4DANGERS: May 2010

Friday, May 14, 2010

CARDBOARD HOUSE PAINTING

“Left Eye of Shinjuku (新宿の左目)” by Take Junichirō, Yoshizaki Takeo, and Yamane Yasuhiro

Shinjuku train station sees 3,470,000 passengers everyday. It’s the busiest train station in the world. A space so used is bound have its contradictions, but in the mid-1990s the contradictions were stark. If you walked a few minutes out of the station’s west exit, you’d come to the sparkling new Metropolitan Office Building. This complex was opened in 1991, sporting the new tallest building in Japan. But in 1991 Japan’s economic bubble was bursting, and the building was soon known as “The Tower of Bubble.” Economic trouble brought unemployment and homelessness on a scale not seen in postwar Japan. Within sight of The Tower of Bubble, in the plaza and in the covered passageways around the west exit of Shinjuku station, a community of the newly homeless sprang up. People made shelters by sewing cardboard together with twine. It was on the walls of these shelters that the murals began, and ended. The following is a collaborative effort to remember the hundreds of cardboard house murals, painted continuously between 1995 and 1998 by Take Junichirō and Yoshizaki Takeo (real name, Yoshizaki Taeko), joined along the way by Emori Haruhiko, Kamijo Kumiko, Ōta Tomomi, Takano Itohisa, and Yamane Yasuhiro. None of the original work survives. What is left to us today is an extensive collection of photographs, the work of photographers Minegishi Ryoko, Ōta Tomomi and especially Sakokawa Naoko. These are an invaluable window, but represent a only small portion of all the paintings. You can access the photographs, and a comprehensive documentary at Take Junichirō's site:

Corrugated cardboard house painting
Shinjuku underground Tokyo
Cardboard House Painting Website