Historian Thomas Havens has called the Yomiuri Indépendant "the chief vehicle of postwar democracy for young visual artists in Japan who lacked connections with the clubby fine arts establishment" and "a bazaar of new ideas and materials.
Access to galleries and exhibitions was restricted by selection committees dominated by established art societies that often screened entries in accordance with personal connections and ideologically-driven standards.
[15] Akasegawa later recalled how in the final years of the 1950s, a sort of competition emerged at the Yomiuri Indépendant to see whose “painting” could extrude most from the surface of the canvas.
[16] By 1959, the art critic Tamon Miki declared that the Yomiuri Indépendant gave him "the feeling of a performance space rather than of an exhibition site.
[9] Later that year, the museum issued an edict banning a number of objects and artworks from its premises, including certain types of nude photographs deemed obscene, swords and other weapons, foodstuffs that might smell or rot, works producing loud noises, and artworks using water, sand, gravel or other materials that were damaging the museum floors and walls.
[9] Art critics including Shūzō Takiguchi, Ichirō Hariu, Yoshiaki Tōno, and Tamon Miki immediately protested these new restrictions, calling them "very troubling for freedom of expression," but to no avail.
[9] Artists also simply ignored the restrictions, and the 1963 edition of the exhibition (which proved to be the last) featured, among other forbidden objects, a bath bucket filled with water, knives, glass fragments, loud and raucous use of a steel drum, and artworks incorporating perishable foodstuffs, including a French roll, udon, bean sprouts, and tofu.
Indeed, the artists had little trouble finding alternative venues to display the works they had prepared for the 1964 Yomiuri Indépendant, showing them in a host of new, small-scale museums, galleries, and exhibitions that had cropped up in recent years.