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The 1960s in the US was known for the Civil Rights movement that saw Jim Crow-era racial segregation laws challenged legally and civilly, led to the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act that ended explicitly anti-Asian immigration laws, and spawned the distinct but related Womens’ Liberation Movement. At the same time, in Japan the 1960s were a season of large-scale public protest, bookended by protests against the 1960 and 1970 renewals of the widely unpopular US-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo jōyaku), but including protests against a range of issues often led by New Left student protestors and anti-Vietnam War activists. Japan’s heavily Marxist New Left initially foregrounded class over race, ethnicity, or gender until government crackdowns on public protest forced them to reformulate activist strategies in the early 1970s. For Japanese artists who visited or moved to the US in the mid-1960s, public actions and protest were familiar, but the context of becoming an ethnic minority at a time when race was in the public eye led them to a new awareness of identity.

For Japanese women artists in particular, the US afforded them an escape from family expectations that coincided with the 1960s renewal of American feminist discourse at the start of the Womens’ Liberation movement. Although many of the challenges that US feminists faced were similar to those found in Japan, the distance and perspective gained from a new cultural context led some Japanese women artists to take up explicitly feminist content in their practices and others to engage in collaborations across minoritized identities. While identity was rarely the single driving issue for these artists, experiences of foreign culture facilitated by Japan’s rapid economic growth and changes in US immigration policy opened up inquiries into identity by Japanese artists that resonated with work produced in the US toward the end of the 1960s and through the 1970s.

1. Feminism

2. Race

3. Nationality

In the 1960s, on the tail of the Civil Rights Movement, second-wave feminism emerged as a viable movement in the US. As women’s struggles came into the mainstream with the advent of the contraceptive pill in 1961 and steps forward in rights such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963, radical movements such as Women’s Lib combined feminism with leftist politics, viewing gender inequalities through a systemic lens, as captured in the popular phrase “the personal is political.” Yet many minority women found mainstream groups like the National Organization for Women unwilling to address intersectional issues, leading to the establishment of separate organizations, often led by Black women, that addressed feminism’s intersections with class, race, and imperialism, and the concerns of other political and countercultural groups. 

Japanese women artists in the US, like Mako Idemitsu, Kyoko Michishita, and Shigeko Kubota, were not only a key route for the exchange of feminist ideas between the US and Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but as they acquired identities as women of color in the US context, they could also offer a critical perspective on the state of US feminism. Through their exchanges and translations of feminist media, subversive uses of technology, and participation in male-dominated cultural spaces, they produced both direct and indirect critiques of gender politics in both countries. While conscious of the sexism within Japanese society, inspiring figures like Michishita to work on translating American feminist ideas into Japanese, chauvinism in the US was also under critique.  Kubota’s Video Poem (1970-75) evoked the gendered body in a provocatively disembodied way. Consisting of a monitor playing a synthesized video self-portrait, enrobed by an inflated bag punctuated by zippered openings that had originally used by Takehisa Kosugi as he stuck bare limbs out of the bag during his performance of Anima 2/Chamber Music (1962), and further paired with a wall text declaring “Video is Vengeance of Vagina / Video is Victory of Vagina…,” the work evoked the eroticized body while withholding it, confronting male dominance of the field of experimental art while indirectly parodying the visibility of often partially or fully nude female bodies in 1960s performance art. Meanwhile, Idemitsu used film and video to explore the role of mothers within the nuclear family, inspired by the complications of her transnational marriage to Sam Francis and the challenges of maintaining her identity as she raised their children primarily on her own. These artists celebrated the moving image, particularly the portability and manipulability of video technology, as a way to unearth new perspectives and representations of women and their lives. 

Moving from Japan to the more diverse yet divided US, Japanese moving-image artists based in America engaged with the topic of race both as observers and as newly racialized subjects within society themselves. Civil Rights protests marked America’s 1960s, which saw the emergence of the Native American rights movement, the Chicano Movement, the Black Liberation Movement, the Asian American Movement, and the founding of the Black Panther Party. Kenji Kanesaka initially began documenting some of these groups photographically as part of the cultural landscape he witnessed coming to America for the first time, eventually expanding to films analyzing the complex systems of oppression that urban Black communities faced. Shigeko Kubota worked with Navajo subjects in her video works, and Masanori Ōe, enmeshed in the hippie movement, observed the dynamics between white hippies, yippies, and radical communities of color from his own perspective as a Japanese immigrant. These experiences not only inspired artists to produce their most salient filmic critiques of America, but also to re-orient their own identity in solidarity with Japanese Americans, other Asians, and all people of color in a world structured by cold war imperialism.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the diplomatic links between Japan and the US were the subject of public contention. Japan and its military bases were a key Cold War US asset due to their relative proximity to and thus convenience for launching military actions in Vietnam and southeast Asia. Joined by a host of other reasons including anti-democratic political shenanigans in the National Diet and authoritarian crackdowns on the use of public space, the Japanese state’s apparent subservience to US desires sparked and prolonged student protests against the United States-Japan Security Treaty (ANPO) throughout the greater 1960s. Since the Pacific War, American cultural influence in Japan had brought about changes in entertainment and fashion, but also became a source of base-related violence, unregulated sex work, and destruction of villages for US-sponsored infrastructure that fomented a sense of powerlessness on the level of the individual and an impression of collusion at the level of the state. Japanese artists living in the US were keenly aware of these tensions, and in traveling to America, gained new perceptions of a culture they had already experienced obliquely.

While a number of artists moved abroad to investigate America, others also took the opportunity to gain a fresh perspective on Japan, taking a more observational stance to the phenomena of their home country upon their return. Kyoko Michishita, for example, explored gender politics during her time in the US, subsequently making a series of works exploring the gender dynamics of family politics in Japan. Recognizing the limits of simply imposing American feminism onto Japan’s issues, she investigated rural communities and unique individuals in search of an autochthonous form of liberation for Japanese society. Similarly, Mako Idemitsu, having started a family in California, went on to critique family structures in Japan and the internalization of Western models. Meanwhile Masanori Ōe, returning to Japan from New York in 1968, fused psychedelic culture and the ideas of Timothy Leary with Japanese folk mythology in his work with the radical performance group Zero Jigen. Throwing Japanese national identity into relief through new insights, these artists had a lasting impact in Japan.