Delicious Kikokushijo Academy

One of my research sites is Kikokushijo Academy (K.A.), a juku (cram school) specifically designed for children who have lived outside of Japan for an extended period--an experience which often jeopardizes their chances at passing school entrance exams upon returning to Japan. While most of the students are Japanese, the school also offers a place for a number of young people who are bi-racial and attend Japanese public schools, though they may use English at home with one parent. The school is a unique, vibrant place where a range of young people from across Tokyo study together under an international and racially diverse faculty. Over the past year, I've grown very close to the 11 year-old students in my Saturday morning class. Together we decided to make a short video to introduce and explain the school to other kids interested in attending K.A. I helped the class write a script and Ken Oka and Kouta Oyama took on the task of developing storyboards and shooting directions. Over the summer, squeezing filming activities into our weekly class time, we shot the piece and I edited it in several stages, bringing rough cuts to the kids for their comments and approval. I intended the project to be collaborative, though time constraints meant that we couldn't devote ourselves to it as we would have liked. This short video has none of the conceptual depth of the work I did with photographer Wendy Ewald over the years, or the intensity of the photographs made by the refugee Karen teenagers in Thailand with whom I did From Journey to Dream. The video does reflect a collaborative relationship however, as I used devices the kids chose, such as speeded up footage which the kids found familiar from its common appearance in Japanese television news pieces. Though the piece was basic and uncomplicated in its intent, Ken and Kouta lead the film confidently, making it far more revealing and intimate than one might expect. Their happiness, wit, intelligence, and eagerness animate this video. More than this, their friendship has been a great joy in my life.

消耗品（人）

shoumouhin(in): tokyo skateboarders: consumable goods/expendable bodies

This is a short paper presented at the conference, Youth and Imaginative Labor: East Asia and beyond, held in Tokyo on July 21-22, 2007. I'm primarily interested in a series of large, black and white ads that Nike SB placed in strategic spots around Shibuya and Harajuku, zones that have been increasingly hostile to actual skateboarders. In the absence of skaters, Nike is able to draw on the authenticity skaters seem to represent. This is an authenticity furthered by the fact they are unwelcome in public space, especially in places of hyper-consumption like Shibuya. Relegated to skateparks or late night forays into forbidden sites, the skaters engage in a practice that is dangerous and destructive to both their equipment and themselves. It is exactly this "failure"--the damage they suffer--that makes them "real", in a way that traditional sports find antithetical. So while the shoes and boards get consumed in the process of skating, so too the skaters themselves are "consumed" by Nike's advertising. Additionally, the skaters, many of whom work dead-end low-wage jobs, appear as "expendable" labor within neoliberal Japan. Under neoliberal logics which fix blame on individual failings, they are held responsible by newspaper columnists and government officials for their own "failures" to secure a steady job and thereby ensure a valid (recognizable) position within society. The young men I'm researching don't make sense to normal social and economic structures: they are floating labor outside the dominant systems of control exercised through the workplace, and they use their excess energy to skateboard, hardly a suitable recreation for Japan's youthful future. At the same time, they provide the authenticating practice, the evidence, of an "outside" to normative society and its logic of public space and this "outside" or non-place grounds the fantasy of bodily rapture that Nike uses to push product.

This paper is dense and I'm trying to open up other questions about phenomenology, bodily experience, identities and self-understandings produced in intense practices, practices that signify a dedication but show no coherent or expected results or pleasures. Is there ecstasy? Is there a kind of possession? Is there a feeling of sociality? How does all this intersect with the fantasies produced in consumer capitalism, as in the dense areas of Shibuya or Harajuku?

Skate and destroy.

渋谷の妄想症

there are invisible holes in the city's interweaving fabric of perpetual motion and static structures. passageways and corridors and ticket gates give way suddenly onto open space where no single direction exerts a dominant pull--bodies rush and flow and pause, waiting to be joined to continue journeys back into the dense landscape of urban dreamscape. there is a kind of paranoia here, or a delusion, but perhaps more appropriately a kind of haunting. things are present, but made partial, incomplete, a binary relation fractured by something missing.

before me, as I wait too, an inaudible narrator appears, seeming at first to also be waiting, but I realize he is speaking to us all, but without being heard--his voice is absent, and there is only his gesture. His hands mark out some occult terrain, or illustrate some instructions. he occupies a space that is empty, suddenly. people who inadvertently pause nearby readjust themselves beyond some invisible perimeter, or simply hurry through. they have a legible purpose: to meet someone here (a group of three girls bow to one another and move off-screen), to meet someone elsewhere (a woman runs from right to left), to receive or transmit information to someone who is not present (a man holds a cell phone to his ear). around us all is white noise, the massive screens benignly illuminating the Shibuya intersection with their looped sequences of light and sound--even this non-sense is legitimated with commercial purpose. capitalism talks to us of fetish objects made real through labor and money.

the man speaks to no one that can be seen by the camera, by me, this entranced observer. my own purpose is suspended as i strain to see what it is not there, hear what i cannot. i realize i am filming this to discover some explanation, to understand what possesses this man even as he possesses this self-created zone of impossibility. his is an uncanny counterpoint to tokyo's impossible consumer architectures that flow and hum with a fantastic energy we inhabit with our bodies and imaginations. this zone before my camera is an interruption. it exists, yet those of us around the man refuse to make it real by including it in the space of the ordinary. this "ordinary" is also fantastic, one which allows us to mask over what is not present. the ordinary is a tentative membrane that has meaning because it fuses together with other things we believe exist and have knotted together with skeins of meaning. we hold this weird manifestation apart, each of us calculating the distance necessary to prevent our own inclusion in this haunted space that bespeaks dislocation, disassembly of meaning, absence and abnormality.

it is a space of doubled impossibility: invisible visibility. to rephrase Avery Gordon, we each utter: "i see [you/you] are not there." this scene is ghostly, but the man is so alive and in being so he exhumes the absence all around him (and our own absences too--who are we not with? who cannot hear us? who can we not speak to?). he is alive with his own language--the motion of his lips in silent speech, the accompanying choreography of his hands, the slow turning from side to side as if seeking to broadcast or acknowledge the fullness of his audience, or perhaps single out a specific recipient. but where is this absent other? the man is a talkative representative of what is missing. none of us want to become the counterpart to his speech: representative of that missing figure, the receiver, the listener, the patiently unseen, that ghostly, impossibly other being that is so apparently present.

i am unsettled as he turns and his eyes meet mine. but it is only the briefest contact. new detours emerge. people devise new lines of motion in response to this uncanny place that has occurred where before the space was understood and comprehensible, full of coherent communications. the city is upended momentarily, its territoriality dislocated by the immateriality of ghosts. beyond what i can see and my own sense of visibility--my own frail empirical truths--all is incomplete. all is ghostly. all these people will disappear. no-one can hear. i am not seeing you. you are here.

with transitions removed

the small half-pipe at the Nogawa skate spot is in the process of being disassembled, leaving the skeleton stripped of its plywood skin. the panels were leaning against the frame last night when I went skating and were transformed from scrap into a surface of pleasure and risk. frontside/backside wall-rides, Tokyo.