Since the early 2000s, Meiro Koizumi has built an impressive body of work combining striking experimentation with acute social commentary. The artist’s early practice was heavily influenced by the work of American conceptual artist Bruce Nauman, and involved attempts to reproduce the immediacy of performance through audiovisual means. Over time, Koizumi’s interest in the medium of video grew more critical, both internally and externally, his work evolving into Brechtian psychosexual melodramas and politically-charged actions that, at their most advanced, construct a complex politics of intervention, documentation and performance. Accordingly, his works began drawing on criticisms of endemic nationalisms, social isolation and views of authorship and spectatorship that could be simultaneously hilarious and tragic, with particular attention paid to the ideology surrounding the legacy of Japanese militarism.

A recent strand of Koizumi’s practice has involved conducting interviews which offer revealing insights into popular memory and mass psychology. In Double projection #1 (Where the Silence Falls) 2013, the artist interviews a former Kamikaze pilot still racked with guilt at having survived the attack in which he participated toward the end of World War Two.¹ In one projection, the elderly man addresses his torment to a friend who died in the same mission, while in a second, overlapping projection, he assumes the role of the friend, whom Koizumi goads into expressing forgiveness.

Particularly notable is the subject’s sincere adherence to the rationale for Japan’s erstwhile belligerence, a desire to bring an end to the Allied bombing of its cities, whose power is undiluted by the decades that have passed. Likewise, his severe sense of guilt is maintained, even though his failure to die with his friend was completely beyond his control — he was ordered to ditch on an island when his plane experienced engine troubles. He remains unconvinced by the artist’s implication that his friend would forgive him, and it is precisely the artist’s failure to transform his subject’s conviction that forms the work’s pathos, offering ground for reflection on the powerful imbrication of state ideology and personal belief in wartime Japan.

Like much of Koizumi’s work, the power of Double projection #1 is heightened by its unusual formal qualities, designed as it is for two overlapping projections. Koizumi takes pains to emphasise his role as mediator, using an intentionally jarring editing style whose interruptions contravene the seductive, often sentimental tropes of the confessional documentary genre. In the final cut, he includes his directorial interventions from off-screen, his voice encouraging the interviewee, acting in the role of the dead friend, to forgive himself.

This interaction unfolds when the old man dons his Kamikaze helmet and converses with himself portraying his dead friend. Here, the work takes on a slightly absurd tone that threatens to undermine the sincere process on-screen. But the earnestness with which this gesture is undertaken is compelling — the helmet acts as a kind of fetish in a therapeutic ritual, which is taking place in tacit agreement between the old man and the artist, neither of whom seem completely convinced that the therapy will have any effect.

Meiro Koizumi’s work becomes a metaphor for the halting, incomplete process through which Japan has attempted to come to terms with its earlier imperialist ambitions. More broadly, it indicates the persistence in the present day of traumas wrought by tragic ideologies long past and, by implication, the need to understand these processes and to prevent them from wounding again.

Endnotes

1. The Kamikaze is a recurring figure in Koizumi’s work, having featured in the 2009 video Portrait of a Young Samurai and 2010 performance Melodrama for Men #5: Voice of a Dead Hero. In both cases, however, the Kamikaze was a representative figure drawn from postwar Japan’s panoply of popular symbols. Double Projection #1 (Where the Silence Falls) is the first time that the artist has dealt with a real Kamikaze. A follow-up work, Double Projection #2 (When Her Prayer was Heard) 2014 features a woman whose partner died as a Kamikaze.