Resident Koreans in Kyoto Today— Representing the Center and the Margins
The City’s image of Kyoto fronts the claim for a national-cultural cachet. Based entirely on its former status as the place of the imperial family, it reminds the nation that much of the imperial culture that has become the trope for “real” Japanese culture under the guidance of the Ministry of Education (Monbusho) used to happen in Kyoto. Today, only resident Koreans have managed to resalvage parts of Kyoto as local and disconnected from the recoding of the city as a national cultural icon.
“Resident Koreans in modern Kyoto” opens up a host of representational issues which are of interest in the exposition of how and where “democracy” is performed (or denied) in this city, and how a community that is fiercely “Kyoto-an” in its self-representation, is also completely excluded from the city government’s self-representation. “Higashi-kujo no Ima” provided a forum for the self-expression of place attachment and disaffection among residents of Higashi-kujo Kyoto.
To provide the City’s side of representation, I have borrowed images from the city-backed Kyoto Chamber of Commerce & Industry’s convention promotion website. [http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/hellokcb/]
the “official” version of Kyoto
- “Kyoto sells itself as a kind of Rome on the Kamo river: a place where ancient dynasties flourished and fought (and fornicated), and, in the process, forged that rare “alloy” known as “elite culture.” Ever dwindling stocks of this stuff make up the mother-lode of Kyoto’s tourist drawing power. Kyoto spins less and less new “alloy” every year, and meanwhile, consumes itself in the process of pandering its historical image”
Heritage management
No one expects the City of Kyoto to advertise its thorniest urban/social problems when it markets itself to tourists and industrial concerns. It is, however, the lack of attention to these—and the laisser faire policy toward these— internally that is the most difficult for residents in Higashi-kujo to accept. But this seeming lack of concern for decades-old urban circumstances is also highlighted when the City announces urban design plans that continue to ignore the lifestyle conditions of its “furyoujuutakuchiku” [“inferior/delinquent residential districts”] now commonly known as suramu: slums.
Like most cities in the world, Kyoto tries to hide its slums. For decades, Higashi-kujo was visually removed from the adjacent Kyoto Station, first by the remnant of the centuries-old city wall, and then by a city-built fence. These are gone today, but less-visible barriers remain—walls within institutions, gateways to opportunity that never open in certain directions, “glass ceilings” that keep certain people in minimum-wage jobs. Again, Kyoto shares many of these same social problems with Los Angeles and London, but the circumstances within Kyoto are also locally significant for understanding the creation of an entire social movement, in the form of a festival community, made specifically (although without the specificity that would allow for retaliation) to counter the city/state construction of Kyoto’s cultural and public sphere.
the newly ancient modern city
The city government’s representation of Kyoto is self contradictory: not satisfied to maintain the cityscape as an historical site, with an economy centered on cultural tourism, fine crafts, and higher education (Kyoto has the largest per capita population of college students in Japan), the city also promotes urban commercial and residential growth and redevelopment. And the city government’s plan for Kyoto is basically a list of new construction ideas, from elevated freeways, to a new city hall and a new concert hall replacing the one they built 30 years ago. The major issues for historical management in Kyoto are available in: Heritage management. For residents in South Kyoto, the plans to limit growth in the north incorporate plans to increase use density in the South, particularly as a site for industrial expansion.
ABOVE: The video-toting ethnographer is recording reactions to the Higashi-Kujo-no-Ima
Photography exhibit at the second Madang.
So
much
of
the
latter—the
“New
Kyoto”—has
destroyed
so
much
of
the
former,
old Kyoto, that the city itself is not recognized (by UNESCO) or recognizable
(by
residents or tourists) as an historical cityscape.
Cornerstone of the City’s plan to attract convention goers is the Kokuritsu Kyouto Kokosai Kaikan (National Kyoto International Hall), referred to in English as the Kyoto International Conference Hall, built in 1966.
photo from:
http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/hellokcb/
To be fair, building and rebuilding “public” works in Japan—as means to acquire the local share of Construction Ministry funds—represents the central activity for prefectural and municipal governments. Taxation in Japan is dominated by national taxes, and cities often choose to compete for nationally funded projects without careful consideration of local impacts beyond the benefits of new jobs in construction: this type of state-driven local construction occurs in virtually all nation-states, but it is most acute within state-nations, given the greater scope of central government power and purse (see also:State-nation modernity).
Convention center facilities in Kyoto were constructed for international events, but today, with the high cost of the yen, most events are regional or national. Photo from:
http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/hellokcb/
While a significant amount of housing in other Japanese cities was destroyed during WWII, much of the city’s housing, although spared of the WWII bombing, was built before the 1930s, and was in need of renovation in the decades after the war1.
The changes in Kyoto’s street-level ambiance are nowhere more evident than in the underground malls north of Kyoto Station, and in the central Shinkyogoku street mall, where tourist shops dominate. Photo from:
http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/hellokcb/
For decades, the notion of preserving at least the façade of the earlier architecture when rebuilding these urban residential areas was not promoted in any fashion by the city, and actively opposed by Japan’s steel industry, which benefited from new national laws constraining wood construction within urban zones. By the time the city began to tout itself as an historical city in the 1970s, almost eighty percent of Kyoto’s urban residences had already been lost to metal and stucco apartments and townhouses.
Cultural production for the tourist trade requires that formerly elite modes of craft work be reproduced mechanically at a much cheaper cost. Plastic “lacquer” dishes resemble the laquerware found in Kyoto’s museums. And it can be put into the dishwasher. Photo from:
http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/hellokcb/
The opportunity to rebuild in a manner that reflected the local history of wood construction was lost, and the city has become indistinguishable in most parts from parts of Osaka or Yokohama, or any other Japanese metropolis. Despite its cultural pretensions, the physical, street-level experience of Kyoto city is almost entirely a post-WWII experience today. The historical/cultural sites of value have been preserved behind walls with some paid admission required.
1One of the local circumstances that residents faced in Kyoto was the increase in height of the local population. Interior wall openings in traditional buildings being only about 170 cm in height was no real problem until the Japanese population grew taller—by an average of more than 10 cm!—after the war. Old homes are physically too small for these new giants.
