Note: This is a computer-generated transcription. If you find any error, please signal it to andrea.rota@ikos.uio.no
Hello and welcome to the IKOS – Religion & Politik podcast. I am Andrea Rota and today we have the pleasure of hosting Mark Teeuwen. Mark is professor of Japanese studies at the department of culture studies and oriental languages at the University of Oslo. He is an expert on the multifaceted history of Japanese thought and religion, with a particular interest in Shinto and Buddhist traditions. In recent publications, Mark has also contributed to the blossoming field of festival studies. In particular, in his latest monographic publication, Mark has applied a long-durée historical approach to the analysis of one of Japan's most celebrated festivals, the Gion festival in Kyoto. This event has served as the paradigm for planning a number of other festivals in Japan and boasts a history spanning over a thousand years. However, Mark's analysis reveals that tradition is not synonymous with unchanging repetition. On the contrary, the Gion festival has regularly undergone periods of crisis, transformation and renovation. For this reason, it can be regarded as a mirror reflecting the evolving interactions between various social actors. Accordingly, in the book, its role oscillates between being the object of research and being an instrument of research through which broader social issues can be illuminated. Mark, thank you for joining us on the podcast and for helping us unpack this fascinating history of the Gion festival.
Thank you very much for having me.
So, to begin with, could you please paint a picture of today's Gion festival for our listeners? If one of them should be so fortunate to be in Kyoto next summer, what can they expect to see and experience?
Yeah, so the Gion festival, it's a huge event. It takes a whole month and it's more than one festival. It's like a cluster of lots of different small festivals all happening at the same time. But there is a sort of structure to it. So, if you imagine Kyoto, there's a river running through it from the north to the south. And the western side of the river is where the city center is. And the eastern side of the river is where all the temples and shrines are, where in the past, at least, all the corpses were deposited. And the place where all the illnesses come from. Now, one of those shrines is called Yasaka Jinja today and the Gion Sha in the past. So here we have got the Gion. And the framework of the festival is that the deities from the Gion Sha are taken across the river into the city center. And then they dwell in a temporary site in the city center for one week. So you have these moving the deities in palanquins, called mikoshi in Japanese, to the city and then a week later back again. Those are two highlights of the festival. And then on the mornings of the same days that the mikoshi cross, you have huge parades of floats. Very large decorated floats. Some of them are like 25 meters high and they are exquisitely decorated. So those are the main days. And before those main days, the floats are already set up in the city center. And then everybody comes out in the evening when it's nice and cool. People dress up like in traditional clothing. They drink, they eat, they just stroll around, they listen to the music, they do some acts of worship. And they just generally have a good time. So that's like the main sights of the festival.
Well, thank you. This seems to be a very engaging event. Can you give us a sense of how the festival was created?
Yeah, so the beginnings are a bit shrouded in the mists of history. So we don't, there's quite a lot we don't know. But it seems to have started in the 970s. So just before the year 1000 as a kind of Buddhist exorcism against disease. There were many of those kinds of exorcism festivals around Kyoto. And they are connected with the fact that the festival takes place right after the rainy season. So the city has been flooded, all the wells are contaminated, everybody gets ill. And then what happens is that you have popular festivals where then these spirits of disease are collected. And then put into this mikoshi kind of palanquin. And sometimes flushed down the river, sometimes carried back to across the river, out of the city basically. And those kinds of popular festivals, they were often also a form of like protest. They often became violent. People set fire to stuff. There were riots. People attacked merchants or other members of the elite. So it was quite a sort of volatile situation. And what happened is that the court tried to get control over this kind of events by organizing them themselves. And which then makes that they come up in the sources all of a sudden in the 970s. So you have already at this beginning, you have then the common people who want to show their desperation. You have the court that wants to show it's in control and make sure that the city is not put on fire. And then you have of course the Buddhist priests. And then you probably also have the merchants who are in charge of the site in the city where the gods are transported to. So all those actors are there. They all have their own different agendas. But we are pretty much left guessing who was doing what, except for what the court was doing, because that's in the sources.
Now you have highlighted this variety of social actors involved in the planning and the performance of the festival. Temple, court, people. How should we understand the scope of the festival? It is more a political event, a religious celebration or none of the above?
So I would say that in all the phases of its development, the festival has been quite an obvious sort of mix of politics and prayer. And also like play and entertainment. Kyoto has been the capital of Japan, right? So it has been the city of rulers. And many of those rulers, now I'm talking not about 970, but a bit later, they've made a point of installing themselves along the route in like a pavilion to show themselves to the people of the city that are organizing the floats. And actually for most of the history, the festival has been held on orders from the military rulers of the city. Now I'm talking medieval times. And the fact that the festival was held successfully was then proof that the gods are on the ruler's side. And the people then are seen as celebrating both the gods and the rulers together. Because first you pass by the pavilion of the ruler and then you pass by the place where the gods are supposed to be brought to later in the day. Now, the temple was extremely important. There were large temple complexes and they had a lot of economic and social power. There was one that was based on a mountain east of the city. And by the 14th century or so, all the merchants in the city were members of guilds that were controlled by this temple. The temple had enormous wealth. That wealth was passed on to those merchants that were part of the guild. And then if you were not in the guild, you would get none of that money. Also, these guild merchants would have monopolies. So the most powerful of them, they would lend out money. And then if the debtors didn't pay, the temple goons would come to take their house apart and sell timber. So this temple was really like the spider in the web of Kyoto. They controlled the guillotine, the shrine. They controlled the guilds. They controlled the merchants. And what was happening with the shogun, putting himself in the pavilion, was also kind of part of this fighting for power between the warrior leaders and the temple. And at times that became like outright war with the warriors attacking the temple and burning it down and killing all the monks and so on. And of course, then you have the merchants in the middle, trying to position themselves between shogun and temple, who most of the time both wanted their taxes. So all that has a lot of influence on how the festival turned out, how it was given form.
So if I understand correctly, it's not so useful to think in binary category like economics and politics and religion. We should rather look at how the different structures of power changed the festival itself. In fact, in the book, you point out that at the beginning of the medieval period, the festival was about to flop. Yeah. What does it mean for a festival to flop?
Yeah, so this term flop, I took it from Olivier Morin, who is a researcher in a field that is called cultural epidemiology. I thought he was going to write about epidemics, but he's not at all. He's talking about how traditions of all kinds are transmitted and how they can survive and what makes most traditions at some point flop, meaning stop. So he identifies two causes why traditions fail. And the one of them he calls the wear and tear problem. So the traditions, they change slightly every year with every new generation taking over. And then it sort of wears down and in the end, it's not really there anymore. And then the second one is the flop problem. And that is, well, people actually know what to do, but they're no longer interested in doing it. So the festival has lost its relevance. And I argue that when it comes to festival, at least, the wear and tear is not really a problem. You can see that multiple times when the festival actually stopped because of war, for example, it was started again afterwards. And of course, it didn't look quite the same as before, but there was plenty of resources to draw on to reconstruct it. There were Guion festivals also in other cities that had borrowed stuff from Kyoto, so they could just reimport that. So the wear and tear was not really a problem, but it was more like, OK, doing this festival costs so many resources. So many people have to agree on what to do in what order and where and how and who pays for it and all of that. So the question is more like, OK, is it possible to repurpose the festival under new social circumstances? That's the flopping problem, right? And as it turned out, so there are many, many stops and starts. And there are many actors, central actors, who suddenly disappear, like the Imperial Court moved to Tokyo. And the warriors, they're no longer there today. And the merchants and the guilds, they're no longer there today. So you would say, OK, if that's what the festival was about, then obviously it shouldn't be there now anymore. But it is. And that's because new actors have been interested in using it for new purposes. Sort of reinvented it, but on the surface it looks pretty much the same, but the setting is different. So I would argue this festival is also very different in what it does
Can you tell us something about the formal change to the festival when actors change, when new patrons come into the scene?
Yeah, there's one very radical change, and that is when these parades come into being. Remember, so you had the Mikoshi palanquins, and then in the morning you had these parades of big floats. And those parades of big floats weren't there in 970. Then it was just the Mikoshi, so the palanquins moving the gods, and then there were festivities around that. But the parades didn't exist. And those came when the shoguns came in, so in the 14th century. And the shoguns, the military leaders, set themselves along the route in this pavilion. And then these parades played to warrior themes. So what is interesting about those parades is that the floats, they have nothing to do with the gods. They're all about warrior lore, or inspired by kind of arts that the warrior elite was sponsoring. So a completely different kind of world, actually. So it's got nothing to do with the gods or the disease or anything. It's got to do with warrior valor and the ancestors of the warriors who are actually in the pavilion. So that's one big change. But after that, actually, the festivals didn't change that much. And it's interesting to see that when you see different actors taking over, you would expect a change. But the actors, actually, rather than inventing something new, they try to reconstruct. So the festival on the surface looks much more stable than it is when you go a little bit under the surface. Like today, for example, you can see that things that disappeared in the 12th century or something are dug up again. And now, because all of a sudden they have a function, and then maybe what the members of the Imperial Guard were doing, like way back, are now being performed by the Boy Scouts of the shrine, for example. So the festival looks like it's timeless, but it's timeless in a timely manner.
I see. And the picture that you're painting is one of a festival that survived major social crisis, infighting wars, while finding new patrons and new expressive forms. Indeed, in the pages of the books, readers discover a history of social turmoil. And at the same time, you also highlight the playful, enchanting and spectacular dimension of the Gion Festival. Can you please elaborate on these aspects of serious levity?
I think this play that you mention, that is actually the aspect of the festival that is most ignored in the literature. So historians, they write about the politics. Then you have the ethnologists and the religious studies people, and they talk about religious meanings and about the rituals of priests. And then if you ask the actors, so the people who actually stage the floats or carry the mikoshi, for example, they also like to talk a lot more about notions of prayer and worship. And they are reluctant to stress play as the essence of the festival. But of course, the festival has always been about, I would say, role play and spectacle and also entertainment. So in the beginning, you had horse races and then later you had the floats. And then when you get to the 18th century, for example, Kyoto becomes a city also of entertainment districts and geisha and prostitution. And you have this large fair that is set up along the river bank of this river. And then you had pageants of the dancing girls. And now today you have all the romantic couples that dress up in their yukata and then have some courting in the float streets and all of that is going on. But of all those things, when you talk about serious levity, I think the most serious is probably the role play. So the people participating in the festival, many of them are actually hired or they are volunteering. Some of them are students, all of them have jobs that have nothing to do with this. But they are, for the duration of the festival, they go into a different role. And they, for example, impersonate a mikoshi bearer, which is very playful. It has a lot of camaraderie, a lot of drinking, a lot of singing karaoke, but it's also deadly serious. For example, they all dress in white and the white means that they basically consider themselves dead before they start. And they also say this, we have made a vow to get the gods to where they need to go, even if it costs us our lives. And we saw this during the corona, for example. People say, yeah, if we're going to die, this is a good time to do it. So it's like it's very serious in a sense. And I could also say that for a lot of the worship at the festival, it's also something you do to immerse yourself in the whole festival experience. By making offerings and praying, then you don't necessarily know what those gods are for or what they're called even. But the playfulness doesn't make it any less serious, I would say. Because, you know, the more serious the play is, the more engaging, right?
Yeah, I see. Yes. Now, if we go back to today's situation, Kjotlskjön Festival is an important tourist attraction and has been included in the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage since 2009. Not the least because of its long history. Which aspects of this tradition are highlighted and which one tends to fade into the background? And maybe what can this teach us about the politics of tradition in contemporary Japanese society?
So the festival stopped during the war, 1942, 1943. And then, well, Kyoto wasn't firebombed, but basically the city center was destroyed anyway. So the social fabric of the city center was completely destroyed, I would say. And then, of course, after the war, there was hyperinflation, there was no food, there was nothing. It was a desperate situation. And so it was impossible to revive the festival. But then the city authorities of Kyoto came in and they organized some kind of financial support system. And since Kyoto was the only city that wasn't completely destroyed, the strategy of the post-war city government was to develop Kyoto into a city of international tourism. So the Kjön Festival now became part of that city strategy. And this had many effects on the festival. So one thing is that now there was a new constitution that separated religion from the state in a much more strict way than before. And especially Shinto was now completely banned from the public sphere. So it was not possible to support anything associated with Shinto. So what did they do? They said everything to do with the shrine and the mikoshi is religious. We're not touching that. Not allowed. Unconstitutional. But the parade, that's a tourism event. And so that sort of separated the sort of religious part, as it was now defined, from the cultural part, with one of them being sort of pushed away and the other part being highlighted as a tourist attraction. And from there, the city government was very much geared towards developing this parade into a more effective tourism event. So, for example, the traditional route was too narrow. So they changed the route to go through the big streets. They put stands up along those big roads and the tickets were sold by travel agents and they were all sold to groups from Tokyo. And then after that came a kind of public discussion about what the Gion Festival actually should be. So it shouldn't deteriorate into a show, was the pushback. And prayer got highlighted as the real essence of the festival. And I would say that after this period of quite relentless touristification, you have seen a turnaround. So in 2014, the second parade was actually revived with support of the mayor of Kyoto. And there were efforts to sort of restore the balance between prayer and show, you can say, or tourism, with making more space for prayer. And you could see that very clearly at the time of the COVID epidemic in 2020 and 2021. So then, of course, nothing could be actually carried out. The festival sort of had to stop in its traditional way. But then actors staged a kind of alternative mikoshi procession and they staged an alternative parade. And this caught the attention of the media. And there was a lot of talk about this is the real Gion Festival that is all about prayer and without all the sort of the show and the tourists. And both actors and also the authorities and the national broadcaster and everybody were stressing like this intangible essence of meaning in the form of prayer. Which sort of I thought was a very interesting development as a new way of relating to this separation of church and state. And it also echoes with UNESCO, because UNESCO stresses this concept of outstanding universal value, which is mostly about the intangible value of a building or in this case also of an event that sort of makes it special and worth listing. Yeah, that value is defined as prayer. Not as play, not as politics, but as prayer. Prayer that then is separated from sectarian religion, because it's a kind of prayer that unites as Japanese, while religion is what splits as Japanese into like Christians and Buddhists and whatever. Somebody asked about the politics of tradition. So if you just look at the 20th century, for example, you have this changing discourse about the festival. In the 1910s, it was sold as a symbol of Japan as an East Asian colonial power. Saying that, you know, the festival is like a sign, like in the medieval times already, we imported Korean and Chinese and Indian and European tapestries, you know, that you can see on the floats. And it reminds the people that, you know, before we locked ourselves into a little country, we were actually, you know, out there in the world. And now we are going back to that. And then came the war and then the Guion Festival was like a mark of the invincible spirit of the Japanese. You know, we still keep going. And the festival was all about victory in the war. And then after the war, it was reinvented again, at least the discourse about it. It was about the democratic spirit of the city of Tokyo in the medieval times. You have to be very ahistorical to see that. So the festival as democratic. So you can see that the story about the festival keeps changing. And that's where the politics come in, if you ask me. It's fascinating.
Do you feel like speculating about where the festival might be headed to?
Yeah, I'm not seeing it being there yet. But there's like maybe two issues. One is exclusion of women. So there has been for a while an initiative to have a women's float, because this is all men, men only. But now women have made their own floats and they want to add it to the parade. And of course, they're not that yet, because the men think that women can't do it. But I think that's changing. You see already girls like participating in the music and the dancing and stuff. So that's one thing. And the other thing is, I think climate change is really becoming a problem for the festival. And that might be a new story to tell about it, because it's in July. So in the last few years, repeatedly, it's been really too hot. So also the year I was there, it was so hot and people are wearing all this clothing. And you have children all decked out in very elaborate clothes and so on. And people were just collapsing and being taken away in ambulances. So it's very vulnerable to a change in climate. The rainy season, if that's going to stretch into the festival period. So weather is really making the festival a lot hotter. You know, in the UNESCO document, there's already some kind of ecological angle there in the new story. But I think that might be another story that the festival could be relevant to.
Fantastic. That means that the story of the festival keeps moving, keeps changing. Thank you very much, Mark, for sharing your insight on the more than a thousand year old history of the Gion Festival with us.
Thank you.
This concludes today's episode of the ICOS Religion and Politics podcast. Our guest was Mark Teeuwen, professor of Japanese studies at the University of Oslo. In the podcast description, you will find links to his latest book, Kyoto's Gion Festival, A Social History. And a few selected articles on the festival's history. Thank you for listening and goodbye.