Yoshida, Shuntaro. “Hunger and Resilience: Collective Agricultural and Artistic Practices in an Area Impacted by Environmental Disaster.” Global Performance Studies, vol. 6, nos. 1–2, 2023, https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv6n1-2a123
The big catfish I let go
caused a big earthquake at the bottom of the lake.
Rain clouds drifted in
and rained on my land.You must remain here.
Last year it was a spice garden.
But now weeds have sprung up all around.Maharu Maeno, Lichen Score[1]
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a dramatic increase in remote working in Japan. As the development of digital remote technology has accelerated, more people, including artists, have moved or considered moving to rural areas. Similarly, the idea of living in two locations to escape the population density of urban centers has become increasingly attractive. A working practice has since grown in popularity whereby artists create art while gardening and farming.
This specifically Japanese engagement in both horticulture and art is known as Half Farming, Half Art. The practice is a model of artistic intervention that cultivates artistic and life practices grounded on sustainable living and connection with the land, generative practices that raise the question of what artists hunger for. In this paper, the notion of “hunger” extends beyond the biological imperative for nourishment to include other embodied experiences. Physically, it reflects the exhaustion faced by artists navigating the complexities of neoliberal societies. Psychologically, hunger diminishes the mental space required for artistic creation. Understanding such hungers as hungers offers a lens into the toll exacted by social and material pressures.
This account also turns its attention towards Earth hunger, a phenomenon triggered by environmental upheavals, disrupting not only the artist’s immediate surroundings but also necessitating the (re)construction of a strategy of sustainable living. In this paper, I explore artists’ experiences of such hungers in Min Tanaka’s agricultural practice and the generative artistic practice of the “Half Farming, Half Art” project in Toride, Japan.
While the people of Japan generally endeavor to coexist with nature, Japan continues to be affected by considerable nuclear pollution. Both visual artists and performing artists have responded to the nuclear threat with works that cast doubt on the possibility of coexistence between humanity and nuclear material (Eckersall; Okamura; Iwaki). The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the Fukushima nuclear accident triggered by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami on March 11, 2011, reaffirm the problematic nature of humankind’s relationship with nuclear weapons and power and highlight the risks posed by contamination. In the context of “Half Farming, Half Art,” an initiative by the Toride Art Project (TAP) at the Tokyo University of the Arts, while the initial intent was to foster autonomy for artists, soil contamination and its consequences transformed the dynamic, revealing the interwovenness of physical and psychological hungers. These were joined by “Earth hunger,” a recognition of the soil as a planetary entity, which results from human contamination of land and the destruction of the “infrastructure of life” (Puig de la Bellacasa 27). Some of the artists involved in the project were forced to relocate to find alternative ways of sustaining their artistic practices and livelihoods, thereby reimagining their relationship with the land and seeking new avenues for creative expression.
This paper discusses the multiple levels of hunger in two ways: by examining the agricultural practice of Butō dancer Min Tanaka as a form of resistance to hunger, and by examining the Half Farming, Half Art practice that has emerged as a response to soil contamination by nuclear disaster. Exploration of these approaches to creative practice illuminates how biological hazards and experiences of hunger can become entangled with artists’ lives and ways of living.
As a practitioner and researcher, I belong to an interspecies dance collective known as Mapped to the Closest Address (MaCA). The collective explores interspecies encounters and aims to deepen our comprehension of human interconnectedness with the environment beyond superficial identification. During the period of challenges brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, MaCA tended two vegetable gardens: a backyard family garden in Hyogo and a Schrebergarten (allotment or community garden) in Frankfurt an der Oder. MaCA recognized the importance of tending our gardens to nurture our artistic practices and our connections to the natural world. Engaging in activities such as preparing the soil and mixing compost has deeply influenced our art performances.
Through horticultural practice and research, MaCA strives to cultivate a heightened awareness of planetary processes and translate them into immersive aesthetic experiences. With its similar preoccupations, Min Tanaka’s work on agriculture and his unique blend of farming and art practices resonate with the collective’s interests. To gain insights into Tanaka’s research, I explored a retrospective of his work at Art Camp Hakushu in which Tanaka himself had collaborated. Additionally, I extensively studied interviews with Tanaka featured in the Art Camp Hakushu catalog, which provided invaluable firsthand information about his experiences and the significance of his agricultural practice in relation to his artistic expression.
My research for TAP at Tokyo University of the Arts also played a crucial role in my exploration of the intersection of art and farming. As a master’s and doctoral student, I researched collective life within the context of the Japanese “Half Farming, Half Art” movement. To deepen my understanding while researching for TAP, I interviewed my supervisor, who played a direct role in the initiative. Among other invaluable insights into the project, he recounted how the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 (also known as the 3/11 disaster) impacted the artists working on the project and their relationship with the land. Their experiences, particularly in the aftermath of a history-altering nuclear disaster, set me on a journey to comprehend the unique hungers and aspirations of the artists involved in the “Half Farming, Half Art” project in Toride.
The perspectives and insights gained through my study of Min Tanaka, as well as my experiences working with MaCA and TAP, have greatly enriched my understanding of the intricate relationship between art, agriculture, and hunger in times of disaster and its aftermath.
Min Tanaka moved to the Japanese countryside in 1985 and subsequently began farming. Although his agricultural duties occupied most of his time, he also performed dance during his daily activities. While many artists have since similarly moved to the countryside to farm and incorporate agriculture into their artistic practices, Tanaka, who moved to the countryside as an amateur to learn about agriculture and establish his performance style, was a pioneer in the exploration of the relationship between agriculture and art in Japan.
Tanaka established the Body Weather Farm in the mountain village of Hakushu, three hours west of Tokyo. There, Tanaka embarked on a dance-agriculture and agriculture-dance investigation that positioned humans as part of nature and would subsequently become the center of his practice. Tanaka’s practice includes body-weather training (“Body Weather”),2 which is “a comprehensive training and performance practice that investigates the intersections between body and environment” (Hug 170).
Practitioners of Body Weather can take part in this practice on Tanaka’s farm. Participants in Tanaka’s workshops are eager to dive into the unknown; their openness and willingness to surrender completely to the process are driving forces at the farm. Body Weather, as professed and exhibited by Tanaka and his participants, abandons the body to seek resonance with physical places, while reaffirming the primacy of physicality to explore interdependent states of change within and outside the body. The agricultural aspects of the practice establish a resonance between the body and nature—a relationship without a hierarchy differentiating the human from the non-human.
As a Butō dancer, Tanaka also incorporated Butō into the life of the Body Weather Farm. His artistic decision was to engage in agricultural practice, in recognition of the foundations in coexistence with nature shared by Butō and agriculture.3 His move to the countryside presented an opportunity to use his Butō training as a basis for his engagement in agriculture, echoing theater scholar Herbert Blau’s observation that “art in times of crisis will attempt to do other things” (13). Applying this observation to Butō encourages us to consider its future artistic direction—maintain itself as an avant-garde form, or follow Tanaka to find its meaning as an element of local agricultural practice.
Tanaka’s experience of farming and art was formed not only by his background as a Butō dancer, but also by his social surroundings. Japan’s rapid postwar economic growth led to the bursting of the country’s economic bubble in the late 1980s. Before the recession, however, Tanaka moved to the countryside and changed his profession to incorporate his agricultural experience. He describes the reasons for this transition as follows: “I was thinking that the best thing to do would be to have a job that I could transition into practice at any time. […] [I] was the kind of kid who thought it was interesting to be close to the soil, so I didn’t want the feeling I got from that environment to end up in the city. I also thought that if I worked in agriculture, I would have enough food to get by” (“Interview” 24).
Tanaka found a vacant house in Hakushu and moved there with several artists involved in the Maijuku Dance Company and the Body Weather Laboratory.4 To this day, artists visit Tanaka in Hakushu and learn from him through farming and communal living. They then apply these insights to their own artistic productions.5 In addition, Tanaka established the Toukason Dance Company in the year 2000 with a group of young dancers including Rin Ishihara. The company performed at agricultural events and festivals in Hakushu until 2009.
Tanaka continues to value living near the soil and the substance of nature, which allows him to engage in a sensory dialogue with organic matter. To illustrate the dynamic relationship between humans and nature, Tanaka states, “The seed reacts chemically with the hand that holds the seed” (“Interview” 25). Through agricultural experiences such as this, Tanaka experiences time simultaneously through the perspective of both humans and natural objects, such as plants, stones, and soils.
Tanaka and others explored these perspectives at various events in Hakushu. The Hakushu Summer Festival (1988–1992), Art Camp Hakushu (1993–1999), and Dance Hakushu (2001–2009) each featured dance performances, folk performing arts, animal dances, circuses, Noh theater, music, art exhibitions, and farming workshops, among other things. Tanaka invited dancers and other artists from the Mono-ha art group,6 which was influenced by American minimalism and the Italian Arte Povera movement, to the exhibitions and events. Local farmers were involved as volunteers in the festival’s operation.
The events and participants in Hakushu played an important role in Tanaka’s collective life and his practice of both agriculture and art, and reflect his underlying philosophy. Tanaka’s practice of making a living mainly through agriculture focuses on the cultivated and cultivating body, resisting physical and psychological hunger and rebelling against the tamed social body through the collective practices of communal living and sharing agricultural knowledge.
Tanaka’s philosophy is best expressed by the speed at which he performs. His physical practices not only “foreground time and reorient sensory perceptions” (Eckersall and Paterson 190) but also, with their focus on crops and slow production through the agricultural cycle, conceptually create a slow movement rebelling against a capitalist society.7 Ultimately, Tanaka attempts to transform the physical world through his intentionally slow agricultural practice. Led by physical and psychological hunger to relocate to the Japanese countryside, Tanaka’s experience of hunger highlights the aspiration and desire for collective ways of living in the context of Japan’s rapid postwar economic growth.
From 1993 to 1994, while Tanaka was living communally in the countryside and engaging in utopian practices, Naoki Shiomi coined the term “Half Farming, Half X.” Shiomi advocated for a way of life in which a person lives half of his life following a subsistence lifestyle, eating by farming, and spends the other half doing what he enjoys, what he wants to do, and what he finds rewarding. He described his approach to farming as follows:
Half Farming, Half X is a way of life in which one makes use of one’s “natural talents (X = vocation, mission, purpose in life, what one loves, life’s work, etc.)” while engaged in a small, sustainable farming lifestyle. Farming time does not have to be half of your daily working hours. It does not matter if you farm only in the morning or in the evening. The farm can be as large as you are willing to make it. It can be a citizen’s farm, a vegetable garden, a commuter farm, or a balcony. It can be in the countryside or the city. […] Half X means you are free to structure it any way you want: it can have a low threshold, flexibility, versatility, and freedom of arrangement. (Shiomi 18)
These words were inspired not only by Min Tanaka and his rebellion against the tamed social body, but also by Shiomi’s awareness of environmental issues in the 1990s and his belief that sustainability could minimize the difficulties he saw in Japanese society, such as the high suicide rate. The term “sustainable society,” which grew out of this macro perspective, began to appear in the media in 1991 and has since been adopted in China, Taiwan, and South Korea. As Shiomi explains, the concept “reminds us of the oriental idea that nature is something to be coexisted with or contained, as we have been trying to control nature. Our way of thinking has become too impoverished” (24). While this concept attracted interest abroad, the Half Farming, Half X lifestyle spread to rural areas in Japan and was adopted by people wanting to maintain a balance between a vocation and a way of life that values the environment.
The term “Half Farming, Half Art” has also been used in the context of social design. Japanese art projects in the 1990s often focused on co-creation with active citizen participants.8 For example, the TAP website indicates that the project has “resulted in Toride residents, Toride City, and the Tokyo University of the Arts working together since 1999” (Toride Art Project). TAP’s stated purpose is “to develop Toride as a cultural city by supporting young artists in their practices and disseminating their work, as well as providing residents with opportunities to interact with art.” As the website indicates, TAP is a collaborative project between Tokyo University of the Arts, the citizens of Toride, and the city itself, through which artists develop projects with the involvement of the wider public.
In 2010, two new projects were launched at TAP—“Art in Danchi” and the “Half Farming, Half Art” project—to create alternative forms and functions of art through long-term activities. Since then, these activities have shifted from fixed-period festival-type events to rolling projects. They attempt to build on the human resources, knowledge, and access to local assets that TAP has accumulated from past activities. TAP’s ongoing art support, international exchange, environmental, and children’s programs aim to raise the cultural profile of the area, in terms of both infrastructure and creative practices.
Unfortunately, TAP was hit with environmental disaster in March 2011. The Fukushima event was a triple threat to the project, comprising an earthquake, a tsunami, and the release of nuclear radiation. These disasters introduced biological hazards to Toride, affecting crops, fish, birds, and other animals and plants. Radioactive rain clouds arrived, bringing increased levels of radiation. As a result, it became impossible for the “Half Farming, Half Art” Project to devote time to the collective farms.
The work of artists and activists after the 3/11 disaster revealed the general need for a long-term mourning process to heal the trauma caused by the Fukushima disaster, as well as the need to reflect on its duration, causes, and effects, and the need to find alternative ways of handling ongoing nuclear contamination. In light of these needs and the changed physical environment, the “Half Farming, Half Art” project transformed its approach, placing a new emphasis on soil contamination. Some artists, acknowledging physical and psychological hungers, decided to escape from the contaminated land. In 2012, others attempted to decontaminate the land for rice cultivation with own their hands, questioning their experience of eating and remembering lost ways of life. Through the activities of removing the surface of contaminated soils, mounding soils, and forming ridges, participants cultivated the soil in embodied practice. Caring for the contaminated land became a transformative act, turning mourning for the soil into a foregrounding of multiple levels of hunger.
The Half Farming, Half Art approach differs from other self-sufficiency projects undertaken by Min Tanaka; for Tanaka, the goal of this approach is to help artists become autonomous by living on the land. However, during the 1980s and 1990s, collectivism under Tanaka did not result in the formation of an altruistic collective, because the group organized festivals and worked for Tanaka rather than for themselves. Tanaka provided courses to the volunteers in exchange for their efforts.9
More recently, the collectivism of the Half Farming, Half Art approach is oriented toward sustaining individual artists, with several people helping and sharing time with each other. One of the professors involved in the Half Farming, Half Art project, who allowed me to interview him on condition of anonymity, told me the following:
The Half Farming, Half Art approach is a way for young Japanese artists to cope with economic poverty. Many young artists have not been able to sustain their [artistic] activities. […] They can finance their activities but have difficulties guaranteeing their livelihoods. In the Japanese art context, living expenses are barely covered by grants. In other words, the Half Farming, Half Art lifestyle is designed to allow artists to cover their own living expenses and management to cover the costs of the artists’ creative activities. (Professor A)
Initially, this lifestyle was conceived as a solution for young Japanese artists facing economic poverty, offering them a way to sustain their artistic activities and cover their living expenses. As grants often fall short of adequately supporting artists’ livelihoods, the combination of farming and art would allow them to finance their own needs and meet the costs of their creative endeavors.
The collectivism of the Half Farming, Half Art lifestyle is engaged in the future of humankind, community, and labor, and fosters individual free will while maintaining the Earth’s dignity. Ensuring that artists have food and time for each other enables them to develop close relationships with one another and explore ways of collaborating through the project’s events. This form of collectivism was the alternative solution to the problem of artists’ physical and psychological hunger. In Japan’s cities, many young artists work part-time jobs, often unrelated to art. This can leave them financially insecure and, even worse, the victim of social oppression. For instance, some artists struggle to maintain their well-being due to a lack of free time, resulting in the accumulation of daily life stresses that can lead to solitude and mental health issues such as depression and suicide. Collective farming enables such artists to remain in touch with the essential human experience of cultivating crops. This not only benefits their mental health, but also provides time for them to create their art.
However, the collectivism inherent in the Half Farming, Half Art approach faced a significant challenge from the soil contamination in Toride that followed the disaster in Fukushima. As Professor A told me in an interview,
In 2011, radiation from Fukushima was carried by clouds and ended up causing rain. Toride became a radioactive area. I was working with some young artists at the time who were collaborating with local farmers to develop the project. As we were about to start it, the nuclear power plant in Fukushima exploded, and I gave up farming for the project.
As a result of the Fukushima accident, the artists were confronted with the destruction of their collective endeavor. In the interview, Professor A also said that soil contamination due to radioactive fallout led to the abandonment of the initiative’s farming activities. The loss of these agricultural practices had a profound impact on the artists’ lives, depriving them of not only sustenance, but also the sense of time and rhythm they had established with significant effort through their Half Farming, Half Art endeavors. The artists faced physical hunger as their ability to grow crops was compromised, psychological hunger due to the cessation of their agricultural and artistic practices, and abiding hunger from disappointment and disillusionment, as they were unable to clean the contaminated soil. In other words, their inability to cultivate and interact with the natural world through agricultural practice created a profound sense of hunger on multiple levels.
In this disrupted collective environment, the Half Farming, Half Art endeavor evolved from a self-sufficiency project into a means of coping with the visible problems of hunger and time. It navigated multiple levels of hunger, deriving a trajectory from the visceral experiences of physical and psychological deprivation faced by artists in accelerated modern societies. In times of anxious futurity, “Earth hunger” resonated with the environmental disruptions faced by contemporary society. It encapsulated the depletion and contamination of the very land upon which artists sought sustenance for their creative endeavors. As such, “Earth hunger” drew them into their practice of caring for the contaminated soil. Their multiple levels of hunger stemmed from the variety of their experiences, from physical and psychological hunger to Earth hunger related to environmental disruption and their sensual experiences of a performative exhausted Earth. Through these experiences, the “Half Farming, Half Art” project became a part of the nexus of inheritance and embodiment, providing an understanding of how their practices inherit hungers of the body in the turbulent history of modern capitalism.
The notion of hunger within the context of the Half Farming, Half Art project encompasses needs and desires that resonate on both individual and collective levels. At its core, hunger reflects a yearning for fulfillment and nourishment of many possible kinds. Through farming, participants are presented with an opportunity to establish a connection to the land and each other, finding solace and fulfillment in shared labor and experiences. These endeavors provide vulnerable bodies with a place to heal and interact, promoting a polyphonic social vision. On the other hand, hunger transcends the physical and psychological realm due to the complexities of the disrupted environment. Hunger, entangled with economic hardship, societal pressures, and environmental disasters, manifests as an alternative source of sustenance, connection, and meaning. Driven by a profound sense of longing and yearning for the Earth, hunger generates resilience practices in the face of ecological degradation.
Even before the 3/11 disaster, many young artists in Japan had been experiencing social and economic hunger. After the disaster, their sufferings multiplied, as they began experiencing a new Earth hunger—the result of anthropogenic soil pollution. In July 2011, the “Half Farming, Half Art” project announced that it would be restarting its 10-year core program, with the aim of combating these various forms of hunger, even though the radiation issue remained unresolved. “Half Farming, Half Art” director and artist Satoshi Iwama asked the following questions about the program’s themes, covering a wide range of topics, from weeding to molecular biology, without separating agriculture and the arts:
What does it mean to live in relation to the earth? And at this time, what does it mean to live in relation to the earth? Why are ‘agriculture’ and ‘art,’ which are far removed from the ‘efficiency’ perspective of modern society, possible themes for exploring the way of life in the future? And why ‘agriculture’ first? (Toride Art Project).
The “Half Farming, Half Art” project changed its research methods as a result of the environmental disaster. Artists and students engaged in self-decontamination work and held the “Half Farming, Half Art” forum in 2012, with the TAKASU House, which supported resident artists, opening the following year. Iwama has also been running a citizen engagement project since 2012. As part of this project, he initiated “a large kite project” which featured an oversized kite made from straw and colored with local plant materials—it flew with the support of artists and citizens in 2022. These practices of the “Half Farming, Half Art” project have contributed to community-building and helped build resistance to collective hungers in their transformation to a resilience practice aimed at tackling enduring soil pollution.
The Half Farming, Half Art concept reflects the complex relationship between humankind and the natural world. Ecological disasters, such as radioactive contamination, weaken artists in numerous ways. Physical hunger arises from food contamination, psychological hunger arises from the need to leave contaminated land, and material hunger points to the artist’s economic problems. However, the practice of engaging in a collectivist lifestyle can contribute to resilience and care for both the Earth and the living beings that inhabit it. This practice sustains the collective lives of artists, encourages the continuation of their art, and, in a time of natural disaster, redirects their projects towards alleviating the degradation of the environment.
By delving into the related practices of farming and art, in conjunction with considering the complicating factors of both physical and psychological hunger as well as soil contamination from nuclear disaster, this paper has aimed to provide insight into artists’ desire to coexist with nature. Already facing unique challenges and met with unprecedented ecological disaster, Japanese artists and members of the “Half Farming, Half Art” project, inspired by the work of Min Tanaka and the concept of Body Weather, endeavored to resist hunger through their innovative practices in agriculture and art.
[1] Maeno spoke these words in her 2022 performance piece Soil Memory, set in Teganuma swamp in Chiba prefecture, the area where she was raised before the earthquake struck. These words evoke the memory of the soil being violated by nuclear contaminants.
[2] The training finds the self-consciousness of the person in the environment and explores ways of thinking. It imposes a daily workshop on the body, endlessly combining words like body and A, body and B, or body and C (Tanaka, “Interview” 22).
[3] Butō became popular in postwar Japan, along with the angra (underground) movement in the 1960s, and has now spread throughout the world, deriving its form from various expressions. One of Butō’s founders, Tatsumi Hijikata, comes from the countryside in Tohoku, northern Japan. The agricultural landscape of his childhood, whose landscapes and communities were destroyed during Japan’s period of economic growth, features strongly in his gestures and body movements when performing Butō (Kurihara 21).
[4] Tanaka calls the environment “body weather” and locates the body in the center of his environment: “When I am born, the first environment I experience is my own body. I feel that it is correct to think of the body not as something attached to ‘I’, but rather as ‘I’ being born inside the body” (“Open a Dance” 43).
[5] The Body Weather Laboratory changed its name to the Body Weather Farm in 1985 and hosts participants from Japan and abroad, including Oguri, Hisako Horikawa, Yasunari Tamai, Astarti Athanasiadou, Frank van de Ven, Gretel Taylor, and others. In addition, Tanaka’s workshops in various parts of the world, such as Australia, have been widely disseminated, and influenced the artists Tess de Quincy, Tony Yap, and Lynne Santos, as well as the Zen Zen Zo Physical Theatre (Marshall 56–57). These artists are inspired by situating their identities with his methodology (Marler 39), rather than the process of his choreographed environment, such as the use of the body being extracted from agriculture, which is based on his daily agricultural practice at Hakushu.
[6] Kauzo Kenmochi, Kouji Enokura, Toshikatsu Endo, Noboru Takayama, and Noriyuki Haraguchi participated in this festival.
[7] Butō scholar Mariko Miyagawa highlighted Tanaka’s speed of movement: “The speed and purposelessness of Tanaka Min’s movements remind us of what we are usually choreographed by and the vast number of rules behind the everyday movements themselves. […] The time that Min Tanaka spins out is a different time from ours, which has become accustomed to the speed of capitalist society, and perhaps it is a return to another time that we had in our childhood” (Miyagawa 100).
[8] “More concretely, the term art project is used in relation to a broad spectrum of activities, from artists building organizations and holding exhibitions in disused spaces such as abandoned schools to art festivals involving outdoor exhibitions and performances and activities that address community issues like social inclusion. But in all cases, they involve forms of creative expression that reach out into contemporary society, commit to a particular social situation, and attempt to engender some transformation of that situation” (Kumakura and Nagatsu 3).
[9] When the festival was held, the management provided a flat stipend of 80,000 yen to the artists (Tanaka, “Interview” 27).
Note: The online sources cited in this paper were checked shortly before this paper was written, in March 2023, and all links were current.
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