Festivals and social movements— Chounaikai

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Here is my son, Louis, running on my chou’s team in the district undokai. With so few children living in our neighborhood, my son became a valuable resource for the child-centered neighborhood events.
Photo by the author

The chounaikai organization of my neighborhood had certain annual and other more regular activities. While preparing for the Awata Matsuri was its single most labor-intensive activity, the organization also participated in annual fire-prevention drills, in the district’s annual undokai (athletic meet) and in the distribution of literature provided by the district office (kuyakusho). Each year the organization also arranges a day-trip to some local destination (such as the Osaka Aquarium).

But the more regular activities of the organization were those that put it into an information-distribution role within the city government. The circulation of kairanban notices—official announcements that are passed from house to house on a clipboard, with each house recording that it has read the notice—the distribution of the city-published monthly newspaper, and many other occasional leaflets, and the posting of city announcements and posters on the neighborhood bulletin board (keijiban) were the main activities of the organization.

The chounaikai maintains an official position as an appendage of the city’s district office. But it does this with a certain lack of enthusiasm. The various duties are passed from household to household, and completed with expected regularity. As Bestor¹ (1989) noted, there can be a significant divergence between the official position of the chounaikai to the city government, and the attitude of the chounaikai’s members to this position and to the city government.

In March of every year, the local fire station would send a squad to check the neighborhood’s fire extinguishers and to refresh the neighborhood chounaikai on their use. Although women (and anthropologists) are mostly the ones who are present in the neighborhood at all hours of the day, the only persons who were trained to use this equipment were men.
Photo by author

One of the benefits of having a neighborhood-level organization in place is the venue this provides when a common concern arises. Several years back, a multistory condominium block² was proposed within the chou, and concerns about the effects of this on mountain views and television reception were voiced through the chounaikai. At this point, if an inadequate response had been made by the developers, the chounaikai could have used its position to bring this complaint to the city.

As it turned out, the condominium developers agreed to place a large television antenna on the roof and provide the houses of the chou with cabled access to this. But the mountain view disappeared in the process.

Because all neighborhoods have these organizations, and because they are held responsible for certain official duties by the city, chounaikai are much more a venue where the city speaks to its citizens than where citizens can organize counter-movements against the city.

They are generally one-way conduits from the district office to its constituents. But they are structurally not limited to this role. And the history of the mis-appropriation of these organizations as a means of surveillance in pre-War Japan does not preclude them from moving in other directions: as local inputs to district policies, or as organizational groups for new festivals.

Later we will be talking about life outside of neighborhood associations, and how these organizations can become gate-keepers in the process of exclusion. For example, you can see this in The great poster conflict. This incident took place at a general meeting of the Higashi-kujo Madang organizing committee, and it ended up with twenty people spending an hour inking out the madang’s fund-raising account number on hundreds of fliers.

In his book, The Great Good Place(1991), Ray Oldenburg argues that “third-places:” places outside the home and outside the workplace (cafes, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, bars, etc.) are vital to informal social life. In much the same way, “third-groups:” organizations outside of government and work, can be seen as vital to social life, particularly to a social life enlivened by cultural expression. This is, of course, where we find notions of “civil society.”

Externality—particularly from the state, but also, I would argue, from the capitalist market, and from religious paternalism— is the primary feature of civil society organizations, and it is through their independent position that they offer venues for critical reflection. Civil society organizations provide opportunities for expressive culture that are not managed in the interest of the state or the market.

However in Kyoto, status is displayed through spectacles organized by the city (together with Shinto organizations, whose prior connection to the state has been formally, but not actually severed). These ceremonial occasions bring into public view the differential axes of agency that flow from connections to official organizations. The close connection between the status displayed in connection with the City’s ceremonial calendar and access to resources that are managed by the state, creates the disequilibrium of allocative and authoritative³ power that characterizes the structure of domination in Kyoto.

“The resources which constitute structures of domination are of two sorts—allocative and authoritative. Any co-ordination of social systems across time and space necessarily involves a definite combination of these two types of resources...
(Giddens 1984, 258).”

The link between culturally based stigma and economic marginality that is so clear from any examination of the circumstances of domination of buraku dwellers imbricates the call for a respect of heterogeneity as a human right with the demand for political/economic justice, and equal access to jobs, housing, institutional affiliation, and social welfare resources. And at the neighborhood level, the exclusion of Koreans from chounaikai organizations positions them outside the gate of a host of city-led state-sponsored events, programs, and institutions.

As long as the chounaikai maintain a client relationship to the district city office (kuyakusho) they are unable to provide the space outside of the interests of the city and the state. The organizational presence of the city within the neighborhood may enhance the city’s public education efforts, but it also occupies the place and the time where an alternative, civil-society neighborhood organization might exist.

We will continue to look at status-quo displays of belonging and exclusion that form the local matrix of civic belonging against which Koreans are to building a counter matrix, based on the notion of heterogeneity. But we also need to look at this counter-movement as having a goal beyond making a space for counter-representations. The articulation of a respect for heterogeneity is a call for justice based on a democratic politics of redistribution as well as a democratic politics of representation.

The chounaikai announces itself as the platform for democratic participation in the neighborhood without providing the most basic task for democratic participation: the right to change the organization itself. This appropriation of the neighborhood as an organized discursive space pushes dissenting groups into other spaces within and without the neighborhood.

Finding their neighborhoods already “organized,” when groups of Kyoto citizens concerned about urban circumstances—from quality of life issues to traffic concerns—attempt to deal directly with the city, they are told to take specific local complaints to the respective chounaikai, where the city can demand a near unanimous decision⁴ before it considers any complaint.

In this way, “neighborhood democracy” becomes an impediment to the organization and the goals of civil-society organizations seeking changes in city policies.

And in terms of the role that the chounaikai play in local festival production, here too the festivals and other events (such as the undokai) are supported with regularity and attention to detail. The events happen every year. However, the events also take space and the time (the holiday on the calendar) away from events that might offer expressive openings that are not permitted in the current neighborhood festivals.

¹In Bestor’s (ibid) description of the choukai (=chounaikai) in his neighborhood in Tokyo there were many features and duties that were not present in my Kyoto neighborhood. I am not certain about whether this is due to an attenuation of a more traditional chounaikai organization in Kyoto, or a more straightforward difference between these types of organizations in Tokyo and Kyoto.

²As Bestor (ibid) and also Robertson (1991) noted, condo-dwellers are not actively included in the chounaikai organization. In Higashi-kujo, Korean families and those living in apartments or city housing are also generally excluded from neighborhood organizations. This adds to a suspicion within the Korean community that these organizations are actively antagonistic toward Koreans.

³Giddens (ibid) lists allocative resources as: “1) Material features of the environment (raw materials, material power sources); 2) Means of material production/reproduction (instruments of production, technology); 3) Produced goods (artifacts created by the interaction of 1 and 2)” Giddens (ibid) then lists the authoritative resources as “1) Organization of social time-space (temporal-spatial constitution of paths and regions) 2) Production/reproduction of the body (organization and relation of human beings in mutual association) and 3) Organization of life chances (constitution of chances of self development and self-expression)”. To both of these lists, I would add control over the means and the symbols of cultural expression: e.g., the wherewithal to celebrate in public.

⁴For example, to apply the historical protection statute at the neighborhood/district level requires the support of 98% of the area’s residents (Kyoto Journal No.27, 86). Without this protection, owners can replace old buildings with newer (usually larger) structures.