Higashi-Kujo Madang— Planning the madang

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The planning for each year’s madang begins with a call for volunteers. Volunteers who come to the initial meetings may serve on one or more of several committees. Volunteers are welcomed at any time, and in all aspects of the event, including participation in the executive committee. The Madang’s openness was encouraged by its goal, and facilitated by its need for many more unpaid workers (and no one was paid) than it could attract. The various committees: for the drama, the music, the art, for logistic support, and for the food booths, were each headed and filled through an open call for volunteers.

‘“We want to make a festival for everyone, so that Koreans and Japanese in Higashi-Kujo can be united” with this thought wholeheartedly in mind, colleagues active in Higashi Kujo have been gathering since last year, holding many meetings in preparation for the festival.’
MADANG STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

These committees manage all of the activities for the Madang, although the Madang executive committee (i’inkai), which is responsible for fund raising and budgeting, also connects with neighborhood community leaders who have been enlisted to secure institutional resources in the district (e.g., access to facilities for rehearsals). This pivotal committee was first peopled by those individuals¹ who had the initial idea for the madang. Some of them were second-generation resident Koreans, others were Japanese living in the local buraku areas, and others were from the local Japanese Center for Independent Living (JCIL) a group that advocates the rights of physically disabled individuals.

Rehearsals

Rehearsals/workshops for music/dance, costume/art production and drama were necessarily numerous, as the madang also recruited volunteers for these skills, and arranged for basic and advanced training. From the middle of the summer until October the evenings and weekends were filled with these rehearsals. Over ten weeks a new play would be written and produced, new drummers (adult and child) would be trained and then coordinated into choreographed dances, and enough artwork to disguise an entire school building would be designed and painted.

This montage of photographs shows scenes from the various practices that led up to the Madang day. The drumming here was that done at the Avanti building in 1993.

Costumes and masks were also made, as well as all of the other necessary arrangements for food, trash handling, seating for the elderly, advertising and fund raising. Continuing meetings of sub-committees and general meetings of all volunteers were held to keep everyone informed and maintain the event’s focus and direction.

Finding time for rehearsals, and then acquiring space, were tasks that most often verged on the impossible. Mostly, the time problem was caused by the kinds of occupations that the volunteers held. Many times a volunteer could already have three or more part-time jobs. Working odd-hours on weekends, and sometimes 12-15 hours a day left few hours open for festival rehearsals. Quite often, volunteers would arrive at a rehearsal directly from work, and then depart for another job after a couple of hours of practice.

These types of scheduling conflicts created frustration and sometimes anger—when a time was fixed that most people could attend very often this meant that some people were excluded by their schedules from participating in the manner they would like. None of the committee leaders were keen on making the decision that would force volunteers out of the event, and so the scheduling meetings were the event’s most rancorous and least productive, until finally some decision was made against the silent knowledge that was no other way out.

It was the drama that suffered most from the lack of free-time in the neighborhood. The original cast would be supplanted and revised many times as work schedules shifted in the months before the madang. It was not unusual for a new cast member to be put into rehearsal in the last week.

During the rehearsals, the volunteers acquire a mutually social-intimate knowledge about each other. They enter into a process of active trust within the tasks they must, together, accomplish. While these volunteers are from the same district of Kyoto, they come from families with divergent and sometimes antagonistic social affiliations, but here they must set aside their differences.

Public relations

It was the task of the executive committee to secure the approvals for the use of the school yard. The first executive committee devised a plan to alternate between four district schools. This plan was advertised as a means to share the excitement of the event across the district, but it also served to decrease any effect the event might have on a single neighborhood. For each school had its own PTA and every school neighborhood had their own chounaikai (neighborhood association) and a serious complaint from either of these could give the school administration a reason to reject the madang’s use of school property. Since the event would only be held at any one school every four years, the nuisance it might create (through noise, traffic, or litter) would not be as noticeable in any one area. Taking the madang out to the public schools is a means of taking control, if only for an afternoon, of a space outside of the buraku. It also makes the madang available for those citizens (perhaps a majority) in Kyoto who would not knowingly enter² a buraku space.

The public schools in Minami-ku (and, I would imagine in all of Kyoto) were not built inside buraku areas. This makes them relatively inconvenient for buraku-dwelling children, while it avoids having non-buraku-dwelling children enter these areas for schooling.

There are some open spaces within the buraku³ where the Higashi-kujo Madang could be held, but that would signal a reduction in the socio-geographic scope of the event. The logic of this event requires that a public (non-buraku) space be appropriated as a sign of the right to perform in public. This is one reason why the first year the pre-event parade, a practice designed to advertise the event locally and to generate enthusiasm, moved out of the buraku housing project, up the main street, to the only public shopping mall in the area, the Avanti Building next to the Shinkansen entrance to Kyoto Station.

¹After the completion of the Third Madang in1995, I was told that the original members of the i’i turned over this committee to a group of young volunteers, most of whom are young adult, third generation resident Koreans. This early “changing of the guard” at the top is another example of an event that attempts to keep its positions of authority in the hands of the people who are creating the event’s most expressive content.

²I was walking to a restaurant one day with a friend in Kyoto, who had lived near a local buraku for all of his life. I had found a shortcut path to this restaurant, a path that avoided the crowded front street in favor of some quiet alleys. As I was leading him on this path, we turned a corner where he suddenly chose to go in a direction away from the restaurant. “This way,” I insisted, pointing ahead. He paused and then with measured reluctance, came with me. As we ventured into a space that I knew was a buraku area, my friend’s reluctance increased to a point of near panic. People on the street recognized him, and greeted him, and he them with bows and polite responses. They were people he had gone to school with, people who knew him well. But he mopped his forehead of sweat and seemed about to faint as we progressed through an opening in a public housing block and out the other side. Then I realized that in forty years of living not two blocks away from where we were, he had never before set foot in this place. It was as foreign and foreboding for him as if it were a nuclear waste dump we were casually strolling through. The stigma of the place was a physical blow to his body, a dank hand that touched him in a way I could not really imagine. Here he was, as nice a person as one could find anywhere, but his body was directly responding to a lesson it had learned despite his own tender predilections. Through this display I also learned the effect of buraku ideology.

³There are other madang that are held in local buraku areas and these have an entirely different quality about their performance. Since non-buraku-dwelling Japanese would not normally venture into these events, they maintain an in-group, back-region mood, at the same time more relaxed, and also less focused.