from "Ginza Days, Omori Nights: The Birth of a Contemporary Art Scene"   For a group of students, who had all studied at Tokyo’s prestigious national University of the Arts (Geidai) in the late 80s, these years (1991-1995) were the golden years. Their dynamism was born of frustration. They were frustrated by their teachers, who focused only on technique and ignored the exciting conceptualism that they could read about in the global art press. They were frustrated by the dominant trends in art criticism in Japan, that focused on the elite avant garde legacy of the 1950s and 60s. And they were frustrated by galleries and curators, with practically no contemporary gallerists willing to nurture new artists, and at that point in time, virtually no art museums showing international contemporary art.   The biggest frustration, though, was the Ginza rental gallery art system. The young artists faced the impossibility of showing their work publicly, because of the domination of the Ginza kashi garo system. These were the commercial galleries for rent by artists trying to sell work, that mostly promoted vain and conservative styles for old fashioned collectors. Tokyo's historical city centre, Ginza, was ageing in the early 1990s, but it was outwardly still the shiny silver heart of the Japanese capitalist dream. In the 1980s, in the midst of the crazily overheating Japanese consumer economy, it had become the most expensive few square miles on the face of the planet. The commercialism and corporate face masked a backstreet scene of underworld money and secret dens of business and pleasure, in which the deals that drove the dream were made. It was also the heart of the old Tokyo art world. Some of the galleries dealing in antiques or Western modern art were owned by yakuza (Japanese mafia) because they were the perfect front for laundering money. The young artists were shut out of this world, unless they had rich parents who could pay for a gallery show.   But still, the group were young, and these were exciting times. There was the amazing pop culture buzz in Tokyo, with new magazines, club nights and alternative fashions, popping up everywhere. They were a gang, and they spent all their time together: talking, arguing, dreaming, checking out the scene. The emergence of “Tokyo pop”, as their movement came to be known, was not some kind of accident. It was a moment in time that brought together a group of extraordinarily talented and energetic people. It was a place too: a school, however old fashioned some of the professors were. A group of friends pushing and inspiring each other. The western art world usually only knows the name of one character from this group: Takashi Murakami. But the truth is, as sociologists know, “it takes a village”, a whole social network, place and time, for such creativity to be born.   I have talked with many of the people involved in or around this Tokyo gang at the time. Min Nishihara, Murakami’s close friend and “muse” in the early 90s, an art writer who formulated many of the key ideas of “Tokyo pop” in the brilliant, trashy articles she wrote. Tomio Koyama, now the most famous commercial name worldwide in Japanese contemporary art. Tim Blum, Koyama’s drinking partner at the time, a brash young Los Angeleno helping to run a small gallery in Tokyo, and sketching a manifesto that will one day turn this amazing new art he finds into something global. Yuko Yamamoto, now one of the most important gallerists in Tokyo, who was a young gallery assistant to Tsutomu Ikeuchi at Röntgen, and met her husband there, Noi Sawaragi, the art writer. Yuko Hasegawa, the ambitious and tireless editor and art organiser, who is today the most powerful museum curator of contemporary art in Japan. Kiki Kudo, now a well known art writer and critic, an art school dropout who became Murakami’s first assistant. Hideki Nakazawa, the key conceptualist of the group, who has gone on to become the most important chronicler in Japanese of those exciting times. And Masato Nakamura, the organiser and closest partner of Murakami, an art intellectual with a talent for conceiving avant garde public interventions in the great tradition of Japanese radical 60s artists.   History blurs chronology, and so much of what happened in those times takes on the misty glamour of myth. For example, there was the famous birthday party on February 1st 1992 of the two young leaders of the movement, Takashi Murakami and Masato Nakamura. They shared the same birthday; Murakami is one year older, he was turning 30. Of all the young ambitious artists, these two were the most “likely lads” coming out of Geidai – the ones who seemed most destined for great things. They had a friendly rivalry, as well as a contrast in styles. They had known each other since the mid 80s from Geidai and tutoring together at art prep school. Murakami had since 1991 started to make waves on the Tokyo scene. At his first proper solo exhibition in December 1991, he exhibited Randoseru, a series of Japanese children’s school bags made out of precious, illegal animal skins. Nakamura shared his feeling of frustration with the contemporary art scene, but was plotting ways of taking art into the streets. Their attitude had especially taken shape around a controversial book published in 1986 by art critic Nobuo Nakamura, Shonen Art (Youth Art), which castigated the lack of any real art scene in Tokyo. Now they were trying to invent one by themselves.   Kiki Kudo, who was 20 at the time, gatecrashed the party with a friend. She had recently failed the entrance exam to Geidai – an archaic system where hundreds of candidates, desperate for one of the subsidised places, have to sit through hours of drawing and painting exams. It was the only art school at which students of poorer class background could afford to study. Murakami, as always was the centre of the crowd, loud, laughing. Kudo and her friend thought he was some kind of funny oyaji (old bloke), a 30 year old intellectual type, who was just finishing his PhD, but obsessed with teenage youth culture. Murakami asked what she was doing? Nothing much, she said. Ok, do you want to be my studio assistant? Murakami didn’t have a studio, he just had an apartment. Kudo had no formal skills, but she knew a lot about the strange sub-cultures Murakami liked, as well as many of the actual people involved. She became an “ideas” person for Murakami.   Kudo’s greatest influence, though, was Min Nishihara. Nishihara had a style of writing totally unlike the high brow intellectualism of other art critics, such as Noi Sawaragi and Yuko Hasegawa, who wrestled with postmodern art theory. Nishihara had more of a down-to-earth, “hardcore” style: fast moving, sharp and throwaway, the style of writing seen nowadays in blogs. Like many people who remember her writing from that period, Kudo describes her as the “genius” of Tokyo pop. Min Nishihara and Takashi Murakami were inseparable, a non-stop barrage of back and forth argument and ideas. Nishihara wrote for the same magazines as Sawaragi and Hasegawa, and she travelled together with Murakami to exhibitions. She tried to discover and promote new artists. They travelled together to Europe, to see the famous Documenta show in 1992, writing scathing critical reviews on every piece they saw. She and Murakami talked about launching a magazine called “Art Sex”.   Takashi Murakami was a brilliant networker, always at the hub of things, a classic “connector”. He was also pushy. When somebody important came into a gallery, the group would move over to try to catch their attention. Min Nishihara remembers meeting Jay Jopling, the famous British gallerist, and Jeff Koons, this way. Koons was friendly to the young group, who were all huge fans of his work. Murakami would just phone people up, tell them to take notice of his work. Murakami is like that, one old friend says, he never stops being “Murakami” 24/7. That's how he had first contacted Noi Sawaragi in the late 1980s. Sawaragi was a young editor at Bijutsu Techo, the most important Japanese art magazine, who had been writing provocative articles about global art trends that all the students had read. They met and got on famously. One day, in early 1991, Sawaragi was going to check out a new, yet-to-open art space in South East Tokyo, and he invited Murakami to come along. It was a totally unexpected place – a big old warehouse in an obscure industrial area, Omori. They met the owner, a young man their age, who was the son of a famous antique tea utensils dealer. Tsutomu Ikeuchi had started his own gallery, and was already showing extraordinary electronic pop art in strange booths at the art fairs. Now he had spent a large amount of his family’s money on renovating this big space for art events. It had three floors, and lots of room for big installations or a huge party. Ikeuchi called it the Röntgen Kunst Institute, because of his fetish with German futurism. He didn’t have many clear plans yet, so over an all night izakaya session, the three decided that they would organise Murakami’s exhibition together. They agreed that the event shouldn’t be like a normal art opening: it had to have music and publicity, and they had to try to get some of the cool Tokyo pop scene to come and look at contemporary art for a change…     …When the 90s artists couldn’t find exhibition spaces, they took to the streets. A defining moment arrived when Masato Nakamura laid the plans for an open air “terrorist” art event, The Ginburart, that would take place on the streets of Ginza in April 1993. Nakumura, was a quieter personality than Murakami, but also a leader with a phenomenal talent for persuasion and organisation. Again, with the radical  legacy of Hi Red Center in mind, but also the more recent example of 80s street art interventions in the East Village, New York, Nakamura targeted the eight chome (districts) of Ginza, challenging 8 artists to make a public art event in each.   Masato Nakamura’s The Ginburart stole Takashi Murakami’s thunder as the leader of “Tokyo pop”. The concept of Murakami’s work hinged on his anti-art intellectualism. Albeit provocative, his art was a purposely meaningless translation of Japanese popular culture. It was only later, after New York, that he discovered it could work so well as a signifier of “Japan” for foreigners. Nakamura was more of an idealist, and believed in art as a social intervention, a means of changing society. A close associate of Nakamura and participant in The Ginburart, Peter Bellars, an English artist and art writer, had also suggested the idea of making the art system itself the target of the art. Bellars couldn’t understand why Tokyo artists didn’t make more art about the extraordinary street life and culture around them. Following Masato Nakamura's "rules of the game", each of the participating artists at The Ginburart did something that upset the normal, everday functioning of the Ginza districts they had been assigned. For example, Min Nishihara painted white text on the streets; Peter Bellars nailed up "Love Hotel" signs outside corporate office entrances. Meanwhile, another Geidai friend, Muneteru Ujino, later famous as sound sculpture and performance artist, gave a popular commentary tour of all the works, dressed as an angel and carried by six men in a Shinto style "Art Mikoshi" shrine.   The most famous art work to come out of The Ginburart was the invention of the Nasubi gallery. This was the perfect visualisation of the young artists’ struggle for space, as well as an accidental product of the rules of the game set up by Nakamura. Tsuyoshi Ozawa was given the honour of performing his work in Ginza 1# chome. For this work, Ozawa decided to parody the Ginza art system by showing various alternative gallery spaces, tiny platforms for works that could be thought of as an exhibition. He called the idea Nasubi gallery (“EggplantArtGallery”) as a parody of one of the famous Ginza galleries, Nabisu. One of these was an old milk delivery box, painted inside like a tiny “white cube”, which he could hang on a wall or post in the street anywhere. Murakami had been invited to participate in The Ginburart, but his plan to make a masochistic “rejection tour” of the Ginza galleries in his district with his art portfolio failed because it was a Sunday, and the galleries were closed. Nakamura, irritated, insisted he had to do something. Murakami asked if any gallery would do? Yes, he was told. So he asked Ozawa if he could make an exhibition inside his milk box gallery. It was the first Nasubi gallery show: a miniature Murakami installation, using coloured paint and plastic Tamiya toy soldiers, which he often used in his earliest works. The show was called Takashi Murakami's Large Retrospective Show. The two artists have fought ever since over who owns the concept, but Ozawa has gone on to show many other artists around the world in his Nasubi gallery.   The impact of The Ginburart surprised the young artists. Not only did they attract a big audience and a lot of curious passers-by, as well as the police. They also made a very powerful statement about art in the city from a generation that felt locked out of the system. It galvanised more young artists to action. One of these was a young sculptor named Yoshihiro Suda, who carved tiny flowers and plants out of wood. Later that year, he hired a daily parking space in Ginza, and parked an empty wooden crate there. Inside this strange installation space was one of his tiny fragile weed sculptures (Ginza Weed Theory, 1993). It was a beautiful metaphor for the struggle of contemporary artists in Tokyo.   In April 1994, Masato Nakamura planned a second, even bigger street event, Shinjuku Shonen Art, in the Yakuza red light district of Kabukicho. Things were beginning to take off for all the group, but with so many plans and artists crowding the scene, it was beginning to fragment. Murakami declined to take part in Nakamura’s new show. He was set on pursuing his idea of turning otaku ideas into commercial contemporary art, and he abandoned Tokyo for New York in late 1994. It marked the end of a short golden era, and of working relations between Masato Nakamura and Takashi Murakami, whose friendship had chilled after The Ginburart. Tomio Koyama and Min Nishihara visited Murakami while he was in in New York. He was depressed and homesick. It was the beginning of 1995. While Murakami sat and hatched his plans in the US, back in Tokyo, two terrible events were about to change everything in Japan again…