Preface— placements and movements

---

The “Koreans” in Higashi-kujo are not going anywhere soon. Not unless the Japanese Government decides to send them all back to Korea. And yet their collective action is actually a movement in social and physical space: without their going anywhere. I am tempted to call their group a “social placement” instead of a social movement, for this very reason.

“A free city for international cultural exchange is one where peoples of any country may assemble freely and in peace, regardless of race, creed or social system, for the purpose of cultural exchange”
Kyoto Declaration

Their movement in physical space is to finally, after several generations of dwelling in the same neighborhood, appropriate this as their own cultural home. They are coming home to Kyoto by remaking this neighborhood on their own terms. Their movement in social space is to re-move the notion that some cultural/racial “Japaneseness” is required in order to live in Kyoto.

The “demonstrations” against ongoing the social discrimination toward Japanese individuals living in Buraku neighborhoods have been domesticated by the City. Every year, after speeches held inside the buraku area behind Sanjo Station (a place where only those who live in the buraku area can hear these), the City’s band strikes up and the parade moves out. By the time the parade approaches City Hall the band is silent. There are no speeches in front of City Hall.
Video by author.

To do this they play on the City’s own words, such as the Kyoto Declaration, in which Kyoto’s City government pledged the city to be a “free city for international cultural exchange.” And they call on Japan’s adherence to international standards for human rights and civil liberties.

While virtually every other public event in Kyoto is planned in advance with the police, the parades that the Higashi-kujo Madang stage on the day before the event simply emerge from the housing projects and explode onto the street, sending the police scrambling to keep up. NOTICE: how the police are taking photographs of the parade.

And, finally, they rely on the City’s long-term Domestication of its many festivals (matsuri) to hide the fact that their festival (madang) is an actual public festival, capable of fostering and sustaining a civil crowd, and of reproducing a counter-public social movement.

The main problem I faced in preparing the reader to see how this Madang worked to re-place this district of Kyoto as a space of heterogeneous cultural production was to articulate the many, and mostly mis-recognized features of Kyoto’s public sphere that made this replacement necessary.

In one paragraph, Alberto Melucci (1989, 12) lays out the problem of locating the conflicts of the public sphere, once these have been moved away from the political arenas where their resolution, under most definitions of democracy, would become possible:

“...new conflicts develop in those areas of the system where both symbolic investments and pressures to conform are heaviest. These conflicts act increasingly at a distance from political organizations. They are interwoven with the fabric of everyday life and individual experience. The new conflicts are often temporary and they are not expressed through ‘instrumental’ action. Contemporary movements operate as signs, in the sense that they translate their actions into symbolic challenges to the dominant codes. This is understandable, since in complex societies signs become interchangeable: increasingly, power resides in the codes that order the circulation of information. In this respect, collective action is a form whose models of organization and solidarity deliver a message to the rest of society. Collective action affects the dominant institutions by modernizing their cultural outlook and procedures, as well as by selecting new elites; but it also raises questions that transcend the logic of instrumental effectiveness and decision-making by anonymous and impersonal organizations of power. Contemporary social movements stimulate radical questions about the ends of personal and social life and, in so doing, they warn of the crucial problems facing complex societies.

The essay on State-nation modernity shows how formative notions are developed in the Commentarium, and then applied, when needed to arguments in the main text. This one will be used often, as it carries a load of descriptive uses.

What Melucci did not bring to this description are circumstances that do not hold for nation-states such as Italy, but which are central to state-nations, such as Japan (SEE here: State-nation modernity). Namely, what we see in Japan is the interest of the state in removing conflict from the political/public sphere. In their public festival, the Higashi-kujo Madang organizers return culture to the public sphere.

Melucci does bring to the fore an ethnographic concern: the location of the effects of this social movement in Kyoto. And here, he is quite correct in steering us away from some external, instrumental outcome. To a great extent, it is the performance of the festival itself that is the desired outcome for this social movement: and the success of each Madang event is judged internally on the amount of cultural expression, and self-reflection that was done. When The festival performs what it proposes, we need not look any further than the event itself.

As an ethnographic text, Community, Democracy, and Performance is first a text of discovery, a careful description of the circumstances of a small community. In this case, the community resides within a city with a population of more than a million residents. This community is also self-defined by the cultural performance it has undertaken. Today it is the “Higashi-kujo Madang community.” And while there are those who still insist on writing about “Japan” as an ethnographic site, this text extends to the Japan only in so much as “Japan”—in the form of agencies of the central government—surveils the neighborhood under study. Community, Democracy, and Performance is a document of value to the on-going organization of the Higashi-kujo Madang,¹ as much as it is of use as a text for those in and out of Japan who are concerned about issues of civil society, the public sphere, and democratic action.

As a work of what I call “engaged social theory,” the text outlines a critique of several notions developed within the literature, and uses the information accumulated in its descriptions to suggest new avenues where notions of culture, civil society, democratic action, the public sphere, and social movements may need additional theoretical support. I have sought to rearticulate these notions in a manner that increases their utility within the self-critiques in which the Madang organizers so readily engage. The outcome of this study of the festival marks out new ground for urban ethnography in and from Japan. As I will conclude below:

“The call for diversity within the public sphere is at once an opening to multiple voices and a demand for reflexive democratic processes that extend from the state to communities to the family. Through their own internal democratic struggles, public communities legitimize their collective voice within the public sphere.

Through their call for the respect of heterogeneity (ishitsusei) as a fundamental aspect of human rights, the Higashi-kujo Madang community opens a counter-public critique of Kyoto's (and Japan's) exclusively “Japanese” public sphere. Out of their experience of social, political, economic, and cultural exclusion from lifescapes in Kyoto, they have acquired a keen sense about practices that create exclusion while professing equality.

The lessons they learned from the public sphere were lessons about what not to do when forming their own community. I would say that they learned these lessons very well, and the resulting Higashi-kujo Madang event and community is a civics lesson from the margin, a lesson of real value to other communities in Kyoto, Japan and elsewhere.

The practices and the lessons of Higashi-kujo are not only performing what they propose, and creating new expressive openings and counter memories for this neighborhood; they are useful in reflecting on how democracy requires its own performances. The above exposition, like its festival object, is only the beginning of a longer, multi-site study of festivals in public—a topic from which cultural sociology, cultural anthropology, and cultural studies would all benefit.”

¹ Although I was reluctant to offer advice while in the field, I did edit a narrative video of the first year’s event for the use of the Madang Executive Committee, and I translated their “Statement of Purpose” into English at their request.