Published on August 20, 2019. This article introduces a Sankei Shimbun piece by Kuwahara Satoshi and discusses the controversy surrounding the Aichi Triennale 2019 exhibition “After ‘Freedom of Expression?’,” including the video work burning a photograph of Emperor Showa, the comfort-woman statue, the protest statement after the exhibition’s cancellation, and the connection with Nagata Kozo and the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal, arguing that freedom of expression was being used as a shield to demean Japan.

August 20, 2019.
Sixteen groups of artists exhibited works, and their themes were all matters with a certain “angle”: comfort women, the forced mobilization of Koreans, the Emperor, the nuclear accident, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, the U.S. forces in Okinawa, and so on.
The following is from an article published in the Sankei Shimbun on August 16.
Was this a development according to the scenario?
The greatest censorship incident in postwar Japan?
An exhibition whose contents drew criticism and even induced terrorist threats was forced to close only three days after it opened.
It was the special exhibition “After ‘Freedom of Expression?’” at “Aichi Triennale 2019,” a contemporary art festival held once every three years in Aichi Prefecture.
Sixteen groups of artists exhibited works, and their themes were all matters with a certain “angle”: comfort women, the forced mobilization of Koreans, the Emperor, the nuclear accident, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, the U.S. forces in Okinawa, and so on.
Personally, I get the impression that it is political propaganda rather than art.
Since each person judges for himself what art is, I will leave that aside.
As soon as the cancellation was decided, the executive committee of the special exhibition, Arai Hiroyuki, Iwasaki Sadaaki, Okamoto Yuka, Ogura Toshimaru, and Nagata Kozo, issued a protest statement, saying, “For the organizers themselves to suppress a project that gathered expressions erased from before people’s eyes by pressure and considered the situation of unfreedom of expression in contemporary Japan can only be called a historic outrage.
It will become the greatest censorship incident in postwar Japan.”
I thought, “What is this, really?”
That is because in early April, Tsuda Daisuke, the journalist entrusted with the role of artistic director of the Triennale, had the following exchange with critic Azuma Hiroki about this special exhibition on the live video streaming service Niconico Live.
Tsuda.
Probably nobody has noticed at all, but this is the most dangerous project.
Probably, politically…
Azuma.
As expected…does the Emperor burn or something?
Tsuda.
Ah…
As Mr. Tsuda said, “dangerous,” the two works—the video work burning a photograph of Emperor Showa, and the “Statue of a Girl of Peace,” which closely resembles the comfort-woman statues that Korean organizations are installing around the world in order to morally demean Japan—were works that maliciously provoked sensible Japanese people.
From here on, this is my imagination.
For Mr. Tsuda, perhaps the special exhibition catching fire and being cancelled was within expectations.
If the real aim of planning the special exhibition was “uproar → exhibition cancellation → outbreak of debate over freedom of expression → release of a protest statement by the executive committee → criticism of the Abe administration,” then Mr. Tsuda has splendidly achieved his original purpose.
Freedom of expression is not the main issue.
Here I would like to make a digression.
When I found the name Nagata Kozo among the members of the executive committee, I remembered a preposterous farce.
Mr. Nagata, a professor at Musashi University, is a former NHK producer and the person who tried to present favorably, in an ETV Special, the so-called “Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal,” a people’s tribunal held in Tokyo nineteen years ago.
At that time, the two people who asked NHK whether the program’s content was acceptable under the Broadcast Act, which obliges broadcasters to clarify points of contention from as many angles as possible in matters where opinions are divided, were Abe Shinzo and Nakagawa Shoichi.
The “Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal” was a people’s tribunal, under the slogan “judging the Japanese military’s system of sexual slavery,” in which “former comfort women” from South Korea, North Korea, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other places served as plaintiffs, and Emperor Showa, the Japanese government, and former military personnel involved with comfort stations were put on trial.
The call to hold it came from the Violence Against Women in War Network Japan, VAWW-NET Japan.
Its representative was the late Matsui Yayori, a former Asahi Shimbun reporter.
It seems to me that this people’s tribunal and the special exhibition, in which the video of a photograph of Emperor Showa burning and the comfort-woman statue were exhibited in the same space, overlap perfectly in their ideology.
At the time, I covered the people’s tribunal and wrote the following in the magazine Sound Argument, February 2001 issue.
“After five p.m. on December 7, 2000, three sightseeing buses slid into the parking lot of Kudan Kaikan in Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo.
The people getting off the buses were mainly elderly women dressed in Korean ethnic clothing.
At the entrance to the hall, Korean was flying about everywhere.
After paying an admission fee of 500 yen at the reception desk, I entered the venue.
In the lobby, the posthumous photograph of the Korean woman who first came forward claiming that she had been taken to the battlefield under the name of the Women’s Volunteer Corps and forced into prostitution, photographs of comfort stations and comfort women, and messages sent to the ‘tribunal’ from all over the country were pasted up in a crowded fashion.
Among these messages were many with radical content such as ‘capital punishment for Emperor Showa’ and ‘oppose the emperor system.’
The first floor of the venue was divided front and back by ropes, and the seats in the front near the stage were ‘victim countries only.’
The back was for Japanese participants.
The first-floor seats were full, with people standing, and an announcement was made asking people to go to the second and third floors.
A considerable number of video cameras were set up in the venue, but most of them belonged to foreign media from South Korea, China, and elsewhere.
And when the women who were ‘former comfort women’ entered, the television crews from various countries busied themselves with reporting activities as if truly delighted.
At 6:35 p.m., with the sound of bells going gong, gong, the video screening began.
Scenes of an old woman described as a ‘former military comfort woman’ shouting ‘Punish those responsible in Japan,’ and scenes of protests in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, were shown again and again, as if to say, here it is, and here it is again; finally, an image was projected of a woman in Korean ethnic clothing pointing a pistol at a man who seemed to be Emperor Showa, tied to a tree…”
The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal handed down a judgment that “Emperor Hirohito and the State of Japan are guilty of crimes against humanity for rape and sexual slavery,” and the following year, very politely, it announced a “final judgment” in The Hague, Netherlands.
As a result, the mistaken recognition that “comfort women equal sex slaves” became established throughout the world.
Even if it was natural that this time a special exhibition that can only be thought to have inherited the ideology of that tribunal was cancelled, people possessed by the ideology of the people’s tribunal will surely use this to appeal to the world that “Japan is a country that suppresses freedom of expression.”
The first step in that will be the protest statement by the executive committee.
The media of countries that want to demean Japan will no doubt report such movements with delight.
I cannot help thinking that this special exhibition may have been a clever plot to demean Japan by using freedom of expression as a shield.
Is that too much delusion?
This time I had no room to converse with Montaigne.
I apologize.
Culture Department, Kuwahara Satoshi.