Feature

“I think it was two months after [the Fukushima meltdown], I got an email from a friend in New York saying you gotta see this,” Columbia grad student Nat Andreini told me on Tuesday night. “I was just totally blown away. I had been living in Japan for a couple years, and there was nothing quite like Chim↑Pom.”

Nat was referring to a series of street performance videos by the collective of six young Tokyo-based artists. Their series of public actions around the fallout site in Soma City polarized public discussion around the March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and resulting Fukushima nuclear meltdown, the worst since Chernobyl.