Higashi-Kujo Madang— the event

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The evening before the first Higashi-kujo madang, the pre-parade ended up at the Avanti building, where they appropriated the building’s “public” circulation space for an impromptu concert. This appropriation of a public space by the madang marked the only time in two and a half years that I witnessed a public space in Kyoto being taken by a public group without prior permission/management by the city. The next year the group did not repeat¹ this tactic, although it might return in future years.

The madang officially starts the day before.

Once the parade had acquired the space in front of the Avanti Building, they created a concert that attracted the attention of many who happened to be passing through this circulation space. But mostly they played for themselves, reclaiming this space that had been a part of Higashi-kujo long before it was developed as a shopping center convenient to the Shinkansen (bullet train) station across the street. Before the Shinkansen station was constructed (through the forced removal of many Koreans from apartments and houses that were destroyed to make room for this) a wall removed the view of Higashi-kujo from passengers at the station.

A parade of drummers wends its way through the neighborhood announcing the next day event. The first year, this parade began at the public housing block and ended at the small circulation plaza on the north side of the Avanti Building, adjacent to Kyoto Station. Here, without prior permission, the drummers set up in a circle for an impromptu concert.

“Areas in the southern part of the city where urbanization is to be actively sought hereafter will be considered as ‘region of concentration of new urban functions’.”
Outline of the New Master Plan of Kyoto City 1993.
While other parts of the city are slated for upscale residential and commercial use, Higashi-kujo’s future is a “concentration of new urban functions” which primarily means the following: industrial zoning and arterial road widening.

The importance of this appropriation of a “public” space as a right of the festival community was not so much discussed, as it was assumed. “They don’t hire from Higashi-kujo” one organizer told me, speaking about the management of this department store. The store literally turns its back on Higashi-kujo, with its only entrances toward the North, it faces the station and is connected to the station through an underground pedestrian walkway. It was a clear target as a destination for their parade. Besides, it provided the only open public space of any size in the area.

Here is the map drawn by the organizers for the route of the second prior-day parade.

The second year, the parade was held during the day, to encourage participation by younger children, and it made a circle from the same starting point (Matsunoki Machi Danchi public housing). The prior-day parade is echoed on the day of the Madang, as the han-madang drumming group parades to the Madang site, arriving to announce the opening of the event. Meanwhile, at the site, from early morning, food stalls, and sound systems, and other fixtures of the event are have been prepared, with the main tents being set up the night before.

Artwork

The artwork committee has the task of creating an alternative space from a Japanese school yard. This is both a task of masking the yard’s disciplinary ambiance with more playful motifs, and of creating visually Korean artwork to symbolize the appropriation of the space by a non- “We Japanese” cultural event.

The artwork is provided in three scales: murals that drape over large surfaces, displays that mark areas, and costumes and small art objects.

The mural art at the first madang reflected an attachment to Korean madang performance. Here we see a display of a Korean madang, with drummers and masked characters. Other elements include Korean carved gate posts and the figure of a tiger. The tiger, used allegorically to represent the threat of oppression and the use of violence, can symbolize arbitrary authorities of any sort: from pre-colonial royalty, to colonial overseers, to post-colonial military governments.
photo by Anjali

The mural art is the main focus of the art committee, as it requires the most labor, and as it provides the main symbolic media for the event.

The mural artist would work off a small color drawing of the art piece.
photo by Anjali

Mural painting was accomplished by volunteers who would show up at certain times, giving as much time as they could (sometimes their lunch break, other times a break between jobs).

This mural depicts a utopian vision of people and animals dancing together. When I asked the artists if this was a vision of the future, or of the past, he said “both: it is our hope and our Korean heritage.”
Photo by author

The second Madang contained a mural that departed from a Korean motif in order to symbolize an aspect of Kyoto life that Higashi-kujo residents rate as strongly imbedded of their neighborhood and life: the nearby Kamo river. In part, this is because many Koreans live in 40banchi, an illegal residential neighborhood within the flood-plain of the Kamo.

The second Madang produced a large mural depicting the relationship between the Higashi-kujo community and the Kamo River, which defines the eastern edge of this district. [Photo by author]

Originally, the mural was going to include the wide variety of objects that are found in the Kamo (which gets more than its share of casual dumping, from old appliances and bicycles to the detris of MacDonalds and empty Coke cans).

Here we see uses of the Kamo that are no longer present: cloth dyers washing their products, women doing laundry.

But here too, “realism” gave way to a desire to promote the positive, and to relate to a history of use. And while the river in the mural teems with fish, fishing in the Kamo is today limits to children and egrets pouncing on minnows in the shallows. Still the Kamo plays a large role not only in the imagination and daily life of Higashi-kujo, but in Kyoto, as its river-course provides the city with its largest public open areas.

City-run fairs use the built-up riparian works north of 4th street (Shijo).
photo by author

The city uses its up-town (and up-stream) river property as a site for annual fairs. High-school and college students frequent the river as a place to meet and drink, and couples find it a romantic spot to sit together. In the summer, children wade in its ankle-deep coolness, netting fry and searching for anything that moves.

Playing music while lounging by the Kamo is one of the advantages that this river brings to a city where house construction does not provide sound proofing. Up toward Kyoto University, the entire band will be found on the river banks practicing together or alone.
Photo by author

But the Kamo is also a reminder of the outsider history of Korean and other Japanese in Kyoto, for this river was for centuries the environs of actors, beggars, and makers of bamboo artifacts and cloth dyers—occupations that were summed up by to term kawaramono: river people.

Look again at this bit of video from Yomiuri Television. When they introduce Higashi-kujo, they start at the river and pan over to Yonju banchi before showing a street sign and the old grandmothers putting out laundry. The images are familiar visual signs of poverty and residential stigma.

Down in this end of Kyoto, the river has not been acquired by the City as a quasi-park space. Here it becomes a neighborhood space, and very few people from outside of the area visit the river along this stretch.

The banks of the Kamo are not everywhere maintained by the City for recreation. They are also acquired as a residence, and they can become fatal, when the seasonal floods bring the river up from its usual trickle to a cascading fury. Those who live in the 40banchi area below Kujo (9th Street) are alternately endangered by flood and fire, as the cold winters and a lack of adequate insulation and electrical safeguards make the illegal dwellings dangerous to keep warm.
These shots, taken on the evening of the 40banchi natsu matsuri (summer festival), show the intimate relationship between this neighborhood and the Kamo River.

There are those who claim that the pebble gardens of Kyoto’s Zen temples were once the river gardens of kawaramono (which seems to be only a convenient notion, without much evidence). But the use of the river for pleasure goes back many centuries. One of Kyoto’s still-active pleasure districts (now a restaurant/bar district), Pontocho abuts the Kamo. And the origins of Kabuki theatre have been traced to the theatrics of women actors who did shows on the riverbanks.

The symbolic appropriation of the Kamo River as a site of local Korean culture recodes the river, for which the city has made its own claims. And the use of this as monumental art project also displaces the Korean symbolism that dominated the first madang. Indeed, the second madang had opened a new face for this event: bringing the struggle back home—to Kyoto.

¹One of the general tactics of the “Madang game” is to not repeat its appropriations as an annual event. It moves its location between four school yards, and it maps out different routes for its parade. In the second year, the parade did attract police attention, and it was followed and warned not to interrupt traffic.