Festivals and social movements— a festival in more than name only
- “...it makes sense to think of an intrinsic connection between democracy, social movements and self-help groups, coming in large part from the fact that (in principle) they open up spaces for public dialogue. A social movement, for example, can force into the discursive domain aspects of social conduct that previously went undiscussed, or were ‘settled’ by traditional practices. The feminist movement problematized female and male sexual identity through making them matters of public debate; ecological movements have achieved a similar result in relation to the environment”
(Giddens 1994, 120).
We are getting very close to the event that will create the counter space of identity in Kyoto; open up to a public sphere on a public street; and show—not just for the small neighborhood of thoroughly marginalized peoples, but for the city and its nation—an alternative to everyday life as this is now supplied by the state. This event happened as, and still happens to be, a “festival.” Commonly described by its organizers as a tabunka matsuri (“multicultural festival”) its current name uses the Korean term madang (meaning hiroba [“commons”] in Japanese). As a festival it creates a space of festivity, with various entertainments, artistry, drama, games, food, music, dance: a whole repertoire of festival practices on display.
On June 6 of 1994, the City of Kyoto staged the centerpiece of its “festival” in celebration of the 1200th year of its original construction. As with most of the “public” events staged for this year-long “festival” the main show was performed for an audience of ticket holders. The tickets started at 3,000 yen (about US$30), but again most of these tickets were available only to those with connections to the City or to the City sponsored committee in charge of this event.
This video is from the state television (NHK) program.
But in another way this event is also a new social movement, as “serious” as any movement, and as hopeful for social change as the outcome of its practice.
The Madang event program is a text that assembles all of the participating organizations and individuals into a document where their support for the event is acknowledged. Fifty pages long, it contains about 30 pages of advertising from local retail and service providers, and it also list contributors and it describes all of the events of the day. Moreover this document codes the event in a manner similar to other neighborhood festivals.
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I will argue that this coincidence of “festival” and “social movement” is not coincidental, although the organizers may not have deliberately planned all of the ways in which these two might productively intersect.
The very same day that the City was celebrating its anniversary with a spectacle of music and song, it staged another spectacle: the invasion by hundreds of police of the offices of the North Korean Chosen Sooren organization in Kyoto. Claiming that the group had failed to file the proper use permit request for some land near Kyoto (it turned out that they had filed this permit—and anyhow that problem could have been settled with a telephone call) the police took away all of the organizations files. Koreans in Kyoto have good reason to fear official harassment when they organize outside of state-sponsored arenas.
Video is from the local KBS television station.
However, once we have taken what we now know about Kyoto’s state-sponsored public sphere, and then look at the options available for counter-public demonstrations, we will see that this social movement happened—with some prior intention, and some later refinements—to find precisely the mode of expression that would allow them to shout their counter expressions out on the street (or the school yard: the streets have been given over to traffic) without creating a space that the state would feel obliged to close down, nor in a voice the state would feel the need to silence, nor marking individuals the state would decide to persecute.
Now the state might, at some point, decide to do any or all of the above (and we will see some of the state responses in the next chapters).
For five years now (in 1997) the Higashi-kujo Madang has managed to run the only public cultural show in town that does not require state approval or support. And with this “show” the organizers achieve two objectives: the organization itself—hundreds of volunteers and a communication and resource development system—and a venue for counter expression: a place of protest, where protest is masked in the same cultural mode that the state uses to mask its nationalist construction of normalcy.
In order to bring the reader to a point where the many festival practices within Kyoto—practices that now include the Higashi-kujo Madang festival—reveal their multiple meanings in the context of Kyoto, we first started with a brief history of Koreans in Japan and Kyoto, from ancient contacts through colonial and post-colonial times, up to the present, where we explored the geographies of their exclusion.
“[Jameson’s notion of] Cognitive mapping is... also meant to allow people to become aware of their own position in the world, and to give people the resources to resist and make their own history. It is the logic of capital itself which produces an uneven development of space. These spaces need to be ‘mapped’, so that they can be used by oppositional cultures and new social movements against the interests of capital as sites of resistance”
.(Keith and Pike 1993, 3)
We then turned to the center, to the cultural programs of the state-nation, and how these inform a national habitus, which pervades the everyday life of those who live in Kyoto. Reflecting this back on the margins we looked at the lifestyle exclusions which combine with geographical exclusions (physical exclusion) to determine the marginal “social space” of Kyoto’s “Korean” and buraku-dwelling residents. Now we are about to see how the deni-zens of Kyoto’s margins are remapping their city and resituating themselves as city-zens within this.
