Features Published 10 June 2014

Estrangements and Fractures

Japan, the uncanny and the work of Toshidi Okada.

Andy Field

I’m standing on the viewing deck on the 69th floor of the landmark tower in Yokohama and the city is everywhere beneath me. To get here we accelerated upwards in a lift that told us as we were ascending that we were currently travelling in the second fastest elevator in the world. This is the second tallest building in Japan in its second biggest city. The people I am with are drinking a novelty electric blue cocktail called a “Sky Lover”.  Yokohama is a port city, it was Japan’s first major port city and as such it was the place where the rest of the world slowly started bleeding into the country. This was the home of Japan’s first ice cream parlour, and its first brewery.

The city below me looks like an architect’s drawing of a city. It is a city that feels familiar; a vocabulary of buildings that is immediately recognisable. Towers gleam. Busy roads snake. Wine bars and Italian restaurants nestle by the quayside, an American diner stares out garishly on a busy commuter square. There are art galleries in old warehouses and pop-up bars in railway arches, the elegant curves of contemporary architecture and neon fizz of old takeaway signs. The golden arches of McDonalds and the white and green of Starbucks glow everywhere that you would expect them to glow.

And yet beneath this surface recognition, there is for someone like me a strangeness to the city that is almost disconcerting. None of the pieces fit together in the way I expected. Even the seemingly familiar, whether it be an art gallery or a Seven Eleven or a McDonald’s, contains within it things I had no idea of. I am gorgeously lost in a place that looks recognisable but feels indecipherable. If the vocabulary is familiar, the syntax is entirely alien.

Ernst Jentsch described the uncanny as something one does not know one’s way about in, and this is undoubtedly how the metropolitan Japan of Tokyo and Yokohama feels to me from my few, far-too-fleeting visits. It is a place that I recognise everywhere and yet always feel lost. Not a distant, orientalised other but rather somewhere at once strange and familiar; a globalised mosaic made up of infinitesimal unknowable details.

First encountering the work of Toshidi Okada was, for me, to move again through this uncanny landscape. As the publicity material for his show at LIFT suggests, his characters – uneasy, insular, adrift in a world that seems at best indifferent to them – will need no translation for anyone who has read Douglas Coupland or seen the films of Richard Linklater. The music is equally familiar – JS Bach, John Cage, John Coltrane. One of his most recent pieces, Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech, was a response to the rise in Japan of temp contracts and the effect they have on the young people tied to them.

These are people we know, struggling with problems we recognise. The world they inhabit is in many ways the same world we inhabit. And yet crucially there remains a distance from our own experience, an unbridgeable fault line of language, history and culture that if anything makes those things we share feel all the more vivid, dislocated as they are from the context we usually find them in; a feeling of estrangement that we might more readily associate with Bertolt Brecht.

This comparison with Brecht is something that Okada himself has remarked upon. His practice revels in estrangements and fractures. Dialogue and movement slide away from each other until one no longer seems to refer to the other at all; until each performer is a dancer and an actor who happen to be temporarily inhabiting the same body. In this, his work seems to have buried deep in its bone marrow an exploration of a country that more than most is caught between conflicting versions of itself – private and public, past and present, small island nation and international giant.  And again, perhaps in all of this we see once more an uncanny mirror of ourselves, another complicated island bewildering itself with its myriad identities.

Photo: Guwashi999.

Toshidi Okada’s show Super Premium Soft Double Vanilla Rich is at artsdepot as part of LIFT 10th-11th June.

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Andy Field

Andy Field is a theatremaker, curator, and co-director of Forest Fringe.

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