“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
http://cardboard-house-painting.jp/
Shinjuku
Realism
by
Yamane Yasuhiro, 2005
Cardboard
Walls, Cardboard Art
by
Justin Jesty, 2006
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