Blue Room Tribe: The Flower of the Avant-garde in Harajuku in the 1970s (December 1974)

Blue Room Tribe: The Flower of the Avant-garde in Harajuku in the 1970s (December 1974)

In the early 1970s, Harajuku, Tokyo, had reached the end of its postwar reconstruction period and was transforming into a peculiar urban space where commerce and culture were jostling for supremacy. The so-called "Blue Room Tribe" of young people suddenly appeared in Harajuku. Before the birth of the flamboyant subcultures such as the Takenoko Zoku and the Roller Zoku, they were performing poetry readings, improvised plays, and silent performances on the sidewalks and parks of the city and on the cobblestones of Omotesando.

Their expressions are strongly related to Shuji Terayama's avant-garde theater "Ceiling Plank" and the genealogy of underground culture. However, they had their own unique style, which could be called a street version of underground, in that they broke down the framework of stage sets, lighting, and audience, transformed the city itself into a stage, and turned chance contact with passersby into art. This movement, which was hardly documented in the media and dispersed ephemerally, was a kind of poetic resistance born of the youth's discomfort with the city and their rebellion against the established order.

At the time, Harajuku was wavering between American culture and the Japanese city, with Yoyogi Park opened on the site of Washington Heights, a postwar U.S. military housing complex, and boutiques along Omotesando Avenue, which still retains remnants of the Occupation Forces' culture. The emergence of the "Blue Room Tribe" was the germ of a secret culture, filling in the "cracks of place" that emerged in these transitional cities. Their actions questioned the relationship between the city and its youth in the 1970s, as well as the boundary between art and public space itself.