I am a closet Chindoguist. I cannot suppress a inner squeal of delight, a feeling of bandit revolutionary glee that out-Gueveras Guevera when I see the inventions of Kawakami Kenji.
If there truly exists such a thing as conceptual art, Kawakami is its unacknowledged master. More so than any dung wielding sculptor, professional naked people, or copycat iconoclast, this Japanese nut case (who makes a living off people who believe he's a Japanese nut case of an entirely different stripe) is the real deal. A brilliant satirist whose ideas dance upon the head of a pin-like fulcrum, on one side, absurdity, on the other, nitty gritty practicality.
I wonder if Kawakami would agree. Some of his contraptions seem genuinely useful, like the double-headed toothbrush that allows you to scrub uppers and lowers at the same time, or the portable subway strap that gives you something to hang on to when all the handholds are taken.
Like any good jester, Kawakami is equal parts genius and genuine fool. This Asia Times article highlights his subversive qualities.
"I'm an extremist," he said. "I believe we have to do extreme things to make people think about this society and to question common sense. I want people to question everything because they don't think and analyze any more. How else could they have elected a president like that in the United States? He's an idiot. But I think my generation failed to change the world. I don't regret fighting the system but I regret that we ended up fighting ourselves. We set a bad example for the young, which is why today they don't have a clue about what is going on."
Although most of his radical energy now goes into his inventions, Murakami's hatred for America, and its subservient Asian ally, is undimmed. "In Europe they treat me as an artist, a new Dadaist [after the early 20th-century art movement that held irrationality and anarchy as the only rational responses to a world gone mad]. In Australia and Canada, I'm called a scientist. In China and Hong they wonder why I don't try to make money from my inventions. But in Japan and the US, they consider me a maker of party goods. People have been trained not to think in Japan and America. I think it's quite natural to hate America, its lack of logic and its brutality. But Japan is pitiable, too, the way it follows everything the US does."
Before knocking together conceptual bombs to lob at society, Kawakami was content to use more conventional ones, as this JapanInc. article from a few years reveals. This jester is, in part, in dead earnest.
Kawakami, who studied aeronautical engineering at Tokai University before he took to lobbing Molotov cocktails at police in the early 1970s as a leftist radical, says the art of chindogu is a rejection of the strait jacket of capitalistic utility, an anarchic antithesis to 21st-century consumer culture that can enrich people's lives and bring them closer together.
Perhaps it was the violence that he so abhors that drove him from more typical versions of leftist protest of his 60s and 70s youth.
The key issues were the Vietnam War and Japan's subservience to capitalist America, but after years of guerilla-style violence against the authorities, the movement eventually became dominated by small leftwing sects and turned in on itself, consuming dozens of former radicals in deadly sectarian disputes. About 100 activists were killed in what was called uchigeba, or internecine warfare among the sects.
Kawakami's current form of protest is infinitely more gentle. However, he clearly has no clue about the ying-yang nature of human aggressiveness and creativity, and seems to have no tolerance for the material side of democracy. Freedom includes economic freedom, the freedom to make, buy, sell and even profit. Perhaps he is even a totalitarian at heart, who would, if he could, experiment on society the way he does with toilet seat covers or toothbrushes.
Oh, his heart is in the right place, no doubt about that. Although he opposes the profit motive, he made an exception for a recent TV show based on his work.
Although it may violate one of the Ten Tenets of Chindogu, Kawakami is willing to allow the show, if successful, to commercialize chindogu contraptions because some of the proceeds will go toward the removal of the estimated 4 to 7 million land mines in Cambodia.
"It's our duty as rich industrialized nations to help poor ones," says Kawakami, who conceives new chindogu while eating yakitori. "I'm very concerned about the gap between rich and poor countries. If you think about the magnitude of the problem, the political and economic mess in Japan becomes a minor issue."
He's got that right. But one of the reasons why Japan's issues are minor ones is the aggregate competitiveness and hard-work ethic of the Japanese people. Their workaday common sense, concern, for the well-being of their families, etc., has made a kind of workers' paradise in which a guy like Kawakami can live pretty well by selling books with pictures of 'unuseless' inventions to folks with the disposable income to buy them and be amused by them. Or to take him seriously.
I suspect that, in spite of all the high-minded rhetoric and pseudo-spiritual political thought, Kawakami is just a guy who gets these great but goofy ideas--and has the know how and drive to turn them into reality. And the joy that most people derive from his inventions is a recognition of how they are useful, yet at the same time, reveal something about human vanity. Yeah, the car-top clothesline may be ingenious, but how uncool would it be to drive around with our boxer-briefs in the breeze?
Anything that makes us take ourselves a little less seriously has got to be a good thing. Ironically, Kawakami justifies his wacky genius by insisting his umbrella ties or mechanical rotating spaghetti forks art are political art, but that's OK. To me, he's a jester on the order of Chaplin, who for all his pretensions about politics, couldn't help but create an art that was so broad in its appeal that people of every country and every age could get a kick out of it.