Be Clean! 3 Favorite 

On October 16, 1964, the artist collective Hi Red Center, clad in sanitation masks and white uniforms and wielding small brooms and toothbrushes, spent several hours meticulously cleaning the streets of the Tokyo district of Ginza, amid the hustle and bustle of a “normal” day. Titled “Movement to Promote the Cleanup of the Metropolitan Area (Be Clean!),” the event was an absurdist happening staged during the internationally telecast 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games that satirized the behaviors then promoted by the Japanese state as part of its push for a “face-lift” for Tokyo’s streets and surfaces.

The state’s cleanliness campaigns, marketed as a “Beautification of the Capital Movement,” and financed with some 4.7 percent of Olympic investment funding by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government—more than that spent on Olympic installations—were designed to present the city and its bodies in a way that would satisfy the expectations of the Western gaze. Hi Red Center’s media-conscious performance, heralded as exceptionally rigorous civic service by several police patrols, subversively expressed the social tension latent within Japan’s postwar reconstruction and Allied Occupation. Staged in front of the Hokkaido newspaper company, near Kenzo Tange’s National Olympic Stadium in one of the busiest commercial districts of Tokyo, Hi Red Center’s actions amplified and distorted the activities and objects that were central to the state’s campaign.