The Higashi-kujo Madang

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New beginnings...

“Higashi-Kujo is a part of Kyoto where many resident Koreans live. Korean eateries and household stores line the streets, and the Korean language is in the air of this district. Resident Koreans, who, in 1910, found their farms stolen by the Japanese colonial government, and their harvests confiscated, who were rounded up and commandeered as forced labor, wound up living in Japan. Before and during the War Koreans came to live in Higashi-Kujo serving as low-wage manual laborers, working on the Higashiyama train tunnel, on the Kamo River bank-reinforcement construction, on the project to widen Kujo street, and in industries such as cloth-dying.”
MADANG STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

Late July in 1993, nearly three months before the very first Higashi-kujo Madang in Kyoto, the heat of the summer was on the city. As in other cities, such as Philadelphia or Madras, where the hot, sultry summers have long been viewed to be as unhealthy as they are unpleasant, summer hits Kyoto like a plague, punishing commuters, and pushing shoppers into the underground arcades. The air rings with the shrill buzz of a progression of species of cicadas, each with their own staccato rhythm. At times, it sounds as though an army of insects was trying to set the air on fire, and it seems as though they might succeed.

In my Kyoto neighborhood in 1993, nearly every other house has at least one room that is air-conditioned, but we make due with electric fans, and regular dips in a cold-water ofuro bath. (The next summer, 1994, was even hotter, breaking the big digital thermometer on the Hankyu Department store, and killing millions of fish in the rivers.) The compressors for the air-conditioners on the roofs of the other houses pump heat into the already steaming neighborhood, and the drone of their motors adds an alto chorus to the soprano cicadas.

As it was our second summer in Kyoto, I had already located a favorite air-conditioned coffee-shop oasis for the brunt of the mid-afternoon heat. However, mad-dogs and anthropologists cannot always be happy staying cool. Today I was on my bicycle, out on the street, with a bag of video gear across my back.

My bike was too old to attract thieves, but my son’s bike and my wife’s (twice) were stolen and had to be replaced. [While there are types of crime where Japan’s rate is much lower than the US, when it comes to bicycles, Kyoto is no better than Los Angeles.] And when it comes to alternative transportation plans, Kyoto is way behind the times. The city makes almost no effort to encourage bicycling, and it considers the thousands of bikes that are parked each day near the train stations as a public nuisance. It regularly carts them off to an impound yard where it takes $50 US and nearly a full day of travel and paperwork to retrieve them.
Here are bikes parked on the sidewalk near Sanjo-Station.
Photo by author

Bicycling, I had discovered years before while living in India, was much cooler than walking; the movement of the vehicle created its own breeze. I rode past hundreds of cars that were parked, many had their engines idling softly (and never seeming to overheat), their drivers slumbered in air-conditioned comfort, while their exhaust choked the already boiling pedestrians, the men sweltering in their suits, and the women fending off the sun with parasols.

And as I was turned downslope along East bank of the Kamo river, the river air was slightly cooler. I rode a ramshackle ten-speed, rolled past the Minami-za kabuki theatre, south, towards the factories downriver. Further down the river were Osaka and the Pacific, but I was only going as far as Tenth Street, where I was to videotape the very first rehearsal of the very first dramatic performance of the first Higashi-kujo Madang. It was a new beginning for everyone, myself included.

It was to be a bicycle ride I would make a hundred times again, at all hours and weather, and in various states of exhaustion and intoxication (unfortunately, exhaustion and intoxication would normally precede my return trip uphill—the lesson being that one should try to find a dwelling downhill from one’s site of study, particularly if this study includes festivity).

“After the War, many Koreans from outside Higashi-Kujo came here to live close to Kyoto Station in preparation for repatriation, hailing the liberation of their homeland. However, in the Korean homeland, the growing opposition between the North and South solidified in the severing of the nation at the 38th parallel, and so many resident Koreans came to reside permanently in Japan without returning to their homeland. The first generation of resident Koreans were extremely robust people who safeguarded their ethnic pride under what were very difficult historical circumstances, and they devoted their energies to the ethnic/cultural education of their children and descendants.”
MADANG STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

There was a bus that ran nearby, but it stopped running at 11:20 P.M., and too many times I watched that last bus leave without me. My only option in that case was to run to catch the final subway train of the day, otherwise I was forced to walk all the way back home: few taxis would pick up a foreigner at that time of night. Besides, bicycling is still the only reasonable mode of travel in Kyoto. For a year I biked all the way across town, quicker than the cross-town bus, to teach at a university on the northwest side of Kyoto.

It was by bicycle that I found my way to the East Ninth-Street Labor Center, where volunteers were preparing to begin their rehearsals for the madang-geki: the street drama. I came with a simple introduction from the chairman of the organizing committee, whom I had meet a few days before. The production organizer, a member of Hanmadang, was too busy to consider whether or not I should be there. And so I took a seat with the others who were there to tryout for a part.

I had decided that I would be as inconspicuous as possible on this first day, and so I found a corner in the room where I could acquire video without much notice and without disturbing the meeting.

HANMADANG MEMBER:
“We started Hanmadang in 1986. At first it was just Madang-geki.[street theater]”
ME: “What was that first play like?”
“At the time the US had begun to export pork products to Korea, and the farmers there, who relied upon the [local] price of pork, could no longer sell to the market at the prices of American pork. So we did a play about this situation. And we performed this in several places, and then, instead of disbanding we continued to study Korean music and theater...
In those years we were continually busy with performance. We couldn’t think about a career or marriage or school... We did hundreds of performances.”

The room was the size of a large two-car garage, with a cracked linoleum floor and fluorescent lights overhead. Perhaps thirty people¹ were trying out for the play and half a dozen children amused themselves for the next three hours or so in the room which had no air-conditioning, but only a couple of standing fans. Between the electric fans and the kids and hum from the fluorescent lights, my video of this first meeting sounds like it was taken in a busy bus station.

That entire first year (the months leading up to the first madang event), I attended every possible meeting and workshop and rehearsal, listening and videoing as was possible, but not yet interviewing. Asking questions at this point—since the event had not even happened yet—would not be very productive, and might raise issues about the event that could, or should not have been raised until later². As this was the very first year of the Higashi-kujo Madang, I was, perhaps, hyperconscious about not wanting my presence to have any determinant affect on the planning and performance of the event. I was also considering that this very first year would be an exceptional time, and that as complete a record as I could assemble would be of incalculable value for any long-term study of the event, and for later reflection by its organizers.

“Today, the resident Korean society is centered around its second and third generation members, and is preparing to welcome its fifth generation. Lately, as marriages with Japanese people are now the majority of marriages, there are many children being born of mixed (or double) Korean-Japanese ancestry. Also, for a variety of reasons more than 160,000 Koreans were obliged to become “naturalized” in Japan.”
MADANG STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

I was also improving my facility with the local variety of Kyoto Japanese (Kyoto-ben) that was used in this neighborhood. An historically conservative form of what used to be the court-inspired (aristocratic) city dialect, it is thick with non-standard grammatical markers and vocabulary. The irony is, of course, that this once-privileged variant of Japanese is being preserved in the city’s under-caste buraku areas where the residents may live their entire lives without venturing more than 100 kilometers from their homes, even though these homes are built in the shadow of the shinkansen bullet-train tracks.

Many of the play rehearsals were held at a local non-profit center for day-laborers. When the drummers practiced, the Roudou Center spilled this music into the neighborhood.

The madang-geki, the street theater, the centerpiece of the entire event, was also the arena where the most acrimonious debates occurred, particularly in the second year, when the participants decided to abandon the more traditional rural-allegorical form for a mode of street-realism that more directly spoke to the conditions of Higashi-kujo.

¹One curious thing I noticed at this time was that all of the prospective actors (except for those who had come directly from work) wore blue jeans. In fact, all of them wore Levi-brand blue jeans. And in fact all of these Levi-brand blue jeans were model 501 Levi-brand blue jeans. During a break, a documentary photographer from Osaka greeted me outside and noted that I was wearing Wrangler jeans, and so was he. I tried, in my nascent fieldworker mode to think of anything significant in this, and failed. But I would later remember other signals of the uniformity that groups achieve in Kyoto.

²In the second year, they asked me if I wanted to volunteer to help in the organization, but again, I was more comfortable as an observer. Even so, they gave me a place in the street drama (as an obnoxious videographer) and they allowed me to organize the photo display.