Kyoto’s Gion Festival

I’ve just finished reading Kyoto’s Gion Festival by Mark Teeuwen. (That’s a non-affiiliate link to the Bloomsbury site. They are having a 30% off sale on this book and all the others in this series until October 6^th 2024.) It is about, well, Kyoto’s Gion Festival, one of the largest matsuri in Japan, and also one of the best-documented. The book traces its development from its origins (probably in the tenth century) up to 1952, and it would not be unfair to say that its motivating question is “why hasn’t this matsuri disappeared?”.

This is not an unreasonable question. It has survived several complete changes in the social order, the whole of Kyoto being burned down (several times) and the city becoming a literal war zone (the Ōnin War of the late fifteenth century — it is said that when Kyoto natives mention “the war” without qualification, they mean this one). Teeuwen makes the obvious point that it could only survive if it was important to enough people, and the interesting, and very definitely not obvious, part of his study is determining to whom it was important at the critical points.

Contemporary accounts of the matsuri tend to portray it as a product of the citizens of Kyoto, existing entirely because of grassroots support. Teeuwen argues that the surviving records show the importance of high-level orders at a number of points. In particular, the revival after the Ōnin War may have happened because the warlord in control of Kyoto wanted to use the matsuri to assert his legitimacy, by imitating earlier shoguns. Nevertheless, as Teeuwen points out, this would have been difficult if the local people, who had to do the work, had been reluctant, and the matsuri would certainly not have survived the warlord’s fall, as it did, without grassroots support.

The records, while much more extensive than for any other matsuri of the same antiquity, still have a lot of holes before the modern period, and it is only the revival after WWII that can really be traced in detail. In earlier cases, Teeuwen lays out what evidence there is. This does make it clear that the social structures supporting the matsuri changed a lot, and that the form of the matsuri also changed — although not quite as often. The contemporary Gion Matsuri does not look much like the tenth century version, but it does look similar to the central parts of the matsuri held from the seventeenth century onwards. The support structure, however, looks nothing like that operating in 1940, never mind earlier.

I recommend this book. Teeuwen is in the “Shinto does not exist” school of academics, which is occasionally irritating, but tangential to his arguments. The strong Buddhist links of the matsuri are indisputable, as is the lack of obvious connection between the main attractions (the so-called hoko and yama) and anything that would normally be called Buddhist or Shinto. Personally, I would say that the Shinto elements are obvious in other parts of the matsuri, but Teeuwen would say that those are not Shinto, because Shinto only means State Shinto (at least, that seems to be his implication). As he says early on, this study dispels any notion that such traditions are static things that are simply preserved from the past.

If you are interested in the development of Shinto matsuri over long periods (a thousand years, in this case), I warmly recommend Teeuwen’s book.