Struggles around the festival: transformation of power relations

After the Meiji Restoration, the central government prohibited old customs of local communities including various festivals and rituals because they were obstructions to the modernization of Japanese society and the construction of a unified nation-state. Especially, the old social ties and local identities of urban and rural communities presented a potential source of opposition to the formation of a hegemonic national identity. In the case of Hakata, the local territorial organization of neighborhoods and nagare groups had a broader range of administrative functions and was a kind of political organization. The association of neighborhood chiefs (chōsōdaikai) could mobilize inhabitants, participate in municipal policy decisions, and have a variety of impacts on politics; they could also select or recommend candidates for municipal and prefectural elections.⁴ As the capability of local government was inadequate and fragile from the 1880s to the 1900s, the neighborhood community played important political and administrative roles.

Local cultural values or the morality of the neighborhood shaped the local politics (Rose 1988). Municipal officials strove to change these social structures repeatedly, and in the process both compromised with and

confronted the chiefs.

In particular, government officials regarded the collective solidarity and deviant behavior in the festival as threats to new social orders and norms. The great confusion of many drunken men who stripped to the waist was seen as dangerous, uncivilized, barbarous, and unproductive. First, this rough behavior on the streets was thought to present a danger of moving in the direction of an anti-government movement.

Second, sanitary problems were very serious in urban environments where social infrastructure was still incomplete. Cholera epidemics broke out many times and seriously damaged economic activities and social life. Finally, it costs too much money to carry out the festival. In Hakata, inhabitants had to save much money over the years to construct tall and ornate floats and serve alcohol and food to a large number of people. There were even some neighborhoods that rented out houses to raise funds. And as many young men indulged in festival preparations for two or three months of the year and could not settle down to their jobs, the festival was seen as a waste of time and energy from the municipal officials’ point of view. In 1886 a municipal official admonished the inhabitants as follows:

The rate of tax delinquents was extremely high in the Hakata area. So people ought to change their life-style and long-established customs and norms, and set their money or property aside, instead of wasting it. (Fukuoka Nichinichi Shinbun 13 May 1886)

In addition, a new urban traffic system transformed the landscape, functions and meanings of the urban streets and neighborhoods, and municipal authorities regarded the Yamakasa Festival as more and more inappropriate for modern urban space. Streets began to function as the exclusive domain of traffic, and power lines became a major obstacle to the movement of the festival’s towering floats. And although spatial structures and the daily rhythms of social life changed rapidly, inhabitants still thought of the streets as their living space. For them the streets were an intermediate space site between private or domestic space, on the one hand, and public space, on the other. The street was an important and multifunctional space for everyday life. They conducted their mundane social interactions, such as neighborly exchanges that reinforced mutual ties, and paid close attention to the numerous everyday spectacles that were played out on the street. So the streets embodied a variety of informal and shared meanings and rules that almost all members of the community understood implicitly.

The police and municipal authorities, for their part, tightened their control and surveillance of social practices, sought to contain collective disorders on the streets, and aimed to make them a sphere of regulated operations. They intended to change the local residents’ habitual ways of living and walking, and discipline the mundane spatial practices of the inhabitants. The unauthorized occupation of the streets by hawkers and street vendors was also prohibited again and again, although these activities were an important means for ordinary people to survive. Street venders and rickshaw men were harassed by the police and subjected to an increasing number of controls. As Lefebvre (2000) points out, the streets are the domain of tensions and conflicts between domination and order from above (‘representations of space’) and everyday routine, festivals, and resistance from below (‘spaces of representation’).

In 1873 the Fukuoka prefectural governor and the police banned the Yamakasa Festival. But, as the inhabitants did not readily submit to this order, conflicts and negotiations between the police and residents continued for ten years. In the end, in 1883 municipal authorities modified their urban policy and allowed inhabitants to hold the festival. In the process, local people also compromised on some points and changed their common practices, for example, they decided to wear their own happi (special coats for the Yamakasa Festival) to hide their naked bodies and designate their neighborhoods. Municipal authorities thought that naked bodies on the street represented the backwardness of Japanese society from the ‘western gaze’. So

disciplining the body was an important adjustment in modernizing Japanese society as a whole and helped to form a well-behaved and self-surveillant subjectivity. But in turn, this elaborate happi became a symbol of the identity of each neighborhood community and a ‘tradition’ of the Yamakasa Festival. In short, local people invented a ‘tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) as they appropriated the compulsory rule of wearing happi in their own way.

In 1898, inhabitants applied for permission to hold the Yamakasa Festival, but the police once again refused. As a result, many men assembled at Kushida Shrine and burned firewood in order to protest this order. A famous journalist and later member of the Diet, Kojima Kazuo commented as follows:

The solidarity of territorial groups serves public works and some of them save money to pay taxes. This local autonomy is not in opposition to constructing the nation-state, but one of the bases for it. Municipal governors and the police ought to use and encourage these social ties and the spirit of solidarity so as to construct a new urban society from below.

(Kyūshū Nippō 21 July 1898)

After intense negotiations between the neighborhood chiefs and the police, the police made a concession to the inhabitants and allowed them to continue the festival. But in some cases the festival was still canceled. For example, during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), local people canceled the festival and voluntarily contributed their money to families of soldiers. It seems that the experience of this war had a great impact on the consciousness and attitudes of ordinary people toward the state and became a moment that strengthened an imagined connection between the local community and the national one.

After this war, Japanese society became rapidly industrialized and urbanized. Not only in large cities such as Tokyo or Osaka, but also in many medium-sized cities, massive transformations in social and spatial structures took place. In the case of Fukuoka City, the seventh Kyushu-Okinawa Eight Prefectures Exhibition held in 1910 transformed urban infrastructures, spatial structures and landscapes. For example, the moat of the former castle was filled in, and local and national entrepreneurs constructed new street networks and traffic systems centered on the streetcar. And branch offices, banks and large shops, including department stores, were constructed along the new main street that connected Hakata and Fukuoka, and this new street came to represent the modernization of the urban landscape. Land prices also rose rapidly and some entrepreneurs speculated in real estate. Increasing mobility and speed was one of the distinct characteristics of the modern urban world, and as Fukuoka City became more deeply involved in the circulation of capital, its urban form and standing was altered considerably. In this restructuring process some inhabitants, particularly affluent ones, moved out of the city center and into the suburbs. As living space was separated from workspace, daily relationships and mutual ties within the neighborhood community gradually lost their material bases and social meanings, and the neighborhood thus diminished in significance to its inhabitants. These transformations, what Harvey (1989) calls ‘time-space compressions,’ had a profound impact on the way of thinking and habitual practices of the people. But responses to these transformations differed among individuals and social groups. Some inhabitants objected to the expansion of roads because it broke down local social ties and transformed daily life. They were still not in accord with the new dominant conceptions of space and time. As some made an effort to accept and live according to the new paradigm, others did not. Thus we can see there is no unified experience of modernization. Simonsen (2004) points out that the urban is a site where multiple spatialities and temporalities collide and that ‘the rhythms of the city’ (Lefebvre) are composed of numerous conflicting processes. Therefore an account positing an uni-directional homogenization of time-space is inclined to overlook the complex relations between the cultural and social construction of bases of urban life.

Under such conditions, it was seriously discussed whether the Yamakasa Festival ought to be canceled or not. There were lots of pros and cons, and an elder who was one of the former chiefs in Hakata insisted that:

The Yamakasa Festival is already inadequate for the new era. It is a ridiculous event. The grandeur and splendor is already lost and it does not represent the authenticity of urban culture nor the authority and prosperity of local residents. There are also many disputes among and within nagare groups in carrying out the festival. We no longer need to preserve it. Constructing the streetcar provides a good opportunity to cancel it… Even in the Daikoku nagare group, whose inhabitants have more enthusiasm for the Yamakasa Festival than other groups, almost all inhabitants may apparently approve of carrying out the festival, but actually the majority of them feel participation to be cumbersome in reality. (Fukuoka Nichinichi Shinbun, 24 June 1910)

He thought that the festival had lost its authenticity as urban culture in the new period. As he had a good knowledge of the former state of the festival, he may have felt a sense of loss to a greater extent than other people did. Since he was one of the representatives of Kushida Shrine, it seems that his opinion had a large impact on other inhabitants. Moreover, some people that insisted on canceling the festival complained of a cumbersome set of rules and obligations. For example, if the head of a household could not participate in the festival or was female, he or she felt obliged to pay money or hire men to participate in their stead. According to critics, these obligations showed that inhabitants did not take part in the festival voluntarily like they used to. I cannot clarify when these practices emerged, but they may point to transformations in inhabitants’ attitudes and consciousness toward the festival in particular and to the traditional rules and norms of the community in general.

But for those who hoped to carry on the festival, these opinions were regarded as corruptions that emerged with the ideas of ‘civilization’ or ‘modernity’:

The head of police says that the Yamakasa Festival is a very dangerous festival and ought to be banned for three main reasons: sanitation, traffic problems, and public morals. But the new streetcar is more dangerous, because it killed some people…After all, not all people are interested

in becoming ‘civilized’ and are pleased to raise hell during the Yamakasa Festival once a year.

(Fukuoka Nichinichi Shinbun, 21 June 1910)

This article represents the discussion among inhabitants at Kushida Shrine and is written in the local dialect. By deliberately using the local dialect, we may say that they intended to represent the ideas and attitudes of local people more forcefully. They may still have had a different attitude towards the quickening pace of life associated with a modern sense of time that the street car represented, and they may have had a concept of modernity that conformed with their daily lives and that they interpreted according to their own framework.⁵ As they felt some anxieties about their future lives and could not entirely accept new conceptions of life, their imaginations sought to forge a distinctive identity, depending on the idealized tradition of the festival. In the end, only the Daikoku nagare group paraded its float and the other nagare groups constructed their floats, but did not parade them around. As the power lines for the streetcar were set up, the traditional style float changed drastically. A new style of float emerged that was divided into two parts: one was tall and of the traditional style, the so-called kazari yama that was put on the streets, the other was the shorter kaki yama that members could move around on the streets.

After this development, municipal authorities and the police repeatedly attempted to regulate festival

practices and performances instead of banning the festival. For example, in 1916 the police instructed the leaders of Yamakasa groups and the chiefs of neighborhood communities as follows:

1. Participants must always wear their own happi. Nudity is prohibited.

2. Do not quarrel.

3. Observe the rules, times, and routes when parading the floats.

4. The leader must take responsibility for his group during the festival.

5. Put floats on the side of the street so as not to obstruct the flow of traffic.

6. To whatever extent possible, do not permit the participation of outsiders.

(Kyūshū Nippō 7 July 1916)

The police intended to control the festival as a whole through such regulations. And the streets were one of the important sites where individuals internalized and were subjected to social norms. Althusser (1970) emphasizes that ideology transforms ordinary individuals into the subjects of and for these very social norms through ‘interpellation,’ and it is ‘on the streets’ that individuals are subjected to these ideological forces in overdetermined ways. The interrelations between the street and the subject are not one-way, but are composed of complex and conflicting processes. As mentioned above, the street was also the site for organizing people to protest against hegemonic norms and for producing collective meanings from below. However, as the police intensified state control over the streets and they became more a regulated domain for conspicuous consumption, ‘micro-politics’ on the streets changed both in content and symbolic meanings.

IV. Commercialization of the festival and the selling place: transformation of ‘tradition’

Fukuoka City had less of an industrial base than neighboring Kita-Kyushu, which was one of four major Japanese industrial regions in this period. Under increased inter-urban competition for governmental redistributions or industrial locations, autochthonous entrepreneurs and municipal authorities worked together not only to develop urban infrastructure such as ports and road networks, but also to produce and reproduce distinctive urban images and identities as an important strategy to attract economic activities and people. They had to offer ‘something different’ to outsiders. In the case of Fukuoka City, holding various exhibitions was one of the key means to create and represent the urban image of the ‘central city of the Kyushu region’. Thus a re-imaging of the city aimed to create social consensus or integration within the city as well as to attract outside resources. As Philo and Kearns (1993) point out, the ambitions involved in

‘selling places’ or ‘place marketing’ are about economic gain and social control. As urban image or identity itself became a commodity, and only select images were presumed to be ‘authentic’ or ‘local,’ some sites and people that were seen as inappropriate for ‘the authentic’ were sometimes then excluded from the idealized and romanticized spaces of Fukuoka City.⁶ As arguments over ‘culture’ play a key part in drawing the social and economic boundaries between the valued and the non-valued, many residents of Fukuoka naturally consented to this exclusion through the workings of hegemonic representation.

The Yamakasa Festival had attracted many spectators from the outskirts of Hakata from the early modern period. But in the 1910s, local entrepreneurs really began to take the ‘commercialization’ of the festival seriously. When, as mentioned above, there were disputes over whether the festival ought to be canceled or not in 1910, one local entrepreneur said that it would better to hold the festival not on the streets, but in the public park outside Hakata:

We should hold the Yamakasa Festival in West Park (Fukuoka). If local inhabitants accept this idea, some problems, in particular traffic, can be resolved. If the festival is held, there is no difference whether it is in Hakata or Fukuoka. And the number of spectators and the economic benefits shall not diminish. (Fukuoka Nichinichi Shinbun 23 June 1910)

As he reinterpreted local culture from an economic point of view and de-contextualized the festival so as to sell it as ‘urban cultural and historical heritage,’ he did not take the relation between festival and place into account. Since the 1910s, nagare groups had dealt with new social and physical circumstances by dividing their floats into two types and changing modes of movement so they could continue the festival on the street. Through the process of urbanization, however, urban inhabitants moved into suburban areas and immigrants who did not have any knowledge of festival moved into the city center, and neighborhood communities changed in character. Particularly in the face of economic depression and increased social inequality in the 1930s, a lot of small scale merchants and shopkeepers declined economically and went into bankruptcy as they competed with the new consumption spaces (public or private local markets and department stores). As a lot of households could not bear the expense of the festival, the scale of it gradually declined, and the number of floats decreased from six to three. Some inhabitants proposed improving on festival practice by no longer hiring assistants from rural areas, having Kushida Shrine grant economic assistance to nagare groups, etc.

In these circumstances, municipal authorities began to regard the festival as a valuable resource for tourism and actively sought the cooperation of local people. In 1935 the Ebisu nagare group took its float to City Hall (Fukuoka) and offered it to Mayor Kuse Tsuneo in order to cooperate in staging the ‘Hakata Port Memorial Exhibition,’ which became an official plan in 1936. It was the first time that a float was moved out of Hakata and into Fukuoka. Newspapers reported that this cooperation between Hakata inhabitants and municipal authorities was a historical event. The relation between them was transformed from one of hostility to one of cooperation and both of them seemed to regard the Yamakasa Festival as not only the ‘traditional festival’ of Hakata, but also the civic symbol and historical heritage of Fukuoka City

In these circumstances, municipal authorities began to regard the festival as a valuable resource for tourism and actively sought the cooperation of local people. In 1935 the Ebisu nagare group took its float to City Hall (Fukuoka) and offered it to Mayor Kuse Tsuneo in order to cooperate in staging the ‘Hakata Port Memorial Exhibition,’ which became an official plan in 1936. It was the first time that a float was moved out of Hakata and into Fukuoka. Newspapers reported that this cooperation between Hakata inhabitants and municipal authorities was a historical event. The relation between them was transformed from one of hostility to one of cooperation and both of them seemed to regard the Yamakasa Festival as not only the ‘traditional festival’ of Hakata, but also the civic symbol and historical heritage of Fukuoka City