A peripatetic takeover of the city is common to many festivals, and the festive state of the city often reveals it in a heightened state: the city at its most urban, a kind of super-normal state. Studying this state of the city reveals the importance of walking routes and the power of simply occupying spaces which are not normally used, or being present at unusual times of day. New Year celebrations are one such occupation, where normally serene and quiet religious spaces become hubs of celebratory activity. In line with the dual religions often observed by Japanese people, Buddhist temples are visited to see the New Year in, and a Shinto shrine is visited on New Year’s Day, but some shrines also have activities in the lead up to the turn of the year.
As an important national holiday, New Year (the calendar year is celebrated alongside the lunar New Year in Japan) is accompanied by decorations
celebrating the zodiac animal of the year to come alongside arrangements of kagami mochi, two large round pounded rice cakes stacked on top of one another and decorated with a daidai citrus fruit, paper streamers, and placed on an elevated wooden tray; the chewy mochi are to be eaten lightly grilled on 11 January. Other decorations include kadomatsu or ‘gate pine’
arrangements of three cut bamboos placed outside the entrance to buildings, further decorated with sprigs of pine tree or plum tree (Figure 6.4). This threshold marker starts to appear from mid-December until mid-January and is intended to welcome the Toshigami, Shinto kami who bring in the New Year.
The temporary nature of the decorations, which are designed to be consumed in part, along with the marking of the threshold again marks this festival out as distinctly architectural in its sensibility.
The New Year’s Eve traditions celebrated in Kyoto and other Japanese cities take possession of the city in a manner different to festivals such as Sanja Matsuri,12 but the city is still occupied by the people of the city in a wholehearted manner. The relationship between home and the temple and shrine is strongly expressed: a bringing of the city and wider community into the domestic sphere.
Associations with particular shrines and temples often conform to family or neighbourhood lines – with no hard rules about which you would give priority
FIGURE 6.4 Author’s photograph of Kadomatsu decoration.
to. Some of the larger temples gain more attention due to their scale and prominence, but the smaller temples also garner more visitors than usual and are celebrated for their atmosphere of intimacy, even authenticity.
Streets that are normally deserted at this time of the evening in winter are full of revellers walking from temple to temple (Figure 6.5). This activation of space outside of the norm is one component of the festive city.
Okera Mairi (おけら参り) is a tradition particular to the Yasaka Shrine. Sacred fires are lit at the shrine, large braziers are tended carefully by feeding them the wooden tablets with wishes and prayers written on them, the burning of these prayers sends them up to the heavens to be fulfilled. Short 20–30 cm lengths of bamboo rope are sold by hawkers – rakish characters who are tolerated by the shrine, but operate as a secondary economy making profit from a sacred practice much like the street food market which springs up within the sacred precinct during celebrations. The ropes are lit at the fires, then spun in the air and carefully protected from the wind to keep them burning (Figure 6.6). The purpose is to take the fire from the shrine back home and light the hearth for cooking the first meal of the New Year. We might relate this to Banham’s (1969) and Heschong’s (1979) concepts of architecture as environmental control and modification, where he maintains that architecture
FIGURE 6.5 Author’s photograph of Kyoto street during New Year celebrations.
is as much about the maintenance of thermal conditions as it is about form and space. Associating this important source of heat with the local shrine is a significant and architectonic act.
Also at the Yasaka Shrine, monks give out sweet non-alcoholic sake called amazake in exchange for a nominal donation. Delicate porcelain sake dishes are also received as a memento. Other parts of the sacred precinct are occupied by street food stalls selling a wide range of hearty and informal foods, including rich noodle stews, fried chicken and charcoal grilled fish.
Temples observe the tradition of Joya no kane (除夜の鐘), tolling a large bell (Figure 6.7) 108 times to represent the number of earthly desires and passions which assail humanity and prevent us from reaching the state of Nirvana. Each ring of the bell dispatches one of these desires. Worshippers can queue to take a turn at certain temples to ring these enormous bells for themselves. Waiting on the hill of Kodai-ji Temple in Gion is something of a test of endurance, with the extreme cold just staved off with hot drinks of tea and sake, and crowds huddled around open fire braziers. Going through such modest hardships is seen as an integral part of the experience to some revellers.
FIGURE 6.6 Author’s photograph of Yasaka Shrine, Kyoto with braziers, street food sellers and amazake.
Visiting temples and shrines in the middle of the night is an altered experience from the normal run of daytime visits. More time is spent waiting for various small events which punctuate the festival, and the environmental conditions make for a completely different sensory experience: the bright flickering fires against inky night skies, the hubbub of excited revellers punctuated by bell ringing and engaging with various activities such as the lighting of ropes: these practices all alter the narrative or rhythm of the visit, marking it out as a special experience.
The New Year’s Day shrine visit is called Hatsumoˉde13 (Figure 6.8) and follows similar patterns of local versus major shrines as the New Year’s Eve activities – extending even to returning to hometowns away from the cities and towns where people have settled. The year is inaugurated by drinking sake from a barrel (in the case of hotels this might be a full-scale barrel, homeowners often opt for a barrel-shaped container to be filled from a bottle with magnetic top for ease of ‘breaking’); this is broken open with a mallet and cold, crisp sake drunk over breakfast.
Fortunes are a traditional part of shrine visits, but take on added importance at New Year. O-mikuji Fortunes are printed on paper and drawn randomly.
Randomization is achieved by pulling a stick from a hexagonal container and taking the corresponding numbered fortune from a small drawer (sometimes FIGURE 6.7 Author’s photograph of Bell at Kodai-ji.
a vending machine takes the place of this process). When a positive prediction is received, it is tied to specific places in the shrine such as purpose built frames or the branches of pine trees. These will eventually be disposed of by the shrine. Ema are small wooden boards of various types (most often shaped as irregular wide-based pentagons and with decoration on one side specific to the shrine). These are written on by worshippers bearing prayers and wishes and are also hung at specific places in the shrine, to be burnt by the priests and attendants at important dates in the shrine’s calendar. Clusters of both Ema and fortune slips are a feature of most shrines. Whilst not restricted to New Year, both o-mikuji and ema are an important part of Hatsumōde.
There are a great many more details to the festivities, from the display of food as a ritual offering (to be consumed later at a banquet and largely representing the generosity of local businesses) to the purchase of amulets and the details of the shrines and temples themselves. What is important to our purpose here, however, is to observe the manner in which festive activities change the nature of the space: underlining that space is socially constructed.
The intersecting path made by revellers who identify with particular shrines and temples for various reasons crosses over with a discussion of the secular versus religious nature of the events which dominates much of the literature on Japanese ritual. Shinto and Japanese Buddhism operate within daily life in a manner which frustrates easy categorization as religious FIGURE 6.8 Author’s photographs of Hatsumōde at Fushimi Inari Shrine.
activity. This celebration involves crossing the city in different ways to usual, occupying the street at times of day normally reserved for night trades of delivery, transportation and security. The festive decoration of thresholds and symbolically connecting the domestic to the religious makes for a study which opens the space of the city up as a pedestrian activity: in both senses of the word – utterly banal and ordinary; and as something to be experienced on foot.
Notes
1 See Forty (2004).
2 See Hillier & Hanson (2008) for more on this.
3 See Careri (2002), Ingold & Vergunst (2008), Tester (1994), Gros (2015) and others for material on aesthetic wandering.
4 See, for example, Dunn (2016) and Beaumont (2015).
5 See Elkin (2017), D’Souza & McDonough (2008) and Rendell (1996).
6 A term referring to our perception of our own bodies.
7 The English translation of this 1979 work was not published until 2005, when Augoyard had become better known through his leadership of the Cresson Institute in Grenoble with Gregoire Chelkoff, with important work on the intersection between architecture and sound design in Sonic Design (2006) and a broader focus on the study of ambiance.
8 Notwithstanding Guy Debord’s critique of contemporary life as being precisely focused on spectacle in The Society of the Spectacle (1994). Our intention is to rehabilitate the ordinary and our interest in this as architects.
Many of the sources for this can be found in contemporary anthropology.
9 This is addressed in Drawing Parallels (Lucas, 2019a), where I discuss the particular case of the axonometric drawings.
10 See Augoyard & Torgue (2006) for more on this.
11 Hills over 3,000 feet, or 914 metres, are in the group of 284 Munroes. The practice is named after Sir Hugh Munro, a mountaineer who listed them in the 1880s.
12 For more on this festival, see Chapter 7 of this volume as well as Lucas (2018b).
13 For further details on Hatsumode and its place between cultural and religious tradition, see Ozawa De-Silva (2014) and Porcu (2012).
Introduction
Various forms of art and social event can be understood as performances, suspending the implicit and explicit rules of everyday life in order to enable roles to be adopted. Most often, we would associate this with the formal theatre space, where a clear distinction is made between the performers and the audience. This separation gives rise to a great many theories in anthropology and architecture, not least of liminality: of threshold spaces.
At their simplest, thresholds are openings between one spatial condition and another: a door from outside to inside, for example. The rules of behaviour in interior spaces are quite different from those outside, be that in the country or the city. Different standards of behaviour are expected in each place.
Similarly, definitions of interior space multiply, with the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen of a typical Western home being understood to enable activities of sleeping, washing and food preparation. If spaces can be understood to have these alternative qualities, then the borders between them are significant.
Applying theatrical and performative metaphors to how we present ourselves socially can also have architectural implications: the ideas of staging explored by Goffman, for example, take account of how we project a constructed self in social situations. This is not a falsehood so much as an effective character designed for each interaction, reserving some of our deeper feelings for more intimate encounters.
7
Theatre and Festival:
Performance and Liminal
Space
This chapter addresses some of the ways in which these border conditions can be widened and exploited, from the subsidiary stage and complicated fictional space of a Kabuki theatre to the days of misrule in an urban festival in Tokyo, physical or social liminal conditions allow us to inhabit spaces in substantially different ways, representing one of the fundamental elements of architecture as a discipline. Some of the potentials of the graphic anthropology method are presented via the accompanying illustrations, ranging from architectural and diagrammatic to painterly and notational explorations of the festival.