Festivals and social movements— the festival as counter-demonstration

Festivals and social movements— the festival as
counter-demonstration

I once mentioned to an organizer of the Higashi-kujo Madang that several of the current Japanese academics who study festivals have made a point of describing their experiences in the 1960s at universities in Tokyo, where massive student demonstrations took over the streets. In these crowds they found a essential emotional display that they also say they find within Japanese matsuri.

“But a demonstration is nothing like a matsuri,” she said. “They are almost perfect opposites.”

Her pronouncement struck me as a critique not of demonstrations or of festivals as these might be considered to be forms of performance, but rather of the distance between Kyoto’s festivals and the demonstrations that its Koreans and buraku-dwellers have staged in the past twenty years. She was born only in the 1970s, and the Sixties in Kyoto are at least as far away as they are, say, in Los Angeles.

A festival can be very much like a demonstration, and a demonstration like a festival. The question then is, what is there about a festival that makes this so? And what happens when this is not the case? I will turn now to a festival (it is called a madang) that is very much like a political demonstration, and has the potential to become more of an overt political event (although the organizers have, so far, avoided this).

This festival and its neighborhood can be found a short bicycle ride away from my house, but the festival, like its neighborhood is as much outside of Kyoto’s civic-led cultural production as the Awata Matsuri is inside this practice.

Like the Awata Matsuri, the Higashi-kujo Madang struggles with the underlying features of daily life in Kyoto that make festival production difficult: a lack of free time, a lack of rehearsal space, and lack of open civic places for performance. But unlike the Awata Matsuri, and unlike all other festivals in the region, this one is managed independently from the city-lead, shrine-centered events that dominate Kyoto’s cultural production.

While my interests have moved to the exploration of a festival (the Higashi-kujo Madang) that runs counter to the logic of matsuri-as-spectacle that is today central to matsuri in Kyoto city, I am still curious about the fate of this genre of cultural practice, which seems at times so robust, and also so fragile. The combined production of hundreds of matsuri events seems far too expensive in terms of time and space and labor to continue without increased support (both financial and social), and yet these events individually seem too well embedded into local social status markings to be easily abandoned. The result is perfunctory performances and attenuated meanings: festivals in name only.

After several months of watching these, I heard about a neighborhood that was planning to create an entirely new festival later that year (1993). Novelty, at least, I remember thinking, would force them into a mode of creation: here was an event that simply could not resemble by any intention the way it looked the year before.