Dancing Toward Democracy— National(ist) Identity Trouble

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Public spheres don't just happen, not in Kyoto, nor in Los Angeles; and they are not all alike, although I have tried to suggest some basic properties they may share. Similarly, public places don't just happen, they are constructed by the groups that put bodies on the street, into the plaza, or into parliaments, to demand open access, to perform a celebration of heterogeneous identities, and thereby to become the architects of public spaces, and of the public sphere.

Japanese national(ist) identity; a condition thrust upon Koreans during Japan's colonial rule of the peninsula; a promise of eventual equality and citizenship (in exchange for conscription and virtual slavery during World War II); a status that was withdrawn without compensation when defeat severed Japan's colonial authority; a privilege now denied to thousands of people born and living in Kyoto; and a discourse that today binds together the mass Japanese public: it is this identity, in its unitizing, essentializing subjectivity, that the Higashi-Kujo Madang resists. And this resistance, couched as a call for a respect for heterogeneity, seeks to remake the entire public sphere into a space of openness. And, while the Madang is mostly ignored by the city, and will not soon find a spot on the Japan Travel Bureau's tourist calendar, it does raise a small clamor in the usually silent street. From this noise, the voice of alternative identities in and for Kyoto is heard.

Today, the Higashi-Kujo Madang clings to its right to exist. Each year it performs that first moment of inclusion, bringing together the many feuding strands of the local neighborhood into a common, embodied community. And every year it attempts the second moment of inclusion by presenting itself to the city on equal terms.

The tactic of opening up this one tiny window of heterogeneous culture within the old Imperial capital of Japan can succeed only when this opening is seized by others who find the uniform of “We Japanese...” too constraining on their own identities. For when multiple groups learn similar tactics, these become a single strategy, and the small tactical openings coalesce into a new openness. This is the intended outcome of the type of “culture trouble” the Madang organizers are making. But admittedly, and unfortunately, the possibility of this happening in Kyoto seems remote.

It is likely that the city will find a way to shut down the Higashi-Kujo Madang, or force it back inside the buraku.

What is more likely is that the city will find a way to shut down the Higashi-Kujo Madang, or force it back inside the buraku. Already, the city government has started up a city-run, city-funded festival in the same district, timed to roughly coincide with the Madang. Probably the City will attempt to enfold the Madang into this festival, while maintaining the City’s (paternalist) control.

As of today, the Madang organizers are determined to maintain the independence of their event, but should the city actively oppose them, they may find themselves without a place to perform in—except the street. But as long as the Higashi-kujo Madang gets performed, then there will be one space in Kyoto where a public public space can be found.

Apart from this madang, crowd activities allowed on the streets in Kyoto are controlled and managed by the nation, the city, or by Shinto shrines in collaboration with city authorities. What is made clear by the opening of this one multivocal space, is the widespread closure of so-called public spaces within the city¹. The ubiquitous role of the state in Kyoto's public events points out a fundamental lack of spaces appropriatable by civil society organizations, and it marks the present as a result of a genealogy of state/imperial spectacles and monuments.

¹ Absent also in Kyoto are sites of a history of public participation. For example, there are no plazas marked by the memories of prior public demonstrations. Instead, the city is multiply inscribed by its connections to Japan's imperial past, a past that lingers in the felt absence of the current emperor, and in the imperial pageantry of the civic spectacles. It is a city of palaces, and tombs, and imperial temples and shrines.