Higashi-Kujo Madang— the madang drama

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The madang drama was finally cobbled together as a three-act tragic comedy about national identity and local life-styles.

The madang drama begins with a dance that defines the circular stage area.

The three acts were evocative of the main problematics of life in Higashi-kujo: living in a place no one else wants to live in; living in a time when generation gaps are profound; living with an identity that must be hidden when dealing with the world outside. The play also featured some of the gendered aspects of these situations, although it purposely avoided the issue of marriage. It also avoided issues that were exclusive to only Japanese buraku dwellers or to resident Koreans. Specific legal issues, and specific complaints against government organizations were not included. The play was political without engaging in a confrontational politics.

the play begins...

The madang geki begins when the players define the circle by dancing around this slowly. The dance marks out the time and the space of the drama. This dance also introduces all of the players that will be participating in the drama. The curtain between the players and the audience is opened both up (announcing a beginning) and out (starting a player-audience interaction that will last throughout the drama).

Madang One: places, homes, and kitchens

The first madang geki brings in a character whose role is to represent the aging, first generation Korean resident, or the aging buraku dweller. The main theme is that of the desires of those who have been left behind, or tossed aside by decades of change that have not touched Minami-district’s Higashi-kujo area.

“The issues before my grandchildren today are the very same issues we faced so long ago. Nothing has changed. Perhaps nothing will change. That is what is so difficult: watching the young face the same problems we have worked so hard to resolve....The Japanese government has offered us hope so many times without result. We have no hope left.”
First generation Korean grandmother. (in her late sixties, she still does house cleaning)

For the sadness of the elderly in this area, a sadness that I noted in several conversations, is the sadness of waiting for promises that never seem to happen. Every time a problematic situation comes to an apparent closure, the results are disappointing as they are managed to reduce their effects on existing priorities. For example, for many years, resident Koreans have protested the practice of fingerprinting¹ that the Japanese Government insists upon as a part of the registration of all foreign nationals (but largely of Koreans). Finally, after years of unsuccessful court challenges, mass refusals and the potential for international attention if refusers were jailed or deported convinced the Japanese government to compromise and to not keep fingerprinting those Koreans who had previously gained permanent residency in Japan. But then the Koreans learned that the Government had computerized archives of their fingerprints, and had no need to fingerprint them again. And so a new struggle has started to get the government to destroy these existing records².

At the same time, there is a sadness of watching affluence touch so many others, while knowing it will never find its way to Higashi-kujo. Kyoto is not at or near the center of Japan’s Post-War economic/cultural efflorescence—that is Tokyo’s place—and the stories of life before, during, and after the war in Kyoto, by Koreans and Japanese alike, are often stories anchored to a common, desperate poverty. Times were bad for many, and very bad, in particular, for Koreans in Higashi-kujo. What money was to be had in the decade after the war was made on the black market³ in rice and other goods. But mostly families did what they still do. They work as hard as they can for what little they get. In the meantime, other parts of Kyoto, particularly the northern reaches and suburbs, have become up-scale middle-class neighborhoods, where the effects of economic growth become visible in real estate and consumer goods (automobiles, fashions, etc.).

In this act of the madang geki, two women happen to meet an elderly woman on the street, a woman who appears to be lost. But she is not lost in space, but rather in time. She is looking through a chain-link fence at her old house, on the other side of an abandoned urban lot, where grass grows deep and wild.

The younger women recognize this old woman as the person who used to deliver rice on her bicycle.

“Look, how tall the grass grows...”the young woman remarks,
pointing to an abandoned lot.
“and look over here, there’s a big sign. (reading)
‘Let’s beautify South Kyoto.’
“Well, how about that!”

They engage her in conversation.

Apart from some vestigial Korean conversation markers, even the old woman speaks in Japanese. The language of her childhood and young adult years has been left behind in her decades of residence in Kyoto, as she has been left behind by her children.

“Look,” one of the young women says, “how tall the grass grows here.” Stepping up to the fence, she reads a large sign in a nearby building: “Let’s beautify South Kyoto.”

“How about that!” She exclaims. The erection of signs like this is the only visible effort that the city has made toward this goal.

The actual long-range plans of the city include increasing industrialization of the south side (Minami-ku) as one way to preserve the non-industrial character of the central and northern areas. But again, one can suspect that buraku boundaries would play a part in the location of new industries (and their hiring practices).

The last major south-side construction was the erecting of the Avanti department store and building across the street from the shinkansen (“bullet-train”) station. This building was created on the site of the main bus terminal, and still serves that function. Several of the madang members complained that they and their friends could not find jobs in this building.

Empty lots in Higashi--kujo are usually fenced off to prevent squatters from building illegal houses.
©1994Higashi-kujo no Ima

The old women looks out at the shacks that line the narrow lane where she lives. Her daughter has married a Japanese man, and moved away⁴.

The old woman (“harumoni” in Korean) remembers the wonders of her daughter’s house... a house outside of Higashi-kujo.

Korean and buraku women can leave their families—and their lack of social standing— behind them, by marrying outside the neighborhood, and thus acquiring a different name and official residence. Young men in Higashi-kujo have expressed their envy of this gender-determined escape route. This escape is often total, the daughter leaves and severs connections that might reconnect her former stigma to her new situation. But this severing of ties with the old identity does not necessary succeed in Kyoto, and forming new ties to new neighborhoods can be very difficult. A Korean woman I spoke with who lives in another part of Kyoto said that her loneliness was the payment for her children’s future happiness. But in this it is also the grandparents who suffer from the distance created between them and their children and grandchildren.

Dreaming of the “System Kitchen” where everything works at the touch of a button...
What the television shows and the catalogues display are dreams made real in plastic and wood. But where the household is not capable of acquiring these fantasy objects, they still remain dreams.
“You push a button and water comes out (of the toilet),” the old woman exclaims, pointing to her derriere.
The younger women sigh.
The auto-bidet on the heated toilet keeps Japan at the forefront of lavatory science, but only a few can afford it.

It is the house of the daughter that the old woman is thinking about, a place so far away, and to which she is not regularly welcomed. In that house there are modern appliances that seem to be marvels to the old woman. The toilet has a built-in bidet. In the kitchen there is hot and cold water at the push of a button, and the heat pump keeps the house warm in the winter and cooler than an electric fan in the summer. Their description of the labor-saving devices of the “system kitchen” brings into relief both the unnecessary extravagance of these consumer items, and their fetishized commodity values for those who cannot afford them.

The old woman’s wonderment is shared by the younger women, who have seen these on television commercials. Their consumer desires are better informed, but no less intense.

Japanese household advertising often puts non-Japanese (and certainly non-Korean) faces into interiors that are borrowed from Europe or the US. The ad above is for utensils and containers for use with microwave ovens.
Verger 1994 catalog

“System kitchen,” one of them exclaims when the old woman describes this magic house.

Later, in the second act, two other women will dream about finding a life somewhere else than Higashi-kujo. Dreams of escape, the desire for mobility, are commonly expressed in this neighborhood. As much as people find ways to cope with being here, they also know that their residence here can only be a negative factor in their children’s lifestyle hopes.

I invited a resident Korean woman who lives in the Kita-Shirakawa district of Kyoto to do her own “day-in-the-life” photo shoot. She agreed, but wished to remain anonymous. She is married to the owner of several pachinko parlors, and their house is opulent by Kyoto standards. They use a Japanese name, and their daughter goes to an expensive private school and to ballet lessons.
Here she has taken a photo in an expensive Kita-Shirakawa food store, Daikokuya.

“Kita-shirakawa,” she exclaims. (This is Kyoto’s equivalent of New York’s Upper-East Side district.) Hers is a dream of movement, of escape. But to get out of Higashi-kujo requires a husband with a position in a large, prominent company.

Up river, when the Takaseigawa was allowed to run dry (see below) in Higashi-kujo, the City was sponsoring art exhibits in the rivercourse north of Shijo (4th street). Here where tourists play, the City has spent considerable funds to upgrade the pedestrian sidewalks, and to maintain a pristine urban watercourse. The neglect that residents of Minamiku (South Kyoto) including residents of Higashi-kujo feel, as an attitude that the city has toward its southern district, is only enhanced by the attention the City pays to selected regions, such as this.
Photo by author

“Kabushiki kaisha (a company listed on the Tokyo stock-exchange),” her friend agrees. Finding employment in one of the leading larger Japanese companies is difficult for any young person in Japan, and these difficulties increase for those with a social or economic disadvantage. Job discrimination is illegal in Kyoto, but enforcement is far from rigorous, and review by the courts is lengthy (several years) and not predictably satisfactory, as women in Japan also have recently discovered.

At the end of the first madang geki the young women invite the harumon (grandmother) to come with them and eat, promising her that they will not serve her the mild, sweet Japanese sauce, but authentic, spicy, Korean-style sauce. Their dreams are not realized, but they can open up a space of consumption at a scale they can afford, and with a flavor they have acquired a taste for.

Madang Two: baseball dreams and summer days

The second madang play is a meandering street scene on a summer day. It begins with a pair of young men recounting an exploit at the Japanese national high-school baseball tournament, an annual event with a broad popular following. The young men come across the two young women (see above) who have been conversing about their plans to move away. Quite obviously, these two men do not qualify as future husbands. The four are met by a man in a wheelchair being pushed by another man.

“The Takasei river goes by the Labor Center. It’s become a dump.To me its strange to think how easy it has become to toss things [there] without a second thought [heiki de poi poi suteru].
‘Why do they gotta toss it here?’[nande koko ni suterenneyaroo] I ask you.”
Third generation Resident Korean

They meet on the banks of the Takaseigawa, a waterway that was once a canal that carried goods to and from North Kyoto to the south towards Fushimi and Osaka. The canal boats have long since passed, but the canal remains the one feature of Higashi-kujo that physically and symbolically connects this area with the more posh northern districts.

In 1994, for the first time in memory, the Takaseigawa canal was completely dry. For some residents, the bleakness of this empty canal was another symbol of discrimination (or, at least, of indifference) by the City.

In 1994, for the first time in memory, the city, facing a prolonged water shortage, decided to shunt the canal’s trickle of water back into the river at Gojo (5th street), well North of Kujo (9th street). For the first time the canal was completely dry.

photo ©1994 Higashi-kujo no ima.

Because there were no beneficial consequences to the City for shutting off the Takaseigawa water (the shunted water simply flowed south via the Kamo river) residents of Higashi-kujo, and of the buraku area south of Gojo complained to the city that they were being punished for a situation they did not cause and in a way that made no sense. After all, the City continued to allow the water to flow through the more affluent tourist quarters of Pontocho above Shi-jo (4th Street). And so, the Takaseigawa canal became another character in the madang geki.

Baseball dreams, summer glory at the High school national tournament.
The second madang geki shows us street life on a summer day in Higashi-kujo. Korean highschools in Japan are not allowed to compete in this tournament. So these dreams of summer glory are made ironic by their administrative impossibility. So many avenues of access to social and cultural achievement in Japan are closed to resident Koreans simply by administrative fiat.

For decades, the Takaseigawa was a working waterway, but its presence, in the sound of its slow running water, in the foliage it promoted, and in its annual crop of fireflies (hotaru), was also valuable as a local urban resource.

By turning off the summer water, the locals fear that the firefly larvae along its banks may not have survived. Whatever constructed urban ambiance there is in Higashi-kujo is linked to its connections with the Takaseigawa and the Kamo river. And the Kamo was also one main reason why Koreans lived in Kyoto before World War II: they were hired in large numbers to labor on the riparian works, cementing the banks against flood and erosion.

This Meiji era (turn of the century) photograph shows boats along the Takaseigawa... here on the great curve near Seventh Street.
From Meiji Kyoto

It is beside the Takaseigawa that the six characters of the second madang geki cross paths on a hot summer day. They know one another, and begin to plan to go somewhere together when an object in the water attracts their attention. Someone has dropped a wallet, and now all it takes is for one of the group to go in and retrieve it.

The entryway of the house of the Korean woman living in Kita-Shirakawa shows the influence of Western domestic architecture and the means for conspicuous consumption. She told me she would never go to Higashi-Kujo, and would not care to meet or know the people there. “You really should avoid that area,” she advised me. Her own story was dominated by the bitterness of the many times her “friends” had used her Koreanness against her.

With some reluctance, one of the group steps into the ankle-deep water and pulls from this a wallet. With great anticipation he opens this and announces “Ten-thousand yen bill!” (man satsu), but then he revises his announcement... “Thousand yen bill” (sen satsu). He counts out all of the money (about sixty dollars US) and they begin to think of ways to spend this, when he looks in a packet in the wallet and finds a photograph of a woman from the Philippines.

“Philippines?” The others exclaim?

They cluster to get a look, and one of the women reports that she has seen this Filipina working in a local market. She and her family are the ones who have recently moved into the public housing block. Now they know who the wallet belongs to. With reluctance, but no hesitation, they decide to return it, and its money, to its owner, whom they know would need this. Together they wander offstage, contemplating a stop in a local noodle eatery.

The video shows the opening of a wallet found in the Takaseigawa. The wallet turns out to belong to a person from the Philippines who has moved into the neighborhood.

The episode of the Filipino was one of the topics at the play-writing meetings that could have long-term impacts on this event. At that meeting, one of the participants remarked that he had heard that a Filipina had moved into the local public housing block (Matsunoki-machi Danchi).

This reinforces the local neighborhood's claim and image as a space for multi-ethnic culture and lifestyle.

¹The fingerprinting dispute is at the center a dispute over the status of resident Koreans as special community in Japan, a community made special by the history of colonization and enslavement during the War. The act of fingerprinting, which is seen by many Koreans as a way of identifying them as criminals, also marks the continuation of pre-War police control over the community (even though the fingerprinting takes place at the district City office). The mark of the fingerprint is appropriated by resident Koreans as a symbol of their discrimination, and also as a marker of official sanctioning of this discrimination.

²But then the record of Japanese Government agencies destroying records because of outside pressure is not clear. Apparently, American Occupation officials ordered the destruction of the lists of buraku locations, and these were ceremoniously destroyed. But later, copies surfaced, and these were somehow copied and quietly distributed to corporations and other institutions. It is perhaps more difficult to ensure institutional forgetting as it is to demand institutional reform.

³And Higashi-kujo, as a space abandoned to its own fates, was also a place where black-market activities were more possible. Its proximity to all of the train lines and to the river enhanced the possibilities.

⁴Although the madang geki did not focus on the issue of intermarriage, which is perhaps the most widely felt issue among area families, this issue showed through in the plots of the play. Both the engendering role expectations and the gendered job market in Kyoto are displayed in the drama. However, this display is not given a reflexive critique, and so we can point to gender domination as one of the practices in Higashi-kujo that would deserve more attention for the Madang drama to be both “realistic” and self-critical