Festivals and social movements

Festivals and social movements— failed festivals

Many of the “failings” of matsuri as a medium of inclusion in Kyoto (assuming, as I once did, that inclusion is integral to a festival logic) can be traced to its failings as a festival—its lack of festivity, despite the violence, or nakedness, or drunkenness that it might inspire. At this point, I must point out, regardless of the social cachet carried by matsuri as a traditional event with high visibility and civic support, there are aspects of living in Kyoto that have been particularly detrimental to the continuation of matsuri as a festival practice; for example, the amount of time devoted to work and the traffic congestion in the streets.

The ongoing de-skilling of the population in festival arts, and the lack of spatial appropriation by festival events exemplify the central predicament of performing festivals in that city. Six-day work-weeks of ten-twelve hour days leave little time off either for workers or for their spouses to devote to learning festival skills. And then, on the day of the event, the streets of Kyoto are rarely completely given over its festivals. Even Gion Matsuri now stops and starts to allow cross traffic to flow through it. Apparently, there are now too many autos and trucks on the roads to permit the closure of the main North-South arterials for any length of time.

Complete appropriation of the street is a signal of festival space. Like any game, a festival demands that its participants disattend from external activities for the duration of their performance. And so stopping and waiting for cross-traffic not only adds to the boredom of the crowds, but preempts the festival mood among the participants. At the same time, because their customary performance requires an accumulation of physical strength and agility, many Kyoto festivals depend heavily on the voluntary services of the community's young adults.

Festivals may (and for some theorists, must) include all ages. But their most vigorous activities are pursued by young adults. This is the cohort of the population in Japan that has recently experienced both a decline in its relative numbers, and a massive increase in the demands on its time. With more than half of the city’s high-school population attending both school and after-school cram schools in preparation for the national university entrance examination, opportunities for play of any sort are all too rare. Indeed the crowds of onlookers at Kyoto’s festivals are nearly entirely populated by individuals who are retired, female, or of pre-school age. Without even an opportunity to witness the festivals, the chances for skilling in their arts become even fewer.

By 1983 Miyamoto-choo had ceased hiring outside musicians, and matsuribayashi came on cassette tapes. Mr. Shigemori, who was in charge of music for that year’s matsuri, explained that the festival committee had decided against hiring live musicians for two reasons: they were outsiders rather than Miyamoto-choo residents, and in the wake of an expensive drive to purchase a new mikoshi, they were trying to keep expenses down.
(Bestor 1989, 239)

The progressive attenuation of the city's festival performances, for example the recent (post 1993) use of pre-recorded Gion-bayashi music (a locally famous genre of festival music) in place of live music ensembles, and the use of trucks to carry or pull festival floats, signals more than the a loss of enthusiasm for (and in) these events, can only partially be linked to structural impediments such as those described above. This process is also the product of a nostalgia worn too thin and brittle, of an attitude of reverence toward the historical content of these events at the expense of their necessary creativity. Not that some reverence may not be due here—there is a heritage of festival forms here that should not be ignored. But this attitude is misplaced when it is not linked to the festival logic of the event, but rather to the ritual repetition of some spectacular performance.

Although Fukasaku insists that the people of Japan will begin to create “a new culture of their own,” he does not venture any suggestions about the form and content of this “new” entity. The “new” culture—the “authentic” community—appears as a state-regulated project in which the nostalgia for nostalgia is manipulated, on the one hand, to mask human responsibility for socioecological change and, on the other, to create a collectivist mythopoeia predicated on the reification of the “old village.” “Old villages” are presumed to have existed in harmonious tranquility until vitiated and transmogrified by outside forces—such as westernization, industrialization, and urbanization. In the furusato-zukuri literature, change for the worse is described as precipitated by external agents. Change for the better, on the other hand, is presented as a wholly Japanese undertaking, a rallying against intrusive foreign agents....
(Robertson 1991, 29-30)

Let me provide a somewhat hyperbolic example to show where I am going here. Imagine, for a moment, a championship game of baseball, a well-matched game that moves, play-by-play, through a series of remarkable feats of personal skill and teamwork, and ends with a dramatic finish on the final play of the game. This is a game that is later recalled by many as one of the best in their memory. But why stop at recollection? Now imagine that two teams are assembled every year to play this game again. Not to play a new game, but to repeat, pitch by pitch, hit by hit, and catch by catch, what happened in this now-famous game. Of course the pitching must be slowed to allow for predictable hitting, and the crowd must be coached to respond in a correctly enthusiastic manner. In fact, some of the skills required to precisely mimic the original event may be as difficult as the skills that were displayed originally (having to hit a home-run on a certain pitch). The final score is never in doubt (apart from a mistaken deviation from the script).

Imagine observing such a game from beginning to end. Admittedly, one does get a fairly accurate representation of the original game; however this event is nothing at all like a game of baseball. It only, at its best moments, looks like one.

Here the reverence for one single, memorable game has spawned an event that goes against the logic of the game itself: for a game is an open-ended agonistic event where the results must never be known in advance, and each play is potentially significant to this outcome. It is this very same openness that helps to separate festival from spectacle. And in its lack, even were there to be plenty of energetic young participants and no traffic concerns, a festival will not be forthcoming.