Resident Koreans in Kyoto Today— Higashi-Kujo today

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During the four decades of Japan’s remarkable Post-War economic growth (a period which ended—at least in its “remarkable” aspect— about 1991) Higashi-kujo Kyoto was remarkable for it’s visible lack of change. “Look ahead twenty years, and tell me what would be the worst situation you could imagine for Higashi- kujo,” I asked one resident Korean woman, during an interview at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Western Kyoto.

“The worst situation?” She mused, and then said, “would be for it to be exactly like it is now, which is what I expect will happen. Look at it. Very little has changed here for so long.”

Take a half- hour tour (you can use the fast-forward button to go faster, or move the slider to skip through the video) down the Takaseigawa canal into the heart of Higashi-kujo. Take note, as you travel, of the many empty lots that are fenced off, and the lack of accessible open spaces, and the general lack of new (post 1980) buildings—although some of the standing buildings show signs of repair/renovation. Much of the residential stock of this district’s non-buraku neighborhoods was created during the post-war urbanization of Japan. It is only now beginning to show neglect.
Takaseigawa VIDEO

What new buildings there are in Higashi-kujo are mainly modest houses built by the residents, or city-built public housing blocks (danchi) that were constructed in response to the long-standing and visible presence of substandard housing in the area (and nation-wide agitation from buraku groups (See: Hane, 1982).

Local industry in Higashi-kujo falls into four main areas: small retail and entertainment, refuse collection (and, dismantling, and rag collection, and general recycling), building maintenance, and small-scale metal fabrication and subconcontracting. Back before Kyoto’s neighborhoods were connected to city sewers, human refuse had to be picked up as well, and some of these “honey-wagons” also were a local business.

One of the many service occupations that were often located in buraku areas was that of collecting human waste. Nationwide, nearly half of Japan’s households are not connected to sewers. But in Kyoto, the punctual (and pungent) visits of “honey wagons” to the neighborhoods are now only a memory.

The one main ingredient in the local job scene—apart from the generally lower wages and social undesireability of these industries—is that most job locations (except for building maintenance or refuse collection jobs) are small enough to be operated by one family without a great amount of capitalization. Such services are also a part of the wider economy with relatively inelastic demand—even in bad economic times, garbage must be hauled. And so, while this district did not enjoy a great bounty during Japan’s economic boom years, they may not be as vulnerable as other parts of Kyoto’s economy to the downside of the current recession.

In this sequence of shots, a field of empty lots, made empty when their buildings were torn down or abandoned, has become a thicket of wire fences. And open space for play and relaxation is thus appropriated by governmental institutions for no other reason than to keep the local people out, although children have created gaps to allow them to play within the space.
The proximity to the train station is not accidental. The first train line was created to link the city’s southern edge, where property values were low. Many of the Korean families in Higashi-kujo have ancestors who came to Kyoto early in the century to help dig the tunnels through the eastern hills (Higashiyama) to allow the trains to pass through to Lake Biwa, and on to Tokyo.
The location is near the raised tracks of the Shinkansen (bullet train) line. And here we see a train slowing to a stop at nearby Kyoto Station.
©1993 Bruce Caron

Higashi-kujo occupies the eastern (higashi) region surrounding a main east-west street (Kujou) south of Kyoto’s main rail station (Kyouto-eki). On its eastern border is the Kamo River (Kamogawa) and its western reaches are the train tacks of the Kintetsu railroad. To the south are the southernmost districts of Kyoto city, notably the Fushimi region, and then unincorporated farm lands and suburbs of south Kyoto Prefecture. On tourist maps (for Japanese or foreign tourists), this area can be located by the absence of any marked tourist destination. There are no civic destinations (public parks, auditoriums, etc.), no government offices, no temples or shrines, no notable shopping centers (apart from the Avanti building immediately adjacent to Kyoto Station)—no tourist “destination” value whatsoever, and also a lack of facilities for local use.

“Indeed, in the past Japan's attentiveness to its international image has been an important factor in determining how the country responded to social issues and protests—occasionally with perverse results. For example, in 1951, when Japan was about to rejoin the international community and the country was gearing up for tourism, Kyoto city administrators, anxious that the poverty of a burakumin ghetto near the central train station would harm the city's image, built a board fence to screen the neighborhood from view; rather than address the ghetto's problems, in other words, they initiated a stark demonstration of conflict avoidance behavior.”
(Pharr 1990, 231)

Ceremonially, the neighborhoods of Higashi-kujo are not linked to any larger Shinto shrine, nor to the organizations (shrine or civic) that manage Kyoto’s main civic events (the “big three” festivals: Aoi Matsuri, Gion Matsuri, and Jidai Matsuri). Higashi-kujo is the first and the last place that visitors who arrive on the Shinkansen (bullet train) see, as it is immediately to the south of the station. But it is a district where visitors rarely, if ever go to.

“Look across the river,” one Higashi-kujo resident instructed me as we were sitting in upstairs dining areas of one of Kyoto’s 27 (at last count) MacDonalds restaurants. Looking west I could see a row of single-story houses flanking the Kamo river north of where the trains cross the river, and west of these, a wall of five- to seven-story condominiums and office buildings. “Why do you think there are no tall buildings near the river?”

the first 4:49:00 of the Takaseigawa Video tours the neighborhood described. I had travelled through its quiet, tree-lined streets for a year before I discovered why its streets were so quiet.

I confessed that I thought the city was trying to maintain a heritage of older buildings along the Kamo, but she said otherwise. “It’s just neglect. That is one of Kyoto’s fumiirenai tokoro— “a place you should not enter”—and it used to be famous for Yakuza [professional criminal gang] activity.”

She did not use the term “buraku”, and, in fact I learned that the area she pointed at has both buraku and non-buraku regions, the boundaries of which are best known to those who dwell in the vicinity. It also has no Japanese inns, no tourist hotels, no tourist destinations at all. The whole strip of the city south of 5th street (gojo) and along the Kamo is today a space excluded from the casual perambulations of locals and tourists (apart from unknowing foreigners). This is “fumiirenai tokoro,” a “don’t set-foot-in-there” place.

The city/chamber of commerce organizers of the Kyoto 1200 celebrations choose Hiro Yamagata’s “Golden Pavilion” as the poster for the event. As with the majority of his work, which is enormously popular in Kyoto, the scene is peopled by images of frolicking individuals, none of whom resemble (either physically or by dress) the majority of the people who live in Kyoto. An assortment of blondes and red-heads gambol near Kyoto’s trade-mark historical landmark (completely reconstructed in the 1950s after a case of arson). Yamagata lives in Malibu, California, and most of his work that sells (often for six-figure US$ amounts) in Japan depicts scenes of cities in Europe and the US.

Kyoto is a place where there are two forms of history: the history that is maintained through active promotion and reconstruction (such as the “Golden Pavilion” that was burned to the ground in the 1950s and reconstructed on its site), and the history of exclusion—the maintenance of places through an active neglect which, over time, adds to their history as artifacts of urban social planning.

As the urban core of Kyoto is reconstructed without reference to its historical, architectural legacy, neighborhoods that are excluded from real-estate speculation because of their stigmatized status ironically acquire cultural value as historically interesting districts. However, this unplanned preservation ultimately fails, as the buildings and the urban landscape (bridges, etc.) themselves degrade through a lack of repair, and eventually are replaced by empty lots.

In the 1994 Higashi-kujo Madang drama, a female character looks across the street to where fenced-off plots of land have sprouted fields of tall grass. On a far-off fence she reads the large sign: “Minaminomachi o utsukushikute...” [“let’s beautify South Kyoto”]. The sign represent’s the city’s only visible response to the widespread physical degeneration of this section of Kyoto.

In the empty lots of eastern Higashi-kujo one senses the logic of some longer-range plan, where the resident population along the river—now about 80% “Korean”— is allowed to age and die. Their houses will be torn down when they too decay, and the land fenced against appropriation by other area residents. In time, the children will move away, perhaps to Osaka or Kobe. And by the time Kyoto celebrates its 1300th anniversary (2094) the entire region will be available for civic construction: something expensive, such as a soccer stadium. And the memory of Kyoto’s only international town will simply fade away.