Cultural movements in today's Japan are often said to give a prominent place to fun and humor and to represent a shift towards prefigurative rather than instrumental forms of politics. The author relativizes this portrayal by focusing on how art was used in the mid-1990s struggle around the cardboard village in the Shinjuku underground passages in Tokyo.

In particular, he focuses on the artist Take Jun'ichirō who with his friends painted more than a hundred cardboard houses in the homeless encampment. He argues that the cardboard village art was immensely political, but in a sense that cannot be exhausted by conventional concepts such as instrumental or prefigurative politics. Instead, the article suggests that a concept of therapeutical activism is needed to make sense of the centrality in the cardboard art of themes such as death, monsters, and uncanny births.