In 1964, Yoko Ono joined a number of specially invited guests arriving at the prestigious Tokyo Imperial Hotel. Located opposite the Imperial Palace in the heart of the Japanese capital, it had been used briefly as a base of operations less than twenty years before by General Douglas MacArthur while he was overseeing the early part of the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945 to 1952).

Each guest was shown to a room in the hotel, where a bath was run for them. They immersed themselves fully, and measurements were taken of the amount of water displaced. Each guest was also asked to hold water in their mouths and the results were again recorded. Next, photographs were taken of each guest standing neatly to attention: front view, side views, back view, plus views from above and below. The images were transferred to boards and, together with the measurements, were used to create a ‘personalised atomic fall-out shelter’. The final product was essentially a coffin.

The message? No-one, including the Japanese government, could keep anyone safe in the event of a nuclear war. ‘Civil defence’ was a charade.

The 1960s in Japan marked the start of the country’s famous ‘economic miracle’: high and sustained rates of growth, which eventually helped to take Japan from impoverished and disease-ridden defeat in 1945 to the world’s second-largest economy. It was the decade of the Tokyo Olympics and the shinkansen, and of an anime and pop culture boom that began to transform Japan’s global reputation: from that of automaton butchers and slavers to the place where good manners and rarefied sophistication meets hyper-modern, light-hearted kitsch.

Amongst most Japanese who had lived through militarism and war, these years of prosperity and revived democracy were welcomed with open arms. Gone was the risk of relatives being conscripted for doomed conflicts in China or the Asia-Pacific, or of the secret police knocking at your door in the middle of the night. Scarcity and rationing had been replaced by full shelves and an ever-increasing array of labour-saving electronics. The dark drama of the late 1930s and early 1940s had given way to a steady rhythm of school, work, home life and occasional holidays.

And yet for some, a question hung over all of this. What price had their country paid for this bounty? To what – and perhaps to whom – were these various pleasures owed?

Two answers presented themselves. First, the extraordinary rate at which the Japanese economy rebounded was not just a matter of people’s hard work. Plenty of salarymen embraced with great energy the exchanging of swords for sharp suits, and bloodshed for global business rivalries. But the success of their efforts depended, at least early on, upon American largesse. The United States underwrote Japanese security, meaning that relatively little had to be spent on defence – indeed, Japan’s American-authored constitution forbade the maintaining of the means to make war. The US also, for a time at least, put up with exchange rates that were favourable to Japan, helping to boost Japanese trade.

The quid pro quo, as far as critics were concerned, was that Japan’s foreign policy was essentially run by the US. The United States prevented the Japanese from forging meaningful links with Communist China. And by using the Japanese islands as giant aircraft carriers – for the stationing of troops, planes, missiles and more – it potentially turned the country into a target for Soviet nuclear weapons.

The second answer to the question of what prosperity might be costing Japan was the lapsing of large parts of the population into what one critic called ‘everydayness’: a calm and satisfied apathy, where great social and political questions were largely left to one side. People might not love the strictures of their school or working lives, but they could imagine worse – in many cases, they could vividly remember it. So why not embrace the joys of shopping, holidays, and a piece of new technology that was rapidly reshaping Japanese culture: television. The critic Sōichi Ōya likened glancing at one to spotting two dogs mating on a street corner: it was compulsive viewing, but you felt stupid afterwards. Lauded in later years as one of the means by which a fractured country was glued back together – everyone watching the same dramas, sports fixtures and game shows – Ōya regarded it as a disaster. It was creating, he felt sure, a ‘nation of 100 million idiots.’

Attempts to push back against American influence and the grey pall of ‘everydayness’ took various shapes and forms across the 1950s and 1960s, from Socialist and Communist campaigning to student protests and violent activism. An infamous example of the last was Yukio Mishima’s attempted coup and subsequent ritual suicide, at a Self-Defence Forces barracks in Tokyo in 1970.

Culture and the arts, too, became a battleground across these decades. Japanese traditionalists believed that during the Allied Occupation, which was essentially an American Occupation, the United States had busily waged a culture war against Japan: removing any hint of national pride from its education system and reimagining that sacred institution, the family, along western lines. On the progressive left, there was scarcely more love for America – particularly the robustly conservative Cold War-era version that emerged in the late 1940s.

Some artists sought to heal their disappointment, and address their anxieties about the future,  by returning to the distant past. The influential artist and critic Tarō Okamoto wrote about the ‘smell of Japanese soil’ supposedly given off by earthenware dating back to the ancient Jōmon period (14,000 – 300 BC). Elite art institutions meanwhile emphasised Japan’s high-culture heritage, from Buddhist statuary to paintings from the Heian era (790s to 1180s). Such things could be appreciated as a silent rebuke of the shallow, Americanised present but they weren’t likely to change anything.

Instead, the potential of art as activism was explored, in the 1960s and 1970s, by participants in a vibrant avant-garde. Amongst the first were the ‘Neo-Dada Organizers.’ In 1962, they sold tickets for a banquet supposedly marking the end of the war and the fall of the Japanese empire. Guests turned up expecting to eat, only to find themselves treated to a taste of colonial-style exploitation: watching, stomachs empty, while the artists gorged themselves at their expense.

Two years later came the performance piece staged at the Tokyo Imperial Hotel, known as ‘Shelter Plan’ and created by an avant-garde art collective called Hi-Red Center – another of whose works involved scrubbing Tokyo pavements with toothbrushes to satirize their government’s obsession with cleanliness in the run-up to welcoming the world to Japan for the Summer Olympics in 1964.

The lives and work of Japan’s avant-garde have now become the subject of a film, Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers, directed by Amélie Ravalec and screening internationally this summer and into the autumn. It is a remarkable film, capturing the spirit of Japan’s avant-garde through its protagonists and their vivid, sometimes mind-bending work. A series of interviews with participants and commentators, including the renowned curator and art historian Alexandra Munroe, helps viewers really to immerse themselves in this world.

This extraordinary moment in Japan’s modern history, Ravalec tells me, was less a movement than ‘a wave of energy that swept across disciplines… photography, theatre, performance, film, design, dance.’ The artists involved were united by ‘a sense of urgency, a desire to confront the lingering trauma of the war and the rapid transformation of Japanese society.’

Many of them had been children during that war. As a result, says Ravalec, they ‘grew up surrounded by loss, censorship, and the pressure to move on… The bombings, the occupation, the violence, the erasure of older belief systems, all of that was left unspoken. The result was a kind of psychic dissonance that fed directly into the work.’

Ravalec first encountered this highly-charged artistic moment in the work of one of the avant-garde’s greatest figures: the poet, writer, playwright, filmmaker and photographer, Shūji Terayama:

He was the quintessence of everything I loved: bold, surreal, clever, erotic, provocative, poetic and utterly unique. His photobook Photothèque Imaginaire completely blew me away… The deeper I went, the more I realised how little of the Japanese avant-garde was known outside Japan. It felt like opening a door into a secret universe. One artist discovery led to another, and suddenly I was surrounded by this entire world of radical creation.

Terayama grew up in Japan’s impoverished north, losing his father during the war. He became deeply interested, as a result, in the problem of subservience in Japan, which some critics blamed for leading Japan down the road towards authoritarianism and disaster in the 1930s and 1940s. Subservience, thought Terayama, draws its power from a kind of natural exuberance that comes with alternately obeying and disobeying rules. He explored this in one of his plays, Nuhikun (‘Directions to Servants’), which featured two contraptions on stage. One was a ‘Saint-Master machine’, crafted to resemble the Meiji imperial throne, via which servants took it in turns to become the master – receiving the permission to discipline, punish and pleasure at will. The other was a ‘self- spanking machine’, which allowed the user to pull a string and receive a welcome wallop.

Elsewhere in his work, Terayama had members of his theatre troupe jump into the audience, insult them, refuse to let them see the end of a play, spread them out at different locations across a city (so that they would see different performances), trap them in venues, and even set fire to parts of the stage. He wanted to upset people, and to make them see the forces at work in controlling ostensibly free societies. Ravalec captures this beautifully in her film, benefitting from archival interview material featuring Terayama himself reflecting on his work and its context.

Theatre groups, too, became part of this burgeoning movement, at once cutting-edge and looking back to Japan’s past for inspiration. The anxieties of the Tokyo authorities in 1964 about what foreigners might think was not a new feature of Japanese history. Back in the late nineteenth century, when the country opened its doors to the modern West, Japan’s leaders had tried to give Japanese culture an overhaul with western tastes in mind. Kabuki theatre went from being a raucous, all-day affair to a sober evening out, enjoyed in respectful silence and ideally in formal evening attire.

One of the great playwrights of the avant-garde era, Jūrō Kara, named his troupe after that older tradition. He called them kawara kojiki (‘riverbed beggars’): the dismissive name given to Kabuki performers back in the early modern era, but one that hinted at a deeper, richer thread in Japanese culture.

One of the most revered scenes in all of Japanese mythology takes place in a riverbed. The Sun Goddess Amaterasu, annoyed with her brother, the Storm God, hides herself away in a cave. The world is cast into darkness as a result. Gods and goddesses gather in a dry riverbed, trying to come up with ways of coaxing her out. They bang drums, crash cymbals and play music. Nothing works. At last, Ama no Uzume, Goddess of Mirth and Dawn, jumps onto an upturned tub, half-naked, and performs a dance that blends the bawdy with the ecstatic. Everyone collapses into laughter, and when Amaterasu takes a peek to see what is going on, the Strong-Armed Man of Heaven hauls her from her hideout. Light returns to the world and all is well.

Whereas in some cultures, humour and play might largely be the stuff of time off – from work or from devotion – in ancient Japanese stories like these they have sacred power. They are somehow the stuff of deep reality. That meant, potentially at least, that avant-garde artists could deploy them not merely in the spirit of reaction or superficial commentary but as a call to return to something essential and fundamental.

According to Ravalec, Terayama Shūji possessed precisely this kind of faith in the potential of art:

He believed in imagination as a force that could override the logic of the world, and even remake it. That space of friction was where his work lived, and it’s where so much of the avant-garde’s power came from. He called it ‘the bizarre department of the human museum’, a place where disgrace, illusion, and madness could hold up a mirror to reality. And in that mirror, something truthful appeared. Most human mistakes in history, he said, were made by reason. It was reason, not madness, that created the atomic bomb.

Jūrō Kara, too, worked very much in this spirit, injecting raw life into his work and seeking out ways of turning performances into confrontations between actors and audiences. He did away with the distance created by modern stages, returning to the old walkways of the early modern era – taking actors right out into the audience. And where television producers sought to make their fare as accessible as possible, Kara’s plays offered toilet humour one moment and then esotericism the next, along with baffling plots and metaphors.

At the heart of the Japanese avant-garde, Ravalec believes, was a tension between the trauma of the war and its aftermath, on the one hand, and on the other the allure of Americanised, postwar life in Japan. The photographer Ishiuchi Miyako experienced this while growing up in Yokosuka, where a large number of US troops were stationed. She speaks about it to Ravalec for her film. As Ravalec puts it:

[Ishiuchi] recalls the strangeness of encountering an occupied zone for the first time, the forbidden streets where women risked assault or rape, and the way the base forced her to confront her identity as a woman. But rather than turn away, she became drawn to those seedy places. Photographing Yokosuka became a way for Ishiuchi to avenge those pent-up resentments.

Elsewhere in the avant-garde, this tension between trauma and allure showed itself in a collision, says Ravalec ‘of Eros and Thanatos, sex and death, beauty and grotesque.’ Perhaps nowhere was this more vividly on display than in the work of the dancer and choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata.

Like Terayama, Hijikata came from northern Japan, from a family so poor that his sister was sold into prostitution. Another of his sisters died young. Where Tarō Okamoto reached back for inspiration to the primordial scents of the Jōmon era and Jūrō Kara to the early years of Kabuki, Hijikata was inspired by northern Japanese shamanism. He wanted audiences to feel the presence of spirits through his dance – he himself said that when he danced, he could sometimes feel the spirit of his dead sister scratching around, seeking him out. He danced semi-naked, his body painted white. His movements were those of a man literally possessed: slow and contorted, fingers twitching, eyes rolling back in their sockets. Yukio Mishima described it as a ‘heretic ritual.’

‘There’s nothing really like it,’ says Ravalec, who features this style of dance in her film:

[It’s] more of an impact than a form of dance…. Hijikata called it ankoku butō, or the ‘dance of darkness’, but within that darkness is a constant search for light. It’s not about choreography in the traditional sense. It’s about… the body as a vessel for memory, for violence, for decay. The first time you see it, it can feel unsettling, even disturbing to watch. The movements are slow, sometimes grotesque, full of tension and collapse. But there’s a kind of beauty in that resistance, in the way it strips everything back and creates space for something more primal to emerge.

For Ravalec, who is fascinated by the ‘psychological underlyings of art’, getting to know the Japanese avant-garde as a whole has been a compelling experience:

Their work is often grotesque, erotic, anarchic but behind it all lies an urge to make sense of a broken world… What drives me is understanding what compels them to create; what desire, fear, or internal chaos is being transmuted into the work. Indeed, beneath the surrealism, the eroticism, the provocation, there’s often something deeply existential at play.

Terayama believed that art could change the world. So did it? After all, much of the social criticism offered by the avant-garde could still be applied to Japan in 2025. Ravalec believes that Japan’s avant-garde did indeed leave behind an important legacy:

This wasn’t a movement that turned into a school or a style. It was too fractured, too volatile, too anchored in its moment. What it left behind is… a commitment to working outside the system. A belief that you don’t need permission, that you don’t need money or prestige to make something powerful. That energy still lingers.

They left behind a vast and unruly body of work: films, books, images, photographs, artworks and performances. Some of it remains hidden, some of it has been rescued, all of it carries that same uncompromising charge. Even now, it still disturbs. It still shocks. It still haunts. It still demands something of you. That is the real legacy.

The Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers, directed by Amélie Ravalec, is currently being screened at venues across the world. You can find a screening here.