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34 Madang night
“Where's your camera,” she asked, shouting over the noise of the post-Madang party.
I was wedged into a vinyl padded booth of a restaurant that could have been a Dennys, except that on the floor next to the counter a dozen Korean drummers were pounding out a beat that sent a hundred revelers into dancing wherever they were standing. The restaurant's staff had retreated to the kitchen, and took turns peeking out through the swinging doors. Near the front picture windows, a long buffet table stood emptied of its Korean fare, and the latest of many cases of 750ml bottles of beer was nearly gone.
“My camera?” I shouted back, “I'm out of film.”
She looked at the pockets of my utility vest. “Tape recorder?”
She smiled at me. It was the first time in fourteen months of meetings and rehearsals and performances that she'd shown anything but cool distrust of my presence in her neighborhood. Trust was a scarce commodity between this neighborhood and outsiders. Most people who lived somewhere else would not even walk through this part of Kyoto. And when outsiders came here with video cameras, as NHK (Japan's PBS) does every decade or so to produce another documentary about its gritty underclass conditions, the residents already know its not done for them.
She was a person, like many of her friends, trapped in the middle of a load of troubles with no good way out and few expectations of any significant changes for the future. But then she was also participating in change by helping to organize the Madang.
It was nearing midnight on the day of the Madang. I had been up since 5 am finishing the photography exhibit. I had my own part to play within the Madang drama, and I was playing the role of ethnographer for a Yomiuri Television crew, who were using my interest in the Madang to create a feature news story. They were shooting me shooting the event, and I was also shooting them shooting me shooting the event. And now I was completely shot.
The Madang rolled to a close around seven, and then we all worked to get the tents down and the equipment packed and the trash collected and carted off, so that the schoolyard was neater than it was when we set up the day before. Last year, the PTA complained that the Madang had left a mess behind (which it hadn't, but someone just had to complain about something). So this year the schoolyard got an extra-thorough cleaning. This normally severe schoolyard, not much more than a rectangular expanse of gravelly dirt, which today had contained, but barely, the festival commotion, had finally been returned to its disciplinary mode.
When the last truck pulled out, the mood picked up. It was time to celebrate. The party began around nine, and hit its stride an hour later. Those who relied on public transportation would began to drift away by eleven-thirty.
I had stashed all my equipment at a locker at Kyoto Station. Like I said to her, all of my film and tapes and batteries were used up, and so was I. Now, after three hours of serious drinking (this was not a crowd to let a glass go empty) the uphill bicycle ride home was looking less and less attractive. The drummers had switched rhythms, pushing the tempo. People were dancing on the empty buffet table.
She gave me a second smile and poured beer into my glass.
“You came here anyway,” she shouted.
“Mochiron,” I said. “Of course I did.”
“Welcome to the community!” she said and put her hand on my shoulder.
“Thanks.” I returned the smile. “Nowhere else I'd rather be.”
The party was hitting its limit. The drummers pushed the tempo further, louder. Everyone was dancing, jumping to the beat. Bodies touching, faces stretched into grins that verged on some permanent rearrangement of tissue. The crowd pressed itself together. And me without a camera.
It occurred to me that here was another moment to the day's festival, a moment not less significant by its intimate scale—the entire year of festival preparation and then today's festival performance were also rehearsals for this moment. This party was not the end of this year's event, but the budding communion that would assure the next. Here was fecund moment drenched in body sweat, and sweetened by a heady abandon.
Suddenly, with a sharp report, one of the drumheads broke. The crowd whooped its approval of this signal that their passions had torn through some unspoken barrier. The other drums used the sound to signal their coda, and slowed to a final measure.
Some days later, I asked her one of my standard questions, “What's the worst scenario you can imagine for what Higashi-kujo will be like in twenty years,”
“The worst?” she replied, “is to stay exactly like it is today.”
Thinking back on the party, I reflected that she need not worry about Higashi-kujo remaining the same. Already, the Madang had opened a space for comment, for reflection, and for social therapy. In one year the neighborhood had already changed.
