D O C U M E N T/ I N T R O D U C T I O N - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

D O C U M E N T/ I N T R O D U C T I O N

INTRODUCTION TO
“CITY AS LANDSCAPE” (1970)
BY MATSUDA MASAO (1933–2020)

FRANZ PRICHARD

Even before Matsuda Masao passed away in March of 2020, amid
an unfolding global pandemic, there had been a resurgence of
interest in Matsuda’s thinking and in landscape theory (or fu¯kei-ron)
more broadly. In part, this interest speaks to the need to locate alterities
within an expansion of the global imaginaries and aesthetic genealogies
of the radical left. This has become an even more urgent task, in light of
the ceaselessly destructive consolidations of neoliberal and state capital
in the half century since Matsuda’s essay “City as Landscape” (1970)
fi rst appeared. This introduction will attempt to outline that essay’s
contributions to the development of landscape theory then, as well as
how it might offer us vital means to expand and deepen the exchanges
worldwide among diverse moments and media of radical critique now.
Matsuda was born in 1933 in Taipei, during the period of Japanese

colonial rule of Taiwan (1895–1945), and he joined the Japanese Com-
munist Party in 1950, while still in high school. After a period of active
participation in the party’s radical factions, leading up to the nationwide
political struggle over the revision of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation
and Security between the United States and Japan in 1960, Matsuda
worked as an editor for a variety of publishers before commencing a
prolifi c writing career as a critic and activist in the late 1960s.1 While

The revision of the mutual security treaty, known as the Anpo treaty, a contraction of the

https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00284

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Matsuda is recognized for his prominent role in radical film criticism
of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is worth noting, if only briefly, IL
diverse scope of his writings. In aggiunta a 1971 collection of writ-
ings related to landscape theory, The Extinction of Landscape (Fu¯kei no
shimestu), Matsuda’s other publications from this period include The
Circuit of Terror (Teroru no kairo, 1969), a collection of writings on the
political tactics of radical Third World thinkers such as Che Guevara
and Frantz Fanon; Roses and the Nameless (Bara to mumeisha: Matsuda
Masao eiga ronshu¯, 1970) and Shoot the Daydream (Hakuchu¯mu o ute,
1972), two collections of writings on diverse film cultures from around
the world; and Media of Impossibility (Fukano¯sei no media), UN 1973 collec-
tion of essays on the politics of media. Inoltre, when we consider
Matsuda’s role as editor of the journal Film Criticism (Eiga hihyo¯) from
1970 A 1973, we find a stunning array of critiques, themes, and radical
modes of thought assembled through his editorial work. Taken together,
such texts render a consistent thread that spans his critical praxis; if
film played a prominent role in Matsuda’s writings, it must be regarded
as only a part of his pursuit of ever-changing potentials for transforma-
tive politics—in other words, revolution.2

The essay “City as Landscape,” recently translated into English for

the first time, was originally published in 1970 in the leftist general-
interest monthly Contemporary Eye (Gendai no me), in a special issue
dedicated to “the structure of the city” (toshi no ko¯zo¯). Along with essays
on such diverse topics as ideological critique of the modern city, IL
myth of city governance, pollution, and the restructuring of the modern
family, the immediate context of Matsuda’s essay was the expansion of
leftist discourse on the city as an important front in the battle against
state power and capital.3

Japanese Anzen Hosho¯ Jo¯yaku, occasioned the largest mass mobilization of political
opposition in the early postwar period. Notably, this protest movement catalyzed many of
the radical new left thinkers, artists, and activists who were active throughout the 1960s
and thereafter. For excellent studies of this crucial historical moment, see Nick Kapur’s
Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Stampa universitaria, 2018) or Wesley Sasaki-Uemura’s Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen
Protest in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001).
For a thorough exploration of the political dimensions of Matsuda’s writings, Vedere
Go Hirasawa’s Japanese commentary on The Extinction of Landscape found in the revised
and expanded reprint edition, “Kaisetsu: fu¯kei-ron no genzai” Fu¯ kei no Shimetsu (Tokyo:
Ko¯shisha, 2013), 319–341.
For a discussion of a related set of leftist urban counter-discourses, see the chapter
“Landscape Vocabularies: For a Language to Come and the Geopolitics of Reading” in my

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Prichard | introduction to “city as LandscaPe”

Tracking the conceptual itineraries of “City as Landscape” reveals

an effort to shift the political terrain in which this struggle was to be
waged. Rather than regarding the city as merely an entirely legible
symptom, situation, or condition of capitalist state power, we find
Matsuda making sensible an expanded, archipelagic scale of displaced
bodies and material processes, a structuring of desire and mediation,
and diffuse forms of power.4 Matsuda’s notion of landscape is therefore
not an aesthetic form derived from the fixed intervals between a repre-
sentation and its viewer, but instead names a political process that
emerges through an embodied drifting within the circulatory flux of
an urban expanse.5 Thus, Matsuda’s essay traces an impermeable con-
stellation of power in need of dramatically changed political imaginar-
ies, perhaps even of novel kinds of desiring subjects, capable of
materializing latent potentials of radical transformation throughout
an all-encompassing—yet incomplete—totality of forces.

Paradoxically, the starting point for this drift within and through
the “city as landscape” is not the glimmering metropolis of Tokyo but
the town of Abashiri, at the northern limits of the Japanese archipelago.
There we learn how a local festival restages the vestiges of Japanese set-
tler colonialism and the dispossession of the indigenous Ainu people
from their lands, rendering a hollow stereotype of mainland festi-
vals, ostensibly for the consumption of mainland tourists.6 However,
Matsuda was not drawn to the remote periphery from a desire to con-
front only the ongoing actualities of the “internal colonization” of the

book Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s
Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).

4 Matsuda sought to differentiate his notion of landscape from jo¯kyo¯, the knowable set

of conditions or situations that determine an appropriate course of political action.
As Rei Terada has insightfully noted, “Instead of only explaining the perduring phenome-
non of landscape by reference to a causal process behind it, the film presents landscape
as the matrix able to attach there-ness to those processes, making their understanding
(not the processes themselves) not only sensorily experienceable but think-able at all.”
Rei Terada, “Repletion: Masao Adachi’s Totality,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social
Scienze 24, NO. 2 (Spring/Summer 2016): 24.
The modern Abashiri shrine accompanied settlers from central Japan, who had colonized
and dispossessed the indigenous Ainu people of their lands throughout the history of the
Japanese empire (1868–present), following prior waves of incursion and displacement
of the Ainu people from their lands during the Edo period (1603–1868). See Ann-Elise
Lewallen’s ethnographic study of the ongoing efforts to revive Ainu indigenous practices in
The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2016).

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artmargins 10:1

archipelago. Piuttosto, he and his companions encountered this spectacle
by chance during their pursuit of Nagayama Norio’s “homeland.”

Nagayama, the teenage serial killer at the heart of the development

of Matsuda’s notion of landscape, was the subject of the collaborative
documentary film A.K.A. Serial Killer (Ryakusho¯: Renzoku shasatsuma,
1969).7 This film was an unconventional project in a number of ways,
but primarily in the sense that it did not seek to reproduce a fixed set
of determinant “conditions” with the intention of illustrating an impov-
erished background that had “caused” Nagayama to turn to violence.
Invece, the collaborative documentary sought to discover Nagayama’s
“homeland” only through depiction of the scenery that would have
enveloped Nagayama from birth to the moment of his arrest in 1968.
Tuttavia, what the filmmakers found as they were stalking Matsuda’s
every move through the Japanese archipelago and beyond was that, non
only was Nagayama’s “homeland” nowhere to be found, but every place
they went had seemingly been depleted of the vibrant local differences
and specific conditions they had anticipated.

What’s more, in the film’s wandering pursuit of Nagayama’s trajec-

tory through his traversals of Tokyo and the urbanized centers of the
archipelago, Matsuda and the filmmaking collective confront a land-
scape evacuated of transformative potentials; for displaced youth like
Nagayama, the cities had become merely the patterned urban conduits
of their ceaseless centripetal and centrifugal flux.8 For Matsuda, IL
filmmaking process provoked a political reorientation needed to grapple

The film was a collaborative production that involved Matsuda, filmmaker Adachi Masao
(B. 1939), screenwriter Sasaki Mamoru (1936–2006), and music critics Aikura Hisato
(1931–2015) and Hiraoka Masaaki (1941–2009), as well as a crew. It was completed in 1969
but was never widely distributed at the time. For a detailed analysis of this film’s role in the
development of Matsuda’s landscape theory, see the chapter “Diagramming the Landscape:
Power and the Fukeiron Discourse” in Yuriko Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-
Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2013), 115–48.
In addition to Walter Benjamin and the francophone thinkers Frantz Fanon, Henri
Lefebvre, and Régis Debray, Matsuda’s thinking for this essay draws heavily on an essay by
the little-known writer Mizuki Kaoru, who critiqued the reformist Marxist-humanism of
Hani Goro¯ (1901–83). Mizuki questioned the idealized notion of the renaissance city that
Hani celebrated as a model for autonomous self-governance in his bestselling work The
Logic of the City (Toshi no ronri) (Tokyo: Keiso¯ Shobo¯, 1969). Inoltre, Mizuki engaged with
poet Kuroda Kio’s (1926–84) criticisms of both Terayama Shu¯ji (1935–83), who celebrated
rural youth fleeing their village homes to the city, and Tanigawa Gan (1923–95), who cele-
brated flocking to the periphery to create the “homeland” anew. Kuroda’s critique high-
lighted the ambivalent plight of both depopulated rural communities and the youth who

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Prichard | introduction to “city as LandscaPe”

with Nagayama’s perpetual wandering condition arising from the dual
dispossession of a “homeland” and betrayal by the hollowed-out husk of
a “refuge” that Tokyo had become. As he details in “City as Landscape,"
Matsuda’s point is that by retracing the teen’s confrontation with the city
as a landscape, the filmmaking process makes sensible the doubly dis-
possessed flows of precarious and exploited youth as an indeterminant
constellation of desiring subjects who seek transformative potentials in
an “invisible homeland,” a virtuality immanent to this landscape.

The existing imaginary of the modernist left, rooted in an opposi-
tional, schematic binary pairing of “Tokyo” versus “homeland,” or center
versus periphery more broadly, is wholly leveled within this landscape,
rendering this imaginary’s former generative potentiality acutely lim-
ited. Tuttavia, the purported equivalence of Tokyo with Japan’s innu-
merable “homelands” does not apply to the empirical, social-historical
surface of reality; Matsuda’s notion of landscape is not simply that
urban/rural and center/periphery dualities have become literally equiv-
alent. Differences abound even in today’s world, after decades of infra-
structural development and the homogenizing cultural forces of
deepened media saturation. Matsuda’s essay instead draws our attention
to the ways in which the homogeneity of landscape can be confronted
through an embodied process of attunement to the ubiquity of the pat-
terns and flows specific to an urban expanse that has subsumed these
dualistic imaginaries.

Matsuda further tracks the diverse dimensions of what we might

call the political affects of this uniform landscape in the essays collected
in The Extinction of Landscape. The disparate essays that fluidly elaborate
Matsuda’s process-based theory of landscape are notably attuned to the
movements of laboring bodies to and from centers and peripheries; A
the modulations of the rhythms and inflections of diurnal, weekly, E
annual cycles of work and leisure; to the vast infrastructural develop-
ments that accelerate some segments of networked flow differently
from others; to explosive growth in the material processes of production
and in the consumption of goods; and to the multi-sensorial prolifera-

fled them, for both the collectives and the runaway youths were all the more deprived of
any means of self-sufficiency in the “drama of drifting” (“ruro¯ no geki”) that informed both
Terayama’s and Tanigawa’s modernist literary imaginaries. Mizuki Kaoru, “When Hani
Goro¯ Became Governor of Tokyo: On the Futurism of a Highfalutin Corpse” (“Hani Goro¯
ga tochiji ni natta toki: Ee kakko¯ no shitai no mirai-ron”), in Kakumei to yu¯ topia: Erı¯to
ju¯hachinin no shiso¯ hihan (Tokyo: Haga Shoten, 1969), 171–89.

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artmargins 10:1

tions of images, sounds, feelings, and tastes that overflow—even as
they bring into existence new forms of mediation—existing geographic
and cultural dispositions, boundaries, and thresholds. Di conseguenza,
Matsuda not only makes sensible how the all-encompassing urban
landscape materializes the totalizing forces of state power and capital,
he also reveals the vague contours of the ceaseless proliferation of emer-
gent and desiring subjects who seek out manifold invisible revolution-
ary “homelands,” each irreducible to any existing political formation.

Even today, “City as Landscape” invites us to search for that virtual-
ity that confronts us only as an impossibility: A (Rif)locate the boundless
sensibilities of political transformation within the endless pursuit of
an “invisible homeland.” Matsuda’s essay thus serves as an important
contribution to the expansion of the global imaginaries and aesthetic
genealogies of the radical left, allowing us to render sensible myriad
transformative potentials within our confrontations with a uniform
landscape—one that envelops not only the Japanese archipelago, Ma
the planet itself.