ANGURA: Posters of the Japanese Avant-Garde, by David G. Goodman, with a foreword by Ellen Lupton. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, 92 pp., 90 color plates, 17 b/w, $19.95.

The 1960s was a time of extraordinary creativity in the arts in Tokyo. As Alexandra Munroe has said, it was "undoubtedly the most creative outburst of anarchistic, subversive and riotous tendencies in the history of modern Japanese culture."

There was the "angura" (underground) theater of Shuji Terayama, Juro Kara and Makoto Sato, the dance of Tatsumi Hijikata, the films of Susumu Hani and Nagisa Oshima. All of these artists and the many more who filled the venues of that time had grown up in the midst of the extraordinary freedom created by the chaos of the immediate postwar period.

They believed that anarchy is conducive to creativity and set about dismantling what corporate culture they could get hold of.