Conflict, Legitimacy, and Tradition in a Tokyo Neighborhood

Theodore C. Bestor

Traditions are generally regarded as unproblematic artifacts of social life, the comforting residue of the past carried gently into the present. Particularly in a society such as Japan, where the contrast between tradition and modernity has been drawn so forcefully and repeatedly by both foreign observers and Japanese commentators alike, traditions have a reassuring ring of historical authenticity about them.

My research has focused on old-fashioned, seemingly traditional patterns of community organization in Tokyo, on patterns of social organization that are frequently thought to be historical survivals from preindustrial life. Over the past decade I have conducted research in a neighborhood I call Miyamoto-cho,’ an area of Tokyo that conforms to Japanese stereotypes of the “urban village”-a place where myriad organizations intertwine to form a highly cohesive, localized social structure that directly affects many residents across a very wide spectrum of their lives and livelihoods; a place where strong and enduring informal ties create for many residents a face-to-face community; a place where communal identity and cohesion-including symbolic and ritual expressions of community-continue to be stressed, reproducing the community in each succeeding generation.

In many ways, Miyamoto-cob epitomizes an old-fashioned Tokyo neighborhood where the weight of historical tradition appears to sustain community social structure and values of communal identity, cohesion, and autonomy. The story could end there, and for many Japanese observers it does. But on closer inspection, Miyamoto-chti’s apparent retention of traditional patterns of community is at best a historical illusion, for the neighborhood is heir neither to a preindustrial hamlet nor to the preindustrial city of Edo (as Tokyo was known before 1868). The neighborhood simply did not exist before 1923, and much of the content of local tradition is developed anew every few years. Miyamoto-chio’s traditions (and the image of the neighborhood as being traditional that many residents’subscribe to) are thus present-day social constructions that owe little to local historical antecedent but owe
much to the interplay of contemporary political, economic, social, and cultural forces. This creation or representation of Miyamoto­ co6 as a seemingly traditional community reflects a process I call traditionalism, and I use the term truditionulistic to underscore distinctions between historical antecedents and contemporary constructions.

In this essay I am specifically concerned with how the neighborhood’s traditions are formed and shaped in response to ongoing social conflicts within Miyamoto-cho. I focus on the ways in which symbols of “traditionalism” are created and modified in events such as the neighborhood’s annual festival. And I examine how different groups within the neighborhood put forward their own interpretations or versions of local tradition in order to control events, establish their own claims to social status, and maintain or overturn Miyamoto-cho’s established social order.

As Bernard Cohn notes in his study of the British Raj, 16 authority once achieved must have a secure and usable past” (1983, 167, quoting J. H. Plumb). Tradition provides just such a secure and usable past, and it is tradition that so frequently becomes the focus of struggles within Miyamoto-cho to assert, maintain, or extend the authority of a variety of actors and interest groups. Claims that Miyamoto-cho’s present reflects a venerable tradition, of course, add luster to the image, the standing, and the legitimacy of the community as a whole. But within the encompassing aura of community tradition, competing factions emphasize or legitimate their own authority over Miyamoto-cho through their control of that tradition, selectively invoking and interpreting elements of tradition-or, when necessary, creating them on the spot-to justify their specific interests or positions.

In particular, competition for legitimacy waged in the name of tradition proceeds on several levels, external and internal. Externally, Miyamoto-cho competes with nearby neighborhoods for political power, for economic position, and for ritual standing. In this latter instance, Miyamoto-cho’s case is bolstered by its position as home to the local shrine and hence primus inter pares among the seven neighborhoods of the shrine’s parish. Miyamoto-cho is also continually skirmishing with the municipal government over the government’s efforts to redefine boundaries and to undermine the legitimacy of “traditional” community institutions.

On internal levels, within the neighborhood different groups assert their control over the content of local tradition to advance their own interests. Conflicts exist among members of the Community over their standing and legitimacy based on cleavages of age, gender, length of residence, occupation, and socioeconomic class. Among insiders, leadership factions divided along generational lines squabble over the control of community events. Similarly, struggles break out between “respectable” and “marginal” members of the community, with the “marginals” trying to wrap themselves in tradition to ensure their social recognition. And finally, conflicts over the meaning of traditions and the kind of community social structure they engender take place in the context of much broader-though rarely overt or explicit-antipathies between members of the so-called old middle class and the
new, that is, between self-employed merchants and artisans on the one hand and white-collar salaried businesspeople and bureaucrats on the other.

Before outlining in more detail how these competitions work themselves out, let me turn to a brief description of the neighborhood itself. Miyamoto-cho is about twenty minutes by commuter train from Tokyo station in what is now considered an older section of the city. Until the early decades of this century the area was a farming hamlet; after the 1923 Kant6 earthquake destroyed central Tokyo, this hamlet was engulfed by Tokyo’s outward expansion and was fully urbanized within a decade. The neighborhood therefore is a recent creation, largely populated and formed in the 1920s and 1930s, with institutional antecedents neither in the rural past nor in preindustrial urban life, although both are frequently cited to explain the neighborhood’s present. Now asserted to be “natural” communities, neighborhoods like Miyamoto-cho were created throughout Tokyo in the 1920s and 1930s by national, prefectural, and municipal agencies as administrative expedients, and their boundaries were drawn and redrawn throughout the 1930s up to the eve of World War II.

The neighborhood is less than a tenth of a square kilometer in area, with about 1,900 residents in 750 households. Miyamoto-cho is a densely packed, mixed residential and commercial area centered around a bustling shopping street that runs near a small Shinto shrine, from which the neighborhood derives its name. Miyamoto-cho’s jumbled homes and apartment buildings are interspersed with about 100 small stores and 40 tiny workshops, almost all of which are owned and operated as household enterprises. The neighborhood is a middle-or lower-middle-class community, dominated socially, politically, and commercially by the self-employed merchants and manufacturers for whom Miyamoto-cho is both home and workplace.

Miyamoto-chd is an ordinary place similar to hundreds of other neighborhoods that stretch in a wide arc to the north, east, and south of central Tokyo. No visible signs of social, economic, or cultural distinctiveness set Miyamoto-cob apart from its surroundings. Yet there is no question in the minds of those who live and work there, or on the part of those outsiders such as government officials who regularly deal with the neighborhood, that Miyamoto-cho exists as a distinguishable entity.

Structurally, Miyamoto-cho has a full complement of interlocking social groups and interpersonal ties of the sorts that typify a traditionalistic urban neighborhood like those found in shitamachi, the classic merchant quarter of central Tokyo. Local groups include a quasi-administrative neighborhood association, or chokai as well as its women’s auxiliary and old people’s club; a shopkeepers’ guild; several PTAs and school alumni clubs; a festival committee and several shrine organizations; a political club; and many recreational or hobby groups. Networks of personal ties run throughout the neighborhood and are relied on by residents in most of the transactions of daily life. Residents are linked to one another by elementary school friendships carried over into adult life; by organized hobbies such as flower arrangement, tea ceremony, or travel; by economic and political self-interest; and by joint participation in the many local associations and groups mentioned above. Through these organizations and through these individual social, political, and economic networks, interaction among residents is frequent; for many people the neighborhood is a face-to-face community.

The chokai is unquestionably the neighborhood’s most important and visible organization. It acts as a semiofficial local government, providing services to residents both at local initiative and on the orders of the municipal authorities. It transmits demands, requests, and information that flow from municipal agencies and higher levels of government to the neighborhood, and vice versa. The chokai distributes information on government programs and regulations and assists the government in record keeping, census taking, and conducting other surveys of local conditions. It lobbies the municipal government on behalf of residents on issues ranging from building a traffic bypass to limiting noise from a local daycare center.

Local groups sponsor a wide range of mutual aid, public safety, public health, and recreational activities. They help at funerals; they aid residents whose homes have been destroyed by fire; they organize earthquake drills; they sponsor traffic safety campaigns; they patrol the neighborhood against fire and crime; they maintain street lights; they spray the neighborhood with pesticides throughout the summer; they run recycling programs; and they sponsor festivals, folk dances, and trips to hot springs.

Informal ties among residents form a base without which many aspects of the formal organizations’ activities could not function. Without them consensual decision making would be impossible, mutual aid and social control would fail, and the chokai and other groups would lack the means to mobilize residents to contribute time, labor, and money to neighborhood activities.

On another level, the neighborhood is an important sphere of economic activity, and the local shopping street’s sixty- odd businesses provide a wide spectrum of goods and services for a primarily local clientele; almost all households do the bulk of their shopping for day-to-day needs within a couple of blocks of home. Most shopkeepers, craftspeople, factory owners, and even professionals, such as doctors, dentists, or accountants, conduct business in small shops, workshops, or offices attached to their homes. Family members are often involved in all aspects of the household enterprise. Ties between customers or clients and the merchant or professional are often close; shops and offices frequently become neighborhood social centers as residents stop to chat over a cup of tea. Local tradespeople and professionals, therefore play an important role in community life not simply because of the links they establish or maintain among other residents.

Socially, if not numerically, Miyamoto-cho is dominated by the households of small merchants and other petty entrepreneurs, who set the tone for neighborhood interaction and local social life. In the central role assumed by entrepreneurs and in the plethora of institutions and associations that loom so larlge in Miyamoto-cho, the neighborhood resembles shitamachi, the older mercantile and artisanal districts of central Tokyo. The distinction between shitamachi and its opposite - yamanote, the nonmerchant areas of Tokyo dominated by white-collar employees and their more "modern" lifestyles - is one of the most fundamental social, subcultural, and geographic demarcations in contemproary Tokyo. This dicotomy is not only applied to Tokyo as a whole but also is projected upon the social life of even so small a unit as Miyamoto-cho.

In the minds of most Japanese, class standing and involvement in neighborhood affairs are inextricably linkied. Neighborhood social life is seen as an aspect of the lifestyle of the so-called middle class, a lifestyle that persists because of the cultural conservatism thought to be inherent in shitamachi. Although Miyamoto-cho itself has no direct historical ties to the classic merchant quarter, and few if any of its merchange households go back in the neighborhood more than two generations, many residents of Miyamoto-cho self-consciously identify themselves, their community, and the neighborhood's style of social life with that of shitamachi.

Although no one is formally excluded from participating in the social life of Miyamoto-cho, members of the new middle class - sarariman - salaried employees of large corporations and government bureaucrats - are excluded de facto, by their lack of time to assume leadership roles, by their involvement in other kinds of social institutions, and by their general social values; that is, they tend to look down on community involvement as parochial, feudal and undemocratic. In this they share the standard outlook of yamanote Tokyo, the Tokyo of the new middle-class elite.

But the. neighborhood is defined not only through its internal institutions and interactions, nor only through the attitudes of its residents. Rather, the neighborhood and especially the neighborhood association-the chdkai-are also defined through their interactions with the municipal government of the ward in which Miyamoto-cho is located.

The Neighborhood and the Government

Although the chokai is nominally a nongovernmental body, it is in close and constant contact with a wide range of municipal agencies, particularly the branch office of the ward government .2 This office handles various official transactions for individual residents and acts as a liaison between the ward government and ten contiguous neighborhoods, including Miyamoto-cho. Municipal authorities regard chokai as little more than semi- official agencies of the government itself, and the branch office considers these ten chokai to be under its jurisdiction. Neighborhood leaders dispute this interpretation of their organizations’ roles and complain about the responsibilities they feel they are forced to shoulder by the municipal, metropolitan, and at times even national governments in pursuit of the government’s rather than the neighborhood’s goals.

Beyond coordinating administrative functions, in recent years the branch office has become the focal point for the ward’s increasingly active policy of machi-zukuri, or “community-creation.” Machi-zukuri policies stem from a belief-widely held by scholars and officials-that existing patterns and institutions of neighborhood life as exemplified by chokai are outmoded and inappropriate in contemporary society; the municipal government
therefore feels it must step in and create institutions that will foster a sense of community and citizenship appropriate to a modern, democratic society (see Nakamura 1980). Ironically, in its attempts to do so, the ward government takes the existing neighborhoods and their activities not only as the instruments but also as the models for creating new senses of community awareness. Thus, these efforts do little to lessen mistrust between neighborhoods and the municipal government. This mistrust in part reflects lingering memories of the government’s wartime role in regimenting local neighborhood institutions as part of the general war mobilization. And contemporary efforts by the municipal and metropolitan governments to promote machi-zukuri are seen as simply another effort to supplant chokai both as institutions and as focal points of residents’ sentiments of identity.

One conflict arose in the 1960s when the government attempted to merge local chokai into larger, allegedly more
rational units of administration. To an outsider nothing differentiates the neighborhoods that were to be affected by this plan, but their residents loudly and, in the end, successfully fought the ward government to a standstill.

In Miyamoto-cho this opposition took a seemingly curious form. On the face of things, residents of Miyamoto-cho and the adjacent neighborhood with which it was to be merged have political and economic interests that would not have been served by a merger. Each neighborhood has routinely been able to elect a member to the ward assembly, so there was political turf to protect. Similarly, merchants’ groups in each neighborhood strive to
maintain and increase their share of local trade in the face of competition not only from other neighborhoods, but also from the large shopping district surrounding a nearby railway station.

Undoubtedly, such factors played a part in mobilizing resistance to the merger, but these are not the reasons mentioned by residents. Instead, they explain resistance as an effort to preserve the “distinct” traditions of the neigborhoods involved. Neither neighborhood was willing to alter practices they felt best suited their own needs and their own sense of autonomous tradition and identity. These sentiments, in Miyamoto-cho at least, revolved in part around the neighborhood hall. The issue was not simply a question of sharing ownership of an old and dilapidated building; it also involved symbolism central to the neighborhood’s self-definition. Miyamoto-cho's hall had been built by residents out of the rubble of homes and shops destroyed during World War II. It was thus an important symbol (at least for older residents) of their communal survival through adversity, And this they were
unwilling to share with other neighborhoods. The hall became an important rallying point for their opposition to the neighborhood merger, and ultimately this opposition prevailed.

To be sure, in 1967 the ward government went ahead and redrew the boundaries, and now the two neighborhoods appear on maps as a single unit. But today that larger unit is used for almost nothing but numbering houses. The chokai and other local groups do not recognize the larger unit, nor in fact does the ward office. Since the ward office depends on the chokai to carry out many of its tasks, it is forced to work within the frameworks that chokai acknowledge.

Today, the government’s branch office also plans and sponsors a variety of traditionalistic activities that often duplicate events put on by individual neighborhoods themselves. Events sponsored by the ward government frequently involve many of the trappings common to the activities of chokai, and neighborhood leaders grumble about being upstaged by the larger, more lavish events the ward government can afford to put on. One example is the extremely elaborate Kumin Matsuri (Ward Residents’ Festival), modeled on customary Bon Odori folk-dance festivals held in midsummer throughout Japan. The ward government first spon­sored the Kumin Matsuri in 1979, and it included a specially commissioned ward residents’ folk song and a folk dance, both of which conform to the conventions of contemporary, commercialized “traditional” folk song and dance genres.‘ The ostentatiousness of this first annual festival aroused so much ill will among chokai leaders that the following year each of the ward government’s eleven branch ofices was forced to hold separate scaled- down versions. But the ward festival continues to be more elaborate than the corresponding efforts of the chokai, and neighborhood leaders continue to complain about the cooperation” they feel forced to give the branch office in its planning of this event.

By the summer of 1984, the Kumin Matsuri had become routinized to such an extent that leaders in Miyamoto-cho and adjacent neighborhoods had discontinued their own independent summer folk-dance festivals. In part, however, the decision to abandon the summer folk dances to the government was related to Miyamoto-cho’s autumn festival, which over the past five years had grown increasingly elaborate; increasingly had drawn the neighborhood’s time and money; and increasingly had become the focus of internal neighborhood dispute.

The Festival

The annual autumn festival, or aki-matsuri, for the tutelary deity of the Shinto shrine from which Miyamoto-cho derives its name, is one of Miyamoto-cho’s most vivid community events.’ In contrast to the municipal government’s Kumin Matsuri, which loosely appropriates the Shinto term for festival (matsuri), the annual autumn festival in Miyamoto-cho is at its core an authentic Shinto ritual that involves both the local shrine and its parishioners. The focus of activity for many residents is not the shrine itself, but the observances held separately in each of the seven neighborhoods, including Miyamoto-cho, that make up the shrine’s parish. During the matsuri the enshrined tutelary deity descends from its normal abode in the shrine’s inner sanctum and is carried in mikoshi (portable shrines) through the streets of each neighborhood to bestow its blessings and ensure that all is well in
the area under its sway. Whether for these theological reasons or for other, social ones, each neighborhood’s observances are largely distinct from those at the shrine, and for many residents the neighborhoods’ festivals-not the shrine’s-are the centers of attention.

The two-day matsuri is a dramatic symbol of communal identity, and the community celebrations draw wide participation. It is, of course, a Shinto rite (and given the postwar separation of church and state the ward government has to keep its hands off).6 But despite the festival’s clear Shinto character, for most who participate it is a largely secular ritual of obscure religious significance, although full of social meaning. Even those whose beliefs are incompatible with Shinto sometimes play a part. One local leader, himself a Baptist, once explained to me that he felt no compunctions against playing a leading role in the festival since he saw it not as a religious observance but as a community event.

The matsuri is organized by a committee (known as the sairei-iin) convened each summer by the chokai but whose members are drawn from the full range of local associations and include residents who otherwise take no active part in neighborhood affairs throughout the rest of the year. Each August the committee’s leaders draw up an elaborate organizational table of festival assignments. Two or three weeks before the festival a delegation of leaders pays a formal call on the 150 or so households that have been assigned tasks related to putting on the festival. Each household is presented a printed copy of the list of positions on festival subcommittees, a small cotton hand towel tenugui) decorated with the year’s festival motif, and a pair of straw sandals to be worn during the festival. Each job-for example, serving on the subcommittee charged with overseeing the musicians’ cart, or
leading the dancing troupe from the women’s auxiliary, or supervising the children’s mikoshi-is ranked in prestige, and festival participants gradually work themselves up from position to position and from subcommittee to subcommittee over the years.

In part, these positions and people’s status within the festival are related to the monetary contributions they make. Households with no position on the festival committee usually give two thousand or three thousand yen, if they contribute at all. Leaders are expected to contribute at least ten thousand and perhaps as much as thirty thousand yen. Donations are tricky, however, and reflect or correspond to one’s standing both in the community and in the festival organization. One can easily err in either direction; too small a donation, of course, marks one as stingy, but too large betrays arrogance and ambition, rather than open-hearted generosity.

Through the matsuri, several important but sometimes contradictory social themes are expressed. Social stratification and ranking within Miyamoto-cho5 are expressed and enforced through assignments of positions on the festival committee. Public posting of residents’ contributions confirms one’s standing or holds one’s pretensions up to public view. Distinctions are underscored between newcomers and residents of long standing and between those who work in the neighborhood and those who work elsewhere. The management of the festival, even the spatial and temporal distribution of activities during the matsuri, reflects rigid divisions of labor along gender and generational lines.

In even the most seemingly trivial fashions, the festival symbolizes distinctions of status among residents. At banquets and other formal meetings, for example, seating arrangements clearly reflect hierarchies of status and power. At the hachiurai, the banquet marking the completion of the year’s festival, held in the old chokai hall, men sit arranged along the “inner’” wall with older and more prestigious but less powerful men seated at the “top” of the room; the younger, active, more powerful leaders sit in the middle; and the youngest leaders-to-be, hangers-on, and other anomalies (like the anthropologist) occupy the “bottom.” Women sit along the “outer” wall facing the men, but as power and authority are less differentiated among women, they array themselves from “top” to “bottom” with less self-conscious attention.

This spatial representation of hierarchy first struck me when my wife and I attended the hachiarai after the 1979 festival, only a few months after I began fieldwork. Of course, we violated one rule simply by attending the event together. We compounded our error by sitting together in what I judged to be an innocuous location well down the “outer” wall, in the midst of a group of women we knew. Consternation reigned. Men tugged at my sleeve. Women whispered to my wife. Our stupidity got worse- we resisted our hosts’ entreaties and simply stayed put! As I watched with gradually dawning comprehension and growing horror, the formal banquet shifted around us. We stayed in place as geography was rearranged. Men moved so that my seat became the end of the male chain of hierarchy now wrapped around both sides of the room, and women scrunched together to assure that my wife, although by my side, was clearly seated within women’s territory!

But despite the social differentiation that plays so visible a role throughout the festival, an overt spirit of egalitarianism and community solidarity is publicly presented as the matsuri’s dominant motif. This ideology of communal solidarity is manifested in many ways, some of them quite concrete. One important example is the mikoshi, the portable shrine, a small replica of a shrine building a meter square and equally tall, placed on a framework of horizontal poles that if laid on the ground would occupy the area of a small automobile. The mikoshi, mounted on this latticework of poles, is carried on the shoulders of twenty or thirty people, customarily men.

When the priest sanctifies the mikoshi and installs the deity into temporary residence within it, the mikoshi is said to be under the control of the deity rather than the bearers. The mikoshi indeed seems to take on a life of its own and becomes a bucking, pitching, careening force beyond the control or influence of any individual among its bearers, who are themselves often more than a little under the influence of sake. Accompanied by almost deafening, hypnotic, rhythmic chants and drum beats punctuated by a rapid counterpoint of whistle blasts, the mikoshi is steered, if that is the correct term, by two or three men who clear away bystanders and try (not always successfully) to prevent damage to property These several men continually shove against the mikoshi bearers to try to turn the direction of the mikoshi, to slow its speed, or to calm its gyrations.

The link between the mikoshi and communal ideology becomes evident in several ways. For example, a common opinion during 1979-1981 was that Miyamoto-cho’s two mikoshi were too small and really should only be carried by children. Both were thought to be light enough that one person among the bearers could influence their course and behavior; ideally, many people told me, a mikoshi should be so heavy that no single person’s actions could affect or even be noticeable in its movements. Lacking a larger, more substantial mikoshi, the adults of Miyamoto-cho continued to carry the larger of the two small mikoshi in the processions, but sentiment clearly favored replacing it with an impressively massive mikoshi.

In another way, as well, the mikoshi and the processions that carry them serve as compelling markers of the community’s boundaries and identity, In each of its major circuits of the neighborhood, the mikoshi is carried (or perhaps directs itself) to the borders of the neighborhood-and no farther. Where the neighborhood’s definition of its boundaries disagrees with the borders drawn by the ward government, the mikoshi observes the neighborhood’s. The mikoshi is careful to pass through all corners of the neighborhood, and the processions trace Miyamoto-cho’s boundaries as closely as they can. When the route of a mikoshi unavoidably must pass through the territory of an adjacent neighborhood -as when roads or alleys linking parts of one neighborhood run through another-the festival committees from the neighborhoods involved negotiate the route beforehand. When a mikoshi, or a women’s dance troupe, takes an unnegotiated detour through another neighborhood, leaders from the invaded neighborhood grumble and expect an apology from the festival committee of the offending neighborhood.

In short, on its annual round of inspection, the tutelary deity offers powerful symbolic support for the legitimacy of Miyamoto-cho’s borders, reaffirms the solidarity of those who live within them, and provides a rationale for maintaining the integrity of those boundaries and the unit they surround in the face of pressures from the ward to reconstitute the neighborhood. Finally, although the matsuri nominally promotes cooper­ ation and identification among the seven neighborhoods of the shrine’s parish, the mikoshi and their processions provide a venue for inter-neighborhood competition. In the late 1970s the neighborhood adjacent to Miyamoto-chb triumphed with an impressive new mikoshi, hand built by local young men. But during 1979­ 1981 Miyamoto-cho countered with the as-yet-unsurpassed spectacle of a foreign anthropologist and his exotic, red-haired, folk- dancing wife featured prominently in its processions.

But in the longer run, other strategies were required to uphold the neighborhood’s standing, and after the 1980 festival the debate about whether and how to raise the money to build a new mikoshi was beginning to be waged publicly in Miyamoto­ cho. At the banquet following the 1980 festival, one of the young leaders of the neighborhood unexpectedly rose during the final formal speeches and proposed that the neighborhood dedicate itself to obtaining a new mikoshi.

The Festival and Internal Conflict

Thus far, my account of Miyamoto-cho’s festival has focused primarily on ways in which traditions of community-vividly symbolized through the festival and its paraphernalia- emphasize the internal solidarity of Miyamoto-cho at the same time that internal cohesion plays a role in the neighborhood’s "foreign relations,” highlighted in conflicts with the ward government and paraded in competitions with Miyamoto-cho’s immediate neighbors. But with the drive to build a new mikoshi, Miyamoto-cho’s festival became an arena for the expression and enactment of intense institutional and personal rivalries wilhin the neighborhood.

The speaker who proposed the new mikoshi drive represented a faction of “younger” leaders: men in their forties and fifties who constituted the inner circle of supporters of the local politician who had been elected to the local ward assembly for the first time only three years before. This “young” politician had successfully achieved his election without inheriting-or being actively supported by-the local political machine of a now-retired politician whose followers continued to dominate the institutional structure of Miyamoto-chd’s chdkai: men in their sixties, seventies, and eighties who had led the neighborhood since the immediate postwar years.

The older leaders were generally “self-made men” who had founded their own businesses just before, during, or after World War II and who were now (at least by local standards) prosperous , successful elder statesmen. The younger leadership faction, conversely, was largely made up of second-or third-generation entrepreneurs whose inherited businesses were often larger and more prosperous than those owned by the elder group. Interestingly, the younger group included several mukoyoshi (adopted sons-in-law): outsiders whose entry to the neighborhood came when they married the daughters of established local entrepreneurial families.

The two factions of leaders were only slightly divided by political affiliations, in the broader sense of the term. Both the young politician and the older, now-retired one were members of the same conservative party, and therefore the young politician- by virtue of his office, once elected-was accepted by (and equally acceptable to) all factions of Miyamoto-chb’s conservative leadership. The two factions of leaders were not separated by any significant differences in political philosophy, and they were equally committed, both pragmatically and in principle, to the neighborhood as the means and more significantly as the ends of political action.

But however much the two groups agreed in general political philosophy and on the importance of the neighborhood, they differed in their views on the exercise of political power within Miyamoto-cho, they differed in who their supporters were and how they mobilized them, and most consequentially they differed in how they felt the ch6kai and other neighborhood institutions should revitalize themselves in the face of indifference on the part of many residents.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the older generation of leaders tended toward a fairly authoritarian political style. No longer involved with electoral politics, they were not overly concerned with marshaling or mobilizing larger numbers of supporters. In any case, they subscribed to a view of leadership in which age, seniority, and the status conferred by offices previously held provided leaders their clout. Once decisions were made by the inner circle of upper leaders, orders were simply issued to those lower in standing. The consent of the governed was not at issue, and as far as considering changes in the chdkai’s organization or activities to revitalize it, the older leaders generally argued that practical, pragmatic, unadorned services were what the residents wanted and were what the ch6kai should strive harder to deliver.

The younger leaders disagreed. Many of them themselves bridled at the older generation’s authoritarianism and recognized that other residents, potentially interested in community activities, were alienated by this style. But the younger leaders also held a different view of politics, in so much as they were closely linked to the young politician’s election campaigns. They were very much aware that residents did not automatically recognize the older leader’s legitimacy and that to attract greater support for the chokai, it had to exert some appeal that would catch residents’ interest. The young leaders recognized the advantages of broadening the basis of chokai support and participation, both for the chokai itself and also for the goals of the young politician. A larger, more vibrant chokai could be used both to recruit support for the young politician and to reward his backers by opening the
organization up to them.

The young leadership faction had two constituencies particularly in mind. The first were younger men, in their thirties and early forties, who would infuse new blood into the chokai and its activities, thus enabling the chokai’s work to be spread around and ensuring that there would be a future generation of cornmitted leadership. The second group were the women of Miyamoto­ cho. The support of women was not of critical importance to the young leaders in terms of revitalizing the chokai (for they, no less than the older faction, saw men as indisputably natural leaders), but it was important for the faction’s wider political goals.

The young politician had begun his career in neighborhood politics as the president first of the elementary school PTA and then of the local junior high school PTA, and so he was well known to and well liked by many of the women of the neighborhood. In his political activities, such as trips to hot springs organized for several busloads of local supporters, women outnumbered men, and he courted locally prominent women for their support. Teachers of arts and crafts such as tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and dance-with their coterie of devoted middle- aged female students-were especially favored by the young politician’s attention.

In the view of the young leaders, new and different strategies to increase the visibility of the chokai were necessary if new supporters were to be attracted. Its conventional activities-traffic safety campaigns, recycling, pesticide spraying, and the like- were too inconspicuous and already too much taken for granted by residents to be an effective rallying point, especially for the younger residents they hoped to attract. Instead, the young leaders seized on the festival as an eye-catching means to build support for the chokai and for themselves.

In May 1982, the young leaders’ faction formally launched a drive to raise funds for a new mikoshi. Since these
“neotraditionalists” were opposed by the ‘‘pragmatists” of the older leadership who felt that reconstruction of the neighborhood hall was a higher priority,8 the young leaders formed their own separate organization, which they called the Mikoshi Hoken Jikko Iinkai (Action Committee for the Presentation of a Mikoshi). Within three months of the group’s formal inauguration, the younger faction of leaders was able to raise more than ten million yen (approximately U.S.$50,000at then-current exchange rates) in cash and in pledges from 408 local households. Table 1 provides a financial statement for the mikoshi campaign.

This in itself was a greater show of interest and participation in local life than the activities of the “regular” neighborhood association under the old leadership had ever been able to mobilize, and the new mikoshi organization gave recognition and leadership positions not only to the long-established “loyal opposition” but also to younger men who had previously disdained any participation in local institutions dominated by the old guard and to women whose enthusiastic support for the new venture was a key to its success.

By September 1982-in time for that year’s festival-the newly created Mikoshi Action Committee had commissioned and taken delivery of the largest, most elaborate mikoshi in the area. Leaders of the fund-raising campaign argued that a major objective was to increase participation in the festival-and by extension in neighborhood affairs-by making the local festival more impressive and exciting. But they also pointed out with pride that Miyamoto-cho’s new mikoshi was more impressive than the adjacent neighborhood’s hand-built one. And they talked with unconcealed pleasure about the failure of another adjoining neighborhood to meet the challenge.

TABLE I FINAL STATEMENT OF THE MIKOSHI FINANCIAL HOKEN JIKKO IINKAI’

(ACTION FOR THE PRESENTATION OF A MIKOSHI)1982-1984(IN YEN)

NOTES:

a Financial statement prepared for the municipal authoritieson August 28, 1984, at the formal dissolution of the committee.

Donations collected from 408 households.

Mikoshi paraphernalia includes stand for mikoshi, wooden collection box, all metal fittings.

Mikoshi maintenance includes renting hall for the mikoshi during the festival, cleaning, storage, and minor repairs.

Ceremonial expensesinclude consecrationof the new mikoshi at the shrine.

Fund-raisingexpenses include printing, copying, postage, and other office expenses.

The new mikoshi indeed changed the character of the festival and the scale of neighborhood residents’ participation in it. For the first time in many years, large numbers of teenagers and young men in their twenties avidly joined in the mikoshi processions; and in a sharp break with the neighborhood’s past practices, women too were allowed to join in.9 The festival became livelier, more boisterous, and continued on far later into the evenings than had been the case a few years earlier. One unanticipated consequence of the new mikoshi was that the young leaders who had contrived to have it built found themselves no longcr ablc to participate in carrying the mikoshi itself. The weight and size of the new mikoshi and the energetic frenzy of the young men and women carrying it simply were too taxing for middle-aged men: they would plunge in for five or ten minutes at a time to take a turn carrying the heavy beams supporting the mikoshi but couldn’t match the stamina of young men able to carry it for hours, shouting until their voices were lost, bouncing the mikoshi up and down until their shoulders and backs were black and blue. The “young” leaders therefore increasingly were relegated to the sidelines of the processions in supervisory roles. And so the twoleadership factions found themselves equally observers and managers of the festival, rather than its direct participants, united in any uneasy alliance between the older leaders who actually ran the festival organization and the young leaders who controlled the mikoshi organization.

During the summer of 1984,two years after the Mikoshi Action Committee had been formed and at the end of its legal charter to solicit funds for philanthropic purposes,10 there were convoluted negotiations over the reconciliation of the two rival organizations. With an unspent surplus of about two million yen and the enthusiastic gratitude of many residents who thought the new mikoshi and the excitement it generated were the best thing and to have happened in years, the young leaders were in a position to set the terms for the reconsolidation of neighborhood institutions.

Despite the displeasure of the older leaders at the split, but with a large bankroll and the support of a majority of local residents, the young mavericks rejoined the regular chokai, reoccupied high positions of leadership, and set up the surplus two million yen from the mikoshi in a separate budget under their control.

The organizational rift was healed, and the generational factions of leaders were reconciled. But the mikoshi campaign had unleashed other forces and other interests as well. The festival that year (1984) became the arena for other sets of conflicts, also couched in terms of who could legitimately claim to represent and participate in traditional communal life.

In their drive to build a new mikoshi the young leadershipfaction had recruited the enthusiastic support of what one might call the underclass of Miyamoto-ch0-the day laborers and construction foremen who have loose ties with the underworld and who quite consciously view themselves as the true heirs to the rough-and-tumble lifestyles of premodern shitamachi, where festivals of rough workmen were punctuated by drunkenness, brawling, and general licentiousness.

In Miyamoto-cho, the laborers and the labor bosses saw the new mikoshi as a vehicle for asserting their role in community life, which in their opinion had been in the hands of conservative, “respectable,” and wealthier merchants and manufacturers far too long.

The construction workers saw the mikoshi as theirs and by their participation sought to open the festival up-making it much less controlled, much more frenzied and raucous, much more drunken. To them the festival should no longer be simply a neighborhood event, but an opportunity to invite in-and to impress-their friends and associates from throughout Tokyo.

Thus, for the first time, in 1984 Miyamoto-cho’s festival was joined-or crashed-by large numbers of outsiders. To respectable residents, these outsiders were terribly osoroshii (scary): men with deep knife scars on their faces; men whose backs were elaborately tattooed; men who stripped down to loincloths to whirl the mikoshi through the streets; worst of all, men who ignored the orders and directions of constituted local authority.

Respectable members of the community stayed away, and things came to a head on the second day of the festival during a heavy rainstorm. Neighborhood leaders ordered that the mikoshi be kept inside for fear the rain might damage the structure and its decorations. The laborers protested and demanded the mikoshi be brought out.

Suddenly, an argument broke out between a neighbor­hood leader, a merchant, and the local labor boss. Within seconds the merchant was jumped by half a dozen laborers who stomped him as he lay in the gutter, his festival garb covered with mud. The fight lasted only a few seconds; but all around, parents pulled their children home, and shutters noisily clattered down.

Eventually the rain broke, and the mikoshi made its rounds. The workmen were allowed to carry it, but they were surrounded by the burliest men the respectable leadership could muster; and when the procession passed the shopfront of the festival leader who had been beaten to the ground, a phalanx of “respectable” leaders formed a conspicuous but passive human shield in front of the shop’s plate glass windows to guard against a sudden lurch of the heavy mikoshi.l2 The festival continued uneventfully but sullenly And quickly, new regulations were drawn up to control the participation of outsiders and to keep the festival firmly under the control of the now reunited “respectable” leadership, both the young leaders who had built the new mikoshi and the old leaders who had initially opposed it.

Later that night, several of the young leaders gathered in a nearby bar to drink and discuss the festival. Inevitably their discussion centered on the brief outburst of violence and the angry mood that lingered afterward. One of the men, himself in the construction business, mused aloud to the group:

It’s all a matter of social status. Tanaka-san [the local labor boss] has been having a hard time lately because of the downturn in the construction industry, and he has trouble finding enough work to keep all his laborers busy. They’ve been getting restless. Tanaka needs to be able to show them he is still important and can still command respect. That’s why he brought his guys to the festival today and that’s why when he got into an argument with Uratsuji-san [the humiliated merchant] he couldn’t back down. He has to show his guys that he is an important man in the community and can control the festival.

Although speaking for the benefit of the other leaders, not particularly for me, my informant had neatly summarized his analysis in terms to gladden an anthropologist. Of course, in this bull session, he was speaking only about the quest for status, leadership, and control on the part of the “marginal” underclass of local society. But I believe his point applies as well to the more general significance of traditional events in community life.

For the “respectable” old middle-class leadership of Miyamoto-cho is also a marginal group, at least in the eyes of new middle-class Japanese salarymen and bureaucrats. Thus for old middle-class merchants it is equally important to be able to demonstrate their own sense of status, leadership, and control. And the arena of community life provides them with the ideal forum in which to do so, just as emphasizing their grasp of tradition is the ideal tool.

Since community is acknowledged by everyone-insider and outsider, resident and bureaucrat, merchant and white-collar worker alike-to be an integral part of the mercantile shitamachi tradition, to the extent that Miyamoto-cho’s old middle-class can forge links-and here I use forge in several meanings-of continuity to the heritage of shitamachi, they are able to enhance their social standing by assuming culturally legitimate and unassailable roles.

In this manner they are able to create and control a social arena in which they call the shots and in which they can justify their exclusion of new middle-class residents on eminently legitimate grounds-their failure to honor traditional values of community participation. Through events such as the festival, a line is clearly drawn between Miyamoto-cho and the wider society, symbolically setting the neighborhood apart. And thus, the old middle-class argues that the systems of ranking that apply in the wider society are null and void within the neighborhood. As residents, the white-collar worker, the symphony musician, and the teacher count for no more and no less than the pharmacist, the baker, and the tofu maker.

Whether outsiders or dissenting insiders like it or not, they are presented with a vision of community and a community social structure that is a fait accompli-a community structure that because of its resonance with tradition is unassailable. Residents and outsiders can choose not to participate, or they can mount a radical critique of Japanese tradition, as do Communists and members of some religious groups that oppose Shinto. But on its own terms the cultural legitimacy of the symbolism invoked in support of the neighborhood’s status quo cannot be shaken.

Thus by accentuating the traditional-most dramatically but not exclusively through the festival-local events serve to imbue Miyamoto-cho and those vying for standing and control with the legitimacy that tradition so amply bestows.

Notes

During 1979-1981, my research in “Miyamotocho” was en­erously supported by the Japan Foundation; the National Science Foun­dation (grant number BNS 7910179); the National Institute of Mental Health (fellowship number MH 08059); and the American Council of Learned Societies-Social Science Research Council Joint Committee on Japanese Studies. Additional research was conducted during three subsequent visits: in September 1983,with support from Sigma Xi; during the summer of 1984, made possible by the Japan Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; and, during the summer of 1986, with support from Columbia University and the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. I also lived in Miyamoto-co again from September 1988 to August 1989 while conducting research elsewhere in Tokyo.
Additional analyses of Miyamoto-cho’s historical development and contemporary social life can be found in Bestor (1985, 1989, 1990a, 1990b). I am grateful to Ardath W. Burks, Takie S. Lebra, Victoria Lyon-Bestor, Robert F. Murphy, Elliott P. Skinner, Robert J. Smith, and Michio Suenari for comments made on various versions of this essay. Portions of’this chapter were previously published in an abridged Japanese-language version as: “Tokyo no aru machi ni okeru katto, dento, seitosei,” in Minzokugaku KnrJyi, vol. 54, no. 3, 1989.
1. Miyamoto-cho is a pseudonym.
2. Throughout this essay I refer to the ku (“ward” or “borough”) government as the municipal administration, in distinction to the prefectural government of Tokyo-to, which only rarely is in direct contact with neighborhood-level institutions or issues. Present-day Tokyo is divided into twenty-three ku, each of which has a limited degree of political and administrative autonomy (see Steiner 1965for a detailed discussion of Tokyo prefectural and municipal governance). While I use “ward” government and “municipal” government more or less inter­changeably, I find it necessary to differentiate these terms because there are municipal functions that are not part of the ward government. Shinagawa ward, in which Miyamoto-ch6 is located, is of average size, with a
population (in 1988)of 345,000 (Shinagawa-ku 1988).
3. In 1988, the ward as a whole contained approximately 160 distinct and recognized neighborhoods (as defined by the existence of chokai) plus an additional 35 or so apartment complexes that have organized local residents groups, called jichikai (see Shinagawa-ku 1988, 240-245), but the ward assembly contains only 40 seats. Thus, neighborhoods able to elect a local candidate are regarded as having secured a highly advantageous resource.
4.The lyrics of the folk song appear in Bestor (1989, 301-302).
5. The following accounts of Miyamoto-cho’s festival are based on my observations, interviews, and participation during the matsuri held in 1979, 1980,1983, 1984, and 1988.
6. In Miyamoto-ch the only government involvement in the festival comes in the form of parade permits issued by the police department to the festival organizers for the mikoshi processions. Generally, a couple of officers, and sometimes a woman traffic-control officer, are detailed to direct the flowof traffic through and around the processions.
7. In determining status positions within the hall, the “inner” wall, farthest from and facing the street, is more prestigious than the “outer” wall, closest to and facing away from the street. The “bottom” and “top” of the room are respectively closest to and farthest from the entryway.
8. This position, of course, was a reversal from the previous generation’s struggles with the ward government, when the old neighborhood hall was seen as a central symbol of the community. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, most other neighborhoods in the area had built new halls, and Miyamoto-cho’s older leaders had come to see their hall as impractical, obsolete, and embarrassingly shabby in contrast. They argued that a new hall was a practical necessity that would enable the chdkai to more efficiently serve the neighborhood’s residents,
while the partisans of the new mikoshi argued that it would attract more people to take an interest and participate in neighborhood affairs, to the ultimate benefit of the chokai.
9. During the festival in 1980 the middle-aged members of the women’s dance troupe were allowed-apparently for the first time-to carry the mikoshi for one short circuit up Miyamoto-cho’s shopping street at the end of the regular festival. With the new mikoshi young women were actively recruited tojoin in the procession, and many of the older women of the neighborhood reacted with a sort of gleeful envy, telling me how glad they were that this had come about and how sorry they were that they were now too old to join in the fray.
10. To publicly solicit funds, the mikoshi committee had legally registered itself with the municipal authorities and had received authori­ zation to conduct a two-year fund-raising campaign.
11. Although the budget initially was earmarked for maintaining the mikoshi and contributing to festival activities, ultimately much of it was spent to further the goals of the older leadership faction as well, including rebuilding the chokai hall, which was done in 1986. The neighborhood’s representative to the ward assembly, himself a central figure in the young leadership faction but on good terms as well with older leaders, arranged a grant to the chdkai from the ward government to build a new community hall (as part of the ward’s machi-zukuri program). The
required matching funds from the neighborhood were provided in part out of the mikoshi surplus.
12. I was among the men quickly drawn up to shield the windows, in tribute as much to my height and weight as to my close personal ties to the leaders of the young leadership faction.

References
Bestor, Theodore C. 1985. “Tradition and Japanese Social Organization: Institutional Development in a Tokyo Neighborhood.” Ethnology 24 (2): 121-135.
-. 1989. Neighborhood Tokyo. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
-. 1990a. “Tokyo Mom-and-Pop.’’ The Wilson Quarterly 14 (4): 27­ 33.
-. 1990b. “The Shitamachi Revival.” Transactions of the Asiatic society of Japan 5 (4): 71-86.
Cohn, Bernard. 1983. “Representing Authority in Victorian India.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nakamura, Hachird. 1980. “The Concept ofCommunity Transplanted in’Japan.” In Asian Pcrspctives on Social Development, edited by S. Koyano, J. Watanuki, and H. Komai. Tokyo: Japan Socio­ logical Society.
Shinagawa-ku. 1988.Shinagawa-ku no kihi (Statistics of Shinagawa ward). Tokyo: Shinagawa-ku.
Steiner. Kurt. 1965. Local Government inJapan. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

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