The Godzilla Tour of Japan : A Writer, a Politician, a Diplomat and an Artist Wrestle With the Fantasy-vs.-Reality Questions of their Country’s Shifting Identity

“Wimps,” Kenji Sato says slowly in English, as if he is savoring the sound of the word. “Japan has become a nation of wimps raised on Godzilla movies.” We are sitting in a skyscraper sipping coffee in a faux French cafe called Petit Monde. The view is of the glass towers and huge, blinking video screens of Shinjuku, the once ramshackle section of Tokyo that is now its flashing, shining center of consumerism. The blocks of swanky department stores, the broad avenues of tall, sleek office buildings and hotels have also become the favorite film backdrop for Godzilla’s rampages of the city. It is a perfect setting for Sato, one of Japan’s most provocative young writers, to lay out his theory that Godzilla films are a primer on what he calls the fantasy of postwar Japan. He’s written a bestseller on the subject, “Godzilla, Yamato and Our Democracy.”

It was a bit over a year ago, not long after Japan’s stunning political upheavals began, that I first met Sato, who is 28 now and has the look of an arty graduate student. “If you want to understand what’s going on in Japan,” he told me then, “Godzilla films are a good place to start.” With Sato as my guide, we set off on what I came to think of as the Godzilla tour of Japan.

Like many Japanese, Sato grew up with Godzilla. Nearly a rite of national passage, there would always be the tale of the monster, born of the horrors of the nuclear age, wreaking havoc on his defenseless victim, Japan. The first one came out in 1954, and yet another one, the 21st, is due out next month. It is not a far-fetched conceit to see them as giving a story line to postwar Japan. Over the years, the skyline in the movies changed from squat and war-scarred to glimmering high-tech, and the plots loosely followed the vagaries of the Cold War. But the basic ingredients, including the 165-foot-high Godzilla, a mutant, overgrown reptile spewing flames of radiated heat, stayed the same.

After Sato went abroad and began to write, he started thinking of these movies less as a story line than as a mirror of something deeper--Japan’s postwar myth. It goes like this: Thanks to Uncle Sam, Japan was reborn as a peace-loving country. Accepting its role as victim in the larger world, Japan abhorred power and, as a result, politics. It was to be a place where consensus reigned and everyone could get rich. Most important, it was to be a sheltered place where people didn’t have to concern themselves with the big, bad world beyond their shores.

Sato calls it the fantasy of postwar democracy, and the point of his Godzilla tour was to tell me that the fantasy is falling apart. “If Japan was still a two-bit country, no one would care if we wallowed in our fantasies. But we’ve become rich and strong and the rest of the world is asking us to get involved, do our part, and we don’t have an answer,” he said. “Japan’s become like a Godzilla movie. Just look at Japanese politics. We all know the plot is outdated and ridiculous, but who will write a new one?”

The Japanese are indeed looking for a new plot. Their political system collapsed last year, bringing to an end 38 years of one-party rule by the Liberal Democratic Party and the orthodoxies of postwar Japan. To be in Japan during the past year has been to witness the flowering of a great debate over what’s next for the country. Sato calls it a grand identity crisis, and he’s right.

It’s not as if the identity issue hasn’t been addressed before. Intellectuals in Japan have agonized over whether the price of modernization has been the loss of Japan’s soul, whether Japan is part of the West or part of Asia, and over what it means to be a pacifist nation. But the debate has had a make-believe quality, like a Godzilla movie, because it has been divorced from the world of politics.

Now with the crumbling of the political set-up, it seems an unmistakable sign that a chapter has closed, that the national narrative needs to be overhauled. Japan is rich now and is no longer frantically trying to catch up with the West. For the first time, the Japanese are asking questions about what’s next from a position of strength.

Sato and three others--a politician, a diplomat and an artist--give voice to the central and often contradictory themes of the debate. Tadatoshi Akiba, the politician, insists that pacifism, so ingrained in how postwar Japanese see themselves, must be retained. Sato seeks identity by reinventing a tradition that he feels has been lost since the war. The diplomat, Kazuo Ogura, turns to Asia as an inspiration and wants Japan to stop imitating the West. And the artist, Yukinori Yanagi, believes that identity can only be defined by individuals, freed from preordained ways of thinking.

These four individuals, in their writing, art and ideas, are offering scripts that can and will be tested in the real world. Perhaps, as the country’s obsessive self-analysis gives way to more democracy, more conflict and more art, the question of identity will take care of itself. For the issues these men are raising are, in essence, questions that will inevitably lead the Japanese to make real choices, not just about who they perceive themselves to be, but about how they live and where they are going.

THE POLITICIAN

One morning, during one of my visits to his tiny office behind the Diet building, Tadatoshi Akiba pulls a book from his cluttered shelves. It’s an album of the 1963 Hiroshima Peace Conference Opposing Atom and Hydrogen Bombs. “This is how I got involved in politics,” he says, finding the picture of himself as a scrawny college student wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and glasses with thick black frames. He chuckles and leans back for a minute, staring at the photo. Behind him, a series of more recent snapshots has been pinned to a bulletin board: the politician standing with representatives of an A-bomb survivors group, with a graying Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, with a European delegation promoting nuclear disarmament.

Akiba is a man of the left, a man of peace and a politician representing Hiroshima, the city of peace. But now he feels embattled. His party, the (Japan) Social Democratic Party, pacifism’s protector, is backtracking. Socialists have gone from ritualized opposition to partners in a new ruling coalition, sparking an extraordinary battle over what it means to be a pacifist nation. Is pacifism, as Akiba insists, Japan’s national mission and the cornerstone of its national identity? Or is it, as Sato claims, an illusion that has locked Japan’s politics into dependence on the United States, trapping the Japanese in passivity? Or has pacifism become an elaborate excuse for isolationism, a shield for Japan the economic giant against messy military entanglements abroad?

For Akiba, the college peacenik who grew up to be a mathematics professor and then a politician, there is no choice but the pacifist path for Japan. To spend time with this broad-shouldered and handsome man of 52 is to hear a version of the national narrative that is embraced by millions of Japanese. In somber tones and in perfect English, from his days teaching at Tufts University, Akiba tells me that the core of Japanese identity was forged in the death and ruins left by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “We are a nation that has renounced war. If we abandon our peace constitution, we will defile the memories of the victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Without it, we will lose our way in Asia and the world,” he says.

Akiba presents his pacifism as wisdom learned the hard way. Being Japanese means spreading this wisdom. “Along with Auschwitz, Hiroshima is one of the crucial events in the history of mankind that we must learn from,” he says. “This lesson, that war is never the answer, is the spirit of Hiroshima.” His mission is universalizing that spirit. It’s the reason he returned to Japan in the early 1980s. It’s what pushed him into politics, it’s why he ran for a seat in Japan’s Parliament in 1989 and why he has made Hiroshima his home.

One weekend, on one of his trips home during the recent Parliament session, I went too. Hiroshima is an odd mixture of a pilgrimage site and an almost dull, modern city whose past has been erased. Along its wide boulevards and greenbelts, little remains from before Aug. 6, 1945, when the Enola Gay dropped its load, the atomic bomb, at 8:15 in the morning.

But the memory of the bombing dominates the city in the form of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, a sprawling oasis of trees and monuments near ground zero. Across the small river at one end of the park, you can see the shell of what was the Hiroshima Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall, now called the A-Bomb Dome, a permanent reminder of the destruction that left an estimated 150,000 people dead from burns or radiation sickness. In the park’s center stands the cenotaph with its famous inscription engraved on a black stone coffin: “Let all souls here rest in peace, for the error shall not be repeated.” The cenotaph, Akiba tells me, captures the importance of Japan’s mission. “But the subject is unclear,” he says, “who will not repeat the error? Japanese or human beings? Or does it mean the U.S.? No, it means me, my country, and that we should take responsibility beyond revenge for ensuring peace.”

He says much of his work involves helping the survivors of the bombing, known as hibakusha, receive medical care and spread their message of peace. His politics rest on the tension between casting the Japanese as victims of the atomic bomb and the claim that Hiroshima has become the universal symbol for world peace. In this, Akiba fits squarely in the postwar Socialist Party, whose politics of identity is based on pacifism. For decades, Akiba and his fellow Socialists were the permanent opposition to the status quo of the LDP, and their moralism was a sign of impotence.

The last year has changed all of this. The fall of the LDP has provoked a free-for-all of party realignments, and Japan’s anti-war stance has become one of the major issues dictating the reshaping of Japanese politics and identity. New voices are asking whether Japan’s pacifism has become selfish, rather than a beacon for the rest of the world. The issue arises in policy debates about when Japan’s Self-Defense Forces can join United Nations peacekeeping operations and whether Japan should join the U.N. Security Council. Is Akiba’s anti-war lesson the right one for the country now?

It used to be that only right-wing extremists or hard-to-stomach nationalist politicians attacked the postwar deal and pacifism. For years, the nationalist right, led by such figures as former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, talked about victor’s “justice,” an unfortunate overemphasis on war guilt and the need to revive the Japanese spirit and the sacredness of the emperor, which made it easy to see why Socialists, like Akiba, warned darkly of a return to militarism. But today, the challenge to pacificism is mainstream.

Ichiro Ozawa is the prime mover of the reformist camp that orchestrated the revolt from within the LDP. Ozawa is not a right-wing nationalist, but he has written a bestseller in which he argues that Japan must become a normal nation. Normal, for Ozawa, means contributing to international security by sending troops to U.N. operations. Otherwise, he argues, rich Japan will be accused of selfishness and will wind up isolated. There are plenty of Japanese who agree, and the debate intensifies.

After the LDP crumbled, Akiba says, he thought Japan might begin promoting peace his way--perhaps by helping the United Nations come up with new, nonviolent ways of dealing with conflict. But in one of the most remarkable turnarounds in Japan’s topsy-turvy political world, Akiba’s party switched sides in July and teamed up with its archrival, the LDP, to form the current government. The Socialist prime minister, Tomiichi Murayama, quickly found himself in the awkward position of being in charge of the same Self-Defense Forces that his party had long claimed were unconstitutional. And in August, he reconciled his position and his party, declaring not only that he considers the Self-Defense Forces constitutional but also that Japanese troops can join U.N. operations as long as no force is used.

In early September, an extraordinary scene unfolded outside the Socialist Party’s Tokyo headquarters. A special convention of office-holders and party leaders was called to endorse the prime minister’s policy reversals. As party notables arrived, they were greeted by jeers and chants from about 200 fellow Socialists huddled near the entrance carrying banners and placards. “Don’t betray Socialists all over Japan,” the group yelled, “don’t stop being the conscience of the nation.” Off to the side, a few Buddhist monks in saffron robes were slowly beating drums. Akiba, like the other party leaders, made his way through the hecklers, though he probably had more in common with the group on the outside. The assembled Socialists endorsed Murayama’s new position and vowed to continue protecting the peace constitution. Akiba sat through it all, looking glum. The Hiroshima spirit had met the new politics of Japan.

THE WRITER

Kenji Sato always arrives a bit late and wired to his Walkman. He’s a big, chubby man, partial to listening to Lou Reed and wearing black trousers with bright, oddball T-shirts. One of his favorites, which he found in New York, shows a roaring Godzilla in red and black. He often brings me an essay on politics he’s just published or news of the play about AIDS that he is writing.

Sato, a privileged child of the new Japan, lives in an affluent section of Tokyo. His father, Seizaburo Sato, is a famous political scientist who heads a think tank started by Nakasone, the nationalist politician and former LDP prime minister. His mother, Kinko Sato, is a lawyer, well-known as an authority on the constitution. He comes from a conservative school of thought whose members resent the modern world for robbing the Japanese of their identity. But Sato is very much part of that modern world and he faces a question: How will Japan’s political changes affect its cultural life?

His theory of the fantasy of postwar democracy grew from his ambition to write fiction, he says. “I looked around and wondered, ‘Why is there no compelling fiction or drama or movies?’ I kept coming back to the postwar political setup and the stifling ideology it created.” The root of the problem, he says, is that Japan never regained its national sovereignty after the war. The symbol of Japan’s dependence on the United States, he says, is Article Nine of the postwar constitution, which states that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation.”

“The generous victor announced there was no need for the government to exercise power, no need for an army and no need for war. Japanese history could start over, from scratch, in 1945. Of course it was wishful thinking, but the Japanese embraced it and they embraced the ideology that went with it,” Sato says.

As he sees it, politicians from the Liberal Democratic Party masterfully turned the pacifist constitution to Japan’s, and their own, advantage. The United States took care of security, and the LDP took care of making Japan rich. “We have a democracy, but it doesn’t work very well. It’s a system that suppresses conflict. Since power is bad, we don’t have politics; we have rule by consensus, which really means by bureaucrats.”

As Japan’s political life stagnated, so did literature, the arts and popular culture, Sato says. Make-believe politics began begetting make-believe culture. It is a connection that expresses weakness, dependence, passivity--in short, a nation of wimps.

Sato can be wickedly funny describing how Godzilla movies just get worse and worse; who can believe that Godzilla really threatens Tokyo when the skyscrapers of Shinjuku now tower over him? He’s written an essay ripping apart the genre of romantic love stories in movies, books and television dramas as banal caricatures, stories of love paralysis between mama’s boys and passive women. These stories usually end with someone else intervening to thrust the hapless couple together, and they live happily ever after--as brother and sister.

It is tempting to see much of culture and style through Sato’s eyes: as reflecting a willfully juvenile sensibility. There is the architectural mish-mash of Tokyo that gives the impression of Disneyland or a movie set; the sugary pop songs; the twittering, high-pitched voices of television stars who act like schoolgirls; the salary men in their blue suits reading comic books on the subways and so on. After a while, the kaleidoscopic images of modern Japan give one the feeling of adolescent restlessness in which fashion, films, writers are devoured for a time as the latest fad and then abandoned.

“It’s as if we have our own soft, Japanese-style Soviet Realism,” Sato tells me one evening. There are plenty of artists and writers who challenge conventions--avant-garde painters on strike against society, butoh performances that are celebrations of mad erotica, ex-student radicals who make porn movies--but for Sato, they are Japan’s cultural samizdat , utterly marginal and easily ignored. As for the rest, it’s Japanese-style Soviet Realism, which replaces praise for the proletariat with praise for the postwar ideology. For starters, he says, that means utopian pacifism and the myth that conflict has been done away with, not just in the political realm but in the cultural realm as well. “Without conflict, there can be no good drama. How do you write good drama when the postwar ideology says there is no more conflict? Of course there is conflict, but it doesn’t get expressed,” he says.

The tables around us in the trendy Italian restaurant are filled with young people dressed in the latest designer fashions. “Just look around. We’re all cut off from tradition,” he says. “We were told that Japanese history could start anew in 1945. That absolved people of a sense of responsibility for the war, but it also meant we are cut off from our traditions. Without a sense of tradition, art just becomes pop. In my own writing, I can’t turn to old stories or use images or metaphors from the past. No one would understand them. Instead, there’s Hollywood or pop music.”

Sato echoes the common lament, a mourning for something lost and a deep ambivalence over being Westernized without being Western. This has long absorbed conservatives; it is what the well-known literary critic Jun Eto means when he says that the American occupation denied the Japanese their sense of cultural continuity. In postwar Japan, this fury over being robbed of tradition has often been expressed in an extreme right-wing nationalism or a quasi-religious quest to find the Japanese spirit. But Sato considers as absurd the search for the pure Japanese spirit in some mythical past before Korean influence, before Chinese influence and certainly before American influence. Reviving past traditions, such as the Shintoism that turned the state into a religious cult with the emperor at its head, holds no answer for him either. Instead, he says, “We have to create a new tradition.”

THE DIPLOMAT

With a casual flick of the wrist, Kazuo Ogura dismisses those like Sato who long for a new tradition to compensate for their sense of loss. Sitting in his roomy office in the Foreign Ministry, Ogura, a trim, elegant man of 56, says such preoccupations spring from a lack of confidence and a cultural fear of being weaker than the West. Those days are over. “Japan is rising and the rest of Asia is rising along with it,” he tells me. “A new Asia has been born and it’s already creating a new tradition.”

Ogura is a man who is confident of his clout in shaping the debate over Japan’s role in the world. He is reserved and decorous. But this senior bureaucrat, whose father was also a senior bureaucrat, shows no reticence in laying out his theme: Japan is part of Asia and, in this era of Asian prosperity, the Japanese should celebrate their role in the Asian renaissance that is emerging.

With its tasteful etchings of landscapes and book-lined shelves, his office has the feel of a professor’s den, and Ogura, wearing loafers and a double-breasted jacket, looks like a professor. Ogura likes to present himself as the in-house gadfly, the maverick and the man of ideas. He says he’s always been intrigued by the stumbling encounters between East and West, and some years ago he wrote a book called “Cultural Friction Between East and West,” which includes an essay pondering why Gen. Douglas MacArthur came up with the famous dictum that Japan was a nation of 12-year-olds. “For many Americans, Japan was not a modern country, but like Sparta,” he wrote of the common view after the war. “Another reason the Japanese were seen as childish is that subconsciously, Westerners think they are intellectually superior.”

Many intellectuals continue to see Asians as inferior, Ogura says. But the Japanese are not childish or weak or passive; rather they are leading the way to what he calls a new Asia. The Japanese should embrace their Asian identity, Ogura says, and he wants to offer an updated answer to the old debate over whether Japan belongs to the West or the East. Last summer, he published an article calling for “the restoration of Asia” in a prominent intellectual journal. It was designed to attract attention, and it did. “I wasn’t writing an agenda for foreign policy, I wanted to capture what’s going on in Asia, what it means for us and how we see ourselves,” he says.

With the tone of a manifesto, Ogura’s article has much in common with a growing sub-genre of writings telling how Asia’s arrival on the world stage promises a new epoch, a renaissance, which will spread its influence as far and as wide as the Western renaissance before it. “Just as the West absorbed from Asia and thereby developed a new set of universal values, Asia should now thoroughly absorb what the West has offered and develop a new set of universal values that it can transmit to the world,” he wrote.

Ogura says he is aiming his argument at several audiences. First, he wants Japan to adopt a more autonomous foreign policy, especially with its Asian neighbors, and stop being just the junior partner to the United States. Next, he appeals to American policy-makers and opinion-makers. “I want to put them on notice that a lot of people in Asia don’t like what they hear coming from America: that Asia’s prosperity is a threat to America,” he says. Then, there’s the rest of Asia. He’s deliberately cast his ideas against the backdrop of the increasingly fashionable talk of there being an Asian Way, contrary to Western ways, of organizing society and politics. Yet, at the same time, he claims the new Asia he is describing has mixed it up so much with the West that a pristine Asian Way doesn’t exist. For all the tensions in his argument, Ogura seems to have found his audience.

When his name came up at a diplomatic reception recently, one of his young Foreign Ministry colleagues feigned a wince. “He’s giving us faceless bureaucrats a bad name,” he said. The assembled group laughed. “But he’s going places.” Indeed he is. In August, Ogura became Japan’s ambassador to Vietnam, where he will have a chance to show how putting Asia first works. After his time in Vietnam, he is expected to be the next deputy foreign minister in charge of economic affairs, which would make him Japan’s chief negotiator in the U.S.-Japan trade talks.

Before he left for Hanoi, I asked Ogura what he meant by the restoration of Asia. “For a long time,” he began, “Asia has been a concept created by Westerners.” It has been a place to be plundered, a place of romance and the exotic, a place to be colonized and a place to civilize and convert. But no longer. Asians are creating their own positive identity, he says, and have developed values that they should transmit to the rest of the world.

What are these Asian values? Many of them are in flux and only just emerging, Ogura says, and, interestingly, spring from American influences. Others have to do with the importance of family, the relationship between the individual and the group. Still others will flow from what he calls the Asian system of capitalism--in which government and business cooperate and exports are emphasized--that is developing in the democratic industrialized countries of Asia. Then there is discipline and order and hard work.

I remark that some of what he is saying seems to fit right in with the slogans about Asian values most vigorously expounded by authoritarian governments. It reminds me of Singaporean officials, for instance, reciting like a mantra Asian values--respect for family, elders and the common good as opposed to individualism, for example--that are supposedly opposed to and better than Western values.

Ogura claims his argument is more complicated than that. It has more nuances. He says his main point is that Asian values have become entwined with Western ones. “Asianism used to be promoted by those who wanted to hold onto tradition,” he says. “But now it is being expressed by those who are the most internationalized, the most Westernized.”

Ogura believes that the Japanese have absorbed and made their own such concepts as democracy, rule of law and individual rights. The Asian renaissance, he says, is of an Asia that has already embraced Western ideas. Yet, he says with a gentle smile, Asians have begun to wonder what happened to the model--America. “America’s culture and political system has long been admired and cherished in Japan and all over Asia. But something has changed. There is now disquiet over what’s going on in America. The American values they cherish seem to be disappearing and that has caused a lot of soul-searching. It’s made us think, what are we? Where are we heading? What is our identity?”

The conflicts in Ogura’s version of an Asian identity will be played out when the Japanese decide whether Japan will try to alter its dependence on the United States for security and whether Japan will push to create an Asian trading zone. But Ogura is confident of his country’s new direction. “Just as Asia has been Americanized in the years since the end of the war,” he says, “now it’s time for America to be Asianized.”

THE ARTIST

Yukinori Yanagi has staked out his own territory: His art explores the symbols and myths and forgotten chapters of Japan’s national story. In a museum north of Tokyo, his version of a red Japanese passport was laid out recently on a gallery floor like an enormous carpet. In Yanagi’s rug, the petals of the gold chrysanthemum, the symbol of Imperial Japan stamped on every passport, are not clustered in the center, but strewn helter-skelter. Under each petal, he has woven the question “s/he loves me?” or “s/he loves me not?” in the languages of the Asian countries Japan invaded during the Pacific War.

On the white gallery walls surrounding the passport rug, Yanagi hung four oil paintings depicting battle scenes painted during the war by some of Japan’s foremost artists. When the U.S. occupation forces arrived, they confiscated by the dozens propaganda paintings like these, and for most of the decades since, the canvases showing victorious naval battles and troop landings have been locked in a storeroom at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.

While we were there, young museum-goers, many clad in black-on-black attire, slipped off their shoes before stepping on Yanagi’s altered symbol of nationality. His art is putting questions of nationality and identity literally underfoot and is rummaging through closets many would prefer remain closed.

“Every country has its own national story. Japan’s is filled with contradictions and now they are exploding. That explosion is what interests me and why I create art,” says the 35-year-old Yanagi as we watch people wander on and off his carpet. He has short-cropped black hair, almost a crew-cut, and long, delicate features. He is often called one of Japan’s most accomplished political artists, but I think this description misses the point: Yanagi sees his art as a form of liberation, a means of release from the orthodoxies that have stressed Japanese uniqueness in culture, politics and history.

He is a champion of individualism; he doesn’t believe there is such a thing as the Japanese spirit or the Japanese character that can be expressed either in art or in politics. He likens being Japanese these days to driving 90 miles per hour down a wet, slick road without a clue what’s ahead. Politically, the old divides between socialist and conservative have fallen apart. Culturally, categories like East and West or the idea of an Asian tradition versus a Western one cease to make any sense. “Japanese have always been told what their identity means. It’s been a form of control, a way to ensure conformity,” he says. Like the writer, the diplomat and the politician, Yanagi says the definition of being Japanese has become muddled. But for him it is a creative muddle.

His art is the expression of a critical spirit and, most important, it is not being ignored. Yanagi’s art is not samizdat ; he has found an audience, and a large one at that. His work does spark controversy: the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art bowed out of exhibiting his “Chrysanthemum Carpet” but quickly commissioned him to do another piece. “Even the forms of censorship are changing,” he says. After curators at the Hiroshima museum said they were concerned that the propaganda paintings would offend sensitivities because the theme of the exhibit was the upcoming 50th anniversary of the bombing, Yanagi says he got the message. The day we visited the museum north of Tokyo, Yanagi asked me to look at the underside of the rug. There, he had printed over and over again the sections of the constitution that protect freedom of thought, religion, speech and expression. “Just in case somebody decided to roll up the rug,” he told me. “I figured they’d get my joke.”

Yanagi lives and works in what was once a rice farming hamlet that has been swallowed by Tokyo’s sprawl. His studio, in an old wooden house that used to belong to a farmer, sits at the end of a gravel alley behind a sushi shop. It’s large, well-lighted and cluttered. Most of the room is taken up by pieces of his work and tables covered with journals, catalogues and brochures. On one table, there’s a brochure for a huge show of postwar Japanese art--which includes his enormous version of the Rising Sun flag in neon--that recently opened at the Guggenheim Museum in SoHo and will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art next year. On another, he has stacked flags made out of colored sand that form a large piece called “Asia-Pacific Ant Farm.” Like his rug, the flags are those of Japan and the countries invaded during the war. When it is exhibited, the flags are connected by clear rubber tubes that red ants run through, burrowing their way through the sand of the flags. On one wall, Yanagi has set up a single flag with ants inside, slowly making tunnels through the sand. “Ants have the perfect society, but no human would want to live in it,” he says as we watch their progress.

Yanagi grew up in a gritty provincial city on the southern island of Kyushu, the misfit son of an LDP local politician and his wife. Yanagi’s father, toward the end of the war, lied about his age, joined the navy and trained to be a kamikaze pilot. But he never left on his suicide mission because Japan had run out of planes. Yanagi remembers a picture of his father in his brown khaki uniform and leather jacket, the pilot’s white scarf around his neck. “I used to stare at it and wonder what it would be like to be a kamikaze who survived. My father’s whole life has been trying to serve the nation, but he always seems to be behind the times. He didn’t fly as a kamikaze and the LDP has lost power. He was brought up to believe the emperor was God, and he’s a man who doesn’t question the way things are,” he says.

“Inside of me there are two sides. One side understands my father and even sympathizes with him for wanting to serve the nation. The other side of me thinks he has been told a lot of propaganda. The two sides are always criticizing each other. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to images of Japanese nationality in my work.”

Yanagi fled Kyushu for Tokyo, and eventually came to America, where he studied art and immersed himself in Japanese history. “I was in a fog but the more I read, the more it became clear: Japanese identity has been created,” he says. “Learning this was freedom to me. But because I am Japanese, these ideas of identity that I have been taught burden me, and I needed to find why this story of Japanese identity has been created.” His conclusion: Ever since Japan has been exposed to Europe and America, Japanese have been told they suffer from a cultural problem--attempting to catch up with the West while retaining their own identity. For Yanagi, this obsession with identity has mostly exercised Japan’s rulers and thinkers and has led to an elaborate myth of Japaneseness. The more Japan set out to imitate the West, the more effort was spent insisting on a unique Japanese spirit as a way of salvaging national pride.

This notion of Japan’s cultural problem has been the main theme of recent Japanese history, he says. It has led to wild swings from emulation of the West to outright rejection and claims that Japan’s mission was to protect Asian values from a hostile Western world. “That’s why the myth of the emperor as god was created, as something purely Japanese,” he says.

He says much about Japan has changed, yet the idea that there needs to be a certain definable Japanese identity lingers. His art expresses his belief that there is no such thing as a Japanese national identity and that attempts to define one only lead to a stultifying national culture. “It’s up to individual Japanese to decide what their identity means to them. This is what the Japanese are facing right now, and this is what I want to deal with in my work,” he says as the late-afternoon sun begins to cast long shadows across the floor of his studio.

In mid-September, Yanagi went down to the Hiroshima art museum, a stunning building that sits on a hill overlooking the city, to oversee the installation of “Article Nine,” a new piece made up of 24 neon signs, each one devoted to the Japanese characters that make up the war-renouncing clause of the constitution. There, in a large gallery with a high ceiling, he set about randomly scattering his pieces of neon and arranging for them to flash on and off in bright red.

“We all know Article Nine by heart,” he says. “All Japanese born after the war have grown up with it. It is central to what we have been told is Japanese identity. I want people to take it apart, just like the neon signs, and then put it back together.”