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Higashi-Kujo Madang— Locating multiculturalism
“The neighborhood is getting more multicultural,” he said, and that started a discussion about changing the festival in name and in mood to a multicultural festival (tabunka matsuri). In fact, in the third Higashi-kujo Madang (1995), a Philippine dancing group joined the event. The future of this event will probably include embracing and articulating multiculturalism inside Kyoto but outside its government-run agencies.
The inclusion of a reference to the Filipina brings out a desire to situate the circumstances of the local resident Korean community within an international context. The Madang organizers point to the simple fact that they are at the front edge of non-Japanese, and equally important, non Japanese-government managed, cultural production in the area. The city’s efforts at kokusaika (“internationalism”) manage to avoid having international persons (even those who were not born in Kyoto) as equal participants in decision--making at any level.
At one point in 1994, as a part of its 1200th anniversary, and as a project in its self-proclaimed goal of becoming Japan’s most “international city”, the city government put together a meeting to discuss the future of kokusaika. It was billed as an idobatakaigi (literally, a well-side chat). But most of the chatting concerned the general but sometimes significant fear that some Kyoto residents have of foreigners, and the various exclusions and administrative difficulties1 that foreigners regularly undergo. There were no new initiatives announced to close the gap between these two groups of local residents. And the local Korean community was conspicuously not invited to attend.
Counter movements to the city- and national state-run programs to “internationalize” Kyoto society are bound to run against the logic of these programs, which attempts to manage the style and the content of what is imported, claiming to adjust this to unique Japanese tastes and circumstances (the consumerist end of Nihonjinron), but domesticating this in the process.
ABOVE: at a forum on the traffic in women at the Kyoto YWCA in 1993, a Filipina NGO organizer from Tokyo discusses the problems that the sex industry creates for all Filipinas who live in Japan. The Higashi-kujo madang’s inclusion of a Filipina in the neighborhood stands as a counter example of the potential for multicultural understanding in Kyoto.
Making foreign goods and ideas safe for local consumption falls easily on the shoulders of the various government ministries2 and their “public” corporations, agencies that assume a paternalist control whenever possible. Part of this process of “domesticating the foreign” involves the need to create an atmosphere of negative apprehension about the foreign. Products and people who are foreign are understood to be dangerous as these are produced or in the way that they live outside of Japan, and it is only prudent that such dangers are not permitted to enter. [See: fear of the foreign] With foreign people, this has long involved attitudes of superiority and also of fear, and thus a form of racism that is linked also to terror. A few examples are in order: As the Filipina NGO organizer described to the audience at the Kansai Forum on crimes against women, the more than 100,000 Filipina3 women who are working in the Japanese sex industry, and working under conditions that most resemble a form of slavery, bring to Japan a service that supports the masculine appropriation of the public sphere. Their sexual services—their bodies—are offered to Japanese men as commodified and domesticated exotic objects. Their exoticness derive from their foreignness, and their submissiveness (the role they must take, unless, of course, the customer wants to be dominated) marks their domestication. Their presence in Japan can only be sustained through the complicity of silence by Japanese women.
The madang geki did not address the sex industry in Kyoto, again avoiding a topic specifically focused on gender issues. But this particular Filipina was presented in the Madang play not as a “Japa-yuki” prostitute, but as a neighbor who happens to hail from the Philippines. And so the play incorporated another call for a respect of local cultural heterogeneity.
The third madang: hiding and betrayal
In the third madang, the circumstances of both the spatial and social marginality of the neighborhood is portrayed through the depiction of practices of hiding and uncovering. The third madang introduces us to Mangiri/Matsuyama, a young executive in a real estate firm (Rakuraku Fudousan) who has been scouting properties for a commercial customer. The customer is looking for a cheap spot build a hotel, and Mangiri, hopefully, but foolishly (as it turns out), has led him to Higashi-kujo.
As they walk through this district, Mangiri points out all of its good points (it is close to Kyoto Station, and it has ample properties for sale, and so the potential for later expansion). The boss cannot help but pick out signals of the region’s dubious ambiance (including the looming public housing), and worries about his company’s image. They run into three young girls who are practicing their music for the Higashi-kujo madang (a play within a play) and Mangiri has to do some quick spin control to belay his boss’s suspicion about the neighborhood.
After that there is a brief episode of comedy relief about a mother who sends her child out to borrow some salt and then punishes him when he returns empty handed. The comedy relief is for the crowd, but the additional figure of the character of the Japanese real estate client, who watches the scene with visible disapproval, moves its referent to the neighborhood itself. Higashi-kujo, we are being told, is the kind of place were such public displays are found, here in a city where public displays of emotion are rarely made.
Then it happens. Two women wander by (one of them steps on the foot of the boss), and they recognize Mangiri, and call him by his name. With that he must acknowledge that he is, in fact, Mangiri, and so a Korean. The client will have nothing more to do with him, or with this section of town, and Mangiri is left with the women, and his anger, and humiliation.
“Why did you shout my name out like that,” he asks.“That’s how we talk in Higashi-kujo. Our voices are big.” She replies.
They learn that Mangiri managed to move away 15 years before, and, after completing an accelerated course on real estate, he had begun to prosper. But then the bad economy began to drag down the real estate market. He was buying himself a house, but without a wife it was a lonely life. He kept thinking about Higashi-kujo.
The woman reminds him: “Life here in a tenement house (nagaya) is happier than that (alone) in a big home out (there).”
He gestures his agreement, and the women hatch a plan on how he can get a bank loan on his house and move back here.
“Everything I earn today goes into that house. But before I go broke, I’m coming back to Higashi-kujo.”
There is a notion of the picaresque quality about life in Higashi-kujo that is here consciously used as a emotional counter to the generally dire economic circumstances. Having reached the bottom of the local economy, locals have little fear of falling. And while the work they do is low-paying and often distasteful, it is also plentiful. And their children are released from the Japanese school “examination hell.”
Exclusion is also a release, and with mutual cooperation they can even manage to create positive alternative life-styles (such as the Higashi-kujo Madang festival) and to tactically reappropriate their situation. However, as much positive value as they can mine from their conditions, it is precisely these conditions that they seek to change. They are not looking to create a sentimental attachment to their poverty and marginal status.
They seek an end to exclusion through a direct attack on the cultural underpinnings of the institutionalized symbolic violence that creates this situation. Their aim is to show how a local neighborhood can establish a respect for heterogeneity, and use this example as a lesson for the larger Kyoto public sphere.
To end the third madang, a final character is introduced. A “foreigner” (gaikokujin, or “gaijin”) wanders into the scene with a video camera.
“Hello,” he calls out, startling the women, who protest this intrusion.“I hate this (kind of thing),” one woman says, “besides, I’m not wearing my makeup...”
“Hello there!” They have me saying in this graphic that accompanied my article in the Higashi-kujo Madang Report. (Also note the inclusion of body hair on the back of my hand).
“I’ve been walking around here and there taking pictures,” the foreigner relates. “I’ve taken so many photos and video.”
“(To one of the women.) I took a shot of your daughter dancing, (and to the other) and your’s too. They were all very charming.”
“What about me?” One of them asks? “I’m her mother.”
“Ah, yes, well, you’re certainly very charming too...” And he takes a shot of them dancing, to show that he really does consider them to be charming, but he excuses himself then and moves along.
the final dance
The end of the third madang comes as soon as the foreigner leaves the circle. The old woman enters from the first madang, and they invite her to join them for some barbecue. All of the others join in an impromptu dance, and the crowd is encouraged to enter the circle. The madang drama is complete only when the audience and the actors dissolve the circle that was created by joining together in a collective celebration.
This circle dance, which further erases the actor/onlooker distinction, will continue until it wears itself out.The celebrations would continue into the night, as I discovered after the 1994 madang: See: Madang night
Basically unorganized, it erupts from the end of the drama, and, as I have noted earlier, it creates a space of shared intimacy, both of bodies and emotions. Here is where newcomers and organizers also find themselves dancing together, it is another space of ENclusion, a place and a time when all who are here are welcome, and where all who are here are us. This experience is also a threshold through which first-year onlookers become madang “veterans”. Here is laughter. Here is joy. Here are micro processes of mutual recognition and acceptance that sociology and anthropology have only begun to explore.
Next I want to focus on the goals of the madang organizers, on how the event might succeed, and where it can only fail to advance this community toward its goal. For one festival—and festivity itself— is not some democratic universal solvent that can wipe clean a history of real and symbolic violence. It is, rather, an available tactic, an opening, a chance for that those who have few of these, to push back against the representations that have shoved them into the margins.
1My wife’s purse was lost (presumed stolen) on the train, and so we had to visit the local police box (koban) with a letter of apology for her losing her foreign resident identity card, before we could go down to the city office and apply for another card.
2The routing of funds through government organizations makes even (so-called) non-government organizations in Kyoto very much concerned about government perspectives. And so the idea that a group completely external to government control and oversight might acquire legitimacy as a source for internationalization would threaten the efforts of the government to manage this process.
3Add to these women from Thailand and Taiwan, and other Asian, and more recently Latin American countries, and the total has been suggested to be more than 250,000 women, most of whom have outstayed their visas and are illegal immigrants... working in a nation where every citizen is required to maintain an official residence, subject to regular police verification. And so it is quite obvious that this industry enjoys government support.
