¹ Photograph taken by Kusuno Yuji, a photographer and producer who worked with Tenji Sajiki and J.A. Seazer. Kusuno's younger brother was a Butoh dancer.

² Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 14.

³ Takuya Kida, “Japanese Crafts and Cultural Exchange with the USA in the 195OS: Soft Power and John D. Rockefeller III during the Cold War,” Journal of Design History 25, no. 4 (2012): 380.

⁴ Ibid, 382.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ See Christopher Gerteis, Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan, Harvard East Asian Monographs 321 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009); Chizuko Ueno, Nashonarizumu to jendā = Engendering nationalism (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1998); Chelsea Szendi Schieder, “Human Liberation or ‘Male Romance‘?: The Gendered Everyday of the Student New Left” in The Red Years, ed. Gavin Walker (New York: Verso, 2020), 143-159; Ota Motoko, “Onnatachi no zenkyōtō undo” [Women's Zenkyoto Movement] Zenkyōtō kara ribue e [From Zenkyōtō to Lib] ed. Jugoshi nōto sengohen, (Kawazaki: Inpaukuto shuppankai, 1996).

⁷ This work can be seen here.

⁸ See Namiko Kunimoto, “Tanaka Atsuko and the Circuits of Subjectivity,” in The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

⁹ Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 61.

¹⁰ Priscilla A. Lambert, “The Political Economy of Postwar Family Policy in Japan: Economic Imperatives and Electoral Incentives,” The Journal of Japanese Studies 33, no. 1 (2007): 11.

¹¹ See Hanabusa's 1964 photographs of farming women working on transistor radio parts and resistors in Hanabusa Shinzō sakuhin ten, no. 50 of JCII Photo Salon (Tokyo: JCII Fuotosaron, 1995), 6-7.

¹² Lambert, “The Political Economy of Postwar Family Policy in Japan,” 14.

¹³ Ibid., 11.

¹⁴ Simon Partner, Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 209.

¹⁵ Thomas Havens, Artist and Patron in Postwar Japan: Dance, Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts, 1955-1980. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 219.

¹⁶ Ibid., 228.

¹⁷ Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Moving Still: Mediating Yvonne Rainer's Trio A,” October 89 (1999): 94.

¹⁸ William Marotti, Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 3.

¹⁹ Generally speaking, conceptualism in Japan has been largely overlooked until very recently. Recent exhibitions at Ota Fine Arts (2017) and Yale Union (2019) on Matsuzawa's work as well as Yoshiko Shimada's writings have begun to reverse that trend. Yoshiko Shimada, “Matsuzawa Yutaka and the Spirit of Suwa” in Conceptualism and Materiality (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 272.

²⁰ This work is visible here

²¹ Siegfried Kracauer, and Thomas Y. Levin. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995), 78

²² Derived from an idealized traditional role for women, the four-character phrase Good Wife, Wise Mother or Wise Wife, Good Mother (ryōsai kenbo) was coined by Nakamura Masanao in 1875. It represented the ideal for womanhood in the East Asian area like Japan, China, and Korea in the late 1800s and early 1900s and its effects continue to the modern day.

²³ Interview with Tsujimura Makoto by the author and Shimada Yoshiko July 15, 2020.

²⁴ Her father moved to Manchuria during the war, as he was unable to find employment in Japan (as jazz was banned).

²⁵ Interview with Tsujimura Makoto by the author and Shimada Yoshiko, July 15th, 2020.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ It is important to bear in mind that there really were no boundaries between the production of art, music, dance, politics, and writing at this time. All too often, scholars, in accordance with the boundaries of University departments, study one practice in isolation from others, overlooking how much these practices and people co-evolved, never insulated from one another.

²⁸ Kuni Chiya was an avant-garde female dancer. Her studio, Kuni Chiya Butoh laboratory, was in Komaba, Tokyo. In the early 1960s she collaborated with Group Ongaku, Araki Nobuyoshi, Kazakura Shō and other members of the avant-garde.

²⁹ See Bruce Baird, Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 5-7. For more on Butoh, see Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario, The Routledge Companion to Butoh (New York: Routledge, 2019).

³⁰ Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the ideas involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns.

³¹ The photograph was taken by Kusuno Yuji.

³² Matsuzawa 1982, 42. Others have argued that this began in the 1950s. See Yoshiko Shimada, “Matsuzawa Yutaka and the Spirit of Suwa” in Conceptualism and Materiality (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 272.

³³ Related material can be found at the Tsujimura Kazuko archive at Keio Arts Center.

³⁴ Gyatei is a Sanskrit term meaning “going to the other side” or reaching realization

³⁵ I cannot be sure she did not direct her gaze at the crowd at other moments during the performance, but the only other photographs of this event show Tsujimura lying still on the ground, giving an impression of disengagement.

³⁶ The name ‘Parinirvana Pariyaya Body’ (PPB) name uses characters that play on body and group. In 1974, Tsujimura started her own dance school, and held numerous events while working with Matsuzawa, and the PPB group. In 1975, she and Kuni had a joint recital named ‘Fall from Quiet Everyday’ with Matsuzawa, Ikeda Tatsuo, Araki Yoshinobu, and others as guest directors. Later in the 1970s, she went to India, then to Bali. She was fascinated by traditional Bali dance and introduced it to Japan in the 1980s.

³⁷ Steve Ridgley has pointed out how boxing appeared frequently in the works of Terayama Shuji, a critic and writer who was also a long-time friend of Tsujimura's. Terayama, along with much of the world, found themselves increasingly interested in boxing as Muhammed Ali's career and reputation grew. Ridgley argues that boxing appeals for the elements of fantasy it employs: shadow boxing, knockouts in place of murders, and fights that are motivated by competition rather than a natural expression of anger. Steve Ridgley, Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 69.

³⁸ The Mishima Incident helped inspire the formation of New Right (shin uyoku) groups in Japan, such as the “Issuikai” founded by some of Mishima's followers. Itasaka Gō and Suzuki Kunio, Yukio Mishima and 1970 (Tokyo: Rokusaisha: 2010).

³⁹ Tokyo Biennale ‘70: Between Man and Matter was held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, May 10-30, the Kyoto Municipal Museum, June 6-28, and the Aichi Prefectural Art Gallery in Nagoya, July 15-26, 1970. It is also known as 10th Annual International Exhibition, Japan. For more on Expo ‘70 see Review of Japanese Culture and Society 23 (2011).

⁴⁰ “If, for better or worse, Osaka Expo was a cultural monument of postwar Japan through which the nation asserted its international standing, Tokyo Biennale was no doubt a legendary moment in postwar Japanese art, which embodied its ”international contemporaneity“(kokusai dōjisei) in a tangible form. Reiko Tomii, ”Toward Tokyo Biennale 1970: Shapes of the International in the Age of ‘International Contemporaneity‘“ Review of Japanese Culture and Society 23 (2011): 191-210.

⁴¹ Hannah Slater, “Unlocking the Exhibition: Tokyo Biennale '70: Between Man and Matter,” unpublished graduate paper, 2020.

⁴² Yoshiko Shimada has recently argued that Matsuzawa was also interested in the sensual. She writes: “…—contrary to his insistence on the non-material and non-sensual—[he]also created works that were large, imposing, and imbued with sensuality.” She argues that “…this contradiction arose in part from his connection to the ancient spiritual practices of Suwa, which were deeply rooted in themes of eroticism, procreation, death, and rebirth.” Yoshiko Shimada, “Matsuzawa Yutaka and the Spirit of Suwa” in Conceptualism and Materiality (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 294.

⁴³ According to documents in the Tsujimura archive now (as yet uncatalogued) held at the Keio Arts Center.

⁴⁴ See Yoshiko Shimada, “Matsuzawa Yutaka and the Spirit of Suwa” in Conceptualism and Materiality (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 272.

⁴⁵ Translated by Kenichi Yoshida in his forthcoming book, Avant-Garde Art. Originally published in Hanada Kiyoteru, Abangyarudo geijutsu (Tokyo: Kodansha bungei bunko, 1994), 30.

⁴⁶ Hanada Kiyoteru, Abangyarudo geijutsu, 32.

⁴⁷ Kenichi Yoshida discusses the philosophical approaches to the mask in Chapter Two of his forthcoming book, Avant-Garde Art and Non-Dominant Thought in Japan: Image, Matter, Separation (New York: Routledge, 2021).

⁴⁸ Cheng, Ornamentalism, xiii.

⁴⁹ I thank Tsujimura Makoto, Shimada Yoshiko, Erica Levin, Daniel Marcus, Elizabeth Ferrell, William Marotti, Rosemary Candelario, Bruce Baird, Anne McKnight, Emily Wilcox, and Max Woodworth for their help with this article.