2023 | 8 min read
In Tokyo, legend has it that the streets have no names. But some do, even if the name was only added later for marketing purposes. In fact, naming streets is just one of the ways in which commerce essentially becomes the city. This is the story of how one street got its name, which it then gave to a gallery, which itself became a site of criticism of the commercialisation of culture practiced by, you’ve guessed it, the street.
All that sounds needlessly complicated though. Let’s start at the top. I mean the bottom. Of where? The street. Kōen-Dōri – which means Park Street or Park Avenue, depending on how leisurely its mood – connects downtown Shibuya with Yoyogi Park to the north. It begins from the famous scramble crossing, but doesn’t really get going, doesn’t find its stride, doesn’t latch onto an identity, until it veers left at the second set of lights and starts heading uphill.
Tokyo is a city marked by topology and Kōen-Dōri is filled with topological riches. There’s that bootcut flare at the lower end, swiftly followed by a flirty knee-bend you won’t forget. At the hips, a mini scramble crossing. And a long, rising spine leads eventually to the park that gave the street its name – or so you’d think.
The park used to be known, perhaps semi-ironically, as Washington Heights, a mock-suburban housing estate built for US Air Force families. During the hardship years of the postwar occupation, Park Street – even if it wasn’t yet called that – would have witnessed a steady flow of jeeps and imported automobiles bearing the new occupiers. Washington Heights was returned to the city in the 1950s and would be repurposed as the athletes’ village during the 1964 Olympic Games. Only afterwards did it become Yoyogi Park, one of Tokyo’s biggest urban parks. But that’s still not how Kōen-Dōri got its name.
Kōen-Dōri actually owes its name to Parco, the retail and cultural complex opened here by Seibu in 1973. Parco – Italian for park – helped turn Shibuya into ground-zero for the new youth culture that was materialising in Tokyo at the time. The street newly renamed Kōen-Dōri became a promenade. Sidewalks twice had to be widened to accommodate the need to see and be seen. The 1986 opening of a men’s designers bazaar at Parco is said to have been the first time that men had ever queued for fashion.
Parco is still a fixture of Kōen-Dōri today, but this latest Parco is a 2010s rebuild with a cultural programme of Showa nostalgia. Experimental theatre makes way for fake nomiya. City pop classics repressed on vinyl. It’s a-me Mario. Parco continues to be a trend incubator of a kind, but its impact is felt less, possibly because the bold fusion of culture and commerce that it once represented has permeated the entire city.
Diagonally across from Parco is a towering brutalist structure with the surprising name of Shibuya Workers’ Welfare Hall. The city-run facility contains meetings rooms and a public gymnasium. It also once housed a gallery space and artist-in-residence programme called Tokyo Wonder Site, which gave up-and-coming artists the chance to create culture in the heart of Shibuya. TWS reflected a political obsession of the 2000s: to raise Tokyo’s profile on the global stage by exporting culture, in the mirror image of how Parco and places like it had imported foreign trends.
Tokyo Wonder Site was a pet project of Shintaro Ishihara, the ultranationalist Governor of Tokyo during 1999-2012. Ishihara built a political career on the back of his fame as a novelist. He understood how story and imagery could serve the national interest. He was also an outspoken figure who made enemies easily. TWS came in for criticism over its massive budget and a nepotism scandal involving Ishihara’s artist son. When Ishihara finally left the political stage, it was inevitable that TWS would follow. Its legacy is to be an emblem of an earlier era of soft power, the feature-phone optimism of the High-Heisei 2000s, when Japan’s pop culture was becoming a force but the Showa-era gerontocracy was still pulling all the strings.
The closure of Tokyo Wonder Site left a vacant slice of prime Shibuya real estate. And it was owned by the city, not by private interests. Tokyo’s public museums are managed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture, or Rekibun for short. In an apparent rejection of the cultural hubris of TWS, the Rekibun announced the opening of a new space called the Kōen-Dōri Gallery that would exhibit art by the socially excluded, which in Japan falls under the label of Art Brut.
Art Brut is more or less synonymous with outsider art, though the latter can also include folk art and other forms of self-taught expression. Art Brut, as conceptualised by the French artist Jean Dubuffet in the 1940s, always described art created on the margins of society, art that was immune or even antagonistic towards culture. It was “raw art” because it wasn’t contaminated by the art school or the gallery system. Indeed, a gallery dedicated to Art Brut would be a contradiction in terms.
In Japan, however, Art Brut took a different turn. It described art made by the mentally handicapped, a label that was often resisted in outsider art cultures elsewhere in the world. Art Brut in Japan centred around social welfare institutions and was closer in spirit to art therapy than social transgression. While it also aimed to improve public perception of the disabled, it was never imagined that they would become artists in their own right. All that changed during 2008-2012, when a series of exhibitions held in Europe brought Japanese Art Brut to global attention.
The Japanese word for this type of cultural conversation is gyaku-yunyū, or reverse importing. Something becomes popular at home mainly as a result of being popularised first overseas. Japan, with its highly codified system of cultural values, wasn’t interested in the art of invisible social misfits. But there was huge interest in Europe in the wonderfully autodidactic creations of Japanese outsider artists. The exhibition Art Brut Japonais held at Halle Saint Pierre in Paris in 2010 was popular enough to earn media coverage in Japan, prompting a critical reappraisal of Art Brut back home.
These unknown Japanese artists seemed to reside in their own separate yet fully-realised imaginative worlds. From mysterious ceramic creatures to found-object sculptures to the overflowing notebooks of unheralded visionaries living in your town, Art Brut springs from a mysterious creative impulse. Its practitioners are indifferent to social approval or recognition. They exist outside the market. One of the charms of Art Brut is the promise of something unadulterated by commerce. In Tokyo, a city of meticulous artifice shaped by commercial interests, this is a tantalising prospect.
The Kōen-Dōri Gallery asks us to see things differently, to look through the eyes of those who, for whatever reason, cannot meet society’s demands. In the current group exhibition called Echoing Cityscapes, the city becomes a place of order or disorder, anything but a destination brand or soft-power project. In Yuji Tsuji’s series of drawings titled My Town Peeped with My Imagination, huge cityscapes emerge out of the repetition of basic motifs: road markings, railway lines and roof tiles. In Takayuki Isono’s Telegraph Poles and Electrical Cables, 36 notebooks filled with pencil drawings of utility poles form the basis of one massive encyclopedia-sized volume.
In Sayaka Yokomizo’s deceptively childlike paintings, the city becomes a more familiar place of physical landmarks and human interactions. The uncommon perspective here is scale. In Shibuya2020, every urban actor, from Parco to your mother, is granted equal importance. The cityscape here is a peoplescape. Curator Koya Kawahara notes: “These large canvases are filled with small stories. Rather than grand, mythological tales, these stories are about familiar interactions between people and happenings in the city that we have all seen before.”
What is a street, really, but a place of familiar interactions. Leaving the gallery and continuing along Kōen-Dōri, you notice everything in its place, everything according to its pattern, from the annual chainsaw massacre of the trees to the ever-gentle circulations of the Hachiko Bus. Instead of history, Tokyo has seasons. Instead of landmarks, it has rhythms. As you walk, quality paving undulates through your sole. Retro phone boxes and unusual streetlights hint at exotic sister-street arrangements.
Park Street, like all good streets, is also a story. It runs from the occupation to the optimism years, from the desire to be seen locally to the desire to be seen globally, from soft-power authoritarianism to a more gentle inclusion. The history of the Park Street Gallery shows us that no single author writes this story. It’s the product of conversations between cultures. Don’t just broadcast, also listen for the echoes. The entire length of Park Street, from Hachiko to the Apple Store, Parco to Yoyogi Park, is formed by these cultural interactions, many of them unplanned, some of them yet to happen.
As you walk along Kōen-Dōri, you also write your own story, the one you’ve been writing all these years. It may not be heroic, but that’s not the point. There are happenings that the city has seen before, that will repeat now for you too. It humbles you to know that your story is a small one, that it’s part of something bigger. A good street can do that to you.
Next: Memorial Hall