Closing: Transforming Everydayness

Abstract

Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan: City, Body, Memory explores the theme of transforming everydayness (nichijōsei), as expressed in art and civic events in an era of dramatic change. This theme is recognised by the activist Ando Takemasa as centrally influencing the student protest movement and its participants’ confrontations with authorities, known as gewalt (gebaruto), from the German word for violence or force. An especially large and important gewalt action — one of the most sustained activist events of the 1960s — has been discussed here in relation to the occupation of Shinjuku Station. As I argue, gewalt had performative and didactic aims. And as Ando notes, this meant making visible that were otherwise hidden from view. That is, the point of these confrontations was to make visible the means of control over people’s lives. For the students, ‘the focus of their activism was not to change national policies or political institutions but to transform [peoples’] depoliticized consciousness’ (Ando, 2013: 1). Hence, the student movement ‘believed that transforming “everydayness” and creating new ways of living would lead inevitably to social and political change’ (9).