Higashi-Kujo Madang— masks and music
Masks, which were borrowed by Korean madang-gut (madang geki) from shamanic rituals, and from other theatrical genres that used masks in Korea, became decorative in their translation to Kyoto’s madang. In other Japanese madang (such as the Kobe madang in Nagata ku), the masks and their roles are maintained in the performance of now-traditional madang geki. So the use of masks in Japan can have differential referents to an earlier Korean mode of masking.
Photo by Anjali
Masks were also made by volunteers, from paper maché and tempera paints. The masks were modeled after a collection of Korean masks in a large book with color plates. But the specific meanings that originally attached to the masks were not consciously maintained. Here was an instance when looking “Korean” (i.e., instead of “Japanese”) provided enough of a meaning (or referent) for a practice. This truncated importation of festival materials signals the lack of traditionalism (and of tradition as providing meaningful information) and an awareness of a need to re-place Japanese festival activities with others.
This need to accomplish an artistic “critical mass” of expressions was not discursively available to the organizers, but was addressed through multiple inputs into when a threshold amount of artwork and music and drama was attained. And in large part, this perception of where a festival gained its look and feel of festivity, was gained through the experiences of Japanese festivals (public and school) in Kyoto.
Music
Children from the Catholic-run preschool in Higashi-kujo, Hope House (kibou no ie), show their colorful Korean costumes, and dance in a courtly style to drums. While their parents dress in a peasant style dress, the style of costume is not provided with a consistent social message. There is little to suggest a straight-line socialist bent to the event.
The music of the madang is drumming. Loud, louder, and loudest: these are the three volumes in which it is available. Outside at the madang the drumming is noisy. Inside, during rehearsals, it becomes philharmonic.
The drumming is most intense when the entire ensemble gathers for a grand circling punmaru (“farmer’s music”) performance. At this time the entire open area becomes a dancing ground.
The actual movements have been choreographed at a great dress rehearsal at the gymnasium of Kyoto’s South Korean high school (one of only two such high schools in Japan).
Other Korean drumming at the Madang included samul nori: a percussion quartet that has become quite popular in Korea as a modern variant of a traditional folk ensemble. Samul nori uses two types of drum, a gong, and a hand-held cymbal to create a pattern of rhythms and syncopation that uses changes in tempo and volume to create an accelerating effect that is emotionally charged.
The performance of a taiko drum band created a visible “Japanese” presence in an event that is dominated by Korean coded practices.
As the years advance and people in the area begin to have a multi-year experience with such voluntary performances, the coordination of this part of the event should get easier. But in the first two years, the rehearsals (and the performances) failed to meet the aesthetic designs1 of the organizers.
LISTEN TO THE MADANG SONG
“Madang, Madang, Madang,
at last its our Madang.
Let’s come and make the Madang. We’ve gathered everybody’s dreams,
Higashi-kujo is full of smiles!”
The ‘Pore Pore band” provided another musical interlude at the Second Higashi-kujo Madang.
Besides Korean drumming, there were many other musical moments. The central microphone was rarely silent, and the central open space was occupied in sequence by several musical groups. A group formed by members of the Japan Center for Independent Living played a kind of inspired Jazz, and a local Taiko drum group also showed how Japanese drumming sounded.
participation by physically challenged individuals
Higashi-kujo has a relatively large number of individuals with various physical difficulties, due to chronic, and sometimes congenital physical problems. The reasons for this population in Higashi-kujo are multiple: the most obvious being the presence of low-income housing. Other reasons may have to do with older histories of prejudice against those with physical characteristics that made them distinctly different—and the marking of difference in terms of distance away from a shared, genetic, Japaneseness2. I would be very interested in seeing how the discourse on genetic disease was articulated in Pre-War Japan.
Yabuki Fumitoshi is the Secretary general of the JCIL in Kyoto. In 1994 he was also a member of the Higashi-kujo Madang Executive Committee. He organized the “wheelchair course” corner of the Madang, where individuals could see for themselves how difficult it is to maneuver a wheelchair without ramps and adequate turn space.
Here I chat with him about the availability of wheelchair ramps on Kyoto’s public buses.
“[There are only] six,” he replies. “And there are a thousand buses.... It is inconvenient.... [And the reason for this is simply] money. It’s [one of those] ‘after due consideration’ matters. Out of this year’s consideration they decided there will soon [mamonaku] be nine lifts. At this rate it will only take 330 years [to fix the situation].”
But then the fear of physical disability, the discrimination against those who are physically challenged, and the lack of public awareness of issues of physical access to modes of transportation and communication, and to public amenities, and to jobs, is found in many places outside of Japan. The Japan Center for Independent Living in Kyoto, like its counterparts in other cities (including Berkeley, California where this movement began), can list a variety of issues that are of everyday import to its members, all of which lack popular understanding, political support, and effective resolution. The Higashi-kujo Madang is an event where physically challenged individuals make contributions to and participate in all of the main activities: music, dance, theatre, food (selling and eating); and they also find a space to relate directly with others and to respond to political inaction and popular misperceptions about their circumstances.
1This disenchantment with the products of amateur art production is one of the effects of spectacular art production either by the state or the market.
2I do not, at this point have enough information to make a claim that connects the spatial aggregation of physical challenged individuals with buraku segregation or with the discourses of nihonjinron. But I would suggest that any discourse that begins with the nation as a single, pure blood-connected unit (and with a royal lineage as its physical trope) may also carry a concern about the presence of anomalies in this bloodline, a concern that might be discursified in terms of externality. Anomalies would derive from external impurities, and the response to anomaly would be to re-externalize the persons so marked, but physically segregating them.
