National spaces and identities— Kyoto City margins and centers
The Golden Pavilion, one of Kyoto’s most popular tourist landmarks, was an aristocrat’s villa and then a temple before a disgruntled priest burned it to the ground in the 1950s. It was then reconstructed, and it remains in this newly fashioned, traditional form, a metaphor for all that is from Kyoto’s past that has been commodified in the present. Photo from:
http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/hellokcb/
The city is full of margins and centers, and of occasions that demarcate these with bright colors. The work of keeping the margins marginal is done in large part by the continual display of the center as central. In its buraku districts, Kyoto contains geographic zones of exclusion that are as exclusionary as its imperial zones are exclusive: an homology that is not lost among Buraku activists.
Most residents dwell in between these zones of exclusion: connected ceremonially to the imperial/national spaces, and connected also to the stigmatized neighborhoods by the everyday practices of discrimination required to avoid contact with buraku places. The “civic” middle ground mimics the imperial space, building fake palaces (such as the Heian Shrine) as civic projects, and marching in or onlooking at imperial parades that lack the essential ingredient: the emperor is elsewhere.
The city-run art museum is a pre-war building across the street from a much larger national museum of modern art. Nearby is the city’s main library, another pre-war building that offers a collection of books similar in size to that of a small-town library in the United States. The national Ministry of Education has not made local library support one of its priorities, and the city budget for cultural matters is inadequate to maintain a library of any size. The city’s many universities also do not allow public use. In the absence of public libraries, local bookstores are usually very busy. Photo from:
http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/hellokcb/
The city competes for Ministry of Construction (kensetsushou) funding to build national museums for its cultural legacy: subsequently turning over the management to the Ministry of Education, and thus giving to the state (which exists mostly in that half-hour walking distance from the Tokyo imperial palace) control over the representation of Kyoto-generated arts and crafts, which are, in the process “nationalized.”
Perhaps the most famous of Kyoto’s crafts is that of yuuzen—painted silk. Painted silk kimonos are still used for weddings and other occasions, but competition from abroad and a general decline in the market signal a long-term decline in this industry. To cut production costs, yuuzen factories now replace the home-based artists who created both the design and executed the drawing. Two of the main yuuzen producing centers are West Kyoto, and Fushimi in the south. Ironically, a worker in Fushimi told me that more than half of the laborers/artists today are Resident Koreans. Photo from:
http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/hellokcb/
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Almost all of the 60 or so museums in Kyoto operate with the active management of national ministries (usually the Ministry of Education). In this manner, the city government over the last fifty years has literally built itself out of control of the management of the elite cultural legacy that was its main value-added cultural commodity. The city-run museums (and the paltry few local libraries) appear to be grossly underfunded in comparison to the national museums.
The Gion Matsuri is Kyoto’s largest civic event, although the crowds at its main parade of giant floats (yamaboko) are modest (40-50,000). As this is performed to be the exactly the same each year, almost everyone has already seen it, and anyhow, any interesting accidents that might happen will be shown on the evening news. Actually, the parade has been changed substantially in modern times: the route was altered to follow the newer, wider streets, and the parade must now stop and go to allow cross traffic to flow. But the more ironic changes occurred early on. This festival was originally performed by a Korean temple outside of the city (the city limits now encompass the Gion district) as a shamanic ritual (mudang kut) of cleansing (See: McMullin 1988). None of this history is provided in the current literature provided by the city about the event. Instead, the festival has become an icon of “real Japaneseness” and Gion-style festivals occur in several cities. Photo from:
http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/hellokcb/
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The translation of local places and artistic works and even workers (living national treasures) into national sites and national arts has been proceeding for several decades, and today adds yet another zone of exclusivity/exclusion to Kyoto’s social geography: the national zone. While the valorized imperial zones and the stigmatized buraku zones were geographically fixed more than one hundred years ago, the national zone continues to grow.
The popularization of Kyoto’s formerly elite arts, such as the tea ceremony, add another layering of national culture onto that directly managed by the state. The schools of tea and also flower arranging that are based in Kyoto are managed in a hierarchical fashion throughout the nation. However, these are also the best example of Kyoto’s claim to national cultural centrality. Small wonder then that the head of the largest tea ceremony school was chosen as the head of the 1200th anniversary celebration. Photo from:
http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/hellokcb/
When one adds the grounds of private and public schools (managed by or under the guidance (gyoseishido) of the national Ministry of Education) to the national zone, and then the many Shinto Shrines (reconstructed under pre-war state Shinto programs, and still managed by a national organization (the Jinjahoncho) that was formerly a government office to this zone of national culture: the great majority of cultural spaces and nearly all open spaces in Kyoto are nationalized spaces where local residents are as much tourists as the hordes of school children that arrive every year on state-sponsored cultural trips.
