Tokyo's newest post-Fukushima visitor draw

A month after the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and ensuing meltdown at Fukushima, Japanese experimental theater director Akira Takayama, 42, found himself standing under a cherry tree in full bloom, pondering something essential to his career.

"Our voices, or rather my voice, what does it mean?” he asks. “The meaning had become lost to me."

Prior to that moment he had been doing little else but sleeping, consuming news reports and trying to figure out how to proceed.

This question, however, set him on a line of thinking that gradually evolved into the “Referendum Project,” his latest work that's currently open to all-comers across Tokyo.

The Project is a traveling act that takes place inside a four-ton truck. It is part of Festival/Tokyo, the city's annual theater fest that takes over various locations through November 13.

Voices from Fukushima

Director Akira Takayama poses in front of some portentous "Danger, No Entry" signs.

Inside the truck are eight private booths, where audience members put on headphones and watch recordings of interviews conducted this past summer with junior high school students in Fukushima.

All the students, in total more than 100, were asked the same questions, both mundane and deadly serious:

"What does it mean to be an adult?"

"What do you think will become of Fukushima?"

"What did you eat for breakfast?"

"Do you have a crush on anyone?"

The questions are then turned back onto the audience members, who are asked to cast their own votes in a fictional national referendum about the future of Japan.

Though utterly serious, Referendum Project is rooted in fantasy -- there is currently no provision for holding national referenda in Japan, nor has one ever been held.

Having suspended reality, Takayama was left with space to create his own model referendum as something closer to a platform for individual voices than a collective decision.

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