“Flatness” is deployed by many performance artists as an intuitive rather than commercially ridden response to the state of globality. The notion of the “child's”

After the collapse of the “bubble economy” in the early 1990s and the 1995 Aum Shinri-kyō's terrorist gas attack, the Japanese wrestled once more with the question of their national identity. What links connect today's Japan with the pre-WWII empire, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the early postwar years? How is theatre implicated in the national project of memory and forgetting?