radical activism with Sakurai’s own militancy and his later text, I want to show how he frames his project not in terms of a raising of consciousness or insight into social contradictions, but in terms of autonomous space and embodied “imagination.” This privileging of a communitarian theatrical space, I argue, engenders an ambiguity in Sakurai’s theater. While his “theory” of tent theater transfigures the formulaic jargon of New Left agitation, refuses the deployment of theater as a mere tool for political ends, and opens up a common ground for theatrical collaboration and artistic activity in East Asia beyond the framework of “(inter)national” cooperation, it nonetheless seems to reiterate a sense of limitation and self-isolation that had already been pointed out within the context of the day-laborer movement.

The Logic of Self-negation and the Place of the “People”

Since the massive demonstrations against the US-Japan security treaty in 1960s, it was mainly New Left student organizations that led the opposition against Japan’s military and economic integration into the Anti-Communist, capitalist camp under US domination. While the Anpo protesters of 1960 had mobilized peacefully in order to avert Japan’s involvement in a future war, Japanese complicity in the Vietnam War and the role of Japan as colonial aggressor within Asia came into focus and protests took a more violent turn in the late 1960s. The charges by the Overseas Chinese Youth Struggling Committee in 1970 (Kaseitō Kokuhatsu) that the New Left groups had to realize their own position as nation of oppressors (yokuatsu minzoku) had a particularly strong impact (Suzuki 2009, 147). Some of the most radical actions were taken by “The East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front” (Higashi Ajia Han’nichi Busō Sensen), a small group initially formed by Hōsei University students at a remove from the predominant New Left “sects.” Between 1971 and 1974, the group planned an attack on the Emperor’s life and carried out a series of bombings targeting Japanese corporations such as Mitsubishi and Mitsui that led large-scale projects in South-East Asia. The group’s ideological stance is briefly summarized in the introduction to Hara Hara Tokei, a guerrilla warfare manual published underground in March 1974.

1. Beginning with the invasion and colonization of Korea, Japanese Imperialism […] invaded and dominated Taiwan, mainland China, Southeast Asia, etc., and assimilated and absorbed the land of the Ainu and Okinawa as internal colonies. We are descendants of those Japanese imperialist […] and are the native residents of the Imperialist State. […]
2. […] The workers and citizens of the Japanese Imperialist State are imperialists and invaders who are unremittingly hostile to the colonialized people.
3. […] The “revolution” which the workers of the Japanese imperialist state pursue for their own interest […] is counter-revolutionary. (“Under Attack” 1974, 3-4)

As the first three entries show, The East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front not only supposed a continuity between historical Japanese colonialist oppression of indigenous peoples and contemporary neo-imperialist exploitation perpetrated by Japanese corporations in South-East Asia, etc. It also made the Japanese laborers responsible for being complicit with imperialist aggression and rejected a revolution by the Japanese working class. The “Armed Front’s” position thus is not based on a theory of revolutionary subjectivity that has to be raised, developed and attained through a dialectical movement of insight into the relations of domination and exploitation and one’s own function within these relations. The revolutionary subjects were the “colonized people” in Okinawa, Korea, Taiwan, etc., as such. This, at the same time, imposed the complete self-negation of “us,” the “[native] resident of the Japanese Imperialist State.” However, there was a single exception mentioned under point 4.

4.The only ones who engage in a radical struggle within the Japanese Imperialist State are the floating people = the day laborers. They are oppressed and functionalized as completely disposable, expendable items. They are oppressed as cheap, expendable workers who can be sacrificed any time, and they are subject to unmitigated extortions in every aspect of their lives. For that very reason, the struggle of the floating people = day laborers, as it can be seen in Kamagisaki, Sanya and Kotobuki-chō, is an unremitting struggle without compromise, one which stands in direct opposition to that of the petit-bourgeois workers. (“Under Attack” 1974, 4)

The exception mentioned, the day-laborers, presented a picture that stood in stark contrast to that of the regular unionized workforce of Japan: rebellious, disobedient, living from day to day, sleeping in the street or in cheap lodging houses. Through the 1960s, mass riots sometimes lasting several days occurred with regular intervals in the districts of Sanya in Tokyo or Kamagasaki in Osaka. Moreover, at the end of the decade these districts, which housed thousands of male laborers and constituted the yoseba, or “gathering places,” open air labor exchanges where workers could be hired on a day-to-day basis, also became the site of activist militancy and labor struggles.⁵ Labor brokers and subcontractors were attacked with physical force in cases of nonpayment of wages or other cases of distress.

After a series of offensive actions by the unions in Sanya and Kamagasaki between 1972 and 1973 to “reverse the relations of domination on a daily basis,” the movement was repressed by a police campaign and mass arrests in 1974. While The East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front was not in direct contact with Funamoto Shūji, one of the main figures in the labor movement of the yoseba, they were clearly aware of his activism and writings.⁶ Funamoto himself went underground after a frame-up for bombing charges,⁷ and committed self-immolation in front of an American military base in Okinawa in 1975, one month after the main members of the “Armed Front” were detained. Agreeing with the premise that the majority of the Japanese working class desired preserving the status quo, Funamoto maintains, in a paper in 1972, that the revolutionary subjects were the popular masses, and continues by asking:

Now, where are the popular masses?

They are the people of the Third World who are the actual driving force of the world revolution, and they are the underclass people who are exploited two or threefold as internally colonized within the imperialist countries […] (Funamoto 1985, 47)

According to Funamoto, the “popular masses of underclass society” were represented by the “non-citizen” “floating underclass laborer” of Sanya and Kamagasaki, whose labor power was sold again and again, according to the demands of capital. As the commodity was in essence “floating,” mobile and fluid (ryūdoteki), the “floating underclass laborers” were living proof for the property of labor power as commodity. While for mainstream commentators Sanya and Kamagasaki represented only marginal locales of “social problems” and urban poverty, for Funamoto they were not particular locales, but places with universal significance: pools of labor power, of labor power as commodity, places of floating mobility, in other words, places of placelessness. Funamoto thus, in fact, does not answer “where” the “underclass people” are. In his logic, they did not have a place, they were “floating.”

What produced the commodity of the “floating underclass laborer,” however, were “the dismantled agricultural and fishing villages, the rationalized coal mines, the discriminated-against burakumin areas, the Korean peninsula, […] the Ainu villages, and finally Okinawa” (Funamoto 1985, 76). It is not simply misery, but the “floating underclass laborer’s” radical embodying of the very essence of the logic of commodity and capital, and therefore his mobility, uprootedness and placelessness, which relate him to the “Third World” and make him the exception to the logic of self-negation of the Anti-Japan Armed Front. As Funamoto argued, only those who felt themselves to be in a superior position and therefore indebted (oime) to the people were susceptible to self-negation, not the underclass laborer. Or rather, self-negation meant something completely else to him:

If the word self-negation […] is understood in the way of the laborer [rōmusha], it means […] to negate one’s own way of life, negate one’s surrendering to and despairing in the particular existential state of the laborer […] to “die by the roadside” [notareshi] without resisting. (Funamoto 1985, 53)

According to Funamoto, then, as the laborer was fully embodying the logic of commodity and capital, self-negation paradoxically meant a form of self-assertion, just as political struggle for the laborer essentially was a struggle for survival. In the same vein, Funamoto understood riots not as a form of protest or a means to attain political goals, but primarily as “collective self-expression” (Funamoto 1985, 144) of the laborers. At the end of his last message, as a recapitulation of the Anti-Japan Armed Front’s and his own struggle after having gone in hiding, he included a set of “secrets for the success” of militant struggle: “to act without talking, to act so it is obscured, not to issue a statement,” “to act so the people [minshū] comprehend it, to pursue solidarity by factual acts without contact to the sphere of open legal activities” (205). These might seem to be contradictory, hardly feasible rules for a successful political struggle, but when Funamoto credits the people with a capacity to understand silent acts that reject the attribution of determinate signification (and therefore remain opaque or senseless to the police or the state), he remains consistent with the theory of the “floating underclass laborer.” In Funamoto’s thought, the laborer is characterized by an essential placelessness, as he is “floating,” fluid or mobile like a commodity. But this is also the very condition of his relative autonomy, as the very act of self-negation or resistance becomes a form of selfassertion or “self-expression,” and this “expression” might be understood as an act of solidarity by those who share the same conditions, “the people.”

Struggle and “Expression” in the Yoseba

Splintered into various rivaling factions, the Japanese New Left had lost much of its earlier support among students and sympathizers by the mid-1970s, but it remained an undercurrent that would congeal in cases such as the Sanrizuka struggle against the new airport in Narita. The labor movement in the yoseba, too, gained momentum again in the early 1980s when a nationwide organization of day labor unions, Hiyatoi Zenkyō, was established. In Sanya, a union campaign against yakuza intimidation and extortion developed into a full-blown confrontation with Kanemachi Ikka, a yakuza group, which resulted in two murders. In late 1984, Satō Mitsuo, a filmmaker, was stabbed to death by a yakuza, shortly after he had begun shooting a documentary of Sanya. Yamaoka Kyōichi, a leading figure within the union, proceeded to direct the film, but was assassinated not long after its completion.

Sakurai Daizō had staged tent theater plays since the early 1970s with Kyokubakan, defined by the police as a “New Left type theater company which aims at enlightening underclass laborers and spreading revolutionary thought through theater” (Asahi Shinbun, 30 September 1976). Having formed the Kaze no Ryodan group in 1982, Sakurai had, by the early 1980s, also become involved with the struggle in Sanya, sometimes going to work from one of the yoseba. After the assassinations of Satō and Yamaoka, he contributed texts to volumes commemorating the two murdered men. These texts are notable here insofar as they are not simply paying tribute to the dead, but also touch upon the relation of “struggle” and (artistic) “expression” (hyōgen). Thus, Sakurai (1985, 68) does not lament the loss of the person Satō Mitsuo, but he writes—resonating the pathos, but not quite the vocabulary and metaphoric typical of New Left rhetoric— that the “expression” of Satō Mitsuo “has fallen.” It was this “(filmic) expression that Sanya—that the world needed most,” because “What the expressive will of Satō Mitsuo encountered […] was the comrades’ life which in the harsh frost and the hard-blowing wind bursts up in flames. It was the single light of fire […] which discloses the world.” Sakurai gives Satō credit for having negated his own professionalism as a filmmaker, i.e., for a form of self-negation, in Sakurai’s words: for having aimed to deconstruct “the foundation of the will to take expressive action” and to “take the authority of the film (camera) apart in the depth of the struggle to recapture it again.” With the metaphorical comparison of the workers’ lives with fire which could illuminate the “world,” Sakurai at the same time also seems to underline the universal significance of the workers’ existence beyond Sanya, despite or because of their marginality. In the text dedicated to Yamaoka, titled “About Expression that Counterattacks” (Sakurai 1987a), the same motif of fire and survival is repeated in an intriguing image taken directly from Sanya’s streets.

You probably know the pitch-black sign that stands at the entrance of the alley next to the Tamahime labor exchange. When I discovered it for the first time, I was so at a loss as to what it was for, and why it was there, that for a second I did not even notice it. Its blackness was so perfect that I felt as if I was shown a tableau. Eventually I realized that it was nothing more than a simple traffic sign covered by the soot from an outdoor fire, but this recognition of reality did not douse my excitement.

Once and again the fire had been lit as a rejection of dying on the street [notareshi], and slowly, being influenced by the temperature and the direction of the wind, it had produced this stunning tableau. The first struggle (expression) against the attacks by death on the street [notareshi] is of course the fire. And the daily repetition of this struggle (expression) then turned into a second expression (struggle). That is because the second expression (struggle) transforms that ugly traffic sign perfectly into a beautiful tableau, and it beautifully nullifies the official norm (police). This is also a possible form of counter-attack [yarikaeshikata], I thought, and became cheerful. (Sakurai 1987a, 31)

Sakurai describes an aesthetic experience, a form of wonder and surprise at the discovery of unlikely beauty, a street sign blackened by smoke. It is the product of laborers gathering around a fire to fight off biting cold and protect their lives. This communal action of the laborers Sakurai identifies as both “struggle” and “expression,” referencing Funamoto’s slogan “Don’t die in the streets” (notareshinuna). He then further distinguishes a “first” and “second” struggle, a first and second expression. If the first “struggle” is simply the workers’ collective labor of making a fire to be warm and satisfy their physical needs, the first “expression” might be seen to be the medium of the struggle, the fire with its physical qualities: warmth and light. Soot of the fire incidentally covers the traffic sign, which stands as proof of the workers’ activity in its daily repetition, but it also crosses out and negates the street sign, the sign of order implemented by authorities and police. The first struggle/expression then turns into a second struggle/expression. The pitch-black street sign is not the outcome of the workers’ intention to create something, nor a conscious act of resistance, but the incidental, unintentional, yet nonetheless necessary product of communal action, just as fire produces smoke. “Struggle” is translated into “expression,” and “expression” again into “struggle.” This Sakurai then calls a form of “counter-attack” [yarikaeshi], again referencing an often-used slogan in the yoseba movement of the 1970s.⁸

The image thus does not depict a head-on confrontation with forces of oppression, nor a coming-to consciousness or realization of class interests, etc., but a subversive and seemingly unintended form of erasing the order only by being and conducting one’s daily life. Sakurai’s interpretation of the blackened sign seems to echo Funamoto’s thinking. For Funamoto, the “natural” existence of the day laborer in the capitalist system was to be discarded and “die on the street” as soon as a worker could not sell his labor power anymore, and “self-negation” therefore simply meant not to freeze to death. At the same time, the defense of one’s life meant to defy the existing order. By their sheer existence the laborers then constituted an anti-thesis to the order. Struggle for survival was itself a form of resistance and political action. According to Sakurai, it was in struggle that the “origin of expression” lay: “Here was the song of refusal still sung even with a slit throat, and here was the source of the imagination of the people” (Sakurai 1987a, 31).

For Funamoto as for Sakurai, “struggle” and “expression” are thus immediately related to one another, as in the image of the fire. The fire generates a negation of the order, but this negation is the expression of the laborers’ being, their collective existence, not an intended, purposive action. Or, in Funamoto’s terms, the effect of their action is not announced and explained, it comes “without talking” and “without issuing statements.” The action does not follow an overt political agenda that is announced beforehand or after. The “expression/struggle” of the blackened sign is not intended for the spectator. And yet, its beauty may be enjoyed by those who can recognize and understand it. Rather than proper knowledge or a revolutionary consciousness, this understanding presupposes solidarity with the people and sharing their “imagination.” Reminiscing about the riots in Sanya in an article 20 years after Yamaoka’s killing, Sakurai detaches the “violence” (bō) from the “riots” (bōdō) to discuss the “movement” (dō) or “affect” (jōdō) of the disturbances. He writes that it was not hate, but rather a sense of surprise and wonderment that spread among the rioting laborers before the riots, and that they were propelled by a last unrenounceable self-respect rather than by “revolutionary dreams” (Sakurai 2006, 217). Avoiding the violent element in labor activism and even in his interpretation of the riots, Sakurai, differing therein from Funamoto, discovered the laborers’ “counter-attack” in actions non-violent and “cheerful” (1987, 31). As his interpretation of the workers’ “struggle” and “expression” as neither violent nor explicitly or even intentionally political acts may be seen to approach a theory of theatrical performance, Sakurai’s conception of tent theater, I want to argue, may be equally read as the translation of his ideas about the yoseba into the theory of a theatrical space.

Tent Theater as “Asylum of Imagination”

Both Sakurai Daizō’s theater project and political activism more generally faced markedly changed circumstances in the 1990s. The bursting of the economic bubble in 1991 marked the beginning of a decade of economic stagnation in Japan. It also meant the near dissolution of the yoseba, with many older workers drifting into homelessness. With the death of Hirohito, the symbol of the unresolved legacy of Japanese imperialism disappeared from the political landscape, while, at the same time, the collapse of Eastern Bloc communism seemed to disqualify any call for system change. The former revolutionary discourse became to be perceived as anachronistic even among hardened militants. In the afterword to a collection of the writings and tracts of the murdered union organizer Yamaoka Kyōichi, Nakayama Yukio, an early Sanya activist and a close friend of Funamoto and Yamaoka, comments that Yamaoka’s texts must appear to be hardly readable as what had been familiar concepts for them, the peculiar idiom of the New Left, had now turned into historical terminology, into “waste-paper” (Nakayama 1996, 430). Similarly, rather than being labeled “countercultural” or “anti-establishment,” in the late 1990s Sakurai Daizō’s theater came to be framed as “fringe” or “otaku” culture (Udakawa 1998).

The 1990s thus led to marginalization and introspection, but also to new alliances. Kaze no Ryodan dissolved in 1994 and Sakurai started afresh with the newly formed Yasen no Tsuki. In the same year, he came into contact with people’s theater practitioners through a theater festival in the Philippines. This encounter led to collaboration with the Taiwanese Assignment Theatre group, and in 1999 Yasen no Tsuki staged its first tent theater performance near Taipei. The following year, Sakurai contributed a short manifest-like text to a pamphlet printed by Assignment Theater. Titled “What is Tent Theater?” (Sakurai 2000),⁹ the essay does not give any details on the history of tent theater or its concrete political context in Japan. Instead, in a rather abstract yet metaphorical language, Sakurai defines the place of tent theater in the “city” ruled by advanced capitalism.

When the tent is set up in the city, it does exist therein, but it does not constitute a part of it. The tent is in the city, yet it is not inside of it. That is because tent theater does not exist as a spatial, but only as a temporal conception.

It resides only in time zones that require some sense of urgency. It is something [kotogara] like a “souvenir” that comes to one’s mind in an instant and is forgotten in the next. Yes, it is a thing/event [kotogara]. It is a thing [mono] and an event [dekigoto] at the same time. It does not just “exist,” but it “happens.”

What is gathering therein are the imaginations that do not have a place inside the city. They are not illusions, but imaginations. If they were illusions, they could be housed in the various theaters that are already set up within the theater city. If the illusions are heightened individually, they would be confined in mental hospitals, and if they demand a collectivity, they are received in religious institutions.

Imagination is embodied. It is a body that lives not in space but in time. But this means neither the sense of time of Christian linear time, nor that of Eastern circular time and reincarnation. It is the sense of time that grows longer and shrinks, swells up excessively and then seems to disappear,—the sense of time that we experience commonly.

The imagination is residing in this ordinary time. It is like our body which is always there, everywhere, always, but which still is actuated only when required by a sense of urgency. (Sakurai 2000a)

Sakurai assumes that mature capitalist society is filled with the “illusion of wealth,” and cities are “theatralized.” People in these “theater cities” are forced to adapt their lives and social behavior and “perform” according to this illusion of wealth. In other words, in the urban areas of advanced capitalist societies of the First World, “wealth” does not simply define the material circumstances of people’s lives, but as “illusion,” it has turned into a form of ideology that dictates their behavior, the way they act and conduct their lives. That is, capitalism does not only dominate individuals in material aspects, but it also commands their minds and bodies, it suppresses their “imagination,”—imagination not understood solely as a mental process, but as an embodied capacity to sense, perceive, and shape reality and act otherwise.

Under these premises, Sakurai contrasts tent theater with the “city.” While the illusion of wealth covers the city, the tent exists “in poverty.” Yet, the tent is not an “alien substance,” it is not just “performing gestures of poverty to antagonize the city.” The tent is not outside the city, but it is not fully inside it either. The tent is not at its place, because it is “moving,” not just in spatial terms but also in matters of time, as a “temporal conception;” it appears and disappears, it “happens” as “thing/event” (kotogara). It creates an autonomous space in the city. Or rather, transient as it is, it is not locatable in the space of the city. Tent theater is not rooted at the place where it is set up and “happens.” “Tent theater does not even have the roots that could make a single flower bloom.” This, according to Sakurai, also distinguishes it from open-air theater, as in the case of open-air theater “the landscape and the particularities of the place demand to be associated with ‘expression’ and make it—for better or worse—into the ‘expression’ of that place. They ground it.” That means “expression” in the tent, conversely, is not “grounded.” It is this groundlessness, Sakurai claims, that frees tent theater from the “illusions” of the city and creates room for “imaginations that do not have a place in the city.” Sakurai therefore defines the tent as an “asylum of imagination.” Imagination is actuated “when urgency is needed,” Sakurai writes, and “urgency means the brutal reality that assails us. When we have to resist it, and we actually do not have a base to mount our resistance, then the asylum (emergency shelter) comes up.” The double character of tent theater as “thing” and “event” may be seen to lie in this “coming up” of the tent. As thing, the tent divides the inside from the outside reality, as temporal, transitory event it calls for urgency. The tent establishes a shelter for “imagination” which is also a shelter against the incursions of reality. That is, it also reconstitutes “reality”,—a “real” reality that goes beyond the illusion of wealth. It is in this sense, that the tent is not just “antagonizing the city which is infinitely repeating its gestures of wealth.” The tent is not leading a direct attack against the illusion of wealth. It is a fragile asylum. It consists of a “thin cloth.” The cloth founds the tent’s placelessness by separating the inside from the outside, the landscape and the surroundings, yet, like a membrane, it connects inside and outside at the same time. It generates both “urgency” and the “reality that assails us,” a time-space, which actuates “imagination.” It is thus the tent’s very fragility that grounds its relative autonomy from the city and its illusions. The tent is therefore still a site of struggle, but this struggle is a struggle of its own.

What separates the inside and the outside of the tent theater is a thin cloth. When a strong wind blows, the whole place gets wrecked, and when heavy rain falls, even the words get shredded. It is an asylum in which the outside constantly makes inroads, safety is never guaranteed. For this very reason, “expression” is posited as something to be gained by struggle, and imagination can be grasped as something that must never be relinquished. (Sakurai 2000a)

With his inventive comparisons of the tent to baggage that someone has forgotten to take along, to a satellite floating in space, or to a flower without roots, Sakurai’s language differs notably from the jargon of New Left agitation, and yet, his use of the terms “struggle” and “expression” refer his text once again back to yosebaactivism and Funamoto’s writings. In the 1990s Sakurai, in fact, took part in a study group meant to reexamine and “revive the thought of Funamoto and Yamaoka” (Sakurai 1996). His theory of tent theater may thus be read in analogy to Funamoto’s explanation of the yoseba.

To repeat, the “floating underclass laborer,” according to Funamoto, shared the characteristics of a pure commodity: ever “floating” in order to sell his labor power, he would be disposed of as soon as his labor power was used up. Sanya was the place where the “floating underclass laborers” gather. It was the place of those without a place. It was in Tokyo, but not “of ” Tokyo. In fact, “Sanya” did not exist anymore but in the minds of the workers, as the Tokyo government had erased the name from the map in 1966. The “locals” (the yakuza, the owner of the restaurants and “doya”—dormitories) lived off the workers, taking a cut from their wages or surcharging them for drinks and lodgment, etc. As the place where the uprooted, the deracinated gather, those without a place or those at the very bottom of the “imperialist” order, the former colonial subjects and the “internally colonized,” Sanya was a place of the placeless, but it was at the same time the place of a struggle for and as expression. It was the place of a “stark reality,” but the fact that the workers were exposed to this harsh reality conditioned at the same time their relative autonomy, as they did not have anything to lose. Self-negation as negation of the worker’s acceptance of their subjugation, therefore, meant a fundamental self-affirmation. Conversely, affirming themselves then meant the negation of the ruling order as such. The negativity of the “unmotivated,” “spontaneous” riots and uprisings in Sanya and the other yoseba signaled this fundamental affirmation as “self-expression.” In the laborer’s existence “struggle” and “expression” were immediately intertwined. It was also in the struggle of Sanya where “the source of the imagination of the people” was to be found, as Sakurai wrote in his text for Satō Mitsuo (1985, 68). In this sense, Sanya was an “asylum of imagination.”

If, according to Sakurai’s theory, capital “theatralizes” the city, then tent theater may be said to “theatralize” Sanya. The tent replicates the logic of negation as self-affirmation and the immediacy of struggle and expression, which mark the “floating underclass laborer.” Like the laborer, the tent is mobile, only temporary, transitory, it is, in Sakurai’s words, “floating like a satellite launched into empty space.” Like “Sanya,” which cannot be found on the map, the tent is not placed or localized, it is not defined by the city and its “illusions.” It is “in,” but not “of ” the city. It possesses a relative autonomy as a place, similar to the floating laborer. Placelessness, paradoxically, reestablishes reality. While the unionized laborer fights for higher wages and an “illusion of wealth,” the day laborer fights against the cold, against “dying on the streets.” The tent is also attacked by wind and rain, “reality” intruding through its “thin cloth.” With its “poverty,” the tent thereby, at the same time, establishes a kind of “corporality,” which conditions an embodied “imagination” independent of the “illusion of wealth.” Just as in Sanya, struggle and expression are intertwined, but like in the case of the traffic sign, in the tent, as Sakurai writes, “even if the ‘expression’ is proof of resistance against the ruthless reality, there is no guarantee that it will appear as such an ‘expression.’” Yet, at the same time, because of the “ruthless reality,” “expression” becomes “something to be gained by struggle.”

Positing “expression” as the aim of an immediate struggle against reality, Sakurai seems to implicitly abandon a political form of theater such as “people’s theater,” which aims at representing actual situations, social realities or conflicts and induces actors and audience to learn and rehearse interventions that might be employed to change aspects of society that oppress individuals and groups. Instead of teaching the audience the truth of social relations and ways of struggling against capitalist domination, etc., Sakurai proposes tent theater to be a space of a shared imagination that is autonomous insofar as it is not just reactive to the ruling order. By applying the logic of Sanya to “tent theater,” Sakurai, however, not only proposes tent theater to be a form of communal space defined by the absence of “illusions,” he also explicitly delimits it from another form of theater. That is, he opposes a bad theater (“theater city”) where the spectator is alienated and only shown “illusions” with a reformed theater (“the tent”) which embodies the living community. He assumes the “tent”—as a way of occupying a place and a time—to be the sensible constitution of community, or conversely the communal constitution of sensibility (“imagination”). And he alleges theatrical performance in the tent (i.e., “expression”) to be self-presence (“struggle”) as opposed to the distance of representation (such as the mere appearance of shingeki realism). He further supposes theater to be the “everyday” bodily perceptions, feelings and attitudes (“that we experience normally”) that precede or pre-form laws and political institutions (e.g., the street sign in Sanya). With its theory of the “tent,” Sakurai’s politics of theater thus subscribes to the idea of emancipation as “reappropriation of a relationship to self lost in a process of separation” (Rancière 2009, 15). Therein, he might be seen to share the same presuppositions as “people’s theater” or the “theater of the oppressed” which aim to transcend the separation of stage and auditorium and make active participants or “spect-actors” out of passive spectators (Boal 1979). According to philosopher Jacques Rancière, this idea of separation and its abolition can be traced through Guy Debord’s critique of the spectacle to Feuerbach’s critique of religion via the Marxist critique of alienation, and eventually back to German romanticism (2009, 6, 15).¹⁰

The Ambiguity of “Theory”

Sakurai’s hyperbolic opposition of the “illusions” outside and “imagination” inside the tent is not, I would suggest, just repeating a trite topos of alienation in a somewhat poetic, simplified way. Instead, it may be seen to reflect the experience of the factual space of the yoseba. Even to an outside visitor like Félix Guattari who toured Sanya in 1985, the district was a place that conveyed a sense of “vertigo” due to the stark contrast it presented to the rest of Japan. The area functioned, Guattari (1986, 31) writes in a contribution to a book aptly titled Theater Tokyo, as the “hell” that created the paradise of contemporary Japan, as “a damned god” that allowed to judge what was of value within the collective system. It thereby turned Tokyo, the “Eastern capital of Western capitalism,” into the “Northern capital of the emancipation of the Third World” (Guattari 1986, 96; 2015, 5).¹¹

If Sakurai’s theory of tent theater can be referred back to the reality of the yoseba, it might be beside the point to probe it for its philosophical underpinnings or ramifications. Just as Sakurai’s plays themselves frequently mix storytelling with lengthy monologues and theoretical explanations, “What is Tent Theater?”, with its “imaginative” metaphors juxtaposed to abstract concepts, seems to perform “theory” as much as it offers a theory of theatrical performance. Sakurai’s text is, in any case, not just an exposition of what tent theater “is,” but it gives instructions about how tent theater should be performed outside Japan. Therein, it is not dissimilar from the political tracts of yoseba-activism which were meant as a call for action as much as social analysis or political theory. In his commentary to a collection of writings by the murdered Yamaoka Kyōichi—published in the late 1990s, i.e., in temporal proximity to Sakurai’s text—, the veteran activist Nakayama Yukio notes down his thoughts upon rereading and editing these kinds of tracts:

When I read … [them] once and again, and then, for a moment, looked up, I could not help but wonder what peculiar world we had remained in for so long. It really was a special world. Sanya and the [other] yoseba were particular spaces, and very visibly so. One only had to take a step outside and turn one’s head around a little bit, and the world became bigger, and when one immersed oneself only a single day in this wider world, the dirty and vulgar world of ours, which did not resemble human life at all,—Funamoto’s “shit pot” (kusotsubo)—would probably recede in the distance.

[… D]id we just stay on in our peculiar and confined world, isolated like a foreign race, ever repeating our argot-like discourse loaded with those peculiar concepts? Like the small bug which forever keeps on creeping on the edge of the shitpot, our logic turned around and around only to describe a closed circle. Sometimes the bug remarks the residue of its own bodily fluids and tries to descend from the edge, but where to? To the bottom of the shit pot again, or on a way to the outside world? (Nakayama 1996, 430-431)

Nakayama’s statement seems ambiguous. In spite of his critique of the “peculiar concepts” of the “argot-like discourse” he took part in, his own slightly selfdepreciating and humorous imagery of the “bug” and the “shit pot” is far from the dead serious New Left rhetoric such as may be found in the East Asia Anti- Japan Armed Front’s Hara Hara Tokei. It rather testifies to a linguistic sensibility that also characterizes Funamoto’s and Sakurai’s writings and may as well be seen to originate from the “peculiar” soil that was the labor movement of the yoseba. Nakayama himself had, in fact, run a small print shop close to Sanya at an early stage of the yoseba movement, where he not only printed the daily leaflets used for agitating the workers, but also several issues of a journal named Razoku (“The Naked Tribe”), to which Funamoto contributed poems.¹² The term “shit pot” Nakayama cites also derives from a poem by Funamoto. Titled “Sanya is a Shit Pot?!”, it addresses a supposedly ignorant office worker who calls Sanya a “shit pot” (kusotsubo) without having a clue of the “real meaning” of the word. The poem then imagines the white-collar worker’s day, his breakfast, commute, and leisure-time with his girlfriend in a café and ends with the comment that the “shitpot” of Sanya was the “manure” for all of that, and that the man should “eat shit!” (232). If the yoseba thus were a place where New Left discourse discovered a straight-forward, “popular” language such as that of Funamoto’s poem, Nakayama’s metaphor of the “bug” and the “shit pot,” however, at the same time also bespeaks a sense of self-inflicted isolation.

The ambiguity implied in Nakayama’s statement, the equivocation of “argotlike” concepts and metaphoric language, of the self-asserting reference to the “shit pot” by Funamoto and the expression of a sense of isolation from the wider world in Nakayama’s citation of the metaphor, I propose, is also relevant for Sakurai’s “translation” of the yoseba into a theatrical space. Sakurai describes this space as one of embodied imagination, but he leaves the “subject,” whose body and imagination are at play, indefinite and vague. Whereas in the earlier description of “counter-attack” (struggle/expression) in Sanya, it is the day laborers who gather around a fire, in Sakurai’s text on tent theater, neither do laborers, nor do actors, spectators, or “the people” make an appearance. The only subject mentioned in Sakurai’s text is “us” (warera/watashitachi). This “us” designates anybody living in the urban environment of a late modern consumerist society (“our bodies…”), and anyone who takes part in tent theater and thereby posits herself outside the society’s “illusion of wealth” (“Everyone of us […] shares a section of this process [of expression]”).

Since 2000 Sakurai may be said to have been vigorously translating this presumed “us” into practice. One year after composing his definition of “tent theater,” he moved to Taipei to stage tent theater with Taiwanese actors. After the first production in Taipei in 2005, he presented plays with Taiwanese and Japanese actors in Beijing in 2007, and in 2010 he went on to produce a play with mainland Chinese actors in a village of the “floating population” (liudong renkou) close to Beijing. During the 2010s, while continuing to mount plays in Taiwan and mainland China, he led the Yasen no Tsuki company joined by Chinese and Taiwanese actors to areas affected by the tsunami in North-Eastern Japan and to Fukushima prefecture, but also returned to the former yoseba districts of Sanya and Kotobuki to perform.¹³ He also led workshops on Jeju Island in the context of the continued protest movement against the Jeju Naval Base and US military presence on the island.

If the tent moves like the “floating people” do, the “imagination” of tent theater (which is first of all the “imagination” of the playwright Sakurai Daizō) also incessantly revolves around the figure of the excluded, the outsiders, those beyond or crossing borders. Sakurai’s plays continuously invoke a utopian place where this collective not only of the living, but also of “the dead that stir imaginations which have nowhere to go” (Sakurai 2000a) gather: nuclear power plant “gypsies” and deserters from the US military, female textile workers and peasants turned coal miners, smugglers, pirates, refugees, indigenous people, immigrants, the victims of colonial and white terror and so on. Disguised as mythological characters, fantastic creatures, ghosts, etc., who move freely in space and time and transform into other beings according to a fragmentary and episodic dramaturgy that never crystallizes into a “grand narrative,” they also cross the borders of languages, as the script is translated and retranslated and actors utter their text in Korean, Japanese or Chinese, with or without knowing the language.

The “we” Sakurai invokes thus differs from the “we” of the East Asia Anti- Japan Armed Front who claimed the identity of “native residents of the Imperialist state,” and who could not imagine another form of solidarity with “Asian” peoples other than complete self-negation. Neither is it the “we” of intellectuals or “cultural workers” who aim to encounter the “people” to learn from them or conversely instruct them to discover and intervene in social realities. It is not the “we” of Sanya’s day-laborers either, but it is a collective that gathers in the “tent” as a place analogous to Sanya. It is both a factual and imagined “people” that is not determined by nation-state figurations. It gathers—albeit transitorily—in the both real and imaginary space of tent theater as a space which is like Sanya—as Guattari (2015, 5) commented (quoting Abe Kōbo)—“perhaps less representative of an absolute misery than an irrevocable refusal of the existing order.” Not confronting, but negating and circumventing the constraints of capital or state power, Sakurai’s “asylum of imagination” is meant as one that goes beyond Japan. It aims, as Sakurai (2000b) voices in a report about a meeting with Taiwanese indigenous intellectuals and artists written around the same time as his definition of “tent theater,” at a form of solidarity or “association” (renkei) with East Asian people’s culture.

If Sakurai’s invocation of the first-person plural points to this kind of utopian communitarian space, he does not address an “other,” an audience, or those outside the supposed heterotopia of the tent. The point is not that Sakurai, writing for a Taiwanese audience, fails to address an “other” in the sense of national identifications, but the need of explaining and defining tent theater as a sort of refugee community of imagination at the very moment when he is writing for a Taiwanese audience nonetheless contains a certain ambiguity. To claim that the “tent” is an “asylum of imagination” that assembles a community which ends the alienation of the spectacle is, in the end, something rather different from simply using a tent to stage theatrical performances. The use of a tent may produce all kinds of enrichments to the theatrical performance. It guides the audience to unknown or improbable venues or brings the theater to new audiences. It makes the surrounding space available as an imagined or factual extension of the stage, when an actor is heard yelling from afar, for example, or when the tent is dismantled to reveal a view of the cityscape. The tent makes stage effects possible that would be more difficult within a solid structure: the use of fire, water, earth, of motorbikes, trucks, etc. The space of the tent may also enhance a more dynamic or physical style of acting. It may thus initiate an artistic and intellectual adventure. Yet, to propose that “tent theater” is the one privileged space that creates a communal imagination opposed to all the outside illusions of the “theater city,” introduces a rigid distinction between “tent theater” and “other theaters.” The idée fixe of the “tent” as community of imagination thus isolates it from other aesthetic considerations and artistic experimentations, and rejects to think theater beyond the “tent.” It leads to the refusal not only to be “grounded,” but also to be compared with other theaters, to encounter other theaters and become other.

Sakurai Daizō himself seems to give expression to the ambiguity inherent in his project with the comparison of the “tent” to a satellite which is launched into empty space and has fallen out of use. While “The Moving Tent” (as the English title of a 2018 documentary about Sakurai’s work goes) keeps “floating” to various places in East Asia, its “theater” remains fundamentally static. On its way to the “outside world,” it remains enclosed upon itself. What the tent as autonomous space or “asylum” preserves, is thus not just imagination, but “tent theater” itself, that is, a particular theatrical style, a style that in Japan is inexorably bound to the period of the 1960s and 1970s and is seen with a certain nostalgia, “Japanese angura shingeki” The performances of “tent theater” in Taipei or Beijing remain adaptations of this style, which entails an inevitable irony, since angura shingeki itself started as a reaction and negation of the dominant angura shingeki that had consisted in adaptations of Western works and the imitation of a Western acting style. Therein then lies the ambiguity of Sakurai Daizō’s project of an East Asian “tent theater.” The staging of his plays in Chinese, the Taiwanese and Chinese actors’ embodying of angura shingeki, their participation in productions in Japanese, may, just like the translation of a literary work, give new life to this style and make it look fresh and new. The tent may thereby become a place where “imagination” takes refuge and “expression” is “gained by struggle.” It might, however, as well be the East Asian people’s “struggle” and “expression” that are extending the life of “tent theater.”

References

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1. Angura is the Japanese abbreviation of the English word “underground.” In the Japanese context, the term specifically indicates the theater form that evolved in the 1960s and 1970s. It is sometimes conflated with, at other times differentiated from the shōgekijō undō (“the Little Theater Movement”) of the same period.
2. For a historical narrative of Kyokubakan, Kaze no Ryodan and Yasen no Tsuki, as well as an examination of Sakurai’s engagement in Taiwan, see Lin (2016). Two collections of Sakurai’s work as a playwright—for Kaze no Ryodan during the 1980s and for Yasen no Tsuki during the 1990s—have been published. See Sakurai (1987, 1999).
3. The first “tent theater” was staged by Kara Jūrō’s “Situation Theatre” (or “Red Tent”) in 1967, followed by Satō Makoto’s “Black Tent Theatre” in 1969. While Kara (born 1940) and Satō (born 1943) were slightly older than their student audience, Sakurai Daizō (born 1951) developed his version of “tent theater” only when student activism was about to recede. He staged his first plays during high school in Hokkaido, continued to do so at Waseda University, a center of the Tokyo theater scene in the early 1970s, and joined the tent group Kyokubakan in 1973. In contrast to Kara, who collaborated with commercial venues like the PARCO department store in the 1980s, and Satō, who went on to become the director of the Setagaya Public Theater in Tokyo in 1997, Sakurai has retained an uncompromising stance regarding cooperation with government bodies or commercial enterprises.
4. For angura artists’ collaboration with Southeast Asian theater practitioners, see Takiguchi (2011). While Takiguchi credits the Black Tent Theatre (Kuro tento) for being the only Japanese theater company which actively collaborated with “people’s theater” groups from Thailand and with the Philippines’ PETA during the late 1970s and 1980s (139-211), he remarks that it was a one-way relationship as the Japanese side adopted the methodology of their Southeast Asian partners without reciprocating with any methodology of their own (210). Also, according to Takiguchi, the “self-recognition as the aggressors” who invaded the Asian region, central to the angura theater and the New Left movement of the early 1970s, was missing in the activities of the Black Tent Theatre in the 1980s (202-203). Kara Jūrō toured Korea, Bangladesh and Palestine in 1973 and 1974, but faced harsh criticism for using the Asian countries without showing real interest in their culture or social and political realities (123).
5. A substantial body of literature has been produced on the topic of the yoseba. The bibliography edited by the Japan Association for the Study of Yoseba (2004) gives synopses of 306 related works published between 1893 and 2003.
6. See Tomotsune (2014) for a detailed discussion of the relation between Funamoto and The East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front. As Tomotsune points out, Hara Hara Tokei includes a correction note indicating that “floating people” (ryūmin) should be replaced by “floating laborer” (ryūdōteki rōdōsha), the term Funamoto had coined (37-39).
7. He was posthumously exonerated from all charges.
8. See the documentation of yoseba activism during the early 1970s, which uses the slogan as book title (“Under Attack” 1974).
9. My translations are from the Japanese original text provided in an email to me from Sakurai Daizō, 27 November 2018. See Lin (2010, 129-130), for a partial quotation of the Chinese translation printed on the leaflet.
10. Rancière (born 1940) critiques the underlying presupposition that theater should be in and of itself communitarian: “in a theater, in front of a performance, […] there are only ever individuals plotting their own paths in the forest of things, acts and signs that confront or surround them” (2009, 16). Basing his critique of theater reform on an argument on intellectual emancipation developed in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), Rancière suggests that the idea of separation and its abolition is one grounded in “stultification,” an unequal distribution of the sensible. Rancière illustrates his argument with the “political and intellectual experience” of his own generation: finding the double requirement of revolutionary theory and practice,—to discover the truth of Marxism on the one hand and to learn the meaning of exploitation from the workers on the other—, unconvincing (Rancière 1987, 17-18). His critique may thus be found to stem from an alternative, opposed “lesson” equally drawn from the “New Left” experience.
11. For a photographic record of Guattari’s visit and his discussions about Sanya (among other things) with the critics Hirai Gen and Asada Akira, see Guattari (1986). Guattari’s short text about Tokyo (2015) is dated 2 January 1986, i.e., a few days before Yamaoka’s assassination on 13 January.
12. These poems told, for example, about the rumor of a “dog” who is a “bum” (Funamoto 1985, 224), or about an alcoholic frog who lives in a “drunk field” (suiden),—a pun on “ricefield” (suiden) (227-228). Different from the sectarian infighting of many New Left groups in the early 1970s, activism in the yoseba often meant a rather playful application of revolutionary principles; it was also about the diversion of a hobo-like lifestyle, as agitation in the yoseba included joining the workers in drinking on days on which they did not find work.
13. See theater group Yasen no Tsuki’s webpage for a comprehensive list and information about performances from 1994 to 2019: https://yasennotsuki.org/chronology/