Festivals and social movements— Event-centered solidarity
Like the City and Prefecture of Kyoto, the Madang prints and distributes its own newspaper Higashi-kujo Madang Nuusu [News] which comes out monthly in the season before the Madang.
From MN 1995 no 2:
HEADLINE “Turning to the Fall performance”
Subhead:”... Let’s make the Madang Circle ever wider!”
Copy: “As was told in the last issue, it has been determined that the Third Madang will be held on November 3rd at Sanno Elementary School...
...It’s time we really started to make the Madang. Now we’d like to introduce the actual groups that be working hard to produce the real Madang (apart from the executive committee):
The planning group; the public information group; the advertising mobilization group; the finance and general affairs group, and the public relations group. We welcome new faces to any group. If you can say “OK: I want to be a member of XYZ group” please contact us right away!
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Like many new social movements in many parts of the world, the Higashi-kujo Madang community uses the event itself to reproduce the community across time, while the group also “performs itself” in public. The annual, nearly year-long preparations, and the festival day performance requires that the organizers assemble all of the resources for this purpose: and in so doing, they construct an entire social/cultural movement as well. For the resources they marshal—from symbolic tokens to practical tools—are doubly useful. Whether the Madang is an excellent alibi for organizing a social movement, or whether a social movement is a good base from which to organize a festival is not the issue here. As we will see, the collective action of the Madang is not aimed at some external, particular, instrumental goal. It does not fail or succeed in those terms. It succeeds only on the aesthetic/symbolic terms that the group sets up for the event itself. However, the Madang organization is linked through the multiple affiliations (and desires) of its collective members to a number of issue-oriented groups in the area. And, as a collective it has begun to achieve an independent voice of its own.
“Collective actors invest an enormous quantity of resources in the on-going game of solidarity. They spend a great deal of time and energy discussing who they are, what they should become and which people have the right to decide that. This on-going process of construction of a sense of ‘we’ can succeed for various reasons: for instance, because of effective leadership, workable organizational forms or strong reserves of expressive action. But it can also fail, in which case collective action disintegrates. The task of sociological analysis is to understand how and why the game of solidarity succeeds or fails”
(Melucci 1989, 218).
This proved to be the case in 1995, when the great Kobe earthquake leveled the Korean neighborhood of Nagata-ku. The Higashi-kujo Madang organizers quickly used the madang collective as a base for gathering donations for the victims in Kobe. That year’s madang also included a locally generated critique of the Japanese government’s failure to respond adequately and fairly to the consequences of the earthquake. And so we can see that the event is capable of acquiring current issues as these occur, and then articulating not only an artistic expression, but a social/ economic response.
In one of the 1994 Madang plays, “Mangiri” is a local Korean man who has moved away and made a career in real estate. One of his big clients is looking for a site neat the station for a new building. But when Mangiri (who calls himself Matsuyama to conceal his Korean background) is showing the client around Higashi-kujo when a couple of childhood friends recognize him and so reveal his secret. His career is finished the moment they call out “Mangiri.” Combining comedy and pathos, the moment resonates with the arbitrary injustice of discrimination against Kyoto’s “Koreans” who are virtually indistinguishable from their Japanese peers until they are forced to show their papers, or are hailed with their real name.
However, an artistic expression remains the core of the event. And after the first year’s allegorical play, the organizers have been pursuing expressions based on “rearuizumu” [realism]. For example, to make a drama (a madang geki) about how a career in Japan requires passing as Japanese, and how easily a life of hard work can fail at the moment of truth, the organizers create a committee to assemble the story.
From the perspectives of older and younger (and male and female) the story is arduously pieced together until it has reassembled a predicament that the entire neighborhood relates to. The process moves from silence to an articulation that requires self reflection.
- “Some kinds of social movements and self-help groups pioneer and...help sustain, democratizing influences by the very form of their social organization”
(Giddens 1994, 120)
In building the Higashi-kujo Madang each year, the organizers participate also in the removal of their bodies and imaginations from a space that is, after all, only a remainder—what is physically been left out when the city rebuilds itself as a center for world tourism, and what has been socially and economically left out when the connections and the jobs are distributed.
“...new conflicts develop in those areas of the system where both symbolic investments and pressures to conform are heaviest. These conflicts act increasingly at a distance from political organizations. They are interwoven with the fabric of everyday life and individual experience. The new conflicts are often temporary and they are not expressed through ‘instrumental’ action. Contemporary movements operate as signs, in the sense that they translate their actions into symbolic challenges to the dominant codes”
(Melucci 1989, 12).
Out from this remainder, the participants build a new center for themselves, a small city, a little culture, a new social group. Tiny and fragile, still it belongs to them all. And its peculiar “strangeness” is something made strange not by an exclusionary rule of the center, but rather because it is something novel standing on its own, marking its own boundaries, and making its own rules. From a cultural strangeness that could only be coded within the dominant Japanese Umwelt as “wrong,” [chigau] this community is forging a strangeness that cannot but be counted as something significantly other: a challenge to the position of the dominant code.
The opening of an-other possible significance out of the uniformity of the national habitus is itself a major task, and the effort to do so and to hold this open against the interests of the state lends this event a greatness far beyond its neighborhood scope. And so the particulars of this task deserve some careful attention. But first I want to also make clear the connection between this festival and the social movement that is its double.
