Japanese Studies

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Hi Red Center’s Shelter Plan (1964): The Uncanny

Body in the Imperial Hotel

Taro Nettleton

To cite this article: Taro Nettleton (2014) Hi Red Center’s Shelter�Plan (1964): The Uncanny Body
in the Imperial Hotel, Japanese Studies, 34:1, 83-99, DOI: 10.1080/10371397.2014.886507

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10371397.2014.886507

Published online: 24 Feb 2014.

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Japanese Studies, 2014
Vol. 34, No. 1, 83–99, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10371397.2014.886507

Hi Red Center’s Shelter Plan (1964): The Uncanny

Body in the Imperial Hotel

TARO NETTLETON, Temple University Japan

This essay considers the relationship between the Japanese Fluxus-affiliated collective Hi Red
Center’s performance event Shelter Plan (1964) and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel, in
which the event was staged. In the year of the Tokyo Olympics and the heralding of the end of
the post-war era for Japan, Shelter Plan, which involved the production of tailor-made bomb
shelters, rejected the ideological function of the Tokyo Olympics, and the increasingly repressive
political climate that accompanied it. I argue that Shelter Plan needs to be understood as a site-
specific response to one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s major works. As successor to a lineage of hotels
designed to house Western visitors in Japan, and imagined by Wright as an opportunity to bring
the Japanese ‘off their knees’ and into modernity, the Imperial Hotel was a highly charged site
for addressing the politics of intercultural exchange between Japan and the West.

The recent exhibition ‘Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde’ held between 18

November 2012 and 25 February 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in
New York is an important example of major Western art institutions’ attempts to
expand their definition of modernism to include non-Western art. In this essay, I
consider Shelter Plan, a 1964 event carried out by the Tokyo-based and Fluxus-asso-
ciated group Hi Red Center (HRC) in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel.
Exhibitions such as the one at MoMA and a growing body of English-language literature
have cemented Hi Red Center’s position as one of the most important art groups to
come out of the 1960s in Japan. For example, a giant reproduction of a 1965 Hi Red
Center poster produced by Fluxus was displayed at the entrance of the MoMA exhibi-
tion and the group was also given its own section. Its works, however, remain under-
theorized. In very broad terms, Fluxus is recognized today for taking up such concepts
as Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymades’, Surrealist games, Dadaist anti-expressionism, and
Cagean chance operations to question the very definition of ‘art’ by attempting to
merge, as the historical avant-garde had done, art with life. Although Fluxus organizer
George Maciunas never met the members of Hi Red Center, Shiomi Mieko, a Japanese
Fluxus artist who worked in New York during the 1960s recounts that, based on the
collective’s works, he ‘showed a reverence for them that bordered on worship’.1
The name ‘Hi Red Center,’ which was intended to evoke Marxist associations, is in
fact taken from the English translations of the first character of the family names of its
three primary members, Takamatsu Jir o, Akasegawa Genpei, and Nakanishi Natsuyuki.
Akasegawa introduces Shelter Plan in his T o mikisa keikaku (1994), a chronicle of the
oky
group’s activities, as follows:

Shiomi, ‘Furukusasu towa nanika?’, 12. All translations of Japanese text are the author’s own.
1

© 2014 Japanese Studies Association of Australia

84 Taro Nettleton

The Body within the Imperial Hotel (Shelter Plan)

Believe it or not, between 1/26–27, 1964, HRC stayed in what might now be
called the first edition of the renowned Imperial Hotel, the hotel designed once
upon a time by the Western architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, which remained
unscathed by the Great Kanto Earthquake.2

Among his other works, Akasegawa’s Morphology of Revenge, which entailed the artist
making models of a ¥1,000 note, has been examined rigorously by critics Reiko Tomii
and William Marotti.3 Hi Red Center’s Cleaning Event is frequently, but usually briefly
mentioned as a response to the clean-up of the city carried out in preparation for the
Tokyo Olympics. Their other works, however, have not received adequate attention.
This is perhaps because the ‘meaningfulness’ of an event like Shelter Plan is less obvious
when compared to the reproduction of a banknote in Morphology of Revenge or the
exaggerated public display of Cleaning Event. The monumental From Postwar to
Postmodern Art in Japan: 1945–1989, a collection of primary documents published in
2012 by the Museum of Modern Art, is unfortunately no exception in this regard. In the
introduction to the section focusing on artists’ collectives in postwar Japan, the volume’s
editor and associate curator at MoMA, Doryung Chong, writes that Shelter Plan ‘is
remembered today as one of the most important events in the history of postwar
Japanese avant-garde’,4 without any further elaboration.
I suspect that Fluxus’ characterization of Hi Red Center is one reason that most of Hi
Red Center’s works remain critically ignored in the West. Shigeko Kubota, a fellow
Japanese Fluxus artist, described the Shelter Plan event in an English version of HRC’s
catalogue raisonné (printed by New York Fluxus in 1969) as follows:

In room 340 visitors:

(a) had their ¥1000 stamped with Hi Red Center symbol,

(b) name, address, sex, bag size, capacity, contents and fingerprint was registered on a
card,
(c) photos of front, back, sides, top, and bottom were taken of each visitor,
(d) body of each visitor was measured, weighed, and outline drawn,
(e) volume measure of each visitor by immersion into a bathtub filled with water… 5

The final products of this event were to be personalized bomb shelters, covered on all
sides by life-size photographic images of the visitors’ bodies and having the exact
measurements, volume, and weight of the visitor. While Shelter Plan effectively put
HRC on the Fluxus map and, in turn, into the history of an international neo-avant-
garde art movement, Kubota’s English account of the event elides the social, cultural,
historical and political context, and hence diminishes the strength of the piece as the
result of a mistranslation. In it, all references to ‘shelter’, which only exists in the
a, have been inexplicably replaced with the word ‘box’. In the official
Japanese as sherut
English Fluxus account, this event was called the Human Box Event. Through this
mistranslation, the event was emptied of all historical references and political nuances,
which in my estimation are what make the work worth consideration.

2
Akasegawa, T o mikisa keikaku, 177.
oky
3
See Tomii, ‘State v. (Anti-)Art’, and Marotti, ‘Simulacra and Subversion in the Everyday’.
4
Chong, et al., From Postwar to Postmodern, 160.
5
Hendricks, Fluxus Codex, 266.
 Hi Red Center’s Shelter Plan (1964) 85

This great loss might be recuperated by opening up the box that Shelter Plan became.
A similar blindness to cultural specificity exemplified in the ‘mistranslation’ of shelter to
human box, is entailed in the re-staging of Shelter Plan as Hotel Event, and Cleaning Event
as Street Cleaning Event, in New York City in the Waldorf Astoria and at Grand Army
Plaza respectively. By ignoring the specific site and socio-historical context of the pieces
and simply replicating the acts in New York City, the Fluxus group reduced Shelter Plan
and Cleaning Event to a performance of absurdity. Such an excision of cultural contexts
may be characteristic of Fluxus and its post-national approach to artworks, but it
nevertheless exacerbates the lack of serious English-language discourse regarding Hi
Red Center’s works. As I will demonstrate, Shelter Plan is a deceptively simple perfor-
mance piece, and an important work that responds to Wright’s Imperial Hotel, func-
tioning as a mnemonic device that counters Japan’s collective and state-promoted
amnesia regarding World War II, and as a critique of the general, hegemonic wave of
conservatism that accompanied preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games.
The Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, which ended in 1963, a year before the
Olympic Games and the staging of Hi Red Center’s Shelter Event, was the main
exhibition venue for avant-garde artists in Japan, who had virtually no contemporary
art collectors or galleries at the time. The art movement Anti-Art, a term first used by
critic Tono Yoshiaki in regards to Kud o Tetsumi’s Proliferating Chain Reaction (shown
in the 1960 Yomiuri Independent Exhibition), was defined by its incorporation of non-
art or ‘junk’ materials. The use of junk in Anti-Art works and of mass-produced items
such as clothespins in Nakanishi Natsuyuki’s Clothespins Assert Churning Action (shown
in the 1963 Yomiuri Independent Exhibition) symbolized art’s ‘descent into the every-
day’, a phrase used by critic Miyakawa Atsushi to theorize Anti-Art, and was arguably
the most radical and most enduring aspect of the avant-garde art of the period.6
Clothespins Assert Churning Action also entailed a performance in which Nakanishi
covered his head with clothespins and walked around the streets of Oimachi, thereby
bringing art out of the exhibition space and into the city, physically penetrating the
boundary distinguishing art and the everyday.
Taking its cue from such attempts to eliminate the boundary between art and life, Hi Red
Center’s most notable works were performed in public space in front of an unsuspecting
audience. For example, on 18 October 1962 the group staged the Yamanote Line Incident, in
which Nakanishi, wearing a suit with his face painted white, performed with an egg-shaped
‘compact objet’ or portable sculpture, and Takamatsu carried a rope-shaped objet on the
platform and inside a train car of the Yamanote Line (the primary line of the Japan National
Railroad, running in a circle around Tokyo’s center). And on 16 October 1964 the group
and its collaborators dressed in white lab coats and masks and carefully scrubbed the streets
of Ginza with dishwashing detergent for the Cleaning Event. In this regard, Shelter Plan is
anomalous, for it was performed in the semi-private space of a prestigious hotel room to a
knowing audience of artists and critics.
Still, Shelter Plan is typical of Hi Red Center’s oeuvre in cutting through the
ideological motivations driving contemporary events and trends. Cleaning Event, for
example, was carried out during the Tokyo Olympic Games, which had opened less
than a week prior on 10 October. The performance functioned as a critique of the
fervor with which the state had cleansed the streets of Tokyo, not only of trash and
debris but also of unwanted citizens such as the homeless and shis oteki henshitsusha or
‘thought perverts’, in an effort, which many described as ‘war-like’, to present Japan

Miyakawa, ‘Anti-Art’.
6
86 Taro Nettleton

to foreign visitors in the best light possible. Three stories on a page from the 5
March 1964 edition of the Asahi shimbun shed light on the mood of the period. One
story reports that a Korean settlement on the grounds of the Sens oji Temple in
Asakusa has been scheduled for removal. Another reports that an organization of
private junior high and high school students will donate seven million yen, collected
from the students’ New Year’s gift money, to the Tokyo Olympic Games fund. The
third notes that efforts to clean up Shinjuku are being intensified in preparation for
the Olympics. It should also be borne in mind that, while photographs of Cleaning
Event may now appear humorous because of the performers’ exaggerated actions and
costumes, in 1963 and 1964 citizens volunteering to clean the city were a common
sight.
Akasegawa’s opening remarks in 1994 regarding Shelter Plan did nothing to describe
the actual actions involved in the event, but they do establish the scene. He thereby
underscored the importance of the Imperial Hotel as a specific site for the event. His
phrase ‘once upon a time’ wryly references the fact that the Imperial had become
antiquated by 1964, when Shelter Plan took place. In a book published in 1968, Cary
James writes of the building’s demise:

The last 20 years saw the building crumble at an accelerating pace. The
reasons for this are numerous. The face of the hotel was disfigured by the
collapse of the soft stone on the industrial atmosphere of modern Tokyo.
Structural sag and cracking were produced when a new subway was con-
structed beneath one of the bedroom wings. A management no longer sensitive
to the building added airconditioing [sic] and extra electrical equipment, and
remodeled parts of the building, all in a heavy-handed manner. With travelers
accustomed to the bright, wide spaces of newer hotels, the actual design
became unpopular.7

Moreover, as longtime Imperial Hotel employee Inumaru Taichir o noted, with the devel-
opment of six new major hotels, including the Hotel Okura and New Otani between 1960
and 1965, the Tokyo Olympic Games brought not only economic growth to Japan but also a
competitive era for hotels in Tokyo.8 The city was transforming radically in the first half of
the 1960s. In preparation for the Olympics, the Japanese government devoted the majority
of its expenditures to improve transportation infrastructure and the efficiency with which
bodies could move through space. The bullet train and various freeways were developed
toward this end. These as well as modernist architectural works such as Tange Kenz o’s
Yoyogi National Gymnasium became symbols of the New Tokyo, which emerged from the
ashes of World War II in less than two decades.9
The Imperial Hotel was designed, according to architectural historian Kevin Nute, as
a successor, in function if not in form, to the Rokumeikan10. Built by Josiah Conder in
1883 for the Japanese Foreign Ministry, the Rokumeikan was used to ‘entertain foreign

7
James, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel, preface.
8
Inumaru, Teikoku hoteru kara mita gendaishi, 151.
9
The violence entailed in the clearing performed to build this New Tokyo is seen in the dramatic and
famous shot of a wrecking ball in the opening sequence of Ichikawa Kon’s Tokyo Olympiad (1965).
Alternately, Suzuki Seijun’s Tokyo Drifter (1966) opens by contrasting the seedy docks populated by
yakuza against the symbols of New Tokyo described above.
10
Nute, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, 155–6.
 Hi Red Center’s Shelter Plan (1964) 87

officials’ and ‘demonstrate Japan’s modernity’.11 The building was paradigmatic of the
Meiji era and its importation of Western culture. Designed as an ‘assembly room where
wealthy aristocratic Japanese could mix socially with foreign residents and guests’, its
critics saw it as a ‘symbol of government pandering to the West’.12 Wright wrote of the
relation between the two buildings:

The foreigner with the advent of Commodore Perry came to share Japanese
joys and sorrows, and soon a building was needed to share the foreign element
of Tokio, the capital of Japan… the Mikado… asked the Germans to build one
of their characteristic national wood and plaster extravaganza for the purpose.
That wretched marvel grew obsolete and the need of another, a great one,
imperative… and I, an American, was chosen to do the work.13

Like the Rokumeikan, the Imperial Hotel was designed to serve foreign visitors and
function as a space for communication between Westerners and upper-class Japanese.
As ‘homes away from home’ for Western visitors, both the Rokumeikan and the
Imperial Hotel were built to provide foreigners a sense of familiarity in an otherwise
foreign land. Between 1945 and 1952, the Imperial Hotel was occupied by the Allied
Forces and used as housing by high-ranking officers.
As critic David B. Stewart explains, the lineage of hotels beginning with the Tsukiji
Hotel (erected 1868), followed by the Rokumeikan (erected 1883), and finally the
Imperial Hotel, shared a common philosophy: ‘the theory [they] embodied was that
foreigners were to be segregated for the sake of their own comfort and to the mutual
benefit, as the government professed, for all’.14 In a sense, by providing a homely
atmosphere to its European and American guests, the Imperial Hotel offered itself as
a shelter, a protective shield against the ‘foreign’ world outside.
While the quotation from Wright above shows that he took great pride in being put in
charge of the project, there is ambivalence here, for Wright intended his architectural
works to be much more than a box or shelter. His aim was to articulate a complex and
organic unity. The stone surface of the Imperial was covered in intricately patterned
Mayan revivalist ornamentation. These intricate surfaces were matched by the complex-
ity of the interior space, in which different sections of the hotel flowed into and
interlocked with each other. As Cary James describes it,

The flow of space slows and alters, and spreads out from this lobby in many
interlocking layers, to sitting corners, into many-windowed lounges, onto the
bright clerestoried dining room, and into corridors lined with glass doors that
look out to central gardens, corridors which lead to the bedroom wings, or
farther into the building.15

The lineage of the building, and not least its exclusive use in the postwar period by the
Allied Forces, emphasize its role as a kind of shield. And the shielding of the inside
against the outside is crucial for understanding the way in which Wright constructed his
persona as sui generis genius through the disavowal of exterior influences. Hi Red
11
Finn, Meiji Revisited, 97.
12
Ibid., 98.
13
James, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel, 36.
14
Stewart, The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture, 78.
15
James, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel, 15.
88 Taro Nettleton

Center’s insertion of the concept of the bomb shelter, a simple and wholly utilitarian
structure designed without aesthetic consideration, highlights the tension between
Wright’s architectural ambitions and the history and use of the Imperial.
As with many performance pieces, film and photographic documentation are the
primary visual materials that remain from Shelter Plan. The 16mm film document of
the event made by experimental filmmaker J onouchi Motoharu shows men, including
video art pioneer Nam June Paik and graphic designer-turned-painter Yokoo Tadanori,
and women, including Yoko Ono, in a stark setting. A backdrop is visible on the wall,
and the participants stand quite rigidly, heels together and toes apart, with serious
expressions on their faces, their dark hair and formal dress creating a stark contrast
against the whiteness of the backdrop. They are carefully measured by men wearing
suits – presumably members of HRC. One can infer that HRC had intended for the
participants to be undressed, because as the participants are photographed, they are
framed on either side by life-sized photographs of HRC members’ naked backsides.
After being photographed against the wall, as one would be for a mug shot, the
participants are instructed to lie on the bed, and photographed again, once with their
feet and once with their head pointed towards the foot of the bed. Six photographic sides
(four sides and photographs of the top of the head and the bottom of their feet) are
produced in this manner for each participant.
Nam June Paik recalls that the extensive measurements taken of the visitors were
similar to ‘things you would be forced to do if you were under police arrest’.16 In this
English-language account, Paik refers to the piece by its proper title, ‘Shelter Plan’, and
not ‘Box Event’. Not only does Paik reintroduce for English reading audiences the
concept of the ‘shelter’ entailed in the event, but he also underscores its disciplinary
quality. Detailed surveillance of one’s body is usually something one is subjected to
against one’s will by those in power – whether police, prison wardens, or military health
inspectors – to collect detailed data of the body in order to exert control over it.
In 1964 in Japan, the image of the disciplined body would have resonated with more
recent occurrences as well as national developments in the late nineteenth century, ones
which were accompanied by intensified surveillance of the body. Both Sabine Frühstück
and Yoshikuni Igarashi have argued that the normalization of bodies through medical
inspection played an important role in prewar and postwar Japanese culture, albeit
towards quite different ends. Frühstück points out that since the late nineteenth century,
‘the quantification and classification of the population’s physical condition was consid-
ered one of the most important tasks in establishing a modern nation whose main
characteristics were declared to be a prosperous economy and a potent military’,17
and that a ‘rather direct connection [was] made by military personnel between the
physical fitness of individual men and the national goal of building a strong imperial
military’.18 Fifty years later, American authorities used similar methods to ‘correct’ the
disaster that was Japan’s transformation into an ultranationalist colonial power. As
Igarashi notes,

Bodies were soon subjugated to a new American medical discourse that sought
their normalization. It was not nationalistic jingoism but the concept of
democracy that the American authorities sought to instill in Japanese bodies

Paik, ‘To Catch Up’, 80.

16
17
Frühstück, Colonizing Sex, 21.
18
Ibid., 28.
 Hi Red Center’s Shelter Plan (1964) 89

through their normalization and sanitization. As displaced objects of nation-

hood, these bodies were feminized, cleansed, normalized, and democratized by
the victors’ hands.19

The intensified surveillance of Japanese bodies peaks during two transformative periods
for Japan, the first being its development into a modern Westernized nation-state, and
the second its shift to become a docile, democratic, first-world nation. These two
periods both point – one as a foreshadowing, and the other regressively as a memory
to be tamed and forgotten – to the disastrous apex of World War II, which ended with
the horrifying ravaging of Japanese bodies by thermonuclear bombing in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. The body mapped by medical scrutiny thus comes to metonymically serve as
a barometer of the nation’s wellbeing. As Igarashi goes on to state, ‘GHQ posited ailing
Japanese bodies suffering from malnutrition and infectious diseases as a threat to its
program of democratizing the Japanese’.20
Situated in this context of the historical alignment of Japanese bodies and the nation-
state, HRC’s parodic reenactment of intensive physical examinations in Shelter Plan can
be read as response to the drastic shift in the national image of Japan, which was tied to
the physical health of its citizens. More than any other event, the opportunity for Tokyo
to host the 1964 Summer Olympic Games, the premier stage for showcasing both
physical and national fitness, symbolized economic success and the end of the recovery
period for Japan. Although Nakano Yoshio famously declared, in 1956, that ‘we are no
longer in the postwar period’21 and the sentiment was repeated in the Japanese
Government’s Economic White Paper that year, it was the 1964 Olympic Games
which occasioned the construction and unveiling of a ‘new Tokyo’ to represent the
veritable rebirth of Japan.22 In April 1964, six months prior to the opening of the
Summer Olympic Games, the Ministry of Health and Welfare declared that it would
promote the purification of the nation in conjunction with a gymnastics exercise routine
and that it hoped the exercise routine would spread nationwide.23
That the scrutinized body was a key concern to Hi Red Center can be seen not only in
Shelter Plan, but also in Cleaning Event. One of Hirata Minoru’s photographs of the
event shows one collaborator in a white lab coat clipping the nose hairs of another
similarly dressed collaborator in front of the office of a newspaper company.24
Moreover, that this kind of scrutiny was intended to evoke a sense of surveillance and
control is underscored by Akasegawa’s later explanation that the Imperial Hotel’s
manager had forced his way into their room to inspect it on the first day of the
performance.25 If the largest share of the Olympic Games preparation was spent on
the development of transportation systems, such as the bullet train and the freeways, the
second largest allotment from that budget was given over to the improvement of sewer
systems, an endeavor that was pursued in tandem with the removal of the ‘unsightly’
homeless population from areas of the city that were most likely to be visited by
19
Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 48.
20
Ibid., 65.
21
Nakano, ‘Mohaya sengo de wa nai’.
22
This included the development of infrastructure such as Tokyo’s metropolitan highway network and
Tokaid o’s Yoyogi
o Shinkansen bullet train, as well as architectural landmarks such as Tange Kenz
National Stadium.
23
Sakurai, Shiso to shite no 60 nendai, 28.
24
Hirata, Art in Action, 43.
25
Akasegawa, T okyo mikisa keikaku, 200.
90 Taro Nettleton

foreigners.26 It is not difficult to imagine that members of the Hi Red Center and their
milieu recognized that they were a part of the unsightliness represented by the uncon-
tained sewage and the homeless men and women. Akasegawa notes that they probably
drew suspicion from the hotel staff because they had too many visitors and because their
neckties were tied awkwardly.27 Bordering on tongue-in-cheek paranoia, this statement
again attests to the scrutiny that the artists experienced at this time and the feeling that
the slightest aberration from the norm would draw unwanted attention.
Writing in 1937, Frank Lloyd Wright explained that he hoped the Imperial Hotel
would ‘help Japan make the transition from wood to masonry, and from her knees to her
feet’.28 In so doing, he makes an explicit connection between architecture, body com-
portment, and the Japanese nation. For Wright, bodies do not simply occupy spaces;
space has the power to inform and inscribe the bodies that inhabit it. Moreover, his
statement reveals his belief that modernity prescribes specific ways to carry one’s body
and that the development of both architecture and bodily comportment progress in a
linear fashion. Using wood for construction is thus similar to sitting on one’s knees in a
common primitivism and proximity to nature. The space of the Imperial Hotel was thus
articulated in an appropriately complex manner.
As in many of Wright’s texts, his condescension – in this case to the Japanese – is
explicit, despite his praise of ‘her’ culture. He writes: ‘I meant to show them how to use
our new civilizing-agents – call them plumbing, electrification, and heating – without
such outrage to the art of building as we ourselves were practicing and they were
copying.’29 Thus while a Western ‘we’ may be using these ‘civilizing agents’ wrongly,
the Japanese nevertheless need to be civilized through the use of ‘our’ technological
advancements, which were to be articulated architecturally in the Imperial Hotel. While
Wright recognized the immense influence space could exert on bodies, he rejected the
possibility that bodies could have a reciprocal relation to space.
Just as bodies need to be considered spatially, space too must be conceived as
embodied and enacted, for space acquires meaning through use. For Wright, however,
the notion that any body not belonging to the architect could have an influence on his
buildings was absolutely impermissible. In particular, Wright adamantly resisted the
idea that Japanese culture directly influenced his works. It is difficult not to draw a
connection between the emphasis on the body in both Akasegawa’s title for the section
on Shelter Plan (‘The Physical Body in the Imperial Hotel’) and the intensive documen-
tation of bodies in the actual performance of the work, and Wright’s refusal to acknowl-
edge the reciprocal relation between building/space and the bodies in it.
As architecture critic Kevin Nute has noted in his excellent and informative study
Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, many critics and close associates of Wright saw the
Japanese influence on his work, despite his repudiation of any direct influence.30 Wright
could not accept the idea that he could be influenced by Japanese culture because he
considered himself a wholly original artistic genius. Nevertheless, it would serve us well
to consider (against Wright’s wishes) the constitutive role that Japanese culture and art
played in his oeuvre. In spite of his repeated attempts to repress and extinguish ‘rumors’
of Japanese influence, they returned to haunt him throughout his life from the first major
publication on his work, and were not silenced by his death. In fact, the literature on the
26
Seidensticker, Tokyo Rising, 228–235.
27
Akasegawa, T o mikisa keikaku, 200.
oky
28
Wright, ‘The Imperial Hotel’, 199.
29
Ibid.
30
Nute, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, 2.
 Hi Red Center’s Shelter Plan (1964) 91

Japanese influence on Wright’s oeuvre proliferated after his death, perhaps for the
simple reason that the architect was no longer around to defend himself.
Wright’s relentless battle against what critics saw as an increasingly apparent influence
of Japanese aesthetics in his architecture can be read as a resistance to penetration by
outside influence and a disavowal of the presence of an ‘other’ within him. While Wright
admitted that he admired and found a confirmation of his own ideals in Japanese
aesthetics, it was the presence of an identifiable influence manifesting itself in a specific
and material body that he objected to most fervently. When Charles Ashbee wrote, ‘the
Japanese influence is very clear. He is obviously trying to adapt Japanese forms to the
United States, even though the artist denies it and the influence must be unconscious’,31
Wright responded by insisting that ‘my work is original not only in fact but in spiritual
fiber. No practice by any European architect to this day has influenced mine in the least.
As for the Incas, the Mayans, even the Japanese – all were to me but splendid con-
firmation’.32 At the very least, the qualification ‘even’ works against Wright to register a
certain difference that ‘Japan’ holds for him. In fact, in his statement, we see a hier-
archical order of influence, at the bottom of which are ‘European architects’.
I suspect that what Wright finds most objectionable in Ashbee’s commentary is the
word adapting. In his objection, we see an attempt to delineate a strict boundary
between body and mind. For Wright, his architecture was the product of pure thought.
Thus the assertion that any pre-existing physical manifestation would inform his work
was utterly unacceptable to him. Wright could not accept the idea that he was borrowing
physical elements from elsewhere to insert them into his own architectural ‘grammar’.
As Hata Shinji points out, however, Wright’s very signature, a red cross used at the
beginning of his days as an independent architect in Chicago, was borrowed from the
Japanese Shimazu family crest, which he ‘saw at the Japanese pavilion of the 1893 World
Fair in Chicago’.33 By positioning other cultures as mere ‘confirmation’ of his own
artistic expression, Wright attempted to contain them safely as affinities, disavowing
both the otherness of the other and the otherness that constitutes the self.
Wright considered his architectural grammar to be an entirely closed system, which
should be read as a projection of his desire to construct himself as a seamless whole.
While it may be true that ‘no other architect proposed the interconnection between the
interior setting and the environment more insistently than Frank Lloyd Wright’,34 his
phobic response to penetration by Japanese influence and the fervor with which he
protected the integrity of his art from evidence of outside influences trouble his con-
ception of organic unity.
According to architectural theorist David Leatherbarrow, Wright’s concept of organic
unity is most clearly expressed in his understanding of the wall not as a protective barrier
but as a screen which the outside and inside traverse. Wright fought against the treat-
ment of a building’s interior space as mere byproduct of its walls, as if it were a box, and
aimed to ‘break the box’. Yet, Wright’s deliberate closing of the boundaries of his work
suggests that this becoming-screen of the wall was not about permeability to the outside
environment as much as it was about extending his control to the outside environment,
in effect colonizing it as a part of the architectural design. The horizontal expanse of the
Imperial Hotel symbolizes this desire for extended control. Wright similarly understood

31
Ashbee cited in ibid., 3.
32
Wright cited in ibid., 4.
33
Hata, Furanku Roido Raito, 30.
34
Leatherbarrow, ‘Sitting in the City’, 270.
92 Taro Nettleton

himself to be a project that could be built and extended. Wright’s autobiography, and
the fact that his accounts of his travels to Japan are filled with strategic forgetfulness and
lapses in specific dates,35 suggest that he viewed himself as a myth under construction.
By constructing a unified architectural grammar, Wright attempted to articulate a
sense of homeliness through his oeuvre. The presence of a foreign body, within himself
and his oeuvre (between which I am suggesting he saw very little difference), would
dismantle the singularity of the grammar which he worked passionately to achieve, by
exposing the origins of his aesthetic vision and his subjectivity, which were, in truth,
multiple. This alien presence is precisely what Hi Red Center’s Shelter Plan stages in the
Imperial.
Wright’s enthusiasm for Japanese woodblock prints worked against his self-mytholo-
gization as a wholly unique talent. His ‘career as a dealer [of Japanese prints] at one time
rivaled that as an architect’,36 and the two roles increasingly became inseparable. In
1908, Wright organized an exhibition of Japanese prints at the Art Institute of Chicago.
He frequently traveled to Japan professionally as a buyer for other collectors, and it was
his firmly established role within the world of Japanese print collectors, as much as his
architectural achievements, which brought him the opportunity to design the Imperial
Hotel in Tokyo. As Nute writes, it was the art collector ‘[Frederick] Gookin [who]
learned […] that the hotel owners were seeking an architect for a new building and
proposed his fellow print-collector Wright, apparently on the grounds that he was one of
the few Western architects with the necessary sensitivity to Japanese aesthetic ideals’.37
On the other hand, Wright also ‘trad[ed] on his reputation as a famous architect’ and
was ‘conspicuous as an aggressive dealer in ukiyo-e prints from his first voyage to Japan
in 1905 until around 1922, immediately following the completion of his work on the
Imperial Hotel in Tokyo’.38 His passion for Japanese prints was driven as much by
financial as aesthetic interest, and ‘the income from print sales allowed him to remain a
visionary as an architect’.39 Although his claim that his architecture was free of influence
means, among other things, that he believed his architectural practice to be impervious
to his activities as art dealer, the inextricable connection between the two suggests
otherwise.
In typical Orientalist fashion, Wright’s fetishization of Japanese prints blinded him to
Japan’s present. In Tokyo, he saw either a confirmation of what he valued in the prints
or the absence of these same values, but never what was actually there.40 In an important
sense, Hi Red Center’s Shelter Plan inserts the body of the ‘other’ inside the Imperial. By
inserting not only indexical signs of Japanese bodies through the photographic prints of
the naked Hi Red Center members posted on the wall of the room during the perfor-
mance, but also actual live Japanese bodies into the Imperial Hotel, and emphasizing
their physicality through their extensive measuring, Shelter Plan underscores the sheer
physicality of the Japanese body against the anesthetized world of the prints which
fascinated Wright. The focus on the Japanese body is particularly notable in light of

35
Nute, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, 144–163.
36
Meech, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan, 14.
37
Nute, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, 152.
38
Meech, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan, 21.
39
Ibid.
40
It is worth noting in this respect that Antonin Raymond, Wright’s assistant in building the Imperial
Hotel, left his position because he found Wright’s ‘grammar’ irrelevant to Japan. See Nute, Frank Lloyd
Wright and Japan, 154.
 Hi Red Center’s Shelter Plan (1964) 93

the fact that for the duration of the Allied Forces’ annexation of the Imperial Hotel
between 1945 and 1952 it was closed off to Japanese guests.
During his sojourn in Japan, Wright could not rid his thoughts of the possibility of an
earthquake. It alone seems to have carried an undeniable reality, which threatened to
rupture the screen of his fetishized image of Japan. That Wright found earthquakes
traumatic is revealed vividly in his autobiographical account. Regarding the time he
spent in Japan planning the Imperial Hotel, he writes, ‘The terror of the temblor never
left me while I planned the building, nor while, for more than four years, I worked upon
it. Nor is anyone allowed to forget it… A sense of the bottom falling from beneath the
building… There may be more awful threat to human happiness than earthquake. I do
not know what it can be.’41 The earthquake functioned precisely to turn (the image of)
Japan, which was presumably familiar to Wright, into that which was uncanny and
dangerous to the integrity of his ego. The threat to his ego was no doubt also caused
by the likelihood of critics reading a Japanese influence in his work, which would be
difficult to deny after taking on a project like the Imperial Hotel that entailed a
prolonged stay in Japan. The occasion to build the Imperial Hotel can thus be said to
enact a haunting return of Japanese influence, which Wright long strived to repress. The
bottom threatened to fall out, then, not only of the building, but also of the grounds
upon which he constructed his originality and autonomy as a unique artistic genius.
Beyond Akasegawa’s account in his book T o mikisa keikaku and J
oky onouchi’s filmic
document, the most frequently reproduced visual artifacts from Shelter Plan are the
photographs, which were taken to create the personally tailored shelters. Akasegawa
notes that the shelters could be ordered in four different sizes ranging from life-size to
one-tenth of life-size, but that they were expensive, and implies that no one may have
purchased a life-sized shelter.42 He also notes that the collection of data for the shelters
was the most important aspect of the piece.43 As noted previously, the photographic
documentation of each participant comprised six different shots (front, back, left and
right profiles, top of head and bottom of feet). These images are invariably displayed
from left to right starting with the right profile image, frontal view, left profile, and back,
with top of head and bottom of feet attached to the top and bottom of the frontal view
image. The resulting pieces are portraits that show the body that is split through
repetition. The images show the photographic subject quadrupled, with each profile
looking at the self in the frontal view. Despite the extensive and invasive measurement,
which connotes a desire to define and fix the measured object, in these photographic
documents, suspended as they await assemblage into a shelter, the body is opened,
multiplied, and dispersed. This portrayal of the body and the subject paints a strong
contrast to Wright’s insistence on the impermeability of his personhood.
As Akasegawa implies in his introduction to the Shelter Plan event, the Imperial Hotel
became identified with the very thing that Wright feared most, an earthquake. Its
resilience in the face of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 is its most memorable
and renowned trait. While some of the building’s critics assert that the structure of the
hotel, in which Wright took great pride, was not unique, and that its survival of the
earthquake was largely a matter of fortuity, the very fact of its survival has tended to
define the building to the point of eclipsing its aesthetic achievements. This stripping
down of an incredibly ornate architecture to its bare utility resonates with the bomb

41
Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright, 214.
42
Akasegawa, T o mikisa keikaku, 196.
oky
43
Akasegawa, Objet o motta musansha, 22.
94 Taro Nettleton

shelter. As Nakanishi Natsuyuki stated in reference to Shelter Plan in court during

Akasegawa’s trial for currency fraud, ‘[the Imperial Hotel] is consistent throughout.
Each [room] is a shelter and the hotel is also a shelter’.44 Arguably, the discourse that
surrounds the Imperial Hotel has the effect of transforming the Imperial Hotel into
something not unlike an earthquake shelter. In doing so, the Imperial Hotel becomes
the very thing that Wright fought against throughout his career: ‘architecture as box’.
Moreover, it was ‘architecture as box’ that dominated the architecture of postwar Japan,
particularly in the 1960s, with Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato’s focus on economic
growth. Above all, the Japanese state prioritized economic efficiency and rationalization.
One product of this focus was vertical architectural development. Photographs of the
time show the Imperial surrounded by high-rise buildings, which highlight the glaring
horizontality of the Imperial. Such horizontal development had become out of the
question with the increase of real estate values in Tokyo.
The staging of the Shelter Plan, which placed the Japanese body within the Imperial
Hotel only to construct another kind of shelter inside it, can be read as producing an
unheimlichkeit, or uncanny effect. As Sigmund Freud notes in his essay on the uncanny,
doubling is central to the concept of the uncanny. For Freud, however, much more
important to the creation of an uncanny effect is a harking back to the moment of
repression. What is most uncanny, therefore, is the revealing of ‘something which ought
to have remained hidden but has come to light’.45 As I have argued, Shelter Plan’s focus
on the physical body of its Japanese participants serves as a counterpoint to Wright’s
disavowal of Japanese influence and the exclusion of Japanese guests from the hotel in
the postwar period.
While Wright professed inability to imagine ‘any more awful threat to human happi-
ness’ than an earthquake, and was extremely proud of the Imperial Hotel’s survival of
the Great Kanto Earthquake, in 1964, when Shelter Plan was realized, the tragic thermo-
nuclear bombings of August 1945 were a much more recent tragedy and would have
represented a new category of disaster from which the Imperial Hotel would likely not
offer adequate protection. The Shelter Plan therefore answers, parodically and exces-
sively, a new need that arose out of the birth and use of thermonuclear war technology
by the US on Japan.
As for Akasegawa’s account, he subtly emphasizes the irony implicit in the American
Cold War paranoia and its obsession with bomb shelters, given that the bombs from
which the shelters would provide protection were of the type that had only ever been
dropped by the United States and only on Japan, where private shelters never spread.46
At the outset of Akasegawa’s chapter on Shelter Plan, he describes the invitation that was
sent out to the event’s participants, noting that it was signed by the ‘Shelter Plan
manager, Hi Red Center’, adding that at this point, ‘Hi Red Center has taken on a
persona’, and that this persona is ‘like that of a foreigner’.47 The same joke recurs in the
caption underneath a reproduction of HRC’s business card. Since the ‘foreigner’ (gaijin)
in Japan is popularly understood as Euro-American and white, Akasegawa’s insistence
on characterizing the Shelter Plan manager as ‘foreign’ creates an implicit link between

44
Nakanishi, ‘Sen’ensatsu saiban’, 220.
45
Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 241.
46
I am aware that the threat of nuclear war at this time in the US would have come from the Soviet
Union. However, even in hindsight, the US is still the only nation in the world to have used nuclear
bombs, and Japan is still the only nation to have experienced this type of warfare.
47
Akasegawa, Tokyo mikisa keikaku, 181.
 Hi Red Center’s Shelter Plan (1964) 95

shelters and the US. Going on to explain the term ‘shelter’, he makes the connection
explicit. ‘A shelter’, he writes,

is like a protective dome… it refers to air raid shelters, built for nuclear wars,
that had become popular in America at the time. In America, an industry had
developed to create these shelters for private homes. Recently, it is said that
shelters are also secretly becoming popular among the upper class in Japan as a
result of high economic growth.48

The shelter was therefore presumably a largely unknown phenomenon among Japanese
readers, even in 1984, when the text was written.
The ‘foreigner’ building a shelter with little or no openings around himself closely
echoes the ways in which Wright attempted to secure himself from the legibility of
influences. At the same time, the creation of shelters within the space of the Imperial
Hotel (itself a Western import) suggests a wry and chilling commentary on the importa-
tion of Western cultural artifacts and scientific know-how, for the atomic bomb was the
final stage of the importation of Western rationality and scientific technology. After all,
the US believed that American reason would tame Japan’s fascism, which it saw as
irrational. Shelter Plan’s allusion to World War II is never explicitly stated. However,
some clues are given. Most importantly perhaps, Akasegawa’s account of it is replete
with jokes regarding war responsibility. For example, in listing the participants in the
event he writes: ‘And Takamatsu Jir o, as I recall, excused himself by saying something
like “well, it’s not a good time…”. Well, I’m not really interested in pursuing such
things as if they were war responsibilities.’ And again on the following page:

It’s true, Hi Red Center stayed at the Imperial Hotel. If you don’t believe us,
look at the receipt. See? A twin room for 7,000 yen… Actually I believe I paid
most of this, and I suspect that to this day Yoshizumi has not repaid me… well,
let us not bring up such issues, as if I was trying to establish war
responsibility.49

Although Akasegawa makes no mention of it, it is certainly no coincidence that the

Imperial Hotel, which he selected as the site for Shelter Plan, provided lodging to Judge
William Webb, chief prosecutor Joseph Keenan, and others during the International
Military Tribunal for the Far East.
While HRC’s political position is never explicitly declared, given the historical context
of the early 1960s, when this event was staged and the art collective came into being, we
can assume that they were at least informed by the rise in left-wing political activism that
reached its zenith shortly prior to the inception of High Red Center in 1963. As
Akasegawa put it, ‘Marx and Lenin were mixed into our young impressionable
minds’, just as ‘the spirit of Zen was mixed into the mind of Riky u’.50 Furthermore,
among those in attendance at the Shelter Plan were not only other important Fluxus
artists such as Nam June Paik and Yoko Ono, and now famed graphic designer Yokoo

48
Ibid., 192.
49
That issues regarding the war were of concern to Akasegawa is evinced also by the fact that in 1962 he
staged a pre-Hi Red Center event entitled ‘War Defeat Day Dinner’ with members of Ankoku Butoh,
Group Ongaku, and Neo Dada Organizers. See Akasegawa, T okyo mikisa keikaku, 35–46.
50
Akasegawa Genpei, Geijutsu genron [Principles of Art]. Iwanami Shoten, 1991, 292. Cited in Tomii,
‘State v. (Anti-)Art’, 151.
96 Taro Nettleton

Tadanori, but also one Adachi Masao, who joined the Japanese Red Army in 1974 and
fought as a soldier in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine filmmaker,
Adachi Masao. He has since gone off to the United Arab Emirates, and is unable to
return to Japan, for he has been declared a member of the Arab Red Army, and would
be immediately arrested upon his return’.51 In a sense, the motley crew assembled
within room 340 of the Imperial Hotel was the vanguard not only of contemporary
art, but also of contemporary politics.
Akasegawa himself was never shy about implying such connections between the
Hi Red Center events and contemporary political events. For example, in regards to
the Ochanomizu Dropping Event, in which participants dropped everyday items such as
bed sheets, bags, clothing, and undergarments from the roof of Ikenob o Kaikan,
which houses a flower arrangement school in Ochanomizu, Akasegawa wrote that
the photograph of the dropped items bore an uncanny resemblance to the aftermath
photos of the Lod Airport Massacre carried out by members of the Japanese Red
Army in 1972.52
In January of 1964, the same month that Shelter Plan was realized, ‘the director of the
national police agency gave a New Year’s speech on the intensified focus on thought
perverts’.53 While Reiko Tomii credits the ongoing protests against the Japan–Korea
treaty and the impending 1970 renewal of the US–Japan Security Treaty as the causes of
this crackdown, it was also likely a part of the general conservatism, which accompanied
the preparation for the Olympic Games, to which Hi Red Center responded in its
Cleaning Event. As Alexandra Munroe puts it, ‘the move to control riotous tendencies
reflected the government and media’s exploitation of the 1964 Tokyo Summer
Olympics as an occasion to usher in a positive “beyond post war era” defined by the
exemplary twin miracles of high economic growth and a vast, prosperous middle
class’.54
Repression of the memory of World War II was part and parcel of Japan’s forced
embrace of American capitalist democracy. Against this hegemonically installed amne-
sia, Shelter Plan staged an uncanny insertion of the war back into the so-called ‘post-
postwar era’. By foregrounding bomb shelters, HRC’s Shelter Plan insisted on revealing
the continued presence of war in the post-World War II era, and more specifically,
Japan’s implication in the Cold War with the establishment of US military bases in
Japan. Its tactic of using the Imperial Hotel to draw attention to the very things that
Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Japanese authorities, would have liked to keep obscured
may have been adopted from a previous work. Curator and art historian Raiji Kuroda
has written that a work entitled Imperial Hotel, created by Masuzawa Kinpei, was one of
the most notorious pieces to come out of the three ‘Neo-Dada Exhibitions’ held
between 1960 and 1961, with which Akasegawa had been involved. The piece, compris-
ing the soiled cotton filling from an old futon, adorned with broken light bulbs and
urinated on, was, according to Kuroda, one of the few effectively political works of the
Japanese Neo-Dada movement. Displayed in the Hibiya Gallery, inside Hibiya Park and
adjacent to the Imperial Hotel and the Imperial Palace, the Masuzawa work contrasted
‘the rich who sleep in beds in the Imperial Hotel with the poor and the homeless who
have to sleep on discarded futons. The shattered light bulbs represented poverty and the

51
Akasegawa, T okyo mikisa keikaku, 189.
52
Ibid., 240.
53
Tomii, ‘State v. (Anti-)Art’, 152.
54
Munroe, ‘Morphology of Revenge’, 159.
 Hi Red Center’s Shelter Plan (1964) 97

fragility of the human body’.55 Masuzawa’s Imperial Hotel undoubtedly left a strong
impression on Akasegawa, who wrote that it was one of the only two pieces that he
clearly remembered from the third Neo-Dada exhibition.56 Shelter Plan is then, in one
sense, an updating of Masuzawa’s work in response to contemporaneous socio-political
contexts.
The 1964 Olympics was also an occasion for Japan to display its success to the
world. It gave Japan the chance to become visible as a democratic nation in the
advanced stages of capitalism. Edward Seidensticker quotes one observer as remark-
ing, ‘The Tokyo Olympics were not merely a sports festival. They were a ritual
marking the fact that for the first time since the defeat Japan had been formally
accepted by the world.’57 In the face of such optimistic claims, Shelter Plan empha-
sizes the ambivalent stance that bodies and nations take up precisely in order to be
recognized ‘by the world’. The photographs printed for the tailored bomb shelters
transformed the bodies of the photographic subjects into an image. In Shelter Plan,
this process of becoming visible and being accepted requires a submission to dis-
ciplinary power. Visibility demands that one accede to a disciplinary matrix. Shelter
Plan hence simultaneously emphasizes the materiality of the Japanese body as it
underscores the risks involved in visibility. This narrative echoes that of the US–
Japan security treaty, in which the maintenance of relations with the US, and thus
easier acceptance by the world, required Japan to allow the US to have military bases
on its land. While these bases were supposed to protect Japan from attacks, they
increased the risks of Japan being targeted by implicating it in wars fought by
the US.
Shelter Plan was thus a counter-hegemonic move against the official mobilization of
a post-postwar phase in Japan and its accompanying rhetoric of growing conserva-
tism. In his history of HRC, Akasegawa describes an art group intent on returning art
to the space of the everyday. This drive is apparent in the fact that nearly all of the
group’s events take place in public. The execution of these pieces in public spaces
was a means to realize an explicit end: provocation. Through these agitations, HRC
aimed to function as a catalyst for reconsidering the nature of art. Comparing HRC’s
event to Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning (1953), Nakanishi Natsuyuki
explained in regard to Street Cleaning Event, ‘Everything could be art. But cleaning
as an art practice, although it might seem similar to erasing a de Kooning drawing, is
very different. He starts with a picture. We started on the street.’58 Shelter Plan,
somewhat in contrast, was a private affair: all the participants were chosen and
formally invited by the group. It was still received, even at the time, as a serious
provocation to the authorities. As Akasegawa writes, the group’s activities in room
340 were suspicious enough that two undercover police officers staked out the scene.
It is no coincidence, then, that only hours after the Shelter Event, Akasegawa was
arrested for currency fraud.59
In looking at the specific cultural and historical contexts that produced both Frank
Lloyd Wright and his Imperial Hotel, and HRC and its Shelter Plan, I have placed them
in dialogue across a temporal rift. In part I have argued that the staging of HRC’s Shelter

55
Kuroda, ‘Akarui Satsurikusha, sono shunkangei ni sube’, 10–11.
56
Akasegawa, Hangeijutsu anpan, 151.
57
Seidensticker, Tokyo Rising, 238.
58
Haryu, et al., ‘Bijutsuka to iu tokkenteki chikaku’, 162.
59
See Paik, ‘To Catch Up’, 77–81, and Tomii, ‘State v. (Anti-)Art’ for accounts of this incident in
English.
98 Taro Nettleton

Plan can be understood as causing multiple disturbances, first and foremost as a threat
to Wright’s ego, by questioning its integrity through an insertion of living Japanese
bodies into one of his works, which he tried so arduously to protect from Japanese
influence. This is of course a fiction, for Wright died in 1959, prior to HRC’s establish-
ment. In this sense, I have tried to enact what Michel de Certeau describes as the
narrating of history. Such a narration ‘does indeed have a content, but it also belongs to
the art of making a coup: it is a detour by way of a past… made in order to take advantage
of an occasion and to modify an equilibrium by taking it by surprise’.60 The politics of
Wright’s refusal of influence, and simultaneous appropriation of Japanese culture and
aesthetics, must be investigated, and HRC’s Shelter Plan is useful tool for this work. If
the effect of the uncanny is, to quote queer theorist Lee Edelman, to ‘signal [the]
toppling of the walls within which the subject has been constructed and through
which he has realized the imaginary architecture of the self’,61 Shelter Plan was a success,
for it was only four years after its realization, in 1968, that the Imperial Hotel was
dismantled.62

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