Festivals and social movements— Looking for a good time

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Festivals bring out displays of Kyoto’s former opulence—often in the form of brocades, either as the result of local manufacture, or as goods acquired from Silk-Road trading (Kyoto was the Eastern terminus of this trade). This photo shows my neighborhood’s festival display.
©Anjali 1993

When my early explorations of Kyoto festivals were less than successful, I begin to ask people where I could find a festival that was really festive (saireiteki), or lively (ikiikina). Their answers would betray either a nostalgia (“things are not like they used to be, you know”) or a remembered location unhinged by its television source (“I saw just what you’re looking for on NHK last week, but where was that? Kyushu, I think, or was it Shikoku?”). Wherever and whenever it was, this festival was not here and now in Kyoto.

Later, more professional advice from ethnographers from the National Museum of Ethnography in Osaka confirmed my predicament. “Why did you choose Kyoto?” they asked, “There’s nothing like that going on there.”

“In Kyoto there are many old temples, and you can really say that everyday, somewhere there is a festival, big or small.”
Kawabata Yasunari,
Kouou (The Old Capital).
[My translation]
Written in 1961, three years before the Tokyo Olympics, this work measures with regret the changes that were transforming cultural production in Kyoto. It is a story that also chronicles the yearly conduct of festival production.

Kyoto advertises itself as a festival town. It is the hometown of Gion-style festivals, which now occur in several other cities. Certainly the lack of festivity in so many festivals was itself remarkable. Why would so many events followed meticulous scripts every year in so perfunctory a fashion?

Many people in the United States, for example, might complain about annual, obligatory family holiday gatherings. But imagine, if you will, that these gatherings were also scripted to an extent that the arrivals and departures and the table conversations, and, of course, the food, were all precisely known in advance. And then elaborate these to a ceremonial plateau, and then perform these in public (early Shinto, before the state took it over was dominated by familial interests), and do so every year.

As difficult as I figured it might be to maintain and reproduce a festival where the energy always threatened to boil over into emotional excess, potential violence, and predictable property damage, it must be even more difficult to manage an event where the emotion had cooled to a dispassionate boredom.

Onlookers at Kyoto’s most famous festival, the Gion Matsuri, fight against the boredom that the event’s current performance (or lack) promotes. With the parade stopping and starting to allow cross-traffic, and with the absence of any performative innovation, the event can only succeed in its terms by resembling its prior performance. At least it offers an alibi for some hirune (afternoon nap). Here a crowd of ringside onlookers has mostly lost the battle against boredom.
Caron 1993

In hindsight¹, the best outcome of not securing a research fellowship before entering the field is when the object that was so carefully constructed in advance for the proposal turns out to be something else in the field. With no commitment to the study of a predetermined event, I was free to explore others.

“...The Shinto shrine brought to the local society a sacred order; by gathering at such jinja and jointly carrying out the festivals observed there, people gained a re-awareness of their membership in that [the primordial rice-cultivation] community, and achieved the very power which allowed them to maintain their social lives.”
Nihon wa Matsuri no Kuni
Japan, Land of Festivals
Tokyo, Jinjahoncho n.d.

The search would take another year. Each festival I witnessed (three or more a month in the first year) turned out—each in their own manner—to be an event scripted to look the way it was expected to look, which is the way it looked the previous year, and the years before that. But this ceremonial conservatism was not surprising, of itself. I just had no idea about the extent of conservatism within Kyoto society. Once I more fully grasped this, the festivals seemed to fit into the antediluvian logic of practice.

For these events display practices that are embedded into longer-term local histories, histories that are tended to with some devotion, at least to their appearance. What was surprising was the effect of this conservatism, now strategically accomplished, sometimes at great expenditures of labor and materials. Given the changing social and demographic circumstances of the city—the many aspects of the city that are not the same—actually keeping something from changing promotes change in its relationship to its surrounding space. And so, the more things stayed the same, the more they actually changed.

Time after time I learned that, in order to create this performative simulacrum, people (anyone was willing) were paid to dress up and act out the scripted roles. Festival participation had become another arubaito, a part-time job that area high school and college students could take on as they wished. In some cases, companies² volunteered their workers, in others these jobs were filled from social clubs or university campus organizations. The result was a loss of social-geographic focus for the event. It was no longer a festival performed by a certain group of residents of a certain neighborhood.

“Matsuri are those occasions on which the Japanese people behave in their most truly “Japanese” manner.”
Nihon wa Matsuri no Kuni
Japan, Land of Festivals
Tokyo, Jinjahoncho n.d.
This appropriation of festivals as indexical of national identity disembeds local culture in favor of a putative national culture.

Larger festivals have always relied on the use of labor from a large area. The Gion festival formerly matched urban neighborhood merchant communities with teams from surrounding villages that would supply some of the muscle-power. These arrangements were fixed and continuous. But again, dislocations, including the fairly rapid depopulation of agricultural villages after World War II required that new sources of festival labor be found, and so the festival arubaito (part-time job) was born.

On another side of the event, the service of providing street foods and trinkets for the festival crowds has become its own industry, and a national community of travelling side-show merchants set up stalls (yatai) and sell the foods and souvenirs that everyone expects to find along the street.

Festival foods in Japan are dominated by products that offer little variety from festival to festival (you can count on cotton candy, corn dogs, and candied apples), but they also maintain some genres of street-foods: fried fish, bean sweets, and okonomiyaki [Lit: “fried what you like to eat” shown here] a fat pancake of shredded vegetables, meats, and unique sauces. While the cuisine has become more uniform across the nation, at least street food³ retains a firm place in these events. (Photo by author)

The financial and spatial arrangements for these merchants are difficult to determine, as they are negotiated between the Shrines, the festival organizing committees, the local organizations that manage all small retail businesses on the streets (i.e., local professional gangs—yakuza), and the police.

But again, what could also be a source of participation and of income for local organizations has now been acquired by people outside of the neighborhood. While rural festivals are occasions that showcase local foods, festivals in towns and cities mostly provide a “national” festival food menu. And so festival foods and goods also do not carry a flavor of the local⁴.

In promoting civic insideness by implicitly encouraging the staging of shrinelike festivals as a style of citizen participation, the central government (LDP) and local municipalities resemble their Meiji counterparts. But where the latter created shrine-centered administrative villages in a concerted effort to foster national spiritual unity, the present government is expropriating local festivals toward a similar end. The outcome is both the cultural and political appropriation of the local by the national and the permeation of the national by the local.
(Robertson 1991, 38)

When I would enquire about this practice of hiring performers, I was told, with a certain amount of uneasiness on the part of the teller, that it had become impossible to keep the event going in the way it was supposed to look with only people from the neighborhood. Either not enough people had lived there long enough to fully belong to the neighborhood, or not enough families had the numbers of children needed to fill all of the roles. And so other arrangements had to be made. Where prior social arrangements were still possible, these were usually maintained. But as the larger practice, now based on expediency, eroded the logic of collective ritual duty/status/reward for performance, these practices became increasingly emptied of significance.

The move to cash rewards created a logic of part-time professionalism that militated against stable social-geographical status rewards. The resulting festival may be performed in a neighborhood, but it was no longer performed by or for the neighborhood. Usually it was done to satisfy a diffuse but requisite civic expectation for the spectacle. There was an obligation to keep it going, even though there was little discussion about what “it” was that actually happened every year.

¹Elsewhere I have written about the problem of promoting the preservation of an historic event without attention to its original logic (Caron 1994). Here I would only elaborate on the need to not abandon the logic of one’s research in the middle of the field, even if you have to continue searching for the entry point where this logic opens to a reflexive critique.

²There are now festival “sports” teams in Tokyo and elsewhere that carry around omikoshi “shrines” as a sort of group aerobic exercise. In the Kantou matsuri in Northern Japan, I saw omikoshis carried by corporate workers in company costume, where the omikoshi bore the corporate logo, and there was no pretense about any divine occupant.

³Until recently in Kyoto, food would not normally be eaten in the street, even when this has been purchased from street vending machines. And so this festival tradition marked a different sense of the street as a site where normally prohibited bodily behaviors were possible. Of late, one can see snack foods being eaten on the street with little opprobrium.

⁴The Higashi-kujo Madang food and goods are all locally run, and do provide income and a type of participation for the community. The same is true of other events held within the buraku areas, where even the self-professed low-class festival merchants do not set up their stalls.