Aichi Triennale 2019

The venue, Kirakutei, is a Japanese-style inn and restaurant that was popular from the Taisho up to the Showa period. It used to be crowded with workers in the sericultural industry before, with naval officers during, and with people from the auto industry after the war. Towards the end of the war, members of the "Kamikaze" Kusanagi Unit had a final dinner there before their suicide mission against the US Navy fleet at Okinawa. The characters appearing in "Hotel Aporia" include members of that special attack unit, a group of Kyoto School philosophers during wartime, and cultural workers (such as film director Ozu Yasujiro and animator Yokoyama Ryuichi) who were dispatched to the South Seas as members of a propaganda corps. The diverse lives and fates of these characters help us understand the multitude of forces, and the complex and often contradictory ideological and historical backdrops of those tumultuous years in which militant nationalism was inextricably intertwined with anti-modernism and promises of liberation. "Hotel Aporia" is the stage on which concealed histories are awakened. In this work, various conflicting contexts wavering between buried memories and forgotten records are pieced together, and layers of consciousness - including those who tragically lost their lives - unfold and find unexpected resonance. Here, historical facts appear in front of the visitor in the full force of their tragedy, yet everything woven in dazzling fiction, like a gathering of mysterious ghosts.