When we embarked on this project four years ago, at the beginning of 2017, the world felt very different. We were both living and travelling in Japan (Elisabetta was a Visiting Professor at Kyushu University; Michael was conducting fieldwork in Kagoshima), participating in crowded matsuri and New Year’s festivities. No one could have imagined what was going to happen a few years later as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, and communal gatherings—the backbone of matsuri and other rituals—would be banned as spreaders of the virus.
Inspired by our own individual research projects, our goal was to hear from scholars doing similar work so that we could add a new English-language volume to the rich Japanese discourse on matsuri, and thus contribute to a field full of potential but with relatively few publications in English at the time. An important aspect of this project was to combine first-hand ethnographic research, which we felt was fundamental to understanding festivals from a contemporary perspective, with theories and methods from a variety of fields, including but not limited to our own areas of specialization (folkloristics and the study of religions). We were also motivated by the desire to create synergies in the study of matsuri in Japan that would stimulate broader discourses on religion and festival in other parts of the world.
With this in mind we started on this volume. Each chapter was originally published in 2020 as part of a special triple issue of the Journal of Religion in Japan (vol. 9, no. 1–3). In that context, we realized, people tend to access essays through a database and read them separately as individual case studies. By publishing the collection now as a standalone book, we hope they will be read together as distinct but connected stories within the broader narrative of religion and matsuri in Japan. We hope scholars will discover, through contrast and comparison and fortuitous juxtaposition, common themes that inform festivals performed in different places throughout the country.
There are certainly many such common themes, but when we put these chapters together three broad concepts emerged as critical factors for considering matsuri historically and in contemporary Japanese culture: complexity, continuity and creativity. We chose these words for the subtitle of the current volume because we hope readers will keep them in mind as they explore the essays herein. Complexity may be most evident in the structure and performance of large urban festivals, but even small-scale rural rituals are similarly layered with symbolism, informed by intricate social interactions, and built on nuanced historical interpretations. Continuity, or at least a desire for it, also shapes matsuri in complex ways, as participants and visitors alike seek connections with people from the past, and enact events premised on the belief that future generations will do the same. Creativity becomes the engine of such continuity, as individuals and communities respond with innovation and flexibility to changing social, economic, and demographic factors.
Not surprisingly, a desire for continuity—and concomitant need for creativity—has perhaps never been felt more powerfully than in 2020, when every matsuri we explore was deeply affected by the pandemic (either severely altered or canceled altogether). Whether intimate ritual, large shrine festival, or staged public performance, matsuri are characterized by communal activity, close cooperation, and deeply felt emotions. They are a time-space in which people come together to work, play, pray, eat, drink, share, celebrate and worship. COVID-19 seems almost willfully to have targeted such times and spaces, and to transform these very human activities into potentially lethal practices. During the disquiet and anxiety of the pandemic, when such social contact and affective nurturing are more essential than ever, it became impossible for community members and visitors to gather together. In some cases, rituals and performances related to the festivals we analyze in this book were creatively replaced by online activities, but the composite range of sensory input that participants and researchers experience during matsuri, and that makes them communally powerful and transformative events, was clearly missing.
We also cannot overlook the explicit religious connections between matsuri and disease. Most notably, Kyoto’s famous Gion Matsuri (whose rituals were either canceled altogether or heavily modified in 2020) originally developed as a response to an epidemic. But other matsuri, both large and small, are similarly performed for protection against pestilence and to ward off bad fortune. On New Year’s Eve 2020, in a radically curtailed version of the Namahage ritual in Akita, men in demon costumes ran through village streets roaring “Corona—be gone!” (korona taisan!). As a mode of spiritual communication with deities, gods or other super-empirical powers, matsuri articulate essential human needs—for health, safety and welfare—that have not changed in centuries. Their meanings—in terms of religious life, social relations, community sustenance, and fundamental human connection—come into even starker relief when such events cannot be held as usual. With this in mind, each chapter in this volume takes on a different profundity, raising questions not only about complexity, continuity and creativity, but also about the very foundations of community.
Against this backdrop, we offer the book as a multi-author, multi-sited exploration of the ever-changing narrative of matsuri and religion in Japan. We are extremely grateful to Brill, and particularly to Laura Morris, for supporting the publication of this standalone version, which includes the original introduction and essays with only minor edits. We hope the book will be read not only by scholars of Japan, but also by anybody broadly interested in festival, ritual, performance, religion and the powerful and diverse ways in which human beings communicate.
These essays were shaped through personal interactions and conversations with countless matsuri participants, and it is to them that we dedicate our work.
EP and MDF
Cape Town and Davis, January 2021