28 Awata Matsuri

---

Neighborhood events

After years of reading about Japanese neighborhood festivals, and witnessing these in my travels throughout Japan in the 1980s, in mid-1992 I had moved into a Kyoto neighborhood that held one of these events, and, by that autumn, it's weekend was finally upon us¹.

Shinto festivals in Japan have played a prominent role in some recent urban ethnographies, from Ted Bestor's pathbreaking Neighborhood Tokyo (1989) to Jennifer Robertson's landmark Native and Newcomer (1991). Still, by far the greater literature on festivals exists in Japanese. Beginning with a period of burgeoning interest in local folklore at the turn of the century—an interest guided by the work of Japan's foremost scholar on this topic, Yanagita Kunio—many of the country's several thousand festivals (matsuri) have received some sort of scholarly attention.

Although it is a momentary punctuation in the year’s activities, the festival illustrates many of the themes that suffuse Miyamoto-choo’s mundane social life throughout the year: the hierarchical structure of neighborhood groups and the egalitarian ethos that permeates many residents’ conceptions of the neighborhood; tensions between internal and external definitions of the community; Miyamoto-choo’s assertion of its identity and autonomy through local events and activities that are self-consciously seen as parts of the neighborhood’s evolving body of “tradition.” These themes manifest themselves in one form or another in all aspects of neighborhood life. But they are perhaps nowhere more clearly and coherently evident than in the annual festival for the Shinto tutelary deity.
(Bestor 1989, 225)

From local histories, to more analytic works, matsuri literature in Japanese is truly volumnous, although, like works on matsuri in English (and like works on ritual in any language) these invariably focus on the event's ceremonial activities and scripts, at the expense of any serious notice of the less-scripted actions that are also expected to occur. This means that we often have an extensive record of the ritual “scaffold” erected for and by an event, but a far less complete record of the event in its potential performative complexity. It was my original task to explore these other, less recorded, aspects of festival production in Japan, by looking at one or more festivals in Kyoto.

I was originally encouraged by the great number of matsuri events that happen every year, and by their self-professed position occupying the center of cultural production in Kyoto city (albeit in the absence of other modes—such as television and music— of cultural production).

our invitation

On the second Friday of October, the chounikaichou (the head of the neighborhood association) poked his head into our house's genkan (entry hall) and asked if my son would like to participate in the carrying of the kodomo-omikoshi (children's portable shrine). I unhesitatingly volunteered my son's services, and took the child's costume that the fellow handed me, which included a headband, a happi-coat and belt, and a light brass bell that was to be attached to this belt. It would soon be time for the Awata Matsuri.

Awata Jinja

By that time, I had visited the nearby Awata Jinja (Awata shrine) on many occasions. Like other Shinto shrines in the area, it provides an open-space, park-like ambiance that is not easy to find in Kyoto. And, from its hill-side vantage point, I had watched the summer Obon fires² on the hills surrounding the city.

The view north-north-west from the Awata Jinja shows the Kitayama (northern mountains) that lie between Kyoto and the Eastern Sea (The Sea of Japan).

Awata Jinja's position at the Eastern entrance to Kyoto on a hill overlooking the old Tokaido road between Kyoto and Edo (Tokyo) lent it some prominence³ in former times. But today it has a moribund feel about it. In part, this might be due to its location: wedged between the expansive, and still vibrant Yasaka Jinja, and the even larger (as a national marker) Hein Jingu (Heian Grand Shrine), where the spirits of the first and the last of Kyoto's resident emperors have been enshrined.

Awata Jinja

The Awata Jinja is nearly always quiet, and it lacks even a marriage facility. On any given day it might appear abandoned, and often when I strolled its grounds I met not a single other person. It is not until the week of the annual festival that one can sense its presence in the neighborhood.

The Awata Matsuri is an annual festival put on by the Awata Jinja, a Shinto shrine located about four-hundred yards from my house. All of the neighborhoods in its precincts gather contributions from their member (ujiko) households for its operation, and some of these households also hold the right to set up temporary shrines where the main procession will pass by. In many ways, this small festival is a miniature of the city's one great festival: Gion matsuri. Like Gion, the Awata Matsuri's traditional practice relies upon the availability of historic-period architecture. This is where my house (although not my household) became the focus of the neighborhood festival the second year of my stay in Kyoto.

The entire process of setting up the neighborhood display is guided not by some sense of religious or other meaning, but by the goal of reproducing the display according to a standard appearance, through the use of photographs. The duties were mostly divided between the adult men (who did the large construction and electrical work) and the women (who created the displays of fruit and nuts and did the fine work on the final display). Young adult men and young unmarried women did not involve themselves in this process.

The two-day festival includes some ceremonial and also entertainment events at the Awata Jinja, and it centers around a double procession: in the afternoon, a ceremonial halberd (hoko) is processed, along with the shrine's omikoshi, which was formerly carried by young men, but now sits on the back of a pick-up truck.

Here we see the shrine’s main o-mikoshi (portable shrine) paraded through the shrine precincts on the back of a pick-up truck.

Later in the evening, another procession takes burning torches along the same route, as the main “ritual cleansing” aspect of the event. Today, the main “cleansing” aspect of the event occurs when it is used as an alibi for neighborhoods to contribute volunteers to police some of the areas that are common to more than one chou (such as the riverbank of the creek (the Shirakawa) that runs through the district.

Our neighborhood kept a storehouse for the ceremonial fixtures in an overhead room between two houses. The expensive articles (the brocade and the halberd) were kept at the home of the chounaikaicho. (Image from the Awata video I, available by request)

Each neighborhood hosts a children's portable shrine which is carried by children⁴ to the main shrine

Posters are displayed to announce the main festival events at the Awata Shrine. This year, the classical festival music concert has been abandoned in favor of a karaoke event. (Image from the Awata video I, available by request).

after being carried throughout the neighborhood.

This festival,

the annual district undokai (sporting meet) and the summer's Jizo-obon festival are events that include participation not only of children, but also of retired people (mostly women).

Old families and foreign visitors

In my neighborhood there are today only a couple of families who trace their residence back to pre-Meiji times, when the area was a precinct of a local branch of a Buddhist temple⁵ with Imperial family connections. I will call these the two “old families” in the area. They still own many of the houses in this small neighborhood, and are the local landlords. There are a few more families that have many decades (and several generations) of residence, most of these have retail or service businesses in the area and own their houses. I will call these the “main” families of the neighborhood, as they are the most active in neighborhood affairs.

The large lantern stands are assembled by neighborhood men.(Image from the Awata video I, available by request)

The rest of the neighborhood are relative “newcomers,” including a disproportionately large number (seven) of households of foreign residents, all of them from the United States or Europe.

Most of these, like myself, were living in Kyoto while they pursue academic⁶ interests. There were no other (non-European) foreign residents in the neighborhood, or, if there were, they were passing as Japanese.

Only one of the foreigner-occupied households has been stable enough (this one also contains a Japanese spouse) to be admitted into the chonaikai. The remainder of the foreign “contingent” are not included in either the deliberations nor the circular information that gets passed through the neighborhood.

At the same time that the neighborhoods were “dressing-up” for the festival, the Awata Shrine became a stage where the offerings of the precincts families were on conspicuous display. (Image from the Awata Festival video II available by request).

One of the newcomers, whose family had lived in the neighborhood for more than thirty years, but whose ancestors originated not only from outside of the neighborhood, but from outside of Kyoto, once complained to me that “it takes five generations to get past the genkan.” Admission to genkan, the front hall where visitors and service people enter the house, does not signal status equality, while an invitation to come up into the house does.

Neighborhood women assemble the interior display stands in my livingroom, after the front wall has been removed. (From the Awata Festival Video I, available by request).

This complaint fit into a mode of complaint that I often heard from Japanese who were not born in Kyoto—that old Kyoto families were emotionally “stingy” (kechi) or arrogant⁷. Some explained this to me as a consequence of the city's thousand-year role as the home of the emperor. “Position” in the old imperial city, the relative proximity of one's house to the imperial center, formed a loose socio-geographical hierarchy centered on the imperial palace. But then I could imagine that similar complaints about “old-timers” might occur anywhere that local tenure means as much as it does in Kyoto. To the many who are considered newcomers to Kyoto (basically anyone who moved in after WWII), this lingering aftertaste of aristocratic sentiment leaves them mis-placed and sometimes out of sorts.

A festival of forms

The people I spoke with from my neighborhood had very little information to offer on meaning of the content of the Awata Matsuri processions, except to point out that our neighborhood shrine contained a brocade that was noted for its beauty and antiquity. The inclusion of this brocade in a book about Kyoto brocades was celebrated by including a copy of the book in the display, along with the brocade.

The entire display is created to resemble master photographs of each detail. The form of the display is thus reconstructed every year. But the contents hold little meaning, and have become empty signifiers. And I sometimes wondered what would happen if they ever lost the book of photographs. (From the Awata Festival Video I, available by request).

Where Bestor’s neighborhood used the event to demarcate its normally invisible boundaries within shitamachi Tokyo, the boundaries of the Awata Jinja’s precincts are normally well-defined—to the west is one of Kyoto’s largest buraku areas behind sanjo-eki, the third-street train station. To the south are the temple grounds of Sanen’in and the enormous Chion’in, Maruyama koen, Kyoto’s largest public park (and a famous cherry blossom viewing spot in the spring), and the Yasaka shrine. To the east are the Higashiyama hills, and to the north is the civic plaza created when the 1894 eleven-hundred year City anniversary was held, and which now boasts the main art museum, modern art museum, zoo, library, concert hall, and the Heian Jingu.

This festival does provide the one time in the year when the boundaries of my own immediate neighborhood (chou) are marked. The children’s mikoshi parade goes down every street and alleyway to the edge of the chou. And as the neighboring shrines—the Yasaka Shrine to the north and the Heian Shrine to the north—have festivals (Gion Matsuri and Jidai Matsuri) that are today appropriated as national civic spectacles, the Awata matsuri is the only local event that remains attached to a longer-term geographical place.

A syntax of obligation

The head of the chounaikai had a copy of the program that the shrine prints every year which he read from to give me some idea of the event. But even this document failed to narrativize the event as having either a definite purpose (although the use of flaming torches in one of the processions is generally explained as a technique of purification) or an identifiable myth. The program provided a simple calendar of events, and space to acknowledge local donors.

What I am suggesting here is that the meanings (a shared semantic load) provided by the event do not inform the main experience of it, rather, it is the events regular appearance, its syntax, that is most important. For example, I could not elicit a narrative story from any participant in my neighborhood. One volunteer at the shrine boasted that this festival is “older than Gion matsuri,” and that it is always covered by the local television station (KTB). (The first claim was not supported by others at the site, and there was never any evidence of television crews at the shrine. ) This twin claim of antiquity and current media interest fronts the main dynamic for referents to this event: it is produced as a visible display of history. It is nostalgia packaged as tradition and sold to others.

Following photographs from previous years, the women complete the offerings for the display alter. Japanese persimmons (kaki) and chestnuts are the primary displays. The work is tackled with general good spirits. There is no noticeable division among the crews. Older participants take on leadership roles without discussion. (From the Awata Festival Video I, available by request).

The performance of the festival in my neighborhood, indeed, in my house as the locus of this event one year, seemed to be mainly focused outward, to fulfill an external expectation. To not do it, would be to abandon the neighborhood’s position in the larger shrine precinct. And abandoning one’s established position in Kyoto, where position is acquired through multiple generations of dutiful behavior, is not an acceptable option—even when this duty requires that the neighborhood rely upon the cooperation of a foreign resident.

Machiya as festival place

It was the second year of my residence in Kyoto when another person announced their presence in our genkan. This time is was a member of one of the two old families in the neighborhood, a relative of our landlord. She was there to request that we allow the neighborhood festival to use our front room for the ritual display that marks the neighborhood’s place in the shrine precinct.

Our living room has been transformed into an abode of the kami (the god himself has been installed in the form of a folded paper object). For the next two days we will share our house with this display. At the end of the festival, there was some discussion about what to do with the kami. “We probably shouldn’t toss it in the trash,” one woman observed, to the laughter of the others. “I’ll take it back to the shrine,” another offered, solving the problem. (Video taken from the street) . (From the Awata Festival Video I, available by request).

Again, as I had come to Kyoto to explore festivity, this request was entirely welcome, although it was also puzzling. For all of the literature I had read about shinto festivals stressed the strict rules of ritual purity that any household serving as a locus of ritual activity would have to undergo.

The display at the Awata Shrine was not dissimilar to the displays set up at the main neighborhoods. In fact, uniformity of display and of practices, a feature that was not prominent among Shinto-Buddhist festivals in prior centuries, became the central feature of Shinto festival practice through the efforts of national reorganizations of Shinto shrines in the last 130 years. (From the Awata Festival Video II, available by request).

To begin with, according to the literature on matsuri,this should have been an honor extended with great care only to those families who had tendered long-term service to the shrine. And then the family, for the year before the festival, but with more attention in the weeks preceding it, would be required to avoid certain impure circumstances, such as the death of a family member. During the event, the family must be careful not to have women who are in childbirth or menses in the house. These various ritual obligations were described as central to the festival’s task of ritually purifying the shrine’s precincts.

The chounaikaichou was in charge of the construction of the festival display. But when I asked him for particulars about the history and meaning of the event, he could only suck air through his teeth and reply “Saa...” (A local performative response when one does not know a reply). Later, he offered me a program.
“Here is a map of the event,” he said.

None of these obligations were applied to my household. For it was not my household that the neighborhood was interested in, it was our house. “What is the meaning of this festival? What is its history?” Such questions raised only the intake of breath that signals a lack of an answer (or annoyance with the question). The head of the chounaikai was summoned as he passed by, and he had the same response. “We do it every year,” he said. “We always do it without fail.” Later he came by to give me a copy of the program that is printed by the shrine (mostly to advertise those local companies and people who had donated the larger amounts). “Here is a map of the event,” he said, “and here we are.”

With their own cries of “washoi, washoi” the children in our neighborhood (with some adult assistance) carried the children’s mikoshi (portable shrine) to the boundaries of the neighborhood (chou), and also to the shrine.
Notice that the older children, those above grade school age, do not participate, as they are busy with school work, and so parents also help to carry the kodomomikoshi.
©1993 Anjali

It was for this reason that the relative of my landlord was standing in my genkan making a polite request that we allow the neighborhood to use our house for this purpose.On that year, the other old houses in the neighborhood were all, for some reason, unavailable. And so, by default, the neighborhood turned to us. It was a request that I had already been coached to accept with equal or greater politeness. But I added my own enthusiasm to this acceptance. Indeed my only regret was that, on that year the neighborhood’s festival and the very first Higashi-kujo Madang were both taking place on the same day. After a year of misgivings, it seemed that my festival cup was finally running over.

When all the work was done, there was little left to do but sit back on benches in the street and sip sake and chat.
©1993 Anjali

Going by the book

I present scenes from my neighborhood’s participation in the Awata Matsuri to illustrate various qualities of event as these can be said to represent the social space of the neighborhood, and the expressive limits of cultural participation in that space.

When meeting in public, practices of polite deference are still maintained by older people. The continuation of these practices is one of the unintentional outcomes of events such as the Awata Matsuri, where formal occasions and formal dress provide interpersonal situations where such behaviors are required. The continuation of these formal circumstances on an annual basis increases the overall “formalization” of the street as a site place where micro-bodily control is expected.
©1993 Bruce Caron

The space that is described in the neighborhood by participation in the Awata Matsuri bears a useful resemblance to the social perceptions/positions of the families in the neighborhood. Distinctions based on length of residence, gender, age, and attachment to the volunteer lay organization of the Shrine are all displayed in this event, along with the positioning of the neighborhood as an integral part of the larger Shrine precincts.

The economics of the Awata Shrine also center on the festival and on the donations that the festival produces. But donations are also accepted as these are appropriate to the position of the household within the shrine’s long-time hierarchy, which maintains as a visible vestige the prestige of those households who were in upper class positions before modernization. To donate more than one should would be as ill-taken as to shirk one’s responsibility to donate as much as one has always done.

The currency for status improvement is not cash, but rather time. As decades pass, the fortunes of houses may decline and force them to neglect their position within this donation scheme. This creates an opening for other households to step up in the ranks. This situation also makes it difficult for the shrine to take advantage of newcomers who might have the economic means to make significant donations.

And so the situation at the Awata Shrine can best be described by a long duration (now a century or more) within which the ritual requirements and the economy of the shrine are slowly weakening, but are not subject to major reform. As an institution, the shrine resembles (as it annually reassembles) a social order that was fixed well before its current members were born. Newcomers to the shrine neighborhoods are kept outside of positions of ceremonial importance, and, as migration is increasing, the participant base for shrine events decreases. The annual festival of the shrine maintains as much of the display of prior events as possible, but it has lost nearly all of the performance and the meaning of this display.

The fragile performative conditions—the amount and the organization of public performance—of this neighborhood may not be very different from other Kyoto neighborhoods, although I would not care to generalize either to the region or to Japan. The many events in Kyoto that today claim to link the present to the area’s vaunted past share in this problematic: by preserving the formal aspects of events at the expense of creative and performative openings, they find themselves in control of events that no longer serve as expressive openings for cultural practice.

¹I would have the opportunity to participate in my neighborhood's annual festival three times while I was living with my family in Kyoto. The first year, my 10 year-old son helped to carry the kodomo-omikoshi (children's portable shrine) around our chou (neighborhood). In the second year the house where I was living became the temporary local resting-spot (otabisho) for the main festival procession, and the temporary shrine for one of many representations of the regional deity. The third year, I mainly took video of the event.

²Kyoto is surrounded by hills on three sides, and every summer, at the end of the yearly Buddhist period of ancestor worship, fires are lit on these hillsides to encourage the visiting souls a successful return to their abodes. [Ancestor worship is most prominent accommodation between Indian Buddhist thought and family funerary practices in East Asia. The very notion of ancestors (and graveyards) runs counter to the original idea of this-world reincarnation. But today, in Kyoto, Buddhist temples make the largest portion of their income and devote the largest amount of their practice to the spiritual care and attention given to family ancestors, through rituals in the temples, rituals in home alters, and the maintenance of graveyards.] Obon occurs in August in Kyoto region, and is a time when families traditionally get together, and one of the best alibis for a few days of vacation.

³The Awata shrine was connected to the Shoren-in temple, a temple that maintains imperial connections, although the Shoren-in's connections with the Awata Jinja were severed (as were those of virtually all Buddhist temples and Shinto Shrines in Japan) during the Meiji period. (Allan Grapard, personal correspondence).

⁴By 1994 the number of children in my neighborhood had dropped to where most of the people carrying the children's shrine were adults.

⁵The temple is still there today, and when the new Emperor first visited Okinawa in 1993, someone set fire to one of its out-buildings as a rather oblique means of protest. This created a period of plain-clothed police surveillance in the neighborhood that included a doorstep interview at my house in which a policeman asked me if I'd seen anyone strange (henna hito) hanging around, and then noticed my Grateful Dead t-shirt and decided I might not be a good judge of what he meant by “henna.”

⁶Most of the foreign residents are tenants of one of the old families, which has, for many years, been a benefactor to foreign scholars: finding lodging in Kyoto is never easy, and usually quite dear—between the rent and the necessary “key money” bribe needed to secure a lease. The availability of a small house at reasonable rent in a convenient location is an invaluable opportunity for someone coming into Kyoto from abroad. The only real benefit that the owner maintains in the arrangement is that temporary residents will not stay long enough to acquire the rights that long-time renters feel they have in Kyoto. In the months when money was short, and the weather was bad, it was this lovely house that kept this researcher's family from regretting the agreement to spend this time so far from their home.

⁷And as with all complaints aimed at entire groups intead of individuals who might or might not resemble the object of the complaint, this one cannot be taken at face value. Several individuals from old Kyoto families were extremely kind to me and to my family. Of course, we were never invited into their houses.