day 4 - ARAI SHIN-ICHI
[tokyo, Japan]

www.araiart.jp/0804273e.html

"Viva! Globalization For TANAKA Mitsu"


Friday, May 8
8:00 pm
Free / By Donation

Petit Retrospective of ARAI Shin-ichi
Works from 1999-2009

The fourth of 5 nights of performances by Mr. Shin-ichi

Viva! Globalization For TANAKA Mitsu

Epilogue for the first edition of "For women of life - an outrageous women-lib theory" (April 1972) by Tanaka

Mitsu First, I’ll tell you that authorities are stepping up their harassment day by day. Things seem the same with everything dubbed a movement. We are still wondering what a movement means and engaging in the lib that the society sees as a movement. Even this humble effort is already disturbing enough for the authorities, it seems. As she entered our collective, a member of our group lent the apartment she had lived by then. Then we found the authorities had listed the new lender, whom we had barely met once, as a member of our group , added with an allegation that she had stolen a rifle from a house and given it to extremists. Newspapers finely faked a story that our group had risen to armed fights. Funny enough, it was when we were struggling for our unfamiliar new job as bar hostesses. We are simply stunned by the slyness of the authorities.

Now, I am being tailed by a plain-clothes on a daily basis. A cop is shameless enough to visit my parents every day to intimidate them saying that their daughter is a ranking member of her feminist group. We just laugh at this old-fashioned mentality to use the word a ranking member. If I am a ranking member, you may be the gang leader. We joke and yet shiver with the sharpened claws of the authorities.

It is the authorities that crave for armed fights more than anybody else. Which fool on earth runs for armed campaigns when they are trying to illegalize everything dubbed a movement? It would be a blind suicide to rise to armed fights, at least on the vague terrain of the new left. As a bitch who has lived wagging her tail, I will refuse to die worthlessly like an underdog. Nor will l choose to live like one.

Women are always "realists." We'll do legal activities as the keystone. This is the very conclusion we reached after shamelessly drifting between the right and left, to the puzzling of the general public. We cannot take off elegantly as a lib group which tries to pick up everything dumped by all these called movements, including housewives leagues and new-left actions.

The authorities are trying to make the lib an exceptional vessel and cut it off from "ordinary women." But they miss one critical point that even their wives are women who cannot flee the fact that lib has taken place. We are not libs. Lib simply inhabits in the very difficulty women face in their lives. For every life of women to become lib. That is the sole condition for this world to become a truly humanitarian one. Now, a new image of woman is being created by career-ambitious women and some celebrity unwed mothers. This image, of economically and sexually independent woman, is a new makeup of postwar women, who were billed as becoming as strong as synthetic stockings. This means in turn, that less successful and imperfect women are left behind the makeup, grumbling only small weeds grow in the shadow. They try to fill up their frustration of not living their own lives by contributing more to order of the establishment. In this world where productivity comes first, those made to believe to be worthless, are sinners for their very existence. Seeking acquittal, they sacrifice themselves to the superficial ideal of society. So we see women who find their role in serving tea, saying they are happy if their tiny job makes everyone happy. Beyond this mentality are the specters of the militarist wives and mothers of yasukuni shrine honoring war-dead.

Liberalization of women means liberalization of the mentality that honors sacrificial deaths. To this end our lib as a movement aims at economic and sexual independence for imperfect ordinary women, linking a woman with women. And so we say no to giving up men and kids for the sake of the cause of our movement. Instead of looking up to single special figure, women now need to stand shoulder to shoulder. I will dedicate this book first to my mother with a lot of thoughts I cannot turn to words. And then to the ex members of our collective and my lib friends who cared for my health and gave me their hands while I was writing this book.

Arai Shin-ichi www.araiart.jp/
www.myspace.com/arashin