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Festivals and social movements— The veneer of appearance
Through this overriding devotion to proper appearance, these events have became ever more like their folkloric records, which have noted in detail the appearance and ritual of such events, without examining their ethnographic complexity. Today many such events no longer hold much underlying complexity to be examined. And, as someone who had arrived in Kyoto to explore this very complexity, the discovery of its absence was indeed worrisome.
But the appearance of the appearance of these festivals was also not really what it appeared to be. There are aspects of a festival where appearance is not enough. When even the excesses in behavior—from cross-dressing (at the sagichou matsuri of Omihachiman) to male nudity and bravado (at the kenka matsuri at Himeji), to public drunkenness at most events—are fully expectable, and kept in their place within the event, then the simulacrum fails to maintain the element of active risk that a performance needs to be a performance, and a festival to be festive. What is by all appearances a festival, ceases to follow a festival logic. What remains is pure spectacle.
There will come a time when no one alive remembers that the festival used to be different, that it used to wander off course or fall down or add new features, and that people used to get bloody or happy or both at the same time. Once that time comes then the simulacrum will have succeeded in closing with its referent and appearances will be all that is expected. When the memory of the festival fades, the spectacle steps into its place. And the lack of surprise is no longer surprising except to the stranger who came looking to be surprised.
The Jinjahoncho in Tokyo produced this video “Japan: Land of Festivals” in the 1980s to be shown at a trade fair in Europe, to explain why the Japanese rice market should not be opened to imports. A heritage of rice cultivation (following a strong determinist ecological anthropological reasoning, which claimed that the uniqueness of any culture is patterned from its interaction with its particular ecology) from pre-historic times is provided as the primary feature of modern Japanese culture. SOME QUOTES: “Until the present day the Japanese people have maintained their way of life on the basis of rice cultivation”... “Shinto1 is...the history of the Japanese way of life... as the basis of Japanese culture, Shinto has culturally...supported the way of life of the Japanese people up to the present day...”
Again, it was not merely a lack of space for surprise—for innovation or improvisation—which characterized these “festivals”, there was also a lack of a definite “social space” in the choice of performers. Traditionally, the onus of participation falls to/on those who represent the “native” population, those families with claims to long-term residence (and who also maintain close ties with local shrines and temples). Today, participation was offered as a paid job to people (mostly young men) hired on to do the heavy work of pulling and carrying festival objects through the streets.1I visited the Jinjahoncho in Tokyo through the gracious generosity of the Bamboo Association, a lay Buddhist organization. The video I was given did not even mention the presence of Buddhism in Japanese history. Nor did it mention the recent period in time when Shinto, as the official state religion of the Empire, provided a sacred aesthetic for fascism in Japan.
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