9 Keitai mizu
A mobile game reflection in a post-3/11
Tokyo, JapanLarissa Hjorth and Fumitoshi Kato
Introduction
When Lisa Nakamura (2002) dubbed the city of Tokyo as the Western default
setting for science fiction, she was signaling to the city’s intricate, multiple,
and hidden cartographies. When we think about the cartographies of Tokyo,
we tend to think about the electronic spaces of Akihabara or the intricacies
of the city’s rail system. Behind the backdrop of Tokyo’s image as a futurist
megacity is a complex urban environment that is renegotiating many issues to
do with energy and sustainability especially after the earthquake, tsunami, and
Fukushima nuclear plant disaster known as 3/11. One such cartography is that
of water—underneath Tokyo’s twenty-first-century modernity evidenced through
skyscrapers, neon signs, and mobile media is a plethora of rivers and streams.
While at first the connection between twenty-first-century mobile media and the
historical importance of water may seem abstract, it is through the marriage of
these two modern and traditional features of Japanese culture that we can connect
to Japanese environmentalism.
It is the relationship between media, water, and place—as a vehicle for
understanding environmentalism—that the project Shibuya: Underground
Streams sought to explore. A collaboration between the Australian Research
Council Linkage project Spatial Dialogues and the BOAT PEOPLE Association
Shibuya: Underground Streams brought together Australian and Japanese artists
to reflect upon the relationship between art, screen culture and the environment
(especially climate change). Through a series of video projections, sound
performances, installations, and mobile games in a shipping container in a Shibuya
park in June 2014, Underground Streams sought to provide a space in which
everyday commuters in the busy area of Shibuya could take time to reflect upon
their environment, climate change, and especially hidden streams. In particular,
one of the mobile game elements, keitai mizu (mobile water), sought to highlight
the significant role mobile media have played in restructuring narratives in and
around the environment and its relationship to grassroots movements in Japan.
This chapter explores the role of artistic interventions into the everyday as
a tool for rethinking entanglements between Asian cities, climate change, and
the environment. With the trauma of 3/11 still haunting Tokyo, Underground