Higashi-Kujo Madang— Arts meetings

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“Bakhtin’s recovery of linguistic heterogeneity extends beyond sociolinguistics into the realm of social dialectics. Dialogism, in this sense, not only relativizes the universal claim of being the norm but also rescues the people whose voice has been silenced due to their non-normative “low” language, the language of the margin. As such, madang guk is a language which represents the life of the oppressed. “
(Choi 1993, 93)

The Uribunken Center is a small, one-story, two-room building tucked in between commercial properties on a narrow lane just south of Kyoto Station. Behind the building is an open space of concrete and asphalt, and a littering of broken glass, just big enough to paint a garage-door sized sign in, or to barbecue some meat for a dozen or so volunteers. Operated by resident Koreans as an office to distribute information about their various social and political actions, the building became the central site of madang activities. It was here that a group of volunteers met to write the play for the second Higashi-kujo Madang.

“What is madang geki [drama]?...They say that the first time the term ‘madang drama’ was used was at...Seoul University in 1976.”
(Yan 1988, v)

The first meeting of the madang geki-in (the committee that would write the play) ended in discord and consternation, and an agreed time for the second meeting. The feelings of artistic frustration with the first year’s play, which had followed the pastoral allegorical mode of madang guk in Korea, had led many of the committee members to look to an alternative mode, one that used realism (rearuizumu), and that connected directly to circumstances within Higashi-kujo.

The poster for the 4th Higashi-kujo Madang shows how the event is moving away from older, pre-existing images of Korean cultural forms to the creation of its own “look.”
From the Higashi-kujo Website

Yan Mingee, a published authority on Korean Madang, a long-time Han-Madang volunteer, and a director of the first year’s Higashi-kujo Madang geki, argued that the play should still fit into a recognizable madang play genre. But here he was more concerned about the interaction between the players and the audience than about the setting of the play.

The importation of Korean student protest theater (madang guk) into Japan included its counter-colonial position on modernization and urbanization in Korea. The processes of urbanization were seen to include, at their core, metropolitan practices and desires that ignored and debased (or disembedded) local, small-scale social practices in favor of those imported from the U.S. and Japan. And the availability of cheap goods and commodities on the international market jeopardized the livelihoods the farmer and the artisan, and worked against organized labor. But madang plays did not (as Japanese television announced, and as Yan [1988, and personal communication] asserts) start in villages, but rather on university campuses.

The key to the madang play, he asserted, was that it abolished the distance between the audience and the players. In this he was making a distinction between “drama” as a spectacle, and madang drama as something else, as a particular space between actors and the audience. “In traditional folk drama in our country [Korea], the actors and the onlookers were not divided.” (Yan 1988, ix). The result, he claims is that voluntary participation by audiences creates a theater that is a different sort of art than Western theater. This difference between madang theatre and Western theater was also noted by Choi (1993):

“The dramaturgy and aesthetics of madang guk animate this counter-memory. Madang guk reaches beyond the Aristotelian tradition in Western drama, which purports to create an illusion and separates the play from its audience, and even beyond Brechtian theater, in which the spectators are informed of the theater's double yet delegate analytic power to the actors. Madang guk rather posits itself as a rehearsal of revolution, as Augusto Boal has suggested (91-92).”

“With two secret service men stationed in a car across from his home, Hwang Sok-yong told me that madang theatre is the only kind of political theatre that is able to evade censorship because it is performed underground. The South Korean news media are systematically censored and most newspapers actually have a Korean Central Intelligence agent in their editorial offices. ‘Everything that goes into the newspaper has to pass through his hands. Censors are everywhere. There is a so-called Cultural Officer in City Hall who controls all scenarios for theatre performances. All scripts have to be submitted to him first.’ Madang¹ is the public mouthpiece of the people’s cultural movement and its performances are often linked with political demonstrations.”
(Erven 1992, 104-105)

Higashi-kujo’s madang drama also connects this form of “staged” drama with the everyday “drama” of the street. And indeed, the three “acts” in the second Higashi-kujo Madang all take the street as their point of departure. As a “rehearsal” for an everyday life that counters the lifestyle that Koreans in Kyoto can only partially acquire, but not control, the Madang drama twists the mundane world into a self-parody that reveals its hidden currents.

Young Korean men, denied access to Japan’s high-school tournament, still fantasize about hitting the winning run in the ninth inning. Young Korean women, doubly disconnected from the job market, dream of marriage to a salaryman, and life on the up-scale side of the tracks. These dreams are shared with the Japanese majority, but access to their possible realization is not. A fuller recognition of this imbalance in lifestyle resources was the thematic thread that tied together the three acts in the second year madang drama.

Before new dreams can be imagined, the old dreams need to be discarded (devalued, demystified). The first step in discarding an old dream is to appropriate it discursively. This is the beginning of therapy. The next step is to revaluate other ideas, notions that are external to the old dreams. Here the need arises for novelty, for invention and improvisation. Instead of substituting another variety of the same old dreams (provided by the market-state) this dramatization looks to local resources, to friendship and to the madang itself as a practice, to inform new dreams.

“The opinions of JCIL (Japan Center for Independent Living) members differ person by person. One person described his impression [to me] like this: ‘why is that even though I participate in the meeting, I have the feeling like there are words, expressions, and circumstances that are understood by everyone [else], but when we describe our sense [of the situation], because it is said by a handicapped person, they don’t listen, and once it is said, [the room] acquires a tension, like the mood that comes about when a stranger speaks.’ I have to think that if it [the situation] is like this for the Madang Executive Committee, what can I say about the area (of Higashi-kujo) as a whole?”
Higashi-kujo Executive Committee Member.

But the madang is itself still tied to the circumstances of its founding. The madang has not yet become a site where counter-life-styles are assembled. It promotes a positive relationship to the locale, and an awareness of how inexpensive—and how valuable—are kindness and companionship. It offers counter memories that recode the official stories in the very site where the latter are acquired (the national school). But if the final goal is not to make local poverty more palatable, the madang must move from parody to urban planning. Let’s look now at the event itself.

I want the reader to remember here that this is an event in its own creative infancy. At this time, the organizers are at least as concerned with establishing the event in the neighborhood without tripping any of the signals that would lead the event to an early oblivion (e.g., by privileging a single political position within the event). Once the event has found its legs, once it has created the institutional inroads that would make it more difficult for the city to refuse to cooperate, the expressive possibilities should open up. Also, the experience of being in the event is too new for it to have informed the life-styles of its participants. It is only after five or more years that the lessons and the skills of doing the event begin to show their effects within the event and within the lives of those who are committed to it.

“Thank you for letting us participate in the 3rd Higashi-kujo Madang. Parents and children spent a pleasant day together.We could feel how everyone brought all of their emotions into this festival.We were surprised how very powerful a spirit there was, and that here was a place where people could meet and touch one another without consideration of national differences. Entering into this place together with friends was a wonderful experience....thank you so much!”
A Filipina/o participant
Daisankai higashi-kujo Madang Hokokushuu [3rd Higashi-kujo Madang Report] p.19.

I will be tracking the ongoing creation of this event over the next ten years. Already, there are movements within the organization that show how it is acquiring more self assurance: the executive committee has been taken over by third generation resident Koreans and younger Japanese organizers, and the third Madang included a Philippine dance troupe under the label “huuman karuchyaa baraitei guruupu” [Human Cultural Variety Group].

At the same time, in 1994 the City, which had previously exhibited little enthusiasm for such events in South Kyoto, decided to sponsor a “Fureai Matsuri” [contact festival] in Minami-ku and to hold this on a weekend in October—in direct conflict with the timing of the Higashi-kujo Madang. Madang organizers were not invited to participate in the organization of this festival, which will use city monies and the neighborhood organizations to appropriate a street for a day of entertainment, possibly with some Korean performers. One can only suspect that the City plans to push the Madang back into the buraku, by holding the cultural space (claiming to offer a multicultural event) and time (an October weekend) that the Madang had appropriated for its own use.

At some point in the future, the Madang will probably be asked to fold its event into the City’s event, in the “spirit of cooperation.” At this point the Madang would either give in and cease to be an occasion where counter-city/state expressions are possible, or it will face an increasingly hostile, City led opposition that probably will close out any use of school grounds.

There are occasional Madang events staged in a small park in the buraku area of Higashi-kujo. The one I attended, called a Toitsu (unity) Madang was much different in its mood from the Higashi-kujo Madang. It was an entirely Korean event, much smaller in size and number of participants, with alcohol on sale, and a street theatre that was more directly aimed at a counter-capitalist topic. The video on the left (speeded up to save space) shows the main character, (cross)dressed as Uncle Sam, bringing peace and cheap rice to Korea, with the help of capitalist businessmen from Japan. The local citizen (dressed in a yellow shirt with the word bunmin (civilian) written on it, is pulled between the glitter of Uncle Sam’s promises, and the money dangled in front of him by the businessmen.

At that point, the Madang will have to go undergound—staging its events in various places without prior publicity. Or it will simply retreat back into the buraku areas where the city has little interest in competing with its expressions, but where it will have little exposure within the larger public arena. And so, during these first years, the Madang organizers are extremely careful about maintaining a positive relationship with as many local residents as possible.

This need to please all the people all of the time results in self-censorship of potentially divisive content, and so, in a sense, the City has already asserted its power to monitor and moderate counter expressions within the City. But still the organizers and participating artists can feel the potential opening that the madang—and only the madang—provides in Kyoto. It is an event that is too important to risk a counter-counter response, but it is also an event too democratic to close out artistic expressions that will run against the discourses of the state in Kyoto.

¹The ongoing political conditions on the Peninsula (both North and South), the long period of separation from the Peninsula with the concomitant loss of Korean language ability, and the attachment to life in Kyoto despite a lack of attachment to “Kyoto” itself were the main reasons why the Higashi-kujo Madang exhibited little nostalgia for a return to a Korean “homeland.” But the political conditions in Kyoto also precluded the first Madang from becoming a political demonstration.