The Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka and Kinshiro Kuzui｜The Underground Sasoriza and Shinjuku in the Sixties

Shinjuku in the sixties, more than half a century ago. Tear gas, wooden staves, the heat of underground theaters, and in the middle of it all the birth of the art film. It was not a mere phenomenon. It was a culture.

In a small district, anger with nowhere to go, anxiety, defeat, and nostalgia were all tangled together. It was the ATG, the Art Theatre Guild, that offered a medium for turning these not into tools for sinking into nihilism but into creative energy, and that made the creativity of young people erupt to an astonishing degree.

Hundreds of thousands of people surrounded the Diet, a single female student named Michiko Kanba died, and still the US-Japan Security Treaty passed. The sixties began with an enormous sense of defeat, the sense that “nothing could be changed.” They had believed that politics could change the world, and it could not. They could change nothing, not a single thing. At that moment, a hole opened in young hearts. Questions from somewhere deeper, which no street slogan and no linked arms could fill, came welling up from nowhere, overflowed, and swallowed the hearts of the young in one rush.

In the vast space of the city, which held no answers, they agonized.

Why do people die?
What is meaning?
Can I truly meet another person?
No, what am I in the first place?
Is there a god?
If there is, why does it not answer?
Can the world be changed?

Young people carried these questions, which neither politics nor revolution had answered, and had lost their way with them. Just then, in dim movie theaters, the screenings began of the cutting-edge art films of the West distributed by the ATG.

The theater where the young people lined up was called the Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka.

It stood in Shinjuku 3-chome, next to Isetan. It opened in 1962 and ran for about twelve years, until 1974. Its general manager was Kinshiro Kuzui, who took part in founding the ATG. Watch the ATG’s films, and his name appears in almost every one of them. He took the vision entrusted to him by Kashiko Kawakita and spread it among the young people on the ground. He was the very embodiment of the ATG as a culture, standing on its front line, welcoming its audiences, and setting off its creativity.

In fact, he did not let the place end as a mere movie theater. From 1963 he began staging avant-garde theater, and in 1967 he opened a small theater called the Underground Sasoriza in the basement of the cinema. The name was given by Yukio Mishima. It became the first space in Japan to show experimental films as a theatrical run.

What on earth was happening in that small place in Shinjuku 3-chome? Before speaking of the theater, we have to look at the streets outside.

In that same year, 1967, something else was happening in Shinjuku. In August, a bright red tent suddenly went up in the grounds of Hanazono Shrine. It was the Red Tent of the avant-garde Juro Kara. When Kara tried to stage Koshimaki Osen, the shrine complained that it went against the national polity, so he opened under the new title Tsukibue Osen and changed it back within about a week.

In June of the following year, 1968, a campaign to expel him arose among the local shopkeepers’ association and others, and he was notified that the use of the shrine grounds was forbidden. Kara scattered flyers reading “Farewell, Hanazono!” and left. Then on January 3, 1969, ignoring a stop order from the metropolitan government, Kara put up his tent guerrilla-style in the West Exit park. Surrounded by two hundred riot police, he kept performing to the end and was arrested after the show.

On January 1 of that year, Shuji Terayama launched the Tenjo Sajiki. He himself said he named it so because he wanted to place himself not underground but somewhere higher. Later he even staged street plays in which the audience was handed a map of Shinjuku instead of a ticket and made to walk the city in search of the performance.

The theater goes out into the streets. The streets become the theater.

Then on October 21, 1968, the night of International Anti-War Day, Shinjuku Station burned. Two thousand people stormed into the station, set fire to train seats as firewood, and twenty thousand onlookers surrounded them. One and a half million commuters were brought to a halt, and the charge of riot was applied.

For those few years, in other words, energy with nowhere to go was bursting out all over the city of Shinjuku. It was something that could not be said in the language of politics. One could call it anti-war or anti-Security Treaty, but something slipped away the moment one said so. Those who put up tents, those who made people walk the streets, those who set fire to the station, all were driven by the same something.

What the ATG, and this theater, did was simple. On the ground floor of a single building, art films by Bergman, Godard, and Resnais were shown. In its basement, the most radical documents of the day, by Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi, were shown. And after the films ended, avant-garde plays opened late into the night.

It was here that Shuji Terayama staged Marie in Furs, and here that Yukio Ninagawa made his debut as a director. And the ATG, which had sown the seeds and nurtured the shoots, made a decisive turn the moment it saw the heat rising outside the theater.

Suddenly, in 1966, Yukio Mishima’s experimental short film Patriotism, distributed by the ATG, was shown at the Shinjuku Bunka and met with success beyond all expectations. From this experience, a plan began to take shape within the ATG.

Hadn’t the time come when they could make films themselves? The future Kashiko Kawakita had envisioned came true far sooner than expected, through the fierce young, or rather through an energy of Shinjuku that we today cannot imagine.

Next time, the era in which the ATG set out to produce films.