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Holding Perspective1982–85Wood prints, collage78.5 cm x 57 cm (31' x 22 1/2')

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The Emperor’s New Clothes in Old Photos: Oura Nobuyuki’s Holding Perspective and the Culture and Politics of 1980s Japan

Kenji Kajiya

When Oura Nobuyuki joined a group show at the Toyama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art in 1986, he could not have imagined the controversy his work would generate.(1)He exhibited ten pieces of his series Holding Per-spective, comprising fourteen lithographs made while living in New York.(2) The work combines images of the Emperor Hirohito with various images from the East and the West. Unexpectedly, two months after the show ended, his work was criticized at the Pre-fectural Assembly for allegedly mocking the emper-or, and was then repeatedly attacked by right-wing groups.The museum had bought four of the pieces and ar-ranged for Oura to donate the remaining six to the museum, but because of the criticism, the museum

hid the acquired pieces from public view and returned the remaining six pieces to the artist. After a right-wing shrine priest tore up the exhibition catalogue at the Prefec-tural Library, the library renounced its claims to ownership and declined offers made by several citizens to donate their cata-logues.Finally, in 1993, the museum secretly sold the remaining four pieces to an anonymous individual and burned the 470 copies of the catalogues in its possession. In 1994, Oura and his sup-porters filed a suit against Toyama Prefecture, demanding that it re-acquire the artist’s work and reprint the catalogues. Their appeal, however, was finally dismissed by the Supreme Court in 2000.(3)Since the controversy arose in 1986, several analyses have been devoted to the incident and the trial. Most discussions have fo-cused on social issues such as artists’ freedom of expression, and the political taboo surrounding Japan’s emperor system. But Oura’s work itself has been hardly investigated. In this essay, I will first discuss the structure of his work. Why and how does Oura use the photos of the emperor? Why does he call his work a “self-portrait,” even though he does not use any of his own im-ages? Through addressing these problems, I will examine what aspect of his work irritated conservatives and right-wingers. I will then argue the ways in which his choice of the emperor im-ages and others is critically involved in the social and political context of the 1980s and 90s.

1. Hirohito and the Diversity of Imperial CultureWhat most characterizes Oura’s work is his choice of specific images of the emperor Hirohito, which differ from the widely circulating images of Hirohito we see today.(4)The emperor’s clothes radically changed at the end of the war. Before the war, Hirohito was largely depicted in military dress. Although he was shown wearing Japanese clothes when imperial ceremonies were performed, images of Hirohito in military uniform were more widely known through newspapers and newsreels as well as from their appearances in the Goshin’ei.(5) After the war, Hirohito is shown wearing Western civilian clothes. The Occupation, accompanied by American culture, urged Hirohito to take off his uniform in favor of civilian attire. Images of the emperor in civilian clothes were and are distributed in newspapers, television, and frequently published photo books. Looking back on Hirohito’s life, we can see how his image has been presented as a dichotomy: the prewar emperor in military uniform and the postwar emperor in Western civilian

Oura Nobuyuki

Oura, Work IV from Holding Perspective

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clothes.(6)It is this dichotomy that Oura wanted to break down in Holding Per-spective. What interest-ed him were the images of the prewar emperor in Western civilian clothes. For instance, Work IV uses the photo of Hirohito in Western attire, taken in 1924 when he married Princess Nagako. Then-imperial Crown Prince Hirohito is wearing a morning coat and striped trousers, cane and gloves in hand. Work I includes a photo, taken around 1923, which depicts Hirohito in a convert-ible, lifting his silk hat. Not only do his formal clothes and modern car signify his assimilation into Western culture. The lifting of a hat is also a polite greeting, one pe-culiar to the Western world, as Erwin Panofsky famously mentioned in Studies in Iconology.(7) The photograph shows how Japan’s imperial family absorbed West-ern customs, not only in terms of their clothes but also in the very habit of greeting.Noteworthy is one of the four pieces not shown in the original show in Toyama (Figure 1). At first sight, it seems a typical image of the em-peror during the prewar and wartime periods. The photo was taken in 1930, when Emperor, and now Commander-in-Chief, Hirohito reviews his troops during military maneuvers in Okayama. Dressed in military uni-form, he rides on a white horse, of which he was very fond at that time. His show of military leadership is mixed with beliefs in the sanctity of the white horse, beliefs

prevalent in Japan as well as in Europe and China. At the same time, we find a vestige of his childhood fixation on things Western. At the age of three, he is shown riding on a white rocking horse, wearing a white one-piece dress for girls in the tradition of the imperial family. Of course Oura used this gender-bending photo in another piece of the series. Employing these two images of Hirohito on a white horse, Oura turned the image of the heroic equestrian into one of the emperor as a subject stuck in an infantile moment.In Holding Perspective, Oura thus developed his interest in the images of the prewar emperor in Western civilian clothes. These pictures reveal how imperial cultures were not limited to the traditional ones but rather were flexible and di-verse even in Japan’s prewar history—a point that right-wing conservatives refuse to examine.

2. Emperor Image as Self-PortraitWhat we should next consider is why Oura called Holding Perspective a “self-portrait.”(8) During the controversy over his work, Oura repeatedly said that he in-tend neither to make fun of the emperor nor to criticize him. Oura was embarrassed when an art critic compared him to senior artists such as Yamashita Kikuji and Kudo Tetsumi who have referred to the emperor critically in their works. Taking into account that his intent as an artist was simply to create a self-portrait, it seems reasonable to suppose that he likens himself to, if not exactly identifies himself with, Emperor Hirohito, whose image, among others from art history and popular culture, are used the most in the series.Born in 1949, Oura grew up in a postwar Japan that saw the influx of American

Oura, Work I from Holding Perspective

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has sexual implications.In Work III, the head of Hirohito is cut in half by a piece of white plate. The photo was taken at Disneyland in California in 1975 when Hirohito visited the United States for the first time. The em-peror smiles at the wel-coming parade attended by Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters. Against the long vista of Prospect Park in Brook-lyn with the wavy surface of the park’s lake on the sky, the emperor is locat-ed in an American con-text. This park is a place that Oura frequented when he made this series in the early 1980s, yet Oura has relocated the emperor in the deserted park in such a way as to cast a lonely shadow on his smile.For Oura, Hirohito is the Japanese individual who has succeeded in assimi-lating Western culture in privileged circumstances, but who, in actual West-ern countries, was made to feel awkward as the object of the gaze. Oura is interested in making a self-portrait using the im-ages of the emperor prob-ably because he found in them something he had experienced in his ten-year stay in New York; the more assimilated he was to Western cultures, the more awkward he felt as a non-Western person. It is in this sense that we should understand Holding Perspective to be the artist’s self-repre-sentation.

ConclusionThe political atmosphere in the 1980s Japan was intertwined with Hirohito and the imperial fam-ily in many ways. The

cultures. For most of his generation, the Japanese emperor was a symbol represent-ing the tradition of Japanese culture. It is probably after he moved to New York in 1976 that he found that Hirohito was one of the Japanese who have been most ab-sorbed into Western culture. Oura, then a Japanese expatriate in the United States, seemed to start thinking about the emperor in foreign contexts.Work VI shows how Oura uses the emperor image to articulate his own experience and interests he had outside his native country. It uses a photo of a luncheon with the Lord Mayor of London, one of the welcoming receptions Hirohito attended during his European visit in 1921. This is the first time in Japan’s history that a member of the imperial family traveled outside Japan. This trip was intended not for diplomatic purposes; it took place to educate the future emperor. Nevertheless, inexperienced in international politics, Hirohito must have felt pressure to act as the nation’s representative.Although Crown Prince Hirohito on the left was a guest of honor, he seems to have been overwhelmed by the large presence of the Lord Mayor in the center. He fid-dles with his napkin, and his gaze is downcast. It was reported that Hirohito hardly spoke and neither drank nor smoked during the luncheon, which made a sharp contrast with the then Prince of Wales Edward VIII on the right, who appears both cheerful and elegant.(9) Hirohito must have been aware that he was the object of gazes as a non-Western guest of honor, who Hirohito probably thought was unusual for most British guests. Hirohito’s diffidence seems to be the reason why Oura chose this picture in lieu of images depicting a more common and dignified emperor. The artist thus emphasizes Hirohito’s uneasiness by juxtaposing the luncheon scene with the fragments of Man Ray’s female nude, another object of a gaze but one that

Photo from Bessatsu ichiokunin no Showa shi, Showa Tenno shi (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1980).

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sixtieth anniversary of the emperor’s accession in 1985 and his sub-sequent death in 1989 brought about a conserv-ative backlash. In 1988, when Hirohito’s illness was reported, Japanese media underwent a pe-riod of self-restraint called “jishuku.” The media refrained from broadcasting programs and commercials that partook of a happy and festive mood. During this period the mayor of Nagasaki City, Motojima Hitoshi, was shot by a member of a right-wing organization after Motojima claimed that Hirohito had to bear responsibility for his actions during World War II.This political backlash was created on the pretext of protecting the emperor and reversing the alleged decline of Japanese culture. It rever-berates what Mishima Yukio wrote more than thirty years ago. In his essay “In Defense of Culture,” Mishima insisted that the emperor is the

source of Japanese cul-ture, and that to defend the totality of Japanese culture, one must defend the emperor.(10). But in contrast with Mishima’s urgings, Oura’s selection of Hirohito images dem-onstrate that the emperor was hardly a totalization of Japanese culture. Through the quest for his own identity, Oura succeeded in unraveling the heterogeneity of the cultural background and personal history of the emperor against a con-text of growing political conservatism. Hirohito has been sufficiently ab-sorbed into Western cul-ture to annoy right-wing-ers and conservatives.Political protests had been shunned during the early to mid-1980s, a period characterized by the rise of postmod-ern culture in which there was scarce room to fully comprehend Oura’s work. His works may have been interpreted as a postmodern piece rife with quotations of past artworks and ready-made images, but at the time they were shown, it was still early for them to be appreciated as a post-colonial investigation of Japan’s modern history.Oura’s struggles in court

Figure 1

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differ from those of Akasegawa Genpei in the infa-mous 1,000-Yen Note Trial that turned on the idea of art in the vanguard context. Rather, Oura’s resistance should be regarded as a movement against the revival of conservative nationalists scheming to re-deify the emperor. He and his supporters held countless meet-ings and symposia, published a variety of pamphlets, articles and books, and raised the level of political awareness among artists and writers, all of which sounded a warning against the conservative revival. In both its content and performance, Oura’s Hold-

ing Perspective embarked upon a critique of Japan’s modern history, an issue that would take on crucial importance in Japanese art of the 1990s.

NotesThis paper was read as “Emperor in Disguise, Emper-or as Disguise: Oura Nobuyuki’s Holding Perspec-tive and the Culture and Politics of Eighties Japan” at Claims to Authority: Workshop on Modern and Contemporary East Asian Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, on May 21, 2005.1. The group show Toyama no bijutsu ’86 [Art in Toyama ‘86] was held from March 13 to April 13, 1986. 2. The work was first exhibited in Oura’s solo show at Gallery Yamaguchi in Tokyo in 1984.3. For the outline of the incident and the lawsuit, see Toyama kenritsu kindai bijutsukan mondai o kangaeru kai [The Society of the Study of the Toyama Prefec-tural Museum of Modern Art Problem], ed., Toyama kenritsu kindai bijutsukan mondai, zen kiroku: Sabakareta tenno koraju [The Whole Record of the Toyama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art Problem: The Emperor Collage in Judgment] (Toyama: Katsura shobo, 2001).4. All but one images of Hirohito are taken from Bes-satsu ichiokunin no showa shi, showa tenno shi [History of the Emperor in the Showa Era: Appendix to The History of Showa for 100 Million People] (To-kyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1980).5. Goshin’ei is a photographic portrait of the emperor and the empress distributed to local government of-fices, the branches of the army, and educational insti-tutions, from primary schools to universities.6. John W. Dower refers to this dichotomy in his book Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999), 330.7. Erwin Panofsky, Introduction to Studies in Iconol-ogy: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renais-sance [1939] (New York: Haper & Row, 1972), 3–31.8. Oura Nobuyuki, “Jinun jishin no shozo ga to shite: Sakusha no tachiba kara,” in Toyama kenritsu kindai bijutsukan mondai o kangaeru kai [The Society of the Study of the Toyama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art Problem], ed., Koritsu bijutsukan to tenno hyo-gen [Public Museums and the Representation of the Emperor] (Toyama: Katsura shobo, 1994), 7–12.9. Nakura Bun’ichi, “Eikoku insho danpen [Fragmen-tary Impressions on England]” [1922], in Inose Naoki, ed., Showa tenno [The Emperor Showa], Mokugeki sha ga kataru showa shi [Witnesses report the history of Showa], vol. 1 (Tokyo: Shin jinbutsu orai sha, 1989), 76–77.10. Mishima Yukio, “Bunka Boei ron [In Defense of Culture]” [1968], Mishima Yukio zenshu [The Com-plete Works of Mishima Yukio], vol. 35 (Tokyo: Shin-cho sha, 2003), 15–51.

Oura, Work III from Holding Perspective