Tabaimo

On the Dark Side of Japanese Animation

Talented young Tabaimo creates animated works that are as beautifully crafted and aesthetically appealing as they are enigmatic, fascinating, and often quite disturbing. Not content to simply construct beautiful or intriguing images, she clearly aims to offer a complex and pessimistic vision of Japanese society at the start of the new millennium.

Looking at her animation, one is struck both by the symbols of Japanese culture (cranes, chrysanthemums, the Japanese flag) and by prosaic images such as commuter trains and sidewalk crossings. Tabaimo manipulates these images to defamiliarize them, placing them in sometimes shocking contexts to provoke her audience into thinking more deeply about societal issues. Thus, in her dream diary-NIPPON we see a young girl defecating on a Japanese flag, while in her Japanese Commuter Train installation a man hangs from a train strap, but the strap is around his neck and he is clearly dead.

Japanese Kitchen Created in 1999 Tabaimo's hand-drawing adds warmth to the characters in this disturbing animated narrative. (photography by Kazuhiko Suzuki)

Japanese Interior Created in 2002 A guest will sit on a tatami mat, using a mouse and manipulating a joystick with his foot to communicate interactively with the animated images. The artist incorporates the ukiyo-e color styles of Hokusai Katsushika and others in her animated images. (photo courtesy of Hara Museum ARC)

Her longer works create the impression of a dream turned into a nightmare. In The Bathhouse, for example, she conjures the world of the traditional Japanese bathhouse, including the boxes where patrons leave their shoes and a wall mural reproduction of Hokusai's Red Fuji to give the viewer the sense of having actually entered a real bathhouse. She then adds fantastic and disturbing touches that suggest the problems involved in maintaining Japanese identity in the contemporary world. The bathhouse patrons are shown not only undressing, but also unzipping their skin, suggesting that out in the "real world" they may be hiding their true identities. An official-looking notice appears, remarking on the increase of trash in the streets. Immediately, the viewer sees garbage dumped into the bath, suggesting that even traditional Japanese culture is being polluted by the modern world. At the end of the piece, when the drain plug is pulled, the bathhouse disappears.

Japanese Kitchen is even more provocative. As with Bathhouse, this is a beautifully drawn and animated work, with colors and patterns that evoke the art of the premodern ukiyo-e print. But the vision of Japanese Kitchen is far darker than traditional art, evoking a society with problems that seem increasingly uncontrollable. In a particularly clever sequence satirizing unemployment, a woman opens her refrigerator to find a miniature man dressed in a suit and working busily at his desk. Plucking him from the refrigerator, she proceeds to cut off his head, a visual pun on the Japanese expression kubi ni naru (literally, to become a neck), meaning someone has lost his job.

The kitchen itself seems to symbolize modern Japanese society in general. While chopping her food, the woman listens to a radio weather forecast that calls for "clusters of high-school student suicides." Cockroaches scurry around, suggesting not only pollution but also another pun, this time on gokiburi teishu (literally, cockroach husbands), who, after becoming unemployed, hang around the house making a mess.

These works are original but they also recall more commercial anime offerings. Themes of suicide areprominent in a recent Japanese television series Serial Experiments Lain, while the image of the bathhouse as a polluted modern Japan dominates the recent Academy Award-winning animated film Spirited Away. But Tabaimo takes these themes even further, creating a surreal world in which one troubling vision leads to another.

Tabaimo Artist, professor Born in 1975, Tabaimo focuses her creative energies on animation that describes the dark side of modern Japanese society. She uses black humor from time to time to craft her unique perspective. The artwork for her undergraduate thesis, Japanese Kitchen, 1999, was awarded the blue ribbon at the Kirin Contemporary Art Awards, a competition for emerging artists. She was the youngest to receive this award. Japanese Kitchen is a three-dimensional installation in which the entry door and the sliding shoji screen bear the symbol of the Japanese flag. Animated images play on the wall of the reception room with its tatami floor. In her installation named Japanese Interior, a guest sits in a four-and-one-half-tatami room with a cushion and table, and enjoys an interactive communication with animated images playing on the screen. Tabaimo's unique installations provoke discussion abroad, as well as in Japan, where she is also a professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design.