3.11 was a rude awakening from our gentle slumbers. The suffering brought on by the earthquake and subsequent Fukushima disaster saddled our country with its most extreme problems since the end of the war. It was a concrete summons bringing us into the present. We need to open our eyes and change. But how? What I want to know is what happened in Japan, in us? And what form are we and Japan taking? To draw our starkest self-portrait yet, we have created something in Akihabara.

Yohei Kurose

The CHAOS*LOUNGE Manifesto was written in March 2010. It is a document written after the end of the 2000s - called the “Zero Years” in Japanese - which, compared to the Nineties, was a decidedly poor decade, both culturally and economically. The declaration contraposes the contemporary art of the 2000s with the so-called digital “architecture” created by the cultural scene of online communities and Internet services - such as Nico Nico Douga, pixiv, Twitter, Tumblr and so on - and looks at the possibilities the latter creates for new forms of art.

The implication is that the young otaku shutting himself up in his room to create earnest illustrations and upload them to pixiv, or the “artisans” who, on top of their regular jobs, edit fan anime videos and upload them to Nico Nico Douga, these people are the movers of the art of the post-2010 decade. Of course, art is not something that just exists in a culture, and those illustrations and videos populating the Web are also not art, nor are the creators artists. Needless to say, the name “wild art” is a semantic contradiction.

And then why, even so, was the CHAOS*LOUNGE Manifesto written and put into practice through an exhibition- That is because the activities of the Manifesto and the CHAOS*LOUNGE unit were actually those of criticism: real art is always critical and criticism is the reversal of values. The tedium of the art of the Japanese 2000s sought to be real art and yearned for a reversal of values through criticism. The CHAOS*LOUNGE Manifesto is written as a highly radical critique born out of the self-awareness of this 2000s culture.

Exactly one year after the CHAOS*LOUNGE Manifesto uncovered the possibilities in the intercrossing consumption and circulation of otaku culture and online culture, the March earthquake and tsunami hit us. Post-2010 Japan became a “post-3.11” world and the form of the overall value-reversing culture also totally changed. Online culture did not alter reality but kept pushing for otaku culture to confront this post-3.11 world.

“Otakus are going about their normal lives with no connection to the disaster. It is this never-ending ordinary life that is venerable.” This is the conclusion that was reached. Seemingly the original CHAOS*LOUNGE Manifesto has no validity as criticism anymore. We should surely make a new declaration, yes? No, that is not necessary. A “declaration” is merely the style of tedious 2000s culture. After 3.11 what has become clear is that there are aspects of the otaku that will not change even after the catastrophe, a rather regretful part of digital Japan where an indigenous system becomes simply peer pressure. In such a “bad place”, the situation evolves steadily towards an “animalized” world.* (The fact that it has become clear that most of the much-hyped numerous post-3.11 demos and anti-nuclear artist performances have in the end given no consideration to a Japanese revolutionary vision, that they have been merely blind travesties of a bourgeois revolution, is a real sign of grave “animalization”. They are a phenomenon that should be understood in the same way as the August riots in England, a symbol of the globalized dispersal of “animalization”.)

We must not make declarations. We must make inquiries. What are the possibilities for art after the era of “animalization”? In the midst of this “animalized” world, the opportunity for constructing relations between society and the individual, and chief of all for the function seemingly possessed by “art”, can only be discovered in subcultures. Japan has attested to this more than anywhere else. Pre-3.11, post-3.11, this will not change, nor attempt to change.

And what about those who remain inside otaku subculture and disregard the problems of otaku self-consciousness? What of those who re-set the regretful Japanese Web and support the Japanese digital subculture? Probably there is the area where there is the technology for intervening in the “animalistic” part of humanity and where high culture “art” presupposed on “human” communication cannot arrive. This territory will be defined as a new art, and the art of the post-“animalized era” will here be put into practice.

Yohei Kurose

Nico Nico Douga: a Japanese version of YouTube, noted for its intuitive embedding of user comments, streaming across the video footage at the point when posted

Otaku: a “geek”, especially one fanatical about a certain subculture, such as manga, video games, pop “idols”, or anime

Pixiv: an art-sharing website

*It was art critic Noi Sawaragi who first described Japanese art as a series of ahistorical events in a “bad place” (warui basho), lacking a chronology in art and so somewhere where modern categorizations are easily resolved. “Animalization” (doubutsuka) is a reference to cultural critic Hiroki Azuma’s famous analysis of pop culture through a postmodern frame.