kagablog

by Anna Tilroe

Ian Kerkhof is no more. No one has heard anything from him since he left the Netherlands under dramatic circumstances in 1999 and headed for South Africa, the land where he was born and raised. Someone else has taken his place and has assimilated everything having anything to do with Kerkhof. That may come as a shock to those who expected so much from this talked-about filmmaker, but fortunately there’s been “no real loss. Because although Kerkhof may have disappeared as a name, there seems to be no end to his output as a creative spirit. Books, films, drawings and written work appear one after another, and these plus an endless series of pamphlets, e-mails and web publications all point to a mentality that reflects Kerkhof’s down to the most minute details. It’s just that all the work is signed nowadays by a certain Aryan Kaganof.

Does the name change really matter? Strictly speaking, no. After all, we say that a work of art is autonomous and greater than its maker. Yet in the past few centuries more and more emphasis has been placed on the name of the maker, so much so that we may well ask whether something hasn’t gone totally awry. Oddly enough, this is a question that has attracted very little discussion, even though at the deepest level it touches on the place of art in our society. Everyone can see that the signature of the artist has become a brand name that determines not only the market value of the work of art but also its significance in the scope of art history and in contemporary society. Likewise, we know that branding as an economic and artistic principle has become so prevalent in the art world that even leading exhibition organizers have become trademarks. These international curators establish name recognition by developing themes that appear to lend a certain urgency to art. It doesn’t really matter if the urgency is understood within society as a whole, or even if it corresponds with the intentions of the chosen artists. The brand name, after all, is not a dialogue but a system, as closed as fundamentalist belief.

What the exact reasons were for Kerkhof’s discarding his name like a moth-eaten suit is something we will never know. But if we properly understand what Kaganof is hinting at, name recognition and everything that goes with it today is fatal to the pursuit of art. In his eyes, an artist is not a personality who keeps giving shape to his specific identity in a way that is recognizable, but a chameleon-like personage, a transparent figure whose absence of identity enables him to be fully receptive to the form, colour, odour and sex of all that surrounds him. It might even be said that this lack of identity, according to a text that Kaganof distributed among his friends and acquaintances, is a cardinal rule for anyone who calls himself an artist, especially if he or she is driven by the ambition to create a masterpiece. Like Kaganof.

The text was written in 1936 by Gertrude Stein and was entitled What Are Master-pieces And Why There Are So Few Of Them. Identity, she wrote in her familiar unrestrained flow of words that I am paraphrasing here, has to do with what you remember about yourself. It is a form of illustrating yourself based on your memory, and although that may be good for people who want to establish a persona that they and others can recognize, it is not good for the making of a masterpiece. A masterpiece can only be created when nothing prior has been laid down and when a conscious effort has been made to relinquish every form of identity.

Kaganof advances Stein’s argument for doing away with identity just when economic globalism and mass migration have brought the idea of cultural and personal identity into sharp focus. As a white man who left South African in protest against Apartheid, he is undoubtedly well aware of this. But, as you might gather from his written work and his films, it is not the task of the artist to create or maintain any kind of identity but to see behind, beneath, beside or through the masquerades, institutions and systems that support it. Because therein lies that which people have in common, that which unites them and makes them human.

A splendid example of this is the film Nice to meet you, please don’t rape me!, made in 1994 during the first round of democratic elections held in South Africa. In this work we follow four men, three black and one white, who have found each other on the seamy side of life in South Africa and try to help each other out as best they can. None of them has an identity in the form of a legal name, a permanent place of residence, a wife, family or possessions. All we learn about them is that they are lost in a society that is marked by vengeance, moral degeneration, and spiritual and physical violation. Their mutual suspicion and aggression, often influenced by alcohol and drugs, lead to fierce outbursts of rage and violence that they are constantly struggling to keep in check with regard to each other by means of pacifying rituals. Each one perceives to a greater or lesser degree that he needs the other, not so much to survive in a desolate, bloodthirsty urban jungle, because these men don’t attach all that much to life. What connects them, rather, is a longing, the longing to preserve whatever shred of human dignity is left to them.

But what do we really mean when we talk about humanity and human dignity? What social and moral criteria do we employ? For Kaganof, there are no presuppositions for human existence. The human being, he believes, has the ability to invent himself, and that ability, that freedom, is both a privilege and a curse. That is why his characters seek the dark and the margins of life. That is why they electrify their brains with drugs and torment their bodies to the farthest limits. They celebrate their limitlessness by transgressing all the rules, even if it means physical or mental ruin, because they know, consciously or unconsciously, that hidden in the transgression lies the ecstasy, the power that lifts us above ourselves, towards the light.

Most of the characters never get that far, however. They go round and round in their limitlessness like guinea pigs in a maze. We look at them and see people for whom the transgression is an end in itself, and it doesn’t matter if they over indulge in sex and drugs in the Amsterdam party circuit (the film Wasted; Naar de klote in Dutch), or sink into the world of criminals and prostitutes in Tokyo (Shabondama Elegy), or scour the bars and drug dens of Capetown (the novel Hectic). Wherever they live, whatever they do and whatever their age, what Kaganof’s people have in common is their recognizability. We recognize them as exponents of a time without memory, without direction, without passion, without morals. Time as a vacuum: our time.

Is Kaganof a moralist? You would almost think so to look at the sharpness with which he renders the moral decay of his characters. But morality as a system of ethical principles and norms is incompatible with what for Kaganof constitutes the artistic vocation. For him, Good and Evil are concepts like Identity: they lay down in the form of rules and regulations that which is essentially fleeting and mutable and, above all, infinitely nuanced. Morality is tantamount to a denial of the depth of the human spirit, a depth that, oddly enough, is mainly perceptible in what is generally regarded as Evil. And that is the area in which Kaganof chooses to be active.

In doing so, he often assumes the position in his books of an involved observer on the one hand and one who sees himself in relative terms on the other. This results in descriptions that are as remorseless as they are humorous and that attest to a profound feeling for detail, such as this fragment from Sugarman and Other Bitter Stories that he himself published in South Africa:

“Brigitta, not yet 21, studies Drama, is distantly related to Hitler. She’s wearing black. Hair dyed purple. Swastika decals on her fingernails. Bored.
Diamond bursts in, kisses the table, kicks Brigitta. He’s wearing a great t-shirt. It says ‘Eat the homeless’. Brigitta kisses his boots and licks him. He kicks her again in her ample buttocks. Diamond smiles insanely, his speed blackened teeth threatening to spill out of his mouth any second now.”

Evil is a choice that only can be made by those who know what Good is. Evil is consciousness as well as loss of innocence and security. Those who embrace Evil are doomed to live with the realization that there is no absolute Truth and that nothing is what it seems. That is why Evil is such a perfect fit in modern life. Living with a sense of insecurity became a condition of our life when, as Hannah Arendt writes in Vita Activa, we began to realize along with Descartes that ‘the nature of Being is such that its manifestations can be nothing but delusions and the images that are derived from those manifestations nothing but hallucinations.’ Everything today is wavering now that science has once and for all shown the limits of the senses and the power of reason, and technology has eliminated the difference between reality and unreality. For this reason we see the good God today, in the words of Arendt, as a Dieu trompeur, an evil spirit who with his cunning trickery ‘has created a being and instilled in it a certain notion of what truth is, but at the same time has poisoned it with such different capacities that it will never be capable of finding one single truth or of being certain of one single thing.’

Kaganof is the son of this deceitful god. He made that choice the minute he picked up a motion picture camera and suddenly found himself able to create the world anew. He filmed not only what he saw, but also what, from the point of view of prevailing morality, should not be seen: the sinful lusts of the body. In Kyodai Makes the Big Time, made when he was still at Film Academy in Amsterdam, he convinced actor Koos Vos to masturbate for the camera – and won a Golden Calf, an important Dutch film prize.

The body has always been a central element in his work. The human being is his body. He bases his identity on it from the moment he says ‘I’, but even that makes him afraid of losing his body again, something he always sees happening with other people. That is why for Kaganof the body must endure everything it fears: torture, sexual excess, sensual chaos and even (as in the film Beyond Ultra Violence – Uneasy Listening By Merzbow) hara kiri. And always in a ritual way, because it is through ritual that the body transcends itself, particularly the frightened mouse that is hiding within it and is so tightly attached to itself.

But inherent in that transcendence is violation: a transgression of borders that is neither socially nor politically acceptable. The person who determines his own death places himself outside the rule of law. He withdraws himself from what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in his book Homo Sacer, calls ‘bio-politics’: the ‘process of discipline, imposed by the political system in which the human being as a living creature becomes both the object and the subject of political power’. It is political power that determines how far a person’s freedom may extend in making decisions about his own life, whether it be a question of drug use, smoking and sex before marriage or of suicide, euthanasia and dying a hero’s death for one’s country.

In line with this came Kaganof’s Western 4.33. That film, which came out in 2002, is a documentary about a mineworkers’ village in Namibia built by German colonists between 1904 and 1907 and based on a model concentration camp that the British had designed in South Africa during the Boer War. More than sixty thousand people from the Herero tribe lost their lives there.

Kaganof filmed the abandoned camp during the winter in black and white. We see barbed wire, fences, dark barracks, a vast white landscape and a black silence. Not a living soul. Then images – in colour – of a woman mourning over a lost love with a man’s voice speaking in an African language (no subtitles, because, as Kaganof once explained during an interview, ‘The Germans never took the trouble to understand what the Herero were saying.’) Murder, loss, lack of understanding, colonialism: the words take shape in the images, forming not a story but an emotion, a scorch mark on the soul.

Kaganof is a brilliant storyteller, but his films don’t follow a story line. They follow the image. He employs that image like a tone in a musical piece, setting it in motion, driving it along, draining it of its colour, letting it flow apart or run over into other images, staccato and dazzling or slowly diminishing, vaguely trilled or clear and taut. It is the moving image at maximum intensity, and in all its movements it shows itself to be as nimble and transparent as thoughts in the brain. We look through the bodies, the birds and the landscapes and see, as in the four Suprematist Compositions, the body of a dancer like a continuously dying and reviving cellular structure, falling mountains, a dog’s carcass as a relief map of the earth and – just like that – a pair of squabbling pigeons.

Kaganof is dead, we suddenly read in white on black between two Suprematist Compositions. Kaganof, son of a god with a thousand tongues, has a great deal more to tell us.

Translation: Nancy Forest-Flier

Immanuel Stammelman

Traduction : Dionysos Andronis

Lawrence Durell s’est posé la question : « L’art est-il toujours un outrage, - doit-il l’être par sa nature ? » Cet outrage est une révolte métaphysique et, en même temps, une reddition métaphysique, l’aspiration du néant, «le cri de l’esprit extériorisé par sa propre révolte » comme dirait Camus. Par l’outrage alors, l’existence de l’homme est mise à l’épreuve. Ce qui s’ensuit est une dialectique de la violence, action et réaction démoniaques rassemblées dans une terrible unité qui, finalement, devient néant.

Cette violence est absurde puisque aucune notion de valeur ne peut lui être attribuée. Elle vise à transformer les hommes en objets. Sous sa pression la transformation de la forme humaine est abaissée vers les larves, les insectes, la vase sensible de Burroughs. Ce n’ est pas temporel mais spatial, pas historique mais ontologique, partie inévitable du paysage. Cette métaphore de la violence comme paysage serait la définition extrême de l’outrage que Kerkhof exprime dans son film «Enchanté de vous connaître mais, s’il vous plaît, ne me violez pas ». On peut commencer d’apercevoir un tel paysage participer à des scènes Broadway surréalistes faisant partie des Tropics de Miller. On peut aussi voir ce qui en reste, comme la violence nous conduit à la mort dans les espaces vides du roman de Beckett «Endgame ». Sur ce point-là, un renversement de motifs apparaît dans le cinéma silencieux de Kerkhof. Un nouveau terme entre en scène. Parce que, si l’outrage est une métaphore du vide, ne pourrait – il pas servir comme un appel de l’être qui, par conséquent, entraîne son contraire qui est la métaphore de l’apocalypse?

Cette violence apocalyptique peut être perçue par les opprimés comme une rétribution et pas comme une récompense et même le millénaire comme un élément de pouvoir que d’amour. Ainsi le cinéma de Kerkhof serait du côté du refus complet de l’histoire et civilisation occidentales, du côté du refus de l’identité humaine et de la conception de l’homme comme la mesure de tout. L’opposition à l’identité occidentale est un coup plus profond que la répudiation de l’histoire et de la civilisation.

L’opposition à l’identité sert comme un élément de rapprochement des pulsions destructrices et visionnaires des l’apocalypse moderne. Elle prépare le terrain de sa renaissance. C’est maintenant l’apocalypse. Le terme recouvre son sens original qui est littéralement révélation. La vision pénètre les perplexités du moment et les amène à la lumière. Au sens courant, la croyance antinomique est parfois appelée altération de la conscience. C’est l’intention permanente de Kerkhof à travers les harangues apocalyptiques de son film «Enchanté de vous connaître mais, s’il vous plaît, ne me violez pas » et l’objet de parodie du film «Dix monologues de la vie des tueurs en série ». Les deux films extériorisent d’états contrariés d’une perfection impossible à exprimer avec des mots. L’outrage et l’apocalypse sont alors les clés visuelles pour appréhender l’imagination de Kerkhof, les clés visuelles qui contiennent quelque chose de vital et dangereux pour notre expérience. Comme telles, Kerkhof s’en sert pour reconstituer des univers contrariés dans ses films. Il nous laisse seuls avec son monde à lui, un monde dépourvu de vie qu’aucun cataclysme ne pourrait réanimer, voir son film «Le Mort 2 – Le retour de l’Homme Mort ». On est près de l’absence de l’outrage. Et Kerkhof nous offre un monde chaotique au bord de sa transformation, voir « Wasted » ou « Shabondama Elegy ». Nous sommes ses témoins de la rage apocalyptique. Ses univers contrariés partagent le même degré de silence. La langue humaine reste effrayée et sans expression devant ce spectacle.

Si le cinéma de Kerkhof est caractérisé par les métaphores extrêmes de l’outrage et de l’apocalypse, d’autres thèmes parviennent à maintenir le silence à son centre. L’un d’eux serait la notion de la création absurde. « Créer ou pas, ne change rien. Le créateur absurde ne pense pas au prix de son travail. Il peut même le répudier », Camus a dit. Le cinéma de Kerkhof est un jeu absurde. D’une certaine façon, tous ses films peuvent être vus comme une parodie de la théorie de Wittgenstein selon laquelle le langage est un ensemble de jeux. Les parodies de Kerkhof, pleines d’allusions autoréférentielles, constituent une tendance générale de l’anticinématographe. Ce jeu absurde de permutations limitées dans l’espace est très évident aussi dans son premier long métrage «Kyodai passe bien son temps », qui a été couronné de prix importants et qu’il a fait en deuxième année de la Netherlands Film Academy.

Il est facile à comprendre que dans cette culture de la répression sexuelle, la protestation peut contenir l’obscénité comme support. Le cinéma qui se base là est un cinéma révolutionnaire. L’obscénité pourtant est réductrice. Ses notions et ses clichés sont très limités aussi. Quand la colère derrière elle gèle, cette obscénité apparaît comme un jeu de permutations qui se limite en très peu de mots et d’actions. C’est sûrement le sentiment qui ressort de la lecture de Sade : sa manière de protestation est monstrueuse et son résultat n’évolue pas. Si Sade est considéré comme le premier avant-gardiste, il laisse ressortir pourtant une étrange immobilité. Sa violence obscène et répétitive enveloppe le langage. Il a libéré l’esthétique pornographique dans les arts mais il a laissé libre place à Kerkhof pour développer ses parodies de violence sexuelle. Les obsessions excrémentielles de ce dernier s’autoparodient et rejettent toute forme d’amour. Dans le domaine de la parodie et de l’obscénité reconstituée, l’anticinématographe domine. Et la dette de Kerkhof vers Sade se traduit par sa prédilection pour la pornographie anale et snuff.

Mais le cinéma silencieux de Kerkhof rejette également la temporalité du cinéma narratif d’une autre manière différente : il vise le concret qui est impossible. Le nouveau littéralisme provient des compositions concrètes de Stockhausen, des collages de Rauschenberg et de la sculpture de Kurt Schwitters. Il est sous l’influence combinée de Schwitters et d’Apollinaire, de cette forme hybride d’effets verbaux et visuels qui crée des peintures avec des lettres. Tout en étant crue, l’identité humaine ne serait-elle pas reconnue alors dans ces œuvres, comme les anti-héros innommables de Kerkhof et de son film «Enchanté de vous connaître mais, s’il vous plaît, ne me violez pas » ?

Comment cette conclusion affecte-elle le film ? Les principes datés de causalisme, analyse psychologique et relations symboliques, auxquels le cinéma bourgeois s’est figé confortablement, commencent à bouger. Il est ainsi entendu que le cinéaste Kerkhof n’est qu’un expert qui définit les choses telles quelles ou qui entretient leurs images pures. Sans caractère, sans intrigue ni métaphores, dépourvu de sens et sans aucune intention d’intérioriser, l’anticinématographe de Kerkhof aurait le même effet qu’une bobine silencieuse. Les formes rhétoriques du cinéma commercial passent sous silence. Le silence chez Kerkhof resurgit aussi à travers les formes radicales de l’ironie. Le crétois qui avait avancé que tous ses compatriotes étaient des menteurs, sert d’exemple, les machines de Tinguely aussi, elles n’ont d’autre but que de s’autodétruire. L’ironie radicale, d’un autre point de vue, ne repose pas sur un collage d’objets ramassés mais sur une toile vide. La théorie de Heidegger sur «le mystère de l’oubli » suggère un soutien au cinéma de Kerkhof. Ce qui est difficile à distinguer chez Kerkhof et sur son ironie radicale est qu’il dissimule l’agression contre l’art. Il fait l’éloge et la critique de la Muse en même temps. Finalement, son cinéma reflète le silence en acceptant la chance et l’improvisation. Son principe devient l’indétermination. En rejetant l’ordre établi ou trouvé, ses films n’ont aucun but précis. Son univers est celui du présent éternel.

Tous les sujets abordés par Kerkhof, le viol, les tueurs en série, la culture des narcotiques, l’inceste, sont pimentés par son sens personnel de l’outrage et transformés par sa croyance en l’apocalypse. Il aspire à la fin de l’histoire et aimerait faire du cinéma une nouvelle forme d’autobiographie. Son travail serait moins un effort d’enregistrer ou contempler la vie que de bien la vivre, encore et encore. Il est le saint de la répétition. Incapable de résumer toute son existence en l’Art, il appelle à la négation de tous les deux. Il essaie d’être simultanément le premier et le dernier auteur d’anticinéma. Ainsi, ses films sont le jeu inaudible d’un solipsiste. Ce n’est pas une coïncidence que son premier court métrage, tourné en première année à la Netherlands Film Academy, s’appelle «The Solipsist ». Il n’a jamais été un étudiant de cinéma. Il s’est servi de cette école comme une unité de production. Il y est arrivé comme un cinéaste accompli avec un programme et une mission. Aujourd’hui cette mission est réussie. Kerkhof a étendu le cinéma au-delà de ses limites ordinaires et il l’a diminué en néant. La fonction du silence chez Kerkhof est claire. Il a systématiquement exploré les sons morts du silence absolu dans tous ses films, plus spécialement dans «Signal de bruit » et «La séquence des barres parallèles » où leur musique est composée par le bruitiste Merzbow.

En tant qu’idéaliste obscène, satirique et visionnaire, Kerkhof est arrivé à renier non seulement le Monde mais l’Image et la Chair aussi. La preuve, c’est qu’il se mutile seul dans son film «The Solipsist ». Sa volonté serait de priver les hommes de leur corps et de rendre le langage silencieux. Utopiste ou nihiliste, il démontre la passion qui alimente les deux (hommes et langage) avec une forme d’expression qui dépasse les limites acceptées. Ses films nous obligent à reconsidérer les principes traditionnels du cinéma.

Le silence est la métaphore du complexe de rage de la personnalité de Kerkhof. Nous avons envie de nous poser la question : « Qu’est qu’il nous offre quand tout est dit et fait ? » Camus et Nietzsche avant lui savaient bien que la négation est une affirmation de valeur. Kerkhof avait bien financé tout seul le film « Nietzsche Inna Babylon ». L’outrage et l’apocalypse, ce sont les deux faces de la même réalité. Kerkhof souhaiterait que le Silence et l’Amour retrouvent leur lien ancien. Le Silence est sa langue maternelle.

Immanuel STAMMELMAN (traduit par Dionysos ANDRONIS)

Reese Erlich, Chronicle Foreign Service

Tuesday, July 10, 2001

(07-10) 04:00 PDT Tokyo — On alternate Saturdays, Kousaku Hino parks a huge RV in front of the Shinjuku subway station, sets up microphones on the roof and harangues passers- by with acerbic speeches about beefing up the Japanese military.

Hino, who heads a right-wing group called Issui-Kai (”One Water Association”), is riding a new wave of nationalism in Japan that has been fueled in part by the April election of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. The latter’s charisma and perceived leadership qualities appeal strongly to Japanese weary of their country’s colorless political class and its reluctance to buck the influence of the United States.

“Since Koizumi became prime minister, we have gone a step toward becoming a whole nation,” said Hino, a stocky man in his early 30s. “We would like to see Japan lead the world.”

Groups such as Issui-Kai have recently expanded their base among alienated youth and are no longer the domain of grumpy old men. Right-wingers are finding an increasingly younger audience by expressing their views in book- length comic books, motion pictures and even musical lyrics sung by punk rockers with orange hair.

While these groups are still on the political fringe, nationalists are growing in numbers and influence, says Shinichi Arai, a retired professor of contemporary cultures at Tokyo’s Surugadai University who heads a group fighting to stop distribution of a middle-school textbook written by nationalist historians.

“We are feeling the effect of globalization,” said Arai. “It’s not a good economy. So, in response, people turn to nationalism.”

Many are turning to Yoshinori Kobayashi’s cartoon books, which have rocketed to the top of the best-seller charts by glorifying Japan’s role in World War II.

Kobayashi, 47, has a huge following among Japanese youth and has appeared on prominent talk shows to hawk his latest works. “On Taiwan,” for example, says Taiwanese women volunteered to become sexual servants (the so-called “comfort women”) of Japanese soldiers for financial gain and social advancement.

Punk singer Karin Amamiya widely admires Kobayashi’s philosophy of Gomanism,

which roughly translates as being politically provocative. “For me, Gomanism is the bible,” said Amamiya. “I see the value in being obnoxious and playing the devil’s advocate.”

Amamiya, who formed a punk rock group called Revolutionary Truth, performs in a miniskirt with a samurai sword strapped to her waist as she croons tunes such as “Get Japan Out of the U.N.” and “Japan Is Becoming Too Peaceful.” She typifies youth drawn to the extreme right wing, not so much because of ideology but out of alienation from Japan’s regimented society, in the view of sociologists.

In a documentary film about her life called “New God,” she complains that she doesn’t “have a self” as she glorifies the emperor.

In May, Toho Pictures released a movie called Merdeka (”Independence” in Indonesian) that critics say falsely suggests Japan helped liberate Indonesia from Dutch colonizers after World War II. During their three-year occupation, the Japanese subjected the Indonesians to forced labor and sexual servitude, historians say.

And a film that lionizes the mastermind of Japan’s invasion of Asia — convicted war criminal Hideki Tojo — was one of the biggest box office draws of last year.

Although such extreme viewpoints lack organized support, some nationalist issues are being placed on the agenda of mainstream conservative politicians.

Koizumi has called for strengthening the military. Shintaro Ishihara, the conservative governor of Tokyo, is passionate over the issue of crime committed by foreigners and has called for the United States to surrender control of a major air base it maintains in Japan under a bilateral defense treaty.

And the Ministry of Education has approved nationalist interpretations in the new textbook. Consider:

– The text makes no reference to comfort women, a subject that appeared in previous middle-school texts.

– Japan’s colonization of Korea is justified “as necessary for Japanese security.”

– The scale of the Nanjing Massacre, in which Japanese soldiers raped, tortured and murdered more than 300,000 Chinese civilians during a six-week period in 1937-38, is downplayed.

– Japan’s World War II victories are said to have “fostered dreams of independence among many people in Southeast Asia and India.”

Tokushi Kasahara, a history professor at Tsuru University, said the textbook parrots the old military justification for aggression. And far from inspiring anti-colonial struggles, he adds, “Japan intended to retain Asian countries as colonies and never planned to provide independence.”

Kiichi Fujiwara, a professor of international politics at the University of Tokyo, said it is not surprising that a nation would not want students to read embarrassing information that would lessen pride in their own history.

He notes that K-12 history books in the United States don’t detail the U. S. government-sanctioned use of napalm and Agent Orange, and the massacre at My Lai committed by American troops during the Vietnam War.

“The textbook is about Japan as the good guy,” said Fujiwara. And while any nation’s “textbooks can be biased, our case is even more offensive. It’s about the political landscape of Japanese society.”

And that landscape is shifting to the right, according to Arai. While Koizumi has the image of being a dynamic reformer, he is beholden to a right- wing faction within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that shares the revisionist view of World War II, he says.

“Sectors of the LDP get support from a group called Families of War Victims, ” said Arai. “They are a very conservative group that can mobilize 1 million votes for LDP candidates.”

Fujiwara notes that these same conservative LDP politicians — prominent among them former Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto and Koji Omi, the cabinet minister currently responsible for Okinawan affairs — are backed by the U.S. government since they advocate deregulating Japan’s economy.

“These politicians Washington wants to support on economic policy are also the most revolting politically,” said Fujiwara.

Meanwhile, punk rocker Amamiya is working to broaden her appeal. She recently formed a new band that continues to sing praises of the emperor and Japanese rearmament.

“The old group, Revolutionary Truth, sounded too right-wing,” she said. “The new group has a better name — Greater Japanese Terrorism.”

this article first appeared in the san francisco chronicle

ian kerkhof on set directing naar de klote! (wasted!), on his right first assistant, maria uit de haage,