Skip Navigation Tokyo's Mad Men: New UCLA book explores antics
of Japanese avant-garde in 1960sWilliam Marotti  Tokyo's Mad
Men: New UCLA book explores antics of Japanese avant-garde in
1960s  They threw random possessions off rooftops, made printed
copies of Japanese currency and perpetrated odd "happenings" in
commuter trains that left Tokyo residents scratching their
heads.  By Meg Sullivan, UCLA Newsroom  No wonder these artists
have been dismissed as just another group of nonsensical
pranksters.  But there was so much more to the underground
artists who made Tokyo an epicenter for the avant-garde in the
late 1950s and early 1960s, UCLA historian William Marotti
argues in a forthcoming book.  In "Money, Trains, and
Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan," Marotti
contends that the two dozen or so renegades gave voice through
their art to postwar angst and in so doing presaged
countercultural concerns that would reverberate worldwide in the
late 1960s and early '70s.  "By delving into what these qu