As indicated by the subtitle of the exhibit, "Ideas from Japan," the artists sent their conceptions of their works (diagrams, sketches, explanatory notes, conceptual views, instructions for construction detail, colors, etc.) to be recreated by the professors of the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne and their students. The intention as conceived by producer Ken Scarlet was for Australians to learn about the Japanese culture through actual production processes.

As I recall it, three people, Stelarc, Cihakova Vlasta and Nobuo Yamagishi were responsible for the selection of the artists. I was the only performance artist among those selected. In the case of performance, no less than in other expressive media, there are ample possibilities for reproduction within certain limits. In comparison with forms such as sculpture and painting which are fundamentally difficult for others to reproduce, it is actually a medium with much greater possibilities for reenactment.

In spite of this, although all the other works were recreated in joint efforts by the students, their professors or several other artists who were involved, it was decided that I alone would give my own performance.

One of the reasons for this was that my plan was so complex, or rather, required such bothersome proceedings that it did not lend itself easily to reproduction. Also, my view that the entire expanse of time, the proceedings including the workshop, were integral to the performance seemed to add to the difficulty.

The artists who contributed their ideas to this exhibition were the following: Koji Enokura, Kintaro Fukuhara, Noriyuki Haraguchi, Toshifumi Hasegawa, Tooru Ikeda, Setsuko Ishii, Hiroshi Kamo, Ryosuke Kanuma, Tadashi Kawamata, Toshiharu Hisano, Mitsunori Kurashige, Kazusumi Maeda, Masayuki Muramatsu, Masaki Nakayama, Keisuke Oki, Hideo Osaka, Tomoaki Sakurai, Suga Kishio, Osamu Takagi, Noboru Takayama, U Tan, Mutsuo Tanaka, Kenji Togami, Morihiro Wada, Mie Wakana and Masafumi Yagi.

Besides the above, seven others accompanied me and played music in performances both in the museum program and at other places in Melbourne. They were: Tatsuro Hattori, Kiyoshi Matsumoto, Masaharu Minegishi, Hirofumi Yamaguchi, Lili Shimada, Tetsuro Furudate and Makoto Murata.

The performance of "A Soft Language - Shark" was comprised of several proceedings which were to unfold one after the other: 1) Charter an Australian fishing boat and come back with the largest shark possible. 2) Produce a documentary video film of the shark's capture. 3) Go to the beach; observe and record the ecological system of the surrounding sea. Film and sketch the types of rocks and distribution of plant life, gather information on animal populations near the shore and the composition of the water, and note geographical formations. 4) Suspend the captured shark from three posts and leave to decay naturally. Record the shark in this position on video or 35 mm film. 5) Hold lectures and workshops outdoors over a three day period, focusing the theme on the recordings and surveys to date as well as performance. 6) Exhibit all recordings.

This was the format of the performance, the concept of which I related to the exhibit planners in Australia. The part that would be enacted in front of a large audience was the fourth segment. The reason I wanted to use a shark was that I wanted the biggest animal corpse I could possibly get, out of a desire to objectify, but I also wanted to re-compose something characteristically associated with Australia in a provocative way.

Another reason I decided on a shark was that it formed an analogue to a segment in a yukara, an Ainu epic. The epic had made a chance appearance in the story of my search for my family's roots, another ongoing project. Through the symbolism of the shark's presence, I wished to consider as a peripheral element the interchangeability of the cultures of Japan (the Ainu) and Australia (the aborigines).

I stressed continuity because I wished to include as much analysis as possible in performance which is an impermanent expressive form. I also wanted to make the performance as much a continuation of everyday expressive acts as possible. My format of linking a variety of expressive styles, chosen with these objectives in mind, was to provide the keys to discovering the metaphors and symbols in this performance. At times, performance finds its way into not only intentional processes of expression, but my daily life as well, due doubtless to these same objectives.

To analyze intricate riddles and publicize the results. The result is performance. Granted that the riddle is appropriate as well as effective, performance leads me to a plane rich in suggestion, with almost surprising and even incidental effectiveness. When this occurs, the effectiveness of the message, the artistic significance for others, is increased several times over.

To elaborate, the more radical the departure from whatever is "normal" and the longer the process of the work, the greater the temporal and spatial involvement in the imaginations of the on-lookers. The phenomenon of performance is attained through this process. In terms of the psychology, understanding and empathy are required to establish a space for the on-lookers' involvement, and this was the role I hoped the riddles I had readied in the periphery would fulfill.

Uneasiness, an inability to understand, rejection ─ the understanding attained through the riddles allows us to overcome these obstacles. In the title of this work "A Soft Language ─ Shark," the word "Language" signifies the riddle (culture) and the "Shark" represents the radicalism of the performance.

The actual process unfolded as follows. First was the quest for a gigantic shark. The production staff found out that the only place a shark might be caught in winter in Australia was off the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, so they immediately contacted a fishing cooperative in the area and arranged to charter a boat for game fishing. Their usual quarry is blue marlin, a huge species of swordfish.

The Australian method of catching a shark is to dump pig guts and blood into the sea to attract shark. We came up with a huge tiger shark some five meters long. It had huge teeth and a mouth large enough to hold two or three objects the size of a human head.

Once in port, we packed large quantities of ice into the shark through its mouth, wrapped the body in cloth and placed it in a specially constructed wooden box (which looked for all the world like a coffin). After nailing it shut, we had the box transported to an airport where it was loaded onto a small chartered plane for the trip from Queensland to Melbourne.

I thought of the shark, this huge living thing that had come up out of the sea. Placed in a coffin, it was flying alone over the reddish desert of Australia. Death, sleeping within those silver wings, casting its shadow on the red sands. The shark was transported from the airport in Melbourne to the National Gallery of Victoria where a dozen or so students were ready to help suspend it in a courtyard.

Then came episode number one. Most likely because a Melbourne newspaper had run an article the day before on this performance which would feature a shark, a largish crowd had come to watch as we worked.

Suddenly, someone from the crowd rushed at the shark and those of us standing near it, waving a huge ax. I was dumbfounded. My installation composed of tripods for hanging and a kind of wall made of large bundles of straw were hacked apart in seconds by this man who then tried to attack the shark with his ax.

Luckily, the shark escaped damage, for the students as well as others helping with the task made a barricade in front of it. However, the man continued to walk around raging and still holding his ax. The courtyard was frozen with apprehension until the police, notified by the museum, took the man into custody.

It was not until later that I found out that this man was a member of a "shark environment protection committee." There certainly are all kinds of environmentalist groups in Australia.

A few days later, a friend suggested jokingly during a coffee break that next time, I should stage a performance using a dolphin or a whale. He was sure that it would draw a huge crowd. I thought, "Never!" at the time, but to be honest, I cannot say I am totally uninterested in this theme.

Reasoning that there are various ways to resuscitate the material used in a performance, the dolphin idea still crosses my mind from time to time. It might be best to add that while I continue to entertain this idea, a small voice inside me protests at how anti-social "art" is.

To return to the performance, the next step was to wrap the body of the suspended shark firmly in a large white cloth. Cutting the shark open while still wrapped this way, we disemboweled it, then proceeded to sew it shut with a video monitor inside, running footage of the sea in Queensland. All this time, I was singing an Ainu yukara under my breath and writing symbols like pictures on the ground with the shark's blood. Closing my eyes from time to time, I could hear the buzz of voices from several hundred observers.

When I looked toward the shark, a faint blue color and the sounds of the sea were trickling out. It was the video of the sea sewn inside the shark's belly, a performance consisting of a creature of the sea which had now swallowed the sea.

However, suddenly, the moisture inside caused the monitor to short circuit and the image disappeared with a hissing sound and a wisp of smoke. From inside the shark came the smell of the instrument and white smoke denoting the monitor's death. Totally by chance, we had recorded the scene of the shark's second death, or rather, of the death of civilization inside the shark.

It was not as if I had known that the monitor would short circuit and break down. However, as a result of this mishap, the performance reached a kind of completion.

Later, many of the observers commented that they had found the white smoke beautiful as it suggested the death of machinery and the shark's resurrection. I must confess that I was somewhat disappointed by the incident, for I felt as though I had become a witness to a Happening such as those staged in the sixties when I had really intended my own performance.

Episode number two. Early the next morning, I received a phone call from a guard at the museum. He shouted in rapid fire English that I should come right away because a strange man had just come and was doing something to my shark. When I arrived, however, the shark's teeth had been cut clean away and its mouth was like that of a miserable old woman.

Said the guard, "It must have been the Italians. They have lots of gift shops and those teeth could bring a thousand dollars." I must clarify for the sake of the Italians' honor that we have no idea who it was, for the perpetrator was never caught. Although many Australians of Italian descent do run souvenir shops, the rest was pure conjecture on the part of the guard. As he spoke, the guard stared at me as if to say, "You Japanese sure do funny art!"

There is an episode three. In the morning two days after the last incident, I received a call from the museum notifying me that the fin seemed to be missing. This time the caller conjectured that the Chinese must have done it. For the sake of their honorable reputations, I add again that the thief was never identified. Of course, if someone really wanted to eat it, they might just . . .

It was such a superb fin that even I might have gone out in the dead of night with an ax. I might add, however, that it was not insured. If it had been, I would be interested to know how the insurer would calculate the relationship of the shark to art in terms of a dollar value.