IN:CU:HO Roland Barthes, The Empire of Signs “One might say Japan imposes the same dialectic on its bodies as on its objects: look at the handkerchief shelf in a department store: countless, all different, yet no intolerance in the series, no subversion of order. Or again, the haiku: how many haiku in the history of Japan? They all say the same thing: season, vegetation, sea, village, silhouette, yet each is in its wayan irreducible event. Or again, ideographic signs: logically unclassi-flable, since they escape an arbitrary but limited, hence memorable [...]. And the same for bodies: all Japanese form a general body, and yet a vast tribe of different bodies open, to the last moment, like a logical system.” IN:CU:HO Artworks by Yayoi Kusama IN:CU:RE Tom Gill, Unconventional Moralities, Tolerance and Containment in Urban Japan; Morals of Legitimacy: Between Agency and System “Hidaka Rokurō (1980) introduces the term 'soft control' to describe the Japanese-style control society: 'Domi-nation of the masses is carried out not in a hard way, but a soft way; not in a unified way but in a multifaceted, multipurpose manner. In particular, control of everyday life, culture, edu-cation and consciousness is impor-tant'. At the level of personal morality, the apposite theme is containment rather than control. Zones of tolerance are defined, often in terms of social geography. Thus prostitution, for example, is illegal in Japan but the law is not strictly enforced within the flourishing red-light districts […]. Again, people in mainstream Japanese society may not openly identify them-selves as homosexuals, yet there is a thriving gay scene […]. Effeminate and transvestite males are even more widely accepted, and may often be observed on television, not as figures of fun but as sought-after commenta-tors on fashion and popular culture.” IN:CU:RE Shibuya Crossing with red lights for pedestrian IN:ME:CO Señal de prohibido fumar en el suelo ES:VE:DE Zona de fumadores en la calle IN:ME:CO Julian Worrall and Erez Golani Solomon, 21st Century Tokyo: a Guide to Architecture “A delirious blurring of the distinction between the mediated image and the programmatic content of the building is the result of the spacing of the rods that enables the screen to be transpar-ent. […] The interpenetration of medi-ated and physical spaces extends to the urban exterior.” IN:ME:SO Pantallas semitransparentes tras las fachadas de vidrio de los edificios de Shibuya
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