Local Spaces and Identities— the overcoded street

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Crime is a minor spectacle on the Kyoto’s streets. The Overcoding, Coding, and Recoding of holidays (most of which are somehow connected to the emperor) as collective, national events, and the staging of numerous national competitions—the most visible being the national high-school baseball tournament— where only Japanese citizens are allowed to participate, these spectacles add to a collective national life-style imagination that remains closed to Koreans in Kyoto. The rites of cultural inclusion offered in the streets and in schools, always use overt “Japanese” symbolism, such as the use of “traditional” dress and participation by (generically Japanese) Shinto shrines. These rites bring the majority population into a regular reenactment of their national imagined commonality. But they do not reach out to include others living in the City.

“The fact that resident Koreans cannot get a job as a general prefectural public employee [in Kyoto Prefecture] promotes the trend in Japanese society to approve the situation of not employing resident Koreans. The big step [forward] will occur with the breakthrough of hiring a Korean as a general prefectural public employee.”
(Mayu 1994,)

Koreans, like the rest of the foreign expatriate community in Kyoto are only “visitors from Earth,” temporarily (only four generations so far) housed in Kyoto, but hailing from another civilization. There is no method that would allow them to belong to Kyoto’s Japanese practices, no matter how long they reside under current circumstances. As much as Koreans in Kyoto cannot participate in these events, they cannot really escape them, as these events dominate the streets and television channels.

In the Japanese public schools, annual cultural festivals highlight national cultural practices and require all students to learn these and to participate in cultural and historical pageants that present an official version of a history that treats Korea in a fashion that many Koreans can find fault with.

Before moving to explore the Higashi-kujo Madang I suspect that the reader may find useful some introduction to the practical circumstances of the public sphere in Kyoto. What follows are comments on the contours of Kyoto’s public sphere, and about the discursive practices that are at work in this arena.