Kitsune Yoru (Fox Night) 2008

‘Kitsune Yoru (Fox Night)’ was a combination of storytelling, urban exploration and live role-playing that took place in the small hours of the night/morning in the city of Yokohama, Japan. It was part of the Dislocate08 symposium and exhibition, coinciding with the (overall, fairly baffling) Yokohama Triennale and examining ideas of urban living, planning and creativity.

A major inspiration for this project was Italo Calvino’s book ‘Invisible Cities’; most of the categories he places his cities into translate neatly into kanji (the Chinese-derived characters that make up the majority of the written Japanese language). The ones I was particularly interested in for the context of Japanese megacities like Tokyo and Yokohama were Memory, Desire, Signs, Eyes, Names, Continuous, Hidden and The Dead. All of these proved to be productive lenses through which to look at real Japanese cities, especially since rendering them in kanji sparks numerous other associations, readings and imagery.

The participants took part in various scenarios and creative exercises- and sometimes physical ones- to re-imagine and recontextualise familiar urban spaces using their own cameras, pens and above all their own eyes and ears. This was intended as a creative, inspiring journey through a version of the city that few people ever see, moving and acting in a way more akin to an urban animal than to our normal roles as commuters, workers or shoppers. If we are not shopping, working or travelling then we become free to explore the city in a way that more closely resembles the mostly unseen urban animals that live all around us: a rat, a raccoon, a stray cat, a fox. In Japan kitsune is the familiar urban or suburban animal, but the term also applies to a shape-changing fox spirit who is often a trickster or a dangerous influence. Read more about kitsune and my film inspired by them on the page for Kitsune San.

In the persona of the kitsune we can approach shop windows closely and stare for as long as we wish, without any desire (or ability) to buy anything. We can stop when and where we choose to, without obstructing or annoying anyone. We can touch and caress posters, sculptures or trees in the street. We can momentarily imagine ourselves as wild animals, characters in a film, aliens, survivors of some disaster. We can examine the odd things that people sometimes abandon or lose in the street. Being a kitsune can also be eerie and disturbing; we can make it that way, or it can come upon us.

The basic rules of the game are:

Fox Rule I: On the rare occasions when you see humans, avoid contact with them; ideally watch them without being observed.

Fox Rule II: Seek out the places that are most crowded by day; in the dead of night they’re often the most full of detritus and interesting sights.

Fox Rule III: Look at all the things you’d never normally have time for, or would feel most awkward about paying attention to.

Fox Rule IV: Don’t hurt yourself or anyone else, or otherwise put yourself in any dangerous situation that’s avoidable. Remember the fox; they’re not afraid, but they maintain a healthy alertness.

Kitsune Rule: The night may present you with opportunities to leave a gift or make an alteration for somebody to find the next day. Be positive, think about magic, follow the Golden Rule (“do unto others as you would have done to you”) and/or Buddhist principles. Make it a nice surprise, i.e. don’t just make a mess or a hazard for somebody else to clean up, don’t do things that might inconvenience, frighten or endanger an unsuspecting person. It’s not about proving how clever or subversive you are, it’s about gifting a stranger you’ll never meet with an interesting image, a laugh or a strange story to tell.

‘Fox Night’ was a dérive, a “drift” that encouraged people to step away from their most habitual, comfortable and well-trodden paths, and suggested new and unusual use of the urban environment. Our purpose was not urban climbing, parkour, any form of trespass or property damage. Our aim was to move quietly and non-intrusively through the city as urban animals, the only trace or clue that we were ever there being in our films and pictures.

Some of the beautiful things we experienced:

The shop front pictured above, fully lit at 4 a.m., presumably to show off the wonderful vintage motorcycle inside. Above the window, a tableau of kaiju (giant monster) figures similarly facing outward; a gift to an empty street in the night. As we prepared to move on, we noticed a woman sitting on the steps of a nearby house; she’d been watching us silently and motionlessly the whole time, either half asleep, drunk, or just totally unperturbed by our strange behaviour. She was playing our game without even knowing it.

A young woman and her daughter accidentally or deliberately set off the smoke alarms in a public toilet. They emerge to dance together, raving to the piercing beeps. They don’t know that we can see them. They dance for themselves, for each other.

Workmen carefully bury numerous small, ovoid objects resembling onions and then pave over them. The backlit steam and fumes make white ghosts skitter across the fresh tar. By morning nobody will ever know the workmen were there, because all the other roads in that part of town are also immaculate and freshly painted.

An abandoned backpack that perfectly fits a nearby bronze statue of a schoolgirl.

A giant plastic ice cream cone sits outside the entrance to a residential block. The ice cream is lit from the inside but apparently belongs to nobody and promotes nothing in particular.

The dolls and mannequins in the doll museum window are predictably creepy, but thanks to a torch and some coloured gels we find that lighting them in green is more disturbing than lighting them in red. We discuss the difference and the crossover between kawaii (cute, lovable) and kowai (scary). This leads almost inevitably to kimokawaii (horrible/unnerving and cute). “That’s a teenagers’ word,” somebody says, “In Japan teenagers just make words up.” Everybody agrees it’s no surprise that the Uncanny Valley was first articulated by a Japanese scientist.

Street sweepers seem to drive around a lot without actually sweeping anything, perhaps because the streets are immaculate already.

A tiny shrine set deeply into the foundations of an apartment building on a hillside. By day the shrine is all but invisible, surrounded by concrete pillars and hidden in shadows. You’d never even notice it. But by night, Buddha’s there, visible but unseen, giving off a light that’’s bright enough to read by.