Terayama
comments on a group of about a dozen fūten who formed an ashram in Nagano where
they built huts and grew vegetables:
Looking
at the fūten-zoku laying around on the greenhouse outside of Shinjuku station,
I can’t help thinking of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which I read as
a kid. Tom Sawyer was a square from a bourgeois family, but Huckleberry Finn
was hip. Huck was lazy and coarse, wore rags, and slept in a sugar barrel, but
he was an idealist. The Shinjuku fūten have more ideals than they can
manage—they talk of love, freedom, liberation from their chains. And with the
clear blue sky for a roof, and the air for their furnishings, they dream of the
return of a primordial society, when people could live as human beings. This
group of fūten who have created their “bums’ ashram” in the village of Kōdo in
Nagano, which even includes the beat poet Gary Snyder, have surely outdone the
Shinjuku fūten in the loftiness of their ideals. Yet, in dreaming of
“human-ness” in the form of a return of primordial society, these young people
who have chosen the fūten route seem to be reading from the book of life
backwards. Me, I like pop music, the hustle and bustle of the city, the gossip
rags and two-bit newspapers. I can’t help loving the people who like deceiving
people and being deceived themselves, the ones who focus all their energy on
one side of a philosophical debate (even knowing that it’s all relative in the
end), or who gamble sometimes and lose, or get drunk on cheap hooch, or the
ones who spend their time worrying and fretting about their lives. This love of
dropping out is not going to be possible in every era.
The
critique here is not so much of separatism as it is of the ashram’s assumptions
about human history—this urge toward regressing to an idealized past was very
much at odds with Terayama’s notion of the synchronic time orientation of
counterculture and its commitment to expanding the sensation of being in the
present tense. Terayama was critical of the Japanese fūten, yet it was the common
Japanese sleeping pill Broverin that Terayama would bring with him to Amsterdam
to offer, as soup, to the audience of his 1972 play Ahen sensō (Opium War),
perhaps giving the Dutch cannabis scene a sample of Tokyo-style hippiedom.
Ridgely, Steven C.. Japanese
Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji (Kindle location 3646-3667).
University of Minnesota Press.
