Bontarō Dokuyama

In 2015, Dokuyama returned to Fukushima Prefecture for the first time since the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, where he took part in a joint exhibition with the artist duo Kyun-Chome at Nao Nakamura's gallery space in Iwaki City. In addition to exhibiting some earlier artworks, Dokuyama produced the short video piece Even after 1,000 Years and the three-channel video installation Over There for the exhibition. In their exhibition statement, the artists pointed out the irony of the name of the Jōban-sen railway that connects Tōhoku to Tokyo and runs through their respective home prefectures of Fukushima and Ibaraki.[11] Jōban (常磐) denotes eternal immortality, imbuing the railway with a sense of security and longevity that was shattered after the triple disaster.[11] The section of the Jōban-sen railway that runs through the exclusion zone was shut down for nine years following the 2011 disaster.

Dokuyama claimed that he was led back home by the late Chieko Takamura, an artist from Fukushima that is posthumously considered a local celebrity.[11] For Even after 1,000 Years, Dokuyama was inspired by "Chieko's Sky (智恵子抄, Chieko-shō, literally "Selections of Chieko") a book of poems written by Chieko's husband Kōtarō Takamura.[12] He followed the poem　"Childlike story" (あどけない話, Adokenai hanashi), in which Chieko longs for the sky above Mount Adatara in Fukushima as the "real sky" that she can nostalgically recall from her childhood.[13] In the video, Dokuyama stands in the pouring rain atop Mount Adatara and calls out for Chieko, pointing to the sky and shouting over and over that it is the only "real sky" and that all other skies are fake.[13][10] In his artist statement, he wrote that despite the ramifications of the triple disaster, "this sky is without a doubt the same as it was five years ago, and it will not change even after a thousand years."[11]

For the video installation Over There (2015), Dokuyama worked with communities who had been evacuated from their homes in 2011 due to the nuclear fallout of the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear PowerPlant accident and were still living in 'temporary' housing four years later.[14] He facilitated workshops in which displaced citizens from Fukushima's various exclusion zones decorated masks using paint and local newspaper clippings to represent the hometowns they hoped to return to one day.[15][16] Dokuyama, who was also still unable to return to his own hometown at the time, then recorded the participants wearing their masks in front of their temporary homes and pointing silently in the direction of their abandoned homes. For the final installation, Dokuyama placed the masks into glass cases and mounted them amongst a three-channel video loop of the residents pointing.[16] Over There brings attention to how—five years later—the disaster was still far from over for those displaced by the Fukushima disaster. It also emphasized the manner in which the displaced have been subordinated as silent "disaster victims," attempting to relieve them from this position by underlining their individual subjectivity.[15]

The 4th branch, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry concerns the anti-nuclear protest tents that were erected in front of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry buildings in Tokyo from September 2011 until they were forcibly removed by the government in 2016. Dokuyama proposed that the anti-nuclear encampment be made into a permanent facility, engaging with the activist community to collect input so that he could create architectural models of their 'ideal' facilities.[13] According to Dokuyama, two officials from the Ministry came across his project on social media and were able to visit the tents under the auspices of art, thus creating a rare opportunity for government officials to engage with the community of anti-nuclear activists living in the tents.[13] By creating models of the fictional 4th branch, the artist reconsidered the city as a public space that could be rented, encouraging viewers to envision an image of Tokyo that could exist within a shared system of partial ownership.[13]

When the government forced the end of the anti-nuclear occupation in 2016, Dokuyama salvaged protest banners from the tents. He has included these banners in installations of The 4th branch, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in exhibitions in Japan as well as in Copenhagen, Denmark, as part of "If Only Radiation Had Color: The Era of Fukushima" exhibition series at X AND BEYOND in 2017.[17]

For The War is Over!, Dokuyama recorded himself shouting "War is over!" at several significant locations in Okinawa in a direct reference to the Battle of Okinawa, one of the deadliest battles of the Asia Pacific War.[18] During his first visit to Okinawa, the artist felt a distinctive consciousness about how belonging to the Japanese nation varies in different localities, and began to think more about the complicated intersection of emotion, memory, and history.[19] For this piece, Dokuyama used satirical humor to critically approach the continued presence of the American military bases in Okinawa despite the war being over long ago.[18]

In 2018, The War is Over! was included in ASIA NOW Paris Asian Art Fair as part of the exhibition "Transitional" curated by Reiko Tsubaki and Hirokazu Tokuyama of the Mori Art Museum.[18]

Innocent Tale of the Sky (2019) consists of a man viewing various construction sites for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, gesturing dramatically towards the construction cranes and shouting demands for Tokyo's sky to be filled by new buildings—taller, higher, and filled with "Japanese power."[10][13] This piece is a companion piece to Dokuyama's Even after 1,000 Years from 2015; it was also inspired by the Fukushima-born artist Chieko Takamura and the collection of poems Chieko's Sky written by her husband Kōtarō Takamura.[13]

In 2019, Dokuyama exhibited both Innocent Tale of the Sky and Even after 1,000 Years as part of "Tokyo Plan 2019" at gallery αM at Musashino Art University.[20] He was selected by curator Yabumae Tomoko as the first artist in a 5-volume exhibition series that dealt with issues related to Tokyo's urban transformation in anticipation of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games.[10] Exhibited together, Dokuyama's videos emphasize the socioeconomic imbalance between Tokyo and Fukushima, locating the "sky" in rural and urban areas as a public space that cannot be owned by anyone.[13] Both videos also brought attention to the apparent aimlessness of voicing one's opinion loudly in Japanese society.[13] As the videos of the men pointing and shouting wildly were looped in the exhibition space, their shouts seemed to lose all meaning and disappear.[10]

In 2019, Dokuyama produced My Anthem (2019), a 20-minute video for which the artist interviewed an elderly Taiwanese choir group who were educated under the Japanese colonial regime and still spoke the language fluently.[21] The video opens with footage of the Imperial Japanese rising sun flag, confronting viewers with the country's repressed colonial legacy and history of military aggression before presenting testimonies of the Taiwanese interviewees' experiences growing up as Japanese Imperial subjects.[22] They showcase the entrenched impacts of Japan's ideological assimilation policies, with the interviewees singing popular Japanese war songs and reciting the Imperial Rescript on Education from memory.[21]

My Anthem was exhibited together with Over There (2015) as part of "Roppongi Crossing: Connexions," at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2019. Exhibited together, the artworks connected two groups that have been marginalized and displaced, showcasing unexpected commonalities between two disparate communities that gestured towards a continuity of structural violence from Japan's past to its present day.[22]

Dokuyama created the installation Synchronized Cherry Blossom for the 2019 Aichi Triennale, where it was exhibited in Nagoya's popular Endoji Hommachi shopping arcade.[2] In an ode to uirō, a Japanese rice jelly sweet that is famous in Nagoya, Dokuyama and his assistant created 30,000 identical pieces of the sticky candy by hand, molding them into light pink cherry blossoms and mounting them onto the branches of a real cherry tree, alluding to the prevalence of Japan's national symbols.[2] After researching the history of the sweet, Dokuyama found that ūiro had become a symbol for Nagoya when the 1964 Olympics brought the shinkansen to the city and ūiro was sold on the train as the city's official snack.[2] In addition to the cherry tree, Dokuyama produced videos of interviews with local Nagoya residents, officials from a local uirō manufacturer, pro-urban development city officials, and people in Russian and Chinese cities once occupied by Japan.[2] In this work, Dokuyama considers how most of the cherry trees that can be found in Japan and are associated as a symbol of the country (Somei Yoshino cherry trees) have been agriculturally cultivated as genetically-identical clones.[2] By grouping these seemingly disparate elements together, Synchronized Cherry Blossom highlighted the way that Japan's national architecture, symbols, and culture—and correlating ideas of "Japanese-ness"—have not necessarily developed organically, but have rather have been fabricated throughout history as part of Japan's complicated national discourse.[2][23]