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Festivals and social movements— furusato of furusatos
As a city busily preoccupied with its own festival heritage, Kyoto was not party to efforts by the LDP (the Liberal Democratic Party, which has been in power [one way or another] in the National Diet since the mid 1950s) to create the “hometown” (furusato) nostalgia that Robertson (1991) details in her work. Furusato images were meant to reconnect new-urbanites to the villages where most of their families had lived before five decades of urbanization brought Japan to it current level (about 85%) of urban habitation. Kyoto openly advertises itself as the furusato of Japan’s national culture, and it historical heartland.
The dynamics of Kyoto’s older (so-called “traditional”) events comes from the manner in which they are managed, and the rapid changes in local demographics. Changing demographics and residence patterns in Kyoto have also fostered the same native/newcomer conflict that Robertson found in a Tokyo suburban city. Increased mobility within Japan1 has resulted in many “new” families into Kyoto's neighborhoods, and also reduced the relative number of families with claims to “old” status. The families that claim “old” residence maintain their claim in part through their position in the neighborhood organization, chounaikai, and in part through their status in the local Shrine—a status maintained through offerings and attention to status-linked duties (in other words, the status is heritable, but not merely inherited). And these duties are mostly connected to the shrine’s annual festival. But what happens when the population of “old families” in a shrine precinct shrinks through demographics and/or urban change (such as the replacement of old house estates—sometimes the only plot of land large enough for this purpose— by apartment or office buildings)?
When the children of the old families became too few in number to perform the festival activities, one solution would have been to share ceremonial stature with the new neighborhood families by opening up festival participation within the group of newer families. This option, with an alibi of fictive antiquity, is precisely what Wazaki (1993) found in the Diamonji community. He called this “flexibility,” but what remains inflexible here is the logic of exclusion. Another strategy is to reduce the status of some participatory roles, while preserving the status of other roles. And so some neighborhoods/shrines reserve the visible leadership roles in the festival within their “traditional” households while opening up general participation not simply to newer families in their neighborhood, but to anyone who would work for cash2.
And, as we shall see, even this diminished state of affairs may not be maintainable. For this event, like some other Kyoto festivals (notably Gion Matsuri) is also linked to a form of residential building (the machiya or “townhouse”) that is quickly disappearing.
In short, Shinto festivals in Kyoto today represent probably the most conservative (in membership and action) notion of “community” available to their locale. In their routinized ritual forms, they hold out against modernity’s challenges. The aspects of exclusion and emotional detachment that Robertson (1991) noted in the new civic3 festival (shimin matsuri) she studied, were in Kyoto also present in its established neighborhood events.
When I had mistakenly predetermined that a neighborhood festival would necessarily foster a democratic social grouping, a temporary communitas that would counter or even reverse hierarchical social roles, I was predicting this as a feature of the logic of festival practice. But what I found was actually what I might have expected: those Shinto festivals I examined in Kyoto do, in fact, reflect and foster the sense of community that is there in Kyoto, a community without communitas.
Kyoto's festivals are “symptoms” of the city's social situation. Matsuri, in this model, is the ritual reenactment of “position4” in its geographic and social forms. While they do not create openings within this society, they do put the local hierarchy on public display. However, the inability of festival organizers to marshal enough interest in these events to maintain a performative tradition means that even their ritual form could become vulnerable to a telling form of social and aesthetic criticism: apathy. Now apathy at the voting place is counted as a quiet statistic (percentage of voters), but apathy at a festival shouts its boredom on the street.
1I was told that the average time between household moves in Japan is now about 20 years. (The average time in the US is only 5 years.) Kyoto is also the only large urban area that has lost population in the last ten years, a trend that is attributed to its lack of an industrial base, and its graying population, which has driven up the cost of national health insurance in Kyoto city, further encouraging families (particularly families with multiple children who pay these extra costs for each child) to move to suburban locations, which then accelerates the geriatrification of the city.
2However, in my own neighborhood, perhaps out of a lack of festival finances, this second option was also not pursued. Instead, the event replaced human labor with machines: they now carry the heavy festival objects on pick-up trucks. And so, despite its claims to antiquity, this festival can hardly be said to resemble even its own traditions.
3Robertson observed that the new shimin matsuri in her locale was created to look like an “old-time” matsuri, a goal that was severely critiqued by the natives, who also maintained their festival. Kyoto's new (since 1994) shimin matsuri, the Kyoto Matsuri, abandons the Shinto matsuri mode (perhaps because the city's calendar is already filled with these) in favor of a grand parade and evening entertainment. It will be interesting to see how this festival further defines both its performers and its audience. The use of nostalgia in civic events in Kyoto is so completely pervasive that even their historical pageant is not just about civic history up to the present, but about a prior history of the city—its pre-Meiji, imperial past. What the grand 1200th Anniversary year (1994) showed most of all was a limit to the amount of nostalgia even old-time Kyotoites could stomach.
4These festivals resembled in many ways the Hindu Utsavam that Appadurai and Breckenridge studied in the 1970s as sites for negotiating elite status claims.
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