Genpei Akasegawa

During the 1950s and 1960s Akasegawa became involved within the NeoDada movement along with Ushio Shinohara Shusaku Arakawa and Yoshimura Masanobu. Akasegawa was also associated with the avantgarde. In January 1963 Akasegawa sent out invitations to a solo exhibition in the form of 1000 yen notes with information regarding the exhibit on their backs. The following year he was indicted for creating imitations of banknotes stemming from the 1894 Law Controlling the Imitation of Currency and Securities and was eventually convicted and given a 3 months suspended sentence for what was dubbed the ThousandYen Bill Incident. His satirical manga Sakura Illustrated was originally published in the Asahi Journal a weekly news magazine. Editorial disputes over its content led to a recall of one issue of the magazine and led to a complete reorganization of its editorial board cancelling publication the magazine for the following two weeks. He writes humorous essays and other literary works under the pen name Otsuji Katsuhiko.