Festivals and social movements— Somewhere else, some time ago

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As I eagerly approached each new festival occasion, sometimes travelling to nearby towns, I looked for the signs of novelty and inclusivity that would suggest that here was an event that was managed to express a cultural sentiment that bespoke of new voices. But new voices were still silent in the events I witnessed.

But the next summer, I had realized that my original expectations were largely misplaced, in the sense that I had expected a festival form to embrace the potential for renewal or reform. In festival after festival, there under the ceremonial scaffold, nothing was being built, and little remained when the ceremony was complete and the decorations and festival apparatus returned to their garages. Scaffold-building, it appears, had become the event. Dis-play had re-placed play.

Playing with fire

One of the main tourist attractions of Kyoto is the night in August when large fires are lit on the hillsides surrounding the city. The lighting of the Daimonji (a.k.a. Obon) fires brings to a close a period when families in this part of Japan perform ceremonies at family grave sites, and at temples, and at home-shrines to family ancestors, all of these under the guidance of Buddhist officiants. It is a time when there is an alibi to travel away from work for the purpose of performing these obligatory rites, although golf courses and tourist hotels also do a brisk business at this time.

“The Daimonji festival is precisely such a means for articulating, and thereby maintaining, community identity. Since the festival acquired a national reputation, it has grown into an event too good to abandon.
(Wazaki 1993, 133)”

At the end of this period when the (invisible) ancestors are present to receive these prayers on their behalf, the time comes to help them back to whatever hell (or other other-world locale) they normally inhabit. The point is also to get them away from Kyoto for another year. Lights are used to assist these invisibles in finding their way back to where the dead must remain. And for three hundred years, various groups have been lighting fires on the hills surrounding Kyoto for this purpose.

The Daimonji fires, such as this one in the shape of the Chinese character “dai” [meaning “large”] are lit on the hills overlooking Kyoto in the middle of August every year.

These fires are actually made of many fires that are arranged into shapes that become visible when they are all alight: rather like a dot-matrix printer forming letter forms on a page, but where each “dot” is a two-meter square blazing fire. The effect of this display (when it is not raining) is the nighttime pyrotechnic equivalent to skywriting... over the lights¹ of the city in darkening dusk, Chinese characters and other shapes emerge in firelight.

For much of the three hundred years this has been practiced, groups have negotiated among themselves for the right (and the obligation) to perform this service. Wazaki (1993) looked at one of these festival groups. He also formulated a notion that these fires create a strong identification with the City, a sense of “citizenship” that is available to all of Kyoto’s city-zens.

“The definite order in which the bonfires on the five mountains are lit is a late invention. Previously, the five holy mountains competed with each other in the lighting of big fires at about 8 p.m. without any formal order. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Japanese economy began to develop rapidly and to achieve high growth rates. The national government intended to develop cities all over Japan through tourism. By this policy it sought to build economic and social recovery from the impoverishment left by the last world war. As a response to the policy, the administration of Kyoto 'rediscovered' the nationally famous festival of Daimonji as an economic rather than as a religious resource. It tried to adapt the traditional festival...into a modern capitalistic form. The municipal authorities insisted that the order of firing should be fixed to become a more satisfactory event for tourists. This was made a condition for granting economic assistance to the five Daimonji organizations.
(Wazaki 1993, 137-138)”

However, much of his own text reveals that the City government has been active in creating this festival as a national space, as a focus for tourism: that is, as an event that is appropriatable by non-Kyotoites, and also less appropriatable by Kyotoites. Indeed, while in the past (say, fifty years ago) the viewing of these fires was an occasion fairly equally shared by the city, in the last couple of decades the construction of taller buildings (such as the Kyoto Hotel) have made this an event that can only be fully consumed through the purchase of a ticket for a roof-top beer-garden viewing spot.

Over four years that I watched the Obon fires I was never in a position to see them all (there are five). I did see four one year², when I made the pilgrimage to the top of a hotel, and for thirty US dollars (¥3000) awaited the time when the fires would be lit. The roof-top was packed with Japanese tourists, and the heat of the day was slowing draining into the evening (as the crowd was slowly draining the hotel’s supply of draft beer) when suddenly the rooftop lights went dim.

As the first fire was lit on the Eastern hillside, the hotel’s sound system cranked up the appropriately romantic tune (actually, Glenn Campbell singing “By the time I get to Phoenix”) and in a hush of anticipation we watched and guzzled our Ebisu beer while the “sacred” fires one-by-one came into view—except for one of them, which was obscured by another tall³ building.

Wazaki (1993) goes to great lengths to show how this event binds people together into a collective Kyoto identity. But he does not question at all the fact that certain groups have been given control of the event, and that this control is not in any way shared, as it is based upon residential history centered on a few neighborhoods, and on those families with claims to lengthy tenure in those neighborhoods. Newcomers need not apply (unless, through marriage, they become connected to one of the “old families”). There is, for example, no procedure by which an interested volunteer from any neighborhood could gain a role in this practice.

“By creating the story of ‘a city as a whole’ which the inhabitants can share with each other, they cement their mutual belonging.”
(Wazaki 1993, 138)

The contingencies of festival production in Kyoto today also means that the onus of doing this event, which, as Wazaki notes, is now “too good to abandon” (and which claims resources from the City for its continuation) is such that the traditional groups are obligated to assure that the practice is performed with predictable precision. The tourists expect no less. This, in turn, means that status/labor positions must all be filled, even though there are not enough individuals from “old families” to fill these today. And so a number of other families with fictive affiliations to the traditional group have recently been included, and some of the original group have dropped out, because of disinterest or disagreement (Wazaki tells us little about these “slackers”).

Today, the claim to a primordial right of membership in this festival organization as the main reason for excluding other Kyoto residents from participation does not hold up to the facts. This right is a pretense that serves to maintain a festival status (and claims to resources) within the city. What is continuous in this event is not a sense of community, even within its core group, but rather its logic of exclusion; and what is displayed is status difference, not collective (and certainly not democratic) citizenship in this “civic” festival.

The ascription of city-wide inclusivity, and nation-wide cultural stature to this event—either by the city, or by anthropologists such as Wazaki—hang the mask of communitas on an event where this does not occur. However these appropriations of the practice also change the contours of the obligation to perform it: it must now be done without fail, and without internal changes to its content. Its expected form is now fixed within the JTB (Japan Travel Bureau) tourist itinerary. Today the Daimonji fires no longer belong to the communities that light them.

This commodification of a once-local practice—a practice with a long history of innovation (e.g., there was at one time only one fire) and internal competition—by the state, for some national interest; and the resulting commodity, which is then appropriated by the city, show the outcome of a process that accounts for the current position of all of Kyoto’s main public events.

The issues of belonging, and of ceremonial status are now imbricated within budgets and interests that the city and other national institutions have applied in order to appropriate the events for national consumption. Other festivals in Kyoto are performed in the shadow of these national events, their once-celebrated localness is transformed into a lack of national importance.

¹Until several years ago, the City assisted in this spectacle by turning off the streetlights for a time. But today the fires compete against a haze of mercury and other lights.

²There was a time when all five were visible from the grounds of the Gosho (the Old Palace), but this is no longer possible.

³The construction of the 30 meter + tall New Kyoto Station effectively blocks all of the Daimonji fires for much of Minami-ku and Higashi-kujo. By allowing such structures to be built, the city further distances its citizens from any collective experience of this event.