The Emotional Geography of Shinjuku: The Case ofChikatetsu Hiroba(Underground Plaza, 1970)
Ōuchida Keiya's Chikatetsu Hiroba (Underground Plaza, 1970), a film from the Japanese underground cinema movement, documents the gathering of ‘folk guerrillas’ (activists and student protestors) at the underground plaza linking the west and east exits of the vast Shinjuku railway station in February 1969. This essay analyses their protests by highlighting their apparent search for a new performative praxis, amidst evidence of complicated broken threads, misplaced emotions and disconnections between politics and action. Through occupying and restoring other uses of the space, I argue that the protestors desired to remake the city as a forum for ideological confrontation and revolutionary aesthetics.